"You who enter here leave all hope behind."
His active lungs breathe in full draughts of air which are simply draughts of poison; his little limbs, bent under the work before being formed, are dedicated from infancy to decrepitude. His intelligence, too, arrested in its early budding, is sadly locked in darkness. It is in vain that, later, in fruitless remorse, we would attempt to imbue him with some truths. The negro will recollect himself after years of brutishness; the child will learn no more after a few months of this odious system. He will never hold in his hand the three keys, at once common and sublime, which open so many things in life and in the soul—reading, writing, and arithmetic. He will never possess those rudiments of science which ought to be the portion of all—something of the form and life of this globe that he inhabits, and much of the glory and destinies of that country which he ought to love and to serve. Never, above all, will he have the clear and strong revelation of his own soul and of God. His soul and God! it is not only ignorance which steals them from him, it is vice. What has taken place in this dark workshop, in this hell, precocious but not the less hopeless? I will not attempt to speak it, but will listen to the words of a poet [Footnote 46] of our age, eloquent interpreter of the frenzies and anguishes of evil in the depths of the human soul:
"The heart of man, unspotted, is a vase profound;
If the first water poured into it be impure,
The sea may pass over without washing away the stain,
For the abyss is unfathomable and the spot in its depths."
[Footnote 46: Alfred de Musset.]
(Applause.) O hands that have abused the child! you will be cursed in spite of all your splendor, in spite of all your science, and in spite of your riches! Hands of a relentless industry, you will remain dry and withered as the hand of the tyrant of Israel under the malediction of the prophet of Judos, "The hand of Jeroboam withered and he was not able to draw it back again to him, because the Lord had cursed it." You have committed the most cowardly, the most revolting, and the most irreparable of crimes. (Prolonged applause.)
II.
The Education Of The Workshop.
I have been too diffuse upon the primary education of man. The fault, gentlemen, is in your attention and sympathy; and then in the empty cradle, the absent mother, this gloomy fireside, where I had need to weep and hope with you.
The home education is concluded by that grand religious ceremony, the first communion, which serves as the first emancipation of the child. More precocious in that than the sons of the rich, the sons of the workman enter from there a sort of public life; from the family, they pass to the workshop. Am I mistaken, gentlemen; is there not a school between the family and the workshop, the primary school first and the professional school afterward? No; the school is not between the family and the workshop, it is beside them. It does not form, in connection with them, a third degree in the popular education. In a word, its part is not principal and independent, but secondary and subordinate. I am full of sympathy and respect for those modest and courageous teachers of the people, to whatever corps of instructors they may belong, whether they wear the religious or the layman's dress, provided they remain at the height of their profession. I will never associate myself with the gross and unmerited injuries of which they are the objects, in different senses, on the part of all extreme parties. But grand as is their mission, I repeat it, it is secondary; and practical reason fails to see in the school what a large number of our contemporaries see in it—the most efficacious instrument for the elevation of the laboring classes. Permit me, gentlemen, to cite the words of an economist, a patient, impartial, and wise observer, whose name and works I would wish to popularize among Catholics. "With a free and prosperous people," says M. Le Play, "the instructor occupies only a subordinate position. The true education is given by the family, aided by the priest; it is completed by apprenticeship to a profession, and by the observance of social duties." [Footnote 47]
[Footnote 47: Social Reform in France, by M. Le Play, author of European Laborers, Commissioner-General to the Universal Exhibitions of 1855, '62, and '67. 3d edition, vol. ii. p. 369.]