The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 6, December 1863 | Page 4

as fathers and mothers are necessary, in the economy of nature, to
a man's getting into the world at all, it is very hard for him to escape
law and control when he comes. I was never asked whether I would be
a citizen of the United States, whether it was my high will to come into
'the Social Compact' existing here. Neither were you. No man ever was.
Just fancy the United States solemnly asking all the infants born this
year, 'if they are willing to join the social compact and behave
themselves in the country as respectable babies should!
It is vastly better to take facts and try to comprehend and use them.
And, as a fact, man is not naturally a brute beast. He never had to make
a Social Compact. He has always found one made ready to his hand.
Some established order, some national life has always stood ready to
receive the new recruit to the ranks of humanity, put him in his place,
and ask him no questions. He is made for society. Society is made for
him. He is not isolated, but joined to his fellows by links stronger than
iron, by bands no steel can sever. The nation stands waiting for him. In
some shape, with some development of national life, but always
essentially the same, the nation takes him, plastic at his birth, into its

great hands, and moulds and fashions him, by felt and unfelt influences,
whether he will or no, into the national shape and figure.
And that is what nations are made for. They do not exist to produce
wheat, corn, cattle, cotton, or cutlery, but to produce men. The wheat,
corn, and the rest exist for the sake of the men. The real value of the
nation, to itself and to the world, is not the things it produces, but the
style of man it produces. That is the broad difference between China
and Massachusetts, between Japan and New York. Nations exist to be
training schools for men. That is their real business. Accordingly as
they do it better or worse they are prospering or the reverse. What is
France about? The newspaper people tell me she is building ships,
drilling zouaves, diplomatizing at Rome, brigandizing in Mexico,
huzzaing for glory and Napoleon the Third. That is about the wisdom
of the newspapers. She is moulding a million unsuspecting little
innocents into Frenchmen! That is what she is at, and nobody seems to
notice. What is England doing? Weaving cotton, when she can get it, I
am told, drilling rifle brigades, blustering in the Times, starving her
workmen in Lancashire, and feasting her Prince in London, talking
'strict neutrality' in Parliament, and building pirates on the Clyde. She's
doing worse than that. That is not half her wrong-doing. She is taking
thousands of plastic, impressible, innocent babes, into her big hands,
monthly, and kneading them and hardening them into regular John
Bulls! That's a pretty job to think of!
So the nations are at work all over the world. And the nation that, as a
rule, takes 'mamma's darling' into its arms, and in twenty or thirty years
makes him the best specimen of a man, is the most perfect nation and
best fulfils a nation's purpose.
For the business of Education, which so many consider the
schoolmaster's speciality, is a larger business than they think. The
Family exists to do it, the Church exists to do it. It is the real business
of the State. The great Universe itself, with all its vastness, its powers
and its mysteries, was created for this. It is simply God's great
schoolroom. He has floored it with the emerald queen of the earth and
of the gleaming seas. He has roofed it with a sapphire dome, lit with

flaming starfire and sun blaze. He has set the great organ music of the
spheres reverberating forevermore through its high arches. He has put
his children here, to train them for their grand inheritance. He has
ordered nature and life and circumstance for this one great end.
Therefore the Nation is not a joint-stock company. It is not a paper
association. It is not a mutual assurance society for life and property.
That is the shallow, surface notion that makes such miserable babble in
political speeches. The Nation is Divine and not Human. It is of GOD's
making and not of man's. It is a moral school, a spiritual training
institute for educating and graduating men. For that purpose it is alive.
Men can make associations, companies, compacts. God only makes
living bodies, divine, perpetual institutions, with life in themselves,
which exist because man exists, which can never end till man ends. The
Family is one of these. The Church is another, in any