poorer people in our cities, if planted in isolated situations in the country, would deteriorate and grow barbaric in habit and thought, even though they might be physically in better condition. What very unattractive people most of our rural population are! It is to be noted that the attrition and constant opportunity for comparison which city life makes possible, and even compulsory, tend to make all the people who are subjected to its influence alike. They do and see and hear and smell and eat the same things. They wear similar clothes, they read the same books, and their minds are occupied with the same objects of thought. In the end they even come to look alike, as married people are sometimes said to do, so that they are at once recognized when they are seen in some other place; while people who live isolated lives think their own thoughts, pursue different objects, and are compelled to depend upon their own judgments and wills for the conduct of their daily lives. The consequence is that they develop and increase peculiarities of character and conduct to the vergo of eccentricity, if not beyond it, and present all that variety and freshness of type which we call originality or individuality. They are much more dramatic, picturesque, and interesting in literature, perhaps not always in real life. I mention this in passing, without any attempt to estimate fully the value of either development. Doubtless something is lost and something gained in either case, and probably much could be said in favor of each. Many persons have a great desire to get, as they say, "back to nature," while others prefer mankind in the improved state, even with some sameness. The ideal life, time out of mind, for all who could afford it, has been the city for action, the country for repose, tranquillity, recuperation, rest. When Joab, the mighty captain of Judea, quarreled with King David, he retired to his country seat, in what was called the Wilderness." When Cicero tired of the excitement of Rome, he found rest and quiet in Tusculum. When things went badly with Cardinal Wolsey, he sought refuge and repose in the Abbey of Leicester. Prince Bismarck retires from the frown of young Kaiser Wilhelm to Friedrichsruhe. The country is a good place to rest in, especially if one can control his surroundings. The quiet, the calm, the peace, the pleasant color, the idyllic sights and sounds, all tend to allay nervous irritation, to tranquilize the soul, to repress the intellectual, and to invigorate the animal functions in a very remarkable degree. But this is not rustic life; it is only the country life of the city resident. But the tranquil appearance of a country town, the apparent simplicity and serenity of rural life, the sweet idyllic harmony of rural surroundings are, as everyone must know who has much experience, very deceptive. I remember in one of Dickens's stories a man who lives the life of a traveling showman, one Dr. Marigold, says, in substance, that temper is bad enough anywhere, but temper in a cart is beyond all endurance. The small jealousies and rivalries, the ambitions, the bickerings and strifes of a small rural community, are greatly intensified by the circumscribed area in which they find their vent, and compared with the same human frailties in a larger sphere have all the drawbacks of temper in a cart. Mr. (Lacon) Colton says: "If you would be known and not know, vegetate in a village. If you would know and not be known, live in a city." But to this it may be added that those who are known in a city are very much more widely known than they can be in the country. A happy fitness between the size of the person and the size of the place is doubtless productive of the most desirable results. Mr. Shaw says: "I am not willing to deduce any pessimistic conclusions from this general tendency, whether exhibited in England, in Germany, or in America. I do not for a moment believe that modern cities are hastening on to bankruptcy, that they are becoming dangerously socialistic in the range of their municipal activities, or that the high and even higher rates of local taxation thus far indicate anything detrimental to the general welfare. It all means simply that the great towns are remaking themselves physically, and providing themselves with the appointments of civilization, because they have made the great discovery that their new masses of population are to remain permanently. They have in practice rejected the old view that the evils of city life were inevitable, and have begun to remedy them and to prove that city life can be made not tolerable only for workingmen and their fam. ilies, but positively wholesome and desirable." It would seem then (1) that for economic reasons a large part of the work of the world must be done in cities, and the people who do that work must live in cities. (2) That almost everything that is best in life can be better had in the city than elsewhere, and that, with those who can command the means, physical comforts and favorable sanitary conditions are better obtained there. (3) That a certain amount of change from city to country is desirable, and is also very universally attainable to those who desire it, and is constantly growing more so. (4) That the city is growing a better place to live in year by year; that in regard to the degenerate portion of mankind, the very poor, the very wicked, or the very indifferent, it is a question whether they are better off in the country; but, whether they are or not, their gregarious instincts will lead them to the city, and they must be dealt with there as part of the problem. (5) That efforts to relieve the congested conditions of the city poor by deportation of children to the country are good and praiseworthy, but only touch the surface of things, and that city degeneration must mainly be fought on its own ground. Perhaps, too, the country needs some of our sympathy and care. It appears clear that here is a constant process of deterioration. Deserted farms and schools and churches mark the progress of ignorance and debasement, and threaten to again make the villagers pagani, as they were in the days of old. And improvement here is not the hopeless thing it might seem; but it must be on economic, and not on sentimental, lines. The problems here discussed have but recently attracted general attention, and doubtless much is yet to be learned, but the progress already made is by no means small and all the signs are signs of promise. GEORGIA. [Address delivered October 31, 1893, by Hon. J. L. M. Curry, general agent of the Peabody and Slater funds, in response to an invitation of the general assembly of Georgia.] Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Gentlemen of the Senate and House of Representatives of the General Assembly of Georgia: I appreciate, I trust properly, the distinguished compliment of being invited to speak to you upon what the president of the senate has well characterized as the paramount subject of your deliberations. I count myself happy in appearing, also, in this magnificent hall of this magnificent capitol, which has, I understand, the rather exceptional merit of having been completed within the original appropriation, and of having been completed without stain or smirch resting upon anyone connected with it. I have the honor of appearing before men of distinguished ability, engaged in the most responsible work of lawmaking. Lawmaking is the attribute of sovereignty, and it is of the highest human honor and responsibility to be invested with this attribute. It would be carrying coals to Newcastle for me to say in this presence that the proper fulfilment of this function demands intelligence, patriotism, integrity, general acquaintance with law, political economy, and a thorough knowledge, not so much of what people desire or clamor for, as of what may be best for the people's needs and welfare. Divine law is the expression of omniscience and omnipotence; human law is the condition of civilization. Under the provocation of atrocious crimes, communities, aroused to indignation, have sometimes violated law. Sometimes, under the experiences of the law's delay and cheated justice, and burning with a desire to take vengeance upon odious malefactors, they have summarily, and sometimes with savage ferocity, deprived a suspected or guilty person of his life under the process of what is known as "lynch law." In pioneer and frontier life, communities have sometimes been compelled, for self-protection, to organize vigilance committees and take the law into their own hands. Such an extreme exigency does not exist at the South, nor excuse the illegal proceedings with which the papers are too often too full. The race of these criminals has not the possession of the government and is not charged with any of its functions. The white people, the race wronged and outraged, are in power, and control the legislative, executive, and judicial departments. As they are the judges, jurors, and executioners there is not the remotest possibility of one of these criminals, under just operation of law, going unwhipped of justice. A mob is a sudden revolution. It is enthroned anarchy. It is passion dominant, regnant. It usurps all the functions of government. It concentrates in itself all the rights and duties of lawmaker, judge, jury, counsel, and sheriff. A mob does not reason, has no conscience, is irresponsible, and its violence is unrestrained, whether it burns down an Ursuline convent, as in Massachusetts, or tortures a ruffian in Paris, Tex. A mob of infuriated men, or of hungry, enraged women, will violate all law, human and divine, and will be guilty of torturing, of quartering, of burning, of murder-enormities hardly surpassed by the most atrocious crimes. Life, property, person, character, perish as stubble before the flame, in the presence of a conscienceless, unthinking, aroused multitude. A rape is an individual crime, affecting disastrously, incurably, the person or the family; a mob saps the very foundations of society, uproots all government, regards not God nor man, is fructiferous of evil. The progress of mankind is to be found only along the lines of the higher organization of society. Our free institutions can not survive except on the condition of the union of enlightened liberty and stable law. Lawlessness and violence are the antipodes of liberty and social order. Obedience to the constituted authorities, to law, is of the essence of true freedom, of self-control, of civilization, of happiness, of masterful development. There probably is not a neighborhood in the United States which would not have summarily arrested and executed, without a day's waiting, the fiend of Paris. But that infliction of merited punishment, coupled with vengeance, is not defensible, but is fruitful of manifold evils. To its disregard of law may be traced whitecapism in the West and South, in which selfconstituted bands mercilessly execute their unauthorized judgments as to martial rights and obligations, political economy, personal duties, etc. It is a very grave error that democracy means the right of the people anywhere and everywhere, and in any way, to execute their passionate will. Ours is a representative government. Our representatives are not chosen because the people can not assemble en masse to legislate, adjudicate, and execute; but because the people ought not to assemble en masse to execute these functions of a complex government. I can fortify myself before a Georgia audience by quoting the expression of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who said before the bar association of this State: "The people have no hands for unlawful work. Justice is in the hands of the people only when it is in the hands of their organized tribunals." I I think it but a natural transition from these preliminary remarks to say that there is a wrong estimate of the power and effects of legislation. Too much is often expected of the general assemblies, as if the legislature were a sort of second-hand providence; and I suspect that not a few of you heard when you were candidates, or when you were about to leave for Atlanta, such inquiries as "What are you going to do for us? What will you do for us when you get to Atlanta?" I heard this very often when I was in public life. The world is governed too much. Some political thinker has said that the best government is that which governs the least. would not altogether subscribe to the "let alone" theory, because it may be pushed to extremes. There are two great factors of modern, progressive, civilized life. They are wise social organizations and proper individual development. Bearing these two factors in mind, I think you will not fail to see the relativity of my introductory remarks to what will follow. In cases of commercial distress, agricultural depression, financial crisis, national bankruptcy, we are too prone to seek for legislative cures and political nostrums, but all the legislation that you could pass from now until next Christmas would not increase one iota the real returns of agriculture. There are some knaves-not in Georgia, I hope-more demagogues, and a good many fools, who are trying to find a short cut to national and individual prosperity by treating wealth as if it were a thing that could be created by statute without the intervention of labor, forgetting that the products of labor represent all that there is of wealth in a country. Now, there are some universally established truths in political and legislative economy. Great changes, new systems of finance and trade, are not to be ordered as if you were to order a new suit of clothes according to a certain pattern. History condemns South Sea bubbles, John Law schemes of finance, shin-plaster, and fiat currency. Building Chinese walls around your country and erecting barriers against foreign trade never made a nation prosperous any more than the absurd notion, revived in recent times, that what makes one nation rich impoverishes the other, what one gains another loses. Now, we have serious agricultural depression in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and in all the Southern States. The abolition of slavery was a gigantic revolution. Did it ever occur to you that there is not in the annals of history anything comparable to it in its unprecedented magnitude and suddenness? This, with other effects of the war, paralyzed Southern industries and produced individual and general impoverishment. African slavery was a great economic curse. I am not speaking of it politically, socially, or morally, but it brought upon the South the curse of ignorant, compulsory, uninventive labor, undiversified products of agriculture, and sparse population. It was an interdict effectual upon invention, thrift, development of varied resources, diversity of employments, large and profitable use of machinery, improvement of soil, construction of good country roads, establishment of free public schools. These were the results of African slavery as an economic force. Curse as it was, it suggests a remedy for its evils. What are we to do? We must increase and make more valuable and diversified our products, and we must improve our country roads. Whatever facilitates exchange of products is a blessing. It will not be worth while to produce unless we can exchange what is beyond our own consumption. What do you need in Georgia? Yon need intelligent, skilled labor. Many of your laborers are ignorant, stupidly so, of every element of art and science. I spoke to a negro the other day at a railway station about his future. His reply was characteristic: "I ain't got nothing, and I don't want nothing." What is the worth of a system which produces such men? What you want is an alliance of brains and hands, with habits of thrift and cleanliness, and increased capacity of production. Now, Mr. President, I affirm that no ignorant people were ever prosperous or happy. You may measure the growth, the progress, development, and the prosperity of a people by their advance in culture, in intelligence, in skill; and you can measure the decline of a people by their decline in culture, intelligence, and skill. In the United States there are twenty millions of horsepower at work, lowering the cost of production, cheapening the necessaries of life, giving to toil a larger reward. Much of what handiwork did has been displaced by labor-saving machinery. Guiding the plow with the hand, mowing grass with the scythe, cutting grain with the cradle— this is fast disappearing from enlightened communities. The steam harvester and thrasher have rendered the work of saving the grain crops more rapid and less arduous. Science has found practical application, and ceases to be mere theory; it has allied itself with the useful arts. Machinery has released thousands from a weary struggle for supply of mere animal wants, and has permitted them to take up other pursuits, such as mining, manufactures, mechanical arts, gardening, fruit raising, etc., but this wealth-creating industry demands intelligence, thrift, and saving. Industry has thus received great benefit; the people have gained hope, inspiration, and life from the applications of the principles of science, have gained, finally, command of all of the resources of nature and have had opened for themselves the highest rewards of intelligent industry. It needs to be repeated and emphasized that national wealth is not the result of chance, or fraud, or legislative hocus-pocus, or stockjobbing manipulations or adroit dealing in futures. It is the result of honest, intelligent labor. The elements of wealth exist in nature in manifold forms, but must be fitted for human wants by labor. Through all transitions from natural condition to finished and useful artificial state, each successive process adds to the value. To utilize the powers of nature, the elements of property and wealth, is, in beneficent results, proportionate to the intelligence employed. The value created is almost in the direct ratio of the skill of the worker. Labor is not spontaneous nor self-willed, but must have behind it an intelligent control. Stupid labor is confined to a narrow routine, to a few, simple products. Unskilled labor is degraded necessarily to coarser employments. What makes work honorable, productive, remunerative, what elevates a man above a brute, is work directed by intelligence. The best method of applying power might be illustrated by such common processes as turning a grindstone, shoveling manure, harnessing a horse, driving a nail. Among the aristocracy of the old world and the Bourbons of the new is a current theory that it is best for the lower classes, the mudsills of society, the common laborers, to remain in ignorance. I have no patience with men who say that education for the ordinary occupations of life is a wasted investment, or who deny the utility or the feasibleness of furnishing to wage earners and breadwinners an education suited to the industries of real life. Will our impoverished people never see that ignorant labor is terribly expensive, that it is a tax, indirect but enormous, bringing injury to the material worked, to the tools or implements employed, wasting force and lessening and making less valuable what is produced? The president has declared what was intended as the burden of my address. While there are local interests and concerns that may interest you, there is one question, overtopping all others, that goes into the very household, that concerns every individual, that is allied to every interest; and that is how to furnish cheaper and more efficient means of education for the boys and girls of the State. When I speak of this being the paramount subject of legislation, I mean to say that the duty of the legislator is not only to look after education in Clarke County, in Cobb County, but to have the means of education carried to every child, black and white, to every citizen within the limits of the Stato. I mean universal education; free education; the best education; without money and without price. The great mistake in legislators and people is that, while they profess to be friends of education, and satisfy themselves that they are, they are talking and thinking of the public schools as poor schools for poor children, and not as good schools, the best schools, for the education of all. Here is field and scope for the exercise of the highest powers of statesmanship. This universal education is the basis of civilization, the one vital condition of prosperity, the support of free institutions. All civilized governments support and maintain schools. In semicivilized countries there is no recognition of the right to improvement, nor of the duty of the government to support universal education. William Ewart Gladstone is the greatest statesman of this century. Financier, scholar, orator, with marvellous administrative capacity, even to the minutest details of departmental and governmental work, and shows his appreciation of education by giving to the vice-president of the council of education a seat in his cabinet, and he is the only British prime minister who has so honored education. Last year I was reading brief biographical sketches of the candidates of the Republican and Democratic parties of Massachusetts for the various State offices-governor, attorney-general, etc.-and every one of them, with one exception, had been trained in the common schools of the State, and, therefore, when in office, they would understand what people were talking about when they advocated common schools, and would feel as Emerson said, that if Massachusetts had no beautiful scenery, no mountains abounding in minerals, yet she had an inexhaustible wealth in the children of the Commonwealth. None of you, perhaps, were educated in the public schools. How many times do you visit the public schools? How many times in the last year have you gone into a public school and sat down on the rear bench and watched the teacher teaching, in order to know what is being done in these great civilizing agencies of the State? A few years ago the King of Prussia, through Bismarck, issued a call for an educational conference, and he took part with educators and scholars in the discussions. In my journeys through the South, pleading for the children, I have found one governor from whom I never fail to receive a sympathetic response to every demand or argument that I may present for higher or general education. In days that are to come, when you shall record what Rabun did, what Troup, what Clarke, what McDonald, what Johnson, what Gilmer, what Jenkins, what Brown, what Gordon, what Stephens, and what other governors of Georgia have done, there will be no brighter page, none more luminous with patriotism, broad-minded, honest, intelligent, beneficent patriotism, devotion to the highest interests of the State, than that which shall record the fact that the great school governor of the South was William J. Northen. [Great applause.] The most interesting and profitable changes that have been made in the ends of modern education is the incorporation of manual training in the curriculum, so as to bring education into contact with the pursuits of every day. The three r's, reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic, used to be the standard. We should add the three h's, and develop, pari passn with the three r's, the hand, head, and heart, so that we may develop the child intellectually, physically, and morally, and so have the completest manhood and womanhood. Oh! it is a sad spectacle to see the ordinary graduate from one of our colleges, with an armful of diplomas, standing on the platform receiving bouquets, and ready to step across the threshhold and enter the arena of active life. You congratulate him because he has acquired knowledge in the schoolroom. But what can he do? What can he produce? What wealth can he create? What aid can he render civilization? He may be a lawyer. Alawyer never yet made two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. [Laughter.] Now, you show that you agree with what I am saying. [Laughter.] I have no sympathy, however, allow me to say it, with the vulgar, ignorant, stupid prejudice that some people have against lawyers. None in the world. [Applause.] You may trace the history of free government in all the struggles for right and liberty, you may study with profoundest admiration the constitutions, the embodiments of political wisdom, and every page of that history you will find illuminated by the wisdom of lawyers. But I say of lawyers what I say of doctors. Doctors do not add one cent to the wealth of the community. Neither do preachers. They are valuable; you can not do without them. But the lawyer, the doctor, the preacher, the editor, do not add one cent to the assessed value of the property in Georgia. Wealth comes from productive labor, and wealth is in proportion to the skill of the labor. It is the mechanic, the farmer, the miner, the manufacturer, the fruit grower, who add wealth to the community and to the country. The others are indispensable in the distribution of the products of labor, in the transactions of business between man and man, and in a thousand ways, but they do not create wealth. Let me come back to what I was saying, that the graduate of your college is educated to be a clerk, doctor, lawyer, preacher. You may turn him out of college and he will tramp the streets of your cities, of Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, to find some place in the bank, or some place in a doctor's or lawyer's office. He has been educated away from business, from ordinary productive pursuits, and has a distaste for labor. If his natural bent had been followed, if he had been taught the application of science to business, made familiar with tools and constructive machinery, he would have turned out, in very many cases, something more useful than he will be after having entered one of the learned professions. I wish some of you would stop over soine time on your way to New York at Washington or Philadelphia and go through the public schools. You would see that from the kindergarten to the high school there is no schoolroom where the pupils can not be taught the application of scientific principles to everyday life, and from which they can not come with a knowledge of the common tools and their uses. England learned that in order to hold the markets of the world she had to teach her children in industrial schools. She discovered that her trade was slipping away from her because of the lack of industrial training on the part of her working people. France gives manual training to both sexes. Saxony, a manufacturing country, had in 1889 115 trade or industrial schools, it being discovered that "a thorough professional education alone can aid the tradesman in his struggle for life." Statistics show a constant improvement of economic conditions. The flourishing orchards, with their world-renowned wealth of fruit, in Austria, Hungary, Bavaria, and Oldenburg, are directly traceable to the introduction of practical instruction in the school gardens. Prussia has introduced into the normal schools instruction in the culture of fruit and forest trees, and "the admirably managed forests and vast orchards of Prussia owe their existence and excellent yield in no small degree to the unostentations influence of the country schoolmaster who teaches his pupils in school and the adult villagers in agricultural clubs." |