It is to me a perpetual wonder how any child's love of knowledge survives the outrages of the school-house. I, for one, declare that no child of mine shall ever be compelled to study one hour, or to learn even the English alphabet, before he has deposited under his skin at least seven years of muscle and bone.
[From the Same.]
The student should study himself, his relations to society, to nature, and to art, and above all, in all, and through all these, he should study the relations of himself, society, nature, and art, to God, the Author of them all.
[From the Same]
It is well to know the history of those magnificent nations whose origin is lost in fable, and whose epitaphs were written a thousand years ago—but if we cannot know both, it is far better to study the history of our own nation, whose origin we can trace to the freest and noblest aspirations of the human heart—a nation that was formed from the hardiest, purest, and most enduring elements of European civilization—a nation that, by its faith and courage, has dared and accomplished more for the human race in a single century than Europe accomplished in the first thousand years of the Christian era. The New England township was the type after which our Federal Government was modelled, yet it would be rare to find a college student who can make a comprehensive and intelligible statement of the municipal organization of the township in which he was born, and tell you by what officers its legislative, judicial, and executive functions were administered. One half of the time which is now almost wasted, in district schools, on English Grammar, attempted at too early an age, would be sufficient to teach our children to love the Republic, and to become its loyal and life-long supporters. After the bloody baptism from which the nation has arisen to a higher and nobler life, of this shameful defect in our system of education be not speedily remedied, we shall deserve the infinite contempt of future generations. I insist that it should be made an indispensable condition of graduation in every American college, that the student must understand the history of this continent since its discovery by Europeans, the origin and history of the United States, its constitution of government, the struggles through which it has passed, and the rights and duties of citizens who are to determine its destiny and share its glory.
Having thus gained the knowledge which is necessary to life, health, industry, and citizenship, the student is prepared to enter a wider and grander field of thought. If he desires that large and liberal culture, which will call into activity all his powers, and make the most of the material God has given him, he must study deeply and earnestly the intellectual, the moral, the religious, and the æsthetic nature of man; his relations to nature, to civilization, past and present, and above all, his relations to God. These should occupy nearly, if not fully, half the time of his college course. In connection with the philosophy of the mind, he should study logic, the pure mathematics, and the general laws of thought. In connection with moral philosophy, he should study political and social ethics—a science so little known either in colleges or congresses. Prominent among all the rest should be his study of the wonderful history of the human race, in its slow and toilsome march across the centuries—now buried in ignorance, superstition and crime; now rising to the sublimity of heroism and catching a glimpse of a better destiny; now turning remorselessly away from, and leaving to perish, empires and civilizations in which it had invested its faith, and courage, and boundless energy for a thousand years, and plunging into the forests of Germany, Gaul, and Britain, to build for itself new empires, better fitted for its new aspirations; and, at last, crossing three thousand miles of unknown sea, and building in the wilderness of a new hemisphere its latest and proudest monuments.
[Speech in the House of Representatives, February 12, 1867.]
I cannot forget that we have learned slowly.... I cannot forget that less than five years ago I received an order from my superior officer commanding me to search my camp for a fugitive slave, and if found, to deliver him up to a Kentucky captain who claimed him as his property; and I had the honor to be perhaps the first officer in the army who peremptorily refused to obey such an order. We were then trying to save the Union without hurting slavery.... It took us two years to reach a point where we were willing to do the most meagre justice to the black man, and to recognize the truth that
"A man's a man for a' that!"
Sir, the hand of God has been visible in this work, leading us by degrees out of the blindness of our prejudices, to see that the fortunes of the Republic and the safety of the party of liberty are inseparably bound up with the rights of the black man. At last our party must see that if it would preserve its political life, or maintain the safety of the Republic, we must do justice to the humblest man in the Nation, whether black or white. I thank God that to-day we have struck the rock; we have planted our feet upon solid earth. Streams of light will gleam out from the luminous truth embodied in the legislation of this day. This is the ne plus ultra of reconstruction, and I hope we shall have the courage to go before our people everywhere with "This or nothing" for our motto.