Civilization and Barbarism/Appendix
APPENDIX.
- To Mr. Senator Sumner,
Honorable Sir,—Encouraged by the distinction with which you have been kind enough to favor me, I take the liberty of submitting to your enlightened consideration a few observations upon a subject which will soon be brought before the Senate, and in whose favorable selection not only the United States, but republican principles everywhere, and the civilization of the popular masses are deeply interested. I have heard that the discontinuance of the National Department of Education has been resolved upon, and if the measure is definitely carried, such action will in my judgment produce a deplorable reaction against the growing interest inspired of late by universal education.
For statesmen like yourself, my suggestions would have little value, if I should pretend to propose new plans upon subjects on which North Americans are so far in advance of other nations. But it may be of some use to know the impressions made upon other peoples, and my feelings in this special case would be, as it were, the expression of their common aspirations. I can speak for South America, where twenty or thirty millions of human beings are agitated by a chaos of revolutions, which conduce to nothing, because certain elements of government are wanting, and I have recently visited Europe, where I conversed with eminent men upon the salutary moral influence which the United States are beginning to exercise.
When Europe recovered from its surprise and wonder at the happy issue of the past civil war, and at the triumph of republican institutions,—among all the causes incomprehensible at a distance, which had brought about this result, it discerned one alone clearly, and that was that behind Lincoln, Congress, and Grant, was a people that could read and write.
The Republic now presents itself to those who do not despair of liberty in the world, with the school as the basis of its Constitution. To the political economist, the North American School, which creates the producer, is a sufficient explanation of the prodigious development of wealth; and in view of the governments themselves, the sudden appearance of the United States and of Prussia as great nations, is closely allied to their systems of universal education. England and France have showed of late that they have profited by the lesson, taking more interest than formerly in the diffusion of education. This is the clear influence exercised by American institutions in their most acceptable forms.
Mr. Laboulaye, the distinguished French professor who has done so much to make North American institutions known in Europe, not long ago presented to the workmen of Lyons the portraiture of Horace Mann as the only man comparable to Washington in the part which he took in the definitive and enduring organization of American democracy. But in the greater part of the world to-day, if the influence and efficacy of North American institutions of education are known by their results, very few if any have an idea of their mode of operation, or of their organization. In England, reports, data, and ideas are frequently sought from the United States, and I am acquainted with the fact that the ex-minister Ratazzi, desiring to organize a vast system of education in Italy, lamented that he had not within reach the precise documents which could explain the systems that have given such happy results in the United States, the only country which can serve as a guide in this respect. The speech of the Hon. Mr. Garfield in the House of Representatives in favor of the creation of the National Department of Education, has been reproduced in the presses of South America as a stimulus toward adopting the same measure, and another of Professor Wickersham, of Pennsylvania, has had the same currency in France and South America.
If the United States, then, owe an account to the human race of their own experience and progress in certain respects which are important to the well-being and improvement of mankind, just as they received from England and from human thought many of the principal benefits of government, a means of transmitting the knowledge would hereby have been established, and the National Department of Education would have fulfilled that useful function, beside the special object for which it was created. It would have come to be, as it were, the Department of International and Foreign Educational Relations, and its reports and data would, when collected, have been a fountain of information, not only for the Southern States, but other nations, for even if a Report of Massachusetts or New York Schools can be obtained in Europe, such documents, by their purely provincial character, are wanting in the authority which the seal of the United States would give to those of a National Department. The great inequality with which education is actually distributed in the United States, and which it was the confessed object of the said Department to regulate, would have given an opportunity to see the work of diffusion, and the application of means, as well as the desired results.
With some diffidence, I will venture to make one observation with respect to the United States themselves. The greatest antagonism between the Southern States and the Northern, has come, in my judgment, from the Southern following the same plan as that of ancient society in Europe and South America, and the Northern advancing in new and peculiar paths. The system of education in the South, limited to universities and colleges, was that of England, France, Spain, Italy, and the South America of to-day, leaving the majority of the people without intellectual preparation and development. The visible sign of the advanced North American system of government is the Common School, and if ever the South shows the same visible sign, its regeneration will be secured.
For the Republicans of Eurdpe and South America, the North Americans have added a new organism of government in the Common School, thus solving a grave difficulty which the ancient Republics could not solve. The North American Republic is a government which under a written Constitution is carried on by written speech. Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, were republican cities (or city republics) governing byword of mouth from the Forum. Washington is only the desk on which the laws are written and where the reasons are given for the law, which on the following day the people in California, Chicago, or Richmond, read written. Hence the Republic to-day is in extension indefinitely dilatable, as the people govern from their residence, be it in Egypt, in Capua, or in Greece, because they can read that which is sent to them written. If, then, Republican institutions are to be diffused throughout the world, patriots, instead of making revolutions, would begin by founding common schools, in imitation of the United States, as the cement of the future Constitutions. If Protestantism, by requiring the Christian to know how to read, in order to put into his hands the Bible, has so much aided by this means alone, the development and improvement of the human race, the School of the American Republic will make useless the ancient aristocracies and the modern repressive governments, by suppressing the popular incapacity and its legitimate fruits—revolutions.
You will understand why, with these ideas and hopes, I deplore the suppression of the National Department of Education, which proposes to be a guide at home and abroad to the laggards of the South in the United States, and would have been a Pharos to the other nations, in the new path marked out by the North. So persuaded was I of the beneficent influence which this department was destined to execute, that I attended the meetings of Superintendents of Schools in Washington and Indianopolis to add my voice to it, and established a Spanish Educational Review[1] in order to make known at large in South America the important data which this public office would furnish. If the preservation of the National Department of Education does not interest you much for practical results in the South, which have not yet been put to the proof, I think you cannot be indifferent to the advantage that other nations would reap from its labors—nations as my own in the dark upon the mode of operation of the American Common School system. May the hope of benefiting millions, and of ameliorating the condition of the human race everywhere, induce you to rekindle and keep forever burning the torch which is to diffuse that light.
I have the honor to subscribe myself, etc.,
- ↑ Ambas Americas.