I would extend the same law to lots and houses in cities and villages--the object being to fill our country with the owners of homes, so that every child shall have a fireside, every father and mother a roof, provided they have the intelligence, the energy and the industry to acquire the necessary means.
Tenements and flats and rented lands are, in my judgment, the enemies of civilization. They make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. They put a few in palaces, but they put many in prisons.
I would go a step further than this. I would exempt homes of a certain value not only from levy and sale, but from every kind of taxation, State and National--so that these poor people would feel that they were in partnership with nature--that some of the land was absolutely theirs, and that no one could drive them from their home--so that mothers could feel secure. If the home increased in value, and exceeded the limit, then taxes could be paid on the excess; and if the home were sold, I would have the money realized exempt for a certain time in order that the family should have the privilege of buying another home.
The home, after all, is the unit of civilization, of good government; and to secure homes for a great majority of our citizens, would be to lay the foundation of our Government deeper and broader and stronger than that of any nation that has existed among men.
No one places a higher value upon the free school than I do; and no one takes greater pride in the prosperity of our colleges and universities. But at the same time, much that is called education simply unfits men successfully to fight the battle of life. Thousands are to-day studying things that will be of exceedingly little importance to them or to others. Much valuable time is wasted in studying languages that long ago were dead, and histories in which there is no truth.
There was an idea in the olden time--and it is not yet dead--that whoever was educated ought not to work; that he should use his head and not his hands. Graduates were ashamed to be found engaged in manual labor, in ploughing fields, in sowing or in gathering grain. To this manly kind of independence they preferred the garret and the precarious existence of an unappreciated poet, borrowing their money from their friends, and their ideas from the dead. The educated regarded the useful as degrading--they were willing to stain their souls to keep their hands white.