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Section 5
The Decivilizing Current in American Society
[42: 719–22] To compare the progress of men in civilization in England and America respectively we must not compare a well to do American with a well to do Englishman, nor even an average American with an average Englishman, we must compare the progress during several generations of a family starting originally at the same point of advancement in each country. The average point of departure in such a comparison would be an English family of the last century selected from the working-classes and not of the more steady, sober and methodic type of such families, rather one of the more unfortunate; a family the head of which is apt to be out of employment and frequently in need of forbearance from his landlord and the tradesmen with whom he deals. If we imagine two corresponding families of this type and trace their history, we shall find that the emigrating family, which we will designate as no. one, at first decidedly declines in civilization, their barbaric propensities are developed. If they were to be taken back to England in twenty years, they would be found much more unsteady, reckless, shiftless, more comfortless themselves, more uncomforting to others, than family no. two, which had remained there. At this point let us take in England a third family (no. 3) which shall be parallel to no. one in its relapsed state. It will be found only among the more vagabondish sort of the working class. The father will be a Sheffield trades unionist perhaps, or a farm laborer,
[690]who occasionally does a little poaching, a tinker, costermonger or navvy somewhat given to drink and gambling, a man whatever his ostensible occupation not on very friendly terms with the parson, the beadle or the constable and not a very desirable juryman. Follow the three respective families for several generations, number two and number three in England, number one in America; shall we find reason to think that number one or number three is at last more advanced in civilization? Accordingly as we answer this question should we estimate the value of the conditions to which Anglo Americans have been subject.
It would be absurd to imagine that under these circumstances we should find that a steady, consistent, uniform advance had been made in all the elements of civilization. If in several qualities there had been great improvement we should not be surprised to find backwardness in others. The development if rapid would have been irregular and in all society there would be many outcroppings of inherited propensities and ancestral habits of thought, which would be easily recognized as properly belonging to a class much lower in the strata of civilized progress, than that generally uppermost.
If we take a hundred thousand emigrants of the average quality of the whole body of emigrants who came from England to America in the last two centuries, subject them to the average conditions of the ship and the ports, and then to the average conditions to which emigrants have been subject, and continue to follow them and their children until they have become established in farming settlements, villages and towns as a body of our present American Society, numbering as they will by this time several millions, what can we reasonably expect to find. For the most part they will have been brought up on farms, with few near neighbors; they will have had very limited schooling, will be mainly what is called self-educated and the young men will have gone out early from their fathers’ houses and will have gained for themselves the most part if not all of the property they each possess. Few of them will have ever seen any painting, sculpture, architecture or other work of fine art: few of them will have ever come personally in contact with what in England is called a gentleman or been in any way under the influence of artistically refined manners or usages. The greater part will be working men and very few will not have been engaged at some period in employments, requiring but a moderate degree of intellectual effort and such as in England are left wholly to the lower classes.
It would be absurd to suppose that under these circumstances we should find that there had been a disappearance of all the qualities and habits inconsistent with an advanced stage of civilization which had existed in those who came out of England and of all those other qualities of a barbarous people which emigrant & pioneer conditions are adapted to
[691]establish. I propose to trace the development and the manifestations of these in certain respects.
[42: 42–43] Doctor Horace Bushnell, a New England divine, in the year 1847, preached in N ew York, Boston and several other places, a sermon on behalf of the Home Missionary Society, by whom it was afterwards published and circulated in pamphlet form, sustaining this proposition: “A new settlement of the social state, involves a tendency to social decline: there must in every such case, be a relapse toward barbarism more or less protracted, more or less complete x x x We are a people trying out the perils incident to a new settlement of the social state.” The history of New England is used to illustrate this proposition, it being argued that the Puritans and their descendants steadily and rapidly declined in all the mental and moral conditions which distinguished a civilized from a barbarous community, during a period of more than a hundred years. That in spite of systematic measures to counteract the tendency, sensuality in all its forms, incivility, ill nature, selfishness, irreverence and lawlessness grew upon the people, each succeeding generation being more ignorant, and more barbarous than that which preceded it.
I do not know that anyone has undertaken to refute this statement of Dr Bushnell and I am sure that no one has, who is a better authority on the subject.
It will not be doubted that the settlers of New England were much more likely to successfully resist such a tendency than any other class of the pioneers of the United States.
One comforting assurance to the leaders in civilization of our present frontier communities is to be drawn from this review, namely, that however bad the seed of these communities may be, it cannot be as bad as was the seed of most of the Atlantic communities simply because there is now no white seed on the American or the European continent as feeble in civilization, as deep in vice, as that lifted from the seedbed of the English colonies.
If I seem to overlook the Puritans, it is because I wish to avoid as far as I safely may a ground of religious controversy. The Puritans—strictly applying that word, and not including under it all the earlier settlers of New England—are the fathers of but a small part of the present people of the United States. And if I [find] it incumbent upon me to say whether the present emigrants, from Europe or from the older part of the United States to the later settlements are really more civilized men than the Puritans, I must say yes. The Puritans whatever their moral elevation, were very low in civilization, and they possessed and bequeathed
[692]to their descendents one element of public opinion strongly antagonistic to civilization. Their requirements were meagre. They considered the fine arts for instance as devices of the devil. They strangled or turned into savage directions the natural demands for festive recreations. Thus, though an admirable breeding stock in some respects, they were no exception to the general rule.
[42: 53–56] Where intercourse occurs between individuals of the less with those of the more civilized sort in pioneer neighborhoods, it is of a more direct character and a greater influence is thus exercised than would be possible under other circumstances, but the opportunity and occasion for intercourse of any kind with persons of a decidedly superior grade in civilization is necessarily infrequent to the emigrant or pioneer. The most savage man in London is made conscious every day of a dependence on and an obligation toward his superiors, if for nothing else because of his demand for bread, beer or gin. He has wants for the supply of which he must resort to other men and he is constantly obliged to exercise consideration in regard to the wants of other men in order to supply his own. If we regard those with whom he associates as a class—the least civilized of the large classes of London—we may see that a large number of those composing this class, with whom the very worst of those who compose it are in daily communication, are themselves in communication with a class superior in civilization & more interested in that which sustains civilization than themselves. The lowest costermongers, for instance, deal with gardeners and market people on the one hand and with decent workingmen’s wives and the maid servants of the lower sort of trades people on the other. And the lower class of work-people & tradesmen have daily experience of their dependence and of the value of the service they are able to offer to a class a little higher in civilization than themselves. That they are conscious of this, and that it affects their habits and manners in certain respects very unfavorably, every American who has been among them must have been made painfully aware. But they could not have acquired a habit of servile, false and parrot-like forms of speech and manner without effort, without self discipline; nor without some practice of imagination in regard to a higher standard of life than that by which they would otherwise have been limited. If an education in civilized qualities thus affects every man in London, not less does it affect men in England out of London because nowhere else maya man’s communications with others be so much confined to those of his own grade of civilization as it is possible they may be in London.
But in America—I have several times been in the cabins of emigrants who had not seen a white man out of their own household for
[693]several weeks and one who had a flourishing. farm told me that he had frequently passed months without speaking to a human being. Once a year only he went to the nearest point at which he could sell and buy. I have known thousands whose contact with civilization was scarcely more intimate or likely to have a more educating influence upon them. It remains to be shown that under those conditions of life in America which least resemble those of the backwoods, influences prevail which are equally calculated to obstruct his progress in civilization.
It is evident then that the first and most obvious educational difference in the condition of one of that class who are dragged unwillingly at the skirts of civilized society, when he is moved from the denser communities of Europe to a pioneer position in America, is the loss of an influence which has hitherto constantly acted upon him favorably to civilization and counter to the indulgence of his more barbarous inclinations.
[41: 748–51] The decivilizing process
In well organized communities, men are forced to cultivate defined methods of serving each other and their time and attention being thus devoted to the acquirement of a particular kind of skill, they become much better fitted for usefulness in their own method than any other. When they go to a new country, they may attempt still to practice their special calling but soon find that there is so much greater a demand for work which they have not been trained to do, and can manage to do but indifferently, that it is more profitable to give up the practice of their special skill, or at least to pursue it with a divided interest. Thus a man trained to compound medicines turns his hand to compounding paints, dye stuffs, perfumery and perhaps wines and liquors. A printer adds to his original trade the work of an editor, a stationer, a book seller, a rag dealer and commonly some others. It is only in the larger towns of the United States and in those only recently, that the business of a hosier, a haberdasher, a glover, a linen draper, a woolen draper, a silk mercer, an umbrella dealer, an upholsterer, a paperer, a carpet dealer &c have been pursued as entirely distinct callings. Yet so far as these different vocations have been pursued by emigrants, they have generally been fitted by previous experience for only one of them—and have unwillingly and awkwardly brought themselves to try to combine several of them. Frequently they gradually abandon their original trade & gain their living by wholly different methods.
In new towns and villages of the West peopled mostly by emigrants from Europe, there is at first a more perfect division of duties than
[694]is usual in older towns of much larger size. This is because the emigrants have not yet thrown off old or taken up new ways very much. Gradually however they unlearn not only their special skill, but their demand for special skill, and acquire the distinguishing habit of the established pioneer to “make shift,” —to “get along” with rude substitutes for the results of civilized skill, and instead of doing anything well, do all things poorly. While I was in Bear Valley two men moved into the place one after the other, who had been brought up to the trade of a barber in Europe, and who wanted to continue in it. Finding that they had but little business except on Sundays when many of the miners coming in from the country around would indulge in a shave “for the fun of the thing,” they each undertook to carryon a small trade in addition in newspapers, prints, fruits, confectionary and liquors. Each finally failed; one turned miner, the other I did not follow. While they remained, however, several men kept their hair short and their faces clean shaved who neglected to do so before and afterwards. We had an excellent baker in the village but he gradually became irregular in his baking and gave his attention to what would have been the callings of at least half a dozen men in his native village in Germany.
A similar process occurs in all the divisions of society“and in the use of terms and designations”the social distinctions of older and more perfectly organized society are lost.
Of various phenomena of America which are clearly due not to the form & method of government but to a recent and incomplete organization of society, there may be noted, the readiness and frequency with which men change their trade or profession & the consequent incompleteness of qualification with which various callings of society are met, and the secondary consequence of the vagueness and disregard of conventional lines defining the duties and proprieties of any calling, profession or function. To this for instance and not to democracy, the chief difference in the practice of law and of medicine between England and America is to be attributed.
In England the right of a man once a clergyman to enter the bar was allowed for the first time in some centuries in 1865. See Littell (art. from Telegraph of London, March 1865, no 1085, p. 516.) In our Western states legislators are frequently found who began life as tradesmen, afterwards became students, acquired the degree of M.A., passed through a theological school, became pastors in churches, and later in life took up the study of law, resigned their clerical duties, practiced law and finally engaged successfully in politics. I know a French gentleman in California, who within two years has been regularly admitted to the bar and advertizes himself as an Attorney at Law; he has been coroner of the county, he has been Surgeon in charge of the county hospital and is a family physician in constant practice over a range of at least 100 sq. miles,
[695]he owns and manages an apothecaries’ shop and a whitesmith’s shop. He has during the same time discovered and opened a copper mine. That he will turn his hand to some other business before long is to be expected because it is to be expected that there will be demands of the community which with a little special study he can manage to meet better than anyone else at hand. As a lawyer, let me add, he regularly performs all the duties which in England would be divided between a solicitor and a barrister, is his own clerk and carries his own bag, nor would he decline to undertake to serve a client in any matter proposed to be committed to him, whether of civil, criminal, probate, chancery or ecclesiastical law. Yet he must have been nearly fifty years old when he first began the study of law, and having walked the hospitals of Paris for some years after receiving his medical education in his native country, he even speaks the English language without fluency. Of course he is an exceedingly poor lawyer in every way. Why is he a lawyer at all, or why does he attempt to practice law? I do not know the particular occasion or its inducements, which influenced him, but it is safe to say that no similar occasion or similar inducements could occur, or if they could, that they could not have had the same influence upon him in England or France even if those countries were republican and were to be governed by American laws. Neither in England or France would the best physician not a specialist undertake many of the offices which it would often be inhumanity in the poorest medical student who ever passed an examination to decline to undertake in a frontier community. Such communities must take the best that is available & the best that is available must not be held back from modesty.
[42: 38–39] Of course whatever peculiar customs the emigrant finds differ from those in which he has been bred, chiefly as they are the result of the same conditions adverse to civilization. They thus simply serve to accelerate and fix such new habits, as he is otherwise likely to have fallen into. Take for example the common case of a German or French peasant woman. All her life long before emigration she has had a working dress and a holiday dress; one made of quite different stuff from the other. The holiday dress she has perhaps inherited as an heirloom from her mother. It has been almost unchanged customarily for many years, unpatched, unrepaired. If she had spent her life in the old country, it would never have been cast off—while the working or everyday dress would have been renewed many times. The exigencies of the voyage and the journey are likely to have broken upon this. She comes among people who know nothing and care nothing for her old country holiday, among whom all her garments are odd and not pleasing. Almost necessarily the
[696]distinctions of dress which she has hitherto observed are neglected, parts of the working dress are replaced at frequent intervals by new acquisitions, while damaged parts of the holiday dress become parts of the daily dress. Every day takes, in this & various other ways, less & less distinction from a holiday. Every holiday still less & less distinction from the common. In a year from her landing the German peasant woman rarely wears any of the old country dress, and makes little distinction between daily and holiday dress, except that her daily dress is composed more or less of that which she has discarded from her holiday dress. Her old standard of working fitness or of holiday fitness being thus lost or disregarded, no other standard is substituted—exactness, precision is impossible—carelessness or cheapness of consideration—following of the fashion of the moment or yielding without consideration to the dress maker & milliner or store-keeper, who is governed by self interest or laziness, is a matter of course. Hence unfitness, and inadaptation and, (in two senses), indifferent habits.
[42: 32] I have been surprised to observe how rapidly under favorable circumstances even the peculiar tastes and habits of the nomadic races were developed in pioneer life. Mrs ——, an Englishwoman of the more refined, quiet, domestic and methodic type, told me that after crossing the plains with her husband in 1849, having lived for several months with a daily moving train of waggons, she found it hard to resume a methodic stationary life and for a long time afterwards, sighed frequently every morning when she awoke because the waggon was not brought up, for the day’s journey. The waggon had become her family habitation, and its movement and all the necessary inconveniences and customs of the train had become incorporated with it as a part of her home. So it made her homesick to spend the day in a house. Thus readily are old customs unlearned and new ones adopted even by those to whom civilization is most kind.
It cannot be supposed that what are generally considered the higher offices of civilized society do not follow in the same way.
[42: 723–32] The pseudo-civilized luxury and the fallacious character of much of the devotion to civilized products and institutions which attends and follows the pioneer condition—
In new countries sparcity of population and abundance of resources of a kind to be developed with little labor, cause high wages to be paid for rude, untrained, un-skilled, injudiciously applied labor. But not
[697]high wages alone, in the ordinary sense of wages, but high consideration, flattery, treats, whatever will help to obtain the labor. The results of civilized education in the man’s habits, the accomplishments and acquirements which go for so much in old countries, are not only not wanted, they are positively, for a time at a discount. Many a man of university education, of strong, well equipped and well developed mind, arriving in San Francisco in 1850, found he could turn his talents to account in no better way than in trundling a wheelbarrow or carrying a hod. And many another who in Europe would have been glad to earn a shilling a day by blacking the boots of such men and running their errands, became their master, instructor or leader in these simple occupations.
The sparcity of population relatively to the wealth which was ready to be developed by labor, was, of course, in this case, extreme,—but the same class of results more or less modified in form occur to the emigrant wherever he goes. It is in fact this state of things (abundant resources & sparcity of laborers) which tempts him, and which makes him an emigrant. Take a case not perhaps quite as well known. Most of the law business of a new country is of a comparatively simple character. A flippant young fellow, with a smattering of law, who is clever in gaining the confidence of the ignorant is at least as likely to do well in a new settled community as the ablest, most learned, most careful old practicioner. Incidents from Howitt’s Australia.
So far as the maxims of success which are applicable to a really civilized community go then, the emigrant finds that they are not merely useless to him, but that in many cases they are incumbrances. The sooner he can put them away, the better. When an English farmer settles in Illinois, for instance, the first advice he receives from his hospitable neighbors is: “Now you must try to forget your old country ways of ploughing deep and straight and carefully, of saving manure and selecting seed, and getting in turnips for winter and looking at the sky. All you have to do is to go ahead and get in as big a crop of wheat as you can, never mind how, only get it in, some way: two or three hundred acres if you can.”
“But if it comes to anything shall I be sure of harvesting it?” “Oh! don’t bother yourself about harvest now, guess you’ll find some way to do it, when harvest comes.”
“But how long will the soil last without manure?”
“What matters is that, if you happen to get one good crop, it will be worth all the land cost you.”
It is the same with merchants, tradesmen, alL The first lesson they get is a lesson of neglect of extended forecast, of precision, study, method—providence, temperance. The first instruction everywhere which the emigrant receives leads him to put a high value upon his mere rude brute labor, and a low value upon the careful exercise of judgment, upon
[698]study, upon the maxims of his fathers, upon all that the mind of man has been or can be exercised upon with advantage to itself. Almost in every case, he takes this instruction too readily and governs himself by it too completely in everything and this no matter what his previous training has been nor what he turns his hand to. Says the San Francisco Bulletin
:
In our new countries the usual rate of interest is twice as large as it is in some of the older, and in the latter twice as large as in Europe. Money represents service or labor rendered, and a certain sum of money loaned is simply equivalent to a certain measure of service which the borrower is entitled to obtain of the community during the period of the loan. As time is equivalent to money and money to service, it follows that comparatively hasty service and with haste the absence of patient, substantial & thorough workmanship is characteristic of new countries. The law applies to matters of statesmanship, of finance, of art, of science, and literature as much as to any other.
A long series of fallacies are thus made to pass current as axioms to demagogues and quacks of all kinds, political, artistic, scientific, literary, clerical and educational, from which great mischief results. No reader can study this statement with the least care, I think without perceiving that the tendency referred to is inevitable and all-sweeping, or fail to understand that under its operation the emigrants to what is designated “new countries” must undergo a process of education irresistably leading them toward barbarism. It is almost a self-evident proposition I say, and the least degree of common sense would seem to be sufficient to comprehend it, yet it is certain that little account is often made of it, and that very generally it is practically denied. On every fourth of July there are west of the Mississippi some thousand men who suppose themselves to be peculiarly qualified to instruct their fellow citizens who, in effect, deny it and point out what they deem to be illustrations in objects and occur-rences familiar to their hearers and readers, of what they practically argue is a tendency directly the reverse.
Some eminent writer, I cannot now think who, has noticed the fact that in pioneer communities there is often to be seen a wonderful inconsistency and contradiction of inclinations in the apparent value of certain civilized luxuries and the apparent willingness with which certain barbarous conditions of life are embraced or submitted to. Thoroughly analyzed there is nothing strange in this. A savage will peril his life to get a yard or two of gay calico, but you cannot get him to plant, cultivate, pick, gin, spin, weave, dye or print the cotton by offering him the prospect of securing the greatest wealth of it added to the greatest wealth of everything else that he wants.
The contrasting quality which distinguishes the civilized people
[699]of Europe, the wiser selfishness which results in methodic and prolonged labors and in cooperation and community of service, has been the growth of centuries. The emigrating, or less cohering and more imperfect particles of this civilized society, are simply less matured in this respect than the rest. The savage, or self sufficient and improvident, inclinations are stronger with them. They are as fond as others of many of the luxuries of civilization. They like perhaps even more than others, as the savage does, showy clothing either of cloth and tinsel or of all those finer and more complicated materials, the relationship of which to broad-cloth and gold lace are indicated in Sartor Resartus. Thus the New England emigrants particularly like to wear a splendid meeting house and an eloquent minister, the New Yorkers an opera troupe and dinners of twenty courses, and it is amusing to see swindling stock-gamblers and other blundering villains wearing these luxuries, the proper use of which they have no more idea of than the negro princess has of the gold watch which she wears hung by her nose. The emigrants know what fine clothes are, better than the savage, and they are nearer the condition of mind which produces them.
Thus in pioneer communities, we must not be surprised to find some remarkable specemins of the higher results of civilization, especially in those communities, wherein, by stealing and wasting the natural resources of the country or by successful raiding impositions upon the credulity of more civilized communities, and other semi-savage warfare of gambling speculation, many persons have rapidly acquired great wealth. The very spendthrift quality of the pioneer leads to this. But in these cases, we have only to look a little closer, to satisfy ourselves that what is boasted of as an evidence of civilization, is a mere exoteric gloss laid over an essentially barbaric habit of mind. We have only to look with a little care to perceive the existence still of intemperance, improvidence, imprudence, coarse self-flattery, short sighted self-consideration and an absolute waste of real and substantial wealth in the purchase of something smart on the surface but dross within, imperfect, incomplete, ill-balanced, out of place, inconvenient, pretentious, deceitful, swindling and essentially villainous. (But just here let us remember that no savage people ever was civilized who did not begin in this way, of which I shall have more to say bye & bye.)
Look at the false shop fronts which line the streets of all our younger western cities; look at their first class hotels, painted, gilded and advertized as palaces without, filthy wigwams within; look at the bills of fare they offer you, forty dishes with French names, yet you famish or grow thin and yellow, for want of a single morsel of civilized, wholesome and nutricious food. Look at the “champagne” that is consumed at the West, especially in California and Nevadah; green-sealed and otherwise emblazoned. Look at our trade in imitation jewelry; see how and when
[700]and where those who are able wear diamonds and real jewelry. (But don’t we see some of these things in Europe? Undoubtedly—among the more uncivilized people, the emigrating classes.)Look again at our “one horse colleges.” Ten offices filled by four men, who sometimes, as their prospectuses, catalogues and advertisements show, cannot altogether compose three consecutive sentences of fair English; Professors of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Mathematic, Belles Lettres, Political Economy, Mental & Moral Philosophy, Astronomy, Geology, the Practical Application of Science, Bookkeeping and Penmanship, condescending, as you will find if you look closer, to teach boys and girls of eighteen or twenty, their alphabet. (This I have seen). Be not surprised, if the next time you make a hit in anything, such a “College” —or “University,” sends you on imitation parchment, a printed imitation of a diploma giving you the title of Doctor of Laws. Send it a pair of globes, or the handful of books which the last tenant left in your house, and they will presently give your name to a professorship or to a clapboard “hall.”
The fact then that a pioneer people are willing to pay liberally for certain civilized goods—certain goods which might be supposed to be peculiarly characteristic of civilization-must not be taken as proof that they are highly civilized or rapidly growing in civilization. Remember the savage, all the world over, in Africa, Australia, America, alike, pays miles square of fertile land, hundreds of beeves, scores of horses, boatloads of skins, or his whole winter store of provisions, for a gold-laced coat, which coat he wears without breeches, in the hottest weather with great inconvenience and discomfort but much applauded by his fellow citizens.
[42: 267] Take the men who have acquired wealth rapidly in San Francisco, who are rapidly gaining wealth & throw out those among them who are essentially gamblers & have made lucky hits as spendthrifts & silly old women sometimes at Baden Baden may do—take those only who as merchants have made their money mainly by wise foresight of the public needs, by cautious & brave & honest & industrious management in being prepared to supply the public needs & in supplying them have been well-paid for the exercise of so much foresight, discretion, patience, perseverance, accuracy, courage & courtesy [42: 230–34] and it is a well-established fact that the exercise of these qualities & virtues in an equal degree in St Louis, would not on an average have been as well-paid. Nor in Boston as well as in St Louis—nor in London as well as in Boston. The same is true in regard to these qualities and virtues when applied to banking, to brokerage, to law. It is evident that Mr Dickens or Mr Solicitor Field, or Mr Hunt will make more money by living in London than they are likely to in S.F. There are certain goods in the production of which
[701]wisdom & the virtues which are required for commercial success may be needed, for which there is little or no demand in a pioneer community. The whole world’s demand for these goods is, however, filled by a comparatively small number of men & women & perhaps if the quantity & quality supplied to our pioneers from local sources could be measured, it would be found to be better paid for, than the same amount of similar quality usually is in older communities.
I have said that this general fact is well-established. The exact degree of additional value is not well-established, and in the nature of the case, from the imponderable nature of the commodity in question, it cannot be. Some approximate comparative idea may be formed, however, by those who have had opportunities of observation. The result of my observations is that in nothing else of commercial value is there so large an advance of the rates paid in thriving pioneer over old communities as in the wisdom & qualities everywhere requisite for commercial management, but owing to the peculiar social condition, this seldom takes the form of salaries, of stipends.
Although for instance, the rates paid for money in a newly settled country appear excessively’ high relatively to those usual in an old one, the value of money relatively to the service of wisdom & skill in commerce and in all its agencies, as in Law, for instance, is much lower in new than in old communities.
To this rule exceptions will readily be found, most of which may at once be referred to the difficulty with which such intangible commodities as commercial wisdom & skill are measured and set forth in market. For some evidence of the rule I may refer to the comparative ease with which a promise of success in their enterprises are discounted for or by individuals in newly formed communities (where there is little ground of value for such promises, except the degree of commercial wisdom or of skill in their callings which they may be supposed to possess). Again it may be seen in the degrees of readiness with which men part with money or wealth in hand. Again in the little injury the credit of a man receives from the fact that he lives up to or beyond his income. This is much less in Virginia City than in San Francisco—much less in San Francisco than in Saint Louis—much less in Saint Louis than in New York, much less in New York than in London. Creditors ask what he can do in the new country, rather than what he is doing.
There is a similar grade in the generosity of men. Ten men might be asked to give their whole last week’s income for a charitable purpose with confidence in San Francisco, to one in New York; ten in New York to one in London. But seek for deliberate, careful study and considerate
[702]advice; for judicious trusteeship, for careful auditing of accounts, for an application of commercial skill and wisdom, in short, to a charitable purpose, and you will find a gradation of difficulty between England and New York, New York and California, much more than tenfold greater than the gradation of rates of prices of merchandize or of money loans. Strong religious fervor, great sensitiveness to convictions of duty or impulses of benevolence will carry individuals beyond the scope of all general rules of action. As a rule in California, such service is not to be had. Nor as a rule can you depend upon having it except for an emergency & under special stimulus in New York. Where it appears most, there is often the greatest deception. I have seen a great deal of pretense of merchants & bankers attending to public or charitable business as a matter of honor in New York, but have met with but few instances in which they steadily for long periods did such work in a methodical businesslike way, where they did not receive a large commercial compensation for it, much more in Phila & Boston. I believe it is quite different in London.
I think that no general fundamental difference between Europe and America, between the East & the West, between our fixed village and rural population and our population at the centres, and along the channels, of Commerce is so little recognized and appreciated, or is so much neglected or forgotten as that caused by the differing degrees of commercial demand for brain-value. One grand reason for this I have already stated. Another is that brain-value is often associated in individuals with unusual lack of susceptibility to ordinary commercial considerations. The best brains in Europe & America are given for a very small commercial consideration to abstract science, because associated with a peculiar demand for the satisfactions inherent to the pursuit of science. But these again are exceptions. There are similar exceptions, accounted for by a similar method, in the field of statesmanship, of war, of the ministry of the churches. Another grand reason for the popular ignorance or regardlessness of the general fact under consideration is that each man depends so much more on his own brains for his individual success than upon what he can buy of others, except as the latter is sold him in the form of complete commodities, that the extent to which each man needs to pay for the use of the brains of others is little considered; in other words [42: 228–29] when brain-value is not paid for in the form merely of advice or instructions, in affairs of every-day business, its commercial value exists only in connection with some manufactured commodity the price of which it has increased, and in that connection is lost sight of. For instance, when a laborer buys a new coat, he is not likely to be informed of or to recognize the brain work of Whitney & Arkwright & a host of others who have contributed to improve the manufacture & commerce of the cotton & wool of which it is made. But the chief reason is that the philosophy of brain-work is so little understood, & especially in America
[703]is so much misunderstood—the limit of brain work of individuals—need of rest of recreation-consequence in false pretenses of brain work during time when must rest or work poorly—of channels of its work and poor work of the same brain out of its ordinary channels. Nevertheless, taking a broad view, it may be seen to be a matter of demand and supply, and it is a commercial fact that new and imperfectly organized communities, though very bad markets for certain sorts of brain-work, do give higher proportionate prices for brain-work, fitted to the peculiar character of whatever each pioneer community it is carried to, on an average, than older communities—higher proportionately to everything else of commercial value.
[42: 235–36] Hence salaries & wages in frontier communities, though they may in cases appear high, compared with the rates of old ones, are almost universally low, compared with the rewards of business to proprietors and hence men at service for wages are universally restless & not long abiding.
The great want & the great deficiency of every new community ordinarily is that of wise and cautious & far & foreseeing men. The fact that such men are not appreciated, that the want of them is not known or felt, that when they put their peculiar goods directly in market & offer them (in the form of advice, for instance,) they are treated with indifference, that legislation is often rash & stupid, is not only consistent with this but is a corollary of it. Wise and prudent men are those who appreciate prudence, who value and are willing to pay for wise counsel. It is the rash & foolish who carelessly assume responsibilities for which they are unfitted and who most dislike subordination to & constraint by the wise. Hence commercial wisdom, to be of value in a pioneer state of society, must be presented not in the form of advice but in the ability to confer benefits in a complete tangible form, as for instance to sell certain goods at rates below those at which they have been sold before.
[42: 251–52] Newspaper articles and sermons, both being written in nearly all cases with great rapidity, cannot contain ripe deliberate thought, but rather expressions of sentiments most likely commonplace, or of principles which would be better asserted than argued. Valuable judgment is nearly always deliberate. What is called dash, if it is a real quality, is generally the clever application of previously well deliberated rules of action. Extemporaneous discourses and stump speeches may be captivating but are not usually wise. “American preachers eloquent but not sound.” Stump-speakers, hack writers and preachers generally serve a good purpose if they attempt merely to dilute the thoughts of students, and whether they attempt it or not this is what they do. Theology student
[704]is a water cart filled up and then sent on a round. If he ceases to be a student as most do and must, for no one can write two sermons a week & have time for deliberate persistent study, he will only spout what has been put in him or what he has worked out of himself while he had to study. A recitation prevents study, because the acquirer for recitation is too much encumbered by the end in view of merely reciting. Truth for truth’s sake, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is as yet seldom sought here. This is the advantage of European universities. But this applies less to ignorant people, the comparison of more ignorant people with Europe, in America, is to the vast advantage of America. (Preachers in America more useful because nearer the people, tho’ less profound, or exactly and cautiously, safely profound.) The government accounts for elevation of ignorant people,–not for unsoundness or unthoroughness of scholarship. This the result of frontier circumstances.
[42: 331–33] Our legislative system is based not only upon the proposition that every man has a right to have the legislation of that which is his—his country—influenced by his own judgment of what is for his individual interest, but also upon the proposition that it is best for the interests of all that every man should take thought for his interests as they will be affected by legislation, that he should look out for himself and have a certain degree of power to restrain legislation which he thinks would be harmful to his interests and to bring about legislation which he thinks would be for his own advantage. It is presumed that when every legislator is made directly dependent for this power to legislate upon the will of a majority of the sound-minded men of a certain community & when every community in the country is thus represented in legislation, a regard for the average interests of all persons in the country will control legislation. It is not presumed, however, as many seem to think, that every man in every community is or can be educated to be a constructive legislator, or even to form a judgment of laws & propositions of laws which have been constructed by others, except as he observes their actual effects upon his interests.
Representative principle. Our chief evil, this too much overlooked—abandoned—and excessive degree in which under our system [the] views of each individual legislator are confined to limited scope of duty—to what his constituents want. This evil leads first to much local & special legislation and to constant revision of laws as their working is found by experience to be grievous to some part of the community, but chiefly acts in preventing wise comprehensive legislation for the general benefit. Statesmanship is impossible. Politics takes its place. Statesmanship as a science [is] now hardly known. We are content with what our
[705]fathers did—we anchor to that, feeling that we cannot trust our present law-givers to revise [the) constitution, that they are not trained to look far enough long enough ahead. Still worse, this evil in Executive functions of govt. Trained executives are almost unknown—the greatest & most difficult responsibilities conferred for political local reasons, to please a constituency with reference to votes. No sound advice based on experience of the executive working of the laws can be given our legislators—no one’s judgment is worth anything upon a question of what will be the effect of a proposed measure because we have no really well-trained & experienced executive functionaries. They all work & think of their work with limited views; for a year or four years, never deeply, thoroughly, carefully studying it, as men do who are to make a business for life of what they study but this only corresponds with all the business of the country. The Executive rules or bye-laws of the country are thus often exceedingly poor, constantly being changed. But this is not the worst of the system. The worst is there is no discipline, that under it discipline is impossible. Hence (Mr. Case’s confession to Dr Bellows & Collector James’s to me). Where the rules are good & rigid & the higher officers honest & resolute men—as in S.F. Custom House, they cannot be enforced, owing to the incompetency & general undisciplined character of the subordinates of all grades.
This all grows out of our pioneer habits—local views, personal independence, decivilization, & the remedies are apparent—less attorney-like representation & more statesman like govt—longer terms—restriction on opportunity & discharge [of) power, enlarged responsibilites of Executive officers. Remedy every year sought to be found the other way, by reducing responsibility & shifting responsibility & changing officers, &c, as with New York City.
[41: 756) In no other communities in which I have lived is the want of men of talent so obvious as in those of California. Waste, improvidence, stupidity and lack of searching thought is seen on every hand. The few who would in any community impress one as men of large grasp of mind, ready and energetic, are overloaded with business. Such men cannot afford to take political offices nor can their communities afford to have them. They are making too much money for themselves & their neighbors where they are. We see the reverse of the French system, in which every inducement is given men of talent to withdraw themselves from. the people & competitive labor for their benefit & take stipends as political functionaries, leaving a nearly dead level of stupidity thro’ the country. See Spencer’s Essays (Herbert) p. 90.
[706]
[41: 755] In sparse settlements, to obtain much strength by combinations of numbers all sorts of people must be brought in to the combinations—all must be conciliated, nicety, exclusiveness is impossible. So if we want service we cannot be nice about even the character of those to serve. We employ women of bad reputation if not at once & readily then after a time in extremity.
Thus a habit forms with the public of not being nice or exacting of public men, of expecting men with important responsibilities to put up with poor, inefficient assistants, of lax discipline, &c.
Men are removed from office, are scrutinized and their business investigated from selfish (office seeking) motives chiefly.
Frequent change of servants is common not to public affairs only but to all of the country.
[42: 765–70] In one of my books upon the Slave States, I remarked that the most manifest general evil resulting to society from Slavery was that it aggravated and prolonged the hardships and disadvantages of a pioneer condition of society. Nothing was so strongly impressed upon my mind in studying the Slave States as this truth and this was the commencement of the line of thought and observation out of which this book grows. As is generally the case in such studies, it is not possible to say what is primary cause and what primary effect. Whether it was that the emigrants to the South were originally of less civilized character than those to the North and thus more readily adopted and firmly held to Slavery than those of the North, or whether it was that the action of Slavery in developing, and strengthening selfish or self regarding habits is the chief cause of the difference between the people of the South and the North is of little matter to my present purpose. The important fact is that in one way or the other, the people of the South, as is now generally recognized even by themselves, adopted & maintained a peculiarly unwise, simple and short sighted policy with regard to Slavery. An uneconomical policy. They would have been richer, stronger, better off in general, had they not stuck to Slavery. They were by Slavery kept in a pioneer condition—living for the most part on isolated plantations, and they were deprived by reason of their sparse settlement of many of the advantages of civilization enjoyed by the people of the North. Thus their condition and history illustrates the position that the emigrating or pioneer class is distinguished by an unusual degree of simple, childlike, short sighted, unwise self regard, or selfishness. In other words, by intemperance or improvidence; the same quality which leads the child to eat for present
[707]pleasure, what is sure to give him pain afterwards, the drunkard to deprive himself of the means of getting food tomorrow to enjoy intoxication today, the savage and the barbarous white hunter of the plains to gorge himself with buffalo hump this month without a thought of providing a store for the next, and the great mining corporations of Nevadah to clutch by the shortest and readiest method forty per cent of the silver contained in the rock they have taken from their mines, letting the remaining 60 per cent go beyond recovery. Now the same phenomenon of vicious economy and blundering selfishness which made the poor whites of the South the friends of slavery, will be readily seen to be present in different parts of the United States, in its essential characteristic, so far as the condition of mind is concerned by which it was maintained in the South, in a degree very much proportionate to the degree in which the population consists of emigrants or pioneers. (It remains to be shown that this is the case in the Eastern large towns.) (Some pioneers differ from emigrants in this, that they are perpetual emigrants and in them the qualities of emigrants are consequently fixed. That is to say, they are more decidedly uncivilized.) Where for instance during the last ten or twenty years have we seen the most intolerant and stupid policy, adopted in dealing with the negro? Not in New England; not in the rural districts of the older states; but in Illinois, Indiana, California and Oregon, in those parts of the population of Canada which have recently emigrated; in all those Eastern cities and in those parts of these cities, which contain a large majority of recent emigrants. The treatment of the Chinese, Negroes, and Mexicans in California is another illustration of it, and it is interesting to observe how the longer-headed politicians of California squirm and stultify themselves in their efforts to hide their own personal common sense in contriving economic apologies for the atrocious demands in this particular of the reckless, fluctuating, nomadic, uncivilized population in whose votes it is their business to deal.
[42: 733–47] In whatever we possess in the United States that is characteristic & peculiar to ourselves and that is so universal in its character, that it may be fairly considered a representative product in any great degree of our condition as mainly a new country, there will be found the elements of barbaric wastefulness, of hasty, inconsiderate, indolent, disjointed, desultory arrangement, and of the jealousy & repellant prejudice and distrust which makes tribal exclusiveness so strong an element of savage character, and the evidence of this will be found strongest where the effects of emigration & of new country life are most evident in other respects. To illustrate this, I will take a class of social organizations which are quite independent of our political system, and that which
[708]is peculiar in which is generally esteemed a product of the American mind of the most respectable character, constituting the Americans a “priveledged people” and the special advantages resulting from which are recalled to mind for the sake of the Glory of the Almighty by many thousands every day of the year.
There are in the United States more than forty thousand organized bodies of men and women associated for certain purposes which each member professes to believe to be of a sacred and all-important character. About as many men charged with the special business of working for these purposes are employed by these societies. The greater part of these are men of family & these families are also extensively employed in the service of these societies. From one hundred to ten thousand dollars per annum, is [paid] for their service in each case. If the average amount is supposed to be equal to the wages of a good mechanic or a fourth rate play actor or the clown of a circus, and it be supposed that an equal amount is employed in other methods for carrying out the purposes of these societies, in gifts to charitable & benevolent objects, missionary enterprizes, Sunday and other schools, colleges, scholarships, theological seminaries, books, tracts, religious periodicals, the support of the lay and irregular ministry, &c., through the churches, the whole amount expended annually cannot be less than $40,000,000, which at the rate of seven percent, (a rate considerably below the average rate paid for the use of capital throughout the country) together with the amount invested in buildings and other fixed property, relates a capital of $600,000,000.
The time and labor of the ministers, during the period in which they receive their salaries, is chiefly given to the purposes of instruction, or the education—the drawing out and lifting up—of the people. They give on an average at least six good days’ works measured as the work of other men is generally measured, in every week, to this duty and to their own preparation for it. The expenditure in other respects is mainly directed to the same end, though in part to the performance, and the making convenient, of religious rites, the chief object of which is not instruction or education. If we allow ten per cent for this, there remains a capital stock of $500,000,000, which is every year increasing, that is as good as set aside for the education of the people, wholly independent of government or of any state or political agency. The Trustees of this fund, are primarily, the voluntary contributors to the treasuries of the societies referred to. Eventually it is controlled in a great degree by a comparatively small number of persons meeting in conventions, synods, assemblies &c.
Considering the connection which in each case these persons suppose to exist between the religious purposes for which they hold this capital in trust, and civilization, it may be assumed that it is a fund devoted to the advancement of civilization.
With that understanding of civilization which I have heretofor
[709]assumed to be correct, chiefly on the authority of Mr Guizot, how far is this trust wisely administered?
Obviously the chief agency employed is that of the ministry, for all the rest are in a great degree influenced if not wholly controlled by the ministry.
What are the qualifications of these agents as agents of civilization?
The Edinburgh Review (1865) (Littell Nov. p 444.) in a review of Le Maudit, sums up the necessary conditions imposed upon a parish priest in France, as follows: “In short, his life is a negation of everything which a gentleman prizes, and an outrage on many of the feelings which a gentleman possesses.” But the Review also says: “We fear there are some districts of the Welch and Scotch highlands where a gathering of the local incumbents or of a presbytery, would exhibit similar peculiarities.” Welch and Scotch highlands? Is it not notoriously true of thousands of English curates? Are the constraints upon manliness and the provocations to meanness, subserviency and hypocricy with which the English clergy and ministers have to contend, as these are exhibited in the novels of Miss Bronte, Mr Trollope, in Salem Chapel and many others, widely different from those exposed by the author of Le Maudit? Are we better off?
I have had the misery of being cast for some little time into close and confidential relations with eight American pastors, who were included under different denominations, and have known many others with some degree of intimacy, and it is a very mild expression of the truth to say of them all: “Their lives were a negation of everything which a gentleman prizes and an outrage upon many of the feelings a gentleman possesses.” I do not mean that gentlemanly instincts and gentlemanly habits were in every case completely crushed out with them, or that they never indulged in that class of the healthful enjoyments of life, which gentlemen peculiarly prize, but where this was not the case it was no fault of their parishes, no fault of the system by which they were supplied with bread, no fault of their brother ministers, more than all no fault of public opinion. Public opinion, less in the city than the country, less in the East than the West, less with the more intelligent than the more narrow minded communities, yet almost everywhere imperatively enough, demands of ministers that they shall surrender real individual dignity to certain artificial forms and vestments of dignity supposed to be fitting to their office, that [they] shall sacrifice individual liberty and independence, to the strengthening of the doctrines and the advertising of the church they are hired to serve; that they shall yield their own manners, their own natural tongue, their own style of living, their own sense of propriety, the recreations and habits which their idiosyncrasies require, as the condition of their continued mental, moral and physical vigor, and, who shall say in
[710]how many cases, their own religious, political and scientific convictions, and shall acquire and practice a self imprisonment, a fictitious zeal, artificial manners, inflated language, and whatever else best satisfies the pride and sense of property in them of those upon whose doles they are dependent.
I have seen a scholar living as the humble servant of a parish of the most vulgar, provincial, narrow minded and self sufficient men and women, with a nominal salary less in amount than many a cook and groom receives, and this looked for, hoped for, managed for, and taken with humble and mean spirited acknowledgments, precisely as a beggar takes alms, and this man had a wife who had been a lady, he had sons whom to make also scholars, to give them even but a taste of the freedom and largeness and elevation of spirit which in his college days he had himself enjoyed, was the highest of his earthly hopes. How he studied the character of his masters and mistresses, how, stately and dignified, bold as a lion, ardent, zealous, eloquent, as they would have eloquence, devoted as they would have devotion, in his clerical and pastoral presentation, he yet cringed and writhed, and coaxed and plead and studied the pettiest economies, and the meanest arts of gathering by charitable driblets, as much as possible of what this Christian people had promised to pay for his services—this story of oppression, degradation and misery, no one has yet begun to tell. To suppose that a man’s manhood can endure such a strain, that a man can be a man of truth, of courage, of wisdom, fit to lead, to instruct, to encourage men, women and children, in the way to live rightly, respectably, wisely, healthfully, nay above all religiously, what “traps for the godly” are the ecclesiastical machines in the contrivance of which all this is assumed!
The English State Church system is bad enough, but no one can deny that it has vast advantages which our own wretched arrangments do not possess for providing centers of religious influence and means of religious communion throughout society. That it has advantages on the whole, over our system, systems, or want of system, may be doubted, but that it has some advantages, advantages that we have not, and that we hardly aim to have, is unquestionable. A sturdy English dissenter once said to me:
I am a dissenter because I see need for reform and great improvement in our State Church, and I can make a more effective protest by standing out, than by going in. I cannot submit to the impositions upon my intellect that the Church requires, yet I must confess the doctrines of the Church are hardly more objectionable to me than those of our own connection; I pay my tythes cheerfully and I have no desire to see the establishment fall. I only want to see it made larger, more free and more effective in accomplishing what it undertakes to do. The Church abounding in abuses as it does, is the best part of our political system, and as with all the rest of our political [711
Just think of what part the Church takes, with all its shortcomings and its nonsense, in the work of civilization. It places to-day, nearly twenty thousand educated men, most of them gentlemen, all intended and presumed to be gentlemen, in as many seperate positions all over the kingdom, that is to say, one for every three sq. miles or thereabouts of the whole surface and one for say, every four hundred families of all classes. These men have taken upon themselves trusts, the execution even in a somewhat imperfect manner necessarily brings them in frequent contact with large numbers of the people, under circumstances favorable to their exercising a strong influence upon their judgment, their opinions, their manners, their habits and their whole character. There is an elaborate method of preparing these gentlemen and watching over them for the purpose of making as sure as is practicable that they are fitted to exercise a good influence, a refining, elevating influence, an influence favorable to the happiness and the ennoblement of that portion of the people which has been denied their advantages of education.
They are absolutely restrained as to what they shall favor in regard to many matters of opinion and in regard to many customs. That these restraints are the most judicious possible, is not to be supposed, yet you should not forget that they are determined and are from time to time reviewed & revised by men chosen really from our best, our most refined, our most carefully and completely educated society, and with more or less regard for their special personal reputation for integrity, purity and virtue, and who are known in every case to have given long and careful consideration to the matters in question. Such men are certainly superior to the mass and likely to judge of these matters more comprehensively and more wisely than the mass.
So far as the virtue and wisdom of the morals and manners of the more fortunate part of our English Society are truly represented in the selection, education and discipline of the clergy, these twenty thousand men are agents for the distribution even to the most unfortunate of our population, of whatever influences flow naturally from their positions. That their influence in this respect, in the great majority of cases, is very great and very good; that the mere presence of gentlemen of liberal education and the manners, customs and habits of cultivated society, which most of them are, operates as a restraint and corrective to much folly and in every little community throughout the land accomplishes vast good among the people and especially among the people of the lower classes, no one can doubt. Much as I dislike many things in it, I can never reconcile it with my conscience, to labor for the abolition of the system. We might do better, without it, but he is a bold man who takes it upon himself to act as if he was sure we would do better.
No sensible man will, I think, deny that there is great force in this reasoning, or that there are most important advantages in the national system of England over our own arrangments.
Whether the evils of the national method of England and generally
[712]of other Christian countries for the support of the ministry and other functions of religious organizations, are greater or less than those which belong to our arrangments, it is unnecessary for me to consider here. No one, I suppose, fails to see very formidable and scandalous evils in the English and Continental systems. It will do us no good to think of them; we are in no danger of suffering from them. I think it probable that if the ministers of each denomination in the United States could be polled upon the question whether we should adopt the English system, if they could be assured that their own doctrines and rites would be favored, would vote in the affirmative, but the laymen in few cases would do so; and as to the selection of anyone denomination to be favored, it is as much out of the question, as the embodiment of all sincere lovers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, in one general ecclesiastical organization.
We seem yet to be centuries behind the stage of catholic charity which is necessary for this, even among our more intelligent and generous Christians. Yet is it not plainly of the first importance, in the interest of civilization as of humanity and religion, that those who are the Trustees of this enormous fund, should acquire a profounder conviction of the folly and wickedness of the excessive division and of the consequent waste, of the forces, which they put in the field.
I have been in one of those dreary Western collections of population dubbed cities; in which, judging from the appearance of the houses, there was a population of from two to three thousand. At the time of my visit, I am sure that the fixed resident population was not above fifteen hundred. Yet there were five churches in it. There were as many gambling saloons and dram shops open on Sunday and I am sure the entire congregation at each church, including travellers and all who came in from the country, did not number one hundred and fifty. I saw one of the ministers. He was a sickly, haggard, starved-looking man, yellow and feeble, wearing a thin, shabby coat, coughing and speaking with the whine of an invalid. A good physician would need only to glance at his face and to hear his voice, to advise him to go at once to mountain air, and to adopt a diet of beef, eggs and cream with frequent doses of alcohol. His sermon was an exhausting harangue directed solely against the doctrines which were upheld in the other church over the way. Two to one, over the way the complementary discourse was being delivered by a man in very similar circumstances. That is to say, half starved, tormented by the suffering of a large half starved family, and always faceing the danger that anyone of the score or two of small mechanics and tradesmen to whom he looked for the means of supporting his family and educating his children, should become more lukewarm in sustaining a man devoted to the duty of praising their own peculiar tenets and heaping ridicule upon those of their neighbors.
What was the quality of the preaching, regarding [it] critically, as
[713]we should regard the work of a popular author, as we should regard the work of a mechanic whom we employed, the goods of a tradesman with whom we dealt? Why the stock, the finish, the whole workmanship, was as bad as possible. If it had not been for the time honored phrases strung through it, ill-asserted and put in carelessly, it was the reverse of eloquent, of instructive, of elevating, of refining, even to those of coarse nature and habit.
What was probably the Sunday school of this church? What its library? There was some attempt at singing a song of Zion. What was the quality of this singing? Better singing far you heard as you passed the saloons in the levee, singing of miserable women, but the proprietors of these wretched places knew their business too well to employ such as were wholly without talent, instruction, or grace.
Is it likely to have been far otherwise in the remaining churches of that city with their little squads of for the most part poor people?
But suppose the Congregationalist and the Presbyterian and the Cumberland Presbyterian and the Babtist and the Free Will Babtist, had been able to keep together and support one man and work through one organization & with one Treasury, does anyone, Congregational, Baptist or whatever he is, suppose that really less good would have been done-that the money would have been worse expended?
Does any man really believe that as this city grew up, and its Christian people divided and divided and divided, that the impelling motive was the glory of God, was the hope of greater efficiency in the business for which Churches are nominally organized? Every sensible man knows that it was not. It was a small, narrow minded, self-love; a fondness for personal importance, and a mean, barbaric, frontier jealousy and desire to distinguish himself from his neighbors, an enjoyment of the conviction that he was more “favored,” that is to say “holier” than they, that mainly influenced each man who brought it about in the majority of cases. Everybody knows this, seldom as it is expressed.
That I do not exaggerate the wretched position to which the barbarity of these self styled churches and Christians often condemns their servants in the new towns of the West, will perhaps be more readily conceded after considering the evidence of a minister whose experience as related occurred not in the far West but in a part of the country long settled, generally prosperous, and in which large amounts of money are every year contributed for the support of missionaries. It is published in the Troy Times in July 1867, the year succeeding the centennial year of Methodism.
THE CASE OF THE REV. MR. MERRILL
The Rev. Mr. Merrill, whose recent disappearance from Plattsburgh, New-York, after being charged with most disrespectful conduct in
[714]connection with a young lady in North Adams, Mass., led many to suppose he had committed suicide—a supposition strengthened by the fact that a portion of his clothes were found by the banks of a river in the vicinity of the town—has made his appearance in the West, and written a letter to The Troy Times, in which he recounts his experience from the time he entered the ministry until the present. He says that ever since he commenced to preach, in 1848, he has been constantly in debt, and to this fact alone he charges all his troubles. He says:
In 1848 I left school at the request of several ministers, and went to Warren circuit to aid the preachers stationed upon that field. The circuit comprised six towns. I was a poor boy, but 18 years old, had thin, poor clothes, and was over $100 in debt. A gentleman gave me a cast off overcoat to keep me from suffering with the cold, and another gave me the use of a horse for part of the year. I hoped to be able to save enough to pay my debts and get me some clothes that year. But the other two ministers had families dependent upon them for support, and the people for the most part were poor, and it took all they could give to take care of them; so I worked through the year and received but $4 and my board. At the close of the year I was sent to another circuit, where I was compelled to buy a horse and carriage. I had no money, and ran into debt for these, and also for clothes to wear. At the end of this year I found that my income had been a trifle less than $100. Of course my debts remained unpaid. They began troubling me. I ought to have stopped preaching then and gone into some other business and paid my debts. But I was now engaged to be married, and my pride rose up against going and making an open acknowledgment that I must stop preaching and go to work to pay my debts. This was my first sad mistake. But others said I had better continue to preach; I would get better pay in the future. So I hoped, and so I believed. I was married, and made the best show I could for housekeeping. At the conference of 1851 I was appointed to Washington Mountain, Mass. With my wife and one child I went to my post. There I found no house to live in and nothing to keep house with. There was no church, but an old store in which to preach. I went to work with a good heart, but troubled with my debts on every side. I sold my horse to help me to live. At the end of the year I went to the Conference, and reported a new church finished and paid for. I had received $200 salary. At this Conference I was removed 250 miles, to the Canada lines in Vermont. I had not one dollar to pay my expenses. I borrowed the money, took my sick wife with a babe but three weeks old in her weary arms, and far among strangers we made our sad way. Here too, I found a field of five towns to travel over and no means to buy a horse. Then I ought to have stopped preaching. But no: a gentleman trusted me for a horse and carriage. Now I was in debt $600. My conscience told me I ought to go into some other business and pay my debts. But pride, and the ill-timed advice of friends, kept me back. This Winter I was so thinly clad, and so exposed to the fearful cold of that mountain region, that my health gave way and sickness and expense followed. Two years after my eldest daughter was stricken down with hip-joint disease from which she has never recovered. For days and months we carried her in our arms. We left nothing undone which love could suggest or skill accomplish to gain relief, but all in vain. Now I had not only debts overwhelming me with confusion, but a living death filling our hearts with the profoundest sorrow. Oh, the anguish of those days none can tell. Thus the days passed heavily on, and my burdens bowed me to the very dust. In 1861 I was appointed to the City of Albany. The gloom and horrors of civil war were now coming upon the nation. For one year I performed the work of my ministry as faithfully as I knew how, and at the same time devoted my energies and influence to aid the war committees in sustaining public meetings and securing volunteers for the army. In 1862 I went with my regiment, the 177th New-York, to the field of contest. I stayed as long as I could, and did my [715
And here I desire to say, that no part of the blame or censure belonging to me for imprudence or wrong doing in this whole matter should be cast upon the young lady involved in this sad affair. I am older, and on my uncovered head let the blows of condemnation fall. I am to blame. Every fair-minded person will see that what I now say cannot be said to screen me or in any way help my case, further than as truth will do it. But as God is my judge, and as I expect to give a strict account at His bar in the last great day for all I speak and do, and as I hope for acquittal when all men shall stand silent before God, so far as any crime is concerned with me, or any other being on earth, as far as I know, that young lady is as pure as the stars that shine over her head by night, or the sun which lights her path by day.
He further says his troubles worried him so much he resolved to commit suicide, and actually made the attempt, but when in the water he
[716]thought of his wife and children, and he repented of his design. He then fled to the West, where he wrote to his family. The letter closes with a piteous appeal for charitableness and forgiveness.
So demoralizing,—so destructive to a decent moral sense-are the conditions by which poor clergymen are enslaved that I have actually heard one of them boast before a company of his parishioners of his having obtained valuable services by a very sneaking but very false representation, an action so despicable that a blackleg might have been ashamed of it. So indefatigably had he been trained in the art of living meanly and in the habit of regarding his skill in doing so as a source of satisfaction to his masters that the practice of imposture upon a stranger to the benefit of his pocket and at the expense of the stranger’s pocket had become to his mind something creditable and pleasant to be recounted.
[42: 758] But there is another form of ecclesiastical barbarism to be considered. The —______ Church has how many Colleges and Theological Seminaries under its patronage? Never mind the number. They are all comparatively poor, each is avowed to be poor in some pulpits every year. Some of them are very poor. What is the character, what the attainments of the majority of the professers, the instructors and educators of ministers, in them? Every educated man in that church knows that in many cases it is very poor, that men are employed at rates of pay which would not procure the services of a moderately well-educated cook, apothecary or book-keeper and that these rates of pay very fairly represent the value of the services they are competent to render.
[42: 760] There are more than one hundred colleges in the United States, each of which has been established and is maintained mainly in the interest of some one of the larger religious organizations. With few exceptions they have a similar organization and the same aims. The students are formed into four classes according to their attainments. Each has its faculty, the members of which are each supposed to be men of unusual learning and attainments in some special branch or branches of knowledge, to which he has devoted himself and in which he is therefore peculiarly fitted to give instruction. Each has its library, its museum, its apparatus. The degree in which they differ in the advantages they offer to students, may be judged in some degree from the fact that while the volumes in the library of the larger number one hundred thousand and upwards, in a score or two they number not over two thousand, [42: 764] while the faculty of the better endowed numbers twenty to thirty; in two thirds of them it numbers only from four to eight. Every man’s common
[717]sense, if he has paid any attention to the subject, should tell him that the pretence of offering a liberal education made in behalf of the majority of these colleges is sheer lying imposture and impudent quackery. They annually turn out with parchment certificates of scholarship a brood of thinly veneered school boys; trained only in cheap, trashy, provincial, self sufficient habits of skimming the surface of subjects of the most profound human labor.
[42: 215–21] There can be no doubt that ministers, deacons, elders and other recognized “lights” of the churches generally, including many who have not held titled offices in these organizations, have always enjoyed the exercise of leadership, the sense of power, the consciousness that others looked up to and were dependent on them. This being the case, there can also be no doubt that there has been an influence acting upon their judgment, inclining them to unduly favor whatever tended to increase this enjoyment, to unduly discountenance whatever tended to lessen it or to prevent its increase. Any agencies which came at all in competition with their own, which tended to supply any part of the demand which their agencies supplied, therefore, they were under temptation to judge unfairly. They were apt to see the deficiencies attending them, to overlook the advantages they offered. Few will doubt that the Roman Catholic priesthood has been thus influenced in judging of certain philosophers, of certain authors or the act of printing and distributing certain unpriestly books which were likely to make the business of supplying information and thought upon certain subjects of interest less a monopoly of the priesthood and its subordinates. Few will doubt that the Puritan clergy were under similar prejudice with regard to the fine arts. And it will be generally admitted that those exercising important influence in the Protestant churches have generally been thus influenced to prejudge whatever exercised the sympathies and engaged the friendly interest of the people, whatever offered an outlet to their benevolent propensities without obviously giving strength to the organization within which they were leaders, and without administering to their satisfaction in the value placed by others upon their own agencies.
It will also be admitted that whatever the conclusions of their judgment, they would take advantage of whatever means they had in their power to induce others to be governed by the same conclusions. And as their power for this purpose with large portions of the community has been very great, there can be no doubt that these portions of the community, & preeminently the church members, have suffered morally from this cause—that is to say, from having been excluded from various means of grace—of moral development—which but for this prejudice
[718]they would have enjoyed. Take for an example the resistance to Sunday schools long maintained in many English communities, to the instruction of peasants in reading & writing, to the distribution of books and tracts among the peasant class of people. This few in America fail to see. But when dancing, dramatic entertainments, fictitious narratives, poetry, fine arts in various forms, and various social festivities are under consideration, it is even yet in America as hard for many to see the means of grace which they offer as it ever was for the popish clergy to see those presented in the Copernican theory or in the printing & public-sale of the Bible, English clergymen those presented in Sunday schools taught by laymen, or English landlords in the secular instruction of agricultural laborers, or the Puritan clergy and tything men in freedom of worship.
And it is also as hard now for these to see the defects of their favorite institutions, to see the evils resulting from the means they employ, as it has ever been for those having part in systems which made themselves important to see the evils of those systems.
This danger is not less but greater because in our social constitution the importance given to these persons is ill defined and disconnected from state authority, but depends wholly upon success in affecting the judgment and thus holding the dependence of individuals. The more difficult the maintenance of the social importance is thus made, the more delicately sensitive of what is calculated to interfere with it will they be, the less simple and clear in their judgment of it, the more ambiguous and covert the errors of their arguments against the rival influence.
Jealousy begets jealousy, unfair treatment begets unfairness, deafness to truth on one side deafness to truth on the other.
Thus two grand evils are favored, to both [of] which the barbarising tendencies of emigration particularly incline all communities in America to fall into, and which the progress of civilization has to contend with.
The grand distinction between the savage and the civilized state is that the repulsive forces of man’s nature are stronger in the first than the last. “Hence,” says Mr Spencer, “the smallness of the first communities. Populations burst as fast as they increase. Races split into tribes: tribes into factions. Only as civilization advances do larger unions become possible. And even these have to pass through some such stage as that of feudalism, with its small chieftainships and right of private war, showing that the tendency to repel is still active.” And wherever men are drifting toward barbarism, the tendency to secession, the disposition to lead off of some and the readiness to be led off of others, increases. The jealousy with which the pillars of the churches regard all who are disposed to Question the soundness either of the doctrines, or plans of practical benevolence
[719]which have been generally accepted by their followers, leads to a corresponding jealousy and cultivates a corresponding inclination to leadership with certain individuals. And the rivalry thus established is all the greater because of the painful effort commonly made to disguise it under the appearance of a reluctant discharge of a painful duty to the cause of truth and freedom of religious judgment—or to the cause of legitimate custodianship of truth and the integrity of Christ’s kingdom.
I lived when a boy, with other boys for several years in the family of a minister of a New England parish in which the old Puritan church was as well represented probably as in any then existing. At first there was no rival to the old minister. But there were a few Methodists, two or three Baptists and one person of still more heterodox avowals among those who lived nearer to the meeting house of this minister than any other. I have no distinct recollection of the process by which it came about, but I recollect very distinctly the feeling with which these people were regarded by us boys. I remember for instance that I felt as if I had met with a hazardous adventure when the leading Methodist stopped me on one occasion and tried to, engage in a pleasant conversation with me. I regarded every kind word as a sly and wiley effort on his part to allure me from the straight and narrow path by inducing the suspicion that Methodists might possess Christian graces. The Baptists we looked at across the meeting houses as we might have looked at men condemned to be hanged. As for the Unitarian, I am sure that I would much rather have walked through the grave yard than have passed near his house at night.
I said that I had forgotten how this feeling was brought about, but it was doubtless by an unfair, insinuating, disguised intellectual tyranny, and doubtless this same intellectual tyranny, appearing as zeal for truth and duty, and in apparent efforts to prevent the betrayal of souls by holders of false doctrines was used more cautiously with others. There was an effort to cause a most unreasonable assurance that the doctrines and methods of the old church, for which the Methodists, Baptists and Unitarians were inclined to pretermit work, beyond all question derived from God and that the arguments against them were stratagems of the devil to deceive souls. No other questions were made of so much importance as these. Thus their champions became men of mark and not being without some ability and means of exercising it among their neighbors, they gradually secured first apologists and sympathizers, then followers, and in a few years the old church was divided again and again, and the seceders may now perhaps outnumber the steadfast. So far as there is any good purpose held in common by all parties to this division, that purpose must suffer, by the organized jealousy and disjunction of labor which has resulted and by greater distance which has been established between the whole body thus divided and that portion of the community
[720]which refuses to regard the ostensible matter of dispute as one which needs to lead to any division of labor in the real work by which alone those enjoying the faith of a Christian are to be distinguished from those less happy.
The means taken by the Puritans to guard against church division doubtless in the end tended to increase division.
The excessive importance placed upon certain doctrines, & comparative disregard of faith as manifested solely by practical benevolence, and the association of the success of ministers with their success in obtaining or holding people in allegiance to certain doctrines which they are pledged to sustain, tends to increase [the] barbarizing tendency & to jealousy of good men, among those suffering under barbarism. Connecticut