Εικόνες σελίδας
PDF
Ηλεκτρ. έκδοση

have received some training in observation along the entire line in both the domain of nature and man, and if he had learned to read, his reading would be along the same liberal and extended line. Such a course of study would not only give the pupil the best possible preparation for life, regardless of when he left school, but also the best preparation for subsequent studies either in the high grades of the common school or in secondary institutions of learning or university. This course of study would hasten the articulation of the common schools, secondary schools, and universities; would bring about a rational articulation without sacrificing the interests of the common schools, secondary schools, or the universities. The passport to a higher grade or institution would not be an ability to disgorge a gorged memory, but to observe and read intelligently, and to express the results of that observation and reading in good English. Inspiration and power rather than information would become the basis of promotion. No articulation that does not consider the interests of all the institutions concerned can bring the best results. The articulation that is based upon the best interests of the common schools is the one from which the secondary schools and universities will derive the most profit.

Life is a very practical thing. By this I do not mean to unduly emphasize the utilitarian at the expense of the ethical and esthetic. Reader, have you gone among the people-the plain, common people-and looked again and again at education from their standpoint? Have you, in imagination, lived over your childhood? Does our public school system seem to have been constructed with special reference to the needs of the people? Does it do the most to enlarge, to strengthen, and perfect their lives? Does it go to them in a spirit of helpfulness, or does it invite them to come to it? Is our system giving them that for which they are hungering? They are asking bread and fish, and we are giving them serpents and stones. They cry alond for trained powers of observation, that they may have better food, clothing, shelter, and transportation; that they may appreciate and enjoy the beauties of nature attending them by night and day. In return, we gorge their memories on geography and the books of natural science. They seek companionship with the good and great through their books; we give them five readers composed of extracts.

Do you say that this is not the province of school, but of life? I reply that childhood and youth is preeminently the time for such training; the period when the senses and curiosity are most active; life will be full of other duties; the to-morrow of neglected opportunity will never come. An instruction that does not make the son and daughter more helpful to their parents, that does not lay hold upon the hands and feet, lacks efficiency. There is something wrong about an education that does not enable the farmer's son to look more carefully after the condition of the crops, the stock, the gates, and fences; the daughter to be more interested, ingenious, and helpful in cooking, sewing, and housekeeping.

I hear a widespread complaint that "schooling" turns boys and girls against work. Is it not strange that history-a recital of deeds-should disincline pupils to deeds in their own sphere-in a word, to work? Go largely among parents, and you will find a general belief that some strange and wonderful power inheres in the text-book, and especially in that knowledge that is so hidden by technical terms as to be unintelligible to the masses. The pedantry of teachers is in no small degree responsible for our present course of study and methods; a desire to possess termsif not knowledge-not understood by the people. We teachers still act out our little part; puppet-like, we still dance at the behest of custom; still pay tribute to the effete past. Our pupils still perpetuate their wordy parades on examination and commencement days. Our graduates, with but little knowledge of composition, manage to deliver themselves of essays and orations, which, with "learned length and thundering sound, amaze the gazing rustics, ranged around." It may be remarked, in passing, that the teacher is no less amazed than the audience. When will we cease this array of pedantry and the artificial, and be perfectly sincere and honest with the people? Our systems of education must get simpler and more helpful though the heavens fall. I learned of an inspired preacher who draws his hundreds of thousands, and npon hearing him, find his secret to be simplicity and helpfulness. Eager to catch a glimpse of the world's great paintings, I find them portraying the meek and the lowly-Alone in the World, The Last Muster, Breaking Family Ties. The short and simple annals of the poor will ever be the inspiration of literature.

Pestalozzi indeed came preaching the gospel of sense-perception in the wilderness of memory culture, and we do him lip service in every convention of teachers, but the actual work of the average schoolroom shows that our hearts are far from him. For twelve long years, Horace Mann, the illustrious apostle of Pestalozzi, with the energy of despair, made his eloquent plea for ideas before words, throughout the length and breadth of Massachusetts, and we love to do him honor; and yet, in the average school, the gluttony of the memory goes on. Herbart, the apostle of apperception, numbers his followers by the tens of thousands, and yet, in practice, the doctrine of the correlation and concentration of studies is a stranger in fourfifths of the schoolrooms.

Shall our great systems of education, with their superb machinery, drift further and further from the people, or shall we hasten to learn the lessons of simplicity, helpfulness, and wisdom? These reforms are coming just as sure as the water seeks the sea. Already there are ominous mutterings among the people. It may be that no member of our profession is destined to lead these reforms to final and complete triumph. We are a conservative body. It may be that to achieve these reforms, some John the Baptist, feeding on locusts and wild honey, and with a leather girdle about his loins, must come forth from among the people. Be it so; thus have been compassed the world's greatest reforms.

ADDRESS OF REV. EDWARD EVERETT HALE AT THE OPENING OF THE NEW ST. LOUIS
PUBLIC LIBRARY BUILDING.

[The exercises connected with the formal opening of the new building for the St. Louis public library were held February 17, 1893. The library at that date numbered 90,000 volumes, having increased threefold since the present librarian, Mr. Frederick M. Crunden, took charge in 1877. Rev. E. E. Hale delivered the following dedicatory address:]

It is impossible, for the people of any community which has not fully tried it, to foresee the joy to individuals which they are making possible. No man can foresee the happiness of homes which is thus made possible. No man can foresee the elevation and advance of social life and publie order. No man can foretell the special occasions in which some new Watt is to be trained to build some new steam engine, in which some new Edison is to be trained for new discoveries in science, in which some new Walter Scott is to be educated for the happiness of millions upon millions. Victories, which can not be written before they are achieved, are all in the germ when we plant the acorn. Or, if you call it a mustard seed, no man shall say what birds shall take shelter, what travelers shall rest, under the shade of that tree of which you plant the germ to-day. Far less shall any man say what conquests shall be achieved by the travelers who from this rest and this shade go forward upon new duty.

I speak, in some sort, as an expert. I have seen the public library of my own home begin with a little collection of public documents in a snuffy little room in the city hall. I have seen it grow till it takes possession of the most costly building in New England. From a thousand books, I think, the gift of a retiring mayor, it has increased till it is now one of the largest libraries in the world. But it is not because I have seen this growth that I am saying what I say. It is because I may see any day a cabman, on his stand, reading one of its brown paper-covered volumes. It is because I have seen the thoughtful mechanic come out from one of its private rooms where he had been at work, in his leisure hours, on the most careful and recondite problems of the mathematics, perhaps extending their discoveries. It is because I have seen the first artists of America meet there to study what elsewhere they could not find, the steps in some line of composition or invention. It is because I know that the rank and file of the city of Boston would more readily rise in rebellion against any city government which neglected to provide for their library than if they had been wounded at any other point of their social life. After thirty years' experience, this has come to be the law and understanding; you may retrench on the right hand and on the left, you may cut down the salary of the mayor, you may leave the streets narrow, you may have a bad fire department, you may go to the dogs in any other direction; but beware how you put a finger on the appropriation for the public library! The people of that city, even those who you would say were of the most ignorant and thoughtless grade, have tasted the blood of life; and having tasted it once, they will not forego their feast. They know what it is to have the best books in the world at their command. They and their wives and their children know what this is. Having once feasted at that board, they mean that the steward and the cook shall purvey for them as well to-morrow as they did yesterday.

As I go forward it is my hope and effort to illustrate my prophecies by one or two' simple details which will at least throw what the artists call "broken lights" upon my picture; and I will try to make you believe that I am not speaking extravagantly. In the presence of the distinguished librarian of this society-a gentleman whose name is known all over the English-speaking world, among the leaders in his business for the tact and skill which he has brought to administration-I shall certainly speak modestly. I claimed to be an expert, but still speak as an outsider speaks, and not as one personally concerned in the administration of these great institutions. I beg to be understood as speaking as a child of the public, who has fared with other children of the public, when we come to the festival of which I have spoken. My ticket is as good as theirs and no better. In what I am to say, I am glad to be under stood as pleading for all sorts and conditions of men. I shall beg you, as I go on, to remember where the leaders of men so often come from. I do not remember that you found Jenny Lind in the court circles of Sweden. I know you found Ben

[merged small][ocr errors]

Franklin in a tallow-chandler's shop. I think Abraham Lincoln had never been sent to a gilt-edged academy, and never graduated at a college of a thousand generations. I am speaking in a nation where every soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack, and it is so speaking that I am taking it for granted that this city of St. Louis, which has so well forecast the future in a hundred enterprises, highly resolves to-night that in the future, in this business of books, the ration of the private who is tramping on foot with his musket on his shoulder shall be the same ration which the Secretary of War is to digest to-night, or the commander in chief of the great Army. It is two hundred and fifty years since the real people of this country highly resolved that every child born into it should be taught to read and write, and should share at the common charge in the effort for education, which other countries had made only for their priests and their rulers. It is two centuries and a half since such people as there were in this country highly resolved that for them, and with us and with our children, church and state should be ruled by the people of America. When they resolved this they meant that all America should be what we now call a school for the training of soldiers; that all America should be as a divinity school for the training of priests, so that every inan might be his own priest, and hold his own personal relation to God; that all America should be a school for the education of sons and daughters of the King, so that the meanest brat born in the meanest hovel might be able to read the Word of Life, or the law of life, as well as the child shaded under purple curtains in the palace of an emperor. True, when the fathers made this high decision they did not anticipate to-day. There had not been so many words printed in the world when the United States was founded as were printed in America yesterday, either in the form of journals or of separate volumes. The fathers who founded universal education, therefore, did not in the same statutes establish universal public libraries. But, if they could have forecast the future of type and stereotype and power presses, the future of to-day, they would have founded public libraries for everybody. And we, who are in that future-we who know what a book is, and how many books there are-we have no idea of limiting any son of God or daughter of God to the 5, 10, or 50 books which he can bring together in his own home. We have learned the great lesson that books are the universal property of the world, and that the light which is lighted is to be put upon a candlestick; it is not to be shut up under any bushel.

We, who are not ashamed of the name of nationalists, do not expect the great victories of cooperation in life to be wrought in one hour, in one year, or in one century. We observe, however, that they have been won already-in a steady evolution. We see with gratitude that this nation has from the beginning been ready to strengthen the hands of its Government whenever and wherever the Government acted for each and for all in the establishment of popular education. Thus the fathers determined that one child should have the same chance as another child. Gradually, in the establishment of their armies, they determined that every man must bear a gun, and that not the one military class, but the whole nation must serve the state. It followed, when they came to questions of suffrage, that they gave the suffrage to every man who had carried the firelock and had risked his life for his country. So when, in any city, one wanted to fulfill the Saviour's demand, and give the cup of cold water to the brother who was in need, the people of the American cities, as by instinct, saw that this water must be cold water, that it must be pure water, that it must be God's water, not defiled by human filth or iniquity. And, without asking under what power they did this, the great cities, as by one step, marched forward, so that the beggar might wash in water as pure as that which flowed for the baths of a palace. The American law is that, if the necessity is a necessity for each child of God, and is the same for each child of God, to each child of God it shall be given, at the public charge.

That child may be blind; still the state will see that he is taught to read. He may be deaf; still the state devises the method by which he shall be taught to hear. Poor thing, he may be deaf and dumb and blind; still the state folds him in her arms, soothes him on her bosom, and you find that by some magic or miracle she has taught him how to speak, how to remember, how to think, and how to live. In such determination that the meanest and the worst shall be nursed and cherished as the noblest and the best, the state does not know the meaning of the word "extravagance."

Now, even in what I have said, you have observed, you could not but observe, that the very words which we use are all tangled in with our thoughts of what a free public library can do, and what this library is going to do for the people who will use it. Thus, when we speak of "light" to-day, why, we hardly know whether we speak of the light which comes from one of Mr. Edison's incandescent burners, or whether we speak of the light which comes to a man as he reads from his New Testament, as he commits one of Tennyson's poems to memory, or as he follows along on the words of stimulus and suggestion which George Eliot has written down for him, or William Thackeray, or any other mistress of life, or master. It is all light, and it shines for all. It is interesting, indeed, to see how, in the common talk and common

thought of people, they have even come round to feel that the use of these intellectual facilities presupposes moral excellence and spiritual refinement. We carry it farther than we ought to carry it. When we say of one of our neighbor's boys that he is a nuisance to the neighborhood, he is all the time in the street, we say of his brother, "There is a good boy; he always has his book and is sitting by the fireside reading." We really think that reading is virtue. This is because we have found out that in the training of the memory there comes in the training of the moral sense, and in the long run we find ourselves more willing to trust the Watt, the Franklin, the Edison, the Lincoln, who have spent their time in diligent reading, than those who have not concentrated thought, attention, memory, imagination, or any of the faculties of the mind; those who have let them go wild, and perhaps result in nothing.

And we are sure that where street arabs, or dreaming ladies, or men of affairs are lured into the crypts of our libraries we are going to have a suffrage more pure, administration more strong, finance more simple. We know that, as fast and as far as we tempt them by our devices to eat wisely and well of the true tree of knowledge, they will eat of the fruit of the tree which is the good tree. The tree best named, the tree of life eternal!

There are some conditions of life which we take as things of course; we see them always and we are not grateful for them. They do not surprise us. Here am I! I could stand on one of your great bridges and look hour for hour on your great river as it flows by St. Louis. And perhaps there is not a man in this audience who could stand by my side there without being bored to death.

You are used to your river. To me, the miracle is wholly new. Now, just as you take the flow of your river, so does the average American, who knows what America is, take the happy, healthful flow of universal education. We take it for granted that a man can read. If he can not read he may go and perish. "Served him right," is the verdict of the coroner. "Look out for the engine"-that is the warning to the traveler in all our wildernesses, or whatever they may be called and whatever the name of the engine. The warning is printed in large letters for him to read it. Vain for him to say, when he picks up the pieces of his carriage, when he collects ono or two buckles of the harness, after the catastrophe which is only not fatal-vain for him to say that the letters above his head were unintelligible to him. "Whose fault is it that he can not read?" "It is no fault of ours," we say; "and he will know better another time."

To learn the value of your river. here you need to be on the top of a waterless ranch in Montana, with your dumb sheep or oxen gathering around you, begging you with their plaintive eyes to give them a drop of cold water to cool their tongues. To know the value of universal education, you need to travel in some country, where not one man in ten knows A from Z, or whether the letters "b-o" spell "cat" or spell "mouse."

In Spain, which is like America, in that it is a country of gentlemen, I have said to a railway porter in his own language, "Chevalier, might I trouble you to take that valise across the street to the hotel," to have the good fellow answer me as courteously, "Chevalier, I will take the valise with the greatest pleasure so soon as the chevalier yonder, who can read, will come and read to all fifteen of us the directions on the luggage."

Till we have had some such experience, you and I do not know what it is to wait at a ticket window for a clerk to be called who can go through that mystic process which shall show how much four tickets will cost when all the company knows that 43 cents is the price of one. Our machine of life here runs on so steadily with our system of universal education that we do not stop to think how it would groan and falter if we had failed to oil the wheels.

Shall we, however, set this great engine to running, and then give it nothing to do? Shall we teach every man, woman, and child in the nation to read, and then give them nothing but baggage tags and danger signals for their reading? Is my boy to be initiated into the mystery of numbers, is he to get an idea of those intricate mysteries of algebra and geometry and what grew from them, and then is he to be satisfied with calculating that 4 times 43 is 172? Are we to train dragoons, skirmishers, riflemen, and light infantry, and then shut them all up in a fortress and tell them that their duty is to police the parade grounds of the garrison? These are the questions to which America has now come. These are the questions which Mr. Crunden and these gentlemen who have called us here are asking you to-night. It is not enough that the boys and the girls, the men and the women of the nation should read the placards in the streets, whether they advertise tragedies or comedies, mustard or pepper. It is not enough that they should be satisfied with anything ephemeral, and even the daily newspaper, in its pride, has to acknowledge that it is nothing more. The time has come; nay, it came long ago, when man, woman, and child had a right to claim the best for reading. Theirs shall be the gate to all past history, unlocked and thrown open. Theirs shall be the other gate, to yesterday's research and discovery, thrown wide open as well. We ought to open to them the path through the garden in which the poets shall sing for them, in which Shake

speare shall portray for them men and women like themselves, in which Dante shall lead them through hell itself to purgatory and to heaven. Has any man found a philosophy which tells him how to live? Let it be theirs! Has any Columbus or Da Gama crossed oceans or deserts? For them has he tried that adventure! Has any son of God spoken words which bring the Father nearer to His children? These are not gifts for any upper ten thousand of the world. These are not like diamonds and rubies, to be locked up in caskets or store chambers for the unhappy people who are imprisoned in palaces. They are the infinite bounty of God for all sorts and conditions of men-as the rain descends upon the evil and the good; as the sunshine blazes for the just and for the unjust. That the dew may thus distill in the darkest corner and on the dryest soil, we establish and maintain our free public library.

All that I have said is absolutely commonplace. For that reason I said it. For I am now to rush in, as fools will you know, where even angels might fear to tread. I am to say now what only a stranger can say on an occasion like this and be excusable. You will please remember, then, that I am wholly a stranger to your councils. Since I arrived here only yesterday, I may say I have taken pains not to inquire about your work in the past, or your plans in the future. But on general principles, I can guess that Mr. Crunden on one hand has some plans of extravagant audacity, and that on the other hand he has some reserves which the public and even his friends can not account for, and which they say belong to the superstitions of his profession.

On the other hand, I can take it for granted without being told that in the board of trustees there are reverses and delays which the whole press of St. Louis ridicules, and yet that there are some audacious extravagancies lying latent which strike Mr. Crunden aghast when they are whispered to him. Of all this I know nothing, but that where bodies of honorable, intelligent, and courageous men are intrusted with a great public enterprise it must be so. I have repeated my commonplaces and compelled you to hear them, that here and now, on the birthday of this library, I may say one thing to everybody. It is the same thing to some errand boy or runner who shall carry a straw's weight of the responsibility of this library as to the gentlemen yonder who are going to draw up their wills before they sleep to-night, and leave to this library the legacy of their fortunes. The great truth is this: Books are made to read.

I give it to you as a motto to be printed in gold
On the main frieze of your largest hold.

They are not made to be locked up in bookeases. The greatest credit to a library is its ability to report at the end of the year that a large number of its books have been worn out in clear and honest service. The Pharisees thought that man was made for the Sabbath, but the Savior taught them that the Sabbathi was made for men. So there are Pharisees who think that books were made to be kept on shelves, but the truth is that shelves and cases and alcoves and corridors and stacks and catalogues and runners and desk clerks and assistants and librarians and trustees all exist so that books may be put into the hands of readers. The sooner a book is worn out the better, so that it be carefully handled and honestly used.

I do not say that the book must be taken outside the library walls. That depends. You are doing a good thing for students when you train them as the British Museum trains them, that they must study where the books are. If one hundred men can consult a volume in one day, as in their almost matchless reading room, that book may do a hundred times as much good in a day as if it had been carried home by a student. This is mere matter of detail. But I repeat the words, I care not how often, so I can fix them upon the memory of anybody who is responsible. "Books are made to read! Books are made to read! Books are made to read! They have no other purpose or object under heaven!"

"Of course they are!" says everybody in this audience, and half the audience add the thought which they are too civil to express, "What a fool the man is, to come all the way from Boston to tell us that! Or what fools the trustees were to invite him!" I beg your pardon. I have in other times been bullying a board of trustees who held that Pharisee doctrine. And one of them said to me, "Why! Mr. Hale, we hold this property in trust; we have receipted for it; we are like bankers whose stockholders have paid them $1,000,000 in gold for their capital." And was I not delighted when he gave me the simile; I hardly gave him time to finish his sentence. "Where would your bank be," I cried, "if you had not lent that capital? Where would your stockholders be if you had tied their shekels up in napkins or, like that man in the other parable, if you had buried them under ground?" And then I read him a lesson, which I trust in God he has not forgotten, how the soul of man is worth more than gold and silver. By so much should he be more eager that these precious ingots which we have inherited from the mining and minting of all time should be freely sent and invested where their value is best known. When they return from

« ΠροηγούμενηΣυνέχεια »