We know, I say, what are the rights of a child. The question I wish to put to you is, are they getting those rights?
The distinguished gentleman and ex-Governor who has just preceded me, has said most eloquently much that I myself do most heartily endorse. And while I dislike to sound in this assembly one discordant note—to strike one chord of the minor here—where all seem so satisfied, I feel that I shall not be true to the great cause of childhood if I fail to say what I do know. It is good for us, now and then, to be shown our shortcomings. It is well for us to see at times into our soul of souls. It is progress to search after better things. Self-sufficiency is retrogression; self satisfaction is decay, and contentment is the sure messenger of degeneracy and death. There is no god as great as the God of Discontent. False glory is the masque of ignorance and self-conceit is the gaudy mantle of the king’s fool.
In telling you then, as the collected teachers and county superintendents of this state, that you have done nobly and performed your solemn duties, the distinguished gentleman has used an hyperbole which strikes me with ironical exaggeration and which has aroused in me this flow of bitterness and gall which I shall now pour out upon your complacent heads. And I do if with this amendment—that if you are doing your duty, if you have fought for the rights of childhood as you should and failed, then the law makers of this state, and the people of the state who send that kind every two years to this capitol are fearfully, wonderfully and criminally derelict in their duty to the children of their own firesides. For I have it from the lips of your chairman himself, in a speech he delivered in Columbia last fall, that in all the forty-five members of the great United States, in numbers of natural born illiterates, North Carolina stands at the very bottom and Tennessee, your own Tennessee, in which you are doing such noble, uplifting work, stands next to her, holding in her hand the black flag of illiteracy.
Does the full force of this get into your peripatetic souls to ruffle the feathers of your immaculate conceit? Great God, it hurts me to think of North Carolina, the birthplace of my father and all his fathers before him that I know anything of, the birthplace of Polk and Shelby and Robertson and a host of others as great sons as ever God gave to the republic, the land of the Anglo-Celt, of patriotism and tar-heel gameness—it hurts me, I repeat, to learn that she stands at the foot, and Tennessee, her daughter and her equal in past grandeur, patriotism and principles, stands next!
Don’t look at me as if you did not want to hear it! Neither do I want to hear it, but it is sometimes good for us to hear the truth—the truth even to crucifixion.
You may be ignorant, but God knows you will fight! Then fight for the white children of your state—fight these laws and the politicians who made them with strings to them—made them to be evaded. Fight for more and better schools and the abolition of child labor until your state stands in the column where its pedigree and its past record entitles it to stand!
For you will fight, thank the Lord!
I journeyed last spring to New Orleans just to see the plain upon which Tennesseans stood and fought to a bloody finish the bullies of beef-eating England and secured by their victory to our nation the Louisiana Purchase and a century of foreign peace, which the memory of that battle strengthens yet in the minds of their children. The old ditch was a swamp of water lilies; the breastworks had gone back to the plain; but the great Mississippi flowed on to the sea, unhampered by Spaniard or Briton, the great artery of a boundless, unbroken and undivided country. And I stood upon a soil made American by the blood of Tennesseans; I looked up at a sky purple, blue and beautiful, thrown over the landscape by the God of our fathers, even as a king of old would throw his royal purple over the masterpieces of the great master. And on the sky and on the land and on the bosom of the mighty river I read: JACKSON—JACKSON—JACKSON!
As I stood there the fighting spirit of my Irish sires came back to me as I saw the ghosts of those long-haired Tennesseans standing behind that bloody ditch fighting for the country which God had ordained should belong to them and the oppressed of the world. The hot blood surged in my cheek as I thought of the 60,000 little white children of the South and the 2,000,000 in the cotton mills and factories and mines and sweatshops of the nation, robbed of their rights of childhood by the greed of gold, the graft of politicians and the low ignorance and lazy debasement of their own parents, stealing from them not only the rights of an education, but even the right of life! And as the blood surged in my head, beating drumbeats in my brain and marshalling in the fine frenzy of prophetic visions the gray host that stood shoulder to shoulder there, I saw again that sallow-faced leader, with the form of a battle spear and the eyes of a god, riding up and down the long lines—bloody, blasphemous and brave—and forever settling with the invaders the issue they had postponed, but not abandoned, at Yorktown. And, seeing him, I saw again that pitiful picture in the Waxhaw Settlement—the Irish immigrant mother, her husband but a week ago buried in a poor white’s grave, two babes at her knees and this one at her breast, with no money and no home and no bread for their mouths, and I said: “Thank God, there were no cotton mills in South Carolina then, or Andrew Jackson would have died there before he was grown, in the lint and the dust and the grind of them, robbed of his childhood and of his chance in life!”
For he also was a poor white, just the meat for a nice, religious director of a cotton mill!