Recollections of a Varied Life

by George Cary Eggleston

Meanwhile the education of the race of men and women who once dwelt there has correspondingly lost its culture aspect. The young men of that old family are now bred to be accountants, clerks, men of business, who have no time to read books and no training that leads to the habit of thinking; the young women are stenographers, telegraph operators, and the like. They are estimable young persons, and in their way charming. But is the world richer or poorer for the change?

It is not for me to answer; I am prejudiced, perhaps.

However it may be, the old life is a thing completely dead and done for, and the only compensation is such as the new affords. Everything that was distinctive in that old life was burned out by the gunpowder of the Civil War. Even the voices of the Virginia women—once admired throughout the land—are changed. They still say "right" for "very," and "reckon" for "think," and their enunciation is still marked by a certain lack of emphasis, but it is the voice of the peacock in which they speak, not that of the dove.

An Old Fogy's Questionings

Whenever I ask myself the questions set down above, I find it necessary to the chastening of my mind to recite my creed:

I believe that every human being born into this world has a right to do as he pleases, so long as in doing as he pleases he does not interfere with the equal right of any other human being to do as he pleases;

I believe in the unalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

I believe that it is the sole legitimate function of government to maintain the conditions of liberty and to let men alone.

Nevertheless, I cannot escape a tender regret when I reflect upon what we have sacrificed to the god Progress. I suppose it is for the good of all that we have factories now to do the work that in my boyhood was done by the village carpenter, tanner, shoemaker, hatter, tailor, tin-smith, and the rest; but I do not think a group of factory "hands," dwelling in repulsively ugly tenement buildings and dependent upon servitude to the trade union as a means of escaping enslavement by an employing corporation, mean as much of human happiness or signify as much of helpful citizenship as did the home-owning, independent village workmen of the past. In the same way I do not think the substitution of a utilitarian smattering for all for the education and culture of a class has been altogether a gain. As I see young men flocking by thousands to our universities, where in earlier times there were scant hundreds in attendance, I cannot avoid the thought that most of these thousands have just enough education of the drill sort to pass the entrance examinations and that they go to the universities, not for education of the kind that brings enlargement of mind, but for technical training in arts that promise money as the reward of their practice. And I cannot help wondering if the change which relegates the Arts course to a subordinate place in the university scheme is altogether a change for the better. Economically it is so, of course. But economics, it seems to me, ought not to be all of human life. Surely men and women were made for something more than mere earning capacity.

But all this is blasphemy against the great god Progress and heresy to the gospel of Success. Its voice should be hushed in a land where fame is awarded not to those who think but to those who organize and exploit; where men of great intellect feel that they cannot afford to serve the country when the corporations offer them so much higher salaries; and where it is easier to control legislation and administration by purchase than by pleading.