The blacks are incapable of ruling the whites; no time was
given to educate them for their new duties, if teaching them was
possible; the Declaration of Independence was in their case a mockery
from the beginning. When all the old abolitionists and slave-holders
are dead, another generation of men grown wiser by the failure of the
policy of their forefathers may solve the black problem.
Complaint is made that the American education of to-day is in a
chaotic condition, due to the want of any definite idea of what
education is aiming at. There is evidence that the ancients of New
England used to birch their boys, but after independence had been
fought for and won, higher aims prevailed. The Puritan then believed
that his children were born to a destiny far grander than that of any
other children on the face of the earth; the treatment accorded to
them was therefore to be different. The fundamental idea of American
life was to be "Freedom," and the definition of "Freedom" by a
learned American is, "The power which necessarily belongs to the
self-conscious being of determining his actions in view of the
highest, the universal good, and thereby of gradually realising in
himself the eternal divine perfection." The definition seems a
little hazy, but the workings of great minds are often unintelligible
to common people.
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