CHAPTER XI.
REMEDY FOR THE DIABOLICAL SPIRIT AND THE CRIMES IN OUR COUNTRY.
Men look around, and ask, Where is the remedy for the so wide-spread corruption of all classes of society? This is a most important question. It is not difficult for a Christian to answer it. A skilful physician, who wishes to cure his patient, endeavors first to remove the cause of the disease. So, in like manner, if we wish to stem the torrent of the evils that flood the land, we must stop the source from which they flow.
Now the leading men and the most prominent journals of New York and New England, confess that the greater part of the wide-spread immorality in our day and country is to be traced to the separation of religion from the instruction in our Public Schools.
Governor Brown, addressing the Seventh National Teachers' Convention in St. Louis, in August last, said: "It is a very customary declaration to pronounce that education is the great safeguard of republics against the decay of virtue and the reign of immorality. Yet the facts can scarcely bear out the proposition. The highest civilizations, both ancient and modern, have sometimes been the most flagitious. Nowadays, certainly, your prime rascals have been educated rascals."
And indeed if we go to Auburn, Sing Sing, and other prisons, and examine some of the criminals confined there, we will find that there is truth in the Governor's words.
Do the managers of the Erie Railway lack any kind of intelligence that could be communicated in a common school? Are not those pests, the Washington and Albany lobbies, rather too knowing? Had not those blood-suckers, the shoddy-ites and army contractors, an average common school education? Do not the "gold rings" and the "whiskey rings" know how to read and write? Were not Catiline of old, and Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold of more recent times, men of intelligence? Were not the parties to the recent tragedy, two of whom Mr. Beecher united in unholy wedlock, passable enough in point of merely intellectual cultivation? Mephistopheles was a person of surprising accomplishments, and the ablest debates in literature are those which Milton puts in the mouths of the grand synod of devils in Pandemonium. Byron was a prodigy of intelligence; but, whether Mrs. Stowe's revolting accusation be true or not, he was certainly a profligate.
No one, certainly, gifted with ordinary power of observation, will ascribe crime solely to ignorance, nor will such a one fail to see that a large class of the most audacious and dangerous offenders of both sexes are educated, nay, over-educated, according to the Public School standard.