ADDRESS OF SENATOR GEO. F. HOAR.
Mr. President and Ladies and Gentlemen:
I suppose your Secretary was well warranted in announcing my name, for early in the summer I made an engagement to prepare a paper to be read here to-night on Christian education in the South; but the occupations of the last four weeks, as imperative as they were unexpected, have put it entirely out of my power to comply with my engagement, as I informed your Secretary yesterday. But with a persistence which certainly affords a very good illustration of the doctrine of the “perseverance of the saints,” he has compelled me to come here to make my excuse in person.
I have not come at this late hour of the evening to enter upon an argument in favor of what I am sure every person within the sound of my voice is now thoroughly convinced of, but rather to express my gratitude and honor at the great work which is now going on in this country for a Christian education in the West and South, in which the American Missionary Association is so nobly taking the lead. I do not think you yourselves are entirely conscious of the sublimity of what you are doing and what you are helping to do. Why, take the $321,000 which, including the expenditure from the Stone fund, your treasurer reports you have expended during the past year: at the present rates at which the Government can borrow money, that represents the income of a capital of $9,000,000—the income of a capital which, I suppose, is greater than the entire aggregate of all the productive funds of the American colleges forty years ago, and which I know is more than fifteen times the entire productive fund of Harvard College as it was estimated by President Quincy in 1840. Gen. Eaton made an imperfect estimate of the amount given for education by voluntary contribution in this country, and in 1872 it amounted to $8,000,000 and upwards; in 1873, the last year before the great depression in business, it amounted to more than $11,000,000; and I am informed on credible and high authority that in this year of grace 1881, it will amount to more than $18,000,000—the income of a capital, at present rates, of more than $500,000,000—a vast national school fund invested not where thieves break through and steal and where moth doth corrupt, but invested in the patriotism and sense of religious duty of a Christian people. There is nothing in statesmanship, there is nothing in the opportunities for political effort, which the highest honors of the State can hold out to any of her public servants, which surpasses in dignity the opportunity to help and to bid God-speed to a work like this.
My friends, it is not strange that the wealth and the conscience of New England should arouse itself to the opportunities which God has held out to you in the present age. There are persons within the sound of my voice within whose lifetime twenty new states will be admitted to this Union from territory which now is scarcely settled. That “ancient, primitive and heroical work,” as Lord Bacon calls it, which he ranks as the highest work which is vouchsafed to man to take part in, is being performed in your day and by your hands, if you choose, in a manner unparalleled in human history; and the sixteen states now reconstructed, within which, until lately, slavery had bolted the door against every form of popular education, now, thank God, have their doors unfolded and afford a field of scarcely less interest than the other. How can the manufacturer, how can the merchant of Massachusetts fail to respond to the appeal of these good men and these good women for help in the great work of educating these communities? Combined, they are very soon to be the majority, both in states and in population, they are to determine every question of peace and war, every policy of finance or of tariff; they are to enact, they are to furnish the men who expound and the men who execute the laws under which you and I and our children are to live, and upon which depends the value of all property and the prosperity of all labor. Will the manufacturer or the merchant, who gladly taxes himself to insure his property against fire or against crime, hesitate a moment when you ask him to insure it against being governed by laws which are to be made by and rest upon ignorance?
But there is a better reason even than this. I think the opportunity to take part in such a great benefaction is enough to stimulate every ingenuous soul. I think there is no more beautiful memorial among men than to have your name remembered or your picture hang on the walls of an institution of learning as one of its founders or benefactors. What gratitude is there like that which men feel for the college or the founder of the college where they were bred and educated? Now you have an opportunity to attach to you the coming generations of the South by this tie, a tie which will be far stronger than all the hatreds or the passions engendered by civil war, or which have grown up under years of misunderstanding and hatred.
I have been gratified in what I have heard and read of the speeches of this Annual Meeting, and what I have read in the reports of your Association, in seeing what theory it is upon which all your efforts seem to rest. The foundation of this American Missionary Association’s work seems to me to be—if I were to state it in a single phrase—reverence for the individual soul; that doctrine which Christ preached, for which Christ died—the doctrine without which there can be neither education, freedom, republic or self-government in the world—that every human soul, whether contained in a casket of ivory or a casket of bronze, is a precious thing in the sight of God, entitled to its equal right, to its equal opportunity, to its equal share in government with every other.
Now, my friends, you have got a great deal still to do to teach the people of this commonwealth of Massachusetts to believe and act upon that doctrine, whether they profess it or not. We avowed it, and pledged our lives and fortunes and sacred honor to support it on the fourth of July, 1776, and under it we grew up from a weak to a strong and mighty people. The doctrine crossed the water. When Mr. Webster, in his speech in 1843, at the completion of the Bunker Hill monument, undertook to sum up what it was that America had done for mankind in the seventy years, nearly, that had then elapsed, he mentioned a few inventions and a few new plants and new animals which had been contributed by this continent, and then he said that the one thing which we had done for the world was the avowal and illustration of this doctrine, that however poor or however humble a man might be, or whatever was his occupation, he was the equal in rights, the equal in dignity, the equal in capacity for improvement, in the presumption of the law, to every other man. Well, Europe began to adopt the doctrine. France established a republic; England becomes nothing but a republic, “hooped,” as somebody has said of her. In Spain, Italy and Germany, the doctrine is spreading; and lo and behold, 75,000 Chinamen landed on our shores and the great republic has struck its flag! Men are not free and equal any longer! God has not made of one blood all the nations of the earth any more!
My friends, there is nothing in this world, if there is any lesson of history to be depended upon, which God visits with a surer and a severer punishment than the violation of this law. Just think how we have undertaken to violate it in the case of the negro; and think of the terrible retribution in desolated homes, in debt and squandered treasure, and in the loss of precious human life, He exacted of us. Just think of our dealing with the Indians! Why, excluding the five civilized nations in this country, there are about 170,000 Indians, all told, including those in the states and including those on the plains. There are 34,000 Indian children, according to the estimate of the Indian Bureau, which I think is a little underestimated—certainly not more than 40,000 Indian children of school age in this country. I suppose Gen. Armstrong could tell you he could take the whole of them and educate them at one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars apiece. Why, that number of Indians is less than one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth part of the population of this country to-day. If you should gather them all into a city they would not form a city the tenth in population among the cities of America; they would not make two average Congressional districts out of our 293. And yet, in the mode in which this country has dealt with them, considering that good faith, honor, honesty, respect for property, respect for its own word, was out of place, from the time when Washington said that was our policy, almost in the words I have uttered, down to the time when the Ponca Indians were driven from their homes, and half Boston rushed to make itself an accomplice to the crime, our history has been marked by a disregard of this law, and has been marked by the terrible retribution which God has exacted of us. The Indian wars and the cost of supporting the Indians, of transportation and of military police, are estimated by a very thorough and careful estimate which I received from the statistician in the Treasury department the other day, at between five hundred and six hundred millions of dollars. I think it amounts to a thousand millions. The interest on the interest of what we have paid for Indian wars would take every Indian child of school age and give him a competent education.