Excerpt from Relation of Education to Wealth and Morality, and to Pauperism and Crime: An Address Delivered at the Reunion of the Alumni of Bridgton Academy, on the 74th Anniversary, July 12th, 1882; And Also Before the Phi Beta Kappa Association, of New York
This is a topic especially appropriate for investigation by the friends of an institution of learning that for half a century has been diffusing its blessings with a generous hand over a thoughtful and intelligent community.
One set of philosophers, led by Benjamin Franklin, proclaim that the surest road to wealth is industry and economy. But another answers that the Chinese, for two thousand years, have excelled all other races and nations in these two virtues, and yet are distinguished, not for their wealth, but rather for the poverty of the great majority of their people.
Something, then, besides mere industry and economy is required even to amass wealth.
The great religious reformers and prophets, as Boodh, Confucius, Plato, Our Savior, Mohammed and Luther, have held up religion as the panacea for all moral obliquity, and yet history declares that the ages and countries most fervid with religion - as for example, Europe - from the 10th to the l5th century, have been pervaded with crime.
The great Christian churches of the Roman Catholic rite, and of the Greek rite, declare that "ignorance is the mother of devotion," and that devotion to these churches is the safety of humanity. Vet the seat of the Greek Church, Russia, where nine tenths of the population are illiterate, has this very year, made the world shudder, at the barbaric crimes committed in that empire upon the brethren of the Founder of Christianity, the Hebrews; the most intelligent and thriving subjects of the temporal head of the Greek Church.
Ireland, for a thousand years one of the most faithful devotees of the Church of Rome, has just completed the entire curriculum of crime, from refusal to pay debts, to murder in the first degree, and made both life and property unsafe within her borders.
It is clear then that "ignorance and devotion" will not bring on the millenium. Evidently the problem of what will accomplish the most complete and efficient prevention of pauperism and crime and produce the highest average increase of wealth and morality, is not yet solved. Its solution is difficult.
One of the best teachers and most scholarly gentleman that in a half century has had the good fortune to preside over this Academy - Moses Soule - often encouraged his pupils by quoting to them from Terence the lines:
Nil tam difficile est
Quin qu?rendo investigari possit.
Nothing is so difficult but that by study it may be solved.
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