GOVERNMENTAL AID TO COMMON SCHOOLS.
WHAT CONGRESS MAY DO AND WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE.
Rev. C. C. Painter.
Education by the State rests upon the sole basis of self-protection.
A despotism must stand impregnable, if at all, in the strength of its armament. But not so with a republic. It must stand in the intelligence and virtue of its citizens. It were a solecism in logic and common sense to admit the nation’s right to manumit the slave as a war measure, and equip him with the ballot as a reconstructive measure necessary to the safety of the republic, but deny at once the right and the duty of qualifying him for the duties of citizenship when an understanding of these duties is also essential to that safety. The constitutional right to use the same power, which is now invoked to qualify the voter for the duty with which the general government has charged him, has been exercised so many times in regard to less important matters that precedents are not wanting to justify this application of it, even to one who wishes to know that a thing has been done before he will believe it can be done.
Whatever criticism may be made upon the use which some of the States made of their share of the $28,000,000 of money distributed from the surplus funds of the Treasury by the Act of June 23, 1836, no one can doubt that it was constitutionally done, and done by the same discretion and power which would be used in giving aid now to the States. And it may be said that the use of this fund so largely by the States at their discretion for school purposes legitimates the confident assurance that a fund now given specifically for schools would be wisely and conscientiously devoted to that object.
As to the present needs look at the facts:
There are in the United States 6,239,958 persons, ten years of age or over, who cannot write their names. More than three-fourths of these are found in the old slave States. More than one-half of the whole number are colored. If the general government should provide means to sustain a school for this class alone for three months in the year, at a salary for the teachers of $30 per month for a school of 30 pupils, it would require the sum of $18,719,958. Of this $14,449,579 would go into the old slave States, $9,187,922 because of colored illiterates, leaving $4,961,657 for the whites, and $4,579,439 would go to the other States for both black and white illiterates.
In 1879 North Carolina raised for common schools a sum which would give $20 per annum to each school of 30 illiterates (not school children). How long it would take that State to make intelligent and safe voters of her citizens at that rate is matter for sober reflection, not alone to the politician, who remembers what the electoral vote of that State is for President, but to every citizen.
If the government should enable North Carolina to keep up her schools for four months at fair wages, instead of one month, as at present, at such a salary as can secure only an inferior teacher, it would be something, but not all that is needed. If such a sum should be given, Mississippi would receive as her share of it $1,119,603; New Jersey, with nearly exactly the same population, would receive $159,747. But $959,529 of Mississippi’s share would be because of colored illiteracy, leaving nearly exactly the same amount for white illiterates which New Jersey would receive, which shows conclusively that it is because of the negro chiefly this help is needed, and for him, as a voter, the nation at large is responsible. In considering the disparity between the sum that would go to the South and the new States of the Northwest respectively, not only must we remember the negro as a factor in the problem, but also these facts: By the ordinance of 1787, by which Virginia ceded the great northwest territory to the general government on such terms–Mr. Webster said, in his great speech on the Foote resolution–as “fixed forever the character of the population of the vast regions northwest of the Ohio by excluding from them involuntary servitude, and impressed on the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than freemen.” And six days after, in his reply to Hayne, he said, also, that “it set forth and declared it to be a high and binding duty of the government itself to support schools and advance the means of education on the plain reason that religion, morality and knowledge are necessary to good government.” By this ordinance of cession, Virginia stipulated that the proceeds from this vast territory should be considered as a common fund for the use and benefit of such as have become or may become members of the confederation or federal alliance of States. The other States claiming unsettled lands within their territory also ceded their titles to the general government, which became possessed of the whole. From time to time Congress has made most liberal grants of this land to the new States for school purposes, so that Minnesota, for example, has realized from her share, or has the land from which, at the same rate of sale, she can realize a fund of $20,000,000 for educational purposes, while the old States have not had a dollar, excepting their share in the grant for the endowment of agricultural colleges by Act of 1862, in which the new States as well as the old shared ratably. It may be truly said, then, that every instinct of self-preservation demands that the unquestionable right of the general government shall be exercised in using the means at its disposal to meet the great danger which threatens us from the presence and power of ignorant voters; and that every sentiment of justice to the negro himself as the subject of many wrongs and the possible avenger of them, and to the States themselves, requires that governmental aid shall be given to the common schools of the country.