hat every man's highest duty
is to himself, we cannot escape community of sympathy and destiny in this
cold-blooded philosophy.
No social or political movement stands by itself. If we inquire, we shall
find one preponderating cause underlying every movement of the age. If
the utilitarian spirit is abroad, it accounts for the devotion to the
production of wealth, and to the consequent separation of classes and the
discontent, and it accounts also for the demand that all education shall
be immediately useful. I was talking the other day with a lady who was
doubting what sort of an education to give her daughter, a young girl of
exceedingly fine mental capacity. If she pursued a classical course, she
would, at the age of twenty-one, know very little of the sciences. And I
said, why not make her an intellectual woman? At twenty-one, with a
trained mind, all knowledges are at one's feet.
If anything can correct the evils of devotion to money, it seems to me
that it is the production of intellectual men and women, who will find
other satisfactions in life than those of the senses. And when labor sees
what it is that is really most to be valued, its discontent will be of a
nobler kind.
THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO
By Charles Dudley Warner
At the close of the war for the Union about five millions of negroes were
added to the citizenship of the United States. By the census of 1890 this
number had become over seven and a half millions. I use the word negro
because the descriptive term black or colored is not determinative. There
are many varieties of negroes among the African tribes, but all of them
agree in certain physiological if not psychological characteristics,
which separate them from all other races of mankind; whereas there are
many races, black or colored, like the Abyssinian, which have no other
negro traits.
It is also a matter of observation that the negro traits persist in
recognizable manifestations, to the extent of occasional reversions,
whatever may be the mixture of a white race. In a certain degree this
persistence is true of all races not come from an historic common stock.
In the political reconstruction the negro was given the ballot without
any requirements of education or property. This was partly a measure of
party balance of power; and partly from a concern that the negro would
not be secure in his rights as a citizen without it, and also upon the
theory that the ballot is an educatin
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