Image not available: GALLERY OF FINE ARTS.GALLERY OF FINE ARTS.
more information for a given amount of money than the cheapest circulating library in the world.
The editor is also invaluable as a social barometer. As Thackeray once said, “The newspaper is typical of the community in which it is encouraged and circulated; it tells its character as well as its condition.” This is awfully severe upon some communities, and upon the readers of certain papers, but it is none the less true.
Unselfish thinkers, who are concerned chiefly for the good of the community, are always the men who esteem the editor most highly. Wendell Phillips, who for more than thirty years was abused by about half the editors of the land, said, “Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.” Many years before, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of our government, said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should prefer the latter.”
The editor has improved more rapidly in the past twenty-five years than the representative of any other profession. Theologians, physicians and lawyers all belong to schools of one sort or other, but of late years there has come up a new school of journalism which is called independent, and it has become so popular withreaders of newspapers that the number of professors and students in it are increasing at a most gratifying rate.
James Gordon Bennett, Jr., explains one difference clearly when he says: “There is one grand distinction between journals—some are newspapers, some are organs. An organ is simply a daily pamphlet published in the interest of some party, or persons, or some agitation.” But the organs are not as numerous as they used to be.
Who would have imagined any time before the late civil war that in any great political campaign preceding a general election in this country there would be scores and almost hundreds of independent newspapers. The time was when a newspaper could not exist unless it were a party or personal organ. But the newspaper has gradually risen from being a mere partisan or personal mouthpiece to being the mouthpiece of its own proprietor. At the present day no properly qualified journalist need attach himself to either party for financial reasons. If he is competent to make a good newspaper he is quite free to express his own opinions regardless of whom he may help or hurt, and the position is so delightful that a great many editors rush into it apparently for the mere pleasure of expressing their own opinions. During the last general election the scarcity of strong party organs, even in the largestcities where they were supposed most to be needed, was a matter of general comment among practical politicians, and it is known that some newspapers changed hands solely for the purpose of being turned into party organs and that it was frequently so difficult to obtain control of existing journals that new ones had to be started for the sole purpose of supplying their respective parties with mouthpieces. This may be considered a compliment to the personal interest of the average journalist or to his personal ability. But, whichever it is, it is highly creditable to the profession, and it is a result which could not have been hoped for twenty-five years ago.
Now-a-days every journalist of actual ability, no matter which party he belongs to, wishes that he may become owner of an independent newspaper. It is impossible for him not to see that the independent newspaper is not only the most quoted and the most talked about, but the most profitable. The paper which is read by both parties is sure of more subscribers, purchasers and advertisers than that which draws all its inspiration from the platform formed by a single convention. The independent editor hears himself quoted in Congress by men of both parties; and these same men are quite likely to grumble and swear within a week to find themselves castigated by the same men whose words of wisdom they recently availed themselves of.
The possibilities of the press for good, now that independence in journalism is practicable and also a business temptation, cannot be overestimated. Public opinion can be created more rapidly by daily appeals and arguments which the newspaper reader can quietly look over by himself, pausing whenever he may like to think over what he has read, than anything that can appear in campaign speeches or magazine essays or books by the most noted writers and specialists. The editor, as a rule, has dropped the old stilted form of the essay, and puts his arguments in the ordinary colloquial form, with homely illustrations and forcible applications so far as words go. If it didn’t seem like complimenting him too highly and making him vain, it would not be unfair to say that his method is that in which the more valuable portion of the four gospels was written. He has learned that political power is no longer in the hands of the learned classes, but that all portions of the community feel and read and think; and that, as every man has a vote, the larger the audience he talks to, the simpler and clearer must be his arguments. Consequently the press is giving us a class of debaters such as the world never knew before, and such as no parliamentary body in the world possesses even now or can hope to possess for some time to come.
With increased freedom from party reins andties, the editor is continually increasing and enlarging the interests to which he addresses himself. There is scarcely a newspaper in the United States at the present day which restricts itself entirely to political subjects. Anything in the nature of human interests, social economies, moral reforms, and even the tastes and amusements of the people is a fair subject for the editor. He is not only a teacher; he is a preacher, and he preaches six days in the week instead of one. In fact, he frequently extends his ministrations into the seventh day also, to the great annoyance of preachers who occupy more dignified positions, but with not so large a congregation.
The press hereafter must be the principal moral, political and social influence of the country. There is no way to put it backward. It is being more and more trusted—more and more read—more and more depended upon to be equal to every emergency; and, to do it justice, it seldom disappoints expectations—a statement that cannot be made with any shadow of truth of any class of statesmen, except the very best. Years ago Lamartine was laughed at as a dreamer when he said, “Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature; there will be nothing else published but newspapers,” but Lamartine’s prophecy is being rapidly fulfilled. The newspaper is invading every department of literature,and giving the reader the best at the lowest price.
There is a great hubbub once in a while in courts and among lawyers about what they are pleased to style trial by newspaper, and it is astonishing that before a court can reach any important case, the conduct of the case, its merits and its probable conclusion have been so well foreshadowed by the press that interest in the trial itself is comparatively slight. So general is the resort to newspapers for information and opinion, that a short time ago when one of the famous boodle aldermen of New York was called up for trial, it was impossible, under the jury laws of the State, to find even one single competent juror in a city the population of which was one million and a half. Everybody had formed opinions, and the opinions generally agreed. They had seen the testimony—seen it discussed from all sides and all points—discussed so clearly, that they had no reasonable doubt of the guilt of the accused. And all this they saw in the newspapers.
It begins to look as if the time might come when lawyers, courts, jurors, judges, would all be supplanted by the editor, and as if soon afterward teachers and preachers also might feel occasion to shake in their shoes. There is no danger in such an event of the editor becoming conceited. He always has a regulating principle close athand. It is right in the counting-room at the book-keeper’s desk. The public can change its opinion of a newspaper as quickly as it can of a political candidate; and when it does, the editor knows of it at once by a class of figures that never are allowed to lie.
Because all this is true—and everybody admits that it is—a great many men of more ambition than brains are attempting to be full-fledged editors at a single bound. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Angels, who have unequalled opportunities of knowing the true inwardness of things, would think twice, or oftener, before attempting to be editors, without first going through a laborious apprenticeship. It seems the easiest thing in the world for a man who has a lot of money of his own, or, better still, some money which belongs to other people, to start a newspaper and air his own opinions—which consist principally of partialities and prejudices—but the end is sure to be disastrous. Many daily papers have started in our large cities and reached a large temporary circulation, which afterward disappeared in the mists of oblivion and left nothing but debts behind. A successful newspaper is the result of natural growth and accretion.
Henry Watterson, editor of the LouisvilleCourier-Journal, says: “The result of any newspaper enterprise depends upon the characterof the man who engages in it—his capacity to discern correctly and to adapt his paper to the wants and needs of the audience it is meant to serve.”
Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New YorkTribune, and now Minister to France, says: “Every great newspaper represents an intellectual, a moral and a material growth—the accretion of successive efforts from year to year—until it has become an institution and a power. It is the voice of the power that the twenty or thirty years of honest dealing with the public and just discussion of current questions have given.”
Horace Greeley, the founder of Mr. Reid’s paper, said truthfully that “The office of a newspaper is first to give the history of its time, and afterward to deduce such theories or truths from it as shall be of universal application.” Can any mere peddler of news and scandals, or any man whose sole gratification is a desire to see his own impressions in print, live up to this standard?
Conscience, application and money, as well as intellect, is necessary to the successful management of a newspaper. George W. Childs, editor of the PhiladelphiaLedger, snatched the sympathies of all decent members of the editorial fraternity when he said: “Few persons who peruse the morning papers think of the amount of capitalinvested, the labor involved, and the care and anxiety incident to the preparation of the sheet which is served so regularly.” Charles A. Dana, editor of the New YorkSun, says: “The legal responsibility of newspapers is a reality, but their moral responsibility is greater and more important.” E. L. Godkin, editor of the New YorkEvening Post, says: “News is an impalpable thing—an airy abstraction; to make it a merchantable commodity, somebody has to collect it, condense it, and clothe it in language, and its quality depends upon the character of the men employed in doing this.”
George William Curtis, editor ofHarper’s Weekly, admitting the tremendous influence of the press, voices the sentiment of successful editors everywhere when he says: “If the newspaper is the school of the people, and if upon popular education and intelligence the success and prosperity of popular government depends, there is no function in society which requires more conscience as well as ability.”
Evidently newspaper men who amount to anything realize their responsibilities. The press is not “all right,” but it seems as far from wrong as conscience and common sense can make any earthly institution.
THE late lamented Sam Weller once spoke of a schoolboy, who, having learned the alphabet, wondered whether it was worth going through so much to learn so little. The same reflection has come to millions of Americans as they thought of how much time they had spent in schooling and how little they knew when they got out.
There are parts of our vast country where the people are lucky enough to have teachers who know so little about the theories of teaching that they impart to their pupils more information than the law demands. But in the cities and large towns where teaching has been elevated, or more properly speaking, reduced to a science, where the most money is spent on the schools and where the school terms are longest, the prevalence of “how not to do it” is simply appalling.
The country boy who goes to school only four or five months in the year knows quite as much as his city cousin who annually has nine or ten months of schooling. What does the city pupilget for the double outlay of time, bad air, back-ache and discipline?
As he cannot make any subsequent use of his accumulation of bad air and back-ache, his entire gain over the country boy would seem to be in discipline. What does this discipline do for him in the adult life for which school life is a preparation?
Does it make him a better business man? No. If it does, why is it that the majority of business men in our large cities are from the rural districts? A few months ago I happened to be a guest at a dinner party at which more than a dozen men prominent in New York business and professional life came together. A question being asked about a social custom of thirty years before, it gradually transpired that not one of the party had been born or brought up in the city of New York, a city of which all now were permanent citizens.
I have told this story to prominent citizens of Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati, and in return received long lists of the great men of those cities who came from the country. With some fear and trembling I tried the same story in Boston at a large public dinner, but the man to whom I told it—he was a man who seemed to know everybody’s antecedents—replied that not more than one in ten of Boston’s Brahmans or live business men were born at the Hub.
Congress is fairly a representative body, but if you will look at the book which gives biographical sketches of all the members, you will be astonished to find how few cities and large towns are represented by men born in them. Nearly all the members were born and brought up in the country. Occasionally you will find that some representative or senator was born in Philadelphia or New York, but if you look at the head of the page you will discover that he is representing a rural district of some State other than his own.
You will find it the same way in the learned professions. In law, medicine and theology, art, literature and science, the men who are most prominent at all the great centres of education and intelligence date back to some farmhouse and country school. Most of these men went to college in the course of time, but whenever you find one of them and talk with him so long that he feels inclined to unbosom himself to you, you discover that the amount of schooling he had at his birthplace was very small. As most of these men have passed the period of their boyhood by at least a quarter of a century, it is not surprising to hear them tell of school years consisting of only three or four months, and of school-room exercises where the number of text-books were so few that many of the lessons were deliveredorally by the teacher, and boys and girls took turns with one another’s books.
If discipline, school discipline, counts for anything, these professions should be full of city-bred men. But they are not, except at the bottom—way down at the bottom. City schools graduate an immense number of young men who enter seminaries and especially departments of colleges, to gain a special education, but somehow these are not the men who are prominent in the new blood of their respective professions.
If discipline, so called, does not make the city-schooled youth superior to his country cousin, what is it good for? Well, it is good to keep the school-room in order. The larger the school the more necessary it is for a teacher to maintain order. In a building containing two or three thousand children, as many school-buildings in the larger cities do, rigid discipline is absolutely necessary to this end. But, to come back to original facts, why does it take seven or eight years to impart a common, a very common, school course which any bright boy or girl of fifteen years could master alone and unaided in a quarter of the time?
School systems, where there are any, seem designed for the special purpose of making the school a machine which should do credit to the individuals who run it. This would be excusable with an actual machine made of wood andmetal, but children are not tough enough to be put to such use. Besides, there is better use for them. It is not odd that teachers should look out for themselves and for their own records in the management of schools. If they don’t look out for Number One they will be an exception to all the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, compared with the children, the teachers’ number one as about one to fifty, and their importance should be judged from this standpoint of comparison.
School systems of study seem based on the capacity of the stupidest pupils. All the others must crawl because the stupid ones cannot walk.
This isn’t right. If armies were trained in that way we never would have any soldiers. Let schools, like regiments, have their awkward squads to be specially trained, so that they may catch up with those who are proficient.
What are the branches in which the common schools give elementary instructions? Spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and grammar. The farther from the large city, the surer the student is of getting any instruction beyond those branches during the first six or seven years of a common-school course. He may be qualified by home reading to go into the natural sciences or into mathematics at an early age, but that isn’t part of the system. It seldompleases the teacher of a graded school to be told of such acquirements of a new pupil. The school exists not to improve the intelligence of the pupil from the standpoint at which the teacher finds it, but to give him such instruction as the teacher is already detailed and instructed by law to give. A boy may forget all he knows of natural science, or algebra, or geometry, in the many years in which he is drilled in elementary studies leading up to the branches which he already understands.
In the country districts boys are often fit to pass rigid examinations for matriculation at college at the age of fifteen years. But the boy who does not begin to go to school until he is eight years of age finds himself at fifteen, in a city, merely fit to enter a high-school, and not a very high school either. Some of the most noted men in our country’s history graduated from college at sixteen or seventeen years. The curriculum of a college in those days was not as high as now. Nevertheless, the graduates certainly gave a very good account of themselves from their earliest entrance into public life. One of them was Alexander Hamilton, who graduated at seventeen, and who elaborated a system of financial management which a whole century of successive Secretaries of the Treasury have not considered themselves competent to improve upon. A very long list of men of similar prominencemight be given, but such illustrations are not necessary. Any intelligent man who has been to school knows that a great deal of his class-room time has been entirely at his own disposal, for the lessons were easily memorized; and therefore his hands were idle and Satan found something for them to do. The worst boys in school can often be found among the scholars who stand highest in the classes, and for the very natural reason that there is nothing to occupy their minds during a large portion of the school time.
Seriously, what is there about the elementary branches, as taught in our common schools almost anywhere, that should consume such an immense amount of time? In the Southern States a number of the despised blacks, children of slaves who themselves could date back their ancestors from generations of slaves, became quite proficient in elementary branches during a year or two, lounging about military camps in the capacity of servants. Special schools were founded, as soon as the war ended, by missionary societies, which prepared courses of study which they considered within the comprehension of the Anglo-African mind. Of course there were a great many stupid blacks; but, while some of these stupid children were making faces at text-books and drawing inartistic pictures on slates, their old fathers and mothers were learning from
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the same children’s text-books more rapidly than the best children in the public schools of the North are allowed to learn.
Sir John Lubbock complains that “A thousand hours in the most precious seed-time of life of millions of children spent in learning thatimust followeinconceive, and precede it inbelieve; that twoe’smust, no one knows why, come together inproceedandexceed, and be separated inprecedeandaccede; thatunclemust be spelled with ac, but ankle with ak,—while lessons in health and thrift, sewing and cooking, which should make the life of the poor tolerable, and elementary singing and drawing which should make it pleasant, and push out lower and degrading amusements, are in many cases almost vainly trying to gain admission.”
Take the course all through, and what is there about it that should require any great consumption of time? Reading certainly is not hard to acquire. Children out of school learn it in spite of any efforts to hold them back. Spelling is learned more effectually through reading than from any text-book. Writing requires only a model of which copies may be made, for there is no business man in New York or in any other large city who writes a copy-book hand. If he did, he would be considered incompetent for whatever position he may occupy. The first thing that a boy must learn on leaving school is to unlearnhis writing-lessons. Arithmetic undoubtedly requires considerable practice to make the pupil perfect and quick in computations, but as it consists entirely of applications of the first four rules, why is it that so much time is spent over the text-books and very abstract propositions and problems? Text-books of arithmetic seem to be skilfully designed for the purpose of keeping the child from practical knowledge on the subject as long as possible. Examples that are called practical are given in many of these books, but only after a large amount of figuring, the purpose of which the pupil is not allowed to clearly understand. A man whose education in figures has been obtained on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk will cypher more accurately and quickly any problem of ordinary nature that may be given him than his own son or daughter who has been several years in school, because he understands the relations and purposes of the factors, which never seem to be impressed upon the child.
General F. A. Walker, once superintendent of the census and now president of the Boston Institute of Technology, says: “The old-fashioned readiness and correctness of cyphering have been to a large degree sacrificed by the methods which it is now proposed to reform. A false arithmetic has grown up and has largely crowdedout of place that true arithmetic, which is nothing but the art of numbers.”
Geography is so largely a matter of memory of the eye that no man who was denied the privilege of studying this science while he was at school ever thinks it necessary to spend a great amount of time over it afterward, even if his business requires him to have a practical knowledge of the subject. It is simply a question of sight and of memory, just as is the case with knowledge of localities which he may visit either to a great or small extent, yet geography in the public schools is divided into two, three, and sometimes five different books, by the use of which the pupil goes again and again over the same lessons, obtaining in the end no more information than that he would get by a few days’ deliberate study of an atlas or a set of maps.
Prof. Geikie, a recognized authority on this subject, says: “Every question of geography should be one which requires for its answer that the children have actually seen something with their own eyes and taken note of it.” This is reasonable; it would also be practicable if globes and large maps were in the class-rooms, but generally they are conspicuous only by their absence.
It is quite true that grammar must occupy considerable of the pupils’ time. For all the persons who have studied it, there seem very few of any age at the present time who are ableto apply the principles of this science in such a manner that they habitually write and speak correctly. But this isn’t so much the fault of the pupil and of the teacher as of the text-books from which the science shall be studied. Good example, from which adults learn grammar more correctly and rapidly than in any other way, seems to be considered too good for children, so they are given text-books with definitions utterly beyond their comprehension—definitions so subdivided that there is nothing which the intelligent teacher so dreads as a few intelligent questions on the subject from a pupil on the grammar-lesson of the day. I have seen an intelligent man, himself a college graduate, and a public speaker of high reputation and elegant style, labor with one of his children over a lesson in grammar, and finally give up in despair and toss the book across the room. If a man of such character is unable to understand a grammatical text-book, what can be expected of the child?
The greater the scholar or teacher, the greater is his contempt for text-books of grammar. Old Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth of England, delights in saying that his distinguished pupil “never yet tooke Greek or Latin Grammer in her hande after the first declininge of a Noun and a Verb.” A more celebrated teacher, John Locke, complained that “Our children are forced to stick unreasonably ingrammatical flats and shallows.” Dr. Parkhurst said recently: “The way for a boy to talk correctly is to talk subject to correction—not to apply himself to linguistic anatomy, surgery and dissection. I studied grammar in the ordinary way about three weeks—just long enough to find out what a genius some people can show for putting asunder what God hath joined together. It is a splendid device for using up a boy’s time and souring his disposition.”
Well, all this routine is being imposed upon the children, and the little wretches are losing spirit and impulse through the delay to which the cleverer ones are subjected and the lack of clearness which causes the stupider ones to despair. Nothing whatever is done toward training the senses and physical intelligence of the child. They do this sort of thing abroad, but for some reason Americans are not allowed to follow the foreigners’ example. Apparently our children have a divine call to whatever handiwork may fall to their lot thereafter in the world, for certainly they get as little training in it as the twelve apostles had in theology before they were called to preach and teach. The French or German, the Swedish child, and even many a Russian child, is taught to use his hands and his eyes and all his senses that can be applied to practical affairs, but the American child gets no opportunity of that sort, except inthe few schools which conform more or less to the kindergarten system. We have a few technical schools in large cities, but they are regarded as means to finish a course of education instead of part of the ordinary elementary instruction.
When technical education, which means simply the use of the hands and eyes, is spoken of to members of Boards of Education and Superintendents of common school systems in large cities, the result is generally an impatient gesture or word. There is no room for that sort of thing, we are told; beside, it is a mere notion of theorists. The general run of children are not equal to it and would be more troubled than benefited by it.
Well, experience is more valuable than argument in answering assertions. A few years ago a man who had scarcely ever done any work in the school-room brought some theories on the subject of technical education over here from Germany, although he was an American. He went to Philadelphia and started a little class for the instruction of teachers. The majority of common school teachers sneered at his theories, so he proposed to silence all further opposition by a practical test. He started a model school for the purpose of demonstrating that what he asserted was practicable. He did not select the brighter pupils in the public schools, but wentdeliberately into the streets and picked up at random a lot of little gutter-snipes who had never been to school at all, or who, if they had, were persistent truants ever since. In a short time people saw—for it was necessary to have them see in order to make them believe at all—these ignorant children of the street doing better technical work in several directions than could be found anywhere else in the city except in establishments paying high prices for artistic labor. They carved wood, they modelled in clay, they made designs on paper, they stamped leather and brass and even showed some capacity for engraving and coloring in the direction of the higher arts.
The effect of this display should have been to have given the system prominence and practical demonstration in the public schools, but it amounted to little except the gathering of a few wide-awake teachers who wished to learn to teach as the theorist had been teaching. A few of those who took the course went into public school work elsewhere and have succeeded admirably ever since. In the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, any child who wishes can now receive a technical education under the direction of the common school authorities. The work began in a single school with a single teacher. It has since been extended to all the public schools of the city, and two teachers work hard frommorning until night. A strange development of this course of teaching deserves notice. Elizabeth is a city containing a great many large manufacturing establishments, and the modest young woman who had charge of the technical education in the public schools was amazed one day to receive a written request from a number of master mechanics in different establishments for a night school for their own benefit, for which they were willing to pay freely; and some of them told the teacher that their attention to the subject was first attracted by their own children doing clearer and more rapid work in the line of design than they, these master mechanics, who had been in the business all their lives, had ever yet succeeded in doing. So for months there was visible the astonishing spectacle of a lot of middle-aged men being taught their own business by a young woman who herself knew nothing whatever of their business.
The helplessness of the average American teacher when the subject of technical education is mentioned was shown amusingly a few years ago when one of the several superintendents who have general charge of the New York city schools devised a system of teaching from what he called object lessons. He prepared a manual and a set of charts and the Board of Education in compliment to him purchased a great many and placed them in the class-rooms. But it was almost impossibleto have them used unless the superintendent himself took the work in hand. The teachers didn’t understand it. They said they couldn’t get the hang of it. The truth was they had never had any education of the same kind themselves and the matter was as foreign to their intelligence as Hebrew or Sanscrit would have been. But, mark the difference; when news of this system penetrated the wilds of the rowdy West, demands and orders for the material to work with came East rapidly, and I was told that a single State in the new West made more use of this system than all the Eastern and Middle States combined. The West knows what it wants; the teachers are closer to the children than in the East. This may be one of the blessings, or perhaps penalties, of life in a new country, but, whatever it may be, the results seem to justify a wish that all of us could be transplanted to a new country, for at least a little while, from the older centres of our American civilization.
General Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “The introduction of shopwork into the public system of education cannot fail to have a most beneficial influence in promoting a respect for labor and in overcoming the false and pernicious passion of our young people for crowding themselves into overdone and underpaid departments where theymay escape manual exertion.” Col. Auchmuty, the philanthropic founder of New York’s great “Trades School,” says: “What scientific schools are to the engineer and architect—what the law school and the medical school are to the lawyer and the physician, or what the business college is to the clerk—trade schools must be to the future mechanics.” President Butler, late of Columbia College’s faculty, now president of the Industrial Association’s great model school, says: “Manual training does not claim admittance as a favor; it demands it as a right. The future course of study will not be a Procrustean structure—absolutely and unqualifiedly alike for all localities and for all schools; but it will have in it a principle, and that principle will be founded on a scientific basis—the highest duty of the educator will be its application to his own particular needs and demands.”
Is the experience of practical educators like these to be cast aside in favor of the antiquated theories of teaching now in vogue?
Any one who wonders why country boys become prominent city men, and why there are about as many Western men in New York city in business as there are men from the East, can find out by looking closely to the difference between city and country systems of education. If a country village is too small to have a high school, it is nevertheless generally the case thatthe higher branches are taught to a large extent in the commonest of schools. College graduates find the profession of teaching a very handy means of paying their expenses while looking about the country and seeing where to begin the practice of law or medicine, or perhaps drop into the pulpit. Boys and girls of twelve or fourteen years may be found studying physiology, algebra and geometry, natural sciences and chemistry in schools all over the new West at a time when children of the same age in the large Eastern cities are slowly wrestling with the lessons and elementary text-books of geography and grammar and arithmetic. When competitive examinations for West Point cadetships are held in the West the general trouble is that the candidates are too young to enter the military academy even could they pass the necessary examination and succeed in winning the competitive prize. I saw such an examination myself in one Western town, which was narrowed down to two boys. These youngsters, the ablest of all the applicants, were aged respectively thirteen and fourteen years. They passed rigid examinations in mathematics, with scarcely a mark against them. That is more than could be done by any boys of similar age in the public schools of New York and Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the three largest cities in the Union.
The rapidity with which children pass throughtext-books in the newer States and more sparsely settled districts is the cause of the great number of so-called colleges which are found all over our country. There are more colleges by title in the United States than in all the rest of the world beside. Their standards are never those of the universities of Europe—seldom of Yale or Harvard. But they are higher than those of the ordinary high schools, and the young man or young woman who passes through them has a very fair general education, and is fitted to go on by private reading to almost any extent. In the larger cities of the East such opportunities are few. There is, perhaps, a single large institution in each city, like the High School of Philadelphia or the Normal College of New York, at which girls are educated, or the College of the City of New York, to which the better boys are sent for a full college course if they desire it. But these same facilities are demanded and obtained in the newer cities at a rate that would astonish the Eastern person who chose to look into the subject.
The most pressing need of our common school system is more teachers. With more teachers greater personal attention could be paid to each pupil, and smaller time would be required for the ordinary school course. In the cities it is the rule that boys and girls must leave school at a very early age in order to help earn a livingfor their respective families. The majority of them are children of parents who are very poor, who have to work terribly hard and save in every possible way in order to keep their families from starvation. Consequently the children go to work as soon as they are large enough to be accepted by any employer at any sort of occupation. Their subsequent opportunities for learning anything are necessarily limited. They must learn by general reading if at all, except for such few opportunities as are granted them by night schools, a beneficent class of educational institutions, which those who most need them are least able to attend, for how much studying can a boy or girl do after nine or ten hours of work in a counting-room or shop or factory? With more teachers our city children could obtain a fair high school education at the age of fourteen, and be better able to make their way in the world at whatever their work might be.
The best finishing school that the people of the United States have ever been able to avail themselves of is the course of home reading which one society or other has within a few years devised, and which some of them are conducting with great care and success. Systems of reading and consecutive study are devised, books are supplied, individuals are selected to receive and inspect examination papers to show the capacity of the students and to give suggestions according asthe students may seem to require, and in this way one single society has now eighty thousand students, with more than a hundred instructors and inspectors. This system might be definitely extended at very small expense by the various States as part of the local system of education. Until the blunders of the common school system are modified or done away with, it is as little as the State can do to give an intelligent child this much of consolation and assistance for the time that it has been compelled to lose by incompetent tuition in the public schools.
THE railroad problem is one of the most complicated and vital questions of the day. Nothing, perhaps, is so typical of the ingenuity, skill and colossal power of our modern civilization as the railroad train—a solitary man holding the lever which controls this tremendous mass of wood and metal, with its freight of goods and passengers rushing past us at the rate of a mile a minute.
The growth of the railroad is one of the greatest marvels of this wonderful century. England got her first road from the Romans in 415A.D.To move the Roman armies it was necessary to have the “Roman Way,” and the remains of those wonderful works still excite the admiration of all beholders. The dangers and delays of roads in the middle ages, and even in the stage-coaching days of our fathers, beset as they were with difficulties and terrorized by highwaymen, all seem to us to belong to some remote past.
It is a new tribute to the genius of that imperialpeople who swayed the world in the earlier ages of Christianity that even now, with all our facilities of modern travel, our people are beginning to realize the necessity of roadways approximating those which they constructed. The farmer often has to haul the products of his fields many miles to reach the railway station, and the time and the effort needed to get his wheat or corn over tortuous and defective roadways entails a very serious loss. In many parts of the country the roads in fact are so impassable in certain months that the farmer is unable to transport his grain to the railway at a time, perhaps, when the markets are high, and is forced to hold it until the season opens, and to dispose of it at a much lower price. There is a general awakening of public sentiment to the necessity for improvement in this direction, and for some years to come there will probably be quite as much effort expended in the bettering of country roads as in the further improvement and extension of our already colossal railroad system.
Until the opening of the railway era, commerce and travel followed the natural lines of transportation—the water-ways. There were, it is true, a few exceptional instances like those of the ancient caravan routes which crossed the lines of the great rivers and built up inland cities, but the operation of natural laws in time
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prevailed, and these cities fell into ruins, while others sprang up along the coasts and water-ways. Even after the introduction of railways, the cost of transportation thereby was so heavy that the water-ways still commanded the general direction of commerce, and it is only since the wonderful cheapening of railway rates—due to the enormous growth of the traffic and the introduction of more heavily loaded cars and other economies—that the iron way has dominated the water-way and subverted what had been one of the maxims of commercial development from the earliest times.
At the present time, where the question of time is not important, the carriage of passengers and goods by water is so much cheaper than by rail as to survive in competition. Where the passenger’s time is of value, or perishable goods are carried, or the merchant is in a hurry to receive his consignment, the railway, following virtually the shortest distance between the two points—piercing mountains, spanning ravines and crossing the rivers, is, of course, the necessary means of communication. Most of the great cities that have sprung up within the memory of people still living, like those of old, are reared on the sea-coasts or the shores of great lakes, or on the banks of navigable streams, the facilities of transportation by water conspiring to create these centres of activity and industry. Wherea number of railroad lines concentrate, a great city may spring up—like Indianapolis; or where great manufacturing facilities exist, as in the juxtaposition of the coal, ore and flux—as at Birmingham, Alabama. But these are comparatively few in number, and have not such limits of expansion as cities which may be reached by water. Aside from their commercial disadvantages, the inland cities present difficult problems, among the most important being that of successful sewage and sanitation.
In this country, indeed, most of the earlier railroads were projected merely to connect navigable streams with one another, or with the coast, their founders evidently regarding rail transportation as an auxiliary of the natural ways, and not as a great rival which was in a very few years to dominate them. In other instances, railways in the early days were simply built along the banks of the rivers, because the people found that when the latter were frozen in the winter, they needed some other means of transportation. These scattered bits of road here and there were, in after years, as the possibilities of railroad development began to dawn upon the minds of far-seeing men, united by connecting links and reorganized into roads of much greater length. In fact some of the most difficult features of the railroad problem of the present day grew out of the failure of projectors of railroadsin the early days to grasp the meaning of the system which they were instituting. France, Germany, Belgium and other European cities have had no serious railway problem. The English people, however, have passed through very nearly the same experience as ours, and we are now solving the same questions which puzzled their heads nearly a generation ago.
The immunity of the continental nations from many difficult railway questions arises from the fact that they began building railroads after England and our own country had undertaken them, and after we had sufficiently developed their possibilities to show the absurdity of many of the ideas that prevailed when they were inaugurated. It was supposed that the first companies chartered would build a railway just as they would build a highway, and that the iron way would be open to competitive traffic by individuals or combinations of individuals, just as the ordinary highway was open. In the charter of the first railway company which built a line, the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, and in fact in all the charters which were granted in England prior to 1829, and the charters granted in this country in the same period, this idea is clearly expressed. The Ithaca and Owego Railway, now a portion of the great New York Central trunk line, was chartered in 1828, and one section of the charter contains this provision:“All persons paying the toll aforesaid may, with suitable and proper carriages, use and travel upon the said railroad, subject to such rules and regulations as the said corporators are authorized to make by the ninth section of this act.”
It is obvious that the notion entertained by the founders of this railway was that they would simply own a turnpike with rails upon it, and would derive their revenue from the tolls charged upon the vehicles that should be rolled over it by individuals. It was not until railway building had proceeded for about a dozen years that it became evident, from the nature of the power employed and the higher rate of speed—unforeseen until then—that might be attained, that the railway company must monopolize the service over the road they built. This rendered necessary an entire revolution of the principles upon which all future charters should be granted. But the fundamental mistake was made. The continental peoples began to build their railways after this fact was discovered, and therefore had the benefit of their predecessors’ mistakes, and adopted precautions which have relieved them of many awkward complications.
Besides this, another mistake of ignorance was the belief that railways would be used exclusively for the transportation of passengers, and it was long after the first rails had been laid that thenotion that “light goods” might be conveyed, dawned upon their minds.
Any man who should have told these pioneers of the railway world that the United States would possess in the year 1889 a hundred and sixty thousand miles of railroad, enough to belt the world seven times at the Equator, would have been regarded as a lunatic. The ownership of this vast property is represented by stocks and bonds aggregating $9,000,000,000. They receive yearly from the public for carrying passengers and freights the sum of $1,000,000,000 and, after paying the expenses of their operation, including the wages of more than 1,000,000 employés, they have left an available revenue of $415,000,000. More than one of the larger companies has a revenue greater than that of the United States government was thirty years ago. To earn this enormous sum the roads work night and day, seven days a week. Through the darkest and stormiest winter midnight, as well as through the pleasantest summer afternoon, the locomotive fires are kept alight and the wheels revolve unceasingly along the rails. The work they accomplish is something startling in the aggregate. In the year 1887, the latest for which the complete figures are at hand, the railroads of the country carried 428,000,000 passengers, travelling 10,500,000 miles, a distance equal to 450 times around the globe. The freight carried in thesame year amounted to 552,000,000 tons, and the distance traversed 62,000,000 miles.
It is a commonplace to speak of what the railroads have done in the way of opening up the country and bringing the blessings of civilization into the wilderness. In the Western country, where the people formerly wore homespun or the coarsest fabrics of Eastern looms, the women now receive weekly fashion plates still damp from the press, and every cross-roads store has in stock the latest patterns, not only from the great cities of our own land, but from the centres of European fashion. The postal system follows along the iron way, the metropolitan newspaper reaches the most obscure hamlet daily, and a chapter might be written upon the growth of the railway postal service alone. The telegraph lines enter new territory with the railway, putting the dweller in the remotest regions within reach of instantaneous communication with all parts of the world.
The effect of the railroad in thus multiplying and exchanging not only material products, but distributing the news of the day and bringing the inhabitants of the Pacific slope and those of the Atlantic seaboard into daily intellectual intercourse, and thus welding all into one homogeneous people, is a theme which has yet to be fully dealt with by the pen of the historian. From Maine to Texas, go where you will, you find the peopleread the same news, discuss the same questions, and are subjected to the same vivifying influences, the ideas of the farmer on the borders broadening in even pace with those of the dwellers in the cities until such a thing as provincialism is unknown on this continent. Indeed, foreigners who visit our shores, who have a taste for the picturesque, complain of this monotony, and bewail the fact that the American town or hamlet, whether situated on the borders of the great northern lakes or on the torrid shores of the Gulf, presents essentially the same exterior aspect and identical social conditions.
It would be too much to expect that this great railway system, with its unprecedented army of employés and the revenues of an empire, should be an unadulterated blessing; that it should not carry some alloy in its composition. Like most humane institutions, even the most beneficent, it has wrought mischiefs as well as brought great benefits. Until now the needs of our rapidly developing country were such that communities everywhere were clamoring for roads which would bring to them what they needed from the outside world and place within reach markets for their own products. Consequently, every possible inducement was offered for the building of railway lines, and without surrounding their construction with such safeguards as had already been found necessary in old and thickly populatedcountries. The result has been in many parts of the country an over-building of lines which has entailed subsequent losses and difficulties and the creation of abuses and complications which together constitute what has come to be known as “the railway problem.” It is clear that what might be broadly called the constructive period in our railway system is ended, and that we have now fairly entered upon a period of restriction and regulation. The people have now to learn to subdue and control these great Frankensteins of their own creation.
As Mr. Frederick Taylor, President of the Western National Bank of New York, who has all his life been a close student of the railway question, says: “Though the railroads have probably contributed more than all other agencies combined to make the United States what they are, no one will deny that the incalculable benefit which we have derived from their growth and development has not been, and is not, wholly ‘unmixed of evil.’ Leaving out other considerations, it is not unfair to say that three-quarters of all the legislative corruption from which we have suffered during the past fifty years have been directly chargeable to the railways; and that a very large proportion, perhaps nearly as much as half, of the litigation that has occupied our courts during the same period has been directly connected with railway matters.”
The great panic of 1873 was directly due to the over-building of railroads. Following it came several years of terrible business depression throughout the country, in which time and money was spent in trying to clear away the wreck. Hundreds of railroad companies were bankrupted and loss and suffering were entailed upon hundreds of thousands of persons who had invested their savings in these enterprises. In no end of instances the stocks of the companies were wiped out of existence entirely, the roads sold under foreclosure and reorganized. Again, in 1877, when the country was just beginning to recover from the shock, it was disturbed and depressed for a long time by the trouble between the railroad companies and their workmen, which in some cases culminated in riot and bloodshed. Another period of artificially stimulated railroad building reached its culmination in the panic of 1884, and two years later widespread strikes among railway operatives again disturbed the entire business of the country. During all this period the legislatures of the various States and the National Congress were busy with legislation intended to modify or remedy the evils complained of.
The question presents such difficulties that many students, including Mr. Taylor, can find a solution of the question only in the suggestion of national control of the railroads throughoutthe country. Mr. Taylor’s idea, however, is that they should not be owned and operated by the nation, but that the government should have the same sort of control which it now exercises over the national banks; in other words, that the national railway commission should supervise the railroads with the same authority which the Treasury Department exercises over the national banking system.
The unrestricted building of railroads under the provisions of the general railroad acts passed in most of the States, following that adopted in New York in 1850, has given rise to destructive competition and brought about some of the knottiest points in the railroad problem. It was held for many years, and is even now contended by a great many people, that the building of railroads, like any other business, should be left free to the unrestricted enterprise of individuals and associations of individuals. “If a lot of fellows see fit to put their money into building a railroad where there is not enough traffic to sustain it, and the road goes into bankruptcy, that is their affair, not ours; it is their money that is lost.” That is about how the average citizen talks on this subject. There could be no greater mistake.
In the first place the railroads are public highways, and as such must be supervised by the community. When in ordinary conversation in this country we speak of a “road,” from Chicagoto St. Paul for instance, it is always understood that a railroad is meant. In the older countries the mention of “roads” is understood to refer to a turnpike. The reason for the difference of usage is obvious. In old and settled countries the highways were in existence for centuries before rails were laid, and the word “road” therefore continues to hold its primary meaning. With us it is the railroad line which first enters into new territory, and it may be years before the contiguous region is sufficiently settled to render an ordinary wagon-road necessary.
The vital fallacy in the popular argument that “competition will settle this question of too many roads” lies in assuming that a railroad is, like an individual, private enterprise. If a man starts a hat shop in a neighborhood already well supplied with hatters, and he is bankrupted in the struggle for business, that is the end of him. He has lost his money and the shop is closed and the equilibrium of supply and demand in hats is restored. But when a railroad becomes bankrupted it does not go out of existence in that way. Where is there an instance in this country of a road, once built, having been abandoned or obliterated? No; the bankrupted road is placed under the protection of a court and in the hands of a receiver. It conducts a fiercer warfare than ever against its solvent rivals; for the bankrupted road is relieved from the necessity of paying intereston its mortgage or paying its debts, and continues to do business at lower rates than ever, for the receiver must keep it a-going pending its reorganization or whatever disposition is to be made of it.
The English people long ago reached a point which we are approaching fast, in that before a railroad is built its projectors must obtain a special charter, and in order to obtain that they must prove that there is a public need of the new line. Any one who has read the papers for the past few years will readily recall many instances of the destructive effects of building lines in territory already well supplied with transportation facilities. Take the West Shore road, which paralleled the New York Central, and not only sunk the capital of its own builders but forced a decline of fifty per cent. in the market price of New York Central, which from an eight per cent, dividend-paying corporation practically ceased to earn more than its fixed charges. The “Nickel Plate” road, paralleling the Lake Shore from Buffalo to Toledo, is another glaring instance in point. And still later we have the building of an unnecessary line from Kansas City to Chicago by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railroad, which has resulted in the fall of the stock of the latter company from about par to less than fifty cents on the dollar, with a coincident cessation of dividends.
A host of mischiefs and evils have sprung from the almost unrestrained power of railroad officials in the matter of their charges. By charging some shippers more and others less by means of secret contracts, the officials opened to themselves a field of unlimited profit. An awkward fact, which there is no denying, is the large fortunes, in most cases running into the millions, possessed by men who are or who have been railroad officials on modest salaries, and who had nothing before entering upon these positions. The cost of transportation being such an important factor in the price of commodities, it was quite easy for the railway to enrich one man and beggar or drive out of business another in the same trade, and this was done according to the personal interests of the man or men who could thus make rates. More than this, it was not at all difficult for the railroad to impoverish one town or city and build up another by discriminating in rates.
In fact, the railroad had the power to say whether a merchant should or should not succeed in business, whether a town should or should not grow in population and prosperity. In the Hepburn committee’s investigation of the New York railroads in 1879 it was shown that the milling business in certain towns of northern New York had been killed by railroads granting rates which favored Minneapolis and other western points.In one town all the millers but one were obliged to go out of business, and it was elicited in the investigation that this man had a secret contract with the railroad by which they carried his commodity for much lower rates than any of the others. The merchants of New York at that time complained that the discriminations of the railroads against the metropolis were driving away its trade to Baltimore and other points. The nefarious contracts made by the railroads with the Standard Oil Company were discovered so recently as to be still fresh in the public mind. It will be remembered that the railroads not only carried the Standard’s oil for a fraction of that charged a certain individual oil refiner, but actually paid over to the Standard Oil Company the overcharges of which they mulcted the unfortunate individual refiner.
The creation of railroad commissions in the various States, and the more recent establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission under the provisions of an act prohibiting these discriminations, forbidding the charging more for a longer than for a shorter haul, and inflicting a severe penalty for making railroad pools, goes far to remedy many of the most glaring evils complained of. But laws after all cannot make men moral, and, as President Charles Francis Adams, of the Union Pacific Railroad, said recently, “one of the chief causes of the railroad troubles is thelow standard of commercial honor among railway officials.” The opportunities for personal profit possessed by dishonest railroad officials, while somewhat diminished by the prohibition of discriminating rates by which they were enabled to build up one town in which they had an interest, or to favor certain firms in which they or their friends were partners, have been removed; but the avenues of unlawful gain still open to them are almost innumerable. As Herbert Spencer remarked in dealing with this same subject in England a quarter of a century ago, “corporations have no souls.” A combination of men will stoop to acts which the conscience of no one of them would sanction as an individual act. So, too, a man will deal with the rights and property of a corporation as he would never think of dealing with those of an individual.
Among the more frequent abuses of their official power, we find railroad officers personally buying lands in new territory or mining lands, and then building at the expense of the corporation branch lines to reach these properties and enhance their value; the establishment of manufacturing or business enterprises, in which the railway men are often secret partners, and securing for these enterprises favorable terms, and then contracting with the railroad to do business for less than cost; the fast freight lines, which ply over many roads, and which have exceptionallyeasy contracts with the corporations and are in many instances the individual enterprises of railway officials. It was not long since shown that some of these lines were actually competing with the railroad proper for freight, and carrying it with express speed as low as the railroad could afford to carry it in ordinary freight cars.
Many of the swindles and abuses in railroad management owe their conception to the scandalous example of Fisk and Gould in the Erie Railroad. One or two of the little tricks played by Gould and his partner in that road, will give an idea of the possibilities of profit in dishonest railway management. When Gould became president and treasurer of the road twenty years ago, the Erie had a very favorable and longstanding lease of the Chemung and Canandaigua roads. The rental was exceedingly low, having been made at a time when the leased lines were in financial trouble. By the terms of the contract, if the Erie should at any time fail to pay the rental, the lease was to be thereby abrogated. Under the circumstances, the securities of these roads were naturally selling for a mere song. Gould, through his agents, quietly bought up these securities for about their weight in waste paper, thus becoming the sole owner of the roads. Then, in his capacity as president and treasurer of the Erie, he deliberately failed