The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths
I HAVE lately been to a neighborhood in one of the old Southern states that I knew twenty-five years ago. The railway station was then a flimsy shanty that the country merchant had himself built, in payment for the railroad’s stopping its one daily passenger train if it were signaled. It stopped twice or thrice a week, and the passenger that got off or on felt himself a person with privileges. The one daily freight train stopped as seldom ; and, when it stopped, it put off a box or a barrel for the merchant, but I think it never took anything on. Three families of importance lived near the railway station, and the little settlement dwindled down the muddy road to a dozen Negro shanties. All round about was a country population on small farms, and further away there were the wrecks of two old plantations.
In the neighborhood were a Methodist church and a Baptist church. “ Mother,” said a pious Methodist girl of eighteen, “ is it impossible for an Episcopalian to be saved ? ” For still the circuit-riding preacher at “ revival ” times insisted that the grace of God fell short of saving them that danced and played cards. The young people and occasionally a hoary sinner went to the mourners’ bench and were duly “ converted.” Then the community rested from disturbing questions of faith till the Baptist “ revival ” came and the Elder insisted on the necessity of immersion.
A bare shanty down the road was used for a schoolhouse. A young woman taught a dozen children for a dollar a month apiece till she was married. Then there was no school for two years. For a generation or two it had an intermittent life. A public school was kept for the very poor in a hut a mile away in the woods, for about six weeks a year. Life ran easy and life ran slow. Politics and religion, the crops and the promise of peaches, fox-hunting stories, and sometimes reminiscences of the war were the staples of conversation.
Two railways now run through the town, and you may take a sleeping-car on either and go to New York in twenty hours, whereas twenty years ago it was a journey, with several stops, of fifty or sixty hours, and there was no sleepingcar. The town has mills and shops, paved streets and electric lights, a wellmaintained private school, and two public schools, one for whites and one for blacks. Society yet divides itself somewhat along theological lines ; but the violence of religious controversy is abated, especially among the men, for they now discuss the price of certain stocks in New York. Even whist parties are held at the home of a woman of Baptist antecedents. The men have a wider range of activities, and the women have more clothes. The spread of well-being has been general. The intellectual life has been somewhat quickened, though it yet shows its structural peculiarities. The people are becoming very like prosperous village-folk wherever they have been lifted, but not yet radically changed, by material prosperity. The well-trained reader of the Atlantic Monthly who is looking for a problem would now go to this town too late ; for twenty or thirty years hence it will be (except for the presence of two races) very like half a thousand towns in the Middle West. It is true the people talk slowly and cut off their words; they read the worst newspapers in the world because they are “ Democratic ; ” but they have not reached that degree of self - conscious cultivation at which society affects intellectual qualities that it has not attained. The people have a vast store of common sense. If they had better cooks, you would be content to live with them the rest of your life, for they give you good fellowship and they bestow the inestimable boon of leisure.
These good qualities of fellowship and leisure mark them off from the people of corresponding fortune and social gradation in other parts of the Union. These qualities are not an affectation nor a mere tradition. The villagers are not only demonstrative ; they really care for one another in most affectionate ways. Helpfulness is not an act of conscience : it is an impulse. Hospitality is not a mere habit: it is a necessity of their natures. It was in a town like this that a plan was made to build a hotel; and when the leading citizen was asked to subscribe to stock in the hotel company, he replied, with a touch of indignation : “ A hotel ? What do you want with a hotel? Whenever a gentleman comes to town I entertain him ; and if a man comes here who is n’t a gentleman, let him go on.” If you are a gentleman and go there, any man in the town will stop work for a day (or seem to stop it) to entertain you. His household will seem to move wholly with reference to your comfort and convenience ; and every man and woman you meet will be delighted to see you. They will frankly tell you so and show you that they mean it. You will come away with the feeling that, though you had before known hospitable individuals and families, you now know a town that had nothing to do but to entertain you.
I can never forget, or recall without a thrill of gratitude, the distinction that was paid me years ago when I went, almost as a stranger, on a professional errand, to a Southern city. I had been at the hotel less than an hour, when a gentleman whom I had not seen for twenty years called and took me to his home willy nilly. His beautiful children did their share in entertaining me, as if I had gone only to see them. I had a letter of introduction to a feeble old gentleman who lived nearly two miles away. I presented it, and he seemed overwhelmed with regret that he could not return my call, nor show me especial attention. During my visit, the venerable colored servant of this fine old man rode to the house of my host every morning at eight o’clock, and delivered this speech : “ De Col’nel sent me to ax consarnin’ Mr. Page’s helf. He hopes he slep’ well, an’ feels refreshed dis mawnin’; and he ’spresses de hope dat you is all well.” (God rest his soul, he disliked most ideas that I think sound, but he loved all men and women that are strong and lovely ; and he was a gentleman.)
If you are determined to find a problem, you may reflect on this : how in the march of industrialism these qualities of hospitality and leisure may be retained in the habits of these people ; and how they may be transplanted to corresponding towns in other parts of the Union. For the practice of kindliness and of restfulness is not a trick, not a mere fashion or tradition : it is a quality of the blood, a touch of nature that would redeem the unlovely wastes of much more prosperous and better informed society.
A few months ago I rode for a hundred miles or more on the first railway that ran by the village that I have described, in the company of a man who has gradually amassed a fortune by the good management of a cotton mill. As we passed a dozen such towns, he said that he had always believed in the success of “ our people.” “ They are as capable as any people under the sun, and are better neighbors than most; and I had no idea that I should ever live to see such a degree of financial prosperity as they have already reached.” Then, after a long talk about the growth of these communities, he remarked, “ Schools, schools, schools of the right sort — that is what we need.”
But in the country, only a few miles from almost any of these towns, men and women live and think as men and women did fifty years ago, or eighty years, or even a hundred. The farmers have more money than their grandfathers had, but the general structure of their life is the same, — a dull succession of the seasons where agriculture is practiced in old-fashioned ways, where weary housewives show resignation rather than contentment, and where ignorance has become satisfied with itself. The country is somewhat more densely populated than it was twenty years ago, but the growth of population suggests only a denser stagnation.
These men and women are not poor, that is, they do not feel poor. They have a civilization of their own of which they are proud. They have for a hundred years been told to be proud of it. The politicians have told them that they are the best people on earth, that the state they live in is the most important in the Union, that the ideas they stand for are the bulwarks of our liberties. Do they not own land ? Are they not independent ? What more could men ask ? One in five is illiterate. But what matter? Some of the illiterate are more successful than some others that can read. What does it profit a man, then, to read ? They have a self-satisfied personal dignity that prevents near approach. If you propose to change a law or a custom, or are suspected of such a wish, or if you come with a new idea, the burden of proving its value rests on you. What they are they regard as the normal state of human society. If you would change it or them, you are under suspicion as a disorganizer of social life. There was talk in one household, I recall, about the possibility that the son of one of the more prosperous men in the neighborhood might go away to study medicine. “ I don’t see the use,” said the father. “We’ve got two doctors nigh enough, and there ain’t no room for a third.” The preacher, too, has hardened their self-contentment, especially the self-contentment of the women. A profession of faith after “ conversion ” prepares them for the life to come, and breeds an indifference to the transitory inconveniences of the life that is.
A country schoolmaster in this region told me last year (truly enough) that the ability to read was not a good test even of a man’s intelligence, to say nothing of his character. “ Why, do you know,” said he, “ how many of the Confederate soldiers were illiterate ? Yet they were the best soldiers that ever went to war.”
“ Suppose they had all been trained, — trained to some useful occupation, — some as geologists, some as miners, some as machinists, some as shipwrights, some as gun-makers. The iron in Alabama, the wood and coal near by, would these not have been utilized in war? ”
“ Utilized ? We ’d ’ave whipped the Yankees — shore ! ”
“ What would you think of schools where men should now be trained to occupations, schools here in this neighborhood, to make ploughs, wagons, furniture, everything useful ? ”
“ That’d be a mighty good thing ; but it ain’t education.”
There is a considerable variety of social conditions in these rural communities, as every where else. Near one home, where both children and grandchildren are illegitimate, is the residence of a man who holds his land by direct descent in his family from a colonial grant, and whose sons are successful lawyers and preachers and physicians in four states. A good many youth go to the towns and find wider opportunities. From this same neighborhood a youth went to New York, and he is now a rich merchant; another went to college by his own exertions, and he is an electrical engineer in a great manufacturing city ; another is a partner in a factory in New England ; another is a judge in Oregon. The most ambitious are those who go away ; and the general level of life seems as low as it was generations ago. The emigration from the older Southern states has been enormous.
Three influences have held the social structure stationary : first slavery, which pickled all Southern life and left it just as it found it; then the politician, and the preacher. One has for a hundred years proclaimed the present social state as the ideal condition ; and, if any has doubted this declaration, the other has told him that this life counts for little at best. Thus gagged and bound, Southern rural society has remained stationary longer than English-speaking people have remained stationary anywhere else in the world. It is a state of life that keeps permanently the qualities of the frontier civilization long after the frontier has receded and been forgotten. The feeling that you bring away with you is a feeling that something has intervened to hold these people back from their natural development. They have a capacity that far outruns their achievement. They are citizens of an earlier time and of a narrower world, who have not had the development that a democracy implies. The cue to a proper understanding of them is the historic fact that they are a capable people whose growth, when democracy began to develop men, was interrupted.
The familiar classification of the Southern people as “ gentlemen ” and " poor whites ” is misleading. The number of the large landed proprietors and of large slaveholders has been greatly exaggerated by tradition. Smaller, too, than is thought is the class that may properly be called “ white trash ” or “ buckra.” The great mass of these country people came of sturdy English and Scotch-Irish stock, and they are very like the country population that settled the other states eighty years ago. They are not poorer nor “ trashier ” than the rural population of New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, or New York, or New England were several generations ago, or than they now are in certain remote regions.
If the rural parts of New York, or of New Jersey, or of Pennsylvania were to-day depopulated, and all the machinery of the present civilization were removed, and if to-morrow the population of eighty years ago were to reappear just as it was, this would be a community very like these Southern communities. What an interesting field for sociological experiment such a reappearance of a part of the past would present! Peddlers and missionaries and reorganizers of social life would overwhelm their “ contemporary ancestors.” It would be a pleasure to help them forward in a decade or two as far as their descendants traveled in eighty years, but it would not be an easy task. After many impatient efforts we should learn the wisdom of trying to find out their point of view, and of contenting ourselves with gently helping them to advance in their own way, even if they came slowly and seemed stupid. Teaching one’s ancestors is at best a difficult undertaking ; for it is not the same task as teaching one’s descendants. What a lot of disappointing effort this generation might have saved if it had known this simple truth somewhat sooner !
Although the new Southern towns are coming to be very like towns elsewhere, there are others where nothing changes. I described such a community in the Atlantic Monthly twenty-one years ago. It is now as it was then, except that the old lord of the community is dead, his plantation has been divided, and his “ mansion ” has gone to decay. Nothing has happened there these twenty years, and the old town has reached that mellow stage of neglect wherein an historical novelist has lately found it a fit scene for a colonial romance. I know another such town where it would be a privilege to die, so quiet is its mild and contented life, so dignified the houses and the trees, and so peaceful the half-neglected gardens. You are aware only of an invitation to repose. When a route for a railway was run through a college town very like this, half a century or more ago, there was great excitement. A railway ? Never! It would jar the dignity of the community and corrupt the morals of youth. It was deflected, therefore ; and, after thirty years of jolting hacks over bad roads, the people had to build a branch railway. But even then they would not permit a locomotive nearer than a mile. The railway, therefore, ended in an old field, and the same hacks yet have their share of work to do.
I recently visited a college town contemporary with this. There amid the queer architecture of the old buildings, under elms and oaks that give acres of shade, — trees some of which were planted by great men with proper ceremonies, — generation after generation of youth has absorbed a little learning and much patriotism. The young men you meet are serious and mature in manner, earnest fellows who have already dedicated themselves to the state ; for the state is greater than the nation. It was in this academic circle, more than a decade ago, that I asked a member of the faculty why he attended a particular church, for I knew that he had for many years been an “ adherent ” of another sect and a believer in none. “ I throw beef to the lion,” said he. “ The sectarian representation in this faculty must be evenly balanced; and by this adjustment I belong to the church that I attend.” He unlocked a door in his library and took out a handful of books, Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, a volume of Renan, and two or three others. “ These I keep under lock and key.”
It was in this college town that I went to rest last winter. My memory will suffer palsy before I forget the unchanging charm of that academic circle of eighteenth-century life; for it is as it was before anything was that now is. The succession of generations is an incident ; the coming of men from other states and other lands, — it is they that soon change, not this circle into which they come. Tradition is king here, and there is no other. You would wear his livery yourself, within an hour after you entered his kingdom; and you would feel at home, as you would feel at home if you could visit your ancestors from whom you so reprehensibly strayed away into your own generation.
When the play of general conversation had ended, one evening, and the talk had settled down to a specific topic, this was the topic, — the lack of freedom of speech in the community. Of course there was in that company absolute freedom of speech. We had been talking about “ radical ” opinions, especially on theological subjects, or on the race relation. “ I should not dare,” said one professor, “ to say in public, in my lectureroom, or in print, a single thing that I have said here.”
“ Why ? ”
“ I should be dismissed.”
“ Do the men who hold the power of dismissal all count your opinions a crime ? ”
“ Why, not one of them. They all agree with me. There is no difference of private opinion. I can discuss anything with them in private. But they could not withstand the public indignation of the press.”
“ This is the more remarkable,” another said, with a laugh, “ because the editor of the most important newspaper in this quarter of the world holds more ‘radical ’ opinions than any other man I know. But he has to serve the public.”
“ Who is the public ? ”
“ The Democratic platform, the Daughters of the Confederacy, old General Soand-So, and the Presbyterian creed,” said one.
“ And the farmers who vote, whether they can read or not,” added another.
As for the editor of the powerful newspaper, I knew that a year before he had sought an engagement in New York in order “to get out of the realm that is ruled by the dead.”
It is in the rural regions and in such a circle of the old academic society that you come upon the Southern problem — that unyielding stability of opinion which gives a feeling of despair, the very antithesis of social growth and of social mobility. “ Everything lies here where it fell,” said a village philosopher in speaking of this temper. “ There are the same rocks in the road that were there before the war.”
To illustrate : one morning I went, in just such a town, to a school for Negroes where I heard a very black boy translate and construe a passage of Xenophon. His teacher also was a full-blooded Negro. It happened that I went straight from the school to a club where I encountered a group of gentlemen discussing the limitations of the African mind. “ Teach ’em Greek ! ” said old Judge So-and-So. “ Now a nigger could learn the Greek alphabet by rote, but he could never intelligently construe a passage from any Greek writer — impossible ! ” I told him what I had just heard. “ Read it ? understood it? was black? a black man teaching him ? I beg your pardon, but do you read Greek yourself ? ”
“ Sir,” said he at last, “ I do not for a moment doubt your word. I know you think the nigger read Greek ; but, even if you knew your Xenophon by heart, I should say that you were deceived. I should n’t believe it if I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears.”
Such are the baffling facts of a sparse population and of a self-satisfied life that lingers past its day. Do they give reason for despair ? The problem is the most important that has been presented in our national history. It is not the education of a few millions of neglected persons, it is not the modernizing of a few picturesque institutions, least of all is it the task of imposing on these people a civilization that has been developed elsewhere (for this would be a fool’s errand indeed, and in no way desirable if it were possible) ; but the larger problem is this : Since democracy means constant social growth and social mobility, is Southern life becoming democratic, or is it remaining stable, or going back to an essentially aristocratic structure ? Are forces inside it asserting themselves that give promise of shaping this life in line with democratic growth ? Or are the native forces reactionary ? Is democracy there at last to be a failure ? Is it equal to the task of assimilating the master and the freed race ? There are thoughtful men who frankly deny the possibility of such a complete conquest by the democratic idea. I quote one such — a man of learning if not of wisdom — who wrote this memorandum for me while we sat last winter under the Christmas mistletoe in a venerable South Carolina “ mansion : ”
“ The dominant elements of society in the two sections of the country were different from the beginning. Slavery did not make the difference, it only emphasized it. The unconscious aims and ideals of the two peoples diverged. The abolition of slavery was a matter of force. So also was the suppression of secession. But these events did not change the essential character of the people. Superficially they are now one. But forty years are as nothing in the life of a people, nor fifty years, nor a hundred. The South is to-day further from a willing acceptance of really democratic ideals than it was twenty years ago. The growth of such an organization as the Daughters of the Confederacy, the increasing celebration of the heroism of the Confederate soldier, the silent unwillingness of white men to tax themselves to educate the Negro, the instinctive denial to the Negro of any real standing in the most important matters of life, — these things seem to me to point to a different genius, a different tendency, a different ideal, even a different necessity. How the divergence will work itself out, I do not know; but a century hence the South will be, in the essence of its civilization, further from the North than it now is. No outward forms of government can make two different peoples the same.”
In another old home in Cambridge, Mass., four years ago, another man of much learning, but also of little wisdom, told me that he had always regarded Southerners as foreigners. “ There’s a difference that I think is radical,” said he. “ The South will never look at life from a democratic point of view.” In recent years I have heard this opinion from thoughtful men only in South Carolina and in Massachusetts, and only in academic circles.
Such statements strip the question of all side issues and of all temporary aspects. It is true that the same laws may not mean the same thing to North and South (as the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution does not) ; it is true that forty years of missionary effort among the Negroes is but an exterior force. With all that it has done, it has not radically changed the Negro’s place in the community. It is true that no exterior or temporary influence counts for much ; and the hereditary “ essence of a civilization ” is everything. No man of thought has ever regarded laws enacted at Washington against the consent of the Southern people as a primary force in shaping their life, nor outside aid to education or to anything else as revolutionary if it ran counter to the native “ genius ; ” preaching is of no avail; almsgiving is an estranging force ; in a word, if Southern life have not in it the seed and the necessity of a true democratic development, then a democratic order of life cannot be thrust upon it, and it were useless to try.
But if I have interpreted our national development aright, and if I know the history of the people of the Southern commonwealths (which to the obscuring of the whole large matter remains unwritten), my friends from whom I have quoted have made a radical misinterpretation of all the large facts and of the dominant tendencies of the Southern masses. It is a question of what are the incidental forces and what are the dominant, inherent forces of the people’s life and character. The large truth is (and for one I see it more clearly every year in the South) that there is no undemocratic fact in the history of the Southern people that is not directly accounted for by slavery and by the results of slavery. The most conspicuous institutional results were the political machines that were built, first by one political party and then by the other, on the race difference, and the ecclesiastical machines that are the direct result of popular ignorance and isolation. The country people that I have described are passionate democrats, men of the ideal temperament to make free commonwealths. The very strongest impulse of Southern character is patriotic and democratic. The apparently contrary tendencies are clearly the results of an arrested development. So strongly have I been impressed with the democratic quality of Southern character that I believe, if a democracy existed nowhere in the world, Southern life would now soon evolve a democratic order of society, perhaps even of a radical type. The adaptation of the whites to the Negro as a freedman and as a citizen (in spite of the restrictions of Negro suffrage) and the gradual acceptance of him as a member of the state are stronger proofs of an inherent democratic tendency than English-speaking men have elsewhere shown.
These old commonwealths were stopped in their development by slavery, and by war, and by the double burden of a sparse population and an ignorant alien race. When the weight of these burdens is considered, the progress made these thirty years in democratic development is without parallel in our history. The present backwardness of rural communities and of old academic and aristocratic circles is but a picturesque reminder of the distance we have traveled. Descriptions of these may entertain us, as the charm of the obsolete appeals to all cultivated minds, but they give no hint, except by contrast, of the real forces of the period in which we live. The work that is going on now in the upland South in particular is a process of conscious and natural state-building, constructive at every important step. Reactionary influences have been respectable, but they are now spent impulses.
There are two great constructive forces : the first is industry, which has already put the essential power in the hands of a class of men that give mobility to social life and opportunity to them that can take it. This industrial development would finally work out the inherent democratic tendency of the people, if no other force were brought into play. The danger is that industrial activity may deal too rudely with the gentleness and dignity of the old-time life, and do violence to its genius for leisure and its imaginative quality.
The other native force that frankly recognizes the arrested development of the people and is taking hold of the problem of their natural growth is the new impulse in public education. It is this that I wish to emphasize. This is native ; this is instinctive; this is nothing different from Jefferson’s creed and plan. It has been long in gathering force, but it is now so strong that its recent manifestation may fairly be called a new chapter in our national history. In the presence of this revolutionary force, doubt about the democratic “ essence ” of Southern civilization falls away. Reside this, all other influences except the forward push of industrial life count for nothing. The response that the people make to their own leaders proves their “democratic genius” and their instinctive recognition of institutions that fit their needs.
Formal education has been going on in the South these thirty years, with increasing efficiency in the cities and the large towns and at the colleges. There are communities in which the whole attitude toward contemporary problems has been changed by the influence of the schools. But it is not of town life, nor of higher education, that I now write. I write rather of that new impulse toward the right training of the neglected masses that is a larger matter than schoolroom work, or academic or professional training, — of the subject as it affects the direction of the whole people’s development. From this point of view a dozen or two colleges count for little, however excellent they may be; and life in the cities is, in a sense, of secondary importance, because the cities are few and the wide stretches of rural life are almost immeasurable.
The situation is discouraging enough, Heaven knows. In the ten cis-Mississippi Southern states, the proportion of illiterate white voters is as large as it was in 1850; and the public schools in these states now give “ five cents’ worth of education per child per day for only eighty-seven days a year.” This is to say, the total expenditure on the public schools is five cents a school-day per pupil, and they are kept open an average of only eighty-seven days a year. But it is precisely because the situation is so bad that it is becoming so hopeful. Schools of this sort are little better than none. The people do not care for them. The stolidity of ignorance cannot be overcome by any such perfunctory attack. The leaders of the best Southern opinion have come to recognize this truth, and they have begun work in a new way. They have discovered that the schools must do something more than teach the three R’s, for a people without diversified occupations and without training do not care for the three R’s, nor do the three R’s profit them greatly. An idle and unproductive man is no less useless because he can read and write.
It was this fundamental fact that General Armstrong saw when he worked out the system of training toward occupations at Hampton Institute for the Negroes ; and it is this fundamental fact that the present leaders of popular education in the Southern states now understand. They are training hand and mind together. The experience in every rural community where a school of this kind has been established is that the people who cared nothing for what they once called “ education ” are so eager for this training that they will make any sacrifice to obtain it. Herein is the beginning of a complete change in the neglected wastes of Southern village and rural life. Here, too, is proof that the people are not “ in the essence of their civilization ” different from the people of the other parts of the country. The “ way out ” has been found. The problem that the South now presents has at last become so plain that thoughtful men no longer differ about it. It is no longer obscured by race differences nor by political differences. It is simply the training of the untrained masses. As slavery and war and an isolated life arrested their development and held them in a fixed social condition, so the proper training of them to helpful occupations will release them to usefulness in a democracy.
The new movement is revolutionary for another reason. The old notion of education was that it meant the training of a few. It is now understood that a few cannot be profitably educated unless all are trained. The failure to educate the masses has sometimes brought tragic results to the educated. There was a man, for instance, in an old Southern town who became a famous scholar in the law, and I suppose that he was a man of very unusual learning. He became a judge, and he was regarded as the foremost jurist in his state. But his income hardly kept his library replenished. He lived in respectable want, and died without making provision for his family. His son also was trained to the law ; and, since the family felt it a sort of sacred duty that he should remain where he was born, his practice, too, was so small that he became discouraged, and his career was a failure. The daughter sold the family mansion to pay the family debts. " But,” as one of her neighbors said, “ she is the first happy and independent member of that family.” She teaches woodwork in the public school, and is training her nephews to scientific agriculture.
The men and the women of both races who are leading this great popular movement work with an inspiration that puts conventional teachers to shame. For example, a young agricultural chemist several years ago began with enthusiasm a campaign of education among the farmers. He put much faith in bulletins and leaflets, which were sent broadcast. “ I soon found out,” said he, “ that sending out literature did little good so long as many farmers could not read and many more would not.” He left his laboratory and became an educational statesman (that is the right word), and there are few men in America whose influence in building up the people is now greater than his. Out of a comparatively small acquaintance, I know many similar experiences. A well-trained preacher, for instance, who has had much to do with the administration of the churches of his sect in rural regions, lately gave up his work and became a superintendent of schools. " Till the country people are educated,” said he, “ church work will not stick. It has to be done over every few years.”
Any one who knows the work that such men are doing could fill these pages with a bare catalogue of heroic deeds — deeds like these for examples : The principal of a school for training white teachers proposed to his faculty that they give a part of their salaries, which were meagre to the edge of poverty, to erect a new building for the school. Not one demurred. The building was put up, but there is yet not room enough for the selfsupporting students that apply for admission ; and twelve teachers have only four recitation rooms. They are occupied almost every hour of the day. Yet no sooner had the winter vacation come than the principal himself hurried to Hampton Institute to study its method of teaching handcrafts, and half the faculty went to New York to hear lectures at the Teachers’ College. A vacation does not suggest rest to them, but opportunity to equip themselves better. From the same institution a man went, as soon as his vacation began, to organize a model school in a village of two hundred people. They had collected $1000. He secured $500 from some other source. The building was opened, and every white parent in the neighborhood went to the dedication of it. The children are now taught in garden, in kitchen, and in workshop as well as in the schoolroom.
Educational work in these states is, therefore, something more than the teaching of youth : it is the building of a new social order. The far-reaching quality of the work that these energetic men are doing lifts them out of the ranks of mere schoolmasters and puts them on the level of constructive statesmen. They are the servants of democracy in a sense that no other public servants now are, for they are the rebuilders of old commonwealths.
I have purposely written nothing about the race relation ; for, as fast as this kind of training takes hold of the people, race friction has a tendency to disappear. The Negro, himself at once the beneficiary and the victim of slavery, yet holds the rural white man, who was its victim and not its beneficiary, in economic bondage ; and he is himself also in economic bondage, and in bondage likewise to the ignorant white man’s race feeling. The white man has held the Negro back, the Negro has held the white man back, and dead men have ruled them both, only because they were both untrained or mistrained.
Any man who has the privilege to contribute even so small a thing as applause to this great movement feels the thrill of this state-building work so strongly that he is likely to care little for such tame exercise as historical speculation. Yet it would be interesting to speculate on the effects of Jefferson’s plan for public education if it had been carried out. Would the public schools not have prevented the growth of slavery? True, public schools and slavery, as well as most other human institutions, are the results of economic forces ; but, if the masses of the Southern population had been educated, or trained to work, a stronger economic impetus might have been given to diversified pursuits than cotton culture gave to slavery, and the whole course of our history might thus have been changed. But, whatever might have been the results of Jefferson’s educational policy if it had been worked out in Virginia, the development of Southern life in the next hundred years will be determined by the success with which it shall now be worked out. The nature of the problem is clear. The work will be slow, and the recovery from these last effects of slavery may require as long a time as it required to get rid of slavery itself ; but of the ultimate result no man who can distinguish dominant forces from incidental forces can have a doubt.
The Southern people were deflected from their natural development. They are the purest American stock we have. They are as capable as any part of our population. They are now slowly but surely working out their own destiny; and that destiny is a democratic order of society which will be a rich contribution to the republic that their ancestors took so large a part in establishing. Undeveloped resources of American life lie in these great rural stretches of neglected humanity as yet almost unknown. The foremost patriotic duty of our time is to hasten its development.
Walter H. Page.