I am not thinking of the additions to the world's learning in all this, great as it is but impossible of appraisement. Nor am I thinking chiefly of the industrial and material advantages. I think it was some bacteriological discovery, known as the Babcock test, resulting in a great improvement in the making of butter, that gave the University of Wisconsin its first wide sympathetic support. It was the discovery by a professor in one of the western universities of the means of inoculating with some fatal disease, and so exterminating, an insect that destroyed wheat and oats, which gave that professor a chancellorship, I am told, and his university more liberal appropriations. But those achievements and fames, while not to be belittled, I have no wish to catalogue and recite here. I am thinking of the social value of this great public educational system that is thinking constantly of tomorrow—of the world markets of to- morrow, to some extent, to which these curricula, as railroads' and ships' courses, lead; of the world's letters of to-morrow, perhaps; but more specifically and more especially of the higher happiness of those particular regions and the success of its democracy. I am thinking of what these institutions of the people's own devising are doing toward the making of a homogeneous spirit, in which individual, disinterested, and varied achievement will have a liberty to grow—as perhaps in no other soil of earth.
Democritus said two thousand years and more ago: "Education and nature are similar. For education transforms the man, and in transforming him creates in him a new nature." The State in its three institutions—the common school, the high school, the college and university—has many in its care and under its tuitions for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, and in these tuitions has she created in her children a new nature, whatever their ancestry or place of birth. Memories of Europe's forges and trees, or fields of roses and golden mountains, and even of Asia's wildernesses, are in the names of many who enter those doors; the memories of other languages are in the muscles of their tongues or the formation of their organs of speech. Like the ancient Ephraimites at the fords of Jordan, they cannot "frame to pronounce" certain words. And memories of persecution or of vassalage are in the physical and mental attitudes of some. But they are all reborn of a genealogy impersonal but loftier in its gifts than any mere personal heritage—a genealogy which, like that of the children of Deucalion, begins in the earth itself, the free soil.
I have often thought and spoken of how artificial differences disappear when, let us say, Smith (English) and Schmidt (German) and Cohen (Hebrew), Coletti (Italian) and D'Artagnan (French) and McGregor (Scotch) and Olsen (Scandinavian) and McCarthy (Irish) and Winslow (of old America) travel together through the parasangs of the "Anabasis," or together follow Caesar into Gaul, or together compute a solar parallax, or build an arch, or do any one of a thousand things that have no national boundaries or racial characteristics. This is an extreme but not an unheard-of assembling of elements which the State has the task of assimilating to its own ideals.
I have not spoken, I cannot speak, of methods of that teaching, of its shortcomings, of it crudities in many places, of its general want of appreciation of form and color (of its particular need of France there), of its utilitarian inclinations, and of its eager haste. The essential thing that I have wanted to say is that this valley is not only more democratic socially and politically than any other part of America, unless it be that narrow strip farther west, but is also more consciously and vitally and constantly concerned about the nation of to-morrow.
I spoke of the flaming ingot of steel swinging in the smoky ravine by the site of Fort Duquesne as the symbol of the new human metal that is made of the mingling of men of varied race, tradition, and ideals in the labor of that continent. But above that in a clearer sky shines a more hopeful symbol—the house of the school, the meeting-place of the invisible spirits, the place of prophecy, pictured against a white field.
The historians have traced the origins of these institutions to New England, to England, to Germany, to Greece. It is not remembered that France went first and hallowed the fields. But it is my hope that out in that valley, once a year, school and university may be led to look back to the men who there ventured all for the "greater glory of God" and majesty of France and found a field for the greater freedom and fraternity of mankind.
My own thought goes back to the place by the St. Charles River where Cartier's boat, which he could not take back to St. Malo because so many of his men had died, was left to be buried by the river, the place where Montcalm gathered his shattered army after the defeat on the Plains of Abraham. It was there that a structure once stood, made of planks hewn out of the forest, plastered with mud and thatched with long grass from the meadows. It was the residence of Notre Dame des Anges, the house from which the first martyrs were to go forth toward the west. This was, says Parkman, the cradle of the great mission of New France. And to this my thought goes as the precursor of the university in the Valley of the New Democracy.
CHAPTER XVIII
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS"
If one travels along the lower St. Lawrence in summer, one sees the narrow strips of the one-time great seigniories, clinging like ribbons of varied colors, green, gold, and brown, to the ancient river, of Cartier and Champlain. There is on each strip, a little way back from the river, a picturesque cottage, usually thatched, not roofed by shingles, with its outbuildings close about, such as Longfellow writes of in Acadia-memories of homes "which the peasants of Normandy built in the reign of the Henries." There is usually on each a section of meadow for the cattle, a section of tilled field for the wheat and corn and vegetables and a section of woodland for the fire-wood—each strip, so divided, being a complete miniature seigniory. Everything is neat. One feels that not a wisp of hay is lost (for it was in haying time that I passed), that every tree is as carefully watched as a child, that whatever is taken from the fields they are not impoverished. The living owners, when they go to their graves, leave their little patches of earth as rich as they found them. There is no hurrying. The habitants go at the pace of their oxen. They are thrifty, apparently contented, conservers of what they have; they spend prudently for to-day; they save for to-morrow—not for the to-morrow of the nation, but for the to-morrow of the family. They are avowedly individualistic, nepotic conservationists and only in effect national.