The Moral and Religious Training of Children [pp. 26-48]

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 27
state to-day is very strong not only in material, but also in the
ideal elements of national strength. More than any other government she has known how to adopt the best features of both
the Roman and the Greek states, and in several of its more
unobjectionable aspects she has even actualized the Platonic
Republic, in which the chief care of the law-giver was the education of the young. Her methods and aims in this direction are
now, especially since the Franco-Prussian war, slowly gaining
force in-the school legislation of most countries of continental
Europe, as well as in our own.
But if popular education is now assumed as a condition of
existence for monarchies, it is obviously far more essential to
the stability and permanence of a republic, governed by nearer
the average intelligence, and where schools have most to do in
determining the level of that average, and with practically no
educational qualification for citizenship. If, in view of this, any
one will take the trouble to look over the statistics of illiteracy
in our own country, or to examine, if only cursorily, the present
educational condition of the Southern States and its obvious
and undisputed effects upon the tone of public life, or to read
up some representative chapter of the recent history of our educational legislation and to observe how much of it is distorted
and perverted by jobbery or partisan interests, compromises,
etc., and how much more of it is the work of the ambition of
incompetent third-rate legislators, he will perhaps begin to realize more plainly than ever before in how real and literal a sense
the life of our republic is a struggle for existence against ignorance and the evils which troop in its train, and to see how it is
that the question whether a republican form of government can
be permanent is at bottom a question of education. There is
ample evidence that the founders of our institutions realized
more clearly than we do that "a republic demands for its continued existence a higher standard of both knowledge and virtue among the people than any other form of government,"
that school laws are the most fundamental department of legislation in a republic, and that the peculiar political problems
liable to a republic can be finally solved not by the legislation
of majorities, but gradually and by no other means than by education. Indeed, our patriotism is not so much love of past his