Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/71

 to the widespread, momentous, and gripping spirit of nationalism.

Nevertheless, despite their superb educational equipment plus other incentives, the Prussians still seemed to intelligent American observers in a very retarded social condition. Horace Mann, who wrote most enthusiastically of their schools and was sympathetic toward the Germans in every respect, in a passage of almost classic force and beauty written in 1843, tells us why education in Prussia accomplished for the people so much less than one might expect. For one thing, he says, the pupils left school too early—at the age of fourteen, which was their time for beginning regular and heavy work. Then, too, books for further self-instruction were lacking. There was in Prussia nothing analogous to the Massachusetts district school libraries. "But," he continues, "the most potent cause of Prussian backwardness and incompetency is this—when the children come out from the school they have little use either for the faculties that have been developed, or for the knowledge that has been acquired. Their resources have not been brought into demand; their powers are not roused or strengthened by exercise. Our common phrases, 'the active duties of life'; 'the responsibilities of citizenship'; 'the stage, the career, of action'; 'the obligations to posterity';—would be strange sounding words in the Prussian ear.... Now, although there is a sleeping ocean in the bosom of every child that is born into the world, yet if no freshening, life-giving breeze ever sweeps across its surface, why should it not repose in dark stagnation forever." The bill of particulars with which the great educator clinches his indictment of the Prussian system, while it aims to describe accurately only the then existing condition in Prussia, might be equally applicable to almost any other absolutist, paternalistic state. All responsibility for the people's welfare was assumed by the monarch, who in turn was actively