Nevertheless, “Ouida” was not altogether wrong. A man is not made intelligent by mere ability to read and write: his little learning is a dangerous thing to himself and to his country. The only reading that such men do is of the most degrading kind: it debases them, mind and heart, gives them a false estimate of their worth, magnifies their woes, and fills them with a sense of their numbers and their power. Eventually they “rise” and have to be shot. Or they succeed, and having first put to death the gifted rascals who incited and led them, they set up a Government of Unreason which they lack the sense to maintain, and their last state is no better than their first. That is the dull, dreary old sequence of events, so familiar to the student of history. That is the beaten path leading back to its beginning, which must be traveled again and again without a break in the monotony of the march. That is Progress—the brute revolt of the ignorant mass, their resubjection by the intelligent few; nowhere justice, nowhere righteousness, everywhere and always force, greed, selfishness and sin. That is the universal struggle—sometimes sluggish, sometimes turbulent, always without an outcome and with no hope of one. Along that hideous path our American free feet are merrily keeping time to the beating of hearts which, swelling to-day with the pride of progress, will shrink to-morrow with the dread of doom.
What then?—is popular education mischievous? Popular education is good for many things; it is not good for the stability of states. Whatever its advantages, it has this disadvantage: it produces “industrial discontent”; and industrial discontent is the first visible symptom of national wreck. Prate as we will of the “dignity of labor,” we convince no one that labor is anything other than a hard, imperious necessity, to be avoided if possible. Education promises avoidance—a promise which to the mass of workers is not, and can not be, kept. It brings to Labor a bitter disappointment which in time is transmuted into political mischief. The only man that labors with a song in his heart is he that knows nothing but to labor. Give him education—enlarge by ever so little the scope of his thought—make him permeable to a sense of the pleasures of life and his own privations, and you set up a quarrel between him and his condition. He may remain in his lowly station, but that will be because he cannot get out of it. He may continue to perform his hard and hateful work, but he will no longer perform it cheerfully and well.
What is the remedy?—educate him still more? Then he will no longer perform it at all—he will die first! Those of us who have tried both may assure him that head-work is harder than hand-work, that it takes more out of one, that its rewards give no greater happiness; he observes that none of us renounces it for the other kind. He does not believe us, and it would not affect him if he did.
What, as a matter of fact, is the public advantage of even that higher education which we tax ourselves more and more to make general? Look at our overcrowded professions, whose “ethics” and practices grow worse and worse from increasing competition. Not one of them is any longer a really “honorable” profession. Look at the monstrous overgrowth of our cities, those congested brains of the nation. They draw to themselves all the output of the colleges and the universities, and as much of that of the country schools as can get a precarious foothold and live—God knows how—in hope to “better its condition.” A pretty picture, truly: a population roughly divisible into a conscienceless crowd of brain-workers who have so “bettered their condition” as to live by prey; a sullen multitude of manual laborers blowing the coals of discontent and plotting a universal overthrow. Above the one perch the primping monkeys of “society,” chattering in meaningless glee; below the other the brute tramp welters in his grime. And with it all a national wealth that amazes the world and profits nobody—the country’s wonder, pride and curse. Still we go on with a maniacal hope, adding school to school, college to college, university to university, and—unconscious provision for their product—almshouses, asylums and prisons in prodigal abundance.
I am far from affirming that the industrial discontent which for more than a half century has been an augmenting menace to our national life, has its sole origin in popular education conjoined with the higher education of too many. For any social phenomenon there is no lack of causes. For this there are, among others, two of special importance. First, the duplication of the labor force by that female competition which, beginning its displacements pretty well up in the scale, drives the unlucky male to lower and lower levels, until forced out of the lowest by invasion by his own sex from higher ones, he finds no rest for the sole of his foot and takes to the road, an irreclaimable tramp. Second, the amazing multiplication of “labor-saving” machinery, whose disadvantages are swift, and advantages slow—which throws men out of work, who starve while awaiting restitution in the lower price of its products, many of which, even when cheap, are imperfectly edible. So I do not say that the schoolmaster is the only pestilence that walketh at noon-day. But I do say—and one with half an eye can observe it for himself and in his own person—that learning in any degree indisposes to manual toil in some degree; that the scholar will not labor musclewise if he can help it, nor with a contented spirit when he can not help it.
In his Founders’ Day address at Stanford University, the President of another university said:
Usually an education will pay, but even when the professions are crowded and he [the college man] can find no place he is still the better for it if he will but accept some lower occupation in life.
But “usually” he will not; he will wedge himself into some “profession,” whether he can make an honest living in it or not. And failing to make an honest living, he will make a living that is not honest. In the service of his belly and his back, he will resort to all manner of shady and unprofessional conduct. His competition forces other weak members of his profession into the same crooked courses, to which the public becomes accustomed and indifferent. What was once unprofessional becomes professional and respectable; with every accession of new men, the standard of allowable conduct falls lower, and to-day the learned professions are little more than organized conspiracies to plunder.
The distinguished author of the address is not without dreams of educational expansion. He says:
Let the common people flock by hundreds of thousands to the higher institutions of learning; then the whole community will be lifted to a happier level.