Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1884 [PAGE 57]

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61 Everywhere among tne civilized communities of the world education is most advanced, its completeness is most notable, its benefits most pronounced, where it has been the foster child of the state. Wherever the combined powers of the state have been evoked, and the directive control of the state has become the guiding authority, so that the whole people have been brought under its influence, there the state has in return been made the most wealthy, the most powerful, the most noble. And this, moreover, has been found to be true; that these results have followed with certainty and completeness, only when the education has been of such a nature that it should permeate and pervade the entire body politic from its highest to its humblest grades. Germany began to lead in the race for supremacy in the affairs of Europe, that dominant place which England once enjoyed, when Germany began to give to all her children the opportunities for the highest culture. Say what you will of surpassing numbers and superior wealth, as the forces which won the victory for the North over the South in the great struggle of twenty years ago, the fact remains that for generations previous to that conflict the schoolmaster had been abroad in the North, and had been conspicuously absent from the South. The results of an education, not of the highest and noblest, but most widely diffused, had fostered the spirit of freedom, had secured general intelligence, had encouraged enterprise, and had made wealth a common inheritance throughout the North. The lack of these same educating influences in the South had pandered to slavery, had steeped the masses in ignorance, had disheartened enterprise, had concentrated wealth in the hands of a few thousands who in their commanding social position could hold the remaining millions in the thic.k darkness, either of slavery or of equally abject and ignorant poverty. With confidence I assert that but for the peaceful victories which had been won by the schoolmasters of the North, the victory of freedom which culminated beneath the apple-tree of the Appomattox had never been celebrated. I desire in my humble way to emphasize this assertion, which I most conscientiously and sincerely believe—namely that the general almost universal, common school education of the North, reaching upward by constant and regular gradations to the highest and noblest culture, was the one underlying and most efficient cause of the victory won for freedom in our deadly conflict with the South. No man who knew the stuff of which the two armies were composed could fail to observe the grand superiority which was shown by the more intelligent boys from the Northern schojls. Witness the old Sixth Massachusetts, out from whose ranks could be chosen a man for any emergency, and for every conceivable duty. They say that about Baltimore a disabled locomotive was found, and there was a call for machinists to put the engine again in order. As one stepped to the front the question was asked, "Do you know how to put this machine to r ghts and to run i t ? " "I guess so," was the response. " I helped build her." Witness the Normal Begiment of Illinois, the Iron Brigade of Wisconsin—but why stop to enumerate? The only paraLel to the Northern army in our late war, was the German host which put on its spectacles and captured France as one wins a game upon the chess-board.