LITMIR.BIZ

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for its own sake, and resolutely bent upon the betterment of life by means of their own living.

      Most of them numbered one or more Baptist or Methodist preachers among their ancestry—men of healthy minds and open ones, men to whom religion was far less a matter of emotion than of conduct, men who did the duty that lay next to them—be it plowing or praying, preaching or fighting Indians or Englishmen—with an equal mind.

      Men of such descent were educated by environment in better ways than any that schools can furnish. From infancy they had lived in an atmosphere of backwoods culture—culture drawn in part from such books as were accessible to them, and in greater part from association with the strong men who had migrated in early days to conquer the West and make of it a princely possession of the Republic.

      The books they had were few, but they were the very best that English literature afforded, and they read them over and over again with diligence and intelligence until they had made their own every fecundative thought the books suggested. Then they went away, and thought for themselves, with untrammeled freedom, of the things thus presented to their minds. I have sometimes wondered if their method of education, chiefly by independent thinking, and with comparatively little reverence for mere "authority," might not have been better, in its character-building results at least, than our modern, more bookish process.

      That question does not concern us now. What I wish to point out is the fact that the country owes much to the influence of these strong men of affairs and action, whose conviction that every man owes it to his fellow-men so to live that this may be a better world for other men to live in because of his having lived in it, gave that impulse to education which later made Indiana a marvel and a model to the other states in all that concerns education. Those men believed themselves and their children entitled to the best in schooling as in everything else, and from the very beginning they set out to secure it.

      Early Educational Impulses

      If a wandering schoolmaster came within call, they gave him a schoolhouse and a place to live in, and bade him "keep school." When he had canvassed the region round about for "scholars," and was ready—with his ox gads—to open his educational institution, the three or four of these men whose influence pervaded and dominated the region round about, said a word or two to each other, and made themselves responsible for the tuition fees of all the boys and girls in the neighborhood whose parents were too poor to pay.

      In the same spirit, years later, when an effort was made to establish colleges in the state, these men or their children who had inherited their impulse, were prompt to furnish the money needed, however hard pressed they might be for money themselves. I remember that my mother—the daughter of one of the most conspicuous of the Kentuckians—when she was a young widow with four children to bring up on an income of about $250 a year, subscribed $100 to the foundation of Indiana Asbury University, becoming, in return, the possessor of a perpetual scholarship, entitling her for all time to maintain a student there free of tuition. It was with money drawn from such sources that the colleges of Indiana were founded.

      Under the influence of these Kentuckians, Virginians, and men of character who in smaller numbers had come out from New England and the Middle States, there was from the first an impulse of betterment in the very atmosphere of the West. Even the "poor whites" of the South who had migrated to the Northwest in pursuit of their traditional dream of finding a land where one might catch "two 'possums up one 'simmon tree," were distinctly uplifted by the influence of such men, not as a class, perhaps, but in a sufficient number of individual cases to raise the average level of their being. The greater number of these poor whites continued to be the good-natured, indolent, unthrifty people that their ancestors had always been. They remained content to be renters in a region where the acquisition of land in independent ownership was easy. They continued to content themselves with an inadequate cultivation of their crops, and a meager living, consequent upon their neglect. They continued to give to shooting, fishing, and rude social indulgences the time they ought to have given to work. But their children were learning to read and write, and, better still, were learning by observation the advantages of a more industrious living, and when the golden age of steamboating came, they sought and found profitable employment either upon the river or about the wharves. The majority of these were content to remain laborers, as deckhands and the like, but in some of them at least ambition was born, and they became steamboat mates, pilots, and, in some cases, the captains and even the owners of steamboats. On the whole, I think the proportion of the class of people who thus achieved a higher status, bettering themselves in enduring ways was quite as large as it ever is in the history of an unfortunate or inferior class of men. In the generations that have followed some at least of the descendants of that "poor white" class, whose case had always been accounted hopeless, have risen to distinction in intellectual ways. One distinguished judge of our time, a man now of national reputation, is the grandson of a poor white who negligently cultivated land rented from a relative of my own. His father was my schoolmate for a season, and was accounted inferior by those of us who were more fortunately descended. So much for free institutions in a land of hope, opportunity, and liberty, where the "pursuit of happiness" and betterment was accounted an "unalienable right."

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      A Poor Boy's Career

      In another case that comes home to me for reasons, the betterment was more immediate. My maternal grandfather, the old Kentuckian, George Craig, whose name is preserved in many ways in the geographical nomenclature of Southern Indiana, had an abundantly large family of children. But with generously helpful intent it was his habit to adopt bright boys and girls whose parents were poverty-stricken, in order to give them such education as was available in that time and country, or, in his favorite phrase, to "give them a show in the world." One of these adopted boys was the child of parents incredibly poor. When he came to my grandfather the boy had never seen a tablecloth or slept in a bed. He knew nothing of the uses of a knife and fork. A glass tumbler was to him a wonder thing. He could neither read nor write, though he was eleven years of age. The towel given to him for use on his first introduction to the family was an inscrutable mystery until one of the negro servants explained its uses to him.

      Less than a score of years later that boy was a lawyer of distinction, a man of wide influence, a state senator of unusual standing, and chairman of the committee that investigated and exposed the frauds perpetrated upon the state in the building of the Madison and Indianapolis railroad—the first highway of its kind constructed within the state. In one sense, he owed all this to George Craig. In a truer sense he owed it to his own native ability, which George Craig was shrewd enough to discover in the uncouth and ignorant boy, and wise enough to give its opportunity.

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      It was a common practice of the thrifty and well-to-do of that time, thus to adopt the children of their poorer neighbors and bring them up as members of their own families. Still more common was the practice of taking destitute orphans as "bound boys" or "bound girls." These were legally bound to service, instead of being sent to the poorhouse, but in practical effect they became members of the families to whose heads they were "bound," and shared in all respects the privileges, the schooling, and everything else that the children of the family enjoyed. They were expected to work, when there was work to be done, but so was every other member of the family, and there was never the least suggestion of servile obligation involved or implied. I remember well the affection in which my mother's "bound girls" held her and us children, and the way in which, when they came to be married, their weddings were provided for precisely as if they had been veritable daughters of the house.

      On one of those occasions it was rumored in the village, that a "shiveree"—Hoosier for charivari—was to mark the event. My father, whose Virginian reverence for womanhood and marriage and personal dignity,

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