"You've Destroyed My
Property," I Rejoined, "And It's No Laughing Matter." And Then All
The Crowd Laughed.
"Guess you'd better get it glued," said one.
So I gathered up the broken article and retired mournfully and
crestfallen into a coach.
This was very sad, and for the moment I
deplored the ill luck which had brought me to so savage a country.
Such and such like are the incidents which make an Englishman in
the States unhappy, and rouse his gall against the institutions of
the country; these things and the continued appliance of the
irritating ointment of American braggadocio with which his sores
are kept open. But though I was badly off on that railway
platform, worse off than I should have been in England, all that
crowd of porters round me were better off than our English porters.
They had a "good time" of it. And this, O my English brother who
has traveled through the States and returned disgusted, is the fact
throughout. Those men whose familiarity was so disgusting to you
are having a good time of it. "They might be a little more civil,"
you say, "and yet read and write just as well." True; but they are
arguing in their minds that civility to you will be taken by you
for subservience, or for an acknowledgment of superiority; and
looking at your habits of life - yours and mine together - I am not
quite sure that they are altogether wrong. Have you ever realized
to yourself as a fact that the porter who carries your box has not
made himself inferior to you by the very act of carrying that box?
If not, that is the very lesson which the man wishes to teach you.
If a man can forget his own miseries in his journeyings, and think
of the people he comes to see rather than of himself, I think he
will find himself driven to admit that education has made life for
the million in the Northern States better than life for the million
is with us. They have begun at the beginning, and have so managed
that every one may learn to read and write - have so managed that
almost every one does learn to read and write. With us this cannot
now be done. Population had come upon us in masses too thick for
management, before we had as yet acknowledged that it would be a
good thing that these masses should be educated. Prejudices, too,
had sprung up, and habits, and strong sectional feelings, all
antagonistic to a great national system of education. We are, I
suppose, now doing all that we can do; but comparatively it is
little. I think I saw some time since that the cost for gratuitous
education, or education in part gratuitous, which had fallen upon
the nation had already amounted to the sum of 800,000l.; and I
think also that I read in the document which revealed to me this
fact a very strong opinion that government could not at present go
much further.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 244 of 277
Words from 125826 to 126336
of 143277
