In England the state takes charge of the education of another class, the nobility and gentry; that is, of young men of ancient and historical families, the nobility, and young men of fortune, the gentry. England is an oligarchical state; her government an aristocracy, the government of all by a few, the nobility and gentry, for the sake of a few, and in the name of a king. There the foundation of power is wealth and birth from a noble family. The union of both takes place in a wealthy noble. There, nobility is the blossom of the state; aristocratic birth brings wealth, office, and their consequent social distinction. Political offices are chiefly monopolized by men of famous birth or great riches. The king, the chief officer of the land, must surpass all others in wealth, and the pomp and circumstance which comes thereof, and in aristocracy of birth. He is not merely noble but royal; his right to rule is not at all derived from the people, but from his birth. Thus he has the two essentials of aristocratic influence, birth and wealth, not merely in the heroic degree, but in the supreme degree.
As the state is an aristocracy, its most important spiritual function is the production of aristocrats; each noble family transmits the full power of its blood only to a single person—the oldest son; of the highest form, the royal, only one is supposed to be born in a generation, only one who receives and transmits in full the blood royal.
As the nobility are the blossom of the state, great pains must be taken with the education of those persons born of patrician or wealthy families. As England is not merely a military or ecclesiastical state, though partaking largely of both, but commercial, agricultural and productive in many ways; as she holds a very prominent place in the politics of the world, so there must be a good general education provided for these persons; otherwise their power would decline, the nobility and gentry sink into contempt, and the government pass into other hands,—for though a man may be born to rank and wealth, he is not born to knowledge, nor to practical skill. Hence institutions are founded for the education of the aristocratic class: Oxford and Cambridge, "those twins of learning," with their preparatories and help-meets.
The design of these institutions is to educate the young men of family and fortune. The aim in their academic culture is not as in Pagan Rome, a military state, to make soldiers, nor as in Christian Rome, to turn out priests; it is not, as in the German universities, to furnish the world with scholars and philosophers, men of letters and science, but to mature and furnish the gentleman, in the technical sense of that word, a person conventionally fitted to do the work of a complicated aristocratic state, to fill with honor its various offices, military, political, ecclesiastical or social, and enjoy the dignity which comes thereof. These universities furnish the individual who resorts thither with opportunities not otherwise to be had; they are purchased at the cost of the state, at the cost of each man in the state. The alumnus at Oxford pays his term-bills, indeed, but the amount thereof is a trifle compared to the actual cost of his residence there; mankind pays the residue.
These institutions are continually watched over by the state, which is the official guardian of aristocratic education; they are occasionally assisted by grants from the public treasury, though they are chiefly endowed by the voluntary gifts of individual men. But these private gifts, like the public grants, come from the earnings of the whole nation. They are well endowed, superintended well, and richly honored; their chancellors and vice-chancellors are men of distinguished social rank; they have their representatives in Parliament; able men are sought out for teachers, professors, heads of houses; men of good ability, of masterly education, and the accomplishments of a finished gentleman; they are well paid, and copiously rewarded with honors and social distinction. Gentility favors these institutions; nobility watches over them, and royalty smiles upon them. In this threefold sunlight, no wonder that they thrive. The buildings at their service are among the most costly and elegant in the land; large museums are attached to them, and immense libraries; every printer in England, at his own cost, must give a copy of each book he publishes to Cambridge and Oxford. What wealth can buy, or artistic genius can create, is there devoted to the culture of this powerful class.
But while the nobility and gentry are reckoned the flower of the state, the common people are only the leaves, and therefore thought of small importance in the political botany of the nation. Their education is amazingly neglected; is mainly left to the accidental piety of private Christians, to the transient charity of philanthropic men, or the "enlightened self-interest" of mechanics and small-traders, who now and then found institutions for the education of some small fraction of the multitude. But such institutions are little favored by the government, or the spirit of the dominant class; gentility does not frequent them, nor nobility help them, nor royalty watch over to foster and to bless. The Parliament, which voted one hundred thousand pounds of the nation's money for the queen's horses and hounds, had but thirty thousand to spare for the education of her people. No honor attends the educators of the people; no wealth is heaped up for them; no beautiful buildings are erected for their use; no great libraries got ready at the public charge; no costly buildings are provided. You wonder at the colleges and collegiate churches of Oxford and of Cambridge; at the magnificence of public edifices in London, new or ancient—the House of Parliament, the Bank, the palaces of royal and noble men, the splendor of the churches—but you ask, where are the school-houses for the people? You go to Bridewell and Newgate for the answer. All this is consistent with the idea of an aristocracy. The gentleman is the type of the state; and the effort of the state is towards producing him. The people require only education enough to become the servants of the gentleman, and seem not to be valued for their own sake, but only as they furnish pabulum for the flower of the oligarchy.
In Rome and England, great sums have been given by wealthy men, and by the state itself, to furnish the means of a theocratic or aristocratic education to a certain class; and to produce the national priests, and the national gentlemen. There public education is the privilege of a few, but bought at the cost of the many; for the plough-boy in Yorkshire, who has not culture enough to read the petition for daily bread in the Lord's Prayer, helps pay the salary of the Master of Trinity, and the swine-herd in the Roman Campagna, who knows nothing of religion, except what he learns at Christmas and Easter, by seeing the Pope carried on men's shoulders into St. Peter's, helps support the Propaganda and the Roman College. The privileged classes are to receive an education under the eye of the state, which considers itself bound to furnish them the means of a public education, partly at the individual's cost, chiefly at the cost of the public. The amount of education depends on three things:—on the educational attainments of the human race; on the wealth and tranquillity of the special nation, enabling it to avail itself of that general attainment; and on the natural powers and industry of the particular individual in the nation. Such is the solidarity of mankind that the development of the individual thus depends on that of the race, and the education of a priest in Rome or a gentleman in England is the resultant of these three forces,—the attainment of mankind, the power of the nation, and the private character and conduct of the man himself. Each of these three is a variable and not a constant quantity. So the amount of education which a man can receive at Oxford or at Rome fluctuates and depends on the state of the nation and of the world; but as the attainments of mankind have much increased within a few years, as the wealth of England has increased, and her tranquillity become more secure, you see how easy it becomes for the state to offer each gentleman an amount of education which it would have been quite impossible to furnish in the time of the Yorks and the Lancasters.
In America things are quite other and different. I speak of the Free States of the North; the Slave States have the worst features of an oligarchy combined with a theocratic pride of caste, which generates continual unkindness; there the idea of the state is found inconsistent with the general and public education of the people; it is as much so in South Carolina as in England or Rome; even more so, for the public and general culture of all is only dangerous to a theocracy or aristocracy while it is directly fatal to slavery. In England, and still more in Catholic Rome, the churches—themselves a wonderful museum of curiosities, and open all the day to all persons—form an important element for the education of the most neglected class. But slavery and education of the people are incommensurable quantities. No amount of violence can be their common measure. The republic, where master and slave were equally educated, would soon be a red-republic. The slave-master knows this, and accordingly puts education to the ban, and glories in keeping three million barbarians in the land, and, of course, suffers the necessary degradation which comes thereof. But in the free states of the North the government is not a theocracy, or an aristocracy; the state, in theory is not for the few, nor even for the majority, but for all; classes are not recognized, and therefore not protected in any privilege. The government is a democracy, the government of all, by all, for all, and in the name of all. A man is born to all the rights of mankind; all are born to them, so all are equal. Therefore, what the state pays for, not only comes at the cost of all, but must be for the use and benefit of all. Accordingly, as a theocracy demands the education of priests, and an aristocracy that of the nobility and the gentry, so a democracy demands the education of all. The aim must be, not to make priests and gentlemen of a few, a privileged class, but to make men of all; that is, to give a normal and healthy development of their intellectual, moral, affectional and religious faculties, to furnish and instruct them with the most important elementary knowledge, to extend this development and furnishing of the faculties as far as possible.