Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

aims without referring to interest, and thus I have been led to the latter topic, even in advance of Chapter VI, in which it is directly mentioned.

We hear a good deal about the Doctrine of Interest-a very indefinite and apparently formidable thing. The crucial question, however, for one to put to himself, by which to test himself with reference to this doctrine, is"Is it really necessary that one become truly interested in a line of thought in order to be nourished by it, or to assimilate it?" Some persons say "no" to this question; others "yes." This is one of the best questions that can be put, in order to test yourself, as to whether you belong to the old or to the new education. For the new education is wrapped up in the affirmative answer to this query.

But why is interest so necessary? Many of us can recall a good many things that we succeeded in learning well, even though we hated them. The multiplication table is one, reduction, ascending and descending is another; some can assert that spelling is a third. But we must remember that true assimilation of knowledge signifies making it a part of our spiritual bone and muscle, a part of us. To do that, in general, requires that we come up very close to it and mix with it. Coldness or indifference, however, implies distance or separation, and, therefore, unability to assimilate. But it must be kept in mind that assimilation is not the same as understanding. One can often understand without assimilating. For instance, a minister's thought in a sermon is often entirely intelligible to us, when we are too indifferent toward it to be affected by it to any appreciative degree.

The degree of interest aroused by studies is of special importance because it is almost synonymous with energy. Energy is as important in education as steam or motive power in manufacturing; and interest is the condition of energy. Until one has warmed up to a line of thought, until he has become deeply interested in it, there is no guarantee that it has so taken hold of him that he will do anything about it. So it becomes of

enormous importance when, as is now the case, efficiency, or power to do as well as to see, is commonly accepted as the aim. of a good education.

This matter, as well as many other, is bound up with the statement of good aims in school. In closing, let me suggest that if good aims are necessary in private study, pupils must learn to put them themselves, without help. Why then should not the aims that are to be stated in class be suggested by the pupil -not by the teacher? How otherwise will you provide for initiative on the part of children in school?

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT. GEORGE BROWNING LOCKWOOD, AUTHOR AND ASSISTANT GENERAL MANAGER, WINONA ASSEMBLY, WINONA LAKE, IND.

No historical event has any importance in itself. Standing alone it forms an enigma to the student of history. An event has importance only as it is measured by its cause and effect relation-by its relation to the past and to the present-to the causes leading to it and to the effects which it as a cause produces.

So it is with grand old Waterloo. In itself the battle is nothing. Standing alone it forms an enigma to the student of history. Separate from its setting in history it is as meaningless as the heart when torn from the human body. Robbed of its cause and effect relation Waterloo is but the flash of sabre, crack of musketry, roar of cannon, cries of wounded and dying, vacant faces of the dead. Full many a picture quite as ghastly could the unwritten history of savage land paint. In its cause and effect relation, however, the battle is everything. Studied in its setting in history-viewed from the standpoint of the thing that led to it and the wonderful things that have come from it, Waterloo is counter-revolution, it is Modern Europe, it is individual and national destiny, it is God's walking on through the ages.

What is true of Waterloo is true to a less degree of every other historical

event worth recording. The straight edge by which every historical event must be measured is its importance as the result of causes or as the cause of results, or both. If any historical importance be claimed for the Rappite and Owenite regimes on the Wabash that importance must be demonstrated by the application of the same straight edge.

The Rappite settlement in the Pocket was the result of a religious revolution in Germany which was the exact counterpart both in character and extent of the religious revolution in England that two centuries earlier drove the Puritans from the mother country to found a new civilization on the bleak coast of New England. In the fatherland the Rappites were Pietists. Pietism was the seventeenth century German prototype of Puritanism. The analogy between them is a striking one. Both Pietism and Puritanism were protests against the degeneracy of the established Protestant church. In Germany, as in England, the official religion degenerated into a multiplicity of meaningless ceremonies; the universities established to safeguard the established religion became hotbeds of vice and infidelity; bigotry and skepticism reigned in the pulpit; philosophy and literature supplanted the teachings of the Man of Galilee; the pulpit became a rostrum for the poet and the essayist, while the professor's chair was but little better than a heathen tripcd.

Puritanism in an earlier and Pietism in a later age arose to protest against this prostitution of religion. Around humble German firesides the simple peasants burned with the faith of their fathers and stoutly resisted the wicked innovations that had turned the official house of worship into an unholy temple. This was especially true in southern Württemberg, the native home of the followers of Rapp.

Here, just as in the early home of the Pilgrims, the Pietists or schismatics were divided into two classes-the Pietists proper who, like the Puritans, though protesting bitterly against the evils common to the established church, did not leave her, but sought by the retention of

their membership to purify the institution from within; and the Separatists who, like their brethren of the same name within the Puritan ranks, utterly disgusted with the new order of things within the state church withdrew entirely from it and founded here and there little religious groups under the leadership of some strong personality.

Resistance to taxation for the benefit of the established church brought persecution, and persecution in turn led to emigration. The Rappites, a band of Separatists, completely dominated by a religious leader, one Geo. Rapp, from whom they derived the name by which we have designated them, came to the New World, and ultimately located at a spot on the Wabash which, in anticipation of the religious freedom they hoped to enjoy there, they called "Harmonie."

[ocr errors]

Pietists within the church and Separatists without the church, discussion, and persecution, and imprisonment and migration brought just as it brought on the earlier century in England a slow but sure reform within the state church and gave rise, just as it gave rise in England, to many groups or sects of religionists from which the creeds and dogmas peculiar to the Fatherland today have crystallized. The Rappites were a phase ofpart and parcel of-that religious revolution which in the early part of the nineteenth century purged the state church and ultimately achieved religious liberty for Germany.

In the causes which led to their immigration to America, the Rappites are of as much historical importance as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. In the results that followed in the wake of their coming they are of very much less importance. The Pilgrims founded a civilization that today bids fair to belt and dominate the earth. The Rappites, coming later, built a cloister within the civilization of the Puritan and inaugurated a dreary communistic society that in less than a hundred years perished from the earth.

Nothing better illustrates the utter failure of the Rapp commune than the story of John Duss.

The mother of Duss joined the Rap

pites after the death of her husband. Duss was educated in the schools of Economy; drifted to Missouri; became a school teacher, a candidate for superintendent of public instruction, and owner of a cattle-ranch; with his wife and two children returned to Economy to take charge of its schools, the only married man in the community; rose to be the senior trustee and successor of Rapp as ruler of the society, and by superb executive ability rescued the society from bankruptcy. At its dissolution some $4,000,000 was divided among the six remaining members of the society, two of whom were Duss and his wife. They have removed to New York. Duss has become a fair leader of a celebrated concert orchestra. During a portion of the time he tours the country, sometimes with great opera singers to assist his band. In the metropolis he threatens to erect out of his share of the Rappite dissolution a great musical theater.

Thus in the end are the fruits of the toil and self-denial of the simple Württemberg peasants, who left the Fatherland almost a century ago and sought religious freedom amid the privations of the wilderness to be devoted to the pleasure of a blase New York audience.

But the Rappites served other purposes. They blazed a path through the wilderness. They founded the site, paved the way, and supplied the inspiration for Robert Owen's unhappy experiment. experiment. Without the Rappites, Owen would never have founded the New Moral World at New Harmony or elsewhere.

Fourier learned all he knew of communism from a study of Owenism. Brook Farm was a romantic attempt to solve social problems by the practice of Fourierism. All this is but saying, in other words, that the Rappites were the forerunners of the commune that Hawthorne, and Emerson, and a host of lesser literary lights have made famous.

The nineteenth century was an age of doing an age when the theories of other epochs were put to the test. The Rappites put the theory of communism to the test upon the most ambitious scale that had ever been attempted, and, with the

2-E. J.

exception of the Owenite venture that followed it, upon the most ambitious scale that has yet been attempted. The immediate and astonishing financial success reaped by the followers of Rapp inspired other social reformers to similar communists ventures. The origin of every American communism can be traced to an enthusiasm over the success of the Rappites and to a belief that their experiments have demonstrated the practicability of communistic principles.

No discussion of the effects or results coming from the Rappite venture would be complete that failed to point out the sociological lessons that the world has drawn from it and from others of its ilk.

not

A religious basis seems necessary to even the temporary success of communistic society. Every commune founded upon some religious idea and hence without the support of religious fanaticism has failed and failed early and signally. Every communistic society whose members were enthusiastic followers of the same religious faith has always achieved success. Witness the Rappites, the Zoarites and the Shakers. All successful for many years. Their communities were founded upon religious grounds and religion was the guiding principle of their daily lives.

"With a firm and deep basis any socialistic scheme may succeed, though vicious in organization and at war with human nature; without a basis of religious sympathy and religious aspiration it will always be difficult, though I judge not impossible."

Four great institutions, family, civil society, state, and church, are necessary to the social regime in which we live. No communistic scheme which ignores or abolishes any one or more of them can hope to succeed.

The Rappites abolished the family by practicing the celibacy which wrought their downfall. The church absorbed the state as we know it and as prophet and priest ruled it with a hand of iron. The lesson forced upon us by the ultimate failure of the Rappites is, in the language of Dr. W. T. Harris: "If in the name of one of these institutions, an attempt is

made to suppress another institution, the attempt destroys the whole experiment. For, each institution, in order to be complete, demands the creation of the other institutions on their full development. If the dominant institution endeavors to create for itself the other institutions, it dwarfs them or mutilates them."

The ultimate and inevitable result of every communistic venture is failure. It matters not whether it be religious or irreligious. However brilliant the social theory upon which it is founded, dissolution will soon or late overtake every communistic scheme. This has been and will continue to be their history. Their fate is inevitable since they are flying in the face of the established social order which man's free spirit has builded as a habitation or temple within which to work out its great destiny.

Communism can never solve the social conflict. Not successful permanently anywhere when practiced on a small scale, no communistic scheme could succeed on a large scale. To substitute communism in place of the established order would necessitate a return to anarchy. The whole communistic scheme presupposes a perfection in human nature which if it existed would enable any social order, even our own, to work so successfully that it would escape criticism at the hands of the social architect, however critical and visionary he might be. Communism, wherever practiced, has sought to overthrow one or more of the four great inevitable institutions that have grown out of the deepest consciousness of the race and to throttle the individual initiative that has been the creator and is yet to be the hope of civilization. Communism may work successfully with another race and on another planet. It can not here.

The only lasting effect and the only effect of communism that is worth while is its moral influence in a world of selfishness. Whether the Rappite community conferred much or little benefit upon its members it gave to the civilization in which it was planted no new scheme of government worthy the name and no material boon. But it did-like many another commune has done-exhibit to a

selfish world a splendid example of altruism and brotherhood worthy of all acceptation. Such exhibitions of altruism warm the cockles of humanity's grasping heart, increase the measure of charity and philanthropy, ameliorate the strife over the dollars, soften the cruel operation of natural law, deepen the sense of social responsibility, dignify and ennoble all men, and bring one step nearer that long delayed time when human brotherhood shall become an achievement and cease to be a dream.

The Rappite commune was the creature of religious revolution, the Owenite commune of industrial revolution. In England the closing decade of the eighteenth century was an era of great inventions. Machinery began to supplant manual labor. Thousands willing to work were suddenly thrown out of employment. Agricultural depression drove the rural population to the cities. Surplus of labor brought the inevitable' reduction of wages. The expense of machinery and its unquestioned advantages enabled the larger factories to crowd the smaller establishments out of existence. The old personal relation between employer and employe peculiar to the small factory disappeared. With eyes fastened upon the great possibilities of wealth under the new industrial regime, soulless corporations forgot that the toilers in their great. mills were human. Surrounded by deplorable sanitary conditions at the factory, at home the workmen were herded together in squalid and crowded quarters unworthy the name. Children of tender age worked by the thousands for hard taskmasters. No provision was made for their education. The laboring classes evoluted into the slaves of their employers. Ignorance and vice were rampant everywhere. Social caste became fixed, for the ascension of the social ladder grew exceedingly difficult and the workman a mere stationary cog in a great machine. The rich became more luxurious; the poor more despondent, and class feeling more intense, until at last "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost became the social creed of what was still believed to be a Christian nation."

).

All this at a time when ideas of political freedom were everywhere in the ascendant. America and France had shattered old political institutions and sung again the old song of human liberty and equality. People looked forward to the near approach of a social as well as a political millenium. The new thought received least encouragement and gained least headway in England. This is not to be wondered at when we remember that it was the mother country from whose unwilling hands the colonies wrested their independence, and the mother country that resisted with an energy that bathed the soil of Europe with the blood of her heroic soldiery, the spread of the fanaticism that overthrew the Bourbons and inaugurated the Reign of Terror.

At this juncture came Robert Owen. The story of his rise as a great cotton master reads like a romance. In 1800 he took charge of the New Lanark mills and entered upon his remarkable career as philanthropist and reformer. Recognizing that charity begins at home, he put in operation processes for the betterment of the working people of his own mills that gave to him and to New Lanark an international reputation. The scope of this article will not permit such a description of his New Lanark philanthropy as the "New Harmony Movement" affords. Much of it was along the line pursued by the Dayton Cash Register Company, at Dayton, O., though always more extensive and thorough. One Mr. Griscom, an American traveler, who visited New Lanark during the Owen regime there declared with enthusiasm: "There is not, I apprehend, to be found in any part of the world, a manufacturing community in which so much order, good government, tranquility and rational happiness prevail."

Having put his own house in order, Robert Owen turned his attention to the deplorable social and industrial conditions within his native country. Labor troubles culminating in great riots at last awakened the conscience of the public to the awful evils of the factory system. Seeking to spur that conscience into the

enactment of remedial legislation, the master of New Lanark, by speech, by tract and by every other device which his ingenuity could .contrive thundered against the grasping selfishness of the employer, the pitiable helplessness of the workman, the deep-seated injustice of the established industrial order, and the seemingly utter indifference of the English people.

Throughout the sixteen years of agitation which his activity generated and in which he was the undisputed and heroic stormcenter, the master of New Lanark held up before the doubting eyes of his slow-thinking countrymen two great ideas that are yet destined to capture and redeem civilization-the worth of a man and the all-potency of environment.

In private as well as in public life by example, as well as by precept, Owen taught throughout his devoted but stormy career that human life and health and happiness are more important ends than the national balance of trade or the winning of individual dividends, and that manhood is of more ultimate value to employer and employe and the body politic than great mills and piles of brick and stone and gold. When reproached and abused by his associates in the cotton trade for his attempt to correct the evils within their factories, he rose to the heights of courage and self-sacrifice when he thundered at them: "Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our country, if it depends upon the cotton trade, rather than they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life."

Though wise laws have compelled better industrial conditions in the United States, yet the American people are today. within the grasp of the same greedy and dangerous commercial spirit as the one against which Owen labored. Here it manifests itself not so much in deplorable factory evils as in recklessness of human life, in unjust combines, in the throttling of small industries, in the unnatural and abnormal domination of wages and the prices of the necessaries of life, in private and public dishonesty, in the aggrandizement of Mammon. We

« ZurückWeiter »