Lowood Institution

“ A bad system often works well for a while, but always carries the seeds of decay and ruin. It was so with the institution of Loyola, in spite of the enthusiasm and sincerity of the early members, and the masterly wisdom displayed by the founders. ”

“ "The charge that Anarchism is destructive, rather than constructive, and that, therefore, Anarchism is opposed to organization, is one of the many falsehoods spread by our opponents. They confound our present social institutions with organization; hence they fail to understand how we can oppose the former, and yet favor the latter. The fact, however, is that the two are not identical.
"The State is commonly regarded as the highest form of organization. But is it in reality a true organization? Is it not rather an arbitrary institution, cunningly imposed upon the masses?
"Industry, too, is called an organization; ”

“ If wealth, education, and breeding were to result in a class who could only carp and criticize, accumulate money, give way to self-indulgence, and cherish low foreign ideals, then would it have appeared that there was a radical unsoundness in our society, refinement would have been proved to be weakness, and the highest education would have been shown to be a curse, rather than a blessing. But Charles Lowell, and hundreds of others like him, in greater or less degree, all over the land, met the great test and emerged triumphant. ”

“ The grandfather of the poet, Judge John Lowell, was author of the clause in the Bill of Rights abolishing slavery in Massachusetts. One of his sons was founder of the great manufacturing city on the Merrimac which bears his name. A grandson established the Lowell Institute, a system of popular instruction by free courses of lectures,—a system unique, in that it aims to bring to its audiences representative454 scholars, chosen less for their skill in the graceful but often specious art of public speaking than for solid attainments. ”

“ It was that hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by unselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly wait to see what would come of their doing their best. At any rate, without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited among his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the nation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone, what might not one expect of American democracy!
His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. ”

“ A natural reply to the statement of Lowell is that great numbers of fathers every year, at a pecuniary sacrifice, send their sons to college with the idea of fitting them better to earn their living, in obedience to the general sentiment of men of this country that there is a money value to college training. But the remark of Lowell suggests another object of the University which, to use the words of Huxley again, is “to catch the exceptional people, the glorious sports of nature, and turn them to account for the good of society.” ”

“ But the people of America, at home, have wider interests than theirs, and affairs more important than they have. Lowell felt this in every fibre of his life, and if the Workingmen’s College in London, or some public meeting at Birmingham, or a Coleridge monument, gave him a chance to give to the people of England his notion of what the people of America are, and have in hand, why, he was most glad to do so. ”

“ I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me, but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative status. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart, and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was so noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance I found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, he admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. ”

“ But the early factory girls were not all country girls. There were others also, who had been taught that “work is no disgrace.” There were some who came to Lowell solely on account of the social or literary advantages to be found there. They lived in secluded parts of New England, where books were scarce, and there was no cultivated society. ”

“ As a representative of our country abroad, no one, not even Lowell, has stood for it so nobly and unselfishly; Charles Francis Adams alone rivaling him in the seriousness with which he gave himself to the Republic. Lowell was not less patriotic, but he loved society and England ”

“ When one considers the eagerness with which Lowell vented himself in the months of his close connection with the Anti-Slavery Standard, one is not surprised that in a book which is at once a defence of criticism and a swift survey of the whole field of American letters as it lay under the eye of this knight-errant of freedom and truth, Lowell should have displayed, with little reserve, the frankness and impetuosity of his nature. It is only after a closer inspection that one discovers also how sound and how generous is his judgment. ”

“ James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) came of one of the oldest and most influential New England families. Born in an atmosphere of learning, in the old family home in historic Cambridge, at the very doors of Harvard College, he enjoyed every advantage for culture that inherited tastes, ample means, and convenient opportunity could offer. Besides the facilities of the college near by, his father’s library, in which he roamed at will from his very infancy, was one of the richest in the whole country. It is not strange, then, that he grew to be one of the most scholarly Americans of his time. ”

“ The agents have stood forward in the support of schools, churches, lectures, and lyceums, and their influence contributed highly to the elevation of the moral and intellectual character of the operatives. Talent has been encouraged, brought forward, and recommended."—For some considerable time the young women wrote, edited, and published a newspaper among themselves, called the Lowell Offering.—"And Lowell has supplied agents and mechanics for the later manufacturing places who have given tone to society, and extended the beneficial influence of Lowell through the United States. ”

“ Lowell could not entertain, he was quite at liberty to accept all manner of invitations, and be under no obligation to return them. So his public duties called him in many directions socially, and he was able, besides doing a little business by the way in these diversions, to see the best of the intellectual life of the day. He had a choice group of friends who had known him before he was a public man, and his position gave shim the entrée in all society, but he whispered: “I think on the whole I find no society so good as what I have been accustomed to at home.” ”

“ The history of Lowell, Mass., is not identical with that of other manufacturing places in New England, and for two reasons: first, because here were gathered together a larger number of factory people, and among them were the first who showed any visible sign of mental cultivation; and, second, because it was here that the practice of what was called “The Lowell factory system” went into operation, a practice which included the then new idea, that corporations should have souls, and should exercise a paternal influence over the lives of their operatives. ”

“ During the War of 1812 we had in England an industrial spy, whose
campaign there has perhaps accomplished more for the country than all
our armies did. It was Francis C. Lowell, of Boston. Great Britain was
just introducing the power loom. The secret of structure was guarded
with all vigilance, yet Lowell, passing from cotton factory to cotton
factory with Yankee eyes, ears, and wit, came home in 1814, believing,
with good reason, as it proved, that he could set up one of the machines
on American soil. ”

“ Lowell had seen something of the great world abroad, and he stood in an amiable relation to that self-centred, comfortable world of New England which held to the established order, even though there had begun within it already the agitation which was to shake the nation. Like many thus poised, he hated slavery in the abstract, but shrank back when it became a question of meddling with it: the instinct for the preservation of an established order was strong. ”

“ One does not need to doubt or believe in this particular collegiate method to give full assent to Lowell’s dictum that “the most precious property of culture and of a college as its trustee is to maintain higher ideals of life and its purpose, to keep trimmed and burning the lamps of that pharos, built by wiser than we, that warns from the reef and shallows of popular doctrine.” For as he moves forward in his address, he is drawn inevitably into a consideration of what was, first and last, the fundamental social question with him, the democratic idea. ”

“ The intellectual life of the early mill girls of Lowell is a phenomenon that will always amaze the student of American conditions. After a twelve-hour work-day in the mills these girls had enough spirit and ambition left to read and study, to attend lectures, and to take a lively interest in the public questions of the day. In Lowell Hall series of lectures were being delivered at that time by college professors and other learned men, and these lectures were chiefly attended by the mill girls. ”

“ It has come about, healthy and strong, in the growth of the country—let us even say in the improvement of the world.
Presidents Quincy, Everett, Sparks, and Walker were all engaged in promoting the evolution of the university. After the close of that series come Thomas Hill and Charles William Eliot, the present incumbent, to whose energy, foresight, and courage so much of what may be called this revolution is due. I have already made some notes here of Mr. Quincy and Dr. Walker. It was in Walker’s administration that Lowell returned to the college as Smith professor. ”

“ And it is worth the while of young people to observe that in the group of men of letters at Cambridge and Boston, before and after James Lowell’s time, Samuel Eliot, William Orne White, James Freeman Clarke, Charles and James Lowell, John and Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Wentworth Higginson, and other such men never speak with contempt of the niceties of classical scholarship. You would not catch one of them in a bad quantity, as you sometimes do catch to-day even a college president, if you are away from Cambridge, in the mechanical Latin of his Commencement duty. ”

“ This, then, is Lowell,—a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and sounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and labor wrought their modern miracles. ”

“ The connection with the Standard had not altered Lowell’s position in politics. It found him independent, and left him so. He was no less a reformer at the end than he was at the beginning, but he was confirmed in his belief that the world must be healed by degrees; and as he was a disbeliever in the short cut to emancipation by way of disunion, so he was at once a firm believer in radical reform, but skeptical of ultimate success through the rooting out of individual evils. He found himself among people who were sure of their panaceas. ”

“ In Lowell’s college work the weakest part was his class teaching. While no teacher in the university was more willing to help his boys, his habit of doing most of the reading, when a boy labored, with friction, breaking right into his reading, was not agreeable to the boy. ”

“ Lowell had outdone himself that night. With merciless invective he had denounced the inhuman barbarism of the South in these lynchings. The sea of eager faces had answered his appeals as water the breath of a storm. He felt its mighty reflex influence sweep back on his soul and lift him to greater heights. He demanded equality of man on every inch of this earth’s soil.
“I demand this perfect equality,” he cried, “absolutely without reservation or subterfuge, both in form and essential reality. It is the life-blood of Democracy. It is the reason of our existence. ”

“ I think that the American people govern America, and that the intrigues or devices of the men who “run with the machine” are of much less importance than very young people suppose, who read very poor though very conceited weekly newspapers. However that may be, this country has received great advantage from Lowell’s determined interference and interaction in our politics in the years which followed his return in 1874. So vigorous were his writings that he was at once recognized as a pure public leader. ”

“ Who shall count your vocation otherwise than noble and ennobling?”
Of their literary and studious habits, Professor A. P. Peabody, of Harvard University, gives his opinion in an article written not long ago in the Atlantic Monthly. He says, “During the palmy days of The Lowell Offering I used every winter to lecture for the Lowell Lyceum. Not amusement, but instruction, was then the lecturer’s aim.... The Lowell Hall was always crowded, and four-fifths of the audience [75] were factory-girls. When the lecturer entered, almost every girl had a book in her hand, and was intent upon it. ”

“ He had refrained, as we have seen, from touching in his English address on Democracy upon the perils which beset it in its American stronghold, but here, at home, in the very heart of its stoutest defence, he must needs use these perils to emphasize his doctrine that the prime business of the college is to “set free, to supple, and to train the faculties in such wise as shall make them most effective for whatever task life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life rather than for its business, and to open windows on every side of the mind where thickness of wall does not prevent it.” ”