Albert E. Winship

“ We have mighty universities, libraries, and laboratories, but we have no man who thinks more clearly, writes more logically, speaks more vigorously than did Jonathan Edwards, and we have never had such a combination of spirit and power in any other American. This mastery is revealing itself in various ways in hundreds of his descendants to-day, and it has never ceased to do it since his blood gave tonic to the thought and character of his children and his children's children. ”

“ No man can have the intellectual power, nobility of character, and personal grandeur of Jonathan Edwards and transmit it to his children's children for a century and a half who has not himself had a great inheritance. ”

“ A problem is primarily something thrown at us as a challenge for us to see through it. To solve a problem is to loosen it so that it may be looked into or seen through. Whatever contributes to the loosening of a problem by throwing light upon the conditions is of value in aiding in its solution, hence the publication of this study of the family of Jonathan Edwards as a contrast to the Jukes. ”

“ They could not be criminals that required capital, brains, education or nerve. Even the kind of pauperism and crime in which they indulged was particularly disgraceful. This is inevitably true of all classes of people who combine idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. They are not even respectable among criminals and paupers.
There is an honorable pauperism. It is no disgrace to be poor or to be in a poorhouse if there is a good reason for it. One may be manly in poverty. But the Jukes were never manly or honorable paupers, they were weaklings among paupers. ”

“ Every preacher, orator, and editor who presented the story of the Jukes, with its abhorrent features, wanted the facts for a cheery, comforting, convincing contrast. This was not to be had for the asking. Several attempts had been made to find the key to such a study without discovering a person of the required prominence, born sufficiently long ago, with the necessary vigor of intellect and strength of character who established the habit of having large families. ”

“ They were a disgustingly diseased family as a whole. There were many imbeciles and many insane. Those of "the Jukes" who tended to pauperism were rarely criminal, and those who were criminal were rarely paupers. The sick, the weak, and goody-goody ones were almost all paupers; the healthy, strong ones were criminals.
It is a well-known fact in sociology that criminals are of three classes: First, those who direct crime, the capitalists in crime, who are rarely arrested, who seldom commit any crime, but inspire men to crime in various ways. ”

“ In most families a son-in-law becomes a representative factor of a family. Therefore, whenever the "Edwards family" is spoken of it includes the sons-in-law, but it does not include the daughters-in-law, nor does it go beyond Jonathan Edwards to include his brothers and sisters or their descendants.
The "Jukes" had no inherited capacity or training upon which they could safely presume. Their only chance lay in nursing every germ of hope by means of industry and education, through the discipline of the shop, the training of the schools, and the inspiration of the church. ”

“ Nature is lovely, but it makes all the difference in the world how we know nature and why we love it.
In 1874 Richard L. Dugdale was employed by the New York Prison Commission to visit the prisons of the state. In this visit he was surprised to find criminals in six different prisons whose relatives were mostly criminals or paupers, and the more surprised to discover that these six criminals, under four different names, were all descended from the same family. This led Mr. Dugdale to study their relatives, living and dead. ”

“ Whatever weakness the Jukes represent finds its antidote in the Edwards family, which has cost the country nothing in pauperism, in crime, in hospital or asylum service. On the contrary, it represents the highest usefulness in invention, manufacture, commerce, founding of asylums and hospitals, establishing and developing missions, projecting and energizing the best philanthropies. ”

“ Remember the size, ages, and financial condition of the family when the father died—the sons being aged eight, thirteen and twenty—and then consider the fact that the three sons graduated from Princeton, and five of the daughters married college graduates, three of them of Yale and one each of Harvard and Princeton. A man might well be content to die without lands or gold when eight sons and sons-in-laws were to be men of such capacity, character, and training as are found in this family. ”

“ Few men and women realize how true it is that these smart rascally fellows, who persist in remaining in ignorance, are to be the vicious, pauper, criminal class who are to fill the dens of vice, the poorhouses, and the prisons; who are to be burglars, highwaymen, and murderers. In place of opinions, it is well sometimes to present facts so clear and definite that they cannot be forgotten.
R.A. Dugdale, of New York State, began the study of "The Jukes" family in 1874, and in 1877 in the twentieth annual report of the New York Prison Commission he made a statement of the results. ”

“ It is very difficult to find anyone who is honest and industrious, pure and prosperous, who has not had a fair education, if he ever had the opportunity, as all children in the United States now have. It is an interesting fact developed from a study of the Jukes that it is much easier to reform a criminal than a pauper. ”

“ Education tends to do away with vulgarity, pauperism, and crime, tends to prevent disease and disgrace, and helps to manliness, success and loyalty.
Ignorance leads to all those things that education tries to do away with, and it tends to do away with all the things that education tries to cultivate. ”

“ Colonel Aaron Burr died at eighty after thirty years of the worst treatment ever meted out to a man against whom the bitterest enemies and the most brilliant legal talent could bring no charge that would stand in the eyes of the law. ”

“ Eminent names in the medical annals of San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, and other cities can be traced to Jonathan Edwards.
The Jukes neglected all religious privileges, defied and antagonized the church and all that it stands for, while the Edwards family has more than a 100 clergymen, missionaries, and theological professors, many of the most eminent in the country's history. America has had no more brilliant preachers and theologians than some of those that bear the names of Edwards, Dwight, Woolsey, Park, Ingersoll. ”

“ None of the Jukes had the equivalent of a common school education, while there are few of the Edwards family that have not had more than that. Few were satisfied with less than academy or seminary if they did not go to college. There is not a leading college in the country in which their names are not to be found recorded. They have not only furnished thirteen college presidents and a hundred and more professors, but they have founded many important academies and seminaries in New Haven and Brooklyn, all through the New England states, and in the Middle, Western, and Southern states. ”

“ The last four years of their life at Northampton were indescribably trying to the children. Human nature was the same then as now, and everyone knows how heavily the public dislike of a prominent man bears upon his children. The conventionalities which keep adults within bound in speech and action are unknown to children, and what the parents say behind a clergyman's back, children say to his children's face. This period of childhood social horror ended only by removal to a missionary parsonage among the Stockbridge Indians, where they lived for eight years. ”

“ A boy of twelve who has lived by his wits is often keener than a boy of the same age who has been well brought up at home and at school, but such a boy knows about as much and is about as much of a man at twelve as he will ever be, while the boy that gets an education becomes more and more of a man as long as he lives. ”

“ The Jukes did not wander far from the haunts of Max. They stagnated like the motionless pool, while the Edwards family is a prominent factor in the mercantile, industrial, and professional life of thirty-three states of the union and in several foreign countries, in ninety-two American and many foreign cities. They have been pre-eminently directors of men. The Pacific steamship line and fifteen American railway systems have had as president, superintendent, or otherwise active in the management one of this family. ”

“ They were a great expense to the state, costing in crime and pauperism more than $1,250,000. Taken as a whole, they not only did not contribute to the world's prosperity, but they cost more than $1,000 a piece, including all men, women, and children, for pauperism and crime.
Those who worked did the lowest kind of service and received the smallest wages. Only twenty of the 1,200 learned a trade, and ten of those learned it in the state prison. Even they were not regularly employed. Men who work regularly even at unskilled labor are generally honest men and provide for the family. ”

“ There were no greater heroes in the Revolutionary war than such men as Timothy Edwards. He was nearly fifty years old when the war closed and he found himself the father of thirteen children and without property or business. Full of courage and enterprise he succeeded in supporting his family in comfort and in regaining a substantial property before his death, which occurred in the midst of the next war, October 27, 1813. ”

“ He began the study of Latin at six and at twelve had a good preparation for college in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, all of which had come from home study. He not only knew books, but he knew nature and loved her. From early childhood to advanced years this remained true. He entered Yale college at twelve years of age. In a letter which he wrote while a college freshman he speaks of himself as a child. Not many freshmen take that view of themselves, but a lad of twelve, away from home at college could have been little more than a child. ”

“ The boy who leaves school to go to work does not necessarily learn to work steadily, but often quite the reverse. Few who graduate from a grammar school, or who take the equivalent course in a rural school, fail to be regular in their habits of effort. This accounts in part for the fact that few unskilled workmen ever graduated from a grammar school. Scarcely any of the Jukes were ever at school any considerable time. Probably no one of them ever had so much as a completed rural school education. ”

“ When the war broke out Timothy Edwards was worth $20,000, which he had accumulated in addition to all his other burdens. When the war closed he had nothing, and was $3,000 in debt to New York merchants. To understand what sacrifices he made it must be understood that when the government was in great straits he took $5,000 of money that was as good as gold and let the government have it, taking in return money that was of slight value. ”

“ On the other hand, although the Edwards family inherited abundant capacity and character, every child has been educated from early childhood. Not all of the college members of the family have been discovered, and yet among the men alone I have found 285 graduates and a surprisingly large number of these have supplemented the college course with post-graduate or professional study. Just as the "Jukes" have intensified their degeneracy by neglect, the Edwards family has magnified capacity and character by industry and education. ”

“ He learned the details of 540 descendants of Max in five generations. He learned the exact facts about 169 who married into the family. It is customary to count as of a family the men who marry into it. He traced in part others, which carried the number up to 1,200 persons of the family of the Jukes.
The Jukes rarely married foreign-born men or women, so that it may be styled a distinctively American family. The almost universal traits of the family were idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. They would not work, they could not be made to study, and they loved vulgarity. ”

“ The massing of people in large cities, the incoming of vast multitudes from the impoverished masses of several European and Asiatic countries, the tendency to interpret liberty as license, the contagious nature of moral, as well as of physical, diseases combine to make it of the utmost importance that American enterprise and moral force find ways and means for accomplishing this transformation. The grand results of the movement in New York city inspired by Jacob Riis ”

“ Not one of the Jukes was ever elected to a public office, while more than eighty of the family of Jonathan Edwards have been especially honored. Legislatures in all sections of the country, governor's councils, state treasuries, and other elective offices have been filled by these men. They have been mayors of New Haven, Cleveland, and Troy; governors of Connecticut, Ohio, and South Carolina; they have been prominent in the Continental congress, in the constitutional conventions of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. ”