 | NATIONAL AID TO SOUTHERN
SCHOOLS. The Negro question |  |
NATIONAL AID TO SOUTHERN
SCHOOLS.
Should the National Government make appropriations
for public schools? This seems to
be the right form of the question; not may it?
but should it? If it may, it may; but if it should,
it must. The Civil War taught us what it can
cost to answer "we should" with "we may not."
We ought to recognize that the constitutionality
of one or another Congressional bill is but
a small part of the question. A bill, however
fine its intention may be, will never become
operative if burdened with conditions which State
majorities consider imperious and inquisitorial.
Moreover, to base the plea for national aid upon
the presence of a surplus in the National Treasury
strikes me is in principle extremely mischievous,
and in policy fatal to the measure.
As long as this is made the reason why, it seems
to me the scheme will fail.
And yet I certainly think the National Government
should make appropriations for public
schools in destitute parts of the country, at
least in the South. On the general principle
I have made in my own mind these points:
education is not the question that properly comes
first in order. The nation should first ask itself,
"Do we in this direction owe a national debt?"—
for if so, there must be, and we are bound in
honor and common honesty to find, some constitutional
way to liquidate it. If we owed a debt
to a foreign nation, we should cut a sorry figure
pleading that we could not make it constitutional
to pay it. Shall we not treat our own citizens
as well as we would have to treat the citizens of
a foreign government?
I think we are confronted here with a distinctly
national debt. The educational destitution in
the South, so contrary to our American scheme
of social order, is distinctly the result of gross
defects in that social order inevitably accompanying
the institutional establishment of African
slavery. It was certainly the Nation's crime.
It is not enough for the North to point to her
bloody expiation in war, nor the South to her
proportionately greater sacrifice. Expiations,
however awful, are not restitutions. Expiations
do not pay damages. Here is one of the vast
evils resulting from the Nation's error still unremoved.
If it had not been for the political
complicity of millions of Northern voters we
never need have had a war, and slavery must
that beyond question, the removal of our vast
Southern illiteracy is an obligation resting upon
the whole Nation, yet one which the States of
the North and West cannot meet effectively
except through the action of the National Government.
Let national aid to education be supplied not
as a national condescension or charity, but as
the one final payment of a national obligation,
so regarded by payer and payee, and no community
will be pauperized. It is absurd to fear
that the payment of a just debt, and its payment
in education, is going to pauperize a community
and make it content to bring up the next generation
in ignorance. It is hardly convincing to
draw large inferences from small examples in
exceptional communities, as has been done too
frequently in this debate. Our whole wide
knowledge of human history and human nature
makes it axiomatic, that a free and educated
generation under self-government will not fail to
educate its children at its own cost.
We need to make one distinction very plain
here—between adults and children. To bestow
a professional education gratuitously upon an
adult certainly does have some tendency to pauperize
him, for it puts advantages of life into his
pay. But the case of a child in school is just
the reverse. Under gratuitous aid he still gets
education at no abatement of price to him, but
finds himself, instead, filled with needs which call
forth his finest manhood to supply. Let the
nation pay its debt of public education to Southern
illiteracy in one generation of school children.
It is true that the Southern States could
do more for public education if they would,
and he is no friend of the South who flatters her
people into the delusion that they are doing all
they can. To show this, one need only compare
these States with the new States and Territories
of the West, where the people invest not only
much more per capita of school population, but
a very much larger proportion of their taxable
wealth, even when they are poorer and more preoccupied
in establishing the preliminary framework
of society, and are burdened with a constant
inflow of alien immigrants. In short, they treat
public education as the very first of preferred
claims. But the supreme fact is not that the
South is or is not doing all it can for education.
It is that hundreds and thousands of children,
white and black, as the result of the nation's
crime, of which they are only the innocent
victims, are growing up in an ignorance more
those who rest their argument against national
aid upon isolated examples in an exceptional
State here and there, we might ask one question:
Which are the paupers, the tens of thousands
who have received Northern aid and even remote
individual aid, the most hazardous of all aids, or
those who have grown up in ignorance without
it? Is it not the fact that most parts of the
South have learned the value and applied the
lesson of public education from the aid, gratuitous
as to them, of Northern missionary societies?
I do not consider the education of the
lower masses in the South a cure for all the ills
of Southern society, but I fail to see how they
can be cured without it, and I fail to see any
excellence in the policy that is content to withhold
it.
But, again, our national scheme, in recognizing
the right of every man to vote as a necessary
part of the universal right of self-government,
forces upon us, as a correspondingly imperative
public necessity, to see that no part of the public
mass is left without the means to vote intelligently.
The one idea stands for freedom, the
other for safety.
I am not of those who consider that when the
nation enfranchised the Negro it created a new
own times, gives proof enough that the illiterate
Negro is neither as dangerous nor as much feared
enfranchised as he was enslaved. But I do insist
that enfranchisement—which my mind emphatically
approves—was only half the essential national
provision for permanent safety. In other
words, I recognize civil freedom as an element
of public safety, not danger, yet an inadequate
element demanding the establishment and maintenance
of intelligence to complete the provision.
To pay the world what it had borrowed, was
one part of the nation's obligation. To liberate
bodily, politically and civilly the slave, was and
is another. There are others. But to loose the
bonds of the Negro's ignorance is still another.
To banquet, toast and embrace the men who
conscientiously fought for the destruction of the
Union and the perpetuation of slavery is generous,
inspiring and largely admirable; but it pays
no part of the national debt to either side; and I
sincerely believe that North and South would
think more of one another if one common, noble
sentiment would recognize the fact that feasting
and embracing cannot of themselves pay the
debts of either party. Let us have the banquet,
by all means; but let us have the wedding first
and the banquet afterward.
Whatever we say with regard to illiteracy of
blacks in the South applies to the illiteracy of
whites also, since they are both the fruit of the
same tree, whose root drew its nourishment
from a moral error as wide as the nation. Let
us be constitutional; but I think no reasonable
mind will doubt that when the nation recognizes
this matter as a national debt, it will find or will
make a constitutional way to mend it.
We are told by the opponents of national aid
to education that it would incur the risk of pauperizing
the communities aided; but surely we
cannot run a more glaring risk than to go on
leaving the reduction of an enormous mass of
illiteracy to communities that believe themselves,
and are widely believed, to be doing all they can,
while they are hardly performing half the entire
bulk of the task. There is not in the range of
our choice any condition or possible attitude free
from risks, and the maxim is as true in politics
and government as in commerce and finance—
"Nothing venture, nothing have." Another
maxim is to the point, that "Forewarned is forearmed."
And certainly all hazards in national
aid would be reduced to trivial proportions when
made conditional upon at least the full maintenance
of the present degree of self-help supplied
by the States themselves.
| NATIONAL AID TO SOUTHERN
SCHOOLS. The Negro question | |