A Great Good Man
by
Some men are great soldiers. Some are great law-makers. Some men write great books. Some men make great in-ven-tions. Some men are great speakers.
Now you are going to read about a man that was great in none of these things. He was not a soldier. He was not a great speaker. He was never rich. He was a poor school-teacher. He never held any office.
And yet he was a great man. He was great for his goodness.
He was born in France. But most of his life was passed in Phil-a-del-phi-a before the Rev-o-lu-tion.
He was twenty-five years old when he became a school-teacher. He thought that he could do more good in teaching than in any other way.
School-masters in his time were not like our teachers. Children were treated like little animals. In old times the school-master was a little king. He walked and talked as if he knew every-thing. He wanted all the children to be afraid of him.
But Ben-e-zet was not that kind of man. He was very gentle. He treated the children more kindly than their fathers and mothers did. Nobody in this country had ever seen a teacher like him.
He built a play-room for the children of his school. He used to take them to this room during school time for a little a-muse-ment. He man-aged each child as he found best. Some he could persuade to be good. Some he shamed into being good. But this was very dif-fer-ent from the cruel beatings that other teachers of that time gave their pupils.
Of course the children came to love him very much. After they grew to be men and women, they kept their love for the good little schoolmaster. As long as they lived they listened to his advice.
There were no good school-books in his time. He wrote some little books to make learning easier to his pupils. He taught them many things not in their books. He taught them to be kind to brutes, and gentle with one another. He taught them to be noble. He made them despise every kind of meanness.
He was a great teacher. That is better than being a great soldier.
Ben-e-zet was a good man in many ways. He was the friend of all poor people. Once he found a poor man suf-fer-ing with cold for want of a coat. He took off his own coat in the street and put it on the poor man, and then went home in his shirt sleeves.
In those days negroes were stolen from Af-ri-ca to be sold into A-mer-i-ca. Ben-e-zet wrote little books against this wrong. He sent these books over all the world almost. He also tried to persuade the white men of his own country to be honest and kind with the Indians. Great men in other countries were pleased with his books. They wrote him letters. When any of them came to this country, they went to see him. They wanted to see a man that was good to everybody. His house was a plain one. But great men liked to sit at the table of the good schoolmaster.
There was war between the English and French at that time. Can-a-da belonged to the French. Our country belonged to the English. There was a country called A-ca-di-a. It was a part of what is now No-va Sco-ti-a. The people of A-ca-di-a were French.
The English took the A-ca-di-ans away from their homes. They sent them to various places. Many families were divided. The poor A-ca-di-ans lost their homes and all that they had.
Many hundreds of these people were sent to Phil-a-del-phi-a. Benezet became their friend. As he was born in France, he could speak their lan-guage. He got a large house built for some of them to stay in. He got food and clothing for them. He helped them to get work, and did them good in many other ways.