I have said that the mother is the principal agent in the fireside education. It is not that I disregard the part of the father; and if it were appropriate for me to say all I think, I should reproach some Catholic writers, who fail to make sufficient account of it. We are in danger of forgetting the father in the presence of the mother—this type so pure, so gracious, so Christian.
But I cannot give here an exhaustive treatise upon family education, and I insist above all upon the importance of this primary education of which the care devolves almost exclusively upon the mother. At this period of life, the body and the heart of the child must be formed; reason will have its turn later, but it will only develop itself upon the double soil, physical and moral, a body and a heart worthily prepared. Now, the hands of the wife are alone capable of this divine field-culture, agricultura Dei; they alone are pure enough and tender enough to touch this virginal and suffering body that an imprudent touch might bruise or blight; they alone are powerful enough to awake in him that organ of the heart which is, according to science, the first to be born and the last to die, primum saliens et ultimum moriens, the power to love which remains so often stifled or corrupted in its germ. As the hands of the priest are consecrated to touch the body of Christ upon the altar—this body glorious but subjected to the fragile conditions of the sacrament—so the hands of the Christian woman, by the benediction of marriage and through the graces of maternity, are sanctified to touch worthily the body of the child, a body infirm but glorious, because it contains a soul; I had almost said because it contains a god. By baptism it has been made a living member of Jesus Christ. (Applause.)
The fireside and the mother! Where are they to-day for the people of our great cities? Ah! I touch two great, hideous sores of our contemporaneous society: the pitiable condition of the working part of the community, and the absence of the mother from the domestic hearth. Here is one of the most unrecognized and most active principles in the evil which we suffer; it is here, in this disorganization of the family, in this demoralization of the people, that are formed those black spots which finally rise in the atmosphere, and become there an ever-increasing cloud which at last bursts in a great tempest.
Is it a fireside or is it a den, this damp, dark, infected cellar from which the poor are absent all day, and in the evening return only to horrible poverty and disorder? Is this the dwelling of the living or the tomb of the dead, this narrow, suffocating garret, where, in order to extend himself upon his bed—I cite a fact recently come to my knowledge in Paris—the fatigued workman is obliged to open the garret window during the night and to put his feet upon the roof? I ask, are such dwellings tolerable for the free citizens of France or Belgium; for men redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ? (Applause.)
If at least the mother were there, her look and her smile would illumine the clouds, transform the ugliness, and make a joyous festival in the midst of this sadness. But labor, barbarous labor, has deprived her of performing the sacred duties of the mother, and has drawn her, weak and tottering, into the great workshop, full of the noise of work and the sound of blasphemy, whence she can not hear the cry of her son carried far from her to an indifferent or covetous stranger, who will restore him to her dead or at least blighted.
I do not exaggerate, gentlemen; these are but too common facts, and which are tending to become the law in these great industrial masses. Ah! well, it is the duty, the imperious duty of Catholics to unite among themselves and with the Christians of all churches and feeling men of all opinions, to make one supreme effort in favor of the working classes. Let us work to restore to them the family which has been taken away from them. Let us work to restore the fireside, modest and poor undoubtedly, but decent and pleasant, where the mother remains with her children and gives them those cares of the heart and the body in which no one in the world can replace her. (Applause.)
I do not wish to be a Utopian, and I have not the credulity to believe that these things can be accomplished in a day. Whatever assistance may be rendered, it will require years and still years before the family life, so deeply violated among the people of our cities, retakes its vigor and beauty. In the meantime, gentlemen, what shall we do? Charity has marvellous inventions. To those who are homeless, it has opened children's homes and asylums; to those who have no mother, it has prepared devoted hearts of teachers, whatever may be the dress and name they bear. It has prepared, above all, three centuries ago, through the heart of Vincent de Paul, that extraordinary woman whose mission was reserved especially for the nineteenth century, for the great crisis of the laboring classes, the helper of the workman as of the soldier, upon the field of battle, of labor, and of suffering—the sister of charity. If any one could replace the mother at the cradles of the people, it would be the sister of charity, (applause;) it would be this nun, unsecluded and unveiled, who, not being of the world, yet lives in the world, and who unites, in an unexampled combination, the heart of the virgin and the feelings of the mother. (Prolonged applause;) Let us leave the child to the sister of charity; we will leave it to the instructor and instructress who fill to it the place of parents, to the infant-asylum and school that supplies to it the place of home. Let us not permit that any hand, under any pretence, snatch it from this cradle-education, and give us that spectacle, which would be loathsome if it were not lamentable— the workman eight years of age. I feel the need of speaking the truth with regard to this grand industry, that has been flattered even to baseness by some, and disparaged even to abuse by others. I belong neither to the class of courtiers nor to that of traducers, and I estimate that the best homage one can render to a power of this world is to believe it great enough to hear the truth. I will say, then, to trade, that it has never a right to put its hand upon a child before the age denoted by nature and by religion. To do this is to commit a crime more odious than that which has so long stained America, and that she has been obliged to wash out in waves of blood. Among those men who owned other men there were those who were just and good, who were more the benefactors of their slaves than their masters. But there were also those who were without conscience and without feeling. They saw in the negro only an instrument, and they required of him unmeasured labor without repose. This was the oppression of the body. But all oppression, as all liberty, passes from that of the body to that of the soul. If the truth could come in them, the truth would deliver them! No communication, then, with those who possess science, with men who speak too high, nor with books that teach too thoroughly. And, finally, to intellectual oppression, these cautious and cruel tyrants added moral oppression. They were doubly right, for, of all the accessories of liberty, the most dangerous is not science but virtue. No virtue, then, for the slave! He has been deprived of the gospel; he must also be deprived of nature! And because in the absence of the gospel, and even in the ruins of human nature, when this nature has not entirely perished, there yet dwell two noble sentiments, two powerful roots, whence all can spring up again and flourish—conjugal love and paternal love—family life was rendered impossible, and in these horrible cases men could no longer embrace, in honor as in tenderness, the companion of their misfortunes and the fruit of their love.
You shudder, gentlemen, and you are right. But nothing which has been lost, however great may be the evil, is ever entirely without remedy. This negro is an adult, a man grown; and if, in a childhood more happy than his maturity, he has been warmed upon the bosom of a black but Christian mother, nigra sed formosa, and has drawn the chaste and healthful milk of virtue; if he has known the gospel, and if he has loved Jesus Christ, he holds in his innermost life concealed resources; he will feel the sudden and powerful awakenings of an honest conscience and of Christian truth, and against the triple tyranny of the body, of the intelligence, and of the heart there will be victorious rebellions.
Gentlemen, the being most effectually oppressed, the victim irremediably crushed, is not the man; it is the child. It is the little white slave of our Europe, who has known neither his cradle nor his mother, and who has awakened to life in the dark workshop, a kind of hell on earth, of which we may write—