VOL. 35

IN

N 1864, in a Washington hospital, a volunteer helper came upon a private soldier, a Swede. The man had a tedious time before him, with doubtful result, but he took everything patiently, with a quiet strength of heart. He was a graduate of the University of Lund, and thankful to get good reading in almost any language, but he preferred the English, as he meant to make this country his home. "Why did you come to America and enlist?" "I heard that there was a war over here. I meant to come here to live, and I wanted to pay for my citizenship at the gate."

To this tale of an immigrant may well be joined a bit from the service of an American native. He was a recent graduate of Yale, a brilliant scholar, and the captain of a battery in the same great

war.

It was the lot of the present writer not only to furnish the Swede with good reading, but to see a letter written by the American-born, a letter written in the shadow of his guns, upon difficult points of Sanskrit grammar: in battle, not long after, this scholar-patriot fell.

Both these incidents could surely be duplicated from the Confederate side. The armies of both sides were recruited from all classes of society, and among these classes the scholars were not the

least zealous or devoted. Their culture had not made them feel too fine to do even the humblest things for that part of the republic that they thought to be right.

Before the Civil war Theodore Koerner had been to the American student the type of all that was finest in the patriotscholar, but after 1861 the United States had recent great examples of her own; and there was always, from the earlier day, the inspiring story of Nathan Hale.

Has it always been thus? Will it always be thus? These are vital questions, and the answer to the first of them is No. Not only have individuals of the cultivated class in various countries been wanting in willingness or ability to serve the state in its need, but there have been cases, marked cases, where the whole cultivated class of a country has lacked both the power and the spirit to meet that country's needs.

Some years ago* there appeared in the London Spectator an article under the title "Three Rotten Cultures": it passed in rapid review the three preeminent cases of failure that have been known thus far. We may begin with these.

The word "culture," it should be first said, is here used in a special sense. We are all familiar with the idea of the culture *March 18th, 1899.

of the individual man: many of us are working at it in ourselves and in others. But not all of us have broadened our thought to the idea of “a culture," as representing the state of an educated class, the educated class of a nation or a race, through a period, through a great period, perhaps through an age. Yet, of course, there is such a thing, and “a culture" is the phrase to express it.

We distinguish between a culture and a civilization or a social system. We say that there is dry-rot in any civilization or social system that permits slavery or polygamy to exist; but these matters apply to a people as a whole. "A culture" refers to the condition, the character, the quality, the attitude, of the educated part.

We are all familiar with the idea that the culture of an individual may be wrong. Its scope, its fronting, its ideals, may be so far defective, one-sided, groveling, proud, selfish, that the man is not symmetrically, not worthily, not valuably, not truly, a cultivated man. Have we ever broadened our thought to the fact that "a culture," even in the larger sense, the culture of a period, of a race, in its educated class, may also be wrong? The whole basis, or fronting, or material, or method, or trend, or aim, of that educated class, in its culture, may be so mistaken or selfish or corrupt that essentially the culture as a whole, the work spent upon that class through a period or an age, and the life lived by them,-comes to naught, or worse.

To return to the "three rotten cultures": The first of those that were given so opprobious a name is that of the noble and wealthy of Rome and the Roman empire some fifteen hundred years ago. It is a mistake to think that in the decadence of that empire these classes were uncultivated, and that the Western empire fell because there were none sufficiently educated to hold it up. The nobles and the wealthy class were educated quite sufficiently for national salvation, but they were not educated in a

manner that would enable them, nor ir a spirit that would prompt them, to de that saving work. that saving work. "They studied regu larly from generation to generation in the Universities scattered over the empire. and in mature life, in the seclusion of their provincial estates, they . . . kept up their reading." In intellectual attainment they were, perhaps, farther above the people than any other class in Europe has ever been. Yet this “cultivated class, though it must have been exceedingly numerous, produced nothing, originated nothing, and enlarged no single field of knowledge." They wrote poetry without fire, and letters that had no suggestion of interest in the great issues of life. They became dilettante grammarians, mere critics of form; they developed no real intellectual ability, no strength of thought, no earnestness of character, no spiritual power; when the times grew more and more terrible, and the world was distraught for those who should save it, these educated, cultivated, refined gentlemen, who should have been the immediate and trusted leaders, had nothing to offer for the common good; they and their schools perished in the common destruction; and the gloom, the despair, of the Dark Ages shut down upon the world. The Dark Ages were, therefore, the result of a culture that somehow had gone wrong.*

The second of the helpless cultures has been brought before our thought especially during the last ten years, and it has not yet passed off the immediate stage. In China the literati have been educated just as highly as were the privileged classes of dying Rome. They have fed upon a few national classics, and nothing else; they have studied these minutely, and have regarded the power of quoting them as a chief distinction separating them from the vulgar, whom they despise. Their culture, unintelligible though it is to us, has refined them

*See Samuel Dill's Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire.

to a very high degree, so that they can be easily recognized by their amenity of speech and bearing; but there the benefit of their culture ends. It refines their tastes and their manners, but it does not discipline their powers, nor widen their scope, nor change their characters; it does not make them contribute anything valuable to personal or national life. To science they are indifferent; in art they are mere imitators; in politics they are selfish and corrupt. They were worth absolutely nothing or less than nothing when the Japanese burst into China a few years ago; they furnished no leaders to guide the Chinese race and the Chinese government when the fleets of the great powers of Europe were hovering, like birds of prey, along the Chinese coast; in the titantic struggle between Japan and Russia, China only lay inertly, the helpless prize for the victor. If those fleets had been on any other coast and the partition of the country among the powers were about to be attempted, if on land and sea the greatest battles in the history of the world were being fought for the domination of that country, the schools of the country would be looked to at once and of course as places where national saviors might be found. The scholars of Japan have always, and notably in the recent war, been found on the firing-line. But no one has at any time seen that, or looked for it, in China. The old-style scholars of China seem never to have thought of doing anything with their culture, except to climb up the scale of rank and pay. It is agreed by all outside observers that, just as in the later Roman day, the first hope, the only hope, for China has lain in destroying the ascendancy, or, by external pressure or influence, radically changing the character, of her cultivated class. It is hard to imagine that as true of Great Britain, or Germany, or the United States.

It may yet be proved that the most momentous event in the history of China is the abrogation of the requirement of an examination in the classics as a condi

tion of entering the service of the state. Of late there has been arising in that land a new scholarship, trained in Germany or the United States or, especially, in Japan, a scholarship based upon Occidental ideas; it is fast supplanting the old culture; it is kindling a new spirit of patriotism, and one of its first and most pregnant results is the punishment of American insults by the boycotting of American goods! Such a result is not pleasant to the American "jingo," but the lesson is one that even he who runs may read. Just think of the opportunity now opening before the Empress of China to set four hundred millions of people far forward in the path of a new national life!

The third of the condemned cultures is also one of our own day, but its deficiencies have not, as with the others, been blazoned to the world. blazoned to the world. Great Britain, having taken upon herself the administration of India, has established a system of schools for the natives, those schools reaching their highest stage in the great Universities of Bombay and Bengal. Thousands of Mahrattas and Bengalis, who are naturally among the most intelligent of mankind, go up through the whole educational system. But it is very generally held that, although they get the form of culture, they do not get its spirit, its substance. For instance, they learn the masterpieces of English literature: that is, they learn them as the Roman nobles of the decadence learned the Latin classics; they learn the words, but catch hardly a particle of their spirit. Like the scholar of the Roman decadence, like the Chinese scholar, they are indifferent to science and the constructive arts; they know for the sake of knowing or for the sake of getting on. For the purposes of large and beneficent administration of public affairs, for high service of their people, they are, as a rule, of no account at all: "They seem to have in politics no sort of efficiency whatever." They do not, for the purposes of citizenship, compare with the much fewer grad

uates of the missionary schools. Suicide is fearfully prevalent among them.

Le Bon's Civilizations of India and his The Crowd are terrible arraignments of what The Spectator calls a "rotten culture." For example, in the latter work (p. 85) he says of India: "In the case of all the Baboos, whether provided with employment or not, the first effect of their instruction has been to lower their standard of morality."

It is the distinct judgment of many intelligent observers that "education in India, as hitherto pursued" under the patronage or direction of the state, "is of no more value than the education of the nobles in the later Roman period, or of Chinese mandarins now, and [that], like theirs, it will ultimately fall, [and] probably with a crash.”

It is hard to see how any one can review such great ranges of fact without being startled out of many crude and hasty notions that before had passed with him for beliefs. We had thought that a school was a school, that the object of a school was to communicate knowledge and to discipline powers, and that by going to school we attained these ends and so were fitted for life. But here are three great scholastic systems, all that an age or a nation has in education, and they are found to be thoroughly wrong, with impotence or mischief as their principal result.

Yet these are not the only cases of the kind, nor are they, except by size, the most impressive. If other examples are smaller, they may, by the special interest of their place or their time, appeal even more powerfully to our minds.

It is one of the rewards of a deeper study of Bible-times that one discovers how the dry-rot of formalism and hypocrisy had eaten into the Pharisaic culture, with ruin as the outcome.

Michelangelo moved in the midst of the great Medicean culture, and moved in a silence that seems to us impossible to understand unless it means that he

was thinking some of the thoughts the are inevitably suggested by the decay the cultures of the Roman, the Chinese and the Hindu. Amidst that culture be placed his marvelous works, the source of healthy and healthful culture to mult tudes since his day, his saints, his M1⁄2donnas, his Moses, his David: it is a familiar quotation from Emerson:

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity."

in

But the Medicean culture in itself was selfish to the core. Said Ruskin of one of Browning's poems: "I know of ne other piece of modern English which there is so much told . . . of the Renaissance spirit, . . . its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of self." And yet this Renaissance spirit and work were all that in those days, especially in Florence and Rome, had any standing as culture at all.

And what shall be said of the condition of France in recent times? She has long been the headquarters of culture in certain lines, yet in connection with the Dreyfus case it was at the risk of life or fortune that any one suggested the importance of inquiring whether the man was guilty or not. The case is now a little old, but its lesson continues: how much did the educated classes do at that time to call France to her obvious duty? Taine says that France "with each succeeding generation is falling more and more into line with China."

Le Bon (The Crowd, p. 87) quotes from Taine as to the failure of the French educational system: "Sturdy common-sense and nerve and will-power our schools do not furnish to the young Frenchmen." To which Le Bon adds: “It is in the schoolroom that socialists and anarchists are found nowadays, and that the way is being paved for the approaching period of decadence of the Latin peoples." Paul Bourget, in Outre Mer, says that the French system of education produces merely narrow-minded bourgeois, lacking in initiative and will-power, or anarchists,

66

the civilized man degenerating into impotent platitude or insane destructive: ness." Upon this Le Bon makes the comment that the public-schools are factories of degeneration." This is not the whole of the story, for the condition of the church is an almost equally important part.* But the condition of the schools is a vital matter, for the pupils of to-day are the citizens of to-morrow. With a large allowance for pessimism in these writers, there must be much truth in their judgments.

It should be said in passing that it is held by many that, just as a new day has dawned for China with her great educational change, so a new day has come for educated France, and, therefore, for all France, with the passing away of clerical domination over the schools. In this connection one may well read Zola's Truth.

The "three rotten cultures" were, or are, not even nominally of the Christian faith. The first was in the inheritance of the pagan religion of Rome, but counted that religion a false, an exploded, superstition, and yet had nothing to put in its place: hence Gibbon could truthfully say that the various religions were to the Roman multitude equally true, to the philosophers (and all the educated class) equally false, and to the magistrates equally useful. The second is intensely religious, after its kind, but it is in the teaching of Confucius, that rises no higher than ancestor-worship and has no power to change either the heart or the life. The third is made up chiefly of Brahmins, with not even the measure of spiritual life that is shown among the Indian Buddhists. The Pharisaic culture set itself virulently against Christ and destroyed him. The Medicean was essentially pagan, not to say heathen, having cast off all but the name of the Christian faith. The French-one wishes to seem sympathetic with the effort of that people to *See an article by William Barry in The National

Review for March, 1899.

have self-government, an educational system, and a voluntary maintenance of religion, all of a kind that shall command the respect of the world, but the critic is not impressed with the extent to which Christianity has shaped the character of the French.

But, religion not being considered, such are the facts about the value of some six educational or cultural systems. Are all national cultures, is American culture, to go the way of the great three, or of the three that are less?

In America we have had a certain unity in our educational work, so that what we are so eagerly making out must seem to those outside, and will surely seem to future times, as completely one as any of those three or those six of which we have been speaking. Ours is the American culture: the future will know it as such. The question may well be pondered with great seriousness: will our culture be added to the list of those that could not be kept from decay, from becoming inefficient for the great, sometimes the desperate, needs of the state? Will some editor of the twenty-fifth or the thirtieth century, perhaps that New Zealander whom Macaulay represented as possibly yet to moralize over the ruins of London,

will he write of "Four rotten cultures," the later Roman, the Chinese, the AngloIndian, the American,-each in its turn and in its time collapsing, the American last?

It is easy for us to say "No," and to take it as a matter of course; but what is the ground of our faith? It would be well for us to keep out of easy presumptions; it is important for us to remember the perils of that national conceit to which we are so prone. The Roman would have maintained the excellence of his culture, and with a peculiarly Roman, an almost American, pride. The Chinese mandarin would smile the simple smile of his race and pity our ignorance of those books that contain all the wisdom that is of any account. The young Bengali