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Not to illiteracy nor to child labour nor to the white plague nor to commercialized vice nor to recurrent unemployment are we, at our best, resigned. This change of mood did not come easily.
For the least satisfactory laws those of some of the Southern states, Georgia, for example, require school attendance for at least four months of each year between the ages of eight and fourteen. But illiteracy, even among our own people, has been revealed too much of it. The laws have not been enforced. There is the sore spot. Why have they not been enforced? But of that later.
In Massachusetts the percentage of white illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent; also in South Carolina there is a property qualification for voters and for these and other reasons child labor is the rule, and so the cotton mills were driving those of Massachusetts out of the business.
Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but the other half has more than average capacity for citizenship."
Bad spelling and wretched writing were features of the age from which New England was not exempt. Real learning was confined, after all, to the ministers and the richer classes in the New England colonies, pretty much as in the mother-country. In Plymouth and Rhode Island, where the hard conditions of life rendered any legal system of education impracticable, illiteracy was frequent.
There is less illiteracy, less pauperism, less drunkenness, more general intelligence, more freedom in Switzerland than in any other country on earth. This has been so for two hundred years: and the reason, some say, is that she has no standing army and no navy. She is surrounded by big nations that are so jealous of her that they will not allow each other to molest her.
The rural child is not illiterate, but he is too close to the border of illiteracy for the demands of a twentieth-century civilization; it is fair neither to the child nor to society. The rural school seems in some way relatively to have lost ground in our educational system.
In spite of his low birth, of his dire poverty, of the rudeness and illiteracy of his associates, of the absence of refinement in his surroundings, of his scanty means of education, of his homely figure and awkward manners, of his coarse fare and shabby dress, he dared to believe there was an exalted career in store for him. He hewed out the foundations for it with indomitable spirit.
Among the disastrous social effects are increasing poverty and crime, lack of sanitation, and an increase of diseases that thrive in filth. Illiteracy and slow mentality lower the general level of intelligence. Lack of training in democracy renders the average immigrant a poor citizen, though some State laws give him the ballot without delay.
If anyone doubts the need of concerted action by the States of the Nation for this purpose, it is only necessary to consider the appalling figures of illiteracy representing a condition which does not vary much in all parts of the Union.
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