Letter Three
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Letter III March 27, 1843
SIR: The course of our inquiry on this all-touching subject naturally
leads us to trace the workings of the present system from one end to
the other. Some good at all events must come from this pursuit. For if
we should not be enabled to see our way clearly to the abrogation of
the entire code, we may at all events take the liberty of sweeping away
such portions as are absolutely injurious as well as those parts which
could, with manifest advantage, be left to spontaneous action.
Political machinery is confessed by its managers to be so far imperfect
that the greater part of the time and effort is devoted to patching it
up so that it may be able to move with any degree of success or
approbation.
In the American Constitution the Town Meeting is the primary spring,
the vital element. Abolish this, and the whole fabric falls. Let the
townsmen omit to act politically, let them forbear the manufacture of
legislators and other officers, and the taper already flickering in the
socket will be finally extinguished. The town meetings, to the external
eye the mere circumference of the wheel, is the very centre of it, the
axle upon which it revolves, and the power which imparts its motion.
We assemble in town meeting, our Fathers having heretofore done the
like. I and my neighbors choose to come together for certain purposes.
What are they? To elect a representative, to be joined by many others
from other towns, to make laws for our government. To appoint certain
persons to select teachers for our children; to levy rates upon
ourselves, and appoint a constable to collect them, and as part of a
county to elect a jailor. We give up our regular productive employment,
our home duties, the education of our children, the providing of fuel,
the cultivation of the garden or field, or whatever the season, in
conjunction with our most sacred family and neighbourly relations may
render needful. We are gathered together over the business of
sanctioning the present social order with all its rights and powers,
real or supposed. The first act is to appoint a moderator. - Well, whom
shall we fix upon? Why it is a secular business, and therefore not the
Priest. But Squire - the Lawyer is a fit person; he has studied the
laws, his life has been devoted to the subject, he can advise the town
if any difficulty of construction arises, and so we place him in the
chair. So far we seem to have proceeded rationally. But we, the mass,
are only unlearned cultivators of the soil, or hard handed mechanics,
who cannot wield a graceful pen, or round off a handsome speech, so
that now the business hitches. The machinery is like a steam engine
before the steam is turned on. Some one must bring forward the
resolves, and suggest reasons for passing them, and the party names
must be patronized by a man of weight. Who so fit as the Banker? He
has, or appears to have a great stake in the hedge; he intends to
preserve things in good order; so we will hear him. A seconder is
wanted. Who can prescribe better than the Doctor? He is skilled in the
treatment of the body physical, and if we trust him with our own
frames, surely we shall not hesitate to accept his prescription for the
body political. So now we are pretty safe. We have secured the guidance
of the best educated classes, and we shall go ahead all right. - The
Lawyer, the Banker, the Merchant, the Doctor have condescended to take
us by the hand, so that we could not possibly be better off.
This, Sir, is no exaggeration of the facts. Enter the town
meetings and see. If in all cases these characters do not come
prominently forward to the eye, it is only because policy suggests they
should keep in the back ground in order the better to carry their
point. To the free observer the proceedings in a town meeting are
dramatically interesting. These assemblies, once perhaps the seats of
truth, of liberty, of safety, have now become a mimic scene, in which
the wires that move the puppets are so obvious to all but the acting
parties that their sober seriousness, as well as their moral utility,
is entirely gone. It is a fact for the historians to note that the most
elevated and energetic men of the age, have long ceased to participate
in politics. Another fact is sometimes added. Namely that the entire
town declines to act in that capacity so far as a legislative
representative is concerned. What person of moral feeling reproaches a
town for this course? None. It is rather accepted as a symptom of more
profound thought and a deeper insight into the moral ordering of human
affairs. In such towns the hinderative conservatism of lawyers,
doctors, and bankers, is on the decline, and the progressive
conservatism of industrious moral thought is on the ascendent. Such men
have already adopted some steps towards a voluntary government, and
they have only to proceed onwards and attain the whole. They are
beginning to be liberated from the farcical incubus of the legal,
medical, and pecuniary night-mare.
Now of all those other things which the town does, of which
could we not be discharged as safely as from the legislative? - "The
Schools," perhaps it will be said, "must be cared for." "Education is
an object worth any price; and though our political functions involve
many follies or errors, yet this item alone counterbalances them all."
Such is the language, such the feeling of many. But how fallacious is
it to suppose that any political machinery, any ferocious government,
need be set in motion for this noble purpose. Let fact be known to
every sincere mind that this mixture of education and politics is only
a contrivance to gild the iron chains by which men are so despotically
bound. In some of the most educated countries on earth, Scotland and
England for instance, the government has seldom interfered in any way,
and then its help has generally been that of a bear in the boat, which
wrecked the passengers. The true school is doubtless the parental home.
The parents who produced should educate the children. All that is now
accomplished by a forced taxation to secure that information to the
children which they are denied at home could as well be done by a
voluntary union amongst the interested parties untainted by that
demoralizing force which compels a parent to contribute who is able and
willing and does devote himself daily to the education of his
offspring.
This impertinent assumption of men in town-meeting assembled is
most gross. - What pure mind could ever conceive of so immoral an act,
so dark and foul a piece of education as sending a man to jail in order
to raise funds for the moral education of children. The plan is as
absurd as it is vile. The only argument in behalf of national education
is that ignorant parents would and do neglect their duty to their
children, so the State must step in. I do not see why the State has not
the same right, and much better arguments, for interfering in
individual affairs at an earlier stage, and either forbidding such
unqualified to marry, or passing them through a needful previous
training. There would be more propriety, kindness and consistency in
such a course. If education be enforced as a preventative of evils, let
it become thorough, let it begin at the beginning. But even now an ill
disposed parent is not forced to send his children to school; he is
only forced to pay. So that this important part of the work is left to
the moral influence of the neighbors; and why could not the money
contribution be committed to the same influence? The existence of the
town school determines the fact that a majority amongst the neighbors
are aware of the importance of education, and therefore they need not coerce themselves; and if they have negligent fellow townsmen, should they rather set about awakening them.
Never was there a greater absurdity than to pretend to enfranchise the
human mind from ignorance and bad passions by force. Love alone can aid
in this work, and therefore the sooner the town ceases to force any one
against his conscience or spontaneous will to pay a cent towards it,
the sooner they will really commence the business they aim at.
Such perceptions naturally excite another, of no small importance;
which is the inferiority that will always mark a national education
compared to that which results from open and free operations. Every
measure touched by the hand of the State, or by any corporate body, if
it be only a few annually appointed select men, acquires a fixedness
which chills it to a corpse-like rigidity. France, with all her
national and royal patronage of manufactures has rarely been able to
equal the English productions brought forth by private enterprise and
skill. Our education, cut down to a few formalities which the ill
qualified inspectors understand, or presume they understand, is in its
effects upon its victims, much more like the lightning shock which
blasts the tall oak to a blackened stump, than the glowing sun which
expands every bud to a fresh and cheerful green. The teachers are cut
too pattern. Genius dare not show his face. - A man of new ideas would
alarm the clerical, legal, trading spirits under which something
nicknamed education, is now used to beguile the people. Thus instead of
helping the people forward it keeps them all down to a low standard.
That this is the general estimate is proved by the fact that most of
those parents who can afford to send their children to free individual
academies do so. I know of few better steps immediately practicable
than that of throwing open education throughout New England to the
moral and intellectual energies of the teachers, and the senses of duty
and self-interest in the parents and the public. It does not sound very
graciously towards our teachers to say that their qualifications would
not attract scholars. I had not the design to dwell at this length on
the item of education. But I perceive that it is important in many
respects. Education is in itself so holy a pursuit that all our ideas
concerning it are of an elevated character, and in spite of the glaring
facts which render it obvious that much is going on about us of any,
rather than of a holy nature, yet the mere name has some charm for us,
and we are lead away by imagination to hopes which are never to be
realized. But let us give up this hateful coercive system. Children
will find their way to school where love teaches the lessons, as
readily as adults find their way to the church where the voice of love
alone is heard. Selfishness and force keep away the tender and kindly
from both halls.
Inspection and repair of Roads, is another purpose for which we
constitute ourselves a corporate body under the coercive system. On
this subject very few words are needful to show that such a mode is
altogether uncalled for. The roads are now in a state by no means
remarkable for facility in travelling; and that owners of land and
houses would neglect to keep up the roads to a state most profitable
for cultivation and convenience of travel is to suppose that they are
at once careful and careless of their own interests. Putting aside the
fact that the common road might, like the railroad, be made into a shop
keeping business, and paid for by every one who used it, we have a
basis enough to rely on in knowing that the same cupidity which makes a
man a land owner, prompts him to improve its value in every possible
way. - The high roads are now not made by all who use them; we do not
tax the transient passenger, and it is not conceivable that men who as
neighbors voluntarily combined for road making would be less liberal
than the same men in town meeting assembled; or than they are when they
subscribe to a church or a lyceum. In some cases the truth in these
views has been so far acknowledged that the road rate has been
separated from the general levy and paid in labor or cash as agreeable.
Another item in this political account is to make a provision for the
poor. Of all the objects for which money or means can be collected
surely this may be left to human hearts to attain without coercion. -
Anything I know is better than that the innocent, aged, helpless poor
should suffer. It is in the very sincerity and intensity of that
feeling that I am able to declare that the town need not trouble itself
to come to a vote on the subject. I am fully alive to the arguments pro
and con on the subject of poor laws, but whether the balance shall be
found in favor of combined action or of individual and private
donation, quite sure I am that charity cannot be sustained by force.
There is no charity in raising money by force to put the care of the
poor people up to the best bidder; that is to say to place them in the
tender mercies of a person who will feed them at the lowest rate per
head. Townsmen cannot do such things on charitable principles. They
support themselves in it by arguments of selfish economy. We all know
how hateful is the very name of poor-house to the rightly ordered mind.
- Every man who is a party to its provision for others, shuns it as the
lowest degradation for himself. Each voter is well aware how little the
charitable spirit dictates his vote. True charity would prescribe a
very different course. That superior feeling which desires not to tell
the left hand what the right hand giveth would find other means for
opening the sluices of a grateful heart for present benefits. It would
bestow in a neighborly and delicate manner suited to each individual
case, whatever would be spared of these external necessities; and
accompanied withal by that personal kindness and affectionate
expression so needful in such cases, and which never can be entered in
the contract with the poor house master, at so much per head. I think I
do not assume too much, I hope I do not, when I say I have broken down
all the pretences for the town taxation so far as its own local affairs
are concerned. There remains, however, the other side of the case to
meet, namely, that of electing individuals to form the more expansive
political body called the legislature, including the governor. This
duty remains to me, although some towns already omit to take part in
this procedure; because it may be said that the general operation still
goes on, and they are virtually represented by the members from
neighboring towns. It may not be needful that every town should be
represented at the State house, any more than it is needful for every
citizen to be present at the town house. - We have therefore to trace,
as well as we are able, what the results of the present system are, and
what would be the probable consequences of a total abstinence of the
citizens from the ballot box. The ancients voted by putting a bean into
the vase; hence the saying of Pythagoras to his disciples "avoid the
bean." A percept we must take a subsequent occasion to discuss, as
these remarks have extended to sufficient length for the present.
Yours, faithfully
C.L.
Concord, Mass.
[ Intro ] -
[ I ] -
[ II ] -
[ III ] -
[ IV ] -
[ V ] -
[ VI ] -
[ VII ]
