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 PATRIOTISM 
 
 Hn ration 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE 
 
 THE PHI BETA KAPPA 
 
 OF HARVARD COLLEGE, COMMENCEMENT, 1900, 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM EVERETT. 
 
 PEACE ASSOCIATION OF FRIENDS, 
 
 20 SOUTH TWELFTH STREET, 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, 
 
 1903. 
 
PATRIOTISM 
 
 Hn ration 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE 
 
 THE PHI BETA KAPPA 
 
 OF HARVARD COLLEGE, COMMENCEMENT, 1900. 
 
 BY 
 
 EVERETT. 
 
 PEACE ASSOCIATION OF FRIENDS, 
 
 20 SOUTH TWELFTH STREET, 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, 
 
 1903. 
 
,7V/ 7* 3 
 
 COPYRIGHTED 
 
 BY WII<I,IAM EVERETT 
 
 1900 
 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 THE lyEEDS & BlDDLE COMPANY 
 
 1019-21 MARKET STREET 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
ORATION. 
 
 I do not see how any one can rise on this occasion with- 
 out trembling. It has been illustrated by too many dis- 
 tinguished names, it has brought forth too many striking 
 sentiments, not to give every orator the certainty that he will 
 fall short of its traditions and the fear that he will do so 
 disastrously. But of one thing I am sure : it behooves the 
 speaker to-day to be candid. No elegant or inflated com- 
 monplaces, concealing one's real sentiment by the excuse 
 of academic dignity or courtesy, ought to sully the honesty 
 with which brethren speak to each other. The first, the 
 only aim, of every university, is the investigation and propa- 
 gation of truth, truth in the convictions and truth in the 
 utterance. 
 
 My very first knowledge of the Phi Beta Kappa dates 
 back to early childhood. In the year 1846 I was present at 
 a portion of the Commencement exercises, when the parts 
 were sustained by Francis James Child, George Martin 
 Lane, Charles Eliot Norton and George Frisbie Hoar. 
 Those exercises were followed by a Commencement dinner, 
 whose good cheer proved too much for a boy not yet seven 
 years old. It was a dinner at home ; no one ever wanted to 
 eat too much at the official Commencement dinner. I heard, 
 therefore, at my bedside, the next day, the tale of Phi Beta 
 Kappa, how Charles Sumner had held his audience for 
 two hours, relating the achievements of four Harvard grad- 
 uates who had lately died, Pickering, Story, Allston and 
 Channing; winding up with the magnificent peroration, 
 transferred, I believe, from an earlier address, in which he 
 appealed so earnestly for peace, as the duty of our time, 
 and answered Burke's lament that the age of chivalry had 
 
 851092 
 
gone by the declaration that the age of humanity had come, 
 that the coming time should take its name not from the 
 horse, but from man. I cannot even think of Phi Beta with- 
 out these names and these thoughts ringing in my ears and 
 almost dictating my words. 
 
 It seems to me that an orator can hardly go wrong if he 
 holds fast to our motto, Philosophy the Guide, or, rather, 
 the Sailing Master of Life. There is little doubt that, when 
 this motto was first taken by a secret fraternity, "veiled in 
 the obscurity of a learned language," it meant that philoso- 
 phy which rejects revelation, the philosophy of the ency- 
 clopaedists of France. Accordingly, when the veil was 
 taken away from the mystic characters Phi Beta Kappa, it 
 was declared that philosophy included religion. How many 
 who accept membership in it to-day direct their voyage of 
 life by philosophy or religion either, it might not be safe to 
 say. It cannot, however, be wrong, whatever our subject 
 is, to steer our way in it with her at the helm. 
 
 I am not going to plunge into a discussion of what philo- 
 sophy means. It has been used to mean many things, and 
 to some it means nothing at all. When Wackford Squeers, 
 who sixty years ago we all knew was of the immortals and 
 who is now in danger of being forgotten, was asked by any 
 parent a question in some occult branch of study, like trigo- 
 nometry, he was wont to answer, "Sir, are you a philoso- 
 pher?" And to the invariable negative he would then reply, 
 "Ah ! then I can't explain it to you." As one of Wackford 
 Squeers' humblest successors, I feel there is something not 
 absurd in his counter-question, when I meet what are called 
 practical men discussing what they call the practical prob- 
 lems of life. 
 
 He who, whether decked with blue and pink ribbons or 
 not, steers his course with philosophy as his guide, ap- 
 proaches all life's problems in another temper and another 
 spirit; he is working by other roads to other ends, than he 
 who is guided by the passions and worships the idols of the 
 hour. Philosophy has different meanings for different men; 
 
but the gulf is boundless between those who accept it with 
 any meaning and those who know it not, or know it only as 
 an object of patronage or scorn. 
 
 The philosopher walks by principle, not merely by inter- 
 est or passion ; by the past and the future, not merely by the 
 present; by the unseen and the eternal, not merely by the 
 seen and temporal ; by law, and not only by accident. It is 
 not, as sometimes fancied, that he does not see and, seeing, 
 does not heed these things. He does not, as Plato bids him, 
 turn his back on what this world shows. He meets im- 
 mediate duties; he lives with contemporary men; he deals 
 with existing demands. But he does all this by the light and 
 guidance of rules of which the servant of time and place 
 knows nothing. 
 
 I claim for this the assent of all my brothers here as an 
 intellectual fact ; but I desire at the outset of what I say to 
 rouse your thoughts to it as the dictate of emotion and of 
 conscience. Philosophy, the study of causes in their deepest 
 effects, beginning with the true use of terms and proceed- 
 ing by sound reasoning, has the power to transmute and 
 sanctify the most commonplace transactions, the most hack- 
 neyed words. The master of all philosophy began his work 
 by forcing his contemporaries to define the commonest sub- 
 jects of conversation. I would, as his follower, ask you to 
 apply that method to one of the favorite watchwords, one 
 of the pressing duties of to-day, and see if philosophy has 
 not something to define and correct in a field where her 
 sway is scarcely admitted. 
 
 You cannot talk for ten minutes on any of what are 
 rightly held to be the great interests of life without feeling 
 how loosely we use their names. We seem not to be dealing 
 with sterling coin, which has the same value everywhere and 
 always, but with counters that, passing with a conventional 
 value here and now, are worthless when we come to some 
 great public or private crisis. Education, business, amuse- 
 ment, art, literature, science, home, comfort, society, poli- 
 tics, patriotism, religion, how many men who use these 
 
words have any true conception of their force ? How many 
 simply mean that form of education, that line of business, 
 that sect in religion, that party in politics, to which they are 
 accustomed? How many are led by this loose yet limited 
 use of words into equally loose and equally narrow ways of 
 action? How many need a Socrates to walk through the 
 streets and force them to define their terms? And how 
 many, if he did appear again, would be ready to kill him for 
 corrupting the youth, and holding to a God different from 
 those the country worships? 
 
 ^ Patriotism, love of country, devotion to .the kind that 
 i).Qre~.us r r is pressed upon us now as paramount to every 
 other notion in its claims on head, hand and heart. It is 
 pictured to us not merely as an amiable and inspiring emo- 
 tion, but as a paramount duty, which is to sweep every 
 other out of the way. The thought cannot be put in loftier 
 or more comprehensive words than by Cicero: Carl snnt 
 parent cs, cari libcri, can fainiliarcs, propinqui; scd omncs 
 omnium caritates una patria complcxa cst. "Dear are par- 
 ents, dear are children, dear are friends and relations ; but 
 all affections to all men are embraced in country alone." 
 The Greek, the Roman, the Frenchman, the German, talks 
 about "fatherland ;" and we are beginning to copy them, 
 though to my ear the English "mother country" is far more 
 tender and true. 
 
 Cicero follows up his words by saying that for her no 
 true son would, if need be, hesitate to die. And his words, 
 themselves an echo of what the poets and orators whose 
 heir he was had repeated again and again, have been re- 
 echoed and reiterated in many ages since he bowed his neck 
 to the sword of his country's enemy. 
 
 Hut to give life for their country is the least part of what 
 rnen have been willing to do for her. Human life has often 
 seemed a very trifling possession, to be exposed cheaply in 
 all sorts of useless risks and feuds. It has been the cheerful 
 sacrifice of the things that make life worth living, the eager 
 endurance of things far worse than death, which show the 
 
mighty power which love of country holds over the entire 
 being" of man. Wealth that Croesus might have envied has 
 been poured at the feet of our mother, and sacrifices taken 
 up which Saint Francis never knew. Ease and luxury, re- 
 fined company and cultivated employment, have been re- 
 jected for the hardships and suffering of the camp; the sym- 
 pathy and idolatry of home have been abandoned for the 
 tenfold hardships and sufferings of a political career; and, 
 at the age when we can offer neither life nor living as of any 
 ;' value to one's country, those children and grandchildren 
 , which were to have been the old man's and the old woman's 
 solace are freely sent forth in the cause of the country, 
 which will send back nothing but a sword and cap to be 
 \ hung on the wall and never be worn by living man again. 
 _Such are the sacrifices men have cheerfully made fprjtjje 
 existence, the honor, the prosperity of their country. But 
 perhaps the power of patriotism is shown more strongly in 
 what it makes them do than in what it makes them give up. 
 You know how many men have been, as it were, born again 
 by the thought that they might illustrate the name and swell 
 the force of their country, achieving what they never would 
 have aroused themselves to do for themselves alone. I do 
 riot mean the feats of military courage and strategy, which 
 are generally talked of as the sum of patriotic endeavor. I 
 recollect in our w 7 ar being told by a very well-known soldier, 
 who is now a very well-known civilian, that it was conceited 
 for me or any other man to think that in time of war he 
 could serve his country in any way but in the ranks. But. 
 in fact, every art and every science has won triumphs under 
 the stress of patriotism that it has hardly known in less 
 enthusiastic days. The glory that runs through every line of 
 Sophocles and Virgil, as they sung the glories of Athens and 
 Rome, is reflected in the song of our own bards from 
 Spenser and Shakespeare to this hour ; the rush and sweep 
 of Demosthenes and Cicero, dwelling on the triumphs and 
 duties of their native lands, are only the harbingers of Burke 
 and Webster on the like themes ; the beauty into which Bra- 
 
8 
 
 mante and Angelo poured all their souls to adorn their 
 beloved Florence was lavished under no other impulse than 
 that which set all the science of France working to relieve 
 her agriculture and manufactures from the pressure laid 
 upon her by the strange vicissitudes of her Revolution. 
 
 Not all this enthusiasm has succeeded : there have been 
 patriotic blunders as well as patriotic triumphs; but still it 
 stands truq that men are spurred on to make the best of 
 themselves in the days when love of country glowed strong- 
 est in their hearts. It would seem as if all citizens poured 
 their individual affections and devotions into one Superior 
 Lake, from which they all burst in one Niagara of patriot- 
 ism. 
 
 I am ashamed, however, to press such a commonplace 
 proposition before this audience and in this place, where the 
 walls are as redolent of love of country as Faneuil Hall 
 itself. The question is if philosophy, our chosen guide of 
 life, has anything to say of this same love of country, if 
 she brings that under her rule, as she does so much else of 
 life, supplementing, curtailing, correcting, or whether 
 patriotism may bid defiance to philosophy, claiming her sub- 
 mission as she claims the submission of every other human 
 interest, and bidding her yield and be absorbed, or stand off 
 and depart to her visionary Utopia, where the claims of 
 practical duty and natural sentiment do not seek to follow 
 her. 
 
 ^For, indeed, we are told now that patriotism is not merely 
 a generous and laudable emotion, but a paramount and over- 
 whelming duty, to which everything else which men have 
 called duties must give way. If a monarch, a statesman, a 
 soldier, stands forth pre-eminent in exalting the name or 
 spreading the bounds of his country, he is a patriot; and 
 that is enough.) 
 
 '^ /Such a leader may be as perjured and blasphemous as 
 
 ( Frederic, or as brutal and stupid as his father ; he may be as 
 
 \ faithless and mean as Maryborough, or as dissolute and 
 
 < bloody as Julius Caesar ; he may trample on every right of 
 
independent nations and drive his countrymen to the sham- 
 bles like Napoleon ; he may be as corrupt as Walpole and as 
 wayward as Chatham; he may be destitute of every spark 
 of culture or may prostitute the gifts of the Muses to the 
 basest ends; he may have, in short, all manner of vices, 
 crimes, or defects. ' But, if he is true to his country, if he is 
 her faithful standard-bearer, if he strives to set and keep 
 her high above her rivals, he is right, a worthy patriot.) And, 
 if he seems lukewarm in her cause, if, however wise and 
 good and accomplished he may be in all other relations, he 
 fails to work with all his heart and soul to maintain her 
 position among the nations, he must be stamped with fail- 
 ure, if not with curse. 
 
 For the plain citizen, who does not claim to be a leader 
 in peace or war, the duty is still clearer. He must stand by \ > 
 his country, according to what those who have her destiny 
 in their control decide is her proper course. In war or in 
 peace, he is to have but one watchword. In peace, indeed, 
 his patriotic duty will chiefly be shown by obeying existing 
 laws, wherever they may strike, even as Socrates rejected 
 all thought of evading the unjust, stupid, and malignant 
 sentence that took his life. But it is not thought incon- 
 sistent with that true love of country to let one's opinions 
 be known about those laws, and about the good of the coun- 
 try in general, in time of peace. In a free land like ours, 
 every citizen is expected to be ready with voice and vote to 
 do his part in correcting what is amiss, in protesting against 
 bad laws, and, as far as he may, defeating bad men whom he 
 believes to be seeking his country's ruin. Nay, a citizen of 
 a free country who did not so criticise would be held to be 
 derelict to that highest duty which free lands, differing from 
 slavish despotisms, impose upon their sons. 
 
 But in time of war we are told that all this is changed. 
 As soon as our country is arrayed against another under 
 arms, every loyal son has nothing to do but to support her 
 armies to victory. He may desire peace; but it must be 
 "peace with honor," whatever that phrase of the greatest 
 
10 
 
 charlatan of modern times may mean. He must not ques- 
 tion the justice or the expediency of the war ; he must either 
 fight himself or encourage others to fight. Criticism of the 
 management of the war may be allowable; of the fact of 
 the war, it is treason. And the word for the patriot is, "Our 
 country, right or wrong." ) 
 
 Right here, then, as I conceive it, philosophy raises her 
 warning finger before the passionate enthusiast, and says, 
 "Hold!*' in the name of higher thought, of deeper law, of 
 more serious principle, to which every man here, every child 
 of Harvard, every brother of this society, is bound to listen. 
 Philosophy says, "Hold !" with the terror of the voice with- 
 in, with the majesty of the voice from above, to Americans 
 now; and, with the spirit of Socrates returning to earth, it 
 bids them know what they mean by the words they use, or 
 they may be crowning as a lofty emotion that which is only 
 an unreasoning passion, and clothing with the robes of duty 
 what is only a superstition. This love o countryi_thisjpa- 
 triotic ardor "f onr^ " g * .submit to have philosophy m-. 
 vest igateher^cl aims to rule ab^ve all oth^L^Hl^ii^I!-^ not in 
 the interest ofl_ajiyLjss--^nerous--em<>tion,4 : K)t4o make men 
 more sordid or selfish, but simply because there is a rule 
 called Tj^juaad--ar-measui ; called Right^-bjLJW-hich -ev-e*y- 
 human action is bound tn be gauged. because, though all 
 gods and men and fiends should league all their forces, and 
 link the golden chain to Olympus to draw its glory down to 
 their purposes, they will only find themselves drawn up- 
 wards, subject to its unchanging laws, the weak members 
 hanging in the air and the vile ones hurled down to Tar- 
 tarus. 
 
 4 What is this country this mother country, this father- 
 land, that we are bidden to love and serve and stand by at 
 any risk and sacrifice? Is it the soil? the land? the plains 
 and mountains and rivers ? the fields and forests and mines ? 
 No doubt there is inspiration from this very earth, from 
 that part of the globe which our nation holds, and which we 
 call our country. Poets and orators have dwelt again and 
 
II 
 
 again on the undying attractions of our own land, no mat- 
 ter what it is like, the Dutch marshes, the Swiss moun- 
 tains, soft Italy, and stern Spain, equally clutching on the 
 hearts of their people with a resistless chain. ( But a land is 
 nothing without the men. The very same countries whose 
 scenery, tame or bold, charming or awful, has been the in- 
 spiration to gallant generations, may, as the wheel of time 
 turns, fall to indolent savages, listless slaves, or sordid 
 money-getters. Byron has told us this in lines which the 
 men of his own time felt were instinct with creative genius, 
 but which the taste of the day rejects for distorted thoughts 
 in distorted verse: 
 
 " Clime of the unforgotten brave ! 
 Whose land, from plain to mountain cave, 
 Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave ! 
 Shrine of the mighty ! can it be 
 That this is all remains of thee ? 
 Approach, thou craven, crouching slave ! 
 
 Say, is not this Thermopylae ? 
 These waters blue, that round you lave, 
 
 O servile offspring of the free, 
 Pronounce what sea, what shore is this ? 
 
 The gulf, the rock of Salamis ! 
 
 " ' Twere long to tell and sad to trace 
 Each step from splendor to disgrace. 
 Enough, no foreign foe could quell 
 Thy soul till from itself it fell ! 
 Yes : self-abasement paved a way 
 To villian bonds and despot sway." 
 
 (It is the nation, not the land, which makes the patriot. If 
 the nation degenerate, the land becomes only a monument, 
 not a dwelling.) Let the nation rouse itself, and the country 
 may be a palace and a temple once more. 
 
 But who are the men that make the nation? Are they 
 the whole of the population or a part only? Are they one 
 party only among the people, which is ready perhaps to 
 regard the other party not as countrymen, but as aliens? 
 Is the country the men who govern her and control her 
 destinies, the king, the nobles, the popular representatives, 
 the delegates to whom power is transmitted when the peo- 
 
12 
 
 pie resign it J- Once the king was the nation, with perhaps 
 a few counsellors ; patriotism meant loyalty to the sovereign. 
 Every man who on any pretext arrayed himself against the 
 crown was a disloyal rebel, an unpatriotic traitor, until at 
 length God for His own purposes saw fit to array Charles I. 
 against the people of England, when, after years of civil 
 war, and twice as many years of hollow peace, and five 
 times as many years when discussion was stifled or put 
 aside, the world came to recognize that loyalty to one's king 
 and love to one's country are as different in their nature as 
 the light of a lamp and the light of the sun. 
 
 ' And yet, if a king understands the spirit and heart of his 
 nation, he may lead it so truly in peace or in war that love 
 of country shall be inseparable from devotion to the sov- 
 ereign. ) Modern historians may load their pages as they 
 please with revelations of the meanness, the falsehood, the 
 waywardness of Queen Elizabeth; yet England believed in 
 her and loved her, and if England rose from ruin to pros- 
 perity in her time, it was because her people trusted her. 
 In her day, as for two centuries before, Scotland, where 
 three different races had been welded together by Bruce to- 
 produce the most patriotic of peoples, had scarcely a true 
 national existence, certainly nothing that men could cling 
 to with affection and pride, because kings and commons 
 were alike the prey of a poor, proud, selfish nobility, who 
 suffered nobody to rule, scarcely to live, but themselves ; ex- 
 empting themselves from the laws which they forced upon 
 their country. 
 
 (. An American cries out at the idea of a limited aristocracy, 
 seeking to drag the force and affection of a nation of vas- 
 sals, and calling that patriotism. Then what will he say 
 to the patriotism of some of those lands which have made 
 their national name ring through the world for the triumphs 
 and the sacrifices of which it is the emblem?) What was 
 Sparta? What was Venice? What was Bern? What was 
 Poland? Merely the fields where the most exclusive aris- 
 tocracies won name and fame and wealth and territory only 
 
13 
 
 to sink their unrecognized subject citizens lower every year 
 in the scale of true nationality. Not one of these identified 
 the nation with the people. / Or does an American insist on a 
 democracy, where the entire people's voice speaks through 
 rulers of its choosing? Does he prefer the patriotism of 
 Athens, where thirty thousand democrats kept up an inter- 
 minable feud with ten thousand conservatives, one ever 
 plunging the city into rash expeditions, the other, as soon as 
 its wealth gave it the upper hand, disfranchising, exiling, 
 killing the majority of the people, because it could hire 
 stronger arms to crush superior numbers? What was the 
 patriotism of the Italian cities when faction alternately ban- 
 ished faction, when Dante suffered no more than he would 
 have inflicted had his side got the upper hand? What was 
 the patriotism of either Greece or Italy, which confined it- 
 self to its own city, and where city enjoyed far more fight- 
 ing against city than ever thinking of union to save the 
 common race from bondage? For years, for centuries, for 
 ages, the nations that would most eagerly repeat such senti- 
 ments as Cicero's about love of country never dreamed of 
 using the word in any sense that a philosopher, nay, that 
 a plain, truth-telling man, could not convict at once of 
 meanness and contradiction. 
 
 But we of modern times look back with pity and contempt 
 on those benighted ages which had not discovered the great 
 arcanum of representative government, whereby a free na- 
 tion chooses the men to whom it entrusts its concerns, 
 its presidents and its prime ministers, its parliaments and 
 congresses and courts. Yet even this mighty discovery, 
 whereby modern nations are raised so far above those poor 
 Old World creatures, the Greeks and Romans and me- 
 diaeval Italians, has not so far controlled factional passion 
 that many countries do not live in a perpetual civil war 
 which Athens and Corinth would have been ashamed ofJ We 
 all know how our dear sister republics of Central and South- 
 ern America, which, as Mr. Webster said, looked to the 
 great Northern Light in forming their constitutions, treat 
 
their elections as merely indications which of two parties 
 shall be set up to be knocked down by rifles and bombshells 
 unless it retains its hold by such means. But how with our- 
 selves? How with England? How with France? How 
 often do we regard our elected governors as really standing 
 for the whole nation and deserving its allegiance? 
 
 In 1846 the President of the United States and his coun- 
 sellors hurried us into a needless, a bullying, a wicked war. 
 Fully a quarter of the country felt it was an outrage, and 
 nothing else. But appeals were made to stand by the gov- 
 ernment, against which our own merciless satirist directed 
 the lines which must have forever tingled in the ears and 
 the consciences of the men who supported what they knew 
 was irretrievably wicked : 
 
 " The side of our country must allus be took, 
 
 And President Polk, you know, he is our country ; 
 And the angel who writes all our sins in a book 
 Puts the debit to him and to us the percontry." 
 
 No, brethren ! no president, no prime minister, no cabinet, 
 no congress, or parliament, no deftly organized representa- 
 tive or executive body, is or can be our country. To pay 
 them a patriot's affectionate allegiance is as illogical as 
 loyalty to James II. or to the French National Convention. 
 Mere obedience to law, when duly enacted, is one thing : So- 
 crates may drink the hemlock rather than run away from 
 the doom to which a court of his native city has consigned 
 him; but, when the tribunals of that country perpetrated 
 such mockery of justice, Plato and Xenophon were right in 
 cherishing to their dying day a poignant sense of outrage, 
 an implacable grudge, against such a step-mother as blood- 
 stained Athens. 
 
 But sometimes the voice of the whole people speaks un- 
 mistakably ; its ruler is the true agent and representative of 
 a united and determined people. The will of the nation is 
 unquestioned. Who are you, who am I, that we should dis- 
 pute it, and think ourselves wiser and better than all our 
 countrymen ? Is not the whole nation the mother, whom to 
 
15 
 
 disobey is the highest sin? No, the particular set of men 
 who make up the nation at any time will die and pass away, 
 and what will their sons think of what they made their 
 country do? 
 
 In 1854 the Emperor Nicholas, whose thoughts were 
 never far from Constantinople, picked an unintelligible 
 quarrel with the sultan of Turkey. The unprincipled ad- 
 venturer, who contrived to add new stains to the name of 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, saw his chance to win glory for the 
 Gallic eagle. He plunged into war, and entrapped England 
 into it with him. The wise old statesman who was at the 
 head of the English government knew the war was need- 
 less and wrong. He did his utmost to stop it ; but his coun- 
 trymen preferred to listen to the reckless Palmerston, and 
 they lashed first themselves and then Aberdeen into war. 
 The whole nation went mad. John Bright told them the 
 philosophic, the political, the Christian truth; and Palmer- 
 ston insulted him on the floor of the House of Commons. 
 Two years were consumed in the costly and pestilential siege 
 of Sebastopol. A hollow peace was patched up, of which 
 the only significant article was, after a short interval, im- 
 pudently broken by Russia ; the unspeakable Turk was given 
 another thirty years' lease of life. And now I do not be- 
 lieve there is one grown man in England among the sons 
 and grandsons of those who fought the Crimean War who 
 does not believe Aberdeen and Bright were right, that Palm- 
 erston and England were wrong, and that the war was a 
 national blunder, a national sin, a national crime. When 
 John Bright stood almost against the whole nation, he was 
 neither self -conceited nor unpatriotic, but a great and good 
 man speaking as the prophet of God. 
 
 Yes, a whole people may be wrong, and deserve, at best, 
 the pity of a real patriot rather than his active love. Our 
 country is something more than the single procession which 
 passes across its borders in one generation: it means the 
 land with all its people in all their periods; the ancestors 
 whose exertions made us what we are, and whose memory is 
 
i6 
 
 precious to us; the posterity to whom we are to transmit 
 what we prize, unstained, as we received it. And he who 
 loves his country truly and serves her rightly must act and 
 speak, not for the present generation alone, but for all that 
 rightly live, every event in whose history is inseparable from 
 every other. If we pray, as does the seal of Boston, that 
 "God will be to us as he was to the fathers," then we must 
 be to God what our fathers were. 
 
 But, after philosophy has forced the vociferous patriot to 
 define what he means by his country, she has a yet more 
 searching question to ask : What will you do and what will 
 you suffer for this country you love ? How shall your love 
 be shown? There is one of the old Greek maxims which 
 says in four words of that divine language what a modern 
 tongue can scarcely stammer in four times four : "Sparta is 
 thine allotted home ; make her a home of order and beauty." 
 Whatever our country needs to make her perfect, that she 
 calls on us to do. I have run over to you some of the great 
 sacrifices and great exertions which patriots have made to 
 make their dear home perfect, and themselves perfect for 
 her sake. But everything done or renounced to make her 
 perfect must recognize that she is not perfect yet ; and what 
 our country chiefly calls on us for is not mighty exertions 
 and sacrifices, but those particular ones, small or great, which 
 ^ shall do her real good, and not harm. ; That her commerce 
 should whiten every sea; that her soil should yield freely 
 vegetable and mineral wealth ; that she should be dotted 
 with peaceful homes, the abode of virtue and love ; that her 
 cities should be adorned with all that is glorious in art ; that 
 famine and poverty and plague and crime should be fought 
 with all the united energy of head and hand and heart ; that 
 historians and poets and orators should continue to make 
 her high achievements and mighty aims known to all her 
 children and to the world ; that the oppressed of every land 
 may find a refuge within her borders; that she may stand 
 before her sister nations indeed a sister, loved and honored, 
 these are the commonplaces, tedious, if noble to recount, 
 
17 
 
 of what patriotism has sought to do in many ages. Yet in 
 every one of these things, when actually achieved, there has 
 often been a worm at the core of the showy fruit, which has 
 made their mighty authors but little better than magnificent 
 traitors. 
 
 For every one of these has often been achieved at the ex- 
 pense of other nations as ancient, as glorious, as dear to 
 their own children, as worthy of patriotic love as their tri- 
 umphant antagonist; and every one has been achieved at 
 the still worse price of corruption and tyranny at home. 
 Every country has in times mistaken material for moral 
 wealth and has grown corrupt as she grew great ; and every 
 country in time has fancied that she could not be great and 
 honored while her sisters were great and honored too, and 
 has gone to war with them, hoping to enlarge her borders at 
 their expense and to gain by their loss. ( It is here, again, at 
 this very point that the philosopher calls upon the patriot to 
 say what he means by his cry, "Our country, right or 
 wrong," the maxim of one who threw away an illustrious 
 life in that worst of wicked encounters, a duel. If there 
 are such words as right and wrong, and those words stand 
 for eternal realities, why shall not a nation, why shall not 
 her loving sons, be made to bow to the same law, the utter- 
 ance of God in history and in the heart ? Can a king, can a 
 president, can a congress, can a whole nation, by its pride 
 or its passions, turn wrong into right, or what authority 
 have they to trifle or shuffle with either ? ) 
 
 We are told that, if we ever find ourselves at war with 
 another country, no matter how that war was brought on, 
 no matter what folly or wickedness broke the peace, no mat- 
 ter how completely we might oppose and deprecate it up to 
 the moment of its outbreak, no matter how as truthful his- 
 orians we may condemn it after it is over, no matter how 
 iniquitous or tyrannical our sense and our conscience tell us 
 are terms on which peace has been obtained, we ought, 
 during the war, to be heartily and avowedly for it. "We 
 must not desert the flag." Patriotism demands that we 
 
18 
 
 should always stand by our country as against any other. 
 
 And what are the patriots in our rival country to be doing 
 the while ? Are they to support the war against us, whether 
 they think it right or wrong? Are they cheerfully to pay 
 all taxes? Are they to volunteer for every battle? Are 
 they to carry on war to the knife or the last ditch? Is their 
 love for their country to be as unreasoning, as purely a mat- 
 ter of emotion, as ours? Certainly, if the doctrine of indis- 
 criminate patriotism, "Our country, right or wrong," is the 
 true one.^ If France and Germany fight, no matter what the 
 cause, every Frenchman must desire to see Germany humili- 
 ated, and every German to see France brought to her knees ; 
 and it is absolutely their duty to have all cognizance of right 
 and wrong swallowed up in passionate loyalty./ Lord Aber- 
 deen and Mr. Bright were right in deprecating the Crimean 
 War up to the moment of its declaration : history says they 
 were right now ; but, while the war lasted, it was their duty 
 to sacrifice their sense of right to help the government aims. 
 Mr. Webster and Mr. Clay were right in pouring out their 
 most scathing eloquence against the Mexican War : Gen- 
 eral Grant was right in recording in his memoirs that he 
 believed it unjust and unnecessary; yet Mr. Webster and 
 Mr. Clay only fulfilled. patriotic duty in sending their sons to 
 die, one by the sword and one by the fever, in the same army 
 where Grant did his duty by fighting against his conception 
 of right. 
 
 Brethren, I call this sentimental nonsense. It cannot be 
 patriotic duty to say, up to 1846, that our country will be 
 wrong if she fights, to say after 1849 that she was wrong 
 in fighting, but to hold one's tongue and maintain her so- 
 called cause in 1847 an< ^ J 848, though we know it is wrong 
 all along. And, observe, these patriots make no distinction 
 between wars offensive and defensive, wars for aggression 
 and conquest and wars for national existence. ) In any war, 
 in all wars in which our country gets engaged, we must sup- 
 port her : her honor demands that we shall not back out. 
 
 O Honor! that terrible word, the very opposite of duty, 
 
19 
 
 unknown in that sense to the soldiers, the statesmen, the 
 patriots of Greece and Rome ! Honor, the invention of the 
 Gothic barbarians, which, more than any other one thing, 
 has reduced poor Spain to her present low estate! There 
 was a time when individual men talked about their honor, 
 and stood up to be stabbed and shot at, whether right or 
 wrong, to vindicate it. That infernal fiction, the honor of 
 the duel, was on the point, sixty years ago, of drawing Ma- 
 caulay into the field in defence of a few sarcastic paragraphs 
 in a review, which, he admitted himself, were not to be jus- 
 tified. It was very shortly after that that Prince Albert 
 came to England, with his earnest, simple, modest charac- 
 ter. He used all his influence to stop the practice and the 
 very idea of duelling. And now all England recognizes that 
 any and every duel is a sin, a crime, and a folly, and that 
 the code of honor has no defence before God or man. When 
 shall the day come when the nations feel the same about 
 public war? When shall the words of our own poet find 
 their true and deserved acceptance, not as poetical rhapsody, 
 but as practical truth ? 
 
 " Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 
 
 Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 
 Given to redeem the human mind from error, 
 There were no need of arsenals and forts. 
 
 " The warrior's name should be a name abhorred ; 
 
 And every nation that should lift again 
 Its hand against its brother, on its forehead 
 Should bear forevermore the curse of Cain." 
 
 Brethren, if there is anything of which philosophy must 
 say it is wrong, that thing is war. I do not mean any par- 
 ticular school of philosophy, ancient or modern. But I 
 mean, if any one studies the nature of God and man in the 
 light of history, with a view to draw from that study rules 
 of sound thought and maxims of right action, he must say 
 war is wrong, an antiquated, blundering, criminal means of 
 solving a national doubt by accepting the certainty of misery. 
 I began my address with Cicero's definition of patriotism. 
 I now recall to you his sentence wrung from the heart of 
 
20 
 
 a man who had blazoned with his eloquence the fame of 
 many great soldiers, and was not even himself without 
 a spark of military ambition, when he found his fellow- 
 citizens bent on war which must be fatal and could not be 
 glorious : Quid ego praetefmisi out monitorum aut quer el- 
 arum, cum vcl iniqnissimam pacem justissimo bello ante- 
 ] err cm? "What did I omit in the way of warning and wail- 
 ing, preferring as I did the most unfair peace to the justest 
 war?" Granting as I do not that war is sometimes nec- 
 essary, so cutting off a man's leg or extirpating an organ 
 may be necessary; but it is always a horrible thing all the 
 same. And just as the conservative surgery of our age is at 
 work day and night to avoid these destructive operations, 
 so the statesmanship of the day ought to be at work, not 
 specifically to secure arbitration, as if that was any thing more 
 than a possible method, but to stop war, as an eternal shame. 
 And granting war is sometimes necessary, if it is ever en- 
 gaged in for any cause less than necessary, it is wrong ; and 
 the country is wrong that engages in it.' A doubtful war, 
 a war about which opinions are divided, is for that very 
 reason not doubtfully evil; and the country that makes it 
 is wrong. Yes, brethren, a nation may be in the wrong : in 
 every war one nation must be in the wrong, and generally 
 both are ; and'if any country, yours or mine, is in the wrong. 
 it is our duty as patriots to say so, and not support the coun- 
 try we love in a wrong, because our countrymen have in- 
 volved her in it. In the war of our Revolution, when Lord 
 North had the king and virtually the country with him, Fox 
 lamented that Howe had won the battle of Long Island, and 
 wished he had lost it. What ! an Englishman wish an Eng- 
 lish army to be defeated? Yes, because England was 
 wrong; and Fox knew it, and said so. 
 
 But there is a theory lately started, or rather an old one 
 revived, that war is a good thing in itself; that it does a 
 nation good to be fighting and killing the patriot sons of 
 another nation, who love their country as we do ours. We 
 are told that every strenuous man's life is a battle of some 
 
21 
 
 kind, and that the virile character demands some physical 
 belligerency. Yes, every man's life must be to a great ex- 
 tent a fight; but this preposterous doctrine would make 
 every man a prize-fighter. 
 
 They say war elicits acts of heroism and self-sacrifice that 
 the country does not know in the lethargy of peace. Hero- 
 ism and self-sacrifice ! There are more heroic and sacrificial 
 acts going on in the works of peace every day thanthebrazen 
 throat of war could proclaim in a twelvemonth. The track 
 ,^of every practicing physician is marked by heroic disregard 
 of life that Napoleon's Old Guard might envy. Every fire 
 like that of Chicago, every flood like that of Johnstown, 
 every plague and famine like that of India, are fields car- 
 l^peted with the flowers of heroic self-sacrifice; they spring 
 up from the very graves and ashes. And these flowers do 
 not have grow up beside them the poisoned weeds of self- 
 seeking or corruption, which are sure to precede, to attend, 
 to follow every war. The dove of peace that brings the 
 leaves of healing does not have trooping at her wings the 
 vultures that treat their living soldiers like carrion. When 
 Lucan has run throughout the catalogue of the national 
 miseries that followed the quarrel of Caesar and Pompey, 
 he winds them all up in the terrible words, multis utile 
 helium, "war profitable to many men." 
 
 There is now much questioning of the propriety of capital 
 punishment. It is strongly urged that the State has no right 
 to take the life even of a hardened criminal, whose career 
 has shown no trace of humanity or usefulness, and has put 
 the capstone of murder on every other crime. And yet we 
 are told it is perfectly right to take a young man of the 
 highest promise, a blessing to all who knew him, the very 
 man to live for his country, and send him to be cut down 
 by a bullet or by dysentery in a cause he cannot approve. 
 
 But there is a still newer theory come up about war as ap- 
 plied to ourselves. It seems that we share with a very few 
 other people in the world a civilization so high and insti- 
 tutions so divine that it is our duty and our destiny to go 
 
22 
 
 about the globe swallowing up inferior peoples, and bestow- 
 ing on them, whether they will or not, the blessings of the 
 American Constitution? \Yell, no! Not of the American 
 Constitution, but of the American dominion, and that, 
 when we are once started on this work of absorption, they 
 are rebels who do not accept these blessings. Xow. if this 
 precious doctrine be true, it utterly annihilates the old no- 
 tion of patriotism and love of country ; for that nation called 
 upon every nation, however small or weak or backward, to 
 maintain to the death its independence against any other, 
 however great or strong or progressive. According to this 
 Mohammedan doctrine, this "death or the Koran" doctrine, 
 the Finns and the Poles are not patriots because they object 
 to being absorbed by Russia, and the Hamburgers were 
 rebels for not accepting the beneficent incorporation into 
 France graciously preferred to them by Marshal Davoust. 
 
 But I will not enlarge upon this delicate subject of mod- 
 ern Americanism. It is bad enough for the nations we 
 threaten to absorb. It is worse for us, the absorbers. I 
 will ask you to remember what befell a noble nation which 
 took up the work of benevolently absorbing the world. 
 
 When Xerxes had been driven back in tears to Persia, his 
 rout released scores of Greek islands and cities in the love- 
 liest of lands and seas and inhabited by the brightest and 
 wisest of men. There is nothing in art or literature or 
 science or government that did not take its rise from them. 
 Their tyrant gone, they looked round for a protector. They 
 saw that Athens was mighty on the sea, and they heard that 
 she was just and generous to all who sought her citadel. 
 And they put themselves, their ships and treasure, in the 
 power of Athens, to use them as she would for the common 
 defence. And the league was scarcely formed, the Persian 
 was but just crushed, when the islands began to find that 
 protection meant subjection. They could not bear to think 
 that they had only changed masters, even if Aristides him- 
 self assigned their tribute; and some revolted. The re- 
 bellion was put down; Athens went on expanding; she made 
 her subject islands give money instead of ships, she trans- 
 
23 
 
 ferred the treasury to her own citadel, she spent the money 
 of her allies in those marvellous adornments that have made 
 her the crown of beauty for the world forever. Wider and 
 wider did the empire of the Athenian democracy extend. 
 Five armies fought her battles in a single year in five lands ; 
 Persia and Egypt, as well as Sparta, feeling the valor of her 
 soldiers. And the heart of Athens got drunk with glory, 
 and the brain of Athens got crazed with power, and the roai> 
 of her boasting rose up to heaven joined with the wail of 
 her deceived and trampled subjects. And one by one they 
 turned and fell from her and joined their arms to her rival, 
 who promised them independence ; and every fond and mad 
 endeavor to retain her empire only sucked her deeper into 
 the eddy of ruin, till at length she was brought to her knees 
 before her rival, and her victorious fleet and her impregnable 
 walls were destroyed with the cry that now began the free- 
 dom of Greece. 
 
 It was only the beginning of new slavery. Enslaved by 
 the faithless Sparta, who sold half the cities back to Persia, 
 patching up once more a hollow alliance with Athens; en- 
 slaved by Macedonia, enslaved by Rome, enslaved by the 
 Turks, poor Greece holds at last what she calls her in- 
 dependence under the protection of the great civilizing na- 
 tions, who let her live because they cannot agree how to cut 
 up her carcass if they slay her. 
 
 Brethren, even as Athens began by protection and passed 
 into tyranny, and "then into ruin, so shall every nation be 
 who interprets patriotism to mean that it is the only nation 
 ^ in the world, and that every other that stands in the way of 
 /what it chooses to call destiny must be crushed. Love your 
 v *country, honor her, live for her, if necessary, die for her;> 
 >ut remember that whatever you would call right or wrong 
 another country is right and wrong for her and for you, 
 that right and truth and love to man and allegiance to God 
 are above all patriotism, and that every citizen who sus- 
 tains his country in her sins is responsible to humanity, to 
 history, to philosophy, and to Him to whom all nations are 
 as a drop in the bucket and the small dust on the balance. 
 
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