The French in the Heart of America Part 21

The clearing in the forest for the log schoolhouse where Lincoln got his only formal schooling ill.u.s.trates the beginning of the field of public provision for culture, a territory then made up in that valley largely of the white acres set apart from the domain of Louis XIV for the maintenance of public schools. I can tell you out of my own experience how meagre that provision was. Out on the open prairie a frame building--the successor of the log cabin--was built. I think the ground on which it stood had never been ploughed. I remember hearing, as if yesterday, a farmer's boy reciting in it one day what we thought a piece of lasting eloquence: "Not many generations ago where you now sit encircled by all the embellishments of life, the wild fox dug his hole unscared and the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer; here lived and learned another race of beings"--little realizing that, except in the encircling embellishments, we were sitting on such a site, and that we were the "new race of beings" and much nearer to the stone-age man than were they who built the ancient wall just back of the Pantheon in Paris.

The thought of the nation for to-morrow was tangibly represented only by that hut twenty feet square, with its few nourishing acres, most primitively furnished, a teacher of no training in the art of teaching, a few tons of coal in a shed, a box of crayons, and perhaps a map. The master made his own fires and swept unaided, or with the aid of his pupils, the floor. When, years later, in a larger building on the same site I came to be master of the same school, and gathered for work at night the farmers' sons who could not leave the fields by day, except in winter, I even paid the expense of the light. Now, if not on that site, certainly on thousands of others, in schools springing from such beginnings, the community provides not only chalk and electric light, but pencils, paper, books, lenses, compa.s.ses, lathes, libraries, gymnastic apparatus, pianos, and even food, if not free, at any rate at cost, in addition to trained teachers, trained in public normal schools, and janitors, and automatic ventilators to insure pure air, and thermostats to preserve an even temperature. The public has become father, mother, physician, and guild master as well as teacher of the new generation.

The public has even become the nurse, for in most of the large cities the kindergarten has become transformed into a public inst.i.tution which takes the child from the home, sometimes almost from the cradle, but more often from the street, at the age of four, five, or six years, and keeps it until it is ready for the tuitions of the elementary grades. In St. Louis, just across and up the river from Fort Chartres, where the initial munic.i.p.al experiment was made, there are now more than two hundred and eighty-three such schools.

It has, moreover, gone beyond these serious maternal employments. The strenuous civilization of the west has insisted that every man shall work.

But now that it has succeeded in this, it is not only beginning to insist that he shall not work too much--the maximum hours of labor in many employments being fixed by law--but he is being taught how to play wisely.

One of the most stirring books that I have read recently, "The Spirit of Play and the City Streets," is an appeal written by Miss Addams, of Chicago, whose n.o.ble work has been for years among the people who live close by Marquette's portage hut--an appeal for the recognition of the play instincts and their conversion into a greater permanent human happiness. There are statistics which intimate that the per-hour efficiency of men in some parts of America, whose number of hours of labor has been lessened, has also been diminished--diminished because of their imprudent use of their leisure, of their play time. So the thought of social experts is turning to teaching children to play wisely, they whose ancestors were compelled to leave off playing.

I speak of this here to intimate how far in its thought of the man of the future, the nation of to-morrow, that valley has travelled-first of all in its elementary training, and within much less than a half century, from chalk to grand pianos, and from inexpensive tuitions in reading, writing, and arithmetic to the dearer tuitions in singing, basket-weaving, cooking, sewing, carpentering, drawing, and the trained teaching of the old elementary subjects, with the addition of history, algebra, physiology, Latin, and modern languages.

When the State of Iowa was admitted into the Union, in 1846, there were 100 log schoolhouses in use, valued each at $125. The latest statistics I have at hand show that in 1912 the average value of the 13,870 school properties in the State was $2,170, that the average expenditure for each pupil was $28.86, and for each inhabitant $6.58, and that of the 507,109 pupils enrolled in the State only six per cent were in private schools-- the average for the States of the west varying from less than one per cent to sixteen per cent.

The elementary school followed the frontier at even pace. It was usually the first public building of every community, large or small. That everybody saw it for what it was, I cannot maintain; but that it was the symbol of the nation of to-morrow, borne daily before the people of the present is certain. The westerners carried rails in the Lincoln campaign, in their pride of his humble birth and vocation; they carried miniature log cabins in another campaign in exaltation of another frontier hero.

They pictured ploughs and axes on the shields of their commonwealths. But if one were to seek a symbol for the democracy of that valley, one could find none more appropriate than the image of a frontier schoolhouse. It is the most poetical thing of all that western landscape, when it is seen for what it is, though it is not always architecturally imposing. A signal- box, says an English essayist, such as one sees along the railroads, is only called a signal-box, but it is the house of life and death, a place "where men in an agony of vigilance light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death." A post-box is only called a post-box; it is a sanctuary of human words, a place to which "friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched not only by others but even by themselves." [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, on Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his "Heretics," p. 41.] And so a schoolhouse is only called a schoolhouse, but it is a place where the invisible spirits of the past meet in the present the nascent spirits of the future--the meetinghouse of the nation of yesterday and to-morrow. And I would show that image of the schoolhouse upon a field of white, as suggesting those white acres consecrated of the domain of Louis XIV to the children of the west.

Some years ago, when walking across the island of Porto Rico in the West Indies, just after its occupation and annexation by the United States, I met in the interior mountains one morning a man carrying upon his shoulders a basket filled with flowers, as it seemed to me at a distance.

As he approached, however, I saw that he was bearing the dead body of his child, with flowers about it, to burial in consecrated ground miles away.

The first task of the new government there, as in the western States, was to make fields consecrated for the living child, to set apart sites for schoolhouses--the place for the common school.

That the common school has not in itself brought millennial conditions to the valley we are aware, even as universal man suffrage has not brought the full fruits of democracy. French philosophers and American patriots alike have expected too much perhaps of an imperfect human nature. But they have made their high demand of the only inst.i.tution that can give in full measure what is sought in a democracy.

First, it teaches the child the way and the means by which the race has come out of barbarism and something of the rigor of the disciplines by which civilization has been learned.

Second, it gives this teaching to the whole nation of to-morrow. There are over ten million children in the public schools of that valley alone in America, and, as I stated above, less than eight per cent in the private schools; in the State of Indiana, where Lincoln had his slight schooling, less than three per cent are in private schools-that is, practically the entire people of the coming generation will have had some tuition of the common school, some equality of fitting.

Third, as is to be inferred from the second fact, children of rich and poor, of banker and mechanic, doctor and tradesman, come together, and in a perfectly natural companionship, though in the great cities, where there is less h.o.m.ogeneity, this mingling is somewhat disturbed by social stratification and the great ma.s.ses of immigrants.

So is the motto of the French Republic written the length and breadth of that valley, though it may never actually be seen upon a lintel or door- post: the "liberty" of access to the knowledges which are to a.s.sist in making men as free as they can be; an elevating "equality" such as a State can give to men of unequal endowments, capacities, and ambitions; and a "fraternity" which is unconscious of else than real differences.

I gave intimation in an earlier chapter of the cosmopolitan quality of the human material gathered into those houses of prophecy. There is separation of Caucasian from African in the south, and there is more or less unwilling a.s.sociation of Caucasian and Oriental in places of the far west on the Pacific slope, but except for these and for individual instances where, for example, the social extremes are brought together, these minglings are but microcosms of the State itself. The schools are not in that valley, in any sense, places provided by wealth for poverty, by one cla.s.s for another--charity schools; they are the natural meeting-houses of democracy, with as little atmosphere of pauper or cla.s.s schools as the highways, on which even the President must obey the custom which controls the humblest.

And let me say in pa.s.sing: there is no body of men and women in America more useful to the State, more high-minded, more patriotic, than the army of public school-teachers--our great soldiery of peace.

They are a body six times the size of our standing army--more than a half- million in number (547,289)--recruited from the best stock we have and animated by higher purposes, more unselfish motives than any other half- million public or private vocationalists of America. The total expenditure for the common schools is but four and a half times the appropriation for the standing army, though the number of teachers is six times (which intimates how little we pay our public school-teachers relatively-- seventy-eight dollars per month to men, fifty-eight dollars to women teachers). These men and women, who take the place of father, mother, adviser, and nurse in the new industrial and social order--receive about one and a quarter cents a day per inhabitant, man, woman, and child--a little more than two sous per day.

It is this two-sous-per-day army that is our hope of to-morrow. It is primarily upon its efficient valor that the future of democracy depends.

For it is they, rather than the parents, especially in the great cities and in communities of large foreign elements, who have its making in their hands. Without them the nation of to-morrow would be defenseless. She would have to increase her standing army of soldiers, and even then, with the mult.i.tudes of individual ignorances, malices, selfishnesses growing in her own valleys and being disembarked by millions at her ports, she would be powerless to defend her ideals.

One whom I have already quoted as speaking so disparagingly of Chicago said that the most touching sight he saw in America was the marching of the phalanxes of the nation of to-morrow past one of the generals or colonels of that standing army of teachers. It was not in Chicago, but it might have been. This particular phalanx had not been in America long.

They were singing "Sweet Land of Liberty" as they marched, swishing their flags, and then they paused and repeated in broken speech:

"Flag of our great republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes, whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we salute thee! We, the natives of distant lands who find rest under thy folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love and protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people forever." [Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 205.] A little florid, you may say. "But think," said the English visitor, even as he pa.s.sed out into the filthy street, "think of the promise of it! Think of the flower of belief that may spring from this warm sowing!"

And what gives most promise now is that this tuition has a.s.sumed a more positive interest in the nation of to-morrow. The pioneer school was a place of discipline, a place of fraternity, and it had the cooperation of the home discipline and of the discipline of the primitive industrial life in which the boy joined even during his school years. But that tuition was in a sense as unsocialized as was the democracy of that day. It was a.s.sumed that this meagre training would equip the boy with all the tools of citizenship. Being able to read, write, and cipher, his own instincts and interests would somehow procure good government and happiness.

Whatever patriotic stimulus his school gave him, as I recall out of my experience, was through a history which engendered a feeling of hostility toward England. That is being succeeded by a positive programme that thinks very definitely of the boy's fullest development and of his social spiritualization. The schoolhouse has become, or is in the way of becoming, the civic centre of the nation.

But on top of the eight years' training of the elementary school, which was considered at first the full measure of the obligation of the community, the State in that region came to build additional years of discipline--the high schools, first to equip young men for colleges or universities and then to fit them for the meeting of the more highly complex and specialized problems of life. These schools multiplied in the upper Mississippi Valley at an extraordinary rate after the elementary schools had prepared the way. In the northern part of that valley alone sixteen hundred were established between 1860 and 1902. And there is hardly a community of five thousand inhabitants that has not its fully organized and well-equipped high or secondary school; while even towns of a thousand inhabitants or less have made such provision.

Near the site of the village of the Illinois Indians, the village where Pere Marquette went from hut to hut in his ministries just before his death journey; where La Salle gathered about his rock-built castle his red allies to the number of thousands and attempted to build up what La Barre, in his letter to Louis XIV, characterized as an imaginary kingdom for himself--there is a beautiful river city, bearing the Indian name of "Ottawa," and in the midst of it a large building that was for me the capital of an imaginary kingdom, my one-time world, though it is called a township high school. I speak of it because it is typical of the instruction and influence that have come out of the long past, and that are looking into the long future, in thousands of the towns and cities that have each about them as many aspiring men, women, and youth as La Salle had savage souls about his solitary castle in the wilderness.

These are the new Rocks St. Louis, these the eagles' nests of the new Nouvelle France--I have visited scores of them--at Peoria, that was Fort Crevecoeur; at Joliet, where is now one of the best-equipped schools in the valley; at Marquette, upon Lake Superior; at Chicago, where I spoke one day to four thousand high-school boys and girls, for in most of these schools the boys and girls are taught together. The valley has one of these schools every few miles, where are gathered for the higher, sterner disciplines of democracy those who wish to prepare themselves for its larger service.

Their courses are four years in length, and, though varying widely, have each a core of mathematics, English, foreign languages, and either science or manual training or commerce. In some large cities the schools are differentiated as general, manual training, and commercial. But the States of that valley have not stopped here. With the encouragement of national grants--again from the great domain of Louis XIV--they have established universities with colleges of liberal arts and sciences, and schools of agriculture, forestry, mining, engineering, pharmacy, veterinary surgery, commerce, law, medicine, and philosophy. There is not a State in all that valley that has not its university in name and in most instances in fact.

They admit both men and women and there is no fee, or only a nominal fee, to residents of the State. These are the great strategic centres and strongholds of the new democracy. A little way back from Cadillac's fort on the Detroit River is one, the oldest, the University of Michigan-- founded in 1837--with 5,805 students. A few years ago I addressed there, at commencement, over eight hundred candidates for degrees and diplomas in law, medicine, pharmacy, liberal arts and science.

A little way from the Fox-Wisconsin portage is another, the University of Wisconsin, with 5,970 students. A few years ago I sat in that beautiful seat of learning among men from all parts of the world offering their congratulations at its jubilee. And they sat in silk gowns only less ornate than Nicolet's when he came over the rim of the basin to treat with the Winnebagoes--whom he had supposed to be Chinese mandarins. I heard, too, the graduates receive their degrees on theses ranging from the poetry of a lesser Greek poet to the "pancreas of a cat." I spent a month in its library at a later time and found it superior for my purposes to any other in America.

No higher inst.i.tution of learning in America is more strongly possessed by the spirit of the ministry of scholarship directly to the people. It needs sorely advice of the arts that centre in Paris, as most of those universities do. It needs advice not of industry but of the indefatigable disinterestedness of the French.

Behind the Falls of St. Anthony in the Mississippi River, first described and named by Father Hennepin, is the University of Minnesota, with 6,642 students. The princ.i.p.al deity of the Sioux was supposed to live under these falls, and Hennepin, the priest of Artois, speaks in his journal of hearing one of the Indians at the portage around the falls, in loud and lamenting voice haranguing the spirit to whom he had just hung a robe of beaver-skin among the branches of a tree. The buildings that are and are planned to be on this site would tell better than a chapter of description what a single State has done and is purposing at this portage of St.

Anthony of Padua, where hardly more than a lifetime ago the savage was sacrificing beaver-skins to the G.o.d of the Mississippi. There are many great laboratories and academic buildings upon that high sh.o.r.e at present, but a score more are in prospect for this mighty democratic university of letters and science, law and medicine, that will house in other centuries perhaps not merely the appeased spirit of the Mississippi but such learning as is in Paris or was in Padua, whose saint is still remembered by the falls; for the university has the necessary means. When the eglise of the Sorbonne, which Richelieu had consecrated, was being built, the French priests out along the sh.o.r.es of Superior were preparing the way for this new-world university. Certain lands in that iron region which they first explored were given by the nation as dowry to the university. These were not thought to be valuable, as at the time of the grant the most valuable timber and farming land had been sold. Fifteen years ago, more or less, a train-load of iron ore was brought down from that region to Allouez, a town on the lake named in memory of the priest of St. Esprit-- and now the lands of the university are valued at from thirty to fifty millions of dollars. [Footnote: "Forty Years at the University of Minnesota," p. 243.]

One might follow the River Colbert all the way down the valley and trace its branches to the mountains on either side, and find in every State some such fortress: in Iowa a university with 2,255 students; in Illinois one with 4,330; and so on to the banks of the river in Texas where La Salle died--and there learn that the most extensive of all in its equipment may some day rise. These, besides the scores of inst.i.tutions of private foundation, but compelled to the same public spirit as the State universities, tell with what thought of to-morrow the geographical descendants of France are doing their tasks of to-day, where Allouez and Marquette, Hennepin and Du Lhut, Radisson and Groseilliers, and the Sieur de la Salle wandered and suffered and died but yesterday,

Their paths have opened and multiplied not only into streets of cities and highways and railroads but into curricula of the world's wisdoms, gathered from Paris and Oxford and Edinburgh and Berlin and Bologna and Prague and Salamanca, even as their students are being gathered from all peoples.

Perrot spoke truer than he knew when he said to the savages of Wisconsin, "I am but the dawn of the day"; and the Indian chief who first of human beings welcomed Europeans the other side of the Mississippi River spoke in prophecy when he said that the earth had grown more beautiful with their coming.

The common school, the high school, the college and university--the common school compulsory for every child; the high school open to every boy and girl, without regard to race, creed, or riches; the university accessible to every young man and woman who has the ambition, the endurance, to make his way or her way to the frontiers of the spirit and endure their hardships! For I think of these universities as the free lands that were out upon the borders of that valley, except that this frontier of the mind will never, never find its limit. There will always be a frontier beyond, for new settlers, new squatters, of the telescope which makes the universe smaller, of the microscope which enlarges it, of the written word, the spoken word, the unknown quant.i.ties, the philosophies of life. Do we not see the illimitable fields opening even beyond the vision of those men of the crucible and retort, who are but leading the new farmers on to visible fields of increasing richness?

Hardly less cosmopolitan are the men of science and letters who are actually in those regions, and only less so those tens of thousands, who, like migrants of the earlier days, are going forward, many to the farthest, lonesomest frontiers of knowledge, but all to something beyond their immediate ancestral lot or field.

I am not thinking of the additions to the world's learning in all this, great as it is but impossible of apprais.e.m.e.nt. Nor am I thinking chiefly of the industrial and material advantages. I think it was some bacteriological discovery, known as the Babc.o.c.k test, resulting in a great improvement in the making of b.u.t.ter, that gave the University of Wisconsin its first wide sympathetic support. It was the discovery by a professor in one of the western universities of the means of inoculating with some fatal disease, and so exterminating, an insect that destroyed wheat and oats, which gave that professor a chancellorship, I am told, and his university more liberal appropriations. But those achievements and fames, while not to be belittled, I have no wish to catalogue and recite here. I am thinking of the social value of this great public educational system that is thinking constantly of tomorrow--of the world markets of to- morrow, to some extent, to which these curricula, as railroads' and ships'

courses, lead; of the world's letters of to-morrow, perhaps; but more specifically and more especially of the higher happiness of those particular regions and the success of its democracy. I am thinking of what these inst.i.tutions of the people's own devising are doing toward the making of a h.o.m.ogeneous spirit, in which individual, disinterested, and varied achievement will have a liberty to grow--as perhaps in no other soil of earth.

Democritus said two thousand years and more ago: "Education and nature are similar. For education transforms the man, and in transforming him creates in him a new nature." The State in its three inst.i.tutions--the common school, the high school, the college and university--has many in its care and under its tuitions for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, and in these tuitions has she created in her children a new nature, whatever their ancestry or place of birth. Memories of Europe's forges and trees, or fields of roses and golden mountains, and even of Asia's wildernesses, are in the names of many who enter those doors; the memories of other languages are in the muscles of their tongues or the formation of their organs of speech. Like the ancient Ephraimites at the fords of Jordan, they cannot "frame to p.r.o.nounce" certain words. And memories of persecution or of va.s.salage are in the physical and mental att.i.tudes of some. But they are all reborn of a genealogy impersonal but loftier in its gifts than any mere personal heritage--a genealogy which, like that of the children of Deucalion, begins in the earth itself, the free soil.

I have often thought and spoken of how artificial differences disappear when, let us say, Smith (English) and Schmidt (German) and Cohen (Hebrew), Coletti (Italian) and D'Artagnan (French) and McGregor (Scotch) and Olsen (Scandinavian) and McCarthy (Irish) and Winslow (of old America) travel together through the parasangs of the "Anabasis," or together follow Caesar into Gaul, or together compute a solar parallax, or build an arch, or do any one of a thousand things that have no national boundaries or racial characteristics. This is an extreme but not an unheard-of a.s.sembling of elements which the State has the task of a.s.similating to its own ideals.

I have not spoken, I cannot speak, of methods of that teaching, of its shortcomings, of it crudities in many places, of its general want of appreciation of form and color (of its particular need of France there), of its utilitarian inclinations, and of its eager haste. The essential thing that I have wanted to say is that this valley is not only more democratic socially and politically than any other part of America, unless it be that narrow strip farther west, but is also more consciously and vitally and constantly concerned about the nation of to-morrow.

I spoke of the flaming ingot of steel swinging in the smoky ravine by the site of Fort Duquesne as the symbol of the new human metal that is made of the mingling of men of varied race, tradition, and ideals in the labor of that continent. But above that in a clearer sky shines a more hopeful symbol--the house of the school, the meeting-place of the invisible spirits, the place of prophecy, pictured against a white field.

The historians have traced the origins of these inst.i.tutions to New England, to England, to Germany, to Greece. It is not remembered that France went first and hallowed the fields. But it is my hope that out in that valley, once a year, school and university may be led to look back to the men who there ventured all for the "greater glory of G.o.d" and majesty of France and found a field for the greater freedom and fraternity of mankind.

My own thought goes back to the place by the St. Charles River where Cartier's boat, which he could not take back to St. Malo because so many of his men had died, was left to be buried by the river, the place where Montcalm gathered his shattered army after the defeat on the Plains of Abraham. It was there that a structure once stood, made of planks hewn out of the forest, plastered with mud and thatched with long gra.s.s from the meadows. It was the residence of Notre Dame des Anges, the house from which the first martyrs were to go forth toward the west. This was, says Parkman, the cradle of the great mission of New France. And to this my thought goes as the precursor of the university in the Valley of the New Democracy.

CHAPTER XVIII

"THE MEN OF ALWAYS"

If one travels along the lower St. Lawrence in summer, one sees the narrow strips of the one-time great seigniories, clinging like ribbons of varied colors, green, gold, and brown, to the ancient river, of Cartier and Champlain. There is on each strip, a little way back from the river, a picturesque cottage, usually thatched, not roofed by shingles, with its outbuildings close about, such as Longfellow writes of in Acadia-memories of homes "which the peasants of Normandy built in the reign of the Henries." There is usually on each a section of meadow for the cattle, a section of tilled field for the wheat and corn and vegetables and a section of woodland for the fire-wood--each strip, so divided, being a complete miniature seigniory. Everything is neat. One feels that not a wisp of hay is lost (for it was in haying time that I pa.s.sed), that every tree is as carefully watched as a child, that whatever is taken from the fields they are not impoverished. The living owners, when they go to their graves, leave their little patches of earth as rich as they found them.

There is no hurrying. The habitants go at the pace of their oxen. They are thrifty, apparently contented, conservers of what they have; they spend prudently for to-day; they save for to-morrow--not for the to-morrow of the nation, but for the to-morrow of the family. They are avowedly individualistic, nepotic conservationists and only in effect national.