The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

On February 1, 1866, Garfield made that masterly address on the Freedmen’s Bureau, in which he so clearly set forth his views on the nature of the Union, and the States of which it is composed. This speech will be more fully mentioned in another place. On March 16, 1866, he made a remarkably able speech on “The Currency and Specie Payments,” farther reference to which must, for the present, be deferred.

A man of Mr. Garfield’s intellect and scholarly acquirements, could not fail to be interested in the cause of education, always and every-where. He was himself a splendid result of the free-school system of Ohio, and had been an enthusiastic teacher. What, then, more natural than that as a public man he should try to interest Congress in the condition of American schools?

At the request of the American Association of School Superintendents, Mr. Garfield, in February, 1866, prepared a bill for the establishment of a National Bureau of Education. The principal object of this bureau was to collect statistics and other facts, and so to arrange and to publish them as to enlighten the people as to our progress in the means of education. The bill was opposed on account of the expense, as it called for an appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars!

Speaking on this bill, June 8, 1866, Mr. Garfield called attention to the subject of national expenditures for extra governmental purposes. We had expended millions on a Coast Survey Bureau, on an Astronomical Observatory, on a Light-House Board, on Exploring Expeditions, on the Pacific Railroad Survey, on Agriculture, on the Patent Office,—why not a few dollars on Education? “As man is greater than the soil, as the immortal spirit is nobler than the clod it animates, so is the object of this bill of more importance than any mere pecuniary interest.”

The National Bureau of Education was established, and the results of its work have fully vindicated the opinions of its founders.

Garfield’s idea of what should be taught in our schools and colleges was as broad and deep as the domain of knowledge; but, withal, very practical. That he loved the classics, his own study of them demonstrates; but he saw that something better adapted to the scientific and practical character of our country was needed. In an address at Hiram, on June 14, 1867, he gave emphatic expression to this idea.

“A finished education is supposed to consist mainly of literary culture. The story of the forges of the Cyclops, where the thunderbolts of Jove were fashioned, is supposed to adorn elegant scholarship more gracefully that those sturdy truths which are preaching to this generation in the wonders of the mine, in the fire of the furnace, in the clang of the iron-mills, and the other innumerable industries, which, more than all other human agencies, have made our civilization what it is, and are destined to achieve wonders yet undreamed of. This generation is beginning to understand that education should not be forever divorced from industry; that the highest results can be reached only when science guides the hand of labor. With what eagerness and alacrity is industry seizing every truth of science and putting it in harness!”

Moreover, Mr. Garfield believed strongly in a liberal political education for the youth of the land. On this point, in the address above mentioned, he said:

“It is well to know the history of these magnificent nations, whose origin is lost in fable, and whose epitaphs were written a thousand years ago; but, if we can not 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 modeled; 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 are administered. One half of the time which is now almost wholly 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 risen to a higher and nobler life, if 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.”