Thus our schools are not mere whetstones to the intellect; they are institutions for evening up society; they resist the tendency to separation into classes, which grows with the prosperity of a community; they bind together, in cordial…
Henry Ward Beecher
The Public Record
Henry Ward Beecher was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God's love, and his 1875 adultery trial. His rhetorical focus on the love of Christ has influenced mainstream Christianity through the 21st century.
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But the Common School gathers up their children and brings them all back again to take a new start together.
It is a provision of our institutions, by which every generation is led to a line and made to start equal and together.
It is a public provision for bringing together, upon a perfect equality, the children of the rich and the poor, the noble and ignoble, the high and the low.
And nowhere else in the world is the penalty of indolence, and even of shiftlessness, so terrible as in the North, as nowhere else is the remuneration of a virtuous industry so ample and so widely diffused.
But the whole South is a vast work-house for the slave while young, and a vast alms-house for him when old, and neither young or old, is he permitted to feel the responsibility for labor.
But such is the public opinion in favor of personal independence springing from industry, that a native-born American citizen had rather die than go to an Alms-House.
With us, it is expected that every man will work, will earn, will lay up, will deliver his family from public charity.
Once declare in New York that Government would take care of poverty and old age, so as to make it honorable, and it would be a premium upon improvidence.
They virtually say to the slave, in reality, "Be lazy, for all that you earn shall do you no good; be lazy, for when you are old and helpless we are bound to take care of you.
It inspires labor by hope of fruition, and intensifies it by the fear of non-fruition.
He shall take all he can make, or he shall take the whole result of indolence.