It is Ruskin who says, "The true history of a nation is not of its wars, but of its households;" and he holds it to be the duty of a State to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated, till it attain years of discretion. But he admits that, in order to accomplish this, the government must have an authority over the welfare of children of which we do not now so much as dream.
Whether such a view be practical or not, one thing is certain: nothing but virtue and intelligence can save a republic from ending in despotism, corruption, and anarchy. There must be genuine character.
And, since virtue is secured by early training and habit, the children of a republic must be trained in ways of honesty, industry and self-control. It matters not who they are nor where they are, the State cannot afford to allow them to grow up in ignorance and crime. The great conspirator, when he aimed to overthrow Rome, corrupted the young men. When our fathers would conserve liberty for their children and for mankind, they "fed the lambs": they looked to the proper training of the young. We have a vast number of humane institutions for the reclamation and recovery of the wayward and the erring. We have reformatory institutions, asylums, prisons, jails, and houses of correction; but all these are only repair shops. Their work is secondary, not primal. It is vastly more economical to build new structures than to overhaul and remodel old ones.
The prevention of crime is the duty of society. But society has little right to punish crime at one end, if it does nothing to prevent it at the other end. Society's chief concern should be to remove the causes from which crime springs. It is much more a duty to prevent crime than it is to punish crime.
Parents should try to be what they would have their children to be. Parents and society are very clumsy in their management of children. We have our duties to one another; and we may be sure of one thing: that any one, however flippant or however scornful, who asks, like Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?" like Cain, has somehow lost his brother; like Cain, has somehow slain him. It seems to me that two great ministrant forces engird this universe—love and law. We need them both in the education and development of human beings—of little children. The mother love should bind the child to home and duty: the father power should construct order and administer government. Society should have both these elements in its government.
As factors in society, what are we doing to prevent crime? We may be very eloquent in pleading that punishments may be quick, sharp, and decisive, that the gallows may have every victim that it claims by law, and that eternal vigilance may be kept on evil-doers. But all this will not avail. As has truly been said: "Crime cannot be prevented by punishment. Crime can only be hindered by letting no child grow up a criminal. Crime can only be stayed by education—not education of the intellect only, but education of the heart, which is alike good and necessary for all." We want that sort of education which has in it more of the aim of character-building.
The end of all culture must be character, and its outcome in conduct. "Conduct," says Matthew Arnold, "is three-fourths of life." The State's concern in education is to rear virtuous, law-abiding, self-governing citizens.
I repeat it, the doctrine that the hereditary defectiveness of the masses can be corrected, both by culture and by education, is the true doctrine. Virtue, integrity, and well-doing are not sufficiently aimed at in earliest childhood. The head, and not the heart, comes in for the maximum of training. And yet right action is far more important than rare scholarship. The foundations of national prosperity and perpetuity are laid deep down in the bed-rock of individual character. Let the plodding, the thriftless, and the unaspiring of any country have the monopoly of peopling that country, and the race will gradually deteriorate, until finally the whole social fabric gives way, and the nation reverts back to barbarism or is blotted from the earth. When a nation exceeds more in quantity than in quality, it is in a bad plight. Ignorance and lack of character in the masses will never breed wisdom so long as ignorance and lack of character in the individual breed folly. The intelligent tradesman, the thrifty mechanic, and the sturdy yeomanry constitute the foundation of a nation—the proud assurance of her perpetuity, her prosperity, and her strength.
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay;