Page images
PDF
EPUB

In obedience to the laws of God and to the laws of all civilized communities, society is bound to protect the natural life of children; and this natural life cannot be protected without the appropriation and use of a portion of the property which society possesses. We prohibit infanticide under penalty of death. We practise a refinement in this particular. The life of an infant is inviolable, even before he is born; and he who feloniously takes it, even before birth, is as subject to the extreme penalty of the law as though he had struck down manhood in its vigor, or taken away a mother by violence from the sanctuary of home where she blesses her offspring. But why preserve the natural life of a child, why preserve unborn embryos of life, if we do not intend to watch over and to protect them, and to expand their subsequent existence into usefulness and happiness? As individuals, or as an organized community, we have no natural right, we can derive no authority or countenance from reason, we can cite no attribute or purpose of the divine nature, for giving birth to any human being, and then inflicting upon that being the curse of ignorance, of poverty, and of vice, with all their attendant calamities. We are brought, then, to this startling but inevitable alternative, the natural life of an infant should be extinguished as soon as it is born, or the means should be provided to save that life from being a curse to its possessor; and, therefore, every State is morally bound to enact a code of laws legalizing and enforcing infanticide or a code of laws establishing free schools.

The three following propositions, then, describe the broad and ever-during foundation on which the common-school system of Massachusetts reposes:

The successive generations of men, taken collectively, constitute one great commonwealth.

The property of this commonwealth is pledged for the education of all its youth, up to such a point as will save them from poverty and vice, and prepare them for the adequate performance of their social and civil duties.

The successive holders of this property are trustees, bound to the faithful execution of their trust by the most sacred obligations; and embezzlement and pillage from children and descendants have not less of criminality, and have more of meanness, than the same offences when perpetrated against contemporaries.

Recognizing these eternal principles of natural ethics, the Constitution of Massachusetts, the fundamental law of the State, after declaring (among other things) in the preamble to the first section of the fifth chapter that "the encouragement of arts and sciences and all good literature tends to the honor of God, the advantage of the Christian religion, and the great benefit of this and the other United States of America," proceeds, in the second section of the same chapter, to set forth the duties of all future legislators and magistrates in the following noble and impressive language :

"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates in all future periods of this Commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university of Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trade, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments among the people." See also Rev. Stat., ch. 23, sect. 7.

Massachusetts is parental in her government. More and more, as year after year rolls by, she seeks to substitute prevention for remedy, and rewards for penalties. She strives to make industry the antidote to poverty, and to counterwork the progress of vice and crime by the diffusion of knowledge and the culture of virtuous principles. She seeks not only to mitigate those great physical and mental calamities of which mankind are the sad inheritors, but also to avert those infinitely greater moral calamities which form the disastrous heritage of depraved passions. Hence it has long been her policy to endow or to aid asylums for the cure of disease. She succors and maintains all the poor within her borders, whatever may have been the land of their nativity. She founds and supports hospitals for restoring reason to the insane; and even for those

violators of the law whom she is obliged to sequestrate from society she provides daily instruction and the ministrations of the gospel at the public charge. To those who, in the order of Nature and Providence, have been bereft of the noble faculties of hearing and of speech, she teaches a new language, and opens their imprisoned minds and hearts to conversation with men and to communion with God; and it hardly transcends the literal truth to say that she gives sight to the blind. For the remnants of those aboriginal tribes, who for so many ages roamed over this land without cultivating its soil or elevating themselves in the scale of being, her annual bounty provides good schools; and, when the equal, natural, and constitutional rights of the outcast children of Africa were thought to be invaded, she armed her courts of judicature with power to punish the aggressors. The public highway is not more open and free for every man in the community than is the public schoolhouse for every child; and each parent feels that a free education is as secure a part of the birthright of his offspring as Heaven's bounties of light and air. The State not only commands that the means of education shall be provided for all, but she denounces penalties against all individuals, and all towns and cities, however populous or powerful they may be, that shall presume to stand between her bounty and its recipients. In her righteous code the interception of knowledge is a crime; and, if parents are unable to supply their children with books, she becomes a parent, and supplies them. . . . Public sentiment exceeds and excels the law. Annually vast sums are given for eleemosynary and charitable purposes,- - to promote the cause of temperance, to send the gospel to the heathen, and to diffuse the doctrines of peace, which are the doctrines of the Prince of Peace.

For public, free education alone, including the direct outlay of money and the interest on capital invested, Massachusetts expends annually more than a million of dollars. To support religious institutions for the worship of God and the salvation of men she annually expends more than another million, and what she gives away in the various forms of charity far exceeds a third sum of equal magnitude. She explores the world for new objects of beneficence; and, so deep and common is the feeling which expects and prompts all this that she is gradually changing and ennobling the definition of a cardinal word in the language of morals,- doing what no king or court with

all their authority, nor royal academy with all its sages and literary men, can do: she is changing the meaning of charity into duty.

For the support of the poor, nine-tenths of whose cost originate with foreigners or come from one prolific vice, whose last convulsive energies she is now struggling to subdue, she annually pays more than three hundred thousand dollars; for the support and improvement of public highways, she pays a much larger sum; and, within the last dozen or fourteen years, she has invested a capital in railroads, within and without the State, of nearly or quite sixty millions of dollars.

Whence comes her means to give with each returning year more than a million of dollars to public education, more than another million to religion, and more than a third to ameliorate and succor the afflicted and the ignorant at home, and to bless, in distant lands, those who sit in the region and shadow of death? How does she support her poor, maintain her public ways, and contribute such vast sums for purposes of internal improvement, besides maintaining her immense commercial transactions with every zone in the world?

Has she a vast domain? Her whole territory would not make a court-yard of respectable dimensions to stand in front of many of the states and territories belonging to the Union. Does she draw revenues from conquered provinces or subjugated realms? She conquers nothing, she subdues nothing, save the great elemental forces of Nature, which God gives freely, whenever and wherever they are asked for in the language of genius and science, and in regard to which no profusion or prodigality to one can diminish the bounty always ready for others.

Does she live by the toil of a race of serfs and vassals whom she holds in personal and hereditary bondage? — by one comprehensive and sovereign act of violence seizing upon both body and soul at once, and superseding the thousand acts of plunder which make up the life of a common robber? Every man who treads her sacred soil is free; all are free alike; and within her borders, for any purpose connected with human slavery, iron will not be welded into a fetter. Has she rich mines of the precious metals? In all her coffers there is not a drachm of silver or of gold which has not been obtained by the sweat of her brow or the vigor of her brain.

Has she magazines of mineral wealth imbedded in the earth? or are her soil and climate so spontaneously exuberant that she reaps luxuriant harvests from uncultivated fields? Alas! the orator has barbed his satire by declaring her only natural productions to be granite and ice.

[ocr errors]

Whence, then, I again ask, comes her wealth? I do not mean the gorgeous wealth which is displayed in the voluptuous and too often enervating residences of the affluent, but that golden mean of property- such as Agur asked for in his perfect prayer which carries blessings in its train to thousands of householders, which spreads solid comfort and competence through the dwellings of the land, which furnishes the means of instruction, of social pleasures and refinement to the citizens at large, which saves from the cruel sufferings and the more cruel temptations of penury. The families scattered over her hills and along her valleys have not merely a shelter from the inclemencies of the seasons, but the sanctuary of a home. Not only food, but books, are spread upon their tables. Her commonest houses have the means of hospitality. They have appliances for sickness, and resources laid up against accident and the infirmities of age. Whether in her rural districts or her populous towns, a wandering, native-born beggar is a prodigy; and the twelve millions of dollars deposited in her savings institutions do not more loudly proclaim the frugality and providence of the past than they foretell the competence and enjoyments of the future.

One copious, exhaustless fountain supplies all this abundance. It is education, the intellectual, moral, and religious education of the people. Having no other mines to work, Massachusetts has mined into the human intellect; and, from its limitless resources, she has won more sustaining and enduring prosperity and happiness than if she had been founded on a stratification of silver and gold, reaching deeper down than geology has yet penetrated. From her high religious convictions she has learned that great lesson,- to set a value upon time. Regarding the faculties as the gift of God, she has felt bound both to use and to improve them. Mingling skill and intelligence with the daily occupations of life, she has made labor honorable; and, as a necessary consequence, idleness is disgraceful. Knowledge has been the ambition of her sons, and she has reverenced and venerated the purity and chastity of her matrons and her daughters. At the hearthstone, at the

« PreviousContinue »