Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/258

 250

��THE USE, MISUSE AND ABUSE OF TEXT BOOKS.

��the teacher and demoralizes the pupil. It discourages industry and promotes in- dolence. Innovation is not necessarily improvement. New processes of teach- ing are not always royal roads to learn- ing. New books are not, as a matter of course, true books. In many instances they are lsss valuable than the old. We boast of our freedom of thought and ac- tion, and yet much of our intellectual labor is performed by self-constituted agents. Candidates for office make our political creeds; bankers and brokers regulate our finance; speculators control our markets ; neighborhood gossips su- pervise our domestic affairs ; and last, though not least, booksellers determine what school books and how many we shall use. Where we need only one, they furnish six; where we need only- two, they furnish twelve, and, by the arts of the trade, constrain us to buy them. The number of text-books, like the king's prerogative in Revolutionary times, has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished. We, like our fathers, are taxed without representation. We have no delegates in the councils of the Sanhedrim that decrees the issue of the books we must buy. It is high time for parents to assert their inalienable rights and contend manfully for life, lib- erty and the pursuit of knowledge. Not a study pursued in our common schools can be named that has not at least twen- ty authors competing for the public pat- ronage ; and there is not one of these au- thors who has not a large intellectual progeny, and if you adopt one of the children the whole family will come and settle with you. From these rival claim-

��ants for popular favor it matters little which you choose, for they are all com- pilers, and the text which an old divine advised his young disciple to prefix to his new sermon would answer as a motto for them all : " Alas ! master ; for it was borrowed." One series of text-books in reading, arithmetic or grammar is about as good as another; sometimes a little better; but as they are all derived from the same sources, when one is in use it is not wise to exchange it for another. Good teachers and industrious scholars will succeed with any one of them; and the positive excellence of any one of them is far less than the noisy puffers would have us believe.

But if there is no end to the making of books, there is an end to writing about them, and an end to the patience of read- ers; and, having written enough to call forth the sympathy of those who buy and the hostility of those who sell, I will, here and now, put a period to my desul- tory criticisms upon authors and books, and leave economy and cupidity to de- cide the controversy upon other fields. I will close with the poetic advice of Charles Matthews :

" Now, to sum up the whole

Of this long rigmarole, It's wise to give each man his station;

It's really absurd

To treat all as one herd, And drive all by the same education,

Try and humor the bent

With which each man is sent Duly stamped at the hour of his birth,

And assist the poor creature

To better his nature And act well his part upon earth."

��A FANCY.

��Long years ago the lily was red as any rose that blows ; The rose was pure and pale as if she slept in Arctic snows. A gay young zephyr kissed, one day, the trembling rose ; Redly she blushed with pride, and straightway grew a queenly flower; But the poor lily, with her broken heart, has been a nun from that sad hour.

— Lucia Moses.

�� �