Page:Civilization and barbarism (1868).djvu/443

Rh to the United States themselves. The greatest antagonism between the Southern States and the Northern, has come, in my judgment, from the Southern following the same plan as that of ancient society in Europe and South America, and the Northern advancing in new and peculiar paths. The system of education in the South, limited to universities and colleges, was that of England, France, Spain, Italy, and the South America of to-day, leaving the majority of the people without intellectual preparation and development. The visible sign of the advanced North American system of government is the Common School, and if ever the South shows the same visible sign, its regeneration will be secured.

For the Republicans of Eurdpe and South America, the North Americans have added a new organism of government in the, thus solving a grave difficulty which the ancient Republics could not solve. The North American Republic is a government which under a written Constitution is carried on by written speech. Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, were republican cities (or city republics) governing byword of mouth from the Forum. Washington is only the desk on which the laws are written and where the reasons are given for the law, which on the following day the people in California, Chicago, or Richmond, read written. Hence the Republic to-day is in extension indefinitely dilatable, as the people govern from their residence, be it in Egypt, in Capua, or in Greece, because they can read that which is sent to them written. If, then, Republican institutions are to be diffused throughout the world, patriots, instead of making revolutions, would begin by founding common schools, in imitation of the United States, as the cement of the future Constitutions. If Protestantism, by requiring the Christian to know how to read, in order to put into his hands the Bible, has so much aided by this means alone, the development and improvement of the human race, the of the American Republic will make useless the ancient aristocracies and the modern repressive governments, by suppressing the popular incapacity and its legitimate fruits—revolutions.

You will understand why, with these ideas and hopes, I deplore the suppression of the National Department of Education, which proposes to be a guide at home and abroad to the laggards of the South in the United States, and would have been a Pharos to the other nations, in the new path marked out by the North. So persuaded was I of the beneficent influence which this department was destined to execute, that I attended the meetings of Superintendents of Schools in Washington and Indianopolis to add my voice to it, and established a Spanish Educational Review in order to make known at large in South America the important data which this public office would furnish. If the preservation of the National Department of Education does not interest you much for practical results in the South, which have not yet been put to the proof, I think you cannot be indifferent to the