The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

“Soldiers and patriots thus educated (in free schools) are better than all armies, arsenals, armories, munitions, alliances and treaties that can be had or imagined in the world.”

Those words, written three hundred years ago by a man who had devoted his life to the study of the rights and wrongs of the common man, sum up the whole story. How his eloquent common sense contrasts with the shrieking of those little Americans who think that a cannon shot can penetrate further than a noble idea! How this old friend of freedom rebukes the puny, alleged statesmen who fancy that the manhood of this republic was developed on the battlefields, instead of realizing that military prowess is only one matter-of-course evidence of its existence! Enlightenment and Democracy make men who live for their country—and that is the new force in the world.

Let the people who fear for the future of the democratic spirit of this people look upon the spectacle of our free schools, those millions of young heads bent over books, those millions of young brains learning to think, to reason, learning to use mind and body in the service of civilization, real civilization. Enlightenment has won all the victories of the republic in the past. Its eternal warfare upon ignorance and incompetence, upon craft of plutocrat and craft of demagogue, and plausible idealism of reactionary, is the safeguard of the republic’s future. And one of the great agents of enlightenment, of Democracy—not the only great agent, not the greatest agent—is formal education in school, academy and college.

And more important even than the formal education of the boys is the formal education of the girls. The other means to enlightenment are more accessible to the men—indeed, they compel the men to become less ignorant and less prejudiced in spite of themselves. But to reach the women, the formal education is almost indispensable, for their ignorance and their prejudice are more sheltered, less open to the light of Democracy that floods the arenas and the market places.

And educated, enlightened, democratic women are of the highest importance to America, whose mission seems to be to lead the world in the march upward to that Arcady where every human unit shall have the chance to count as one.

Our extensive and our expanding system of higher education of women is often bitterly assailed by educated men, by educators. Bourbonism, especially when bulwarked by vanity, does not yield easily. And it will be many a day before death reaps the last man with the passion for looking down on his fellow-creatures. To avoid useless dispute, admit that woman should look up to man. Still there remains unimpaired the truth that woman’s two highest functions are to be the companion of man and the mother of men. The profitable companion for an educated man must be an educated woman—educated not merely for man’s “hours of ease,” nor for his happily infrequent hours “when pain and anguish rack the brow,” but also for the hours of development and endeavor.

So long as so-called education consisted in a little Latin and less Greek, forgotten as speedily as the business of life could crowd it from the mind, higher education was as unimportant to women as—well, as it was to man. But now that education consists in teaching not how the Greeks and Romans lived, but how “you and I” must live to-day and to-morrow, the gap between the man who has had the higher education and the woman who has not had it and has not supplied the deficiency, is wide indeed and will grow wider. If as much attention were given to the relations between men and women from five years after marriage on to the end as is given to their relations during the purely sentimental and transitory mating season this difference would appear in its true importance.

The same point of view applies to woman as a mother. So long as the training of children centred around the slipper and the switch, an ignorant mother was not at a great disadvantage—the best educated mothers knew little. But now-a-days the child of the highly educated mother has an enormous advantage, other things being equal, because such a mother applies science to the conduct of her home as her husband applies it to the conduct of his profession or business.

No education in the mother will compensate for lack of character. Character without education is infinitely better than education without character. But character plus education is the true ideal—and it is attainable.

If we are speedily to enter more fully into the rich promised land which Democracy opens to us, we must have not only the man who knows but the woman who knows. After all, is not our ultimate excuse for being alive that we are the parents of the next generation? And there the woman, with practically absolute control over the next generation at its vital, formative age, has the better of the man. If anything, does she not need the higher education more than does the man?