ADDRESS OF SENATOR GEO. F. HOAR.
Mr. President and Ladies and Gentlemen:
I suppose your Secretary was well warranted in announcing my name, for early in the summer I made an engagement to prepare a paper to be read here to-night on Christian education in the South; but the occupations of the last four weeks, as imperative as they were unexpected, have put it entirely out of my power to comply with my engagement, as I informed your Secretary yesterday. But with a persistence which certainly affords a very good illustration of the doctrine of the “perseverance of the saints,” he has compelled me to come here to make my excuse in person.
I have not come at this late hour of the evening to enter upon an argument in favor of what I am sure every person within the sound of my voice is now thoroughly convinced of, but rather to express my gratitude and honor at the great work which is now going on in this country for a Christian education in the West and South, in which the American Missionary Association is so nobly taking the lead. I do not think you yourselves are entirely conscious of the sublimity of what you are doing and what you are helping to do. Why, take the $321,000 which, including the expenditure from the Stone fund, your treasurer reports you have expended during the past year: at the present rates at which the Government can borrow money, that represents the income of a capital of $9,000,000—the income of a capital which, I suppose, is greater than the entire aggregate of all the productive funds of the American colleges forty years ago, and which I know is more than fifteen times the entire productive fund of Harvard College as it was estimated by President Quincy in 1840. Gen. Eaton made an imperfect estimate of the amount given for education by voluntary contribution in this country, and in 1872 it amounted to $8,000,000 and upwards; in 1873, the last year before the great depression in business, it amounted to more than $11,000,000; and I am informed on credible and high authority that in this year of grace 1881, it will amount to more than $18,000,000—the income of a capital, at present rates, of more than $500,000,000—a vast national school fund invested not where thieves break through and steal and where moth doth corrupt, but invested in the patriotism and sense of religious duty of a Christian people. There is nothing in statesmanship, there is nothing in the opportunities for political effort, which the highest honors of the State can hold out to any of her public servants, which surpasses in dignity the opportunity to help and to bid God-speed to a work like this.
My friends, it is not strange that the wealth and the conscience of New England should arouse itself to the opportunities which God has held out to you in the present age. There are persons within the sound of my voice within whose lifetime twenty new states will be admitted to this Union from territory which now is scarcely settled. That “ancient, primitive and heroical work,” as Lord Bacon calls it, which he ranks as the highest work which is vouchsafed to man to take part in, is being performed in your day and by your hands, if you choose, in a manner unparalleled in human history; and the sixteen states now reconstructed, within which, until lately, slavery had bolted the door against every form of popular education, now, thank God, have their doors unfolded and afford a field of scarcely less interest than the other. How can the manufacturer, how can the merchant of Massachusetts fail to respond to the appeal of these good men and these good women for help in the great work of educating these communities? Combined, they are very soon to be the majority, both in states and in population, they are to determine every question of peace and war, every policy of finance or of tariff; they are to enact, they are to furnish the men who expound and the men who execute the laws under which you and I and our children are to live, and upon which depends the value of all property and the prosperity of all labor. Will the manufacturer or the merchant, who gladly taxes himself to insure his property against fire or against crime, hesitate a moment when you ask him to insure it against being governed by laws which are to be made by and rest upon ignorance?
But there is a better reason even than this. I think the opportunity to take part in such a great benefaction is enough to stimulate every ingenuous soul. I think there is no more beautiful memorial among men than to have your name remembered or your picture hang on the walls of an institution of learning as one of its founders or benefactors. What gratitude is there like that which men feel for the college or the founder of the college where they were bred and educated? Now you have an opportunity to attach to you the coming generations of the South by this tie, a tie which will be far stronger than all the hatreds or the passions engendered by civil war, or which have grown up under years of misunderstanding and hatred.
I have been gratified in what I have heard and read of the speeches of this Annual Meeting, and what I have read in the reports of your Association, in seeing what theory it is upon which all your efforts seem to rest. The foundation of this American Missionary Association’s work seems to me to be—if I were to state it in a single phrase—reverence for the individual soul; that doctrine which Christ preached, for which Christ died—the doctrine without which there can be neither education, freedom, republic or self-government in the world—that every human soul, whether contained in a casket of ivory or a casket of bronze, is a precious thing in the sight of God, entitled to its equal right, to its equal opportunity, to its equal share in government with every other.
Now, my friends, you have got a great deal still to do to teach the people of this commonwealth of Massachusetts to believe and act upon that doctrine, whether they profess it or not. We avowed it, and pledged our lives and fortunes and sacred honor to support it on the fourth of July, 1776, and under it we grew up from a weak to a strong and mighty people. The doctrine crossed the water. When Mr. Webster, in his speech in 1843, at the completion of the Bunker Hill monument, undertook to sum up what it was that America had done for mankind in the seventy years, nearly, that had then elapsed, he mentioned a few inventions and a few new plants and new animals which had been contributed by this continent, and then he said that the one thing which we had done for the world was the avowal and illustration of this doctrine, that however poor or however humble a man might be, or whatever was his occupation, he was the equal in rights, the equal in dignity, the equal in capacity for improvement, in the presumption of the law, to every other man. Well, Europe began to adopt the doctrine. France established a republic; England becomes nothing but a republic, “hooped,” as somebody has said of her. In Spain, Italy and Germany, the doctrine is spreading; and lo and behold, 75,000 Chinamen landed on our shores and the great republic has struck its flag! Men are not free and equal any longer! God has not made of one blood all the nations of the earth any more!
My friends, there is nothing in this world, if there is any lesson of history to be depended upon, which God visits with a surer and a severer punishment than the violation of this law. Just think how we have undertaken to violate it in the case of the negro; and think of the terrible retribution in desolated homes, in debt and squandered treasure, and in the loss of precious human life, He exacted of us. Just think of our dealing with the Indians! Why, excluding the five civilized nations in this country, there are about 170,000 Indians, all told, including those in the states and including those on the plains. There are 34,000 Indian children, according to the estimate of the Indian Bureau, which I think is a little underestimated—certainly not more than 40,000 Indian children of school age in this country. I suppose Gen. Armstrong could tell you he could take the whole of them and educate them at one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars apiece. Why, that number of Indians is less than one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth part of the population of this country to-day. If you should gather them all into a city they would not form a city the tenth in population among the cities of America; they would not make two average Congressional districts out of our 293. And yet, in the mode in which this country has dealt with them, considering that good faith, honor, honesty, respect for property, respect for its own word, was out of place, from the time when Washington said that was our policy, almost in the words I have uttered, down to the time when the Ponca Indians were driven from their homes, and half Boston rushed to make itself an accomplice to the crime, our history has been marked by a disregard of this law, and has been marked by the terrible retribution which God has exacted of us. The Indian wars and the cost of supporting the Indians, of transportation and of military police, are estimated by a very thorough and careful estimate which I received from the statistician in the Treasury department the other day, at between five hundred and six hundred millions of dollars. I think it amounts to a thousand millions. The interest on the interest of what we have paid for Indian wars would take every Indian child of school age and give him a competent education.
Now, my friends, we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the Indian, and we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the negro. It has been demonstrated by a sufficient number of individual instances that both these races, having their own peculiarities and their own defects, as the white man has his own peculiarities and his own defects, are fit for civilization, for law, for education, for the family, for the home, for the arts and the industries which belong to civilization and peace. Take the case of the negro, whom we have not all learned to respect as we should. I sat in the House of Representatives with seven members of the negro race, and you could not find seven men in that House, chosen on any principle of selection, who were the equals of those seven men, or who certainly were their superiors, in everything that indicated the conduct of an honorable, sensible and capable representative of the people. I should like to have you take the Congressional Record, and read the speeches of the old slave-masters, and then put by their side the speeches of the slaves! Why, the great orator and statesman of the Southern Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, when he came back to the public service, announced weeks beforehand a speech that he proposed to make upon a political question of the day. The House and the country were in expectation. Mr. Stephens gave months of his best thought and his best care to the preparation of that speech; and when he finished delivering it, a full-blooded negro got up, and, on the moment, answered the argument which had been made by the great champion of the slave-holding race and overthrew it. When our illustrious senator died, his eulogy was pronounced throughout the land from the lips of orator and poet and friend. Massachusetts called to her service, perhaps, the two most brilliant and accomplished orators in the country, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Schurz; and still the one eulogy of Charles Sumner which more than any other deserves to go down into literature and to be found in the school-books of coming generations, is that pronounced by Robert B. Elliot, of South Carolina. It is too late. If you do not educate these black people, it is not because they are your inferiors; it is because, in your selfishness and greed, you prefer to do something else with your money than to expend it for the benefit of these American citizens.
But, my friends, as I have said, I did not come here to enter upon an argument in behalf of a cause in which this audience, at least, is already enlisted. I come to express to you nothing but gratitude, nothing but hope. It is no time for despair. I notice that our friends, especially the clergymen who spoke to us, reexamined, somewhat, the foundations of our religious faith in their speeches, as if they thought that science or unbelief had shaken a little the strength of the old faith in the minds of men. I don’t believe it. Undoubtedly, modern science has stripped our religious faith of some of the frame-work, of some of the imagery, of some of the associations with which the vision and the imagination of our early childhood had surrounded it; but it seems to me that, judging as we should judge of the progress of mankind, by the state and depth of its religious faith, and by the perfectness of its obedience to the moral law, humanity reached its high-water mark on the day of President Garfield’s funeral. Three thousand millions of mankind, at the same hour, in this country and across the sea, bowed their heads in a common grief and rose up to do a common honor to the simple qualities of love, courage, religious faith, obedience to the will of God, exhibited by one man and by one woman whom freedom had called to her high places.
Why, my friends, you know how it is. Every speaker and every auditor knows how an emotion is multiplied by the size of the audience that feels it. You utter a jest to your neighbor which will hardly create a smile, or you make a remark with pathos in it, which will hardly move him; but say the same thing to a great audience of three or four thousand people, and in every man’s heart that feeling is multiplied and intensified by the knowledge that the same feeling is experienced by every other person. You all know how that is. Now, science, the telegraph and the press enabled the emotion of human sorrow, at the time of Garfield’s funeral, to be felt over the entire civilized world. Do you think, speaking of science having injured the cause of religion or Christianity, that the telegraph and the printing-press are the products of cold, hard science—that there is no religion or morality in them? Yet, of what evil passion would they have rendered the service of conveying it to the whole of mankind at once? Could any base man, could any mere intellectual power, could any man of wealth, could any Napoleon, could any conqueror, have swayed mankind as this simple President of ours and his wife did on that day? The power in this universe that makes for evil, and the power in this universe that makes for righteousness, measured their forces. A poor, feeble fiend shot off his feeble bolt; a single human life was stricken down; and, lo, a throb of Divine love thrills a planet!
But, my friends, those of us, young or old, who are enlisted in the service of God’s moral law, who pour out their wealth or do their work in life in obedience to the doctrine, “He that hath done it unto the least of one of these, hath done it unto Me,” works in the service of the Master, who never will be shaken on His throne, and whose rewards are sure.