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The 
 Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths 
 
THE REBUILDING OF 
 OLD COMMONWEALTHS 
 
 BEING ESSAYS TOWARDS THE 
 TRAINING OF THE FORGOTTEN 
 MAN IN THE SOUTHERN STATES 
 
 BY 
 
 v 
 
 WALTER H. PAGE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 190Z 
 

 Copyright, 1902, by Walter H. Page 
 
 Copyright, 1902, by Houghton, Mifflin & Company 
 
 Published April, 1902 
 
TO THE 
 
 $cmoureb pernor? of Mv JFatfcer 
 
 WHOSE WORK WAS WORK THAT 
 BUILT UP THE COMMONWEALTH 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Old Jeff. Meddlin lived in a ram- 
 shackle house, ploughed a poor farm, 
 made a cross-mark for his signature, 
 led prayers in the congregation, and 
 only twice in his life went out of the 
 county where he was born. He was a 
 man with a strong body and with good 
 sense ; but his thought travelled in nar- 
 row ways, and dyspepsia wore him out 
 before he grew old. Young Jeff, is 
 very like his father, with this differ- 
 ence, that he indulges in drink instead 
 of prayer ; and Jeff. 3d, a lad of good 
 parts, has started life on the level 
 where old Jeff. died. The family for 
 three generations has not got out of its 
 shirt-sleeves. 
 
 vii 
 
Vlll 
 
 Preface 
 
 Their neighbour, Colonel Graham, 
 says, ' ' Some men will rise and some men 
 will not. Nothing can lift up the Med- 
 dlins." With this comfortable irrespon- 
 sibility, he has never seriously thought 
 of their potential value to the State, 
 nor (since they have always voted for 
 him) as sovereign and possibly danger- 
 ous citizens. He sees men ranged in 
 clearly defined classes, but he has never 
 thought of them as a democracy. Nor 
 has he ever included his thriftless black 
 neighbour, Sam. Goode, in his thoughts 
 of citizenship except at election times, 
 when Sam., though dependent on him, 
 has always voted against him. 
 
 Now, when I think of the community 
 where Colonel Graham lives and of its 
 future, I think not only of him but of 
 the Meddlins and of the Goodes as well ; 
 and I have on several occasions, by 
 tongue and by pen, tried to convince 
 
Preface ix 
 
 him that the very virtue of a democracy 
 is that by the right training of all its 
 children it has the power constantly to 
 reinforce itself from the rear. 
 
 What I have written and said to him 
 makes up this little book. If I have 
 repeated many things many times 
 (things, too, that were old before I was 
 born) it is fair to ask the reader to 
 remember that Colonel Graham is some- 
 what deaf and hard to convince. I will 
 thank the reader to remember, too, (as 
 an old English writer reminded the 
 prince whose patronage he sought), that 
 "the Author's worst Publick Crime is 
 that he is an 111 Writer." 
 
 W. H. P. 
 
 May, 1902. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Preface vii 
 
 The Forgotten Man 
 
 An Address delivered in June, 1897, at the 
 State Normal and Industrial School for 
 Women, at Greensboro, North Carolina. 
 
 The School that Built a Town . 49 
 
 An Address delivered in December, iqoi, at 
 the State Normal School, at Athens, Georgia. 
 
 The Rebuilding of Old Com- 
 
 WEALTHS . . . . . 105 
 
 Republished from The Atlantic Monthly, for 
 May, iQoa, 
 
The Forgotten Man 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 [An Address delivered at the State Normal and 
 Industrial School for Women at Greensboro, 
 North Carolina, June, i8gyj\ 
 
 THE cordiality of your greeting 
 touches me deeply. I have 
 not, as some old-time wander- 
 ers are said to have done, carried with 
 me wherever I have gone a pot of my 
 native earth; but I have carried with 
 me always what the pot of earth would 
 stand for. Your welcome is the more 
 gratifying because you are kind enough 
 to link me with the great cause for 
 which your institution stands. 
 
 We have often reminded ourselves 
 and informed other people that we 
 
2 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 have incalculable undeveloped resources 
 in North Carolina, in our streams, our 
 forests, our mines, our quarries, our 
 soil — that Nature has been most boun- 
 tiful; so that our undeveloped re- 
 sources invite men under the pleasant- 
 est conditions to productive industry. 
 And so they do. But there is one 
 undeveloped resource more valuable 
 than all these, and that is the people 
 themselves. It is about the develop- 
 ment of men that I shall speak, more 
 particularly about the development 
 of forgotten and neglected men. 
 
 In making an estimate of a civiliza- 
 tion it is the neglected and forgotten 
 man more than any other that must be 
 taken into account. When you build 
 a house, you make the foundation the 
 strongest part of it, and the house, 
 however ornate its architecture, can 
 be no stronger than the foundation. 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 3 
 
 /In considering the level of the life of 
 any community, you must not give 
 undue value to any class of men. A 
 community is not rich because it con- 
 tains a few rich men, it is not health- 
 ful because it contains a few strong 
 men, it is not intelligent because it con- 
 tains a few men of learning, nor is it 
 of good morals because it contains 
 good women — if the rest of the popu- 
 lation also be not well-to-do, or health- 
 ful, or intelligent, or of good morals. 
 The common people is the class most 
 to be considered in the structure of 
 civilization. / Moreover, in proportion 
 as any community in the organization 
 of its society or in the development of 
 its institutions lays emphasis on its 
 few rich men, or its few cultivated men, 
 it is likely to forget and to neglect its 
 very foundations. It is not these small 
 classes that really make the commu- 
 
4 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 nity what it is, that determine the 
 condition of its health, the soundness 
 of its social structure, its economic 
 value and its level of life. The security 
 and the soundness of the whole body 
 are measured at last by the condition 
 of its weakest part. 
 
 So much, if you please, to get the 
 proper point of view. If you have 
 been in the habit in your social studies 
 of dividing men into classes and of 
 considering some more important in 
 possibilities to the common weal than 
 others, your studies are not in keeping 
 with the dominant democracy of our 
 country and of our race. In any 
 scheme of man-culture one man must 
 be regarded of as great importance as 
 another. The doctrine of equality of 
 opportunity is at the bottom of social 
 progress, for you can never judge a 
 man's capacity except as he has op- 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 5 
 
 portunity to develop it. When we 
 make a social study, we must come 
 face to face with all the men who 
 make up the social body, seeing them 
 as they are, and not through the 
 medium of our traditions nor by their 
 estimates of themselves. 
 
 From this point of view let me make 
 a very rapid and general survey of the 
 culture of men in North Carolina — 
 of the social structure and the social 
 forces that have shaped our civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 In the days of our fathers the social 
 structure was to a slight extent aristo- 
 cratic, but it was much less aristocratic 
 than the social structure was, for ex- 
 ample, in Virginia or in South Caro- 
 lina. The mass of the people were 
 common people; they lived directly 
 out of the soil and they had the man- 
 ners and the virtues and the limitations 
 
6 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 of a simple agricultural population, 
 which was much the same in the early- 
 part of the century in all countries 
 where a livelihood was easily obtained. 
 They were nearly all of English and 
 Scotch, and Scotch-Irish stock. Most 
 of them were sprung from peasants 
 of sturdy qualities; a very few from 
 gentlemen; and some were descended 
 from forced and hired immigrants. 
 Taken all together they were a com- 
 mon people, capable of as sound de- 
 velopment as the population of any 
 other State. But they were ignorant, 
 as the common people in all lands 
 were a hundred years ago. 
 
 The dominant idea of education 
 was that it was a luxury for the rich, 
 or a privilege of the well-born — if a 
 necessity at all, a necessity only for 
 the ruling class. This class-feeling in 
 education was perceptible even within 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 7 
 
 my recollection. When I was a pupil 
 at the most famous school for boys in 
 the State, a lad whose father had not 
 had a military or political career, was 
 at a certain disadvantage. I recall a 
 scene more ludicrous than any in 
 Dickens when a thirteen-year-old com- 
 panion of mine came to my room one 
 day, shut the door and fell on the bed 
 and wept — because his father was not 
 a Colonel. I tried to comfort him by 
 telling him that my father was not a 
 Colonel either. So far from consoling 
 him this information only gave him the 
 less respect for me. I had not seen 
 this weeping lad for more than twenty- 
 five years, till I recently met him on 
 the train. He was telling me of his 
 children and I asked if he had ever 
 reflected that his own children's father 
 was not a Colonel. He recalled the 
 incident as clearly as I recalled it. 
 
8 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 Learning might be acquired but there 
 could be no true education in an at- 
 mosphere where such an incident could 
 happen. 
 
 These things I mention not in blame 
 of our ancestors. It is out of just such 
 stock that the men came who to-day 
 rule the world. But I mention these 
 things because we ourselves have writ- 
 ten and spoken much nonsense about 
 ourselves and about our ancestors and 
 have made ourselves believe that we 
 were in some way different from other 
 sturdy folk and that we were in some 
 way better than other common people. 
 Thus we have come to put a false value on 
 our social structure, and we have never 
 looked ourselves in the face and seen 
 ourselves as others see us. This false 
 view has done incalculable hurt. All 
 social progress must begin with a clear 
 understanding of men as they are. 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 9 
 
 We are all common folk, then, who 
 were once dominated by a little aris- 
 tocracy, which, in its social and eco- 
 nomic character, made a failure and 
 left a stubborn crop of wrong social 
 notions behind it — especially about edu- 
 cation. 
 
 There lingers one very striking relic 
 of the aristocratic structure of opinion 
 in North Carolina — a certain timidity 
 on the part of our leaders in dealing 
 with the public, a timidity on the part 
 of the leaders, which we have falsely 
 called conservatism on the part of the 
 people, a hesitation to trust the people's 
 judgment. It cropped out humor- 
 ously on this platform yesterday. Mr. 
 Scarborough declared that our people 
 were conservative — very conservative ! 
 You must consider what they are 
 ready for and what they are not ready 
 for, for they are very conservative. 
 
io THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 A half hour later, while narrating the 
 career of Dorothea Dix, Mr. Carr 
 showed how one woman of enthusiasm 
 came here from Massachusetts and 
 induced the State to spend for a single 
 institution at one time (and that an 
 asylum for the insane) a larger sum 
 than the whole annual resources of the 
 State government; and no man has 
 from that day to this made objection 
 to the expenditure. Our whole history 
 is full of such incidents. Almost every 
 noteworthy thing that we have done 
 has been done in obedience to an im- 
 pulse. Conservative ? We are the most 
 impulsive people imaginable. But if 
 " conservatism " so overcome any 
 one who hears me in the very con- 
 servative things that I have to say, 
 it must be understood that I speak 
 only for myself. I speak out of my 
 own ignorance only, and I speak, I 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN n 
 
 regret to say, only as a spectator of 
 your noble work. 
 
 In the old days when education was 
 dominated by the aristocratic idea, 
 the chief influences that shaped opinion 
 were the stump and pulpit. From 
 the stump two cardinal articles of faith 
 were proclaimed. One was that a man 
 must have liberty. Much was made 
 of what was called personal liberty, 
 and I think rightly. If any man sought 
 an unfair advantage of another, the 
 injured man was quick to assert his 
 rights before the law, if, indeed, he 
 did not assert it with his fists. This 
 sturdy notion of liberty has been a 
 great quality from the time of the 
 t Mecklenburg Declaration till to-day. 
 If our fathers emphasized it too much 
 let us forgive them, for we shall see 
 presently that we also have need of 
 
i2 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 some fighting qualities. Another ar- 
 ticle of faith proclaimed from the 
 stump was that taxes were too high. 
 From the days of King George to this 
 day, the politicians of North Carolina 
 have declaimed against taxes, thus 
 laying the foundation of our poverty. 
 It was a misfortune for us that the 
 quarrel with the King George hap- 
 pened to turn on a question of taxation 
 — so great was the dread of taxation 
 that was instilled into us. 
 
 The other great educational force 
 was the pulpit. Parts of the people 
 were strongly inclined to an emotional 
 kind of religion, and our historians tell us 
 of great camp meetings and "revivals'* 
 that swept over whole counties, con- 
 tinued for weeks, and threw many 
 persons into trances. More men lost 
 their reason from religious troubles 
 than from any other cause, except the 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 13 
 
 lonely overwork of women. The latest 
 book written and published in the State 
 that I have happened to see is the 
 autobiography of a notable religious 
 maniac whom I knew in my boyhood. 
 The more primitive and violent forms 
 of religion took a deep hold on the peo- 
 ple and (as is usually the case) without 
 affecting their conduct at all. 
 
 Not only was the preacher a mighty 
 man in our life, but there was in the 
 old days a type of preacher who was 
 an heroic man, a man who had all 
 the qualities of the pioneer. He was 
 ready any day to face the hardships 
 of the wilderness or to stand in the 
 presence of the Almighty. I doubt if 
 we have ever produced other men as 
 great as our pioneer preachers. They 
 were cast in so large a mould, they 
 dealt so directly with the fundamental 
 emotions of men and with some of the 
 
i 4 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 great facts of the spiritual life, that 
 they almost ranged themselves with 
 the giants. I had rather have known 
 one of these men than all the political 
 and military heroes that we have since 
 bred. The politician has been the 
 greater popular hero, but the preacher 
 has had much the greater influence. 
 For a century he was by far our greatest 
 man — the man of the largest original 
 power and of the strongest character. 
 He inherited the heroic qualities of the 
 pioneers, and he led a life at once 
 serene and active. He was a primitive 
 sort of character, genuine and fearless. 
 If our traditions overrate the political 
 leaders that we have produced, they as 
 greatly underrate the early preachers. 
 
 Now let us see what these two powers 
 that ruled our fathers did for the edu- 
 cation of the masses. The first con- 
 ception of education was the aristo- 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 15 
 
 cratic conception, and the first system 
 of teaching was controlled by those 
 who held political power; it was the 
 old system of class education. It did 
 not touch the masses. They had no 
 part in it. They grew up with the 
 idea that education was a special 
 privilege: they did not aspire to it, did 
 not believe that it was attainable, and 
 at last they came to believe that it was 
 not desirable, certainly that it was not 
 necessary. They remained illiterate, 
 neglected, forgotten. There was no 
 substantial progress in broadening edu- 
 cational opportunities in North Caro- 
 lina from the time of the colony till 
 the beginning of the civil war, except 
 the noteworthy and noble work that 
 was done just before the war to develop 
 a public school system. This notable 
 and noteworthy effort gives us good 
 reason to hold those who made it, 
 
1 6 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 chief among whom was Calvin H. 
 Wiley, in grateful remembrance. 
 
 I commend to you most earnestly 
 as of the first importance a thorough 
 study of our social beginnings and 
 development — not always as it has 
 been described by our historians, but 
 from original sources. You will clear 
 your minds of the hazy exaggerations 
 that we get from tradition. Many 
 traditional heroes will disappear, and 
 many whose names have been forgotten 
 or are seldom heard will re-appear 
 as real heroes. Among these will be 
 the group of men who strove forty 
 years ago or more to establish a public 
 school system. But their scheme, like 
 Jefferson's own great scheme, was 
 doomed to await a later time for its 
 development. 
 
 Later than the aristocratic system 
 of education and overlapping it, came 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 17 
 
 the ecclesiastical system. In establishing 
 and developing this, the preachers did 
 valiant service. They were colporteurs 
 and they carried religious books to the 
 people. The churches established, be- 
 sides preparatory schools for boys and 
 girls, three schools for men which grew 
 into colleges. At first they were es- 
 tablished for the education of preachers, 
 but they broadened their field of labour 
 and became schools of general culture, 
 and most admirable service they have 
 done. The denominational educational 
 movement was broader in its benefits 
 than the old aristocratic educational 
 movement had been, for these colleges 
 were open to the common people and 
 they proclaimed the desirability of 
 general education. Still they were class 
 institutions ; each was a school of a sect. 
 Universal education, universal free edu- 
 cation, was not on their programme. 
 
1 8 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 Some men whom the State had ne- 
 glected were now remembered by the 
 churches, especially if they were of 
 an emotional temperament and felt 
 " called " to preach. The way towards 
 general education was broadening, but 
 the very conception of education was 
 yet a class conception. It was provided 
 less for the sake of the people than for 
 the sake of the church. 
 
 The forgotten man remained forgot- 
 ten. The aristocratic scheme of educa- 
 tion had passed him by. To a less 
 extent, but still to the extent of hun- 
 dreds of thousands, the ecclesiastical 
 scheme also passed him by. The gen- 
 eral level of education was almost as 
 low as it had ever been. Both the 
 aristocratic and the ecclesiastical plans 
 held undisputed sway till a time within 
 the memory of us all. But in the 
 meantime education had been making 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 19 
 
 more rapid conquests — developing in 
 method and extending its benefits in 
 other States and in other lands — than 
 in any preceding time in the history of 
 the world. 
 
 Tried by the tests of this progress, 
 what have the aristocratic system and 
 the ecclesiastical system of education 
 to show for themselves ? 
 
 First, what did they do for their own 
 favoured classes? North Carolina is 
 one of the old thirteen States. The 
 aristocratic system had free play here 
 for nearly a hundred years, and the 
 ecclesiastical system has had free play 
 for at least half as long. They estab- 
 lished our university and our denomi- 
 national colleges. Excellent as these are, 
 they do not rank with the best institu- 
 tions of most of the other original thirteen 
 States — of Virginia, nor of New Jersey, 
 nor of New York, nor of Connecticut, 
 
2o THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 nor of Massachusetts. Nor have they 
 trained even a select body of scholars 
 that have been or are in any way 
 famous. Make another test: there are 
 no great libraries in the State, nor do 
 the people yet read, nor have the 
 publishing houses yet reckoned them 
 as their patrons, except the publishers 
 of school books. By any test that may 
 be made, both these systems of educa- 
 tion failed even with the classes that 
 they appealed to. One such test is 
 the test of emigration from the State. 
 In 1890 there were living in other States 
 293,000 persons who were born in 
 North Carolina. One in eight of every 
 native of the State then living had 
 gone away. When we remember that 
 almost every one of those emigrants 
 went to States where taxes are higher 
 and schools are more numerous and 
 better and where competition is more 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 21 
 
 fierce, and when we remember that 
 they went away from a State that is 
 yet sparsely settled and richer in 
 natural opportunities than most of the 
 States to which they went, the failure 
 of these systems becomes painfully 
 obvious. 
 
 If a slave brought $1,000 in old times, 
 it ought to be safe to assume that every 
 emigrant from the State has an eco- 
 nomic value of $1,000. This emigra- 
 tion therefore had up to 1890 cost us 
 $293,000,000 — a fact that goes far to 
 explain why we are poor. To take the 
 places of these 293,000 emigrants, after 
 twenty years of organized effort to 
 induce immigration 52,000 immigrants 
 born in other States had come here, a 
 large proportion of whom had come 
 for their health. But counting the 
 sick and the dying at $1,000 each, we 
 had still lost $241,000,000 by the 
 
22 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 transaction. This calculation gives a 
 slight hint of the cost of ignorance and 
 of the extravagance of keeping taxes 
 too low. 
 
 Next, what did these systems of edu- 
 cation do for the masses? In 1890, 
 twenty-six per cent, of the white 
 persons of the State were unable even 
 to read and write. One in every four 
 was wholly forgotten. But illiteracy 
 was not the worst of it ; the worst of it 
 was that the stationary social condi- 
 tion indicated by generations of illiter- 
 acy had long been the general condi- 
 tion. The forgotten man was content 
 to be forgotten. He became not only 
 a dead weight, but a definite opponent 
 of social progress. He faithfully heard 
 the politicians on the stump praise him 
 for virtues that he did not have. The 
 politician told him that he lived in 
 the best State in the Union, told him 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 23 
 
 that the other politician had some 
 hare-brained plan to increase his taxes, 
 told him as a consolation for his ignor- 
 ance how many of his kinsmen had 
 been killed in the war, told him to dis- 
 trust anybody who wished to change 
 anything. What was good enough for 
 his fathers was good enough for him. 
 Thus the forgotten man became a dupe, 
 became thankful for being neglected. 
 And the preacher told him that the ills 
 and misfortunes of this life were bless- 
 ings in disguise, that God meant his 
 poverty as a means of grace, and that 
 if he accepted the right creed all would 
 be well with him. These influences 
 encouraged inertia. There could not 
 have been a better means to prevent 
 the development of the people. 
 
 I have thus far spoken only of the 
 forgotten man. I have done so to 
 show the social and educational struc- 
 
24 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 ture in proper perspective. But what I 
 have come to speak about is the for- 
 gotten woman. Both the aristocratic 
 and the ecclesiastical systems made pro- 
 vision for the women of special classes — 
 the fortunately born and the religious 
 well-to-do. But all the other women 
 were forgotten. Let any man whose 
 mind is not hardened by some worn-out 
 theory of politics or of ecclesiasticism 
 go to the country in almost any part 
 of the State and make a study of life 
 there, especially of the life of the 
 women. He will see them thin and 
 wrinkled in youth from ill prepared 
 food, clad without warmth or grace, 
 living in untidy houses, working from 
 daylight till bed-time at the dull round 
 of weary duties, the slaves of men of 
 equal slovenliness, the mothers of joy- 
 less children — all uneducated if not 
 illiterate. Yet even their condition 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 25 
 
 were endurable if there were any hope, 
 but this type of woman is encrusted 
 in a shell of dull content with her lot ; 
 she knows no better and can never learn 
 better, nor point her children to a 
 higher life. If she be intensely re- 
 ligious, her religion is only an additional 
 misfortune, for it teaches her, as she 
 understands it, to be content with her 
 lot and all its burdens, since they 
 prepare her for the life to come. Some 
 men who are born under these condi- 
 tions escape from them ; a man may go 
 away, go where life offers opportuni- 
 ties, but the women are forever help- 
 less. 
 
 And this sight every one of you has 
 seen, not in the countries whither we 
 send missionaries, but in the borders 
 of the State of North Carolina, in this 
 year of grace. Nor is it an infrequent 
 sight. There are thousands and thou- 
 
26 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 sands of such women in our popula- 
 tion. 
 
 Now one of the two things is true — 
 either these forgotten men and women 
 are incapable of development, and belong 
 to a lower order of intelligence than 
 any other people of Anglo-Saxon stock ; 
 or our civilization, so far as they are 
 concerned, has been a failure. Of 
 course there is no doubt which of these 
 suppositions is true; for these people 
 are capable of development, capable 
 of unlimited growth and elevation. 
 But, if they be capable of development, 
 then both the aristocratic and the 
 ecclesiastical systems of society have 
 failed to develop them. 
 
 Since both the politician and the 
 preacher have failed to lift this life after 
 a century of unobstructed opportunities, 
 it is time for a wiser statesmanship 
 and a more certain means of grace. 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 27 
 
 And surely of all people the preacher 
 and the politician ought, in common 
 modesty, to be the last to oppose a new 
 system of education for the develop- 
 ment of the undeveloped masses. 
 
 But now the story brightens. These 
 old educational systems having failed 
 here, as they have failed in other 
 States, the public -spirited, far-sighted 
 and energetic young men, chief among 
 them your own President and the 
 President of the University, who came 
 into activity ten years or more ago, 
 began seriously to develop a public 
 school system, first of course in the 
 towns. They developed by their own 
 earnestness the work that had been in 
 part planned by men like Major Finger. 
 One town followed another, levying a 
 local tax to supplement the State tax. 
 I doubt if such an educational revival 
 was ever known in any other State, 
 
28 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 certainly nothing like it was ever 
 known before in North Carolina. I am 
 sure that you who have lived here con- 
 tinuously for the last ten years do not 
 know how great the quickening of 
 civilization has been. The level of 
 life has been moved further upward in 
 these ten years than it was moved in 
 any preceding fifty years. I never 
 come here but I am astonished at the 
 changes I hear of. The civilization that 
 you have to-day is different from the 
 civilization of my own boyhood by a 
 greater remove than that civilization 
 was different from the civilization of 
 fifty years before. 
 
 In my judgment there has been no 
 other event in North Carolina since the 
 formation of the American Union 
 that is comparable in importance to 
 this new educational progress. The 
 movement now has such momentum 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 29 
 
 that nothing can hinder the complete 
 development of the public school sys- 
 tem till every child is reached. When 
 every inhabited township votes a local 
 tax to supplement the State tax, the 
 taxes you now levy will seem small 
 and will be increased. According to 
 the last published reports of the Com- 
 missioner of Education, the total sum 
 spent per year per pupil in the public 
 schools was still lower in North Caro- 
 lina than in any State except South 
 Carolina. It was only $3.40. In 
 Georgia it was nearly $6.50, in Virginia 
 it was nearly $9, in Indiana it was $20, 
 in Michigan nearly $20, in Wisconsin 
 $21, in Minnesota nearly $30, in the 
 new State of North Dakota it was 
 nearly $33.50 — nearly ten times the 
 expenditure per pupil that was made 
 in North Carolina. None of these 
 States is richer than your own in 
 
3 o THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 possibilities. The ability to maintain 
 schools is in proportion rather to the 
 appreciation of education than to the 
 amount of wealth. We pay for schools 
 not so much out of our purses as out of 
 our state of mind. For example, there 
 is a man in Moore County who had two 
 children at school at the expense of 
 somebody else. Although he did not 
 pay their bills, he took them from 
 school the other day because, he said, 
 the charge for tuition was too high. 
 He is the frankest and most faithful 
 believer of our old-time economic creed 
 that I have ever known. 
 
 As the movement to establish public 
 schools everywhere gathers force, men 
 of wealth will find that they can do 
 no public service with their money so 
 sure to bring lasting results as to build 
 schoolhouses. The history of philan- 
 thropy shows that no public bene- 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 31 
 
 faction brings the same sure and per- 
 manent results as provision for the free 
 education of the masses. The battle 
 will be practically won when the whole 
 State shall stand on this platform: 
 
 A public school system generously 
 supported by public sentiment, and gen- 
 erously maintained by both State and 
 local taxation, is the only effective means 
 to develop the forgotten man, and even 
 more surely the only means to develop the 
 forgotten woman. / 
 
 Even ten years ago, many men in 
 North Carolina did not stand on this 
 platform. Now I hear that few oppose 
 such a programme, and those few you 
 will soon educate for sheer pity. 
 
 Standing in this institution to-day, 
 it seems incredible that I myself can 
 recall the opposition both of political 
 leaders and of ecclesiastical leaders 
 to free public schools. Nothing else 
 
32 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 ever made me so nearly hopeless. 
 Thank Heaven, that opposition is 
 passed. Or, if it be not wholly passed, 
 and if any dupe of an old political fallacy 
 say that we are too poor to increase 
 our taxes for education, remember 
 that the average amount paid now by 
 every taxpayer is only $2.13; the 
 average amount paid by each tax- 
 payer in the poor State of Maine is 
 $9.23; in Virginia $4.72, in Florida 
 $5.93; in Iowa it is Si 5. Too poor to 
 maintain schools? The man who says 
 it is the perpetuator of poverty. It 
 is the doctrine that has kept us poor. 
 It smells of the alms-house and the hovel. 
 It has driven more men and more wealth 
 from the State and kept more away 
 than any other political doctrine ever 
 cost us — more even than the doctrine 
 of Secession. Such a man is the victim 
 of an ancient and harmful falsehood. 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 33 
 
 If any beggar for a church school 
 oppose a local tax for schools or a 
 higher school tax, take him to the 
 huts of the forgotten women and 
 children, and in their hopeless presence 
 remind him that the church system 
 of education has not touched tens of 
 thousands of these lives, and ask him 
 whether he think it wrong that the 
 Commonwealth should educate them. 
 If he think it wrong, ask him and ask 
 the people plainly, whether he be a 
 worthy preacher of the gospel that 
 declares one man equal to another in 
 the sight of God? Is not one man 
 equal to another also in the sight of 
 the Commonwealth? In all reason- 
 ableness, it is impossible to under- 
 stand how any man can regard it as a 
 Christian act to stand in the way of 
 the State's elevating the neglected 
 masses. Can any church afford to 
 
34 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 put itself in such a position ? or, if it do, 
 has it any right to complain if good 
 men declare it an unchristian attitude ? 
 Even if you could respect the religion 
 of the man who objects to the elevation 
 of the forgotten masses by public 
 education, it is hard to respect his 
 common sense; for does his church not 
 profit by the greater enlightenment 
 and prosperity that every educated 
 community enjoys? This doctrine 
 smells of poverty — poverty in living, 
 poverty in thinking, poverty in the 
 spiritual life. 
 
 * The most sacred thing in the Com- 
 monwealth and to the Commonwealth 
 is the child, whether it be your child 
 or the child of the dull-faced mother 
 of the hovel. The child of the dull- 
 faced mother may, for all you know, 
 be the most capable child in the State. 
 At its worst, it is capable of good 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 35 
 
 citizenship and a useful life, if its in- 
 telligence be quickened and trained. 
 Several of the strongest personalities 
 that were ever born in North Carolina 
 were men whose very fathers were un- 
 known. We have all known two such, 
 who held high places in church and 
 state. President Eliot said a little 
 while ago that the ablest man that 
 he had known in his many years' 
 connection with Harvard University 
 was the son of a brick mason. The 
 child, whether it have poor parents 
 or rich parents, is the most valuable 
 undeveloped resource of the State. 
 
 But the day is past when worn-out 
 theories hold us in captivity, and we 
 owe its passing chiefly to the idea that 
 this institution stands for. Our whole 
 life will soon be delivered from the 
 bondage of ignorance by our hitherto 
 forgotten women. I am reminded of the 
 
36 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 story of the saving of a captured city by 
 its gentlewomen. In an old translation 
 of Montaigne it runs thus : 
 
 "The Emperor, Conradus, third of that 
 name, having besieged Guelphe, Duke of 
 Bavaria, what vile or base satisfaction so- 
 ever was offered him, would yield to no 
 other milder onditions, but only to suffer 
 such gentle women as were with the Duke 
 in the city (their honours safe) to issue out 
 the town afoote, with such things as they 
 could carry about them. They, with un- 
 relenting courage, advised and resolved 
 themselves (neglecting all their riches or 
 jewels to carry their husbands, their chil- 
 dren and the Duke himself e, on their 
 backs. The Emperor, perceiving the 
 quaintnesse of their device, tooke so great 
 pleasure in it that he wept for joy, and 
 forthwith converted the former inex- 
 orable rage and mortall hatred he bare the 
 Duke into so milde a relenting and gentle 
 kindnesse, that thence he entreated both 
 him and his, with all favour and courtesy." 
 
 You that know me will bear witness 
 that I have not spoken of our fathers, 
 nor of our political leaders, least of an 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 37 
 
 of our religious leaders, in a spirit of 
 ungrateful criticism. I have meant 
 with all proper respect for them and 
 for their good qualities and good works 
 only to show that their systems have 
 proved failures for our needs. Doubt- 
 less under the conditions of thier lives 
 they did the best they could do. But 
 the conditions of our lives are different ; 
 and our duty is to accept our own 
 conditions without illusions, to face 
 our own problems like men, and when 
 necessary with all respect for the past 
 to lift dead men's hands from our 
 life. 
 
 May I go forward a step further in 
 the development of public education 
 that must in due time follow this 
 delivery from the bondage of the old 
 systems? The extension of free pre- 
 paratory schools in every part of the 
 State is leading to the establishment 
 
38 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 of free high schools, such as already 
 exist in some towns, as in Greensboro 
 and in Durham, and in other larger 
 towns. These will draw to themselves 
 the intellectual interests of the whole 
 community and make the public school 
 system the pride of our people. I 
 know towns where every enlightening 
 interest centres in the high school. 
 Lectures are given there on literature 
 and on music and on practical subjects 
 as well, by the most learned men and 
 women. Parents pursue courses of 
 study with their children. The whole 
 life of such towns is lifted to a high in- 
 tellectual level. In some such towns 
 private schools exist only to train 
 those boys and girls who are too dull 
 or backward to keep pace with the 
 rest — a sort of asylums for the stupid. 
 My own sons are to-day preparing to 
 enter Harvard University at the Cam- 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 39 
 
 bridge Latin school, where the sons 
 and daughters of the professors at 
 Harvard are in the same classes, or 
 may be, with the sons and daughters 
 of draymen and hack-drivers. All have 
 the same privileges and the same op- 
 portunities; and no pupil can buy even 
 a book or a pencil; the city supplies 
 them all. Every man pays for it in 
 his taxes; and every man profits by it 
 in the increased value of his property, 
 in the higher wages he receives, as a 
 higher and higher degree of skill in all 
 work is developed, and a higher and 
 higher level of trained life is reached. 
 On their way home from school these 
 pupils may stop at a magnificent public 
 library and take from it any book they 
 please free of charge, or spend the 
 day in the large reading rooms, in- 
 vestigating any subject they may be 
 interested in. So may any man or 
 
4 o THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 woman or child in the whole city, free 
 of charge. The library building was 
 the gift of a wealthy citizen. The 
 books are paid for by my taxes and 
 the taxes of other men there. Every 
 town in Massachusetts, but about a 
 dozen small and remote towns, has 
 such a free library — the direct growth 
 of a public school system. The States 
 of New York and Michigan send travel- 
 ling libraries of new books — collections 
 of good literature — to any town that 
 asks for them and has a public library 
 of its own. After 'these hundred or 
 two volumes have remained in one 
 town the allotted time, they are sent 
 on to another, and so on indefinitely — 
 all at the State's expense. 
 
 When I have seen these things and 
 profited by them, and when I know 
 that men are every day going away 
 from this old land that they love to 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 41 
 
 get such advantages for themselves 
 and for their children, can I listen to 
 the mendicant whine of any ignorant 
 political or ecclesiastical leader who says 
 that my children had better not be 
 educated at all if they cannot be bred 
 with his narrow outlook on life? 
 
 Now look a little further yet along 
 the line of development of the public 
 school system. Following the high 
 school may come (and I think ought 
 to come), a still higher extension of 
 State education — the wholly free Uni- 
 versity and Industrial Schools. When 
 your University was established, the 
 old political idea of education prevailed, 
 and a restricted number of boys from 
 each county was admitted free — and 
 these only. This system discriminates 
 in favour of a restricted number of 
 youths and against all the rest. It is 
 still only a partially free system. There 
 
42 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 is always a danger that the boys who 
 pay, if it be known who they are, will 
 regard those who do not pay as charity 
 students. If all alike were free — as all 
 in my judgment ought to be — no such 
 danger could arise. 
 
 The old aristocratic system had a 
 leaning towards charity as the ecclesi- 
 astical system has; and the view of 
 education as a charity has always been 
 one of the greatest weaknesses of both 
 systems. Education pays the State. 
 The more persons educated the better 
 education pays the State. But to dole 
 it out to a restricted number is to 
 regard it as charity and to turn the State 
 into an alms-giver. Most of the East- 
 ern States, where the aristocratic idea 
 was strongest, have stopped short of 
 free universities; but many of the 
 Western States have been wiser. 
 
 In the State of Michigan, for instance, 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 43 
 
 a child of either sex may begin its edu- 
 cation at a public school and pursue it 
 through the State University without 
 charge; and this University has be- 
 come one of the strongholds of learning 
 in the Union and one of our great 
 schools. A similar system has been 
 adopted in Kansas, in Texas, and in 
 other States. Any child in any one of 
 those great Commonwealths may have 
 free training from infancy to maturity — 
 free training in one of the most efficient 
 systems of education ever devised by 
 man. And this system has been con- 
 structed and developed almost within 
 the lifetime of the youngest of us. 
 
 The opportunity exists in North 
 Carolina to establish a similar system 
 by a single effort and without any con- 
 siderable increase of expenditure. We 
 have our State University, most useful 
 and vigorous under its recent President, 
 
44 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 and its present one, and we have our 
 three larger and older denominational 
 colleges — Davidson College with its 
 solidity and old-time dignity, Wake 
 Forest College, a striking demonstration 
 of what people of moderate means 
 may at any time do when they work 
 with united purpose, and Trinity Col- 
 lege with its new life made possible by 
 its generous benefactors. We have all 
 these and the other State schools and 
 denominational schools for boys and 
 for girls. If they could all be united 
 into one great school, it would at once 
 become by far the most efficient and 
 noteworthy institution in the South. 
 And there is no reason why it should 
 not become one of the great seats of 
 learning in the Union. If the doors of 
 such an institution were thrown open 
 free to every boy and girl in the State, 
 and there were free schools to train 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 45 
 
 them for it, we should no longer talk 
 of forgotten men and women; and 
 people from other States would seek 
 homes here. These counties would be 
 peopled at last by as useful and as 
 cultivated a population as any in the 
 United States. 
 
 Nor need the religious influence of 
 any of the denominational colleges 
 suffer by such a move when the time 
 for it comes. Every one might have 
 its own dormitory and religious super- 
 vision over pupils of its own sect. A 
 definite movement of this sort has 
 already been made where the denomi- 
 national schools have shown a wish to 
 become a part of the system of public 
 education. 
 
 But I have wandered too far from 
 the problems of the immediate present. 
 Such things as I have spoken of, we 
 may look for in the future. What may 
 
46 THE FORGOTTEN MAN 
 
 we not look for in the future? What- 
 ever I might say in prophecy would 
 be as inadequate as all that I might 
 say in congratulation. Great changes 
 come as silently as the seasons. I am 
 no more sure of this spring time than I 
 am of the rejuvenation of our society 
 and the lifting up of our life. A revo- 
 lution is in progress, and this institu- 
 tion is one of the first and best fruits 
 of it. I declare in truth and soberness, 
 that this is the most inspiring sight 
 that I have ever seen in North Carolina, 
 for before the moral earnestness of 
 well-trained women social illusions van- 
 ish and worn-out traditions fall away. 
 
 O earnest young Womanhood of the 
 Commonwealth, we that had forgotten 
 you now thankfully do you honour. 
 Many a man with the patriotic spirit 
 that is our inheritance has striven to 
 lift dead men's hands from our stagnant 
 
THE FORGOTTEN MAN 47 
 
 life and has been baffled by a century's 
 inertia. I speak the gladdest speech of 
 my life when I say that you have lifted 
 them. This institution and your pres- 
 ence is proof that the State has re- 
 membered the forgotten woman. You 
 in turn will remember the forgotten 
 child; and in this remembrance is laid 
 the foundation of a new social order. 
 The neglected people will rise and with 
 them will rise all the people. 
 
The School That Built a Town 
 
THE SCHOOL THAT BUILT A 
 TOWN 
 
 [An Address delivered at the Commencement of the 
 State Normal School at Athens, Ga., December 
 
 II, IQOI.] 
 
 I HEARTILY thank you for your 
 invitation to come here; for I 
 think that your school stands 
 for as useful work as any work done in 
 the world. 
 
 The training of children in the pub- 
 lic schools gives exercise to the highest 
 qualities — sympathy, self-sacrifice, the 
 love of every human creature and the 
 love of our country. These are the 
 virtues that make men and women 
 strong and lovely. 
 
 Your work also brings results of the 
 5i 
 
52 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 highest value. The American people 
 of this generation are a people of great 
 practical skill ; but the American people 
 of the next generation, the Georgians 
 among them if you do your task well, 
 will be the most efficient people on 
 the earth. 
 
 Your work, too, is free from doubt. 
 There is work that men must do without 
 enthusiasm. There is work that brings 
 only the unrelieved weariness of toil 
 and a plodding gait. But the direct 
 value of what you do is free from doubt 
 in all sound minds ; for you are building 
 the noblest fabric of society, which is a 
 world-conquering trained democracy. 
 Whatever others may be doing, then, 
 you are working with the central 
 secret of human progress; and it is an 
 inspiration to see you. 
 
 And now, if I can repay you at all, 
 
BUILT A TOWN 53 
 
 it must be by telling you the story of 
 the school that built a town. 
 
 It is the town of North wood. Its 
 early history is like the early history 
 of hundreds of other American towns. 
 The people who lived there were mer- 
 chants, lawyers, preachers, doctors; 
 a rich man or two; a few men that 
 had workshops and those that worked 
 for them: carpenters, clerks, labourers, 
 a few loafers, a few rum sellers — the 
 same kind of population that you could 
 find almost anywhere in the Union. 
 They were people of sturdy stock and 
 good qualities. Most of them were of 
 American parentage; but there were 
 Germans, Irish, Jews and two French- 
 men — one a dancing master, who taught 
 fencing also, and the other a teacher of 
 his language. And life went on there 
 as life goes on in all such communities. 
 The people were pretty well-off. When 
 
54 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 court was in session many countrymen 
 came to town, and all the loafers 
 gathered about the court-house, and 
 the lawyers gave the hotel an air of 
 importance as if it were a big hotel in 
 a big town. The farmers filled the 
 market place on Saturday and the 
 stores and the grog-shops drove a 
 thriving trade. But the savings bank 
 had many depositors, the churches 
 were well filled on Sunday, and the 
 Sunday-schools swarmed with pretty 
 children; for it was a town of large 
 families. 
 
 And there were schools of course. 
 One was kept by a good lady who had 
 studied French and music in her youth 
 and who held on in her widowhood 
 to the memories of her triumphs 
 which still threw a gentle halo over 
 her. She taught at her home a group 
 of the best-bred children of the town. 
 
BUILT A TOWN 55 
 
 She taught them to speak with a cer- 
 tain prim correctness, and at the end 
 of every term she coached them to 
 stand in their pretty frocks and clean 
 breeches in a pretty row and to recite 
 pretty verses and to make a pretty 
 bow to their mothers. They took 
 home good reports and their parents 
 said that they were very fortunate to 
 have so cultivated a lady to teach 
 their children. 
 
 There was another school kept by 
 another lady. She was young and 
 energetic and she put emphasis on 
 modern methods of education. She 
 had the real Frenchman to teach 
 French. She laid great stress on calis- 
 thenics and she put on gymnasium 
 clothes herself and led the children in 
 their exercises. She was a young 
 woman of great physical vigour, and 
 naturally the children of strenuous 
 
56 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 parents came to her school and they 
 boasted that she made it her business 
 to teach, not to confer a social dis- 
 tinction on her pupils. 
 
 Then there was a school for boys 
 at which they were prepared for busi- 
 ness or for college, and it was a good 
 academy of the old sort. Two men 
 owned and conducted it. One was an 
 old-fashioned scholar who made the 
 boys learn the Latin grammar by heart, 
 and who flogged them when they failed ; 
 and he was looked upon as men afar off 
 look upon stern Learning. If you 
 could have taken the popular con- 
 ception of the Higher Education, clothed 
 it in flesh and put a plug hat on it, you 
 would have had that man. If you 
 had met him in the street for the first 
 time, you would have known his calling 
 and could have guessed his history; 
 for he had won prizes at the university 
 
BUILT A TOWN 57 
 
 in his classical studies. It was some- 
 times said that he recited Horace to 
 himself with his eyes shut while he 
 pretended to look at the boys play 
 baseball. His partner was a book- 
 keeper and a business man who taught 
 the boys that were taking the com- 
 mercial course to keep accounts and 
 to write a plain hand; and he taught 
 the English branches also. The boys 
 who attended this school were the 
 sons of the best-to-do families of the 
 town, and there were boarding pupils 
 too. 
 
 Then still another school was es- 
 tablished in Northwood when the town 
 had grown a little bigger. This was a 
 seminary for young ladies, and it was 
 a church-school. A preacher and his 
 wife were the principals; and, besides 
 the girls that lived in the town, a good 
 many came from a distance. The 
 
58 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 church had supplied the money to 
 build a large house for it, and the 
 young ladies' seminary was one of 
 the things that a part of the town was 
 proudest of. Most of its pupils came 
 from families that held the faith of 
 the church that had built it. The 
 girls of other religious faiths were 
 sent away to finishing schools which 
 were under the management of their 
 own churches. 
 
 Nor were the poor forgotten ; for the 
 people took pride also in providing a 
 public school. The building was not 
 large, nor the equipment worth men- 
 tioning; and two young women were 
 engaged at very low salaries to conduct 
 it. They were generally selected be- 
 cause they needed the salaries ; and the 
 teachers were changed every year or 
 two, sometimes because they got tired, 
 and sometimes because they got mar- 
 
BUILT A TOWN 59 
 
 ried, but oftenest because there were 
 other young women who wanted the 
 places, and turn about was regarded as 
 fair play, 
 
 No man could say, therefore, that 
 Northwood was not well supplied with 
 schools. When a stranger went to the 
 town, the people boasted to him of 
 their zeal in education. But the town 
 grew bigger, and almost every year 
 there were changes in the schools. One 
 year the cultivated old lady's school 
 for children was split into two, not 
 because of anything that happened 
 in the school, but because of a church 
 quarrel in the social set that patronized 
 it. Another year the dismissal of a 
 teacher in the young ladies' seminary 
 caused a heated discussion throughout 
 the church and two factions sprung up. 
 The resignation of the principal's wife 
 was demanded; and the principal him- 
 
6o THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 self had the hard fortune to be obliged 
 to choose between his wife and his 
 ecclesiastical superiors. All these un- 
 happy events caused much gossip at 
 the tea-parties of the other churches, 
 and one of them established a modest 
 school for girls of its own. It was this 
 same year that the sturdy old master 
 of the boys' school died, and so many 
 people lacked confidence in his partner 
 that its patronage seriously fell off. 
 In a year or two he ceased to teach and 
 became a life insurance agent. A 
 young scholar from the university then 
 came and took up the remnants of the 
 school and did the best he could with 
 it During these eight or ten years of 
 such recurrent misfortunes, there grew 
 up, perhaps half a dozen more schools 
 for children. Almost every social set 
 found that there was a lady in it who 
 had some particular reason for teaching, 
 
BUILT A TOWN 61 
 
 and her friends of course sent their 
 children to her; and thus the educa- 
 tional advantages of the town con- 
 tinued to be unusual. For, with every 
 social division among the people and 
 with every church difference, schools 
 continued to multiply. 
 
 These events in the life of the town 
 covered a good many years. It had 
 grown somewhat ; but it had not grown 
 rapidly. It was essentially the same 
 kind of town that it had been ten 
 years before. Yet important changes 
 had been going on, and the most im- 
 portant was the change in the public 
 school. It became so crowded with 
 the children of the poorer class that 
 it was necessary to build a second 
 school-house. This was built in the 
 end of the town where well-to-do 
 people lived, and more and more of 
 them took to sending their children to it. 
 
62 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 About that time a greater interest 
 was taken in public school education 
 throughout the State. The univer- 
 sity had been made free to every pupil 
 in the Commonwealth who was pre- 
 pared to enter it, and the public school 
 system was much talked about and 
 developed. 
 
 It so happened that the principal 
 of one of the public schools in North- 
 wood at that time was an uncommonly 
 energetic man — a man who knew how 
 to manage men. He made a very 
 careful study of the population, and 
 this is what he fpund — that, in spite 
 of all the schools in the town, there 
 were a great many children that were 
 not at school at all. There were many 
 more of them than anybody would 
 have believed. He found also that 
 even those that got a smattering of 
 book-learning got nothing else, and 
 
BUILT A TOWN 63 
 
 that few received further instruction 
 than the schools in the town gave. 
 He made a list of all the families in 
 Northwood, and it filled a book almost 
 as big as a banker's ledger. He put 
 down in it the boys and the girls whose 
 education was prematurely arrested. 
 One night he sat down with the sum- 
 mary of this book before him, and he 
 said to himself, " These people are not 
 in earnest about education; they are 
 simply playing with it and are fooling 
 themselves." 
 
 He showed this summary first to one 
 man, then to another. In this way 
 first one man and then another was led 
 to think about the subject in a new 
 way. I need not tire you with the 
 details of the agitation that followed; 
 for it extended over many years. But 
 the result was that a third public 
 school was built. Then sometime later 
 
64 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 a high-school was built. In a few 
 years it was found inadequate, and 
 the building was used as still another 
 primary public school and a larger 
 house was put up for the high-school. 
 By this time the public schools had 
 ceased to be regarded as schools for 
 the poor. They were the best schools 
 in the town, and almost all the people 
 in the town sent their children to them. 
 Long ago, the old scramble about 
 teachers had ceased. Influential citi- 
 zens had stopped trying to get places 
 for their widowed daughters-in-law and 
 their wives' nieces in the schools be- 
 cause they needed work. Only well- 
 trained teachers, as a rule, were en- 
 gaged. The best men in the town 
 served on the school-board, and they 
 had got so tired of the scramble for 
 places that they had a law passed by 
 the legislature which permitted them 
 
BUILT A TOWN 65 
 
 to appoint a school director, who in 
 turn could himself appoint teachers, 
 and nobody else could. They held 
 him responsible; and, since he was not 
 elected, he had no temptation to ap- 
 point incompetent ones. 
 
 With the feeling of security, every 
 school principal and teacher became 
 courageous. Especially courageous was 
 the principal of the high-school. He 
 put a carpenter-shop in the base- 
 ment which developed into a wood- 
 working department, and he graded 
 the pupils on their course in wood- 
 work just as he graded them in any 
 book-study. This pleased the people. 
 They said that he was "practical." 
 But he took the trouble to explain that 
 he was not training carpenters, and he 
 insisted that they must not mis- 
 understand him. 
 
 But the plan was so popular that a 
 
66 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 well-to-do builder, whose son had taken 
 a great interest in the wood-working 
 course, gave the school a very much 
 better shop. Then by some other 
 stroke of good luck (I've forgotten the 
 details of the story) a shop was added 
 for work in iron — a little shop, almost 
 a toy-shop; but the children were 
 taught there. Then came a garden, 
 for a quarter of an acre was set aside 
 and the children learned to plant and 
 to work things that grow. In the 
 meantime a small chemical laboratory 
 had been fitted up, and a physical 
 laboratory as well. Then a separate 
 building was given for use as a gym- 
 nasium. Somebody gave a small library. 
 At a public meeting a year or two 
 later it was decided to build a public 
 library next the school-house. 
 
 Workshops, a garden, laboratories, 
 a library, a gymnasium — there were 
 
BUILT A TOWN 67 
 
 other things as well. A kitchen was 
 built and the girls were taught to cook. 
 Then a dozen other things came along, 
 such as basket-making; singing was 
 taught uncommonly well, and nearly 
 all the young people learned to sing. 
 And the school had an orchestra. 
 Every boy and girl took a course of 
 work with the hands as well as with 
 the head; and it was discovered that 
 the head-work was the better done for 
 the hand-work. 
 
 At last a generation had grown up 
 that had been educated in the public 
 schools of Northwood. Nearly every 
 useful man in the town and most of 
 the useful women were high-school 
 graduates. They made the social life 
 of the town. The doctor, the dentist, 
 the preacher, the mayor, even the 
 Governor, most of the merchants, the 
 owner of a knitting mill, the owner of 
 
68 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 a furniture factory, the owner of a 
 great tin-shop, the owner of a wagon 
 factory — all sorts of successful men 
 had been graduated at this school and 
 most of them had got the impulse 
 there that shaped their careers. 
 
 And the high-school was both the 
 intellectual and the industrial centre 
 of the town and of the region. The 
 scholars went there to the library; the 
 farmers went there to consult the 
 chemist or the entomologist; men of 
 almost all crafts and callings found an 
 authority there. For this high-school 
 had now become what we should call 
 a college and a very well organized one 
 too. 
 
 In the first period of Northwood's 
 history, you will observe, the town 
 carried the schools — carried them as a 
 burden. The schools of the cultivated 
 widow, the strenuous young lady and 
 
BUILT A TOWN 69 
 
 the old fashioned scholar, and the young 
 ladies' seminary, much as the several sets 
 and sects each boasted of its own in- 
 stitution, were really tolerated rather 
 than generously supported. The prin- 
 cipals had to beg for them in one form 
 or other. The public school was re- 
 garded as a sort of orphan asylum for 
 the poor. The whole educational work 
 of the town was on a semi-mendicant 
 basis; or it was half a sort of social 
 function, half a sort of charity. It 
 really did not touch the intellectual life 
 of the people. They supported it. 
 It did not lift them. The town carried 
 the schools as social and charitable 
 burdens. 
 
 Now this is all changed. The school 
 has made the town. It has given 
 nearly every successful man in it his 
 first impulse in his career, and it has 
 given the community great renown. 
 
7 o THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 Teachers from all over the country go 
 there to see it. More than that, many 
 pupils go from a distance to enter the 
 high-school. More than that, men have 
 gone there to live because of the school. 
 They go there to establish industries 
 of various sorts, because the best ex- 
 pert knowledge of every craft can be 
 found there. The town has prospered 
 and has been rebuilt. The architects 
 are high-school men ; the engineers who 
 graded the streets and made a model 
 system of sewers are high-school men; 
 the roads were laid out by high-school 
 men. There is a whole county of 
 model farms and dairies and good stock 
 farms. High-school men have in this 
 generation made the community a 
 new community. They conduct all 
 sorts of factories — they make furniture, 
 they make things of leather, they make 
 things of wrought iron; they have 
 
BUILT A TOWN 71 
 
 hundreds of small industries. It is 
 said that a third of the houses in the 
 town contain home-made furniture after 
 beautiful old patterns that the owners 
 themselves have made. And there is 
 one man who does inlaid work in wood. 
 And all this activity clusters about 
 the public schools. The high-school 
 now not only affects but it may be 
 said to dominate the life of the town; 
 and this is the school that has built the 
 town, for it has given everybody an im- 
 petus and has started nearly everybody 
 towards an occupation. It has enabled 
 them to find their own aptitudes. 
 
 Now there is all the difference in the 
 world between the Northwood of this 
 generation, and the Northwood of the 
 generation before. It is a difference 
 so great that it cannot be told in one 
 morning. But the change is simply the 
 result of a changed view of education. 
 
72 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 Education, Ladies and Gentlemen, 
 when it is dallied with, played with, 
 tolerated, and imperfectly done, is a 
 costly and troublesome thing. In the 
 first place it is talked to death. It 
 causes more discussion than politics 
 or than bad crops. There are many 
 persons who do not believe in it and 
 many more who wish they did not and 
 could get rid of the bother of it. 
 
 But when education becomes not 
 only part and parcel of the life of the 
 people, but a thing that they have all 
 profited by — a thing that underlies 
 life as the soil underlies the growth in 
 the garden — then education becomes 
 cheap and easy. Nobody asks what 
 it costs, nobody questions its benefits, 
 nobody harbours a doubt about it. 
 
 In one case the community grudg- 
 ingly supports its schools as a burden. 
 In the other case, the schools build the 
 
BUILT A TOWN 73 
 
 community. And this is the lesson of 
 Northwood. 
 
 The difference between one concep- 
 tion of education and the other, when 
 it dawns on a man, changes his whole 
 attitude towards teaching and towards 
 social problems and towards the State. 
 He becomes another man. For one 
 view is selfish and the other is patriotic. 
 One undertakes to develop a few men 
 and women and it fails because no 
 man can be really well developed in a 
 community of undeveloped men. This 
 is one reason why isolated scholars are 
 so often impracticable, and this is the 
 reason why many business men tell you 
 that they do not believe in college 
 education. The other conception of 
 education is that it trains all the 
 members of a community and thus 
 enables every one to find his natural 
 aptitudes. 
 
74 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 To carry on education as a privilege 
 is to mistrain some and to leave the 
 others untrained. To carry it on as a 
 universal duty is to open to every one 
 his natural opportunity, to enable every 
 one to find himself and to find his use- 
 fulness to his fellows. It is to give 
 balance and flexibility and symmetry 
 to the whole community. 
 
 Has any man here doubt about this ? 
 Does any man think that I am spin- 
 ning a pretty theory? Does any man 
 still hold to the notion that, if the 
 children of the rich are sent off to 
 college, and the children of the poor 
 have a little " schooling" so that they 
 can read a newspaper and calculate 
 the cost of a bale of cotton, we shall 
 continue to get along tolerably well? 
 Is any man here opposed to building a 
 good school-house in every school- 
 district of Georgia, and to employing 
 
BUILT A TOWN 75 
 
 the best teachers in the world and to 
 making the school a training-place 
 for every child in the district — one for 
 whites and one for blacks? If you 
 hold these notions, you are a dead 
 weight on Georgia. You are one of 
 the reasons why its property is not 
 now worth five times what it is. You 
 are one of the reasons why the pro- 
 ducts of its soil are not five times as 
 great as they are, for such schools as I 
 mean would make most farmers highly 
 successful farmers. You are one reason 
 why the population of the State is not 
 twice or thrice what it is; for such 
 schools as I mean would attract good 
 people from every part of the world, 
 and cause more children to grow to 
 healthful maturity. You are one of 
 the reasons why Georgia is not one of 
 the greatest manufacturing States in 
 the Union, for such schools as I mean 
 
76 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 would turn thousands of the best- 
 trained hands and minds to the making 
 of beautiful and useful things. You 
 are one of the reasons why the Georgians 
 have not more scholars, more orators, 
 more organizers of industry, more own- 
 ers of beautiful homes, more horses 
 and cattle and grass and fruit and more 
 good roads and more strong men and 
 more lovely women and more beautiful 
 children than any other State in the 
 Union. Last of all, you are not a 
 democrat. You have never thoroughly 
 read Thomas Jefferson. You do not 
 know that his ideal State was a State in 
 which every man was trained at the 
 public expense. You are a frayed-out 
 "knight" of feudal times with a faded 
 plume, and you think in terms of the 
 Middle Ages ; and the sooner you know it 
 the better for the community, and I am 
 glad of a chance plainly to tell you so. 
 
BUILT A TOWN 77 
 
 Of course, Ladies and Gentlemen, 
 there is no such man in your com- 
 munity. Perhaps there is no such 
 man in all Georgia. But there are 
 men in every community and in every 
 State in the Union who even yet do not 
 know the full meaning of what you are 
 doing. For what are you doing ? You 
 are not mere teachers of children as 
 the widow and the old scholar and the 
 old preacher in Northwood were. You 
 are also the builders of a new social 
 order. The future of Georgia is in 
 your hands. You are the high servants 
 of the State, but for that very reason 
 you are not the servants of any sect 
 or party or class, and sects and parties 
 and classes must keep their hands off 
 you. You must be free — you of all 
 men and women. 
 
 It falls to you to make it plain by 
 your work and by your bearing that 
 
78 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 yours is the most patriotic and the 
 most important service that any class 
 gives to the State. You must stand 
 up for what you stand for. You know 
 what you are trying to do. Others 
 have various vague notions of social 
 growth. You know that there is only 
 one true science of building a stable 
 and broad-based democratic social 
 structure. You know what you need 
 for your work. Demand it as a right 
 in the name of the children of the 
 Commonwealth. In other words, never 
 for a moment be afraid of that dying 
 body of opinion which looks on the 
 public school as a sort of educational 
 orphan asylum. Stand to it, that it is 
 the nursery of the leaders of the world, 
 as by the high virtue of our invincible 
 democracy it is ! 
 
 But to return to the school at North- 
 
BUILT A TOWN 79 
 
 wood. The diploma given by the school 
 tells something more definite than 
 most diplomas tell, and every diploma 
 does not tell the same thing. One 
 recites what courses of study a boy has 
 taken and how well he has mastered 
 them. But it tells also that he can 
 swim well, that he can do work in iron, 
 that he can draw, that he has good 
 muscles. It tells, too, that he is per- 
 sistent and plucky, and that he is un- 
 selfish and thrifty. The diploma is 
 made to fit the boy, not the boy to fit 
 the diploma. It tells what sort of 
 boy he is, what he has done, and what 
 he is good for. A diploma given to a 
 girl likewise tells frankly the character 
 and the equipment of that particular 
 girl ; for the people of Northwood are so 
 much in earnest about education that 
 they have learned to be perfectly 
 frank. The diploma will tell that the 
 
8o THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 girl is of sound body, that she can 
 sing, that she can row, and it plainly 
 says that she has good manners ; it tells 
 her good qualities of mind and of 
 temper, as well as the success with 
 which she has pursued her studies. 
 It tells that she can lay out and work 
 a garden of roses or of potatoes. If all 
 the diplomas given to all the graduates 
 were the same, they would not value 
 them. 
 
 The school, you understand, is not 
 a mere workshop, nor is it a place to 
 learn a trade. It does not make car- 
 penters of boys nor cooks of girls. 
 Nor does it make Greek scholars or poets 
 or musicians of them. But it comes 
 as near to making them the one thing 
 as the other. It comes as near to making 
 cooks and chemists and farmers as it 
 comes to making scholars. For those 
 high schools and colleges that teach 
 
BUILT A TOWN 81 
 
 only books and train only the mind 
 and not the hands, — they do not really 
 make scholars as we used to suppose 
 that they did. The utmost that they 
 do is to teach the boy the rudiments 
 of scholarship and the method of work 
 by which, if he persist, he may some 
 day become a scholar. This school 
 does the same thing in scholarship, 
 but it does also a corresponding thing 
 in hand-work. The old kind of teach- 
 ers simply fooled themselves and mis- 
 led their pupils and the community 
 when they assumed that their courses 
 in literature and the like made scholars. 
 And what a wasteful self-deception it 
 was ! In North wood, one boy may, if 
 he persist, become a scholar; another a 
 wheelwright ; another a farmer ; and so 
 on. And it is found that by doing 
 hand-work also the pupils do better 
 head-work as well. It simply opens to 
 
82 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 all the intellectual life and the way to 
 useful occupations at the same time. 
 
 There are two things that they are 
 all taught in that school. They are 
 taught to write a plain hand-writing, 
 and they look upon a bad hand-writing 
 as they look upon neglect of dress — it 
 is the mark of a sloven. And they are 
 all taught to write the English language 
 in short clear sentences, so that any- 
 body can understand what they write. 
 
 Now let us see how the people of 
 Northwood themselves look at educa- 
 tion. The simplicity of the work of 
 the school is what first strikes you. 
 And you find this same simplicity in 
 the people's conception of education. 
 They do not call it education. They 
 call it training. They speak of a boy 
 as trained in Greek or in metal- work; 
 and of a girl as trained to sing or to 
 draw or to cook. This frank and simple 
 
BUILT A TOWN S3 
 
 way of looking at school-work has 
 changed their whole conception of 
 education. It has brushed away a vast 
 amount of nonsense, and cleaned the 
 mind of a great accumulation of cob- 
 webs. For one thing nobody in that 
 town makes addresses on the need of 
 education. A man would as soon 
 think of making an address on the 
 necessity of the atmosphere, or of fuel, 
 or of bread. And you never hear any- 
 thing about elaborate systems of edu- 
 cation, or the co-ordination of studies, 
 or the psychology of the unrelated. 
 
 They look at the trades and the pro- 
 fessions in the same simple way. They 
 say that one man has been trained as a 
 physician, that another has been trained 
 as a farmer, that another has been 
 trained as a preacher, that another has 
 been trained as a builder, another as a 
 machinist; and they lay less stress on 
 
84 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 what a man chooses to do than upon 
 the way in which he does it. It is 
 respectable to have any calling you like, 
 provided you are trained to it; but it 
 isn't respectable to have any calling 
 unless you are trained. The town for 
 this reason is not divided into the 
 same sort of sets and classes that you 
 find in most towns. There is not one 
 class that puts on airs and regards 
 itself as the Educated Class, to which 
 all other classes are supposed to pay 
 deference. Of course some men read 
 more books than others ; some are more 
 cultivated than others, and there are 
 social divisions of the people there as 
 there are the world over. But when 
 everybody knows how to do something 
 well, a man who does one thing well en- 
 joys no particular distinction. A jack- 
 leg lawyer can't compel any great respect 
 from a really scientific horseshoer. The 
 
BUILT A TOWN 85 
 
 mastery of anything is a wonderful 
 elevator of character and judgment. 
 
 Next to their simple and straight- 
 forward way of looking at education 
 what strikes you most about the people 
 of Northwood is their universal interest 
 in the school. Apparently everybody 
 has now been trained there. But when 
 one man thinks of the school he thinks 
 of the library ; another of the laboratory ; 
 another of the workshop; another of 
 music; another of chemistry. Books 
 are only one kind of tools, and the 
 other kinds are co-ordinate with them. 
 And everybody goes to the great school- 
 house more or less often. The singers 
 give their concerts there. I was there 
 once when a young man gave a per- 
 formance of a musical composition 
 of his own, and at another time when 
 a man showed the first bicycle that 
 had been made in the town. In three 
 
86 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 months he had a bicycle factory. 
 Everybody is linked to the school by 
 his work, and there is, therefore, no 
 school party and no anti-school party 
 in local politics. There is no social 
 set that looks down on the school. 
 The school built the town, and it is the 
 town. It has grown beyond all social 
 distinctions and religious differences 
 and differences of personal fortune. 
 It has united the people, and they look 
 upon it as the training place in which 
 everybody is interested alike, just as 
 they look upon the court-house as the 
 place where every man is on the same 
 footing. The fathers of our liberties 
 made the court-house every man's 
 house. The equally important truth 
 is that we must, in the same way, 
 make the public school-house every- 
 body's house before we can establish 
 the right notion of education. 
 
BUILT A TOWN 87 
 
 Now no wise man has anything to 
 say against church schools or private 
 schools in their right places; for both 
 have their uses. But the history 
 of civilization has proved over and 
 over again that no church and no 
 private means can ever overcome the 
 social and financial and political and 
 religious differences of people and build 
 a training place for all. Nothing has 
 ever done this and nothing ever can 
 do it but a public institution that is 
 maintained by taxation and that be- 
 longs to all the people alike. 
 
 And now we come to the very heart 
 of the matter. /To talk about educa- 
 tion in a democratic country as mean- 
 ing anything else than free public 
 education for every child, is a mockery. 
 To call anything else education at all 
 is to go back towards the Middle Ages, 
 when it was regarded as a privilege of 
 
88 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 gentlemen or as a duty of the church 
 and not as a necessity for the people. 
 
 If a few men only are to be educated, 
 the accidents of fortune determine 
 which they shall be. These will regard 
 themselves as a special class, set off 
 by themselves; and a false standard 
 of education is set up both in the minds 
 of the educated and in the minds of 
 the uneducated. The uneducated re- 
 gard themselves as neglected. You 
 have the seeds of snobbery and of 
 discontent sowed over all the wide 
 wastes of social life, and the uneducated 
 part of the State simply adds to its 
 inertia rather than to its wealth and 
 health. 
 
 But even this false conception of 
 education is not the worst result of a 
 system that benefits only a few. If 
 only a part of any community be trained, 
 the very part that needs training 
 
BUILT A TOWN 89 
 
 least is the part that gets it. It is the 
 ignorant that are neglected, and the 
 State thus goes steadily down. For 
 those that are predisposed to ignor- 
 ance and idleness and a lack of occupa- 
 tion are the very members of the com- 
 munity that ought not under any cir- 
 cumstances to be neglected. There 
 is, therefore, no way under Heaven 
 to train those who need training most 
 but by training everybody at the public 
 expense. 
 
 More than this (for democracy has 
 the quality of giving constant sur- 
 prises) it is always more than likely 
 that among the neglected are those 
 that would become the most capable 
 if they were trained. Society forever 
 needs reinforcements from the rear. 
 It is a shining day in any educated 
 man's growth when he comes to see 
 and to know and to feel and freely to 
 
9 o THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 admit that it is just as important to 
 the world that the ragamuffin child 
 of his worthless neighbour should be 
 trained as it is that his own child 
 should be. Until a man sees this he 
 cannot become a worthy democrat 
 nor get a patriotic conception of edu- 
 cation; for no man has known the 
 deep meaning of democracy or felt 
 either its obligation or its lift till he 
 has seen this truth clearly. 
 
 There is another peculiarity about 
 the people of Northwood that you will 
 notice. They talk about the proper 
 training of men, but you never hear 
 them say much about the natural re- 
 sources of their community. When I 
 went there, I recalled that some of 
 our Southern people used to talk much 
 about our natural resources and to invite 
 all the world to come and live with 
 
BUILT A TOWN 91 
 
 them, because they had good air and 
 good water and good soil and good 
 timber and gold and iron under the 
 ground — in other words, because God 
 had been generous to the land. Well, 
 the truth is, the land was really richer 
 when the Indians held it than it is now ; 
 the water was just as good, the air 
 just as pure, and there were more 
 forests and more iron and gold than 
 there are now. For that matter, there 
 are undeveloped regions in South Amer- 
 ica that have many natural advantages 
 even over the great and varied natural 
 advantages of Georgia. 
 
 This programme of inviting settlers 
 was a programme of sheer dependence 
 on Nature. It implied the old con- 
 ception of education, the old con- 
 ception of wealth-creation; for it took 
 no account, or little account, of the 
 part that men play in making wealth. 
 
92 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 God might make a land as fertile as 
 Eden and underlay it with gold and 
 stock it with venison and quail; yet 
 it would yield no more than men made 
 it yield. Within reasonable limits, it 
 matters little what Nature has done 
 for a country. If you take any land 
 in the temperate zone and put well- 
 trained men there, the land will turn 
 out to be all right. What did Nature 
 do for Holland, which is the most 
 densely peopled country of Europe, 
 and one of the most thrifty and happy ? 
 Nature overflowed it with the sea, and 
 man had to reclaim the very soil he 
 lives on. On the other hand, the 
 city that was the capital of the Roman 
 Empire is now to a great degree un- 
 inhabitable for malaria and fevers, 
 and the Grecian archipelago itself does 
 not attract modern immigration. But 
 the land of the Pharaohs does, after 
 
BUILT A TOWN 93 
 
 the neglect of centuries, because it is 
 under trained English administration. 
 I know a part of our own country so poor 
 in natural resources that God must 
 have forgotten to finish it; yet the 
 people who live there make more kinds 
 of useful and beautiful things than 
 the same number of people make 
 anywhere else in America and more 
 of them are rich or well-to-do than 
 the people in any other part of the 
 country. And education engages as 
 large a part of the population as any 
 other single industry, and there is as 
 much money spent on school-houses 
 and their equipment and on libraries as 
 is spent in the equipment of any single 
 industry. 
 
 While natural resources count for 
 much, the community where the people 
 are trained to profitable industry is 
 the community to which other men will 
 
94 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 go to live, and they will go from all 
 parts of the world. After the first 
 pioneer settlements are made, it is 
 trained men that attract men rather 
 than natural resources. The right 
 training of men is a better thing than 
 the bounty of Nature itself. Nature 
 alone never made prosperous States. 
 
 But what commonplace things are 
 these that I tire you with ! They are 
 only the A. B. C. of your philosophy and 
 of your work. Yet if any should ask 
 for proof of this doctrine, that it is the 
 training of men that makes a country 
 great, let him take a chapter out of 
 the current history of the United 
 States. The most remarkable spectacle 
 that has ever been seen in the world is 
 the spectacle of the trained American 
 people at work to-day. From one 
 ocean to the other they are so doing 
 
BUILT A TOWN 95 
 
 their daily labour that the products of 
 their skill as well as the products of 
 their soil are invading not only every 
 new land, but every country of the 
 Old World as well and the sleeping 
 Orient to boot. In London the Eng- 
 lishman will soon go from his home to 
 his office on an electric railway owned 
 by Americans. He wears American 
 shoes and uses American cutlery. If 
 you cross Southern Europe on one 
 of the fastest express trains, you will 
 be drawn by an American locomotive. 
 In Spain itself they use American 
 engines and American machinery. And 
 American locomotives whistle in African 
 jungles and climb the Andes, and run 
 across Japan. We have built bridges 
 over rivers on the road to Mandalay. 
 American electrical machinery lights 
 the southernmost beacon on the globe 
 in Terra del Fuego, and American 
 
96 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 machinery cuts timber at the northern- 
 most lumber camps in Sweden, almost 
 under the midnight sun, whither it 
 was drawn on reindeer sleds. The 
 lantern of Aladdin has been superseded 
 in Bagdad by American lamps. The 
 coolies that fanned Indian princes have 
 lost their job, for American electric 
 fans do it better. We send laundry 
 machinery to Shanghai, and brewing 
 apparatus to Germany. 
 /And it is not by mechanical work 
 and mechanical achievements only that 
 the trained American is covering the 
 earth with his influence. We are bring- 
 ing civilization and order to long 
 neglected islands on both sides of the 
 globe and proving that the true gov- 
 ernment of colonies is to teach them 
 to govern themselves. We prevailed 
 against the powers that prey in pre- 
 venting the partition of China. 
 
BUILT A TOWN 97 
 
 These achievements have a deeper 
 meaning than the mere skill they show 
 in diplomacy, in administration, in 
 organization, in artisanship, and in 
 trade, though the meaning of these is 
 deep enough. They show that we 
 have learned something in the training 
 of men that no other people has learned, 
 some method whereby every man may 
 find his aptitude and may reach his 
 most natural development. They show 
 that we have found the secret of pre- 
 serving the mobility of society whereby 
 individuals may reach the highest effi- 
 ciency with some certainty and not 
 by chance./ 
 
 The only advantage that Americans 
 have over their kinsmen of the Old 
 World is the advantage of free demo- 
 cratic training. We are no more capa- 
 ble by nature than the English, and 
 we are not as well trained as the Ger- 
 
98 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 mans, but we have greater social mobil- 
 ity, which is the very essence of demo- 
 cratic training. We have built a type 
 of society that permits more men to 
 find their natural places in it. And 
 thus it is that the greatest contribution 
 to social science, to the science of 
 training men and of building States, 
 is the demonstration that we have 
 made of the ever-re-creative and ever- 
 renewing quality of democratic society. 
 If the triumphs of trained democracy 
 that are now filling the world with 
 talk and wonder prove that the first 
 duty of the State is the right training 
 of all its children, see what this means 
 for Georgia ! There are more than two 
 million pairs of hands and brains in 
 Georgia. If they were all trained to 
 wasteless work and to straight thought 
 while they work, men would soon 
 come from every land to learn of you. 
 
BUILT A TOWN 
 
 99 
 
 No other part of the globe would be 
 so rich, no other part of the multitudin- 
 ous swarms of mankind would be so 
 blest. What would you have your 
 Commonwealth become? The train- 
 ing place of the peaceful conquerors 
 of the world? You have the material 
 for making it so. The neglected boy 
 of your sandhills might become, if he 
 were rightly trained, a strong leader 
 of men or a creator of great wealth. 
 The tangle-haired girl that plays in 
 your gulleys might become the mother 
 of a greater statesman than you have 
 yet bred. By training every one of 
 them, but not by training some only, 
 to a useful occupation and a steady 
 balance of body and mind, in two 
 generations, even before many of us here 
 shall die, you may have more wealth, 
 a better diffused well-being, a more 
 robust manhood, greater grace, than 
 
ioo THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 Georgia in all her generations has 
 yet had, and more renown than all 
 the deeds of all her honourable sons 
 have yet brought her. 
 
 Have you not merely played with 
 education and missed the meaning 
 of it, regarding it as an incident of 
 juvenile life, or as a thing to confer a 
 little distinction in conventional society ? 
 Have you kept it in mind that it is 
 the science of building commonwealths ? 
 When you see its full meaning your 
 State will grow under the patriotic 
 ministrations of these its consecrated 
 servants as well-tended gardens grow 
 under the nurture of your Southern 
 sun. And the Georgia of to-day, pros- 
 perous and fortunate as it is, is but a 
 raw wilderness in comparison with 
 the Georgia that may be. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen of this state- 
 
BUILT A TOWN 101 
 
 creative craft, the happiest of mortals 
 have always been those who have 
 worked under a great inspiration. 
 Happiest of men and women are you, 
 then, who have an inspiration that 
 none has had since the fathers of our 
 Republic. For you have dedicated 
 yourselves to the most solemn high 
 service of democracy; and the mute 
 appeal of neglected children is to you 
 the voice of God. It is your privilege 
 to lead them who have been forgotten 
 through the wide-swinging doors of 
 opportunity ; and thus you will develop 
 the richest neglected resources of civili- 
 zation. I feel honoured to applaud 
 you as you go forth, not as workers for 
 wages, but as rebuilders of this Com- 
 monwealth on a broader foundation 
 than the fathers laid. 
 
 You whose privilege it is to labour 
 here and we who have the pleasure 
 
io2 THE SCHOOL THAT 
 
 to applaud you — let us together recite 
 this creed: 
 
 I believe in the free public training of 
 both the hands and the mind of every 
 child born of woman. 
 
 I believe that by the right training of 
 men we add to the wealth of the world. 
 All wealth is the creation of man, and 
 he creates it only in proportion to the 
 trained uses of the community; and, 
 the more men we train, the more wealth 
 everyone may create. 
 
 I believe in the perpetual regeneration 
 of society, in the immortality of democ- 
 racy, and in growth everlasting. 
 
 We who have seen this truth have 
 been changed by it; and we can never 
 fall away from it. We have an in- 
 exhaustible supply of energy and a 
 boundless hope. We work with joy 
 for the love of our fellows and for our 
 faith in them. We cannot rest for the 
 
BUILT A TOWN 103 
 
 glory of democracy as it has been 
 revealed to us, for we are caught in the 
 swing of its orbic movement. And 
 we cannot recant even at the bidding 
 of all the "solemn plausibilities of the 
 world." We have learned the central 
 secret of human progress. Since civi- 
 lization began, religions and state- 
 craft, priests and conquerors, cliques 
 and classes, sects and sections of 
 society have played for the leadership 
 of man. We play for it, too ; and we 
 hold the master trick against them all; 
 for, when we win, man leads himself. 
 
The 
 Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths 
 
THE REBUILDING OF OLD 
 COMMONWEALTHS 
 
 [Reprinted from " The Atlantic Monthly," for 
 May, 1902.] 
 
 I HAVE lately been to a neighbour- 
 hood in one of the 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 signalled. It 
 stopped twice or thrice a week and the 
 passenger who 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 
 107 
 
io8 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 never took anything on. Three families 
 of importance lived near the railway sta- 
 tion, 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 neighbourhood were a Method- 
 ist 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 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 109 
 
 and the Elder insisted on the necessity 
 of immersion. 
 
 There was a shanty down the road 
 that was used for a school-house. A 
 young woman taught a dozen children 
 for $1 a month each till she was married. 
 Then there was no school for two years. 
 For a generation or two it had an in- 
 termittent 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, each in its season, 
 the crops and the promise of peaches, 
 stories of fox-hunting and sometimes 
 reminiscences of the war were the 
 staples of conversation. 
 
 Two railroads now run by the town 
 and you may take a sleeping car on 
 either one and go to New York in 
 twenty hours, whereas twenty years 
 ago it was a journey of fifty or sixty 
 
no THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 hours with several stops and there 
 was no sleeping car. The town has 
 mills and shops and paved streets and 
 electric lights, a well-maintained pri- 
 vate school and two public schools, 
 one for whites and one for blacks. 
 Society still divides itself into church- 
 groups, 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 
 man 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 quickened, 
 although it yet shows some of its struc- 
 tural peculiarities. The people are be- 
 coming like village-folk wherever they 
 have been touched but not radically 
 changed by material prosperity. If the 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS in 
 
 well-trained reader of The Atlantic 
 Monthly who is looking for a problem 
 were now to go to this town, she would 
 go too late; for time is working its 
 natural results in this American com- 
 munity and twenty years hence it will 
 be (except for the presence of two 
 races) very like hundreds of 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, 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 have 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 most other parts of 
 the country. They are not only demon- 
 
ii2 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 strati ve; they really care for one an- 
 other in most affectionate ways. Help- 
 fulness 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-com- 
 pany, he replied with a touch of in- 
 dignation: "A hotel? What do you 
 want with a hotel ? Whenever a gentle- 
 man comes to town I entertain him; 
 and, if a man comes here who isn'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 and his business will 
 seem to move wholly with reference 
 to your comfort and convenience; and 
 every man and woman you meet will 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 113 
 
 be delighted to see you. They will 
 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 fami- 
 lies, you now know a whole 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 several years ago when 
 I went on an errand to a Southern 
 city where I was almost a stranger. 
 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. 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 
 
ii 4 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 could not return my call nor add to my 
 entertainment. During my visit the 
 venerable coloured 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 'spesses 
 de hope dat you is all well. " God rest 
 his soul ! he opposed most ideas that I 
 think sound, but he loved all men and 
 women that are lovely and strong; and 
 he was a radiant gentleman. 
 
 If you are determined to find a prob- 
 lem, you may reflect on this — how in 
 the march of industrialism these quali- 
 ties of fellowship and leisure may be 
 retained in the mass of the people; 
 and how they might be transplanted 
 to corresponding towns in other parts 
 of the Union? It is not a trick, not a 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 115 
 
 mere fashion or a tradition : it is a quality 
 of trie blood — a touch of nature that 
 would redeem the unlovely wastes of 
 much more prosperous and better- 
 informed life. 
 
 A few months ago I rode for more 
 than a hundred miles along this 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 neigh- 
 bours than most," said he. "But 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 
 
n6 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 the growth of these communities he 
 remarked — "Schools, schools, schools 
 of the right sort — that is what we 
 need." 
 
 But in the country about these towns 
 men and women are essentially like 
 the men and women who lived there 
 fifty years ago, or eighty years, or even 
 a hundred. The farmers have more 
 money than their predecessors had, 
 but the general structure of their life 
 is the same — a dull succession of the 
 seasons where agriculture is practised 
 in old-fashioned ways, where weary 
 housewives show resignation rather than 
 contentment and where ignorance has 
 become satisfied with itself. The coun- 
 try is somewhat more densely popu- 
 lated than it was twenty years ago 
 but the growth of population suggests 
 only a denser stagnation. 
 
 These men and women do not feel 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 117 
 
 poor. They have a civilization of their 
 own, of which they are very 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 inde- 
 pendent ? What more could men ask ? 
 One in five is illiterate. But what 
 matter? Some of the illiterate men 
 are more successful than some others 
 that can read. What does it profit a 
 man, then, to read? There is a self- 
 satisfied personal dignity which these 
 men show that prevents near approach. 
 If you propose to change any law or 
 custom, or are suspected of such a 
 wish, or if you come with a new idea, 
 the burden of proving its value is on you. 
 
u8 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 What they are they regard as the nor- 
 mal state of human society. There 
 was talk in one neighbourhood, I recall, 
 about the possibility that the son of 
 one of the more prosperous of these 
 men 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, by fixing 
 their attention on the life to come, 
 almost to the exclusion of ambition to 
 lift up 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," asked he, "how many 
 of the Confederate soldiers were illiter- 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 119 
 
 ate ? And 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 ship- 
 wrights, 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 Ve whipped the 
 Yankees — shore !" 
 
 "What would you think of schools 
 where men should now be trained to 
 occupations — schools here in this neigh- 
 bourhood, to make ploughs, waggons, 
 furniture — everything ? " 
 
 "That'd be a mighty good thing; 
 but that ain't education." 
 
 There is, of course, a considerable 
 variety of social conditions here as 
 everywhere else in the world. Near 
 
i2o THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 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 in 
 four States. A good many youth go 
 to the towns and find wider opportuni- 
 ties. From this same neighbourhood a 
 young man went to New York and is a 
 rich merchant there; another went to 
 college by his own exertions and is an 
 electrical engineer in a great manu- 
 facturing city; another is a partner in 
 a factory in New England; another is 
 a judge in Oregon. The most ambitious 
 of course, go away; and the general 
 level of life seems to remain as low as 
 it was generations ago. The number 
 of emigrants from the old Southern 
 States tells the story of the stagnation 
 of life in these rural regions. 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 121 
 
 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 proclaimed 
 the present as the ideal condition; 
 and, if any doubt this declaration, the 
 other has bidden him be content and 
 make sure of the world to come. Thus 
 gagged and bound this 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 perma- 
 nently the qualities of the frontier 
 civilization long after the frontier has 
 receded and been forgotten. The feel- 
 ing that you bring away with you after 
 a visit to such a community is a feeling 
 that something has intervened to hold 
 these people back from their natural 
 development. They have capacity that 
 
i22 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 far outruns their achievement. They 
 are citizens of an earlier time and of a 
 narrower world who have not come to 
 their own. And this is the cue to their 
 character. 
 
 The familiar classification of the 
 Southern people as "gentlemen" and 
 "poor whites" is misleading. The 
 number of the large landed proprietors 
 and of large slave-holders has been 
 greatly exaggerated by tradition. 
 Smaller, too, than is thought is the 
 class that may properly be called 
 1 ' white trash "or" buckra. ' ' The great 
 mass of these people came of sturdy 
 English and Scotch-Irish stock and 
 they are very like the country popula- 
 tion that settled the other States 
 eighty years or more ago. They are 
 not poorer nor "trashier" than the 
 rural population of New Jersey or 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 123 
 
 Pennsylvania or New York or New 
 England were several generations ago, 
 nor than they are now in some remote 
 regions of these States. 
 
 If the rural parts of New York or 
 New Jersey or of Pennsylvania were 
 to-day depopulated and all the ma- 
 chinery of the present civilization were 
 removed, and if to-morrow the popu- 
 lation of eighty years ago were to re- 
 appear just as it was, this would be a 
 community very like these Southern 
 communities. What an interesting field 
 for sociological experiment such a re- 
 appearance of a part of the past would 
 present ! Peddlers, missionaries, and 
 reorganizers of social life would over- 
 whelm their "contemporary ancestors. " 
 It would be a pleasure to help them 
 forward in a decade as far as their 
 descendants travelled in eighty years, 
 but it would not be an easy task. 
 
i2 4 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 After many impatient efforts we should 
 learn the wisdom of trying to find out 
 their point of view and of contenting 
 ourselves with seeing them advance in 
 their own way, even if they came slowly 
 and seemed stupid. Teaching one's 
 ancestors is at best a difficult under- 
 taking; for it is not the same task as 
 teaching one's descendants. What a 
 lot of disappointing effort this genera- 
 tion might have saved if it had known 
 this simple truth somewhat sooner ! 
 
 I have purposely not written of the 
 Negro as a separate part of the popula- 
 tion, for in the building up of the 
 commonwealth he will yield to the 
 same kind of training. The Negro, 
 at once the beneficiary and the victim 
 of slavery, yet holds the white man, 
 who was its victim and not its benefi- 
 ciary, in economic bondage ; and he is 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 125 
 
 himself also in economic bondage and 
 in bondage likewise to the white man's 
 race-feeling. Training that brings eco- 
 nomic independence sets the strongest 
 and most natural forces of life at 
 play. I long doubted whether a. de- 
 mocracy could absorb two different 
 races thus living together and yet apart. 
 But the practical results of right train- 
 ing, both on the white man and on the 
 Negro, have left no room for doubt, I 
 think, in the mind of any far-seeing 
 man who has made a personal study of 
 these results. The doubtful thing is 
 whether within any calculable time they 
 will all receive right training. 
 
 Without right training, you have 
 such a problem as men nowhere else 
 in our country have. It will yield 
 little to reason. Argument will not 
 solve it. Time alone will bring slow 
 change. The preacher cannot help; 
 
i26 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 for the races have fallen apart in their 
 religious life. The politicians have only 
 made the race-relations worse. The 
 white man has held the Negro back, 
 the Negro has held the white man back ; 
 and dead men have ruled them both. 
 Training to economic independence is 
 the only true emancipation. 
 
 Distinctive Southern life is to be 
 found not only in the country but 
 in certain old towns also. A college- 
 town will serve as an example. I 
 know such a community where it seems 
 proper to rest till one die, so quiet is its 
 mild, 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 railroad half a 
 century or more ago was run through 
 a college-town very like this there was 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 127 
 
 great excitement. A railroad ? Never ! 
 It would jar the dignity of the com- 
 munity and corrupt the morals of 
 youth. It was deflected, therefore; 
 and, after thirty years of jolting in 
 hacks over bad roads, the people had 
 to build a branch railroad. But even 
 then they would not permit a locomo- 
 tive nearer than a mile. The railroad, 
 therefore, ended in an old field and the 
 same hacks yet have their share of 
 work to do. But the old field is now 
 the site of a cotton mill. 
 
 I recently visited a college-town 
 contemporary with this. The century- 
 old buildings, the elms and the oaks 
 that give acres of shade — trees some 
 of which were planted by great men 
 with proper ceremonies — in such an 
 atmosphere generation after generation 
 of youth has absorbed a little learning 
 and much patriotism. The young men 
 
i28 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 you meet are grave 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 "ad- 
 herent" of another sect and a believer 
 in none. "I throw beef to the lion," 
 said he. "The sectarian representa- 
 tion 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 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 129 
 
 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 in our country. The suc- 
 cession 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 
 feel at home, as you would feel at home 
 if you could visit your ancestors from 
 whom you were reprehensible for stray- 
 ing away into your own generation. 
 
 When the play of general conversa- 
 tion had ended one evening the talk 
 settled down to a specific topic, and 
 this was the topic — the lack of freedom 
 
i 3 o THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 of speech in the community. Of course, 
 there was in that company absolute 
 freedom. We were talking about 
 "radical" opinions, especially on theo- 
 logical subjects and about the race- 
 relation. "I should not dare," said 
 one Professor, "to say in public — in 
 my lecture-room 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 any- 
 thing with them in private. But they 
 could not withstand the public in- 
 dignation that would be expressed 
 through the press." 
 
 "This is the more remarkable," 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 131 
 
 another added with a laugh, " because 
 the editor of the most important news- 
 paper 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 So-and-so, and the Presby- 
 terian 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 such a circle of the old aca- 
 demic society and in rural regions that 
 you come upon the real Southern 
 problem — that unyielding stability of 
 
132 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 opinion which gives a feeling of de- 
 spair, the very antithesis of social 
 growth and of social mobility. " Every- 
 thing 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 
 to a school for the Negroes and 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 encoun- 
 tered 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 — im- 
 possible!" I told him what I had 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 133 
 
 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 
 you were deceived. I shouldn't be- 
 lieve 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 ? Not at all ; but they 
 do give reason for patience. The prob- 
 lem is the most important that has 
 been presented in our national life. 
 It is not the education of a few millions 
 of neglected persons; it is not the 
 modernizing of a few picturesque in- 
 stitutions; least of all is it the task of 
 
134 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 imposing on these people the civiliza- 
 tion that has been developed elsewhere 
 (for this would be a fool's errand in- 
 deed and in no way desirable if it were 
 possible) ; but the larger question 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 race 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 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 135 
 
 not of wisdom, who wrote this memo- 
 randum for me under the mistletoe in 
 an old South Carolina mansion last 
 winter : 
 
 "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 real demo- 
 cratic ideals than it was twenty years 
 ago. The growth of such organiza- 
 tions as the Daughters of the Confeder- 
 
i 3 6 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 acy, 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 im- 
 portant 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 civi- 
 lization, further from the North than it 
 now is. No outward forms of govern- 
 ment can make two different peoples 
 the same." 
 
 Another man of learning if not of 
 wisdom used to say to me in Cambridge, 
 Massachusetts : " The Southerners have 
 always seemed foreigners to me. The 
 Northern and the Southern people are 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 137 
 
 different. I do not think they will 
 ever work out the same ideals." 
 
 These opinions (which I have heard 
 in recent years only in South Carolina 
 and in Massachusetts and only in 
 academic circles) 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 North 
 and South (as the XlVth amendment 
 to the Federal Constitution does not) ; 
 and forty years have not essentially 
 changed the Negro's place in the com- 
 munity; and it is true that no exterior 
 or temporary influence counts for much 
 and the hereditary " essence of a civi- 
 lization" 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 revolu- 
 
138 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 tionary if it ran counter to the native 
 "genius"; preaching is of no avail; 
 alms-giving 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 demo- 
 cratic order cannot be thrust upon it 
 and it were useless to try. 
 
 But, if I understand the great forces 
 of our time, and if I know the history 
 of the people of the Southern common- 
 wealths (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 all dominant 
 present tendencies. There is no un- 
 democratic trait in the Southern people 
 that is not directly accounted for by 
 slavery and by the results of slavery. 
 The most conspicuous institutional re- 
 sults were the political machines that 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 139 
 
 were built on race differences first by one 
 political party and then by the other, 
 and the ecclesiastical machines that 
 are the direct result of popular ignor- 
 ance and isolation. The country peo- 
 ple that I have described are men of 
 good mettle, men to make free com- 
 monwealths of. The very strongest 
 impulse they have is patriotic and 
 democratic. The contrary tendencies 
 are clearly survivals of a deflection 
 of their development. So strongly have 
 I been impressed with the democratic 
 quality of Southern character that I 
 believe, if a democracy existed no- 
 where in the world, Southern life 
 would now evolve one, perhaps even of 
 a radical type. 
 
 These old commonwealths were ar- 
 rested in their development by slavery 
 and by war and by the double burden 
 of a sparse population and of an ignor- 
 
i 4 o THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 ant alien race. When the weight of 
 these burdens is considered, the pro- 
 gress made these thirty years in 
 the development of the innate demo- 
 cratic tendency is without parallel in our 
 history. The present backwardness of 
 Southern life in rural communities and 
 in old academic or social circles is but 
 a picturesque reminder of the distance 
 we have travelled. 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 process that has been going on in 
 the upland South in particular is a 
 process of conscious and natural State- 
 building, constructive at every impor- 
 tant step. Reactionary influences have 
 been respectable, but they are spent 
 impulses. There are two great con- 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 141 
 
 structive forces. The first is Industry, 
 which has already given the essential 
 power over to a class of men that bring 
 mobility to social life and opportunity 
 to them that can take it. This in- 
 dustrial development would finally work 
 out the inherent democratic tendency 
 of the people if no other force were 
 brought into play. But no man who 
 knows the gentleness and the dignity 
 and the leisure of the old Southern life 
 would like to see these qualities blunted 
 by too rude a growth of sheer indus- 
 trialism. 
 
 The other great 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. This 
 is native, and it is nothing different 
 from Jefferson's creed and plan. So 
 strong is it that its recent manifesta- 
 
142 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 tion may fairly be called a new chapter 
 in our national history. In the presence 
 of this revolutionary force, fear of re- 
 action and doubt about the democratic 
 "essence" of Southern civilization falls 
 away. Beside this all other forces 
 except the force of industrial life count 
 for nothing. 
 
 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 towards modern life 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 for 
 the right training of the neglected 
 masses that is a larger matter than 
 school-room work or academic or pro- 
 fessional training — of the subject as it 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 143 
 
 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-Mis- 
 sissippian Southern States the propor- 
 tion 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 that 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 
 
i 4 4 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 so hopeful. Schools of this sort are 
 little better than none. The people 
 do not care for them. The stolidity 
 of ignorance can not be overcome by 
 any such perfunctory attack as this. 
 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 un- 
 productive 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 towards oc- 
 cupations at Hampton Institute for 
 the Negroes ; and it is this fundamental 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 145 
 
 fact that the present leaders of popular 
 education in the Southern States un- 
 derstand. 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 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 neglected 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 ob- 
 scured by race differences, nor by 
 political differences. It is simply the 
 
146 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 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 occu- 
 pations 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 train- 
 ing of a few. It is now understood 
 that none can be well 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 re- 
 garded as the foremost jurist in his 
 State. But his income hardly kept 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 147 
 
 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 
 life was a failure. The daughter 
 sold the family mansion to pay the 
 family debts. "But," as one of her 
 neighbours said, "she is the first happy 
 and independent member of that fam- 
 ily." She teaches wood-work in the 
 public school, and is training her 
 nephews to scientific agriculture. 
 
 The men and 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 agri- 
 cultural chemist several years ago be- 
 
148 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 gan 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 as long as 
 many farmers could not read, and 
 many more would not." He left his 
 laboratory and became an educational 
 statesman, and there are few men in 
 America whose influence in building 
 up the people is greater than his. Out 
 of a comparatively small acquaintance, 
 I know many similar experiences. A 
 well-trained preacher, for example, 
 who has had much to do with the ad- 
 ministration of the churches of his sect 
 in rural regions, lately gave up his 
 work and became a superintendent of 
 public schools. " Till the country peo- 
 ple are educated," said he, "church 
 work will not stick. " 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 149 
 
 Anyone who knows the work that 
 such men are doing could fill these pages 
 with a bare catalogue of heroic deeds — 
 deeds like these for example: The 
 principal of a school for training white 
 teachers proposed to the 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 self-supporting 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 their 
 winter vacation come than the principal 
 hurried to Hampton Institute to study 
 its method of teaching handicrafts; 
 and half the faculty went to New York 
 to hear lectures at the Teachers' Col- 
 lege. A vacation does not suggest rest 
 
i 5 o THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 to them but opportunity to equip 
 selves better. One of them went, as 
 soon as his vacation began, to organize 
 a model school in a village of two 
 hundred people. They had collected 
 $1,000. He secured $500 from some 
 other source. The building was opened 
 and every white parent in the neigh- 
 bourhood went to the dedication of it; 
 and the school, with its garden, its 
 kitchen and its workshop as well as its 
 books, provokes such enthusiasm as 
 the community never would have felt 
 for a mere book-school. 
 
 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 the energetic 
 educators in the South are doing lifts 
 them out of the ranks of mere school- 
 masters and puts them on the level of 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 151 
 
 constructive statesmen. They are the 
 servants of democracy in a sense that 
 no other public servants now are; for 
 they are the re-builders of these old 
 commonwealths . 
 
 Any man who has the privilege to 
 contribute even so small a thing as ap- 
 plause to this great movement feels the 
 thrill of this State-building work so 
 strongly that he is not likely to take a 
 keen interest in 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 re- 
 sults of economic forces; but, if the 
 masses of the Southern population had 
 
152 THE REBUILDING OF 
 
 been educated, or trained to work, (and 
 such training is education) a stronger 
 economic impetus might have been 
 given to diversified pursuits than cot- 
 ton-culture gave to slavery, and the 
 whole course of our history might have 
 been changed. But, whatever may 
 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 
 abolish slavery; but of the ultimate 
 result no man who can distinguish 
 dominant from incidental forces can 
 have a doubt. 
 
 The Southern people were deflected 
 
OLD COMMONWEALTHS 153 
 
 from their natural development. They 
 are the purest American stock we have. 
 They are naturally 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 an important contribution to the 
 Republic that their ancestors took so 
 large a part in establishing. Rich un- 
 developed resources of American life lie 
 in these great rural stretches that are 
 yet almost unknown. The foremost 
 patriotic duty of our time is to hasten 
 their development. 
 
 The End 
 
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