We further take it for granted, that children will then be content to be vivacious; will be left to the witching ways, the pulpy and dewy freshness of the morning glory of life, until they shall have gradually come to the ripe maturities of action; that they will not fall from grace into the condemnation of mischievous notice; will not daily burst into astonishing feats of memory or attainment before reluctant, domestic audiences, nor carry on social insurrections against the United States of their begettors until they have achieved their independence, nor hold a Fourth of July every day in the year.
Should reform in this direction not take place as just anticipated, then we shall expect that infantile precocities will be utilized before they shall have evaporated into the insipidities of manhood and womanhood. At present, it is well understood, children are anachronisms, sadly out of place, squandering uselessly their best powers without any corresponding responsibilities; legally treated as minors, when they are in fact majors; denied the legal rights to marry until they reach a period when marriage is tame and idle, and the means to support a wife are exhausted; prohibited from going to Congress and being Presidents, while full of original ideas and administrative ability, and allowed to go when they have oozed away through the leakages of active growths all capacity, and become just—what we see them at Washington; and wasting in pantalets the money which, if suffered, they might earn better than the old heads which are now only figure-heads.
We shall not be surprised to see, if not during Grant’s time, at least before the century runs out, a constitutional amendment relieving aged Americans—those, for example, who have attained the ripe, very ripe age of twenty-one—from the duties and cares of office, and securing to the public the benefit of young vigorous intellects, varying from twelve to seventeen years of age.
The happy results of this change will be apparent—to any infant mind. Short-jacketed M. C.’s will impart new vivacity to Congressional debate; young ministers to foreign courts will be able to acquire, if they do not know, some language beside the American, and be able to converse with those with whom they have business,—an un-speakable luxury now. Active, bustling infants will give a new ardor to journalism, and produce a more enterprising corps of wide-awake, newspaper correspondents, to keep up the stock of telegraph companies by information which, being constantly in advance of the facts, would fairly represent and be fitting types of, the infantile correspondents themselves, and necessitate additional contradictions. As territorial governors, obliged to take hazardous journeys on our railways,—which often intervene and prevent older men from reaching their destination,—they would be nimble enough to get out of the wreck, or perhaps smart enough to keep their deaths secret, and have their ancestors draw their salary,—thus accomplishing, although not present, the principal business of that office. Then, too, how much livelier would things go on in our churches, if, instead of the dull, old elders, deacons, or vestrymen, now seldom elected before they reach the great age of thirty, and who, when they were boys, were smart enough, although not as alert as their own boys now, were allowed to rest their stiffer awkward limbs in their pews, and ecclesiastical affairs were managed by their youngers? The sick would be visited by cheerful, round-faced persons, bright with the health which would be brought as a living fact to the invalid; widows would be comforted by the presence of dark-haired and hopeful youths, and not depressed by the aspect of people encumbered with wives and the chilling experience of at least a score and a half of years; while the poor would receive liberally from those who well know, that the best use for money is to keep it in vigilant circulation.
School Teaching from 1869 onwards.
(p. 542)
Business would also be conducted on youthful principles, in consonance with the other rapid ways of the times; capital would be nimble and alert, creating profits so lively that they would leap back into the common and rapidly running current. Old legislative peculators, bank and trust defaulters, would soon, in the natural course of things, and without the shocks of legal trials,—which generally produce no results,—be displaced; while young iniquity would scarcely acquire the rime and rust which now incrust so many of the old instruments of corruption, making them almost respectable. Biographies, now often running tediously through so many chapters, would be brief; as an American life might be assumed to close up substantially at twenty-five at least, and we should get the rich morning cream, without wearying ourselves with collecting the thin globules that float on the pan of age.
In the better times to which of course everybody looks, we take it for granted, also, that the every-day arts and the familiar sciences, now taught in schools and colleges, will be laid aside; and that Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Irish, and other tongues,—those sad reminders of Babels and other polyglot attempts and results,—will give place to more practical studies. How to cook, so as not to destroy the remnants of stomachs left by candy-eating, hot breads, and other delectable addictions of the old barbarous times which America has passed dyspeptically through; how to get a husband or wife, in every way suited to the expectations and ideas of different members of the family, and on a scale mathematically adjusted to the pecuniary latitude and longitude calculated from the paternal meridian; how to scale a tariff for conductors, which shall not raise the market price of gold rings, studs, and heavy watches, and yet leave something for the directors to operate the stock with; the best methods of acquiring a fortune without the stale process of failure and settling with creditors; the mode of conducting railway collisions and steamboat explosions, without ruining whole families and destroying rising communities at a blow, and without leaving so many facetious questions to funny coroners and irresistibly comic jurors; a method of advertising wares and leaving some praiseful adjectives not used up; a system which should graduate the decrease in weights and measures to the price; and how to make an hour’s work go as far as ten old-fashioned absurd hours,—these will help to furnish out a curriculum of study for institutions high and low.
The fashions will be regulated by the Secretary of the Treasury, who will issue a daily telegraphic bulletin, so that no one shall have any advantage over another.
The President of the United States, by way of keeping his hand in, may practise on a Sunday school every Sunday, addressing them in rotation, and going over those in New Jersey and Texas several times, if a safe pass can be secured. The antique modes of mining will be abolished altogether. A central bureau, located in Wall Street, will so work all kinds of veins and arteries, auriferous, argentiferous, and verdibackish, as to entice out all their values on call.