THE EXPANDING ENLIGHTENMENT 169
standing of psychological and social forces the historian might enable Americans to direct their future course more certainly along the path of progress.5
Political measures appealed to others as the best way to overcome threats to progress. Convinced that progress was merely a chimera if Federalist policies were unchecked, John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia, called on agrarian America to mobilize against the menace of chartered banks, protective tariffs, and moneyed corporations. In his Enquiry into the Principles and Tendency of Certain Public Measures (1794) Taylor attacked these rising institutions as instruments of the moneyed aristocracy for exploiting other classes. In subsequent writings this economic realist warned his fellow citizens that unless corporations were checked they would erect a new moneyed aristocracy that would sink America to the level of former aristocracies.
The Vogue of the Modem Languages and Literatures
While it would be too much to say that the classics were disparaged by all the disciples of the idea of progress and the Enlightenment, they unquestionably did hold a less important place in the liberal climate of opinion of the late eighteenth century than they had once held. Jefferson, who so well exemplified the Enlightenment, continued to find inspiration in the classics, and Franklin himself looked with greater favor on them in later life; but Dr. Benjamin Rush was more representative of the American exponents of the Enlightenment. Writing in 1791, Rush declared that the emphasis'the classics had received explained iix large measure the prejudice which the masses felt for institutions of learning. So long as Latin and Greek remained the only avenues to education, universal diffusion of knowledge beyond the bare rudiments was impossible. In a new country where the chief task was to explore and develop natural resources, education should be functional to the main concern. "Under these circumstances, to spend four or five years in learning two dead languages, is to turn our backs upon a gold mine, in order to amuse ourselves catching butterflies/' If the time spent on Latin and Greek were devoted to science, continued this champion of
5 Nathaniel Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, Vermont, 1793), 31-33.