And
I would show that image of the schoolhouse upon a field of white, as
suggesting those white acres consecrated of the domain of Louis XIV to the
children of the west.
Some years ago, when walking across the island of Porto Rico in the West
Indies, just after its occupation and annexation by the United States, I
met in the interior mountains one morning a man carrying upon his
shoulders a basket filled with flowers, as it seemed to me at a distance.
As he approached, however, I saw that he was bearing the dead body of his
child, with flowers about it, to burial in consecrated ground miles away.
The first task of the new government there, as in the western States, was
to make fields consecrated for the living child, to set apart sites for
schoolhouses--the place for the common school.
That the common school has not in itself brought millennial conditions to
the valley we are aware, even as universal man suffrage has not brought
the full fruits of democracy. French philosophers and American patriots
alike have expected too much perhaps of an imperfect human nature.
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