Jefferson, the great apostle of popular self-government, most earnestly longed to see all America outside of New England divided into such townships as hers.
But to return to the Pilgrims. They established schools and churches everywhere. Free education was maintained by taxation of all property.
Let us sum up. Here was a country in which everybody had been well trained in the available ways of self-support and also of saving and accumulating,--the very first essential to make good citizens. Such citizens were required to administer their public affairs themselves; and thus they received the very best political education and training in a school of genuine democracy,--which is the next essential. The children of each generation were schooled better than those of the former, the colleges and universities constantly did better with the students, and libraries open to the public both multiplied and enlarged,--the third essential. And education and business were rationally mixed, until in Webster's time it might be said with truth that the average New Englander worked with a will, and wisely, every day to maintain himself and family, and also found leisure to add something of value to his store of knowledge. Here is another essential. The moral and religious atmosphere became purer and purer, and more and more on all sides good intention was conspicuous in the light, and evil intention hid itself deep in the dark. This is the last essential.
The foregoing is made up from the Plymouth oration. Webster was too near to discern all the intellectual and moral advancement and the opulent future promise of his own community, the proper fruit of the conditions just summarized.[79] Let us indicate by only such a paucity of examples as we have room for. Able and fully furnished lawyers everywhere. Think of Story, a most diligently attending judge and one of the best; also finding time both to be the first law professor and most fertile and eminent author of the age, exhausting English and American sources and authority in his books, and crowding them with a civil law learning to be surpassed only by that of the Roman jurists of Germany; let Ticknor, whom we may call the founder of the post classical school of literature in our country, suggest the students of modern languages who followed in an illustrious line,--let him suggest also the famous historians, such as Prescott, Bancroft, Hildreth, Motley, Parkman, really representatives of the school just mentioned, using methods that got into the American air first from Ticknor; let Channing suggest the pulpit,--Channing, who raised religion from the gloom of dogma and orthodoxy into a life of angelic joy; what can one say to describe Emerson in a breath,--the teacher to us all of fit aspiration, right thinking, noble expression, the highest virtue and truest religion, and who lived, as Dr. Heber Newton has lately told, the most perfect of lives as a man; Hawthorne, showing the world sick with its yearning for moral redemption that even a disgraced, lone, and friendless woman can by a subsequent life of unreserved confession, purity, and love to her neighbors turn a horrible brand of guilt into a jewel more precious and brilliant than diamond,--how his consummate achievement rebukes the sixty years' dilatoriness of Goethe over his unfinished Faust; and divine poets, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes,--the last two conspicuous in letters, Lowell being in my judgment the greatest American man of letters; I have said nothing of the statesmen and orators, beginning with Fisher Ames and John Adams,--and there are others in every high round of the intellectual life known all over the land whose names I must omit.