THE CHAUTAUQUA PLAN.
The eleventh Assembly has wrought its work, and it is safe to say no Assembly ever made more converts to the Chautauqua Plan. Among the number, too, were many of the best thinkers and ablest educators in the country. Many left Chautauqua this summer convinced of the possibilities in the work, and resolved to spread its influence. One of these, the Rev. Dr. A. A. Livermore, president of the Unitarian Theological School at Meadville, Pa., a man widely known as a ripe scholar, has published an article analyzing the Chautauqua plan. This article explains most clearly the strong features of the work. After describing the enthusiastic Commencement the writer says of the C. L. S. C.: “College education, as it has been hitherto carried on, has been largely a forced concern; students have been sent to school, rather than gone on their free and spontaneous will. The pupils of Chautauqua are voluntary agents, and engage in their work with a will. It is the difference between task work and love work. Almost all schools and colleges are handicapped by the compulsion necessary to bring their pupils up to the mark. But here all goes like clock work. There is a vim and abandon which argue the best results. Not knowledge, but the love of knowledge, is the best of accomplishments, and that is breathed into the Chautauquan graduates.
“The religious element is made a leading principle in the Chautauqua education, and it is the true one. Intellect for intellect, taste for taste, study for study, lacks the genuine inspiration, but put on the annex of religious faith in God, Christ and immortality, and you have got an effective leverage to raise the whole nature of man. The Chautauqua Idea is not so much to make specialists; as for example, engineers, editors, ministers, doctors, lawyers, but well instructed men and women. Human nature is a diamond in the rough, and it is worth polishing and setting for its own sake. God having bestowed such a magnificent treasure on man, he is guilty who does not put it to its intended purpose, and return it to its author improved and developed to its best extent.
“Another fine idea of the Chautauqua University is to educate people at their homes. Massing students together in great monastic institutions is dangerous business. Humanity heats and moulds and corrupts when put into crowded institutions, be they prisons or colleges. Some of the worst disorders perpetrated in society take place in schools and universities where young people are herded together in great numbers with the restraints of home and society largely thrown off. This scheme is to carry on the work at the fireside, on the farm, at the shop, by the work bench. Carry education to the people, instead of carrying the people to education. And still further it is the idea not to take people from their usual occupations after they are educated, not to take farmers, mechanics, housewives from their present callings and put them in the learned professions, but to leave them still where they are, and start them on a course of mental and moral improvement which they can conduct all their lifetime at their homes, and while still engaged in their several industries. This is a capital merit of the system, and deserves especial commendation.
“So planned and so engineered, Chautauqua is the university of the common people, of the great middle class that constitute the strength and glory of every country, and especially of ours. Its numbers are prodigious, its extent is world wide. It sets a splendid example for all nations. It strikes the keynote for the education eventually of the whole human race. In our land it is destined to do more for the perpetuation of our free institutions than many another time-honored school or college that limits its benefits to some privileged class, sex, color or section. Chautauqua blows a trumpet to every quarter of the compass, and says to all, ‘Come ye and buy wine and milk without money and without price.’”
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.
Is there not ample room for non-partisan comment on partisan struggles? We are in the midst of a political conflict which inevitably takes up a large part of the general attention; surely there must be some suggestions which a non-partisan can profitably make. For example, look at the fact, new in important points, that personal scandal affecting candidates occupies a conspicuous place in the contest. We have been in the habit of reasoning that such an element must be demoralizing. Is it such in the present instance? We think not. We further think that some very good results may follow such a political campaign. The prominence given to questions of personal purity, in public life and in private life, is itself a good sign. It means that the people are keenly alive to moral issues, that these issues cannot be evaded, that the public demand for purity has risen without the special notice of the quick-witted managers of politics. Nor are the discussions having any unfavorable effect on sound morals. The people insist upon the moral element, and by so doing prove that they are sounder, truer, more religiously patriotic than they were supposed to be. We see also the better uses of the press in more favorable lights. When a scandal is not merely mud, but involves plain matters of fact in the life of a candidate, the press is put on its good behavior to tell the story with decorum, and prove it with good evidence. We never have seen a cleaner campaign, though we never saw one with such conspicuous challenging of private character. A wise man said long ago that the American people are always grave in grave circumstances. The present occasion proves the rule. The solemnity of the challenge of character has given an air of sobriety to the campaign which is as satisfactory as it was unexpected.
Another thing which seems to us quite in our way to say is that the political contest has an uncommonly large humanitarian element in the center of the field. We probably have readers who believe that the interests of the American workmen are not specially concerned in the result. It is not that question of fact which we now raise, but the fact of the solicitude for the workmen which is conspicuous. We are witnessing, at this point, not so much a discussion about the tariff—for so far there has not been much of that—as a discussion over the permanent welfare of a large and growing section of our population. This discussion is not carried on by them so much as on behalf of them. Granted that a great party sees in their welfare an opportunity; what is it that makes the opportunity? It is surely not any incidents of the last Congress, or any opinions of candidates. These would be insufficient to create the discussion in its serious form. Is it not true that the philanthropy which freed the slave is thinking and feeling for the men in mills, and their wives and little ones? It would be easy to show that the politicians would have passed this matter by if they could. But we have become a manufacturing country. The laborer has become a great fact. He is a citizen, a social element, a man with a soul, and the head of a family. The social instinct in us took alarm some years ago. Outside of parties it has worked out into humanitarian feeling, and is ripening into purpose. The workman is likely for some decades to fashion for us the spirit of our politics and the ends sought by our statesmanship. No matter how much or little it may influence the results of this struggle for the control of the government, the question of the workman’s well-being has come among us to stay. It touches our life at all points. It challenges our institutions. It says to us: “Solve me or I will dissolve you.” Are we to have a distinctly depressed class doing our work? Is the “white slave” to live, suffer and die under our feet? There are persons who say, “it is inevitable. Older societies have sifted down to the bottom these forlorn and hopeless elements by force of a natural necessity, by a law of human society.” No good and strenuous American believes such a doctrine. The country we live in exists in our thought, to make life fairer, sweeter, more equally gracious for all the members of the national household. Our ideal is challenged by the specter of a degraded mass of laborers. We can not see this ghost of the old world without a shiver of apprehension. It may be that tariff questions do not touch the main question; that is for others to consider. What we note is that the whole of this labor question, with its complicated relations to all other questions, looms large on the horizon.