Education: How Old The New Part 12

"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater {330} scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write.

Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters."

If there was all this of progress in education in Spanish-American countries in advance of what we had in the United States, people will be p.r.o.ne to ask where, then, are the products of the Spanish-American education? This is only a fair question, and if the products cannot be shown, their education, however pretentious, must have been merely superficial or hollow, and must have meant nothing for the culture of their people. We are sure that most people would consider the question itself quite sufficient for argument, for it would be supposed to be unanswerable.

Such has been the state of mind created by history as it is written for English-speaking people, that we are not at all prepared to think that there {331} can possibly be in existence certain great products of Spanish-American education that show very clearly how much better educational systems were developed in Spanish than in English America.

The fact that we do not know them, however, is only another evidence of the one-sidedness of American education in the North, even at the present time. Our whole att.i.tude toward the South American people, our complacent self-sufficiency from which we look down on them, our thoroughgoing condescension for their ignorance and backwardness, is all founded on our lack of real knowledge with regard to them.

The most striking product of South American education was the architectural structures which the Spanish-American people erected as ornaments of their towns, memorials of their culture and evidences of their education. The cathedrals in the Spanish towns of South America and Mexico are structures, as a rule, fairly comparable with the ecclesiastical buildings erected by towns of the same size in Europe.

As a rule, they were planned at least in the sixteenth century, and most of them were finished in the seventeenth century. Their cathedrals are handsome architectural structures worthy of their faith and enduring evidence of their taste and love of beauty. The ecclesiastical buildings, the houses of their bishops and archbishops and their monasteries were worthy of their cathedrals and churches.

Most of them are beautiful, all of them are dignified, all of them had {332} a permanent character that has made them endure down to our day and has made them an unfailing ornament of the towns in which they are. Their munic.i.p.al buildings partook of this same type. Some of them are very handsome structures. Of their universities we have already heard that they were imposing buildings from without, handsomely decorated within.

It must not be forgotten that the Spanish Americans practically invented the new style of architecture. How effective that style is, we had abundant opportunity to see when it was employed for the building of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. That style is essentially American. It is the only new thing that America has contributed to construction since its settlement. How thoroughly suitable it was for the climate for which it was invented, those who have had experience of it in the new hotels erected in Florida, in the last decade or so, can judge very well. Many of its effects are an adaptation of cla.s.sical formulae to buildings for the warm, yet uncertain climate of many parts of South America. Some of the old monasteries constructed after this style are beautiful examples of architecture in every sense of the word. If the Spanish-American monks had done nothing else but leave us this handsome new model in architecture they would not have lived in vain, nor would their influence in American life have been without its enduring effects.

This is a typical {333} product of the higher culture of the South Spanish-American people.

With regard to the churches, it may be said that the spirit of the Puritans was entirely opposed to anything like the ornamentation of their churches, and that, indeed, these were not churches in the usual sense of the word, but were merely meeting houses. Hence there was not the same impulse to make them beautiful as lifted the Spanish Americans into their magnificent expressions of architectural beauty.

On the other hand, there are other buildings in regard to which, if there had been any real culture in the minds of the English Americans, we have a right to expect some beauty as well as usefulness. If we contrast for a moment the hospitals of English and Spanish America the difference is so striking as to show the lack of some important quality in the minds of the builders at the north. Spanish-American hospitals are among the beautiful structures with which they began to adorn their towns early, and some of them remain at the present day as examples of the architectural taste of their builders. They were usually low, often of but one story in height, with a courtyard and with ample porticos for convalescents, and thick walls to defend them from the heat of the climate. In many features they surpa.s.s many hospitals that have been built in America until very recent years.

They were modelled on the old mediaeval hospitals, some of which are very beautiful {334} examples of how to build places for the care of the ailing.

Contrast for a moment with this the state of affairs that has existed with regard to our church buildings and our public structures of all kinds in North America, down to the latter half of the nineteenth century. We have no buildings dating from before the nineteenth century that have any pretension to architectural beauty. They were built merely for utility. Some of them still have an interest for us because of historical a.s.sociations, but they are a standing evidence of the lack of taste of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The English poet, Yeats, said at a little dinner given to him just before he left this country ten years ago, that no nation can pretend to being cultured until the very utensils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as useful. What is to be said, then, of a nation that erects public buildings that are to be merely useful? As a matter of fact, most of them were barracks. The American people woke up somewhat in the nineteenth century, but the awakening was very slow. A few handsome structures were erected, but it is not until the last decade or two that we have been able to awaken public taste to the necessity for having all our public buildings beautiful as well as useful.

The effect of this taste for structural beauty on the appearance of the streets of their towns was an important element in making them very different from our cramped and narrow pathways. {335} The late Mr. Ernest Crosby once expressed this very emphatically in an after-dinner speech, by detailing his experience with regard to Havana. He had visited the Cuban capital some twenty years ago, and found it very picturesque in its old Spanish ways. It is true the streets were dirty and the death-rate was somewhat high, but the vista that you saw when you came around the corner of a street, was not the same that you had seen around every other corner for twenty miles; it was different. It was largely a city of homes, with some thought of life being made happy, rather than merely being laborious. It was a place to live in and enjoy life while it lasted, and not merely a place to exist in and make money. He came north by land. The first town that he struck on the mainland, he said, reminded him of Hoboken.

Every other town that he struck in the North reminded him more and more of Hoboken, until he came to the immortal Hoboken itself. The American end of the Anglo-Saxon idea seemed to him to make all the towns like Hoboken as far as possible. There is only one town in this country that is not like Hoboken, and that is Was.h.i.+ngton; and whenever we let the politicians work their wills on that--witness the Pension Building--it has a tendency to grow more and more like Hoboken.

Perhaps we shall be able to save it. As for Havana, he said he understood that the death-rate had been cut in two, and that yellow fever was no longer {336} epidemic there, but he understood also that the town was growing more and more like Hoboken, so that he scarcely dared go back to see it.

The parable has a lesson that is well worth driving home for our people, for it emphasizes a notable lack of culture among the American people, which did not exist among the Spanish Americans, a lack which we did not realize until the last decade or two, though it is an important index of true culture. The hideous buildings that we have allowed ourselves to live in in America, and, above all, that we have erected as representing the dignity of city, and only too often even of state, together with the awful evidence of graft, whenever an attempt has been made to correct this false taste and erect something worthy of us, the graft usually spoiling to a very great extent our best purposes, proclaim an absence of culture in American life that amounts to a conviction of failure of our education to be liberal in the true sense of the word.

There were other products of Spanish-American education quite as striking as the architectural beauties with which Mexicans and South Americans adorned their towns. Quite as interesting, indeed, as their architecture is their literature. Ordinarily we are apt to a.s.sume that because we have heard almost nothing of Spanish-American literature, there must be very little of it, and what little there is must have very little significance. This is only another one of these examples {337} of how ridiculous it is to know something "that ain't so."

Spanish-American literature is very rich. It begins very early in the history of the Spanish settlement. It is especially noteworthy for its serious products, and when the world's account of the enduring literature of the past four centuries will be made up much more of what was written in South America will live than what has been produced in North America. This seems quite unpatriotic, but it is only an expression of proper estimation of values, without any of that amusing self-complacency which so commonly characterizes North American estimation of anything that is done by our people.

South American literature, in the best sense of that much abused term, begins shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century, with the writing of the Spanish poet, Ercilla's, epic, "Araucana," which was composed in South America during the decade from 1550 to 1560. This is a literary work of genuine merit, that has attracted the attention of critics and scholars of all kinds and has given its author a significant place even in the limited field of epic poetry among the few great names that the world cares to recall in this literary mode.

Voltaire considered this epic poem a great contribution to literature, and in the prefatorial essay to his own epic, the "Henriade," he praises it very highly. The poem takes its name from the Araucanos Indians, who had risen in revolt against the Spaniards in Chile, and {338} against whom the poet served for nearly ten years. He did not learn to despise them, and while the literature which does justice to the lofty sentiments which sometimes flowed from mouths of great Indian chiefs, is supposed to be much more recent, Ercilla's most enthusiastically extolled pa.s.sage is the n.o.ble speech which he has given to the aged chief, Colocolo, in the "Araucana."

The expedition against the Araucanos inspired two other fine poems--that of Pedro de Ona, "Arauco Domado," written near the end of the century, and "Araucana," written by Diego de Santisteban, whose poem also saw the light before the seventeenth century opened. A fourth poet, Juan de Castellanos, better than either of these, wrote "Elegias de Varones Il.u.s.tres de Indias." He was a priest who had served in America, and who remembered some of the magnificent traits of the Indians that he had observed during his life among them, and made them the subject of his poetry. This was only the beginning of a serious Spanish-American literature, that has continued ever since.

Father Charles Warren Currier, in a series of lectures at the Catholic Summer School three years ago, did not hesitate to say that the body of Spanish-American literature was much larger and much more important, and much more of it was destined to endure than of our English-American literature. In the light of what these Spaniards had done for education in their universities, and for the beauty of life in {339} their cities by their architecture, this is not so surprising a saying as it might otherwise be. All of these things stand together and are confirmations one of the other.

The most interesting product of Spanish-American education, however,--the one which shows that it really stood for a higher civilization than ours,--remains to be spoken of. It consists of their treatment of the Indians. From the very beginning, as we have just shown, their literature in Spanish America did justice to the Indians.

They saw his better traits. It is true they had a better cla.s.s of Indians, as a rule, to deal with, but there is no doubt also that they did much to keep him on a higher level, while everything in North America that was done by the settlers was p.r.o.ne to reduce the native in the scale of civilization. He was taught the vices and not the virtues of civilization, and little was attempted to uplift him. Just as the literary men were interested in the better side of his character, so the Spanish-American scientists were interested in his folklore, in his medicine, in his arts and crafts, in his ethnology and anthropology--in a word, in all that North Americans have only come to be interested in during the nineteenth century. Books on all these subjects were published, and now const.i.tute a precious fund of knowledge with regard to the aborigines that would have been lost only for the devotion of Spanish-American scholars.

It is not surprising, then, that the Indian {340} himself, with all this interest in him, did not disappear, as in North America, but has remained to const.i.tute the basis of South American peoples. If the South American peoples are behind our own in anything, it is because large elements in them have been raised from a state of semi-barbarism into civilization, while our people have all come from nations that were long civilized and we have none at all of the natives left.

Wherever the English went always the aborigines disappeared before them. The story is the same in New Zealand and Australia as it is in North America, and it would be the same in India, only for the teeming millions that live in that peninsula, for whom Anglo-Saxon civilization has never meant an uplift in any sense of the word, but rather the contrary. The white man's burden has been to carry the Indian, instilling into him all the vices, until no longer he could cling to his s.h.i.+fty master and was shaken off to destruction.

This story of the contrast of the treatment of the Indian at the North and the South is probably the best evidence for the real depth of culture that the magnificent education of the Spaniards, so early and so thoroughly organized in their colonies, accomplished for this continent. Alone it would stand as the highest possible evidence of the interest of the Spanish Government and the Spanish Church in the organization not only of education, but of government in such a way as to bring happiness and uplift for {341} both natives and colonists in the Spanish-American countries. Abuses there were, as there always will be where men are concerned and where a superior race comes in contact with an inferior. These abuses, however, were exceptions and not the rule. The policy inst.i.tuted by the Spaniards and maintained in spite of the tendencies of men to degenerate into tyranny and misuse of the natives is well worthy of admiration. English-speaking history has known very little of it until comparatively recent years. Mr.

Sidney Lee, the editor of the English Biographical Dictionary and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, wrote a series of articles which appeared in Scribner's last year on "The Call of the West." This was meant to undo much of the prejudice which exists in regard to Spanish colonization in this country and to mitigate the undue reverence in which the English explorers and colonists have been held by comparison. There seems every reason to think, then, that this newer, truer view of history is gradually going to find its way into circulation. In the meantime it is amusing to look back and realize how much prejudice has been allowed to warp English history in this matter, and how, as a consequence of the determined, deliberate efforts to blacken the Spanish name, we have had to accept as history exactly the opposite view to the {342} reality in this matter. Lest we should be thought to be exaggerating, we venture to quote one of the opening paragraphs of Mr. Sidney Lee's article as it appeared in Scribner's for May, 1907: "Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious acc.u.mulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent who deplored her presence among them.

Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native.

"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed {343} books, maps and ma.n.u.scripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another.

Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice.

Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light which illumes every corner of the picture the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler."

Here is magnificent praise from one who cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities to bias his judgment. He has studied the facts and not the prejudiced statements of his countrymen. The more carefully the work of the Spaniards in America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is studied, the more praise is bestowed upon them. The more a writer knows of actual conditions the more does he feel poignantly the injustice that has been done by the Protestant tradition which abused the good that was accomplished by the Catholic Spanish and which neglected, distorted and calumniated his deeds and motives. This bit of Protestant tradition is, after all, only suffering the fate that every other {344} Protestant position has undergone during the course of the development of scientific historical criticism. Every step toward the newer, truer history has added striking details to the picture of the beneficent influences of the Church upon her people in every way. It has shown up pitilessly the subterfuges, the misstatements and the positive ignorance which have enabled Protestantism to maintain the opposite impression in people's minds in order to show how impossible was agreement with the Catholic Church, since it stood for backwardness and ignorance and utter lack of sympathy with intellectual development. Now we find everywhere that just the opposite was true. Whenever the Reformation had the opportunity to exert itself to the full, education and culture suffered. Erasmus said in his time, "Wherever Lutheranism reigns there is an end of literature." Churches and cathedrals that used to be marvellous expressions of the artistic and poetic feeling of the people became the ugliest kind of mere meeting houses. Rev. Augustus Jessop, himself an Anglican clergyman, tells how "art died out in rural England" after the Reformation, which he calls The Great Pillage, and "King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries." The same thing happened in Germany, and education was affected quite as much as art. German national development was delayed, and she has come to take her place in world influence only in the nineteenth {345} century, after most of the influence of the religious revolt led by Luther in the sixteenth century has pa.s.sed away. These are but a few of the striking differences in recent history that are so well typified by the contrast between what was accomplished for art and culture and architecture and education by the Catholic Spaniard and the English Protestant here in America during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Truth is coming to her own at last, and it is in the history of education particularly that advances are being made which change the whole aspect of the significance of history during the past 350 years.

{346}

{347}

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS

{348}

"Tu recte vivis si curas esse quod audis; Neve putes alium sapiente bonoque beatum."

--Horace, _Ep_., 1, 16.

[You are living right if you take care to be what people say you are. Do not imagine that any one who is really happy is other than wise and good.]

"Quod ipse sis, non quod habearis, interest."

--Publius Syrus.

[The question is what you are, not what you are thought to be.]

"May you so raise your character, that you may help to make the next age a better thing, and leave posterity in your debt for the advantage it shall receive by your example."

--Lord Halifax.

{349}

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS [Footnote 20]

[Footnote 20: This was the address to the graduates at the First Commencement of the Fordham University School of Medicine, June 9, 1909.]

I have felt that the first graduation of the youngest of the medical schools might very well be occupied with the consideration of the place of the medical profession in history. We are rather apt in the modern time to neglect the lessons of history and, above all, of the history of science, first because it is not always easy to get definite information with regard to it, and secondly and mainly because we are likely to imagine that scientific and medical history can mean very little for us. In America particularly we have neglected the history of medicine and it has been one of the definite efforts at Fordham University School of Medicine to renew interest in this subject. It is entirely too important to be neglected and it has valuable lessons for all generations, but especially for a generation so occupied with itself, that it does not properly consider the claims of the past to recognition for fine work accomplished, and for the exhibition of some of the best qualities of the human intellect in the pursuit of scientific and practical medical knowledge in previous generations.

{350}

At the earliest dawn of history we find inst.i.tutions called temples in which men were being treated for their ailments. Those who treated them we have been accustomed to speak of as priests. And such they were, since their functions included the direction of religious services. These religious services, however, were not the exercises of religion as we know them now, but were special services meant to propitiate certain G.o.ds who were supposed to rule over health and disease. There were other kinds of temples besides these. We still talk of temples of justice meaning our law courts, and our phrase comes from an older time when people went to have their differences of opinion adjudicated by men who conducted the services of praise and prayer for particular deities who were supposed to mete out justice to men, but the temple attendants were at the same time expert in deciding causes, knowing right and wrong, wise in declaring how justice should be done. These early temples, then, in which the ailing were treated and over which experts in disease and its treatment presided, were not temples in our modern sense, but were much like hospitals as we know them now. They would remind us of the hospitals conducted by religious orders, trained to care for the illnesses of mankind and yet deeply interested in the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d.

Human inst.i.tutions are never so different from one another, even in spite of long distance of time {351} or place, as they are usually presumed to be. Men and women have not changed in all the period of human history that we know, and their modes and ways of life often have a startling similarity if we but find the key for the significance of customs that seem to be very different. These temples of the G.o.ds of health and of disease, then, were places where patients congregated and men studied diseases for generations, and pa.s.sed on their knowledge from one to another, and acc.u.mulated information, and elaborated theories, and came to conclusions, often on insufficient premises, and did many other things that we are doing at the present time. The medical profession is directly descended from these inst.i.tutions. They are among the oldest that we know of in human history. These special temples are only a little less ancient than other forms of temples if, indeed, they were not the first to be founded, for man's first most clamorous reason for appeal to the G.o.ds has ever been himself and his own health.

With the reception of your diplomas this evening you now belong to what is therefore probably the oldest profession in the world. In welcoming you into it let me call your attention particularly to the fact that the history of our profession can be traced back to the very beginning of the course of time, for as long as we have any account of men's actions in an organized social order.

{352}