The Book of the Bush - George Dunderdale (life books to read txt) 📗

to Joliet-the match was not yet made.

It was at this time that the dissatisfaction with the new British teacher became extreme; Miss Priscilla fanned the flame of discontent. She did not "let concealment like a worm i' th' bud feed on her damask cheek," but boldly proposed that Mr. Sellars-a true-born native of New England, a good young man, always seen at meetings on the Sabbath-should be requested to take charge of the West Joliet school. So the meeting was held: I was voted out, Mr. Sellars was voted in, and the daughters of the Puritans triumphed.

Miss Priscilla wrote to Dresden, announcing to her beloved the success of her diplomacy, requesting him to come to Joliet without delay, and assume direction of the new school. This letter fell into the hands of another lady who had just arrived at Dresden from New England in search of her husband, who happened to be Mr. Sellars. The letter which that other lady wrote to Miss Priscilla I did not see, but it was said to be a masterpiece of composition, and it emptied two schools. Mr. Tucker went over to Dresden and looked around for Mr. Sellars, but that gentleman had gone out west, and was never heard of again. The west was a very wide unfenced space, without railways.

"The fact is," said Mr. Curtis, "we were all kinder shamed the way things turned out, and we just let 'em rip. But people are now stirring about the school being closed so long, so Mr. Strong and Mr. Demmond have concluded to engage you and me to conduct the school."

We were engaged that night, and I went rail-splitting no more. But I fenced my estate; and while running the line on the western boundary I found the grave of Highland Mary. It was in the middle of a grove of oak and hickory saplings, and was nearly hidden by hazel bushes. The tombstone was a slab about two feet high, roughly hewn. Her epitaph was, "Mary Campbell, aged 7. 1827." That was all. Poor little Mary.

The Common Schools of Illinois were maintained principally from the revenue derived from grants of land. When the country was first surveyed, one section of 640 acres in each township of six miles square was reserved for school purposes. There was a State law on education, but the management was entirely local, and was in the hands of a treasurer and three directors, elected biennally by the citizens of each school district. The revenue derived from the school section was sometimes not sufficient to defray the salary of the teacher, and then the deficiency was supplied by the parents of the children who had attended at the school; those citizens whose children did not attend were not taxed by the State for the Common Schools; they did not pay for that which they did not receive. In some instances only one school was maintained by the revenue of two school sections. When the attendance in the school was numerous, a young lady, called the "school-marm," assisted in the teaching. Sometimes, as in the case of Miss Priscilla, she fell into trouble.

The books were provided by the enterprise of private citizens, and an occasional change of "Readers" was agreeable both to teachers and scholars. The best of old stories grow tiresome when repeated too often. One day a traveller from Cincinnati brought me samples of a new series of "Readers," offering on my approval, to substitute next day a new volume for every old one produced. I approved, and he presented each scholar with copies of the new series for nothing.

The teaching was secular, but certain virtues were inculcated either directly or indirectly. Truth and patriotism were recommended by the example of George Washington, who never told a lie, and who won with his sword the freedom of his country. There were lessons on history, in which the tyranny of the English Government was denounced; Kings, Lords and Bishops, especially Bishop Laud, were held up to eternal abhorrence; as was also England's greed of gain, her intolerance, bigotry, taxation; her penal and navigation laws. The glorious War of Independence was related at length. The children of the Puritans, of the Irish and the Germans, did not in those days imbibe much prejudice in favour of England or her institutions, and the English teacher desirous of arriving at the truth, had the advantage of having heard both sides of many historical questions; of listening, as it were, to the scream of the American eagle, as well as to the roar of the British lion.

Mr. Curtis was a good teacher, systematic, patient, persevering, and ingenious. I ceased to hate him; Miss Priscilla's downfall cemented our friendship. We kept order in the school by moral suasion, but the task was sometimes difficult. My private feelings were in favour of the occasional use of the hickory stick, the American substitute for the rod of Solomon, and the birch of England.

The geography we taught was principally that of the United States and her territories, spacious maps of which were suspended round the school, continually reminding the scholars of their glorious inheritance. It was then full of vacant lots, over which roamed the Indian and the buffalo, species of animals now nearly extinct. We did not pay much attention to the rest of the world.

Elocution was inculcated assiduously, and at regular intervals each boy and girl had to come forth and "speak a piece" in the presence of the scholars, teachers, and visitors.

Mental arithmetic and the use of fractions were taught daily. The use of the decimal in the American coinage is of great advantage; it is easier and more intelligible to children than the clumsy old system of pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings. It is a system which would no doubt have been long ago adopted by England, if it had not been humiliating to our national pride to take even a good thing from rebellious Yankees, and inferior Latin races. We cling fondly to absurdities because they are our own. In Australia wild rabbits are vermin, in England they are private property; and if one of the three millions of her miserable paupers is found with a rabbit in each of his coat pockets, he is fined 10s. or sent to gaol. Pope Gregory XIII. demonstrated the error of the calendar then in use, and all Catholic nations adopted his correction. But when the adoption of the calendar was proposed in Parliament, John Bull put his big foot down at once; he would receive no truth, not even a mathematical one, from the Pope of Rome, and it was only after the lapse of nearly 200 years, when the memory of Gregory and his calendar had almost faded away from the sensitive mind of Protestantism, that an Act was passed, "equalising the style in Great Britain and Ireland with that used in other countries of Europe."

A fugitive slave with his wife and daughter came to Joliet. One day he was seized by three slave-hunters, who took him towards the canal. A number of abolitionists assembled to rescue the slave, but the three men drew their revolvers, and no abolitionist had the courage to fire the first shot. The slave was put in a canal boat and went south; his wife remained in Joliet and earned her bread by weaving drugget; the daughter came to my school; she was of pure negro blood, but was taught with the white girls.

The abolitionists were increasing in number, and during the war with the South the slaves were freed. They are now like Israel in Egypt, they increase too rapidly. If father Abraham had sent them back to Africa when they were only four millions, he would have earned the gratitude of his country. Now they number more than eight millions; the Sunny South agrees with their constitution; they work as little and steal as much as possible. In the days of their bondage they were addicted to petty larceny; now they have votes, and when they achieve place and power they are addicted to grand larceny, and they loot the public treasury as unblushingly as the white politicians.

The nigger question has doubled in magnitude during the last thirty years, and there will have to be another abolition campaign of some kind. The blacks are incapable of ruling the whites; no time was given to educate them for their new duties, if teaching them was possible; the Declaration of Independence was in their case a mockery from the beginning. When all the old abolitionists and slave-holders are dead, another generation of men grown wiser by the failure of the policy of their forefathers may solve the black problem.

Complaint is made that the American education of to-day is in a chaotic condition, due to the want of any definite idea of what education is aiming at. There is evidence that the ancients of New England used to birch their boys, but after independence had been fought for and won, higher aims prevailed. The Puritan then believed that his children were born to a destiny far grander than that of any other children on the face of the earth; the treatment accorded to them was therefore to be different. The fundamental idea of American life was to be "Freedom," and the definition of "Freedom" by a learned American is, "The power which necessarily belongs to the self-conscious being of determining his actions in view of the highest, the universal good, and thereby of gradually realising in himself the eternal divine perfection." The definition seems a little hazy, but the workings of great minds are often unintelligible to common people. "The American citizen must be morally autonomous, regarding all institutions as servants, not as masters. So far man has been for the most part a thrall. The true American must worship the inner God recognised as his own deepest and eternal self, not an outer God regarded as something different from himself."

Lucifer is said to have entertained a similar idea. He would not be a thrall, and the result as described by the republican Milton was truly disastrous:

"Him the Almighty Power Hurl'd headlong down to bottomless perdition Region of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell."

The manner in which the American citizen is to be made "morally autonomous, and placed beyond the control of current opinion," will require much money; his parents must therefore be rich; they must already have inherited wealth, or have obtained it by ability or labour. The course of training to be given to youth includes travelling for six years in foreign countries under private tutors, studying human history, ethnic, social, political, industrial, æsthetic, religious; gems of poetry; the elements of geometry; mechanics; art, plastic, and graphic; reading Confucius, Sakya-muni, Themistocles, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Paul, Mahommed, Charlemagne, Alfred, Gregory VII., St. Bernard, St. Francis, Savonarola, Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, and Lowell.

The boys on the prairies had to earn their bread; they could not spend six years travelling around and studying all the writers above mentioned, making themselves morally autonomous, and worshipping their own deepest and eternal selves. The best men America has produced were reared at home, and did chores out of school hours.

When I was expelled from school by the Yankees, Mr. McEvoy, the leading Irish politician, called me aside and said: "Whisper, you just hang round until next election,