USA > Illinois > Bureau County > History of Bureau County, Illinois > Part 3
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mystery that has so swallowed them up. Who were they? How did they live; what did they do; what did they know? Where were they from ? How did they so completely pass away from the face of the earth? And when the inquiry comes down to the period of the immediate ancestors of the inquirer the inter- est intensifies, and the minutest, dry details become profoundly interesting. Were they wise or foolish, strong or weak, happy or wretched? And we re-create in the mind as well as we can the picture of their daily and hourly life, customs, habits, temperaments, their wisdom and follies, successes and fail- ures.
The proper study of mankind is man. Here is the great fountain of valuable knowl- edge; and the " man " that is best studied, at least is the easiest and best to understand, are our immediate forefathers or predecessors. To know all about them is all you can learn of the human race that it is essential to know. To solve the complex problem cannot be done by a surface knowledge of all the races, but by a thorough comprehension of those about whom your every nature and impulse leads you along in the investigation.
Could the graduates of the schools be turned out with their diplomas, when these would mean that they knew the history of their own race, to a degree even approaching perfection, then indeed might we rest content in the possession of that great boon, the best educated people in the world; the word history being here used in that broad and true sense that means a mastery of the high- est type of knowledge, the understanding of the mental and physical laws, and in contra- distinction of those terms the annals. the chronology, the dates, the disconnected and often trifling incidents that were once con- sidered history, such as the births of kings and princes, their deaths and pompous
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burials, battles, famines, epidemics, great conflagrations or political revolutions. A true history of a people is a mastery of the laws of race and the laws of heredity, climate and soil, epoch, momentum-the understand- ing of the laws of mind growth as well as those controlling the growth of the physical body, society, church, State and all the won- derful developments of a civilized people.
Everything is a growth-a development- a passing from the simple to the complex. Thus it commences with the legends, then the traditions, the chronicles, the annals, and last, the history: the bud, the seed, the tender sprout, the sapling, and the tree, which in the long years is drawing its sap and food from the deep soil and giving off' its luscious fruit in the distant and glorious summer. The greatest always is the slowest and last to perfect itself. Hence, we say, the true con- ception of history is modern, and so far we have yet no complete history of any race or people, but the materials for the coming his- torian have been being gathered since the days of Herodotus. When the world is ready for this great man he will come, and in a sin- gle book he will confer upon mankind some- thing incomparably superior to all that has ever yet come from the printing press.
Some geological ages ago preparations commenced to make this the fit abode for man. The oscillations of the earth's surface commenced, it is said by geologists, about the Huron region on this continent, forming there the first dry land, and this process pro- ceeded slowly in a southwesterly direction until our hemisphere has grown and fash- ioned itself much as we have it now. The commencement of this continent-building was the yielding up by the waters of the first pages in geological history. And what can be more interesting and instructive than these wonderful and unfailing records, when
brought under the trained eye of intelligence and made to reveal the startling story of their existence!
The soil is the Alma Mater-the nourishing mother, indeed-of all animate life in this world. Without it nothing-from it all that we possess. The wealth and joys, the hopes and ambitions, the beauties of nature and of art, the new mown hay, the maiden's blush, the love-lit eye, the floating Armada, the thundering train, the flaming forge and the flying spindle, the hand of friendship, the sweet rippling laughter of childhood, all that we can conceive of utility or beauty, men- tally or physically, are from the cold, dull soil upon which we tread. From here alone comes life and all its belongings.
The sun worshipers were not base in their adorable ideal-light and heat were the near approach to the sources of life, and yet it was only an aid to the soil; a laboratory dis- solving and combining the elements of the air and rocks and creating the soil, the great fountain of all. The works of these sun worshipers are scattered over the face of the earth, furnishing us some of man's earliest records. None ever worshiped the soil. For it they had no just appreciation; its all- commanding value is yet little understood, and in the world's slow progress the soil and the slavish drudge-the lowest menial and the ignorant lout were about the only things that were a part and portion of the soil or identified with it in men's minds; and for ages agriculture and unwashed ignorance were regarded as much one and the same thing. In that first nation whose air was too pure for a slave to breath, was inaugurated the long reign of a feudal system, where the laborer and the soil passed by the same title deed, and the allegiance and the lives of the serfs were bought and sold as the meanest of merchandise. While the soil has found no
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worshipers and but few who cared to under- stand its value, it has proceeded in its benefi- cent works, showering its benefits upon all until it has lifted us from dull and dirty savages into the joys of the splendid civiliza- tion that now smiles upon mankind.
Why should we teach our children to un- derstand the stupid dirt beneath their feet ? Build schoolhouses and teach them metaphy- sics-the involved and abstruse speculations and problems that dazzle and bewilder the mind; make them classical scholars and take them far away from the dirt that flies as dust, sticks to your clothes as mud, and is only vile and nasty. And thus a vital error has gone on and on, and is still wielding its power for evil throughout the world.
The soil comes of the rocks, and except in the instances of drift, its component parts may be instantly identified with the sub- jacent rocks, and in the drift sections, as is nearly all the surface of Illinois, the under- lying rocks are always the index to the sur- face qualities. To the intelligent eye that examines the stratified rocks of a country it is plain enough what elements of plant food it contains, and what particular vegetation it will best produce.
Our people are agricultural in their pur- suits. The Mississippi Valley will be the storehouse and granary of the world. It can always say to hungry man, "In thy Father's house is enough and to spare." With its wholesome and generous products, it will freight the ships whose sails will fleck every sea. Teach the people to read the secrets of the soil, and give them cheap transportation and the unobstructed and free markets of the world, and then, indeed, will come that boundless wealth which nurtures those master spirits among men who shape and fix the proud destiny of civilization.
It has never occurred, it seems, to the
school men, that the public schools should be organized and operated in reference to local- ity or the peculiar controlling interests of the people; that certain portions of the world will produce different industries, and differ- ent occupations for the people; that one place is for mining, another for certain manufac- tories, and another for agriculture, and of this last we have an endless variety of pro- ducts. One portion of our country produces mostly rice, another cranberries, another sugar, another tobacco, and often a single variety of the many kinds of this product, another cotton; and then we have here, in the Upper Mississippi Valley, that wonderful garden for the production of that great vari- ety in abundance, including nearly every- thing except those articles named above. And to this is added the raising of stock, which nearly equals the immense values of the immediate soil products.
The coming school teacher will see to it that the bent of the schools are directed to best preparing the rising generation for the successful struggle of life by educating them for their life surroundings. There is noth- ing so practical in life as knowledge, and the best knowledge is that which betters men's lives. A common affliction all over the world is "learned ignorance," and a people may suffer more from this evil than from those illiterates whose columns of per cents figure in our census reports. There can be no cen- sus taken of "learned ignorance," and hence its prevalence in a people may not be easily detected, and its inflictions difficult to meas- ure. The shrewd observer may pick them out by their loud advocacy of, and unfalter- ing faith in all the many errors that were instilled into them in their own school edu- cation. They believe wisdom is born as you first enter the school room, and is full grown and perfected when you leave its doors with
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a diploma; that knowledge is in the text books, and that the professor who knows all these must be the greatest man in the world. It is this "learned ignorance " that measures the people of a community by the school- houses, the number of teachers and the grad- uates they turn out, and the absence of illit- erates among them. These are grievious errors, and they are most apt to pass from father to son, and thus become fixed as axiomatic truths.
It is the home influence, the laws of hered - ity, the environment of life, the age, the momentum and public sentiment that are man's architect and controlling influences. And the artificial, unphilosophical, empirical contrivances of the world's reformers and Utopia builders, are as the feather in the bal- lance against the mountain in shaping men's destiny.
The schools upon which the present sys- tem is based, were founded seventeen hun- dred years ago, for the sole purpose of edu- cating young men for the priesthood-to teach them how to teach morality-possibly how to proselyte. The study of the catechism and the Lives of the Saints were the whole of the curriculum. They were a mere addenda to the Catholic Church, and committing to memory constituted the entire process of the school room. They were Catholic schools, and in the course of the world's revolutions came the Lutheran, the Methodist, the Bap- tist, and the innumerable other schools as the sects multiplied, all enlarging the scope of their work, until they came to be the teachers of all classes of men. They wran- gled and struggled and spread, keeping even pace with the growth and power of their re- spective sects, until sincere and good men were led to believe that knowledge and doxy were synonymous terms. Nothing has, per- haps, filled its mission better than the theo-
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logical schools-Jew or Gentile. Their ex- istence in the organization of society was probably an imperative necessity. But Jew- ish education to teach the child knowledge (understanding the mental and physical laws) is a companion piece to that startling cry that runs over the land about every time the tax- gatherer comes around, that the public schools are "Godless schools." Education, we are told, is furnishing the mind mental food, as we give the physical body bread and meat. If Knowledge is a hard-shell Baptist, then why do we not hear of the Godless saw-mills, fish ponds, pig pens or cattle ranches ?
The original idea of the school was to pro- pagate morality. And the way men in that age thought, they were justified in the belief that if you cultivated the moral, the intel- lectual would take care of itself. Many able and good men think so now; possibly a large majority of mankind. And the roaring dema- gogue will tell you that the majority, espec- ially the large majority, cannot be in error.
The truth is, a nation, people or race are good or bad, moral or immoral, honest or thievish, drunken or sober, pure or vile, no- ble or ignoble, exactly as they are removed from the thrall of ignorance. Give people knowledge, and you give them, in exact pro- portion to the amount thereof, pure morality, virtue, health, and all that ennobles and makes them great and good. This alone is the great teacher and reformer. Ignorance is a thief, robber and murderer, and it is but idiocy that gabbles about the "bliss of ignorance." It is the monster criminal, and pity it all we may, its horrid possession of men, its grim and fatal clutch, can only be loosened by real knowledge, and not by " learned ignorance " nor sham reformers. Ignorance is the major- ity enthroned, levying blackmail and war, making laws and ruling empires, sowing
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death and despair, and scattering its wrecks along the shores of the stream of time.
The trend of the average mind of this age is to education, to better its thoughts, to gain knowledge, and to this achievement it puts forth its best efforts. If it is given " learned ignorance " for the genuine article, it cannot be blamed for taking the poison in the faith that it is healthful food.
Again, no one truth is the whole truth about even the simplest act or thing in life. To make a fire in the cook-stove, feed a pig or raise a hill of corn requires, in order to do either properly, to understand many of the physical laws applicable to each case. To rush at the doing of either with the mastery of only a single truth that will come in play, is to open a Pandora's box of disappoint- ments, failures, evils. If this is true of the simplest acts of life, how much greater self- afflicted evils are going to come to us when we move in the great and complex affairs of life, our education, our political economy, our religion-in short, the individual and society life itself. Here come into play the innumerable and the great physical and men- tal laws-omnipotence itself-that must be at least partially understood and obeyed in order to live at all. It is this jumping at judgments that are founded upon one or two truths concerning little and great affairs that brings the shams and frauds, the bigots and fanatics. the general demoralization and the "learned ignorance" that so retards the spread of knowledge among men, and thus beats back the cause of progress, and kills the brightest hopes that send their sunshine across life's pathway.
II.
The very earliest settlers in Illinois had neither schools, churches, doctors, preachers nor lawyers. A good dog and a trusty rifle
were then a greater necessity than any of these, and there was as little demand for the luxurious pleasures of modern people as there was for the evils that accompany the increase of societies, and the denser population of these days. Being without schools, etc., they were also without penitentiaries or police officers.
Gov. Reynolds came to Illinois in the year 1800; born in the old commonwealth of Penn- sylvania. After he had lived here fifty-five years, he wrote down his recollections in his " Pioneer History of Illinois," of the people he found here when he came. He says, they were removed from the corruption of large cities, and enjoyed an isolated position in the vast interior of North America. He thinks that a century before 1800, they had solved for themselves the problem that neither wealth nor splendid possessions, nor an extraordinary degree of ambition, nor energy, ever made a people happy. They resided more than 1,000 miles from the older colonies; they were strangers to wealth or pinching poverty, but they possessed con- tent and real Christian virtues of head and heart. and were consequently happy. Their ambition did not urge them to more than an humble and competent support, and their wants were few and simple. They did not strive to hoard wealth, they seldom drank to excess, and he pronounces them a " virtuous, contented and happy people."
This is the testimony of a man who tells what he saw, and he knew well the people of whom he is speaking. There are none living now who were here when Reynolds came, to tell their recollections of the people, and excepting what he tells us about them, we are ignorant, save faint traditions, shadowy tales reciting the story of
" Where nothing dwelt but beasts of prey, Or men as fierce and wild as they."
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Accepting the "old Ranger's " account of the people as literally true, we find they had no schoolhouses, and they were illiterate as a rule, and he who confounds the terms illit- eracy and ignorance, would say they were. of course, very ignorant. Yet the truth is, among the early settlers of Illinois, history will forever preserve the fact that there were even then men here who, were they living now in the prime of their manhood, would take rank with the foremost men of the age. In the way of superstitious dreads and beliefs they were more ignorant than we are now- that is, than some of us. But remember, the whole world then believed in witches, and goblins, spooks and spells. Hideous appari- tions then confronted men in every turn of life, projecting their ghastly presence into every family circle, between husband and wife, parent and child, and often crushing all the highest and holiest human impulses and passions.
The revolutions of the earth have, in the distant past, brought their long periods of the same faith and beliefs among the nations. Beliefs and moral codes that were enforced by eloquence, by pious frenzy, by the sword, the fiame and faggot, by the gibbet and the headsman's ax and by those great and cruel wars that converted this bright and beautiful world into a blackened and desolate waste, and sincere men became moral mon- sters, who converted the fireside into a penal colony, punishing the flesh until death was a welcome refuge, and torturing frightened imaginations with the pictures of a literal hell of fire and brimstone, until poor men and women and even children could only escape by suicide -- that mad plunge into the incon- ceivable horrors of the damned. Time when, not only society, but all civilized nations, believed substantially the same beliefs, and hunted down heretics and killed them; when
State and church were one and the same thing. The State was supreme over body and mind, and legislated for body and soul, and glutted itself with persecutions and slaughters. It enacted that the literature and philosophy of the world was contained in the "Lives of the Saints," of which the pious and good had gathered many great libraries of hundreds of thousands of volumes.
Here then are the two extremes-the ear- liest pioneers without State or church-the old world with little or nothing else but church and State. The latter went daft and dried up the fountains of the human heart, and made the world desolate and sterile: the first wresting the desert wilderness from the savage and the wild beasts, and literally making the solitude bloom, and bear the im- mortal fruit of glorious deeds. These State- less, schooless, churchless, illiterate people blazed the way and prepared the ground for the coming of the school teacher and the church, the lawyer and the hospitals, the in- sane asylums and the penitentiaries, the les- sons of life and the hangman's rope, the saloons and the gambler, the broken-hearted wife and the bloated sot, the sob of innocence betrayed, and the leering human goats as they wag their scut and caper upon their mountain of offense, the millionaire and the tramp, and the other perhaps inevitable evils that mar and check the joys and bles- sings of larger and older societies. In the slow growth of our common pests, intertwin- ing their roots and branches with the beauti- ful and the good, most fortunately there can be found the gleams of sun-light from those who came and asked questions, who dared to investigate and "drag up drowned truths by the locks." In the long " night of storm and darkness " these were the beacon lights shin - ing out upon the troubled waters.
After the brave and illiterate pioneer
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awoke the resting echo, and had fought out the long battle with the beasts and the sav. age, there came together here from the ends of the world the various degrees of life and social rank that now offer to the State his- torian the busiest, most extended and varied subjects for an enduring literary work-a story that of itself is an epic poem: their present struggles, their vast schemes of em- pire, their growing wealth, their grand suc- cesses, their short-comings and great failures -the swing of the pendulum in the vast clock of God, ticking off the centuries and geological ages. The sweeps onward and upward, the retreats and revulsions back- ward, the sublime march of the human race, the travail of the ages, the revolutions, wars, beliefs and bloody reforms and reviv- als-things that seem to retard, but really are the demonstration of the progress of man ; all is but the creation, molding and building up of that philosophy that reaches out to the great mass of mankind, and results in that culture and experience which deepens and strengthens the common-sense of the people, rectifies judgments, improves mor- als, encourages independence and dissipates superstitions. In this prolonged human trag- edy of the ages-this apparent chaos of ignorance and riot of bigotry and all shades of persecution-there have been born at cer- tain undeviating periods, the great thoughts of the world's few thinkers, giving us the truth, which grows and widens forever, for it alone is immortal, and in time it yields us a philo- sophy that worships the beautiful only in the useful, and the religious only in the true: a philosophy that is the opposite and contra- diction of sentiment as opposed to sense; that requires a rational personal indepen- dence of thought on all subjects, whether secular or sacred, and that equally rejects an error, whether it is fresh and novel, or glo-
riously gilded by antiquity-a philosophy that yields no homage to a thing because it is a mystery, and accepts no ghostly authority ad- ministered by men, and the root of which lies in a florid mysticism. There is now a per- ceptible intellectual activity that marks the present age, and that is beginning to pervade all classes, asking questions, seeking causes. It is practical, not theoretical, and its chief aim is to improve the arts and industries, to explore and remedy evils, and to make life every way better worth living. Its types are the electric light, the telephone, better ships and railways, draining the lands and cleaner habits and better houses, healthier food and wiser institutions for the sick, destitute and insane. And scored upon its victorious ban- ners is that one supreme boon of lengthening the average life of a generation ten years. Let the mind dwell a moment upon this mag- nificent miracle, and then call these men, these practical philosophers, what you please, but tell us what coronet is fit to bind their brows, save that of the divine halo itself. They taught mankind the sublime truth that God intends us to mind things near us, and that because knowledge is obtainable, it is our duty to obtain it, and that the best morality or religion is that which abolishes suffering and makes men and women wiser, healthier and better; that the disputes of the schoolmen and the sectarians are to be re- garded as a jargon of the past, and to listen to them is time wasted; nothing is worth studying but what can be understood, or at least sufficiently understood to be usefully applied.
This is a kindly, tolerant, courageous thought, free from the distigurement of bigot- ry and prejudice. It alone, and only it, brings the perceptible advancement in the school, the press and the pulpit and every- where. It is irresistible, and its inflowing
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tide is sun-lit with hope, like the blue Egean, when the poet spoke of "the multitudinous laughter of the sea waves."
The labors and sufferings of these men, who gave the average man the new lease of ten years of life, were long, patient and immeasurable, and their innocent and heroic blood has stained the stream of time from its source to the present hour. They worked out their inventions and discoveries, offered them to the world, and were led to the rack or became hiding fugitives from the inappeas- able wrath of mankind. The brutal mob tore assunder their quivering limbs, threw their flesh to the dogs often, and then complacently erected those monumental piles to ignorance and baseness that pierced the heavens and disfigured the face of the earth.
Such was the long and unequal fight between ignorance and knowledge, and that is now going on, not with the bloody ferocity that characterized the ancient type of ignor- ance, but with equal determination and more cunning in its attacks, and more stealth in its assassinations. It can be conquered only by its extermination.
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