CHAPTER XI. J. L. M. CURRY AND HIS SERVICES TO EDUCATION IN THE SOUTH. CONTENTS. I. Proceedings of the Trustees of the Peabody Fund. II. Eulogium of Dr. J. L. M. Curry: By E. A. Alderman, President of Tulane University. I. PROCEEDINGS OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE PEABODY EDUCATION FUND, AT THEIR FORTY-THIRD MEETING, NEW YORK, OCTOBER 8, 1903. There were present: Chief Justice Fuller, the chairman, and Messrs. Green, Porter, Morgan, Courtenay, Somerville, Fenner, Gilman, Hoar, Smith, Doane, and Jesup. Chief Justice Fuller announced the death of Doctor Curry. the general agent of the board, and at his request Doctor Gilman presented the following minute, which, on motion of Judge Fenner, was adopted by the trustees as an expression of their views. When the vote on the adoption was taken the members rose from their seats out of respect to Doctor Curry's memory. The trustees of the Peabody Education Fund gratefully record their appreciation of the services of Hon. J. L. M. Curry, LL. D., as general agent of the fund. On the death of Dr. Barnas Sears, the wise originator of the methods adopted by this board under Mr. Winthrop's guidance, Doctor Curry, in 1881, was unanimously appointed his successor. He had already acquired distinction as a soldier, a legislator, a minister of the Gospel, and a college president, and his acquaintance with the leaders of public opinion and with the educational conditions of the Southern States, enabled him to enter upon the administrative responsibilities to which he was called with every assurance of success. These expectations were completely sustained. A few years later, at the suggestion of President Hayes, who was a member of the two boards, Doctor Curry was made the executive officer of the Slater Fund as well as of the Peabody, and in this double capacity he traveled widely and constantly in the South, visited colleges, normal schools, industrial schools, and common schools, attended educational conventions, and addressed not infrequently, and at their request, both houses of the legislature in many, if not all of the Southern States. He was also called upon in the Northern States to discuss those phases of education with which he was familiar. Few of his contemporaries can be compared with Doctor Curry as an orator, so that it is doubtless due to him, in a large degree, that the present awakening of the South to the importance of public provision for education should be attributed. He was keenly alive to the responsibilities of his position, unwearied by the long journeys which they involved, conscious of radical differences of opinion among those whom he met, and undismayed by perplexities. His enthusiasm for education, his consideration for others, and his sincere desire to promote the welfare of all the people enabled him to exert a profound and serviceable influence which will never be forgotten. Twice during his connection with this board he was appointed by different administrations to represent the United States at the Spanish court. With these exceptions his services were uninterrupted until a few months before his death, when his physical powers gave way. The board provided for his relief from such duties as he was willing to throw off, yet his vigor had departed never to return. He was unable to attend the special meeting of the board in January last, and he died near Asheville, N. C., February 12, 1903, in his seventy-eighth year. He was buried in Richmond, and at the funeral his colleagues in this board were represented by the treasurer, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. Mrs. Curry, who was then a great invalid, died a few weeks later. It is not easy to sum up in a few sentences the characteristics of this remarkable man. His versatility is shown by the various positions to which he was called the bar, the ministry, the legislature, the Army, the Congress of the Confederate States, the Congress of the United States, the professorship of law, the administration of two educational trusts, the mission to Spain. It was twenty years after the outbreak of the civil war when he entered upon his task as a promoter of peace and union by the agency of education; and during the twenty-two years that still remained to him of life his other distinctions, if they did not vanish, were quite subordinate to that which came from his connection with this fund. As an adviser to the trustees, as the official visitor to the schools which were aided by the board, as the authorized exponent and advocate of general education, as the eloquent and forcible speaker upon the public platform, he won the admiration and respect of his associates and colleagues. Other leaders will undoubtedly come forward, but the managers of this trust will never fail to associate the names of Sears and Curry with those of Peabody and Winthrop. To these four men perpetual gratitude is due. II.-EULOGIUM OF DR. J. L. M. CURRY. BY E. A. ALDERMAN, PRESIDENT OF TULANE UNIVERSITY. [An address delivered at the 1903 meeting of the National Educational Association, Boston, Mass.] Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry was born in Lincoln County, Ga., on June 5, 1825, and died in Asheville, N. C., on February 12, 1903. This long life was a purposeful life, rich in experience of men and governments, and full of devotion, of service, of struggle, and achievement. There was never a pause in its unceasing, virile activities, and when the end came I know no man of whom it could be more truthfully said that he had drunk honorable life to its lees. Doctor Curry had been a soldier in two wars, a maker of laws in State and nation, a teacher and preacher, a writer of useful books, twice a representative of his Government at the court of Spain, and a statesman of that truest sort whose faith in the perfectibility of men was unfailing and whose ambition was to give to all men a chance to inherit the power, the beauty, and the richness of life. The intense, rich life of Doctor Curry covered an equally rich period of his country's history. Thomas Jefferson was still alive when he entered the world. The scene of his youthful activity was the isolated lower South; for, though born in Georgia, Alabama was the State which he served from his entrance into the Alabama legislature in 1847 to his presidency of Howard College in 1868. He was well born and well educated, and he inherited a certain distinction of manner and presence that commended him well to the genius of his age and region. His young manhood was passed amid the storm of a great argument, made necessary by the silence and indecision of the Constitution as to the nature of this Union. To our minds, cleared of the hot temper of the time, that age seems an unhappy, groping age; but it was a good age in which to be born, for men were in earnest about deep, vital things. It was, indeed, an age of passion, but of passion based on principles and enthusiasm and deep loyalties. The cynic, the political idler, the self-seeker, fled before these fiery-eyed men who were probing into governmental theories and Constitutional interpretations and who counted their ideas as of more value than their lives. The time had its obvious faults, and was doomed to fall before the avatar of progress; but there lived in it beauty and force, and a great central note of exaltation of personality above social progress. Around the fireside the talk did not fall so much upon the kind of man who forms the syndicate or corners the stock market, or who wages the warfare of trade around the world, but, rather, simple, old questions were asked which might have been asked in the Homeric age: Is he free from sordidness or stain? Has he borne himself bravely in battle? Has he suffered somewhere with courage and dignity? Has he kept faith with ideals? Doctor Curry had reached his prime when the great drama, fate driven and fate determined, passed from argument into war, and he himself, caught in the grip of that same fate, notwithstanding all his gentleness and tenderness, played the part of a man and a soldier. He had reached the heights of middle age when the storm had passed and pain and despair had smitten so many souls. What is there for a strong man to do-a man of heart and courage, with a spirit unspoiled by hate or bitter memories, with a purpose unshaken by any doubt? This was the great interrogatory that faced him in the silence of his soul. There could be no bickerings for such men as he. There could be no crude racial scorn, no pettiness, no puerile obstinacy. His passion was for constructiveness. His supreme genius was for adaptability to environment. He saw his task lying before him— like a sunlit road that stretches straight before the traveler's feet. He was to walk in that path for all his remaining days. The quality of his mind, the sum of his gifts and graces, the ideals of contemporary civilization suggested forensic preferment, but no consideration of fortune or of self could swerve him from his course. The quiet man at Lexington who had borne the greatest burden of all saw the same vision that appeared to Curry. It was a vision of many millions of children standing impoverished and untaught amid new duties, new occasions, new needs; appealing to the grown-up strength of their generation to know why they should not have a country to love, an age to serve, a work to do, and training for that work. The vision was life-unconquered, tumultuous, renewing, regenerative young life. The elders had had their day. Here stood undefeated youth asking a chance to live worthily in its world and time. George Peabody, away off in Massachusetts, saw the same vision. It did not matter to him that these youths were the sons of men who had been enemies to his cause. It did matter to him that youth which the nation needed was springing up untrained; and, rising clear above small passions, he poured his great fortune into the stricken States. Our amazing democracy has nothing finer to show than the spectacle of these three men acting thus largely in a time of national passion and headiness. The general agency of the Peabody and Slater boards came to Doctor Curry in 1881 as the opportunity of his life, and his last years were to be years of splendid youth wherein he was able to work resolutely for high national ends. The task that confronted him, in its larger lines, was to democratize the point of view of an aristocratic society, to renationalize its ideals and its impulses, to preach the gospel of national unity to both sections, to stimulate the habit of community effort for public ends, to incarnate to young men the ideal of social service, and to set the public school, in its proper correlation to all other educational agencies, in the front of the public mind as the chief concern of educational statesmanship. His task, in its more technical aspect, was to reveal the public school as it should be--actually at work in a democratic form of society, with all of its necessities-trained and cultured teachers, varied curricula, industrial training, and worthy surroundings. From 1881 to 1895 his work was to be a battle for public opinion. And slowly that public opinion got born, and many earnest men gathered around this splendid figure, and under its influence young scholars had their creative instincts awakened and public men felt its stirrings in the air. Above it all and energizing it all stood this genuinely gifted man-I had thought to say old man, but there was never any suggestion of age about Doctor Curry. He met youth on its own grounds and asked no odds. As the things of sense faded from his sight there was vouchsafed to him that supremest good of life-an honest bit of creative work well done and bearing fruit. At the beginning of his work not a single Southern State had a system of free public schools. At his death there existed in every one of the Southern States a system of public schools more or less complete, and a wonderful activity in university, normal, technical, and industrial education. And, greater than all this, a generous and triumphant public sentiment had been aroused that will never stop short of efficiency and perfection. It was given to him to see Southern governors from Montague to Heard turned into educational statesmen and to behold the best brain and heart of the North and the South united in a common and intelligent purpose, to get at this great task right and heartily. His was the first voice to declare that the strategic point of this whole battle was the untaught white man and his child. He was among the first to declare that there was no place for a helot in our system and that the negro should be properly trained for life in the Republic. He was among the first to urge common sense as against sentimentality in the education of the negro. He caused the world to know something of the courage and patience and self-reliance of the southern struggle for self-realization, and he made the world believe that there were strength and purpose enough in this people to solve their own problems with justice and wisdom. In the discharge of all these duties of the pioneer and propagandist, no man who has lived in America since Horace Mann has shown such energy and enthusiasm as J. L. M. Curry. Personally, Doctor Curry was a man to enjoy and to love. He had the grand manner and the social instincts of the old order. He moved in a fine, lordly way among his fellows. But at his heart he was a democrat to the core, and an individualist in the structure of his mind and in his sublime patience with and belief in the unfailing rectitude of public impulse. He had the genins for giving himself out and the equipment of intellect and temperament necessary for his many-sided duties. It did not matter to him whether he spoke before this learned body or in some little country village-he was all there, heart and soul. The real genius of the man, as I have said, was for adaptability to his time and for sympathy and service on the side of its better forces. The most vivid characteristic of the man was his intense and complete Americanism. He had believed in his youth in the ethics, at least, of secession. He did not change that belief in his old age. Calhoun was second only to Aristotle in his regard; and yet I have never seen a man to whom the flag made such an appeal or to whom the great unrended nation was so dear. The unforgettable service of J. L. M. Curry was the development of an irresist ible public opinion for the education of all the people in the Southern States. The great lesson of his life is the joyous fruitfulness of unselfish striving for high impersonal aims. His fame is secure, for it is the persistent fame of the teacher and reformer. Is it not our task-the task of the living-to press forward with patience and quiet resolve not to be deterred, not to despair, nor fret, nor doubt? Surely this work we are in is the nation's work, and this nation is a great spiritual adventure, worth living for and working for, as well as dying for. III.-SERVICES OF DOCTOR CURRY IN CONNECTION WITH THE PEABODY FUND. BY A. D. MAYO, A. M., LL.D. The death of Dr. Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry at Asheville, N. C., on February 12, 1903, removed from the Southern States a man who for the past twenty-two years had been not only the most conspicuous of southern educational leaders, but. perhaps, beyond all others, has illustrated the position and functions of an educational statesman. The fifty-six years of public life allotted to him were an extraordinary training for a work of great magnitude in a crisis of the civilization |