?«'«£*'**& f«^*>'i^--*'i¥ft'S?-fc-*^^ ?f^ Mi^^ GIFT OF ^ kS Horace Bushnell, The Citizen. By EDWIN D. MEAD. BOSTON, 1900. v^^ -> e little surplus of his year's production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder of his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world, you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the sordid look of the picture; but, five or ten years hence, this boy will prob- ably enough be found in college, digging out the cent's worths of his father's money in hard study; and some twenty years later he will be rcturninir in his honors, as the celebrated judge, or governor, or senator and public orator, from some one of the great states of the republic, to bless the sight once more of that venerated pair who sha])ed his beginnings and planted the small seed of his future success. Small seeds, you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up and blos- somed into a large-minded life, a generous public devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind," We have quoted thus largely from this noble address, because it reveals like nothing else the background and the shaping forces of this great New England life, and because it strikes again and again the real kev-note of his gospel of citizenship. That gos- pel was a gospel of virtue, of morality, of self-reliance and of work, of sim- plicity, high-mindedness. fraternity and public spirit, of a politics com- manded and surcharged with religion, a new Puritanism, There was no one of his political addresses in which the closing words of "The Age of Home- spun" would not somewhere have found proper place. ''Your condition will hereafter be soft- ened, and your comforts multiplied. Let your culture be as much advanced. But let no delicate spirit that despises work grow up in your sons and daughters. Make these rocky hills smooth their faces and smile under your industry. Let' no absurd ambition tempt you to imitate the manners of the great world of fashion, and rob you thus of the respect and dignity that pertain to manners properly your own. Maintain, above all, j'our religious exact- ness. Think what is true, and then respect yourselves in living exactly what you think. Fear God and keep his command- ments, as your godly fathers and mothers did before you, and found to be the begin- ning of wisdom." As Bushnell was a warm lover of his own Litchfield county, so was he a supremely loyal son of his own state ; and as "The Age of Homespun" is the most noteworthy literary tribute to the life and people of his boyhood home, so is his "Historical Estimate" of Connecticut, an address delivered before the legislature of the state, it may be observed, the same summer that the sermon was given at Litch- field, the most significant review HORACE BUSHNELL, THE CITIZEN which has ever been written of the noteworthy and noble things for which Connecticut has stood. In all the circles of his patriotism, Bush- nell's heart beat strongly. He loved his native place, he loved his city of Hartford, he loved Connecticut, he loved America, and he loved the world ; and his patriotism in each nar- rower circle was food and inspiration for that in the wider and the wider still. "The man who does not love and honor the state in which he and his children are born has no heart in his bosom," he says at the beginning of his "Historical Estimate ;" and this eloquent survey of the history of Con- necticut is indeed the tribute of a lover. It is the tribute of the most just and intelligent lover. Nothing perhaps reveals more trulv Bushnell's splendid scholarship ; and after we have followed him in his careful sur- vey of the services of Hooker, Daven- port, the younger Winthrop and the other founders of Connecticut, and the men of the period of the Revolu- tion and the Constitutional Conven- tion, we are not disposed in any way to temper his enthusiastic tributes. His study of the strong local inde- pendence of the little Connecticut towns has a peculiar value. We dis- cussed in these pages some months ago the splendid opportunities which our American history offers to the American painter; and we spoke of several noteworthy hints and outlines of particular subjects given by various imaginative writers. Bushnell gives such a hint in his "Historical Esti- mate," and it is such a striking pic- ture which he suggests that we must quote the passage. It is where he pictures the return of Mason with his little Puritan legion to Hartford, after the Pequot war, when the colony made him its general-in-chief, and Hooker, in presence of the people, delivered him his commission. "Here is a scene for the painter of some future day — I see it even now before me. Tn the distance and behind the huts of Hartford waves the signal flag by which the town watch is to give notice of enemies. In the foreground stands the tall, swart form of the soldier in his armor; and be- fore him, in sacred, apostolic majesty, the manly Hooker. Haynes and Hopkins, with ' the legislature and the hardy, toil- worn settlers and their wives and daugh- ters, are gathered round them in close order, gazing with moistened eyes at the hand which lifts the open commission to God, and listening to the fervent prayer that the God of Israel will endue his ser- vant, as heretofore, with courage and counsel to lead them in the days of their future peril. True there is nothing classic in this scene; this is no crown bestowed at the Olympic games, or at a Roman tri- umph; and yet there is a severe, primitive sublimity in the picture, that will some- time be invested with feelings of the deep- est re\erence." The Massachusetts man may feel that the space which Bushnell gives to arguing that Putnam and not Pres- cott was the commander at Bunker Hill is disproportionate; but he does not grudge any word of praise for Putnam any more than he grudges the warm words to Wooster. Wolcott, Ledyard and Brother Jonathan. It is not with Connecticut statesmen and warriors only that this "Historical Es- timate" concerns itself; the Connecti- cut clergy and poets, inventors and educators, have due honor, — and the names of these are many and great. The occasion of the address was the inauguration of the State Normal School at New Britain, and therefore, as was fitting, the educational institu- tions of Connecticut, from Yale Col- lege to the district schools of "a little obscure parish in Litchfield county," whose remarkable contributions to the intellectual hfe of the nation he enumerated with joy and pride, were given special prominence. Connecti- cut, he said, "is to find her first and noblest interest, apart from religion, in the full and perfect education of her sons and daughters." No other New England state can point to such a his- torical estimate as Dr. Bushnell has made of Connecticut in this glowing essay ; and the history as it rises to view under his loving pen is seen to be what he pronounces it, — "a history 8 HORACE BUSHNELL, THE CITIZEN. of practical greatness and true honor ; illustrious in its beginning; serious and thoughtful in its progress ; dis- pensing intelligence, without the re- wards of fame; heroic for the right, instigated by no hope of applause ; independent, as not knowing how to be otherwise ; adorned with names of wisdom and greatness, fit to be re- vered as long as true excellence may have a place in the reverence of man- kind." * * * It was most fitting that Connecti- cut should call Dr. Bushnell to give the address before her legislature upon the occasion of the opening of her State Normal School. His ser- vices for the cause of education alto- gether were very great. It would be interesting to dwell upon his relations to Yale College, from his student days there to the day of his death. It was before the alumni of Yale College that he delivered, in 1843, his oration upon "The Growth of Law," to which we shall presently refer in speaking of his conspicuous services for the cause of internationalism and the organization of the world. It was before the alumni of Yale College that he de- livered, in 1865, at the commemora- tive celebration in honor of those of the alunmi who fell in the war of the rebellion his great oration upon "Our Obligations to the Dead." He led his class at Yale, we read, in athletic sports, as well as on the intellectual side ; and he left in the college an en- during monument in the Beethoven Society, which he organized in order to lift the standard of the music in the chapel. Bushnell, some one has writ- ten, was "musically organized;" and his_ discourse on "Religious Music," which was delivered before this Bee- thoven Society at the opening of a new organ — the first used in the col- lege — is a discourse which should be read and honored in every school of music, as its author's luminous and inspiring essay upon "Building Eras in Religion" should be read by every student and teacher of architecture. As we turn the pages of his volumes, we note that it was before various Yale bodies that many of his ad- dresses were delivered ; and there were addresses there delivered which have not been reprinted. As a fre- quent preacher in the college chapel, he was a perennial influence at Yale ; and as we write the word, an old Yale student, now the head of one of our great educational institutions, enters our room to tell us how for him, as for so many others, those sermons were the beginning of the real life of thought. It was at New Haven, before the Sheffield Scientific School, at Com- mencement in 1870, that Bushnell gave his address upon "The New Educa- tion," which is one of the warmest and wisest welcomes of the new scien- tific tendencies in our schools and universities which can be found in the books. Like every word of Bush- nell's, this word is strong and satisfy- ing because it is comprehensive and proportionate. Nowhere are the de- fects of the old academic method more frankly pointed out ; nowhere are the usefulness and need of scien- tific training more enthusiastically emphasized. So far from sharing the jealousies of the new scientific move- ment in education, which was so com- mon in religious circles thirty years ago, Bushnell took "a most particular pleasure in the advocacy of a way of education specially devoted to the ap- plications of science, because of the conviction I feel that our schools of application will be the best and most certain rectifiers possible of the unbe- lieving tendencies of science itself." So far from sharing the apprehension which was then common among academic folk, that the new scientific enthusiasm was a menace to literary and humanistic culture, he confidently prophesied precisely the results which have followed. Replying to the gen- eral charge that in his criticism of the old and his hospitality to the new he was willing to take down the honors HORACE BUSHNELL, THE CITIZEN. of the fuller and more fertilizing courses, he exclaimed: "Far from it. I accept no such construc- tion as that. I can think of it only as ab- surd. No, a true classic culture can never be antiquated; and if I seem to raise a crusade for the shorter methods of applied science, I do it in the clear understanding that such shorter methods are wanted, and that I am doing nothing against, but every- thing for the advancement of the old methods. For if we push the new educa- tion to its utmost efficiency and far enough to practically fill the whole tier of life for which it is organized, making every walk of industry and enterprise, every farm- house, factory, mine, trade, road, every shop of handicraft, every humblest toil, even down to the knife-grinder's lathe and fisherman's barrow, to feel its quickening touch of intelligence, the classic culture will only be as much more largely sought, and its courses as much more frequented, as the general under-lift of mind is higher than it was before." It was not, however, solely nor in- deed chiefly to the university that Bushnell addressed his interest and effort as an educational thinker. We know of no words of his upon the higher education — and we think of many earnest ones — so earnest or so pregnant as those upon the common school. If we were to commend one of his educational addresses above all others to the American people to- day, it would be that upon "Common Schools." He insists upon the fun- damental importance of the common school as "a great American mstitu- tion ; one that has its "beginnings with our history itself ; one that is insepara- bly joined to the fortunes of the re- public ; and one that can never wax old or be discontinued in its rights and reasons till the pillars of the State are themselves cloven down forever." He sees clearly the inseparableness of democracy and public education. He would have said, as we said last month in these pages, that education is sim- ply another way of spelling de- mocracy. The common school, he said, "is an integral part of the civil order." "An application against com- mon schools is an application tor the dismemberment and reorganization of the civil order of the State." The true schools for our American democracy, the schools which alone can make for the perpetuity and integrity of a really democratic society and democratic institutions, he emphasizes most strongly and with impressive detail, must be public and common, "in just the same sense that all the laws are common ; so that the experience of families and of children under them shall be an experience of the great republican rule of majorities ; an ex- ercise for majorities of obedience to fixed statutes, and of moderation and impartial respect to the rights and feelings of minorities ; an exercise for minorities of patience and of loyal assent to the will of majorities ; a schooling, in that manner, which be- gins at the earliest moment possible, in the rules of American law and the duties of an American citizen." In all the discussions of the parochial school question which have followed in the half century, few really important prin- ciples have been laid down which are not clearly outlined in this address by Bushnell. in 1853. He points out with careful kindness what the ways and places are for toleration and for generous hospitality ; but he shows W'ith a firmness and common sense equally great what the imperative^ of .1 republic are upon all citizens alike, whatever their religion. The danger to the American public school from religious parochialism of any kind is perhaps passing by. The danger from social parochialisms of manv kinds is to-dav greater; and Bushnell's words upon this point are so serious and im- portant that we quote the passacre in its entirety, as something upon which many men and women of wealth and high social position in our American cities should solemnlv ponder. We do not remember anv word upon this subject so impressive as this, save one. the word of Phillips Brooks in his crreat address before the Boston Latin School. 10 IJORACR BUSHNELL, THE CITIZEN. "This great institution of common schools is not only a part of the state, but is imperiously wanted as such, for the com- mon traininsT of so many classes and condi- tions of people. There needs to be some place where, in early childhood, they may be brought together and made acquainted with each other; thus to wear away the sense of distance, otherwise certain to be- come an established animosity of orders; to form friendships; to be exercised to- gether on a common footing of ingenuous rivalry; the children of the rich to feel the power and do honor to the struggles of merit in the lowly, when it rises above them; the children of the poor to learn the force of merit and feel the benign encour- agement yielded by its blameless victories. Indeed, no child can be said to be w^ell trained, especiallv no male child, who has not met the people as thev are, above him or below, in the seatings, plays and studies of the common school. Without this he can never be a fully qualified citizen, or prepared to act his part wisely as a citizen. Confined to a select school, where only the children of wealth and distinction are gath- ered, he will not know the merit there is in the real virtues of the poor, or the power that slumbers in their talent. He will take his better dress as a token of his better quality, look down upon the children of the lowly with an educated contempt, pre- pare to take on lofty airs of confidence and presumption afterward; finally, to make the discovery when it is too late that poverty has been the sturdy nurse of talent in some unhonored youth who comes up to afifront him by an equal, or mortify and crush him by an overmastering, force. So also the children of the poor and lowly, if they should be privately educated in some in- ferior degree by the honest and faithful ex- ertion of their parents, secreted, as it were, in some back alley or obscure corner of the town, will either grow uo in a fierce, in- bred hatred of the wealthier classes, or else in a mind cowed by undue modesty, as be- ing of another and inferior quality, unable therefore to fight the great battle of life hopefully, and counting it a kind of pre- sumption to think that they can force their way upward, even by merit itself. With- out common schools, the disadvantage falls both ways in about equal degrees, and the disadvantage that accrues to the state, in the loss of so much cha-acter and so many cross ties of muttial resnect and generous annrcciation. ""e embittering so fatally of all outward distinctions, and the propaga- tion of so many misunderstandings, richfed only by the immense public mis- chiefs that follow. — this, I say, is greater even than the disadvantages accruing to the classes themselves; a disadvantage that weakens immensely the security of the state and even of its liberties. Indeed, I seri- ously doubt whether any system of popu- lar government can stand the shock, for any length of time, of that fierce animosity that is certain to be gendered where tlie cliildren are trained up wholly in their classes, and never brought together to feel, understand, appreciate and respect each other, on the common footing of merit and of native talent, in a common school. Fall- ing back thus on the test of merit and of native force, at an early period of life, mod- erates immensely their valuation of mere conventionalities and of the accidents of fortune, and puts them in a way of defer- ence that is genuine as well as necessary to their common peace in the slate. Com- mon schools are nurseries thus of a free republic; private schools, of factions, cabals, agrarian laws and contests of force. Therefore. I say, we must have common schools; they are American, indispensable to our American institutions, and must not be yielded for any consideration smaller than the price of our liberties." In connection with the subject of Dr. Bushnell's interest in education, his year in Cahfornia constituted one of the most significant chapters of his Hfe. Here he appears preeminently as the great citizen and as a distinct and shaping force in American educa- tion. This Cahfornia episode re- ceives but passing mention in Dr. Munger's book. The earher biog- raphy devotes a chapter to it, occu- pied almost entirely by Bushnell's let- ters describing his California life ; but the great purport of that life to the new Pacific state and its intellectual interests has no adequate statement. We have said that a special book is needed in America upon "Horace Bushnell, the. Citizen." We com- mend to some bright and reverent historical student in the University of California the preparation of a special monograph upon "Horace Bushnell in California." In such a volume should be reprinted the three Califor- nia addresses which have not been collected in any of the volumes of Bushnell's works, but exist, almost inaccessi1)le, only in pamphlet form: "Society and Religion: a Sermon for California." delivered at the installa- tion of the pastor of the First Con- HORACE BUSH NELL, THE CITIZEN. II gregational Church of San Francisco, in 1856, a sermon which may be com- pared, in its service for CaHfornia, with John Cotton's "God's Promise to His Plantation," in its service for the colony of Massachusetts Bay ; the appeal for an endowment for the new University of California, issued by Bushnell in 1857; and the article upon "The Characteristics and Pros- pects of California," published orig- inally in the Nczv Englaudcr and then circulated in pamphlet form in 1858. We know of no other description of California and no forecast of its future in that early day so interesting or so valuable as this. It ranks with Ma- nasseh Cutler's "Description of Ohio" in 1787. Horace Bushnell v/as in- deed California's Manasseh Cutler; and like Manasseh Cutler his chief in- terests for the new world with whose opening he was concerned were not material, but political, religious and educational. His effort was to make California know at the beginning that "more to her than gold or grain" should be "the cunning hand and cul- tured brain." "The doing world of California," he said in his appeal for an endowment for the new univer- sity, "will be right when there is a right thinking world of California prepared, before the doing, to shape it." "It is not," he said, "in the gold, nor the wheat, nor the cattle on a thousand hills, that California is to find, after all, its richest wealth and its noblest honors ; but it is in the sons she trains up and consecrates to religion, as the anointed prophets and preachers of God's truth, her great orators of every name and field, her statesmen, her works of art and genius, the voices of song that pour out their eternal music from her hills. Her pride is not that wanting a Shakespeare or a Bacon or an Ed- wards, she sent for him : but that hav- ing begotten and made him. he is hers.'; ' It is indeed a memorable thing that it should have been this great New England Puritan who was the animat- ing spirit in so high degree in the founding of the great university which looks forth through the Golden Gate ; that he should have selected its unrivalled site and should have been invited to become its first president. 'Tf I can get a university on its feet, or only the nest ei>;^ laid, before I re- turn," he wrote from San Francisco to his Hartford friends, just before he went back to them, "I shall not have come to this new world in vain." Of all the interesting things in his letters from California, there are none so in- teresting as those in which he tells of his explorations for the best site for the university and discusses the con- siderations for and against his accept- ance of the presidency. His sense of obligation to his faithful Hartford flock was the motive which finally de- termined him, and in New England, where his life began, it ended ; but surely no memory should be held in higher honor in California and in its university than that of Bushnell. When the trustees of the new uni- versity asked themselves by what name they should call the place where it was to be seated, their president, Frederick Billings, from Vermont, with that splendid idealism which often marks the business man, said: Call it Berkeley. A century ago the ereat Enstlish philosopher published hi? famous verses upon the planting of the arts and sciences in America. He entertained hich hopes of the future of learnine and culture here. So deeply did he feel the importance of making the spiritualities in- stead of the materialities control this great new world, that he came here to give his own life to the work. He went home thwarted and disappointed. Let us here, on the shore of the Pacific, help to realize his dream. The course of the empire of knowledge can take its way no farther west- ward on the continent than this place. Let the place be given gratefully and reverently his name. And Berkeley is its name. In the splendid plans for the rebuilding and extension of the great university, of which just now we hear so much, some place should certainly be found, 12 HORACE BUSH NELL, THE CITIZEN. and that a central and impressive place, for a statue of the great bishop ; and beside it should rise a statue of Horace Ikishncll. They would be joined fittingly, not only because of the relation of their names and influ- ences to this great seat of Icarnnig, but because they stand alike for that public spirit, that devotion to truth and to humanity, and that high ideal- ism, which we trust will ever there be native. Could the mouths of both men be opened there, they would unite in one prophecy and one prayer: "In happy climes, the seat of innocence, Where nature guides and virtue rules; Where men shall not impose for truth and sense The pedantry of courts and schools; — "There shall be sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic page, The wisest heads and noblest hearts." If the thought and learning of America command such an outlook through the Golden Gate upon the great new life and new duties that confront and invite the republic in the Pacific as would satisfy the eye and conscience of Berkeley and of Bush- nell, then indeed will that life be se- cure and true ; then will the nation be safe from every infidelity and every shame. In selecting the site and planning the grounds for a new university, Bushnell was exercising one of his most conspicuous and characteristic talents and 'indulging one of his dear- est enthusiasms. As Dr. Munger says, "he was a born engineer, always laying out roads and building parks and finding the best paths for railways among the hills." "It is characteris- tic of him," says Dr. Munger in an- other place, speaking of his religious thought, "that all his leading conten- tions had their genesis early in his career and were almost never absent from his thoughts." What was true of him as a theologian was true of him as an engineer and landscape architect; he was these from his very boyhood. His daughter writes: "He saw twice as much as most people do out of doors, took a mental sur- vey of all land surfaces, and ke])t m his head a complete map of the phys- ical geography of every place with which he was acquainted. He knew the leaf and bark of every tree and shrub that grows in New England; estimated the water power of every stream he crossed ; knew where all the springs were, and how they could be made available ; engineered roads and railroads ; laid out, in imagination, parks, cemeteries and private places ; noted the laying of every bit of stone wall." Referring to his own boasted piece of stone wall at the old home in Litchfield county, as firm after fifty years as when he laid it, she remarks that it is doubtful whether he was ever as well satisfied with any of his writings as he was with that stone wall. Dr. Bartol writes: "In otir many walks in Boston, nothing in streets or buildings. Common or Pub- lic Garden, but was caught by his eye and had improvements suggested from his thought ;" and Dr. Gladden, writing of his visit to North Adams, says: "He was up early in the sum- mer mornings and out for a walk ; once when he came in he said, 'I have found the place for your park,' and exhorted me to go to work at once and get the town to secure the site. It was indeed the very place for a park, and if the thriving city of North Adams could have it now, it would be a boon to her people ; but my faith was not strong enough, and North Adams lacks its Bushnell Park." His house at Hartford was built from his own plans. "In selecting the lot he provided for two things, a garden and an open view of the country, ending in distant hills. Each was a necessity to him, — the manifold life of growing things and the distant horizon." This engineering enthusiasm of his had large scope in California. In the section devoted to his California life. Dr. Munger says: "The variety of his studies and interests, especially in en- HORACE BUSHNELL, THE CITIZEN. 13 gineering and topography, reminds one of Da Vinci. If Bushnell had a passion outside of theology, it was for roads, and he closely connected the two ; the new country afforded him a wide field for each. He was a critic of all he saw with the eye, and a builder in imagination of such as were needed or were possible. He foresaw a railroad across the continent — hardly dreamed of as yet — and, hav- ing examined all possible routes of entrance into San Francisco, named the one that was finally chosen." In this connection there is a passage in his remarkable essay upon "City Plans" which should be rememl:)ered. After showing how Sacramento and Marysville, which are actually set below high-water mark, could both at the distance of hardly a mile have secured ample high ground, equally convenient, he notices the re- markable combination of disadvan- tages in San Francisco itself, which might all have been avoided by choosing another site. "There was just over the bay, a few miles to the north, at a Httle hamlet called San Pablo, a grand natural city plat about five miles square, graded handsomely down to the bay. supplied on its upper edge with the very best v,ater breaking out of a gorge in the hills, having a straight path out to sea for ships, among islands of rock easily defended, and a fair open sweep for railroad connections, north, east and south; and behind the rock summit on its mid-front a natural dock- ground two miles long, parti}' covered by the tides even now, and open to the deep water at both ends. In short, there was never in the world such a site for a mag- nificent commercial city; but, alas, the city is fixed elsewhere by the mere chance landing of adventure, and a change is for- ever impossible! What an illustration of the immense or even literallv unspeakable importance of the results that are some- times pending on the right location of a city!" It is a fair thing for San Francisco to consider, even at this late day, in view of the fact that she is likely to become one of the great cities of the world, whether it would not be profit- able for her now boldly to act upon Ijushnell's wisdom, and prove that to men of adequate vision and adequate energy no change which is commend- able is too great to be impossible. It was just before his visit to Cali- fornia that Bushnell threw himself into the work of securing a public park in his own city of Hartford. This park, which bears his name, was, as we have shown, the fruit of a hie- long passion. He early noticed, in the very centre of the city, a great tract that had never been put to use and was really a. deformity ; and after years of effort he carried ut his plan of transforming this into the beauti- ful Hartford park which we know, crowned by the State Capitol. The action of the city government, recog- nizing that this pubhc park was due to his foresight and persistence and naming it by his name, was an- nounced to him on his last day of conscious life. Speaking of this park, upon whose border stands Bushnell's own church. Dr. Parker, his fellow Hartford minister, has well written: "The entire scene, one of the fairest in our land, — the park, the church, the capitol, — is Dr. Bushnell's lasting memorial. Si qtiaeris monv.meiitmn, circimispice." Rev. Joseph Twichell, another Hartford friend and com- panion, has said that "Bushnell lies back of all that is best in the city. He quickened the men who have made Hartford what it is." i\nd yet another, Rev. N. H. Egleston, writes: "What interest of Hartford is not to- day indebted to him? Do we speak of schools? The fathers of those who are now enjoying our unsurpassed appliances for education know well that the city is indebted to no one more than to Dr. Bushnell for the new impulse which lifted its schools to their present grade of ex- cellence. Do we speak of taste and cul- ture? Who has been a nobler example and illustration of both, or who has by his just criticism and various instructions so aided in their development? If we turn 10 the business interests of the city, who of its older residents does not remember how, years ago. at a time when the im- pression had become prevalent that Hart- N HORACE DUSHNELL, THE CITIZEN. ford had reached its growth, that it was declining, wliilc other cities were outstrip- ping it, Dr. Bushnell lifted himself up in that crisis and asserted not only the abil- ity- but the dut}' of the city to prosper, and how he woke the city to new life, and gave an iniDulse which has been felt to this day? Hartford feels him to-day everywhere. It may be doubted whether another instance in our own history is to be found of a man impressing himself in so many ways and with sucii force upon a place of such size and importance as this. Hartford is largely what he has made it." The reference to Bushneirs word in Hartford's business crisis is to his sermon, "Prosperity our Duty," preached in 1847, a sermon not in- cluded, we think, in any of Bushnell's volumes, but which shall be included in the monog-raph upon "Horace Bushnell and Hartford," which some young Hartford scholar will some day, we trust, place in the library. In that volume will also be reprinted Bushnell's "History of the Hartford Park," published in 1869 in Hearth and Home. Alost comprehensive and most val- uable of Bushnell's writings as an en- gineer is the essay, "City Plans," pre- pared for the Public 'improvement Society of Hartford, but for reasons of health never delivered. In our own time there are manv men alive to the great question of public beauty, to the idea of a city as a unit and a true work of art, to the principles of a good city plan, the utilizing of his- torical association, the conditions of health, the requisites to fine effect; but when Bushnell wrote his essay upon "City Plans," there were few such men. In this field, as in so many others, Bushnell was a prophet. "There is wanted in this field," he wrote, •'a new profession, specially prepared by studies that belong to the special subject matter. If a city as a mere property con- cern is to involve amounts of capital greater than a dozen or even a hundred railroads, why, as a mere question of inter- est, should it be left to the misbegotten planning of some operator totally disquali- fied? We want a city-planning profession, as truly as an architectural, house-planning profession. Every new village, town. city. ought to be contrived as a work of art, and prepared for the new age of ornament to come." Of interest as an illustration of this engineering eye of his, as well as of his sense of the new life dawning for the world through the wonderful new opportunities of travel and communi- cation, is his striking address upon "The Day of Roads ;" and not remote in its interest is that great essay on "Building Eras in Religion," which gives its.nanie to one of his volumes. Few of his essays have greater sweep than this, or illustrate more impres- sively his aesthetic mind and his con- structive imagination. His interpre- tation of the spirit which reared the Jewish Temple and the spirit of the cathedral age is full of fine insight ; but more stimulating is his forward glance to the building era which will come when the intellectual synthesis to which the world is now advancing is complete. The moral and spiritual reg;eneration of the world which he foresees "is going to require a great building age for its uses ;" and he even ventures upon a program in large outline of this architecture of the new dispensation. "I know not anything that will fire us with higher thoughts and tone our energies for a loftier key than to see just wliat our prophets saw with so great triumph, glorious ages of building for God, such as never were beheld before ; a city of God, or it may be many, com- plete in all grandeur and beauty, and representing fitly the great ideas and glorious populations and high crea- tive powers of a universal Christian age." It is an essay for the Ameri- can architect as well as for the reli- gious man to study. What might we not hope, could we have an architec- tural genius fertilized by Bushnell's religious vision in as high degree as Bushnell's religious mind was en- riched by his architectural taste and talent! * * * The volume entitled "Moral Uses HORACE BUSH NELL, THE CITIZEX 15 of Dark Things" contains two essays, that upon "Bad Government" and that upon "The Conditions of Soli- darity," which must not be neglected by the student of Bushnell as a citi- zen, the latter being a noteworthy consideration of the organic nature of human society, upon which the whole tendency of thought since Bushnell's time has led us to lay even greater em- phasis. In the volume of "Sermons on Living Subjects" is a noble sermon on "How to be a Christian in Trade," which touches many vital considera- tions in our present business and social life. But for the most part the writings which represent Bushnell the citizen are collected in the two vol- umes, "Building Eras in Religion" and "Work and Play." These vol- um^es should lie upon the table in every American home. They should have place especially in the library of every young American student wdio is about to go out as an influence in our political and intellectual life, charged with the duty of keeping the republic true to the great ideals of its founders and to the moral imperative listened to so reverently and pro- claimed with such power by the au- thor of these pulsating pages. Few men in Am.erica have insisted more strenuously upon lifting political questions out of the region of tem- porary expediency into that of mor- als. The conflict with slavery gave him occasion enough to emphasize this principle. His article in the Christian Frecvian in 1844, an answer to Dr. Taylor, not repubHshed in his volumes, is a noble expression of it. "He taught the people that the only way to secure the greatest good was along the path of absolute righteous- ness and not in vain attempts to measure consequences. Dr. Taylor maintained that consequences created duty, a principle that determined po- litical action in the country for twenty years. Bushnell contended that right- eousness secures the only conse- quence worth having. It was this principle that carried the nation through the war and brought slavery to an end." The Congregational Library in Bos- ton is very rich in Bushnell material. It has in its collection many sermons and addresses which do not appear in Bushnell's collected works. Among them we have found a sermon preached in 1844, upon "Politics under the Law of God." It will be noted that this is the same year as that of the article in the Christian Freeman to which Mr. Munger refers. In the preface to this public discourse Bush- nell says that it is offered to the pub- lic "because it has been so unfortunate as to be denounced for qualities posi- tively mischievous and dishonorable to a minister." "My ideal in the dis- course," he says, "was to make a bold push for principle as the test of public men and measures, and let the lines when drawn cut where they would. I think I saw clearly that, if we are ever to have any principle in politics, it m.ust be enforced when there is a ques- tion on hand and results of conse- quence are to be eiTected." The dis- course itself is the expression of a spirit which America in this time has sadly needed to find in all her pulpits, but has found in too few. Before coming directly to the slavery ques- tion he surveys the various evils in the nation at the time, which it was the duty of men who stood for morality in politics to denounce. '"In the great Missouri question, on which the personal freedom, character and happiness of so many famiUes of human beings, the honor and security of our lib- erties and the moral well-being of a ?j:reat section of our territory were pending, what were the considerations that weighed in the deliberation and determined the final vote? Was it the immutable princi- ples of justice and humanity, those prin- ciples which God asserts and will forever vindicate? No, it was the balance of power between the slave-holdinsr and non- slave-holding states." '"In the Indian question, what did we do but lend the power of the civil arm to crush a defence- less people and their rights? We violated our most solemn treaties and pledges. If there was a just God in heaven, he could not be with us. It was policy — a compo- i6 UORACIl BUS/I.MiLL, THE CITIZEN. sitioii with fraud and wickedness. An honored chieftain at the head of the nation recommended the measure, tlie nation de- creed it, and the military enacted it with their bayonets!" "The Florida war was a transaction rooted in unmitigated iniquity and oppression." At the close of his sur- vey, which covers other points, he de- clares: "We are guilty as a nation of the most daring wrongs, and if there be a just God \vc have reason to tremble for his judgments. We arc ceasing as a nation to have any conscience about public mat- ters. Good men and Christians are suffer- ing an allegiance to party rule, which de- molishes their personality, learning quietly to approve and passively to follow in what- ever path their party leads." He considers some of the causes which operated to pro- duce this result; and declares among other things that the neglect of the pulpit to as- sert the dominion of moral principles over what we do as citizens has hastened and aggravated , the evil — and adds: "It is the solemn duty of the ministers of religion to make their people feel the presence of God's law everywhere, and especially where, the dearest interests of life, the in- terests of virtue and religion, are them- selves at stake. This is the manner of the Bible. There is no one subject on which it is more full than it is in reference to the moral duties of rulers and citizens." Fol- lowing his survey of causes, he speaks of consequences; and after noticing two or three of these observes: "Take away con- science, let party strife and discipline clear off the constraint of principle, and your constitutions have no value and no avenger; your civil order is shivered to fragments. Nor is it possible that public life or any warm sentiment of patriotism should survive the destruction of moral and religious influences in the state. Who will love his country when liis country ceases from equity and protection? The divorce of politics from conscience and religion must infallibly end in the total wreck of our institutions and liberties." He then asks what shall be done, and answers: "First of all, we must open our eyes to what we have done. We must see . our sin as a people and repent of it." And again, "Require it of your rulers to cease from the prostitution of their office to effect the reign of their party. Require them to say what is true, and do what is right;^^and the moment they falter, forsake them." The sermon, which is one of the most impassioned which Bushnell ever preached, ends with a scathing denuncia- tion of slavery, which was then the great source of our political corruption and infi- delity: "Slavery is the great curse of this nation. I blush to think how tamely we have suffered its encroachments. The time has come to renounce our pusilla- nimity. We have made a farce of American liberty long enough. God's frown is upon us, and the scorn of the world is settling on our name in the earth. God I know is gracious, and how much he will bear I cannot tell. He is also just, and how long his justice can suffer is past human fore- sight. Our politics are now our greatest immorality, and what is most of all fear- ful, the immorality sweeps through the Church of God." Eiishnell's first ptibli*^ sermon, "The Crisis of the Church," was occa- sioned by the mol:)bin,c^ of Garrison in the streets of Boston in 1835. This was a time when in many pulpits the subject of slavery was a tabooed sub- ject, and churches were divided upon it. But Bushnell, as Dr. Munger says, "held to the Puritan conception of the state as moral, and did not hesitate to use his pulpit to enforce this conception and to denounce any departure from it. The antislavery niovement was -so distinctly Christian that he would not keep it out of his pulpit, even if his sermons were re- garded and used as campaign docu- ments." Of the fugitive slave law he prayed that God would grant him grace never to "do the damning sin" of obedience to it. "The first duty that I owe to civil government," he said, "is to violate and spurn such a law." Of the spoils system he spoke in a notable sermon on "American Politics," in 1840, as the civil service reformicr speaks to-day. "In all mat- ters pertaining to our national wel- fare," wrote his daughter, "his pa- triotism w'as ever on the alert." His constant refuge was in the Puritan spirit and in the companionshi]-) of the founders of New England and of the republic. Few addresses have been given upon the Pilgrim Fathers worthier or weightier than his "The Founders Great in their Uncon- sciousness," before the New England Society of New York on Forefathers Day; 1849, j^'ist fifty years ago. "The way of greatness is the way of duty," — to learn this principle from them and take it to our hearts, this, he said, is the most fitting monument we can HORACE BUSHNELL, r.^E/ririifiiV; :'**:%: j/\ 17 erect to the fathers. His profound address on "Popular Government by Divine Right," deUvered as a sermon on the day of the national thanksgiv- ing in 1864, in the very midst of the civil war, is a luminous study of the development of our nationality and, still more important, a searching crit- icism of the dictum that the "consent of the governed" is the real and suffi- cient basis of just government. Ul- timate and true sovereignty resides not in any majority of men, but in the law of God, which nations, through whatever painful processes, must dis- cover and conform to. Political in- quiry becomes a search for right, for moral relations ; and in closing his essay, Bushnell says these remark- able words, — speaking of govern- ment, of course, in its limiting and controlling, and not in its construc- tive and cooperative aspects: "There will be less and less need of govern- ment, because the moral right of what we have is felt ; and as what we do as right is always free, we shall grow more free as the centuries pass, till perhaps even government itself may lapse in the freedom of a righteous- ness consummated in God." The next year Bushnell was the orator at the commemoration by Yale College of her alumni who had fallen in the war, giving his great oration, "Our Obligations to the Dead." We have spoken of "The Age of Home- spun" as the prose counterpart of Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night." The oration on "Our Obligations to the Dead" is the prose counterpart of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," which was read at Harvard just five days before, in that midsummer of 1865. It would be useful to compare the oration and the poem and see how many of the same great thoughts were developed independently, in the different ways. This wc^ of the ora- tor is of interest in remembrance of the poet's word on Lincoln: "Tn the place of politicians we are going to have at least some statesmen ; for we have gotten the pitch of a grand new Abrahamic statesmanship, unsophis- ticated, honest and real, — no cringing sycophancy or cunning art of dema- gogy." Of interest in this connec- tion, too, is Bushnell's application in another essay, that on "The True Wealth of Nations," of the term "the first American" to one daring to re- " nounce a state of cHency upon Europe and stand upon his own na- tional feet. This word of Bushnell's antedates Lowell's ode by thirty years. An echo, or an anticipation — we do not remember which — of a striking word in Lowell's Lessing es- say is this word of Bushnell's in his Commemoration address: "Great ac- tion is the highest kind of writing, and he that makes a noble character writes the finest kind of book." It woud be inspiring to quote many of the eloquent passages from this great address ; we shall instead quote one practical suggestion, the deliverance of a far-seeing statesmanship, which, could it have been acted on, would have saved the nation how much trouble and have been the source of how great order and strength to-day: "Do simply this, which we have a per- fect constitutional right to do. — pass this very simple amendment, that the basis of representation in Congress shall hereafter be the number, in all the states alike, of the free male voters therein. Then the work is done; a general free suffra