The number of prisoners received into the institution from 1850 to 1860 was 1,605, of whom 15 per cent. were illiterate, 15 per cent. were able to read, and 70 per cent., or more than two-thirds, knew how to read and write; from 1860 to 1870, 2,383 prisoners were received into the penitentiary, and of these 17 per cent. were illiterate, 12 per cent. could read, and about 71 per cent. could read and write.
Of the 627 convicts who were in the penitentiary during the year 1867, 62 per cent., or five-eighths of the whole number, had attended the public schools of the State, 25 per cent., or two-eighths, had gone to private institutions, and 12 per cent., or one-eighth, had never gone to school.
But, as we have said, statistics deal with crime, and chiefly with the more open and discoverable sort, not with morality; whereas nations are destroyed not so much by crime as by immorality.
The thief is caught and sent to the penitentiary; but the trader who adulterates or gives short measure, the banker who puts forth a false or exaggerated statement, the merchant who fails with full hands, the stock-gambler who robs thousands, Crédit-Mobilier men and “ring” men generally who plunder scientifically, Congressmen who take money for helping to swindle the government, getters-up of “bubble companies”—salted diamond-fields and Emma Mines—compared with whom pickpockets and burglars are respectable gentlemen—these know not of penitentiaries; prisons were not built for such as they. The poor man abandons his wife, without divorce marries another, and is very properly sent to State prison. His rich and educated fellow-citizen gets a divorce, or is a free-lover, or keeps a harem, and for him laws were not made. Even that respectable old dame Society only gently shakes her head. We must not expect too much of gentlemen, you know. The ignorant girl falls, commits infanticide, and is incarcerated or hanged—heaven forbid that we should attempt to tell what she would have done had she been educated!—at any rate, she would not have gone to prison, though her guilt would not have been less.
Has the very great diffusion of enlightenment among our people during the hundred years that we have been an independent nation made them more moral and more worthy?
“The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”
The Yankee is smarter than the Puritan—is he as true a man? Is the inventor of a sewing-machine or a patent bedstead as worthy as he who believes in God and in liberty against the whole earth with all his heart and soul, even though the heart be hard and the soul narrow? What compensation is there in all our philanthropies, transcendentalisms, sentimentalities, patent remedies for social evils, for the loss of the strong convictions, reverent belief, and simple dignity of character that made our fathers men? Do we believe in the goodness and honesty of men as they did, or is it possible that we should? What can come of beliefs in oversouls, whims, tendencies, abstractions, developments? If we were shadows in a shadow-land, this might do.
Look at a famous trial where the very aroma and fine essence of our civilization was gathered: What bright minds, keen intellects! Poetry, eloquence, romance; the culture, the knowledge, the scientific theories, of the age—all are there. And yet, when the veil is lifted, we simply turn away heart sick and nauseated. Not a hundred statistical prison reports would reveal the festering corruption and deep depravity, the coarse vulgarity and utter heartlessness that is there, whatever the truth may be, if in such surroundings it can be found at all.
In Laing’s Notes of a Traveller (p. 221) we find a most striking example of almost incredible corruption united with great intellectual culture. “In this way,” he says, “we must account for the singular fact that the only positively immoral religious sect of the present times in the Christian world arose and has spread itself in the most educated part of the most educated country in Europe—in and about Königsberg, the capital of the province of Old Prussia. The Muckers are a sect who combine lewdness with religion. The conventicles of this sect are frequented by men and women in a state of nudity; and to excite the animal passion, but to restrain its indulgence, is said to constitute their religious exercise. Many of the highest nobility of the province, and two of the established clergy of the city, besides citizens, artificers, and ladies, old and young, belong to this sect; and two young ladies are stated to have died from the consequences of excessive libidinous excitement. It is no secret association of profligacy shunning the light. It is a sect—according to the declarations of Von Tippelskirch and of several persons of consideration in Königsberg who had been followers of it themselves—existing very extensively under the leadership of the established ministers of the Gospel, Ebel and Diestel, of a Count von Kaniz, of a Lady von S——, and of other noble persons.… The system and theory of this dreadful combination of vice with religion are, of course, very properly suppressed.… The sect itself appears, by Dr. Bretscheider’s account of it, to have been so generally diffused that he says ‘it cannot be believed that the public functionaries were in ignorance of its existence; but they were afraid to do their duty from the influence of the many principal people who were involved in it.’”
But we are not the advocates of ignorance. We will praise with any man the true worth and inestimable value of education. Even mere mental training is, to our thinking, of rare price. Water is good, but without bread it will not sustain life. Wine warms and gladdens the heart of man; but if used without care, it maddens and drives to destruction. We are crying out against the folly of the age which would make the school-room its church, education its sacrament, and culture its religion. It is the road to ruin. Culture is for the few; and what a trumpery patchwork of frippery and finery and paste diamonds it must ever remain for the most of these! For the millions it means the pagan debauch, the bacchanal orgy, and mere animalism.