Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/151

 monarch or the tyranny of a wage-master. The soul once crushed under a master's power, be the master a slave-driver with his whip and bloodhounds or a corporation armed with an injunction from the United States courts — the soul once crushed cannot arise in a single generation and assert its wings in the high air of freedom. The free soul must be born free. Here is the curse of our wage system. It keeps multitudes of citizens hanging for the bread of life upon the word of a master. Slaves in all but the name.

The education which trained the great American for his life work was a severe one; to live through it and come out with a store of energy for future use he needed a robust body to start with. The life of a city is full of intellectual stimulus, but it has not produced the loftiest thinkers, and it tends to degenerate the moral and physical fibre of the race. Great thinking which takes into account the problems of eternity must grow in the vast calm of nature's solitudes.

Not in London, but in his country home, with green orchards around him, Newton solved the problem of the inorganic universe; and in another country home Darwin deciphered for us the story of our origin. Almost all men who have attained to greatness have passed their youth in the country. Our typical American was born in the country on his father's farm. Barefooted and bareheaded he played with nature in his childhood, and she took him to her bosom and mothered him. The birds sang to him, and he knew their language as all our fathers knew it in the springtime of the world; the sun kissed him and bathed him with light; the living things of the fields and woods were his companions ; the stars in their mighty march across the heavens perpetually sang to him, hymning the greatness and the mystery of God.

To the present generation such a childhood may have lost its charm. Its stern simplicity, its pagan health, the rude self-helpfulness which came from it are perhaps less pleasing to us than the pinched cheek, the slender frame, the politer manners of the city child. But the city child blossoms too young.

The aloe fills out the rude and homely bulk of its prickly leaves for a hundred years before it flowers; to make a man you must have a childhood of placid, unconscious, natural growth, free from the pernicious influence of too many books and of fashion. Books are the curse of childhood. In that precious period when impressions are stamped upon the mind never to be erased it is things, realities that the budding man should deal with; he should learn to look at things as they are; he should learn that iron is heavy and ice is cold by holding the iron and the ice in his hand. He will then know that no amount of idle wishing will make the iron lighter or the ice warmer. While the modern child sits stooped over his book, our old-fashioned American was learning to use his eyes and his hands in the freedom of the fields and woods. We are coming back slowly and tentatively to this system of pedagogy as if it were a new and untried thing. We are now and then allowing our children to take their noses out of their books and learn to use the hands which must earn their bread; but it is with fear and trembling, we are horribly afraid that our primary schools may turn out a breed of mechanics, carpenters and en- gineers. So far they have produced a great variety of breeds (among them the stock of Coxey's army), but I cannot see that a generation of capable and honest workmen would be a thing to dread or a falling off from past achievements. Our old-fashioned American went to school and he had a book. He went to school barefooted, with patches on the knees of his trousers and on other regions not visible in front. His face was sunburned and freckled; and his hair stuck out through a hole in his straw hat. His book was a venerable volume inherited from his father before him. The torn pages were rich with grease and sound morality; and he learned to read them; he ciphered a little in his arithmetic and he learned to write. This ended his primary schooling. Grown into a rugged youth with huge bones and mighty muscles, he panted to take his place among active men and wreak his energy upon the world. He took his axe and went