Things as They are in America |
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Popular passages
Page 238 - The public highway is not more open and free for every man in the community, than is the public schoolhouse for every child ; and each parent feels that a free education is as secure a part of the birthright of his offspring, as Heaven's bounties of light and air.
Page 354 - African descent to an inferior social status. There seems, in short, to be a fixed notion throughout the whole of the States, whether slave or free, that the colored is by nature a subordinate race ; and that, in no circumstances, can it be considered equal to the white.
Page 243 - One copious, exhaustless fountain supplies all this abundance. It is Education, — the intellectual, moral, and religious education of the people. Having no other mines to work, Massachusetts has mined into the human intellect, and, from its limitless resources, she has won more sustaining and enduring prosperity and happiness than if she had been founded on a stratification of silver and gold, reaching deeper down than geology has yet penetrated.
Page 238 - State not only commands that the means of education shall be provided for all• but she denounces penalties against all individuals, and all towns and cities, however populous or powerful they may be, that shall presume to stand between her bounty and its recipients. In her righteous code, the interception of knowledge is a crime ; and if parents are unable to supply their children with books, she becomes a parent and supplies them.
Page 243 - For the support of the poor, nine-tenths of whose cost originate with foreigners or come from one prolific vice, whose last convulsive energies she is now struggling to subdue, she annually pays more than...
Page 280 - Sale is going to commence — this way, gentlemen/ cried a man at the door to a number of loungers outside; and all having assembled, the mulatto assistant led the woman and her children to the block, which he helped her to mount. There she stood with her infant at the breast, and one of her girls at each side. The auctioneer, a handsome, gentlemanly personage, took his place, with one foot on an old deal-chair with a broken back, and the other raised on the somewhat more elevated block. It was a...
Page 323 - Sound, no greater obstacles from snow are likely to be met with than have already been encountered and overcome on roads in the New England states and in the state of New York. It is the general...
Page 244 - Nor can the most superficial observer fail to be impressed with the advantages thus derived from the long and welldirected attention paid to the education of the whole people by the public school systems of the New England States and of the State of Pennsylvania. Here, where sound and systematic education has been longest and, in all probability, most perfectly carried out, the greatest manufacturing developments are to be found, and here it is also where the greatest portion of the skilled workmen...
Page 357 - ... black races. In every city, there are white and black schools, and white and black churches. No dark-skinned child is suffered to attend a school for white children. . . . As an explanation of these distinctions, I was informed that white would not sit beside colored children; and further, that colored children, after a certain age, did not correspondingly advance in learning — their intellect being apparently incapable of being cultured beyond a certain point.
Page 246 - ... the want of Education and general knowledge, as is frequently the case in this country. In every State in the Union, and particularly in the north, Education is, by means of the Common Schools, placed within the reach of each individual, and all classes avail themselves of the opportunities afforded. The desire of knowledge, so early implanted, is greatly increased, while the facilities for diffusing it are amply provided, through the instrumentality of an almost universal press. No taxation...