It is not necessary in this age of enlightenment to dwell upon the manifest and manifold advantages to a people and to a nation, of education. They are palpable, and conceded by all men. Illiteracy, then, must as plainly be a disadvantage to a nation, a hindrance to the advancement and welfare of its people, and an evil which should be eradicated.
We Americans boast, and boast rightfully, of the high position in the scale of intelligence we occupy as a people; but pride in that fact should not blind our eyes to our existing imperfections. We are proud of the attainments of our men of letters; we rejoice in the achievements of our scientists and inventors; we glory in our rapid advance among the nations to wealth and power; and we fail to give serious heed to the hundreds of thousands of our people who are growing up every year in clouded ignorance, without even the rudiments of education.
If we examine with care our census returns and the reports of our Bureau of Education, we will be startled by some of the facts they reveal. To follow many of these revelations in detail might lead to an accusation of making invidious distinctions, but there are enough to which the attention of the country may be called without the shadow of justification for such a charge. Let us look at these.
Take the Bulletin of “Illiteracy in the United States,” as returned at the tenth census, and its first line reveals the deplorable fact that of the 36,761,607 persons of ten years of age and upward, 4,923,451 (over one-seventh) are unable to read, and 6,239,958 (nearly one-sixth) are unable to write.
It appears, moreover, from other census tabulations presented[D] to the United States Senate that, of the 50,155,783 persons constituting our population in 1880, there were equally proportioned between the white and colored races, 4,204,363 of both sexes over twenty-one years of age unable to write, or about 2,000,000 “illiterates” out of the 10,000,000 persons at that time entitled to vote; or, in other words, one of every five voters in the United States unable to write his name. From other statistics of that census it appears also that 1,640,000 voters were unable to read. Thus we have the astounding assurance that while one in every five voters can not write the ballot that he wishes to deposit, one in every six voters can not even read the ballot that he places in the box!
It is this one illiterate voter in every five (or six) voters who holds the balance of power at our elections.
While a very large proportion of our population, and also of that portion of it which exercises the elective franchise, can both read and write, yet a great number of these are very little the more intelligent because their limited ability to do either or both is so imperfect and so rarely availed of. Alluding to these, a committee of the United States Senate (Report 101, Pt. 2, first session, Forty-eighth Congress), said: “Of those who can write, multitudes do not place a sentence on paper twice in a lifetime. Thousands never get an idea from the printed page.” Yet these are the men who may at any time subject the country to their control—men who hold the weighty balance of political power.
To the patriot, to the lover of republican institutions, to the advocate of unrestricted individual suffrage, this fact is appalling. But it is none the less a fact that should be known. Nor may the advocates of monarchical systems of government and of restricted suffrage take comfort from that fact. That the deciding ballot in our political contests may be an ignorant one does not prove the evil or folly of unrestricted suffrage. Not at all. Cancer in the breast does not prove the folly of life. Nor is a jammed finger necessarily fatal. These simply remind us that in the one case the knife, and in the other the lotion, should be quickly and efficiently used. So with the ignorant ballot. Its existence merely proves the absolute necessity of prompt and vigorous action to enlighten it—of educating him who casts it—of taking counsel from the past and present and providently guarding the future. It teaches us that while we are properly horrified at any desecration of the sacred right of suffrage—whether by bulldozing, ballot-box stuffing, false counting, or other methods of intimidation or of fraud—it is high time to arouse ourselves to a state of facts existing around us and under our very noses, constituting a sacrilege only differing from these others in degree; to realize, in time to remedy it, that at every election we witness, at almost every voting precinct in the land, a constant, never-failing, almost winked-at desecration by power-clad ignorance of that right; to realize the great dangers from this source that we have thus far happily escaped; to properly apprehend the possible perils thus stored up for us in the bosom of the future, and by timely, energetic and sufficient action to arrest them. Thus the very knowledge that one in every five of our voters exercises ignorantly this undue and prodigious power must nerve a free and enlightened people to make immediate and adequate provision both to aid and to make obligatory the elementary education of those who in due time will inherit from us the right of suffrage.
It can not be too often or too strongly urged, under the light of this revelation from the census returns, that an ignorant ballot is a dangerous ballot, because it may be at once heedless, and easily deceived; that an educated ballot is, to the degree of education, an enlightened ballot—possibly wrong-headed or mistaken at times, but as a rule careful, brave and pure; and that, as the ballot is placed in the hands of all Americans, education—the means by which they may discriminatingly cast that ballot—should be open and free to all.
The very existence of the Republic depends upon the proper use of the potential ballot. Education alone can teach that proper use. Hence it is that “education to all” is the chief corner stone of the Republic; and to make that secure, no effort however great, no expense however large, should be withheld.