Reflections and Comments 1865 1895 by Edwin Lawrence Godkin

E >> Edwin Lawrence Godkin >> Reflections and Comments 1865 1895

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THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The _Baltimore American_, discussing the plan of the Hopkins
University in that city, says: "The _Nation_ suggests to the Board
of Trustees a university that would leave Latin, Greek, mathematics,
and the elements of natural science out of its curriculum." This is
so great a mistake that we are at a loss to understand how it could
have been made. The _Nation_ has never suggested anything of the
kind. The university which the _Nation_ has expressed the hope the
trustees would found is simply a university with such a high
standard for admission on all subjects that the professors would be
saved the necessity of teaching the rudiments of either Latin,
Greek, mathematics, or natural science; or, in other words, that the
country would be saved considerable waste of skilled labor. The
reason why we have ventured to expect this of the Hopkins trustees
is that they enjoy the all but unprecedented advantage of being left
in possession of a very large bequest, with complete liberty, within
very wide limits, as to the disposition of it. In other words, they
are to found a university with it, but as to the kind of university
they may exercise their discretion.

That this is a very exceptional position everybody familiar with the
history of American colleges knows. All the older colleges are bound
to the state, or to certain religious denominations, by laws or
usages or precedents which impose a certain tolerably fixed
character either on the subjects or on the mode of teaching them, or
on both. They have traditions to uphold, or denominational interests
to care for, or political prejudices to satisfy. The newer ones, on
the other hand, are apt to have incurred a bondage even worse still,
in having to carry out the wishes of a founder who, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, had only a faint notion of the nature and
needs of a university, and in endowing one sought rather to erect a
monument to his memory than to found a seat of learning. In so far
as he was interested in the curriculum, he probably desired that it
should be such as would satisfy some want which he himself felt, or
thought he felt, in early life, or should diffuse some social or
religious or political crotchet on which his fancy had secretly fed
during his years of active exertion, and on the success of which he
came to think, in the latter part of his life, that the best
interests of the community were dependent. The number of these
honorably ambitious but ill-informed and somewhat eccentric
testators increases every year, as the country grows in wealth and
the habit of giving to public objects gains in strength.

The consequence is that we are threatened with the spectacle during
the coming century of a great waste of money by well-meaning persons
in the establishment all over the country of institutions calling
themselves "universities," which are either so feebly equipped as
rather to hinder than help the cause of education, or so completely
committed by their organization to the propagation of certain social
or religious theories as to deserve the appellation of mission
stations rather than of colleges. Education is now an art of
exceeding delicacy and complexity. To master it, so as to have a
trustworthy opinion as to the relative value of studies and as to
the best mode of pursuing them, and as to the organization of
institutions devoted to the work of instruction, a man needs both
learning and experience. The giving him money to employ in his
special work, therefore, without leaving him discretion as to the
manner in which he shall use it, is to prepare almost certainly for
its waste in more than one direction. To make the most of the
resources of the country for educational purposes, it is necessary
above all things that they should be placed at the disposal of those
who have made education a special study, and who are free, as we
understand the Hopkins trustees to be, from any special bias or bond,
and are ready or willing to look at the subject from every side.
Their liberty, of course, brings with it great responsibility--all
the greater for the reasons we have been enumerating.

Now, as to the use which they should make of this liberty, the
_Baltimore American_ fears that if they found a university of the
class sketched by us some weeks ago, "the people of Maryland would
be greatly disappointed--there would not be over fifty students,"
and "there would be a great outcry against the investment of three
and a half millions of dollars for the benefit of so small a
number." Whether the people of Maryland will be disappointed or not,
depends on the amount of consideration they give the matter. If they
are satisfied that the foundation of such a university as is now
talked of is the best use that can be made of the money, they will
not be disappointed, and there will be no "outcry" at all. Being an
intelligent people, they will on reflection see that the value of a
university by no means depends solely on the proportion borne by the
number of its students to the amount of its revenues, because,
judged in this way--that is, as instruments of direct popular
benefit--all the universities in the country might be pronounced
failures. The bulk of the community derives no direct benefit from
them at all. Harvard, for instance, has an endowment of about five
million dollars, we believe, and the total number of the students is
only 1,200, while the population of the State of Massachusetts is
1,500,000, so that, even supposing all the students to come from
Massachusetts, which they do not, less than one person in every
thousand profits by the university.

The same story might be told of Yale or any other college.
Considered as what are called popular institutions--that is,
institutions from which everybody can or does derive some
calculable, palpable benefit--the universities of this and every
other country are useless, and there ought on this theory to be a
prodigious "outcry" against them, and they ought, on the principle
of equality, if allowed to exist at all, to be allowed to exist only
on condition that they will give a degree, or at least offer an
education, to every male citizen of sound mind. But nobody takes
this view of them. The poorest and most ignorant hod-carrier would
not hold, if asked, that because he cannot go to college there ought
to be no colleges. Sensible people in every country acknowledge that
a high education can in the nature of things be only obtained by a
very small proportion of the population; but that the few who seek
it, and can afford to take it, should get it, and should get it of
the best quality, they hold to be a public benefit. Now, why a
public benefit? The service that Harvard or Yale renders to the
community certainly does not lie simply in the fact that it
qualifies a thousand young men every year to earn a livelihood. They
would earn a livelihood whether they went to college or not. The
vast majority of men earn a livelihood without going to college or
thinking of it. Indeed, it is doubted by many persons, and with much
show of reason, whether a man does not earn it all the more readily
for not going to college at all; and as regards the work of the
world of all kinds, the great bulk of it is done, and well done, by
persons who have not received a university education and do not
regret it. So that the benefits which the country derives from the
universities consists mainly in the refining and elevating
influences which they create, in the taste for study and research
which they diffuse, in the social and political ideals which they
frame and hold up for admiration, in the confidence in the power of
knowledge which they indirectly spread among the people, and in the
small though steady contributions they make to that reverence for
"things not seen" in which the soul of the state may be said to lie,
and without which it is nothing better than a factory or an
insurance company.

There is nothing novel about the considerations we are here urging.
The problem over which university reformers have been laboring in
every country during the past forty years has been, how to rid the
universities, properly so called, of the care of the feeble,
inefficient, and poorly prepared students, and reserve their
teaching for the better-fitted, older, and more matured; or, in
other words, how, in the interest both of economy and culture, to
reserve the highest teaching power of the community for the most
promising material. It is forty years since John Stuart Mill wrote a
celebrated attack on the English universities, then in a very low
condition, in which he laid it down broadly that the end above all
for which endowed universities ought to exist was "to keep alive
philosophy," leaving "the education of common minds for the common
business of life" for the most part to private enterprise. This
seemed at the time exacting too much, and it doubtless seems so
still; but it is nevertheless true that ever since that period
universities of the highest class, both in Europe and in this
country, have been working in that direction--striving, that is to
say, either to sift the applicants for admission, by imposing
increasingly severe tests, and thus presenting to the professors
only pupils of the highest grade to work upon; or, at all events, if
not repelling the ill-fitted, expending all their strength in
furnishing the highest educational advantages to the well-fitted. In
the last century, Harvard and Yale were doing just the kind of work
that the high schools now do--that is, taking young lads and
teaching them the elements of literature. At the present day they
are throwing this work as far as possible on the primary schools,
and reserving their professors and libraries and apparatus, as far
as the state of the country and the conditions of their organization
will permit, for those older and more advanced students who bring to
the work of learning both real ardor and real preparation. A boy has
to know more to get into either of them to-day than his grandfather
knew when he graduated. Nevertheless, with all the efforts they can
make after this true economy of power and resources, there is in
both of them a large amount of waste of labor. There are men in both
of them, and in various other colleges, much of whose work is almost
as much a misuse of energy and time as if they were employed so many
hours a day in carrying hods of mortar, simply because they are
doing what the masters of primary schools ought to do, and what no
man at a university ought to be asked to do. It is a kind of work,
too, which, if it have to be done in colleges at all, is already
abundantly provided for by endowment. No Maryland youth who desires
to learn a little mathematics, get a smattering of classics, and
some faint notions of natural science, or even to support himself by
manual labor while doing this, will suffer if the Hopkins endowment
is used for higher work. The country swarms already with
institutions which meet his needs, and in which he can graduate with
ease to himself and credit to his State. The trustees of this one
will do him and the State and the whole country most service,
therefore, by providing a place to which, after he has got hold of
the rudiments at some other college, he can come, if he has the
right stuff in him, and pursue to the end the studies for which all
universities should really be reserved.

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR

I

September 8, 1877.

Having just returned from a few weeks' stay in Virginia it has
occurred to me as probable that your readers would be interested in
hearing how such changes in Southern manners and tone of thought and
economical outlook as could be noted in a brief visit strike one who
had travelled in that region before the war had revolutionized it.
It is now twenty years since I spent a winter traversing the Cotton
States on horseback, sleeping at the house which happened to be
nearest when the night caught me. Buchanan had just been elected;
the friends of slavery, though anxious, were exultant and defiant,
and the possibility of a separate political future had begun to take
definite shape in the public mind, at least in the Gulf States. I am
unable to compare the economical condition of that part of the
country at that time with its condition to-day, because both slavery
and agriculture in Virginia differed then in many important respects
from slavery and agriculture farther south. But the habits and modes
of thought and feeling bred by slavery were essentially the same all
over the South; and I do not think that I shall go far astray in
assuming that the changes in these which I have noticed in Virginia
would be found to-day in all the other States.

The first which struck me, and it was a most agreeable one, was what
I may call the emancipation which conversation and social
intercourse with Northerners had undergone. In 1857 the tone of
nearly everybody with whom I came in contact, however veiled by
politeness, was in some degree irritable and defiant. My host and I
were never long before the evening fire without my finding that he
was impatient to talk about slavery, that he suspected me of
disliking it, and yet that he wished to have me understand that he
did not care, and that nobody at the South cared two cents what I
thought about it, and that it was a little impertinent in me, who
knew so little of the negro, to have any opinion about it at all. I
was obliged, too, to confess inwardly that there was a good deal of
justification for his bad temper. There was I, a curious stranger,
roving through his country and eating at his board, and all the
while secretly or openly criticising or condemning his relations
with his laborers and servants, and, in fact, the whole scheme of
his domestic life. I was not a pleasant companion, and nothing could
make me one, and no matter on what themes our talk ran, it was
colored by our opinions on the institution. He looked at nearly
everything in politics and society from what might be called the
slaveholder's point of view, and suspected me, on the other hand, of
disguising reprobation of the South and its institutions in any
praise of the North or of France or England which I might utter. So
that there was a certain acridity and a sense of strong and deep
limitations and reserves in our discussions, somewhat like those
which are felt in the talk of a pious evangelical Protestant with a
pious Catholic.

In Virginia of to-day I was conscious of a curious change in the
atmosphere, as if the windows of a close room had been suddenly
opened. I found that I was in a country where all things were
debatable, and where I had not to be on the lookout for
susceptibilities. The negro, too, about whom I used to have to be so
careful, with whom I used to make it a point of honor not to talk
privately or apart from his master when I was staying on a
plantation, was wandering about loose, as it were, and nobody seemed
to care anything about him any more than about any poor man. I found
every Southerner I spoke to as ready to discuss him as to discuss
sheep or oxen, to let you have your own views about him just as you
had them about sheep or oxen. Moreover, I found instead of the
stereotyped orthodox view of his place and capacity which prevailed
in 1857, a great variety of opinions about him, mostly depreciatory,
it is true, but still varying in degree as well as in kind. It is
difficult to give anyone who has never had any experience of the old
slave society an idea of the difference this makes in a stranger's
position at the South. In short, as one Southerner expressed it to
me on my mentioning the change, "Yes, sir, we have been brought into
intellectual and moral relations with the rest of the civilized
world." All subjects are now open at the South in conversation.

Is this true? it will probably be asked, with regard to the late
war. Can you talk freely about that? Not exactly; but then the
limitations on your discourse on this point are not peculiar to the
South; they are such as would be put upon the discourse of two
parties to a bloody contest in any civilized country among well-bred
men or women. The events of the war you can discuss freely, but you
are hardly at liberty to denounce Southern soldiers or officers, or
accuse them of "rebellion," or to assume that they fought for base
or wicked motives. Moreover, in a certain sense, all Southerners are
still "unrepentant rebels." Doubtless, in view of the result, they
will acknowledge that the war was a gigantic mistake; but I found
that if I sought for an admission that, if it was all to do over
again, they would not fight, I was touching on a very tender point,
and I was gently but firmly repelled. The reason is plain enough. In
confessing this, they would, they think, be confessing that their
sons and brothers and fathers had perished miserably in a causeless
struggle on which they ought never to have entered, and this, of
course, would look like a slur on their memory, and their memory is
still, after the lapse of twelve years, very sacred and very dear. I
doubt if many people at the North have an adequate notion of the
intensity of the emotions with which Southerners look back on the
war; and I mean tender and not revengeful or malignant emotions. The
losses of the battle-field were deeply felt at the North--in many
households down to the very roots of life; but on the whole they
fell on a large and prosperous population, on a community which in
the very thick of the fray seemed to be rolling up wealth, which
revelled as it fought, and came out of the battle triumphant,
exultant, and powerful. At the South they swept through a scanty
population with the most searching destructiveness, and when all was
over they had to be wept over in ruined homes and in the midst of a
society which was wrecked from top to bottom, and in which all
relatives and friends had sunk together to common perdition. There
has been no other such cataclysm in history. Great states have been
conquered before now, but conquest did not mean a sudden and
desolating social revolution; so that to a Southerner the loss of
relatives on the battle-field or in the hospital is associated with
the loss of everything else. A gentleman told me of his going, at
the close of the war, into a little church in South Carolina on
Sunday, and finding it filled with women, who were all in black, and
who cried during the singing. It reminded one of the scene in the
cathedral at Leyden, when the people got together to chant a _Te
Deum_ on hearing that the besieging army was gone; but, the music
suddenly dying out, the air was filled with the sounds of sobbing.
The Leydeners, however, were weak and half-starved people, weeping
over a great deliverance; these South Carolinians were weeping
before endless bereavement and hopeless poverty. I doubt much if any
community in the modern world was ever so ruthlessly brought face to
face with what is sternest and hardest in human life; and those of
them who have looked at it without flinching have something which
any of us may envy them.

But then I think it would be a mistake to suppose that Southerners
came out of the war simply sorrowful. At the close, and for some
time afterward, they undoubtedly felt fiercely and bitterly, and
hated while they wept; and this was the primal difficulty of
reconstruction. Frequently in conversation I heard some violent
speech or act occurring soon after the war mentioned with the
parenthetical explanation, "You know, I felt very bitterly at that
time." But, then, I have always heard it from persons who are to day
good-tempered, conciliatory, and hopeful, and desirous of
cultivating good relations with Northerners; from which the
inference, which so many Northern politicians find it so hard to
swallow, is easy--viz., that time produces on Southerners its usual
effects. What Mr. Boutwell and Mr. Blaine would have us believe is
that Southerners are a peculiar breed of men, on whom time produces
no effect whatever, and who feel about things that happened twenty
years ago just as they feel about things which happened a month ago.

The fact is, however, that they are in this respect like the rest of
the human race. Time has done for their hearts and heads what it has
done for the old Virginia battle-fields. There was not in 1865 a
fence standing between the Potomac and Gordonsville, and but few, if
any, undamaged houses. When I passed Manassas Junction the other day
there was a hospitable-looking tavern and several houses at the
station; the flowers were blooming in the yard, and crowds of young
men and women in their Sunday clothes were gathered from the country
around to see a base-ball match, and a well-tilled and well-fenced
and smiling farming country stretched before my eyes in every
direction. The only trace of the old fights was a rude graveyard
filled, as a large sign informed us, with "the Confederate dead."
All the rest of the way down to the springs the road ran through
farms which looked as prosperous and peaceful as if the tide of war
had not rolled over them inside a hundred years, and it is
impossible to talk with the farmers ten minutes without seeing how
thoroughly human and Anglo-Saxon they are. With them the war is
history--tender, touching, and heroic history if you will, but
having no sort of connection with the practical life of to-day. Some
of us at the North think their minds are occupied with schemes for
the assassination and spoliation of negroes, and for a "new
rebellion." Their minds are really occupied with making money, and
the farms show it, and their designs on the negro are confined to
getting him to work for low wages. His wages are low--forty cents a
day and rations, which cost ten cents--but he is content with it. I
saw negroes seeking employment at this rate, and glad to get it; and
in the making of the bargain nothing could be more commercial,
apparently, than the relations of the parties. They were evidently
laborer and employer to each other, and nothing more.

The state of things on two farms which I visited may serve as
illustrations of the process of regeneration which is going on all
over Virginia. They are two hundred miles apart. On one of two
thousand acres there were, before the war, about one hundred and
fifty slaves of all ages. The owner, at emancipation, put them in
wagons and deposited them in Ohio. His successor now works the
plantation with twelve hired men, who see to his cattle, of which he
raises and feeds large herds. His cultivation is carried on on
shares by white tenants. He has an overseer, makes a snug income,
and spends a good part of his winters in Baltimore and New York. He
laughs when you ask him if he regrets slavery. Nothing would induce
him to take care of one hundred and fifty men, women, and children,
furnishing perhaps thirty able-bodied men, littering the house with
a swarm of lazy servants, and making heavy drafts on the meat-house
and corn-crib, and running up doctor's bills.

The other was owned at the close of the war by a regular "Virginia
gentleman," with the usual swarm of negroes, and who was in debt.
He sold it to an enterprising young farmer from another county,
paid his debts, and retired to a small place, where, with two or
three hired men, he makes a living. The young farmer, instead of
seventy-five slaves, works it with twelve hands in the busy season
and three in winter, is up at five o'clock in the morning
superintending them himself, raises all raisable crops, and is as
intent on the markets and the experiments made by his neighbors as
if he lived in Illinois or the Carse of Gowrie. He was led by
Colonel Waring's book to try tile-draining, and made the tiles for
the purpose on his own land. He was so successful that he now
manufactures and soils tiles extensively to others. It would be
difficult to meet at the North or in England two men with their
faces turned away from the old times more completely than these,
more averse from the old plantation ways; and, as far as I could
learn or hear, they are fair specimens of the kind of men who are
taking possession of the Old Dominion. Their neighbors consist of
three classes: men who had by extraordinary exertions saved some or
all of their land after the war, and had by borrowing or economizing
managed to stock it, and are now prospering, by dint of close
management and constant attention, on the Northern plan; young and
enterprising men who had bought at low rates from original
proprietors whom the war left hopelessly involved, and too old or
incapable to recover; and a sprinkling of Northern and English
immigrants.

II

The part played by the Virginia springs in the political and social
life of "the States lately in rebellion," is to a traveller most
interesting. The attraction of these springs to Southerners has been
in times past, and is still, largely due to the fact that the South
has, properly speaking, no other watering-places. Seaside resorts
there are none worth mention, from Norfolk down to Mexico, and there
are but few points of the long, level, dull, and sandy coast-line
which are not more or less unhealthy. Suspicion on this point even
hangs around the places in Florida now frequented by Northerners for
the sake of the mild winter temperature. But oven if the sea-coast
were healthy, it is in summer too hot to be attractive, and offers
no relief to persons whose livers and kidneys have got out of order
in the lowlands. These naturally seek the hills for coolness, and
they go to the sulphur springs of Virginia because the sulphur
waters are very powerful and efficacious in their effects on people
afflicted with what the doctors call "hepatic troubles." But then
they never would or could have gone from the Southern seaboard to
places so far off if it had not been for the inestimable negro. The
extent to which he contributed to the rapid pushing out of the
scanty white population of the slave States to the Mississippi has
never, I think, received due attention. He robbed pioneering,
indeed, at the South of most of the hardship with which it is
associated in the Northern mind--I was going to say discomfort as
well as hardship, but this would be going too far. To the Southern
planter, however, who could go West with a party of stalwart negroes
to do the clearing, building, ploughing, and cooking and washing,
the wilderness had but few of the terrors it presented to the
Northern frontiersman. He was speedily provided with a very
tolerable home; not certainly the kind of home which the taste of a
man as well off at the North would be satisfied with, but a vastly
better one than any new settler in the Northwestern States ever had.
The springs in the Virginia mountains became popular a century ago,
and were greatly resorted to in much the same way. They were remote
and in the woods, but, owing to slavery, they swarmed from the very
first with servants who could not "give notice" if they did not like
the place, or felt lonesome.

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