AN ASSET

MAKING THE MIDDLE CLASS

DOMINANT *

BY HENRY WARD BEECHER

THE earliest attempt to develop men, on purpose, was in Egypt, so far as we know. The Egyptian school has all the marks in it of antiquity and of primitive development, for it was limited in the numbers admitted and limited in the topics taught. Only the royal family could go to the schools of Egypt. That included, of course, the priesthood; and putting aside some slight mathematical teaching, it is probable that mysteries and superstitions were the whole subjects taught, and that mainly to teach men how to be hierarchs or rulers of some sort. When we cross over the sea to Greece, at a period much later, though how much we know not, we find that schools had developed, and that the idea of making more of men than natural law makes of them, or the casual influences of human society — the attempt directly to train intelligence and to produce knowledge was farther advanced; for anybody could go to a Greek school that had the means to pay-anybody but slaves and women:

* From an address delivered in Exeter Hall, London, 1886.

they trained very near together in antiquity, and they are not quite far enough apart yet. And yet I am bound to correct myself when I say that women were not privileged; they were. It is probable that in no period of human history has more pains been taken with the education of women than was taken in Greece. In all their accomplishments, in learning, in music, in the dance, in poetry, in literature, in history, in philosophy, even in statesmanship, women were very highly educated, provided they were to live the lives of courtesans. The fact is simply astounding that in the age of Pericles intelligence and accomplishments were associated with impudicity, and were the signs of it, and that ignorance and modesty were associated ideas. If a woman would have the credit of purity and uprightness in social relations she must be the drudge of the household, and if any woman radiant in personal beauty and accomplished, fitted for conversation with statesmen and philosophers, appeared, it was taken for granted that she was accessible..

We hardly can trace the unfolding of human intelligence after it plunged into that twilight or darkness of the Middle Ages. Then we begin to find intelligence developed through mechanical guilds, and in various ways of commerce; but schools, such as we now understood schools to be, are very imperfectly traced out in the Middle Ages. But when that new impulse came to the moral nature, and

the intellectual and philosophical nature, to art, to literature, to learning when the Reformation came, whose scope was not ecclesiastical alone by any means it was a resurrection of the human intelligence throughout its whole vast domain schools began to appear to be, as John Milton says, "Raked embers out of the ashes of the past," and they began to glow again. And from that time on, the progress of the efforts to develop, by actual teaching, human intelligence grows broader, brighter, and more effectual down to our present day; and to-day in the principal nations of Europe education is compulsory, the education not of favored classes, not of the children of the wealthy, not of those that have inherited genius, but the children of the common people. It is held that it is unsafe for a State to raise ignorant men. Ignorant men are like bombs, which are a great deal better to be shot into an enemy's camp than to be kept at home, for where an ignorant man goes off he scatters desolation; and it is not safe to have ignorant men, for an ignorant man is an animal, and the stronger his passions and the feebler his conscience and intellect, the more dangerous he is. Therefore, for the sake of the commonwealth, our legislators wisely, whether they be republican institutions or monarchical institutions or aristocratical institutions, have at last joined hands on one thing that it is best to educate the people's children, highest to the lowest everywhere.

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And what, in connection with various other general causes, has been the result of this unfolding of intelligence among the common people? It has not yet gone down to the bottom; there is a strata of undeveloped intelligence among the nations of Europe certainly; I am not speaking now of the residuum that falls down from the top like the slime of the ocean, but of those who are reasonable and honest and virtuous and useful. It may be said that, as the sun touches the tops of the mountains first and works its way downward through the valley later and later in the day, so there is very much to be done in Europe yet to bear knowledge and intelligence, which is better than knowledge, to the lowest classes of the common people. All those heavings, all those threatened revolutions, all those civil and commercial developments that are like the waves of the sea, are springing from the fact that God in His providence has thrown light and intelligence upon the great under-mass of society; and the under-parts of society, less fortunate in every respect than those that are advanced, are seeking room to develop themselves; they are seeking to go up, and no road has been found along which they can travel as yet. I do not believe in Nihilism in Russia. If I had been born and brought up there, and had felt the heel on my neck, I would have been a Nihilist. I am poor stuff to make an obedient slave out of! Nevertheless, they are like blind men trying to find their way into the open air,

and if they stumble or go into wrong departments, are they to be derided and cursed? Because they are seeking to construct a government after they shall have destroyed government and made a wilderness, are they, because they are doing the best they know how are they, therefore, to be cursed? or pitied, better directed, emancipated? When they come to America to teach us how to make commonwealths, we think they are out of place, decidedly. Well, that is our trait. We thank Europe for a great deal for literature, ancient and modern; we thank Europe for teachers in art, in color, in form, in sound; we are grateful for all these things; but when the Socialists of Germany, and the Communists of France, and the Nihilists of Russia come to teach us how to reorganize human society, they have come to the wrong place. Their ignorance is not our enlightenment. [Applause.]

The main cause of all this, the cause of causes, lies in the swelling of the intelligence of the great, hitherto neglected, and ignorant masses of Europe. They are seeking elevation, they are seeking a larger life, and as men grow in intelligence life must grow too. When a man is an animal he does not want much except straw and fodder; but when a man begins to be a rational and intelligent creature, he wants a good deal more than the belly asks; for reason wants something, taste needs something, conscience needs something; every faculty brought into ascendancy and power is a new hunger, and