MX7 REPRESENTATIVE PHI BETA KAPPA ORATIONS REPRESENTATIVE PHI BETA KAPPA ORATIONS . EDITED FOR THE UNITED CHAPTERS OF PHI BETA KAPPA BY CLARK S. NORTHUP WILLIAM C. LANE JOHN C. SCHWAB BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Btoerjsi&e prt Cambridge MDCCCCXV COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HOUOHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED OF TH THIS EDITION ONE THOUSAND COPIES WERE PRINTED. APRIL 1915 tfis PREFACE THE Phi Beta Kappa was organized not only as a fraternal but as a literary and debating society; and the exercises appro priate in such a society were conducted with more or less regu larity for many years. In addition to these exercises there grew up in several chapters the custom of an annual meeting with an oration and a poem. The annual address has now become, indeed, a custom in most of the eighty-six chapters ; and thus has been produced a considerable body of literature. The list of those addresses which have been printed already includes some hundreds of titles. The range of subjects dealt with by these orators is a wide one. Many have been educators and have discussed topics con nected with their profession; others have dealt with political, his torical, social, or religious topics. Many of these addresses possess intrinsic value; and nearly all, even the earliest, have still some value as reflecting the opinions of their times or of their authors. It has been thought by many that some of the most represen tative of these orations should be reprinted, not only because they are in themselves worthy of thus receiving a new lease of life, but also because such a collection would help to emphasize the aims for which the Society has always stood the cultiva tion of friendship, literature, and morality. To the Committee named below, therefore, the United Chap ters has entrusted the task of selecting these orations and of see ing the volume through the press. The Committee has found it by no means easy to make a selection; doubtless several more volumes as good as this could be made. The Committee hopes that the reception accorded this volume may be so favorable as to make possible the publication of a second series of orations, and perhaps a volume of poems. The frontispiece is from a crayon portrait of Emerson, about 1846, by either Hildreth or Johnston, and first appeared in Vol ume V of Emerson s Journals. It is here reproduced by the kind permission of the owners of the copyright. vi PREFACE For permission to reprint these orations the Committee ex tends its thanks to all the authors represented, and to the fol lowing publishers: Hough ton Mifflin Company, the Macmillan Company, Charles Scribner s Sons, Moffat, Yard and Company, Harper and Brothers, the Atlantic Monthly Company, the Har vard Graduates Magazine Association, the Tufts College Grad uate, the Oberlin Alumni Magazine, the University of Chicago Press. CLARK S. NORTHUP. WILLIAM C. LANE. JOHN C. SCHWAB. CONTENTS HORACE BUSHNELL. The True Wealth or Weal of Nations. Yale, 1837 r , . . 1 H WALDO EMERSON. The American Scholar. Har vard, 1837 24 JOB DURFEE. The Influence of Scientific Discovery and In vention on Social and Political Progress. Brown, 1843 . 43 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY. The Connection between Science and Religion. Harvard, 1845 76 EORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. The American Doctrine of Lib erty. Harvard, 1862 . .;* 94 ^FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH. The Scholar of To-day. Am- herst, 1868 112 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK. Intellectual Leadership in American History. Brown, 1875 129 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS. The Relations of Higher Educa tion to National Prosperity. Vermont, 1876 152 CHARLES HENRY BELL. The Worship of Success. Dart mouth, 1881 174 >WENDELL PHILLIPS. The Scholar in a Republic. Harvard, 1881 191 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS. The Social Plaint. New York Alumni, 1892 216 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE. Evolution vs. Revolution, in Politics. New York Alumni, 1896; Vassar, 1906; Cornell, 1913 233 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN. The Unity of Human Nature. Ho- bart, 1901 . 254 viii CONTENTS BLISS PERRY. The Amateur Spirit. Columbia, Tufts, 1901 263 BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER. Things Human. Chicago, 1901 276 FELIX EMANTJEL SCHELLING. Humanities, Gone and to Come. Pennsylvania, 1902 .......... 286 ALBERT SHAW. Jefferson s Doctrines under New Tests. Wil liam and Mary, 1904 ............ 298 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON. The Age of Erudition. Chicago, 1905 ................. .326 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT. Academic Freedom. Cornell, 1907 .................. 344 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART. The Hope of Democracy. Tufts, 1907 .................. 362 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS. Democracy and a Prophetic Idealism. Leland Stanford, Jr., 1907 ....... 377 AUGUSTUS GROSVENOR. The Attitude of the Scholar. North Carolina, 1909 . ....... ...... 395 JOSIAH ROYCE. What is Vital in Christianity ? Vassar, 1909 404 /s BARRETT WENDELL. The Mystery of Education. Johns Hop kins, 1909 ......... . .; ..... 442 t ^<WOODROW WILSON. The Spirit of Learning. Harvard, 1909 466 PAUL SHOREY. The Unity of the Human Spirit. Oberlin, 1910 , .... .481 REPRESENTATIVE PHI BETA KAPPA ORATIONS REPRESENTATIVE PHI BETA KAPPA ORATIONS : .. .\\ - : - 1 : : " THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS BY HORACE BUSHNELL Delivered before the Alpha of Connecticut, at Yale College, August 15, 1837. IT is truly a great satisfaction to me, that I appear before you, not to claim a place, but only to supply a chasm in the succes sion of your distinguished and eloquent speakers. I am thus per mitted to feel, that I discharge an office rather of good will and fraternity, than of ambition; and if I do not leap into the chasm that has occurred, with exactly the zeal of a Curtius, I may at least cherish the hope, as I go down, that the ground will close over me, and the line of your distinguished orators pass on with out any mark of disruption. I propose to speak of the greatness and happiness of states, and especially of our own; which I shall do, not ambitiously, or as coveting the distinction of an orator, but in the way of prac tical and grave discussion. Wherein consists, and how shall be attained, the true greatness and felicity of a state? My chief concern will be to offer something which, for argu ment and doctrine, is worthy of so grave a problem. I hope it may appear, that a ground is here open for the erection of a science more adequate, in some respects, than the science, so called, of political economy; and one that shall base itself on higher and more determinate principles. That the body and form of such a science can be developed in a single discourse, will not be supposed. If I am able to open a passage, so that we may look in upon the field to be occupied, or if I may but excite to investigation of the subject the young men of this honored university, who are soon to fill public stations and diffuse the leaven of their opinions in every part of the republic, my end will be answered. 2 HORACE BUSHNELL If any, in our present crisis of difficulty and depression, have ceased to hope for their country, it needs to be remembered, as a check to this precipitate despair, how much of mischief and misrule every great rijAtioh has had to survive. Moreover, I know not the time when the pyrospects of our country, judiciously vjeweii; \visr tJriglitej than" now. That we are able to bear so violent a shock, without any disruption of the laws, is enough, in itself, to encourage new confidence in our institutions. This strong-handed compulsion, too, which has checked the impetu osity and the increasing recklessness of our people, is accomplish ing, by force, what arguments and warnings were powerless to effect compelling them to know the worth of principles and of wise and judicious leaders. We have not yet come to the end of our institutions, but rather to an interregnum of sobriety and reason, in which truth may find a place to interpose her counsels, and in which, I trust, the most solid and healthful principles are to find a more ready reception. It is in this confidence that I now speak. And while I am encouraged by the temper of the times, I cannot expel the con viction, too, of some positive and peculiar agreement between my subject I trust also between the principles to be advanced and a destiny of real greatness, certainly to be reached by our country. There are too many prophetic signs admonishing us, that Almighty Providence is pre-engaged to make this a truly great nation, not to be cheered by them, and set ourselves to a search after the true principles of national welfare, with a con fidence that here, at last, they are to find their opportunity. This western world had not been preserved unknown through so many ages, for any purpose less sublime, than to be opened, at a certain stage of history, and become the theater wherein better principles might have room and free development. Out of all the inhabitants of the world, too, a select stock, the Saxon, and out of this the British family, the noblest of the stock, was chosen to people our country; that our eagle, like that of the prophet, might have the cedars of Lebanon, and the topmost branches of the cedars, to plant by his great waters. A belt of temperate climate was also marked out for our country, in the midst of a vast continent, with a view, it would seem, to preserve the vigor of the stock, and make it fruitful here, as it ever has been, in THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 3 great names and great actions. Furthermore, it is impossible to glance at the very singular territory we occupy, without perceiv ing that the two great elements of force are to be developed together, in this people, as they never yet have been in history. These elements, of course, are weight and motion vastness of conception and vigor of action. Though we have a field every way ample to contain two hundred millions of inhabitants, there is yet no vast central inland, remote from the knowledge and commerce of mankind, where a people may dream out life, in the gigantic but crude and sluggish images of Asiatic repose. Vast as it is, and filling the minds of its people always with images of vastness, it is yet surrounded, like the British islands, and per meated, like Venice itself, by the waters of commerce becom ing thus a field of vastness, not in repose, but in action. On the west it meets the Pacific, and the waters of another hemisphere. On the east and south, a long bold line of coast sweeps round, showing the people more than a thousand leagues of the highway of the world. On the north, again, stretches a vast mediterranean of congregated seas, sounding to each other, in a boisterous wild chorus, and opening their gates to the commerce of far-distant regions. Then again, across the land, down all the slopes and through valleys large enough for empires, sweep rivers that are moving lakes. All the features of the land are such as conspire to form a people of vast conceptions, and the most intense prac tical vigor and activity. And already do these two elements of force appear in our people, in a combination more striking and distinct than ever before in any people whose education was so unripe. Need I say, that such a people cannot exist without a great history. We have been told, that stars of nobility and orders of hierarchy, as they exist in the old world, are indispen sable, as symbols, to make authority visible, and inspire the peo ple with great and patriotic sentiments. But how shall we long for these, in a country where God has ennobled the land itself in every feature, filling it with the signs of his own august royalty, and training the people up to spiritual vastness and force by symbols of his own! But we detain our subject. Plato, Locke, and other philoso phers who have written theoretically concerning government, 4 HORACE BUSHNELL failed to establish any conclusive doctrine, only because they busied themselves in planning constitutions, and discussing the forms of government. Forms must be the birth of circumstances, not of any abstract or absolute doctrine. The attempt of Locke, seated in his study, to produce a complete frame of government for South Carolina, was one of signal audacity, and worthy of the very signal defeat it met in its application. Civil philosophy, if any such thing is possible, must begin with a definition of the object of the civil state, and confine itself to adjusting the principles, not the forms, by which that object may be secured. There is always some end or object, some good pursued by a state, which determines its polity. The institu tions of Lycurgus, for example, have their object in the forma tion of a valorous people. The Spartan state, accordingly, never advances in wealth or in the arts, never becomes a truly polite nation, never even adds to her empire by conquest. All the lines of her history and polity terminate together in producing a den of lions. The Roman state, in like manner, concentrated its aim on the pursuit of empire, and no bird or beast of prey was ever more constant to its instincts, than the Roman policy to its object, till it achieved the dominion of the world. Other nations have pursued objects more complex, falling of course into sys tems of polity equally complex with their objects. The great fundamental question, then, on which everything in civil phi losophy hinges, is to determine what is the end which a state ought to pursue, or in what the true greatness and felicity of a state consists. Which makes it the more remarkable, that almost no thought has been expended in bringing this question to a definite settlement. Even Lord Bacon soberly puts forth the atrocious, the really Satanic doctrine, "that it is the principal point of greatness, in any state, to have a race of military men, and to have those laws and customs which may reach forth unto them just occasions (as may be pretended) of war." What a conception to be given out by a philosopher! And yet even this very shocking way of greatness would have, at least, the merit of making a soldierly and manly people just what we are most likely to miss of in the present drift of society. For it is the really shameful fact, that we are now turning our policies and public measures, more and more, on questions of money and trade; as if THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 5 property were the real end of statesmanship. Since the words wealth and weal are brothers of the same family, many appear to imagine that the political economists, Adam Smith and his disci ples, having carefully defined that national wealth which is to be the end of their science, have therein defined that national weal which is the true end of statesmanship a mistake that has occurred the more naturally, that the general deification of money begets a tendency in the same direction. And so it comes to pass, in the modern school of nations, especially in those that have conquered to themselves the great principle that govern ment is for the good of the governed, that their evil genius seems about to plunge them into the miserable delusion of confounding the good of the governed with money and possessions; and so to rob them of all the noble advantages they had gained. Ceasing to care, any more, for what the people are, the great question now is, what are they to have? Under the supposed auspices of the new science, a new era of misgovernment is thus inaugu rated. And the danger is that the free nations so called will become mercenary as free; nations without great sentiments or great men; without a history; luxurious, corrupt, and, in the end, miserable enough to quite match the worst ages of despotism. There is, besides, in the new science of political economy, care ful as it is in its method, and apparently unanswerable in its arguments, an immense oversight, which is sure to be discovered by its final effects on society, and to quite break up the aspect of reality it has been able to give to its conclusions. It deifies, in fact, the laws of trade; not observing that there is a whole side of society and human life which does not trade, owns no laws of trade, stands superior to trade, wields, in fact, a mightier power over the public prosperity itself just because it reaches higher and connects with nobler ends. Could these price-current philosophers only get a whole nation of bankers, brokers, factors, ship-owners and salesmen, to themselves, they would doubtless make a paradise of it shortly only there might possibly be no public love in the paradise, no manly temperance, no sense of high society, no great orators, leaders, heroes. After all it is not the whole question this question of econ omy. Suppose, for example, that some very young nation, one that has not yet run itself into all manifold industries and forms 6 HORACE BUSHNELL of creation, like the older nations, were to put implicit faith in the new science, and consent to buy, always, what she can cheaper buy than create; so to become, in fact, a producer of but one article cotton, for example, or wheat. Such a state will be no complete creature, like a body whose breathing, puls ing, digesting, assimilative, and a hundred other, processes, all play into each other, in that wonderful reciprocity that makes a full-toned vital order, but it will be like a body having only a single function. It will be low in organization. It will have no great consciousness and scarcely any consciousness at all. For it has no relational system of parts and offices. The men are repetitions, in a sense, of each other, and society is cotton, or wheat, all through nothing more. Mind is dull, impulse mor bid and unreliable. There is no great feeling, nothing to make either a history of, or a man. Living thus a thousand years, the nation becomes nothing better than a provincial country a thousand years old. Could they now sell out all the great gains, made by their wise trading economy, and buy, for such a price, the dear, deep public love that belongs to a people duly mani folded in then* works and productive arts, the rich gifts of feeling and sentiment, the ennobled state-consciousness, out of which spring the soldiers and heroes, the orators and poets, and the great days of a great people, it would be just the wisest trade and best economy they have ever known best, I mean, not only for the character it would bring, but for their creative energy and even for the total, at last, of their wealth itself. Nay, if they would only march disgustfully out, some day, leaving all their lands and properties behind, just to get rid of their ineffable commonness, their exodus, for a purpose so manly and so truly great, would even beat the exodus of Moses. What, then, it is time for us to ask, is that wealth of a nation which includes its weal, or solid well-being? that which is the end of all genuine policy, and all true statesmanship? It consists, I answer, in the total value of the persons of the people. National wealth is personal, not material. It includes the natural capacity, the industry, the skill, the science, the bravery, the loyalty, the moral and religious worth of the people. The wealth of a nation is in the breast of its sons. This is the object which, accordingly as it is advanced, is sure to bring with it riches, justice, liberty, THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 7 strength, stability, invincibility, and every other good; or which, being neglected, every sort of success and prosperity is but accidental and deceitful. That any statesman should look upon the persons of his coun trymen as secondary, in consequence, to money and possessions; or that he should not value the revenue of great abilities and other high qualities that may be developed hi them, vigor, valor, genius, integrity, above any other possible increase or advantage, discloses a sordid view of state policy, and reflects on the people themselves, in a manner fit to be resented. "You will confer," says Epictetus, "the greatest benefit on your city, not by raising the roofs, but by exalting the souls of your fellow- citizens; for it is better that great souls should live in small habi tations, than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses." It is not difficult to feel the justice of this noble declaration; for it is not a secret to any one of mankind, that a very rich man may yet be a very insignificant man, nay, that he must be so, if he has lived only for gain, and made all wisdom to consist in economy. To understand that states are made up of individuals, is still less difficult. Well was it that the sordid god of gold and of misers was placed under ground; by what strange mistake is he to be brought up now and installed king of nations? The truth, which I assert, and which seems too evident to require any formal argument, is happily illustrated by reference to the Mexican state, as contrasted with our own. It was not a peaceful band of emigrants or exiles who landed there to find a refuge, and a place to worship God according to their own con sciences. It was not the Saxon blood, nor the British mind, filled with the determinate principles and lofty images of freedom enshrined in the English tongue. They came in the name of a proud empire, armed for conquest and extirpation. The infernal tragedy of Guatemozin was the inaugural scene of Mexican jus tice. They loaded themselves with gold and silver. They rioted in plunder and spoil, founded nothing, cherished no hope of lib erty, practised no kind of industry but extortion, erected no safeguards of morality. What is the result? Worthless, or having no personal value in themselves, there has grown out of them what alone could grow; a nation of thriftless anarchists and intriguers, without money at the very mouth of their mines, 8 HORACE BUSHNELL without character abroad or government at home, and with nothing to hope for in the future, better than they have suffered in the past. How striking an example, to show, that neither a fine country nor floods of gold and silver, can make a nation great, without greatness in the breasts of her sons! Revert now to the simple beginnings of our founders. They brought hither, in their little ships, not money, not merchandise, no array of armed force, but they came freighted with religion, learning, law, and the spirit of men. They stepped forth upon the shore, and a wild and frowning wilderness received them. Strong in God and their own heroic patience, they began their combat with danger and hardship. Disease smote them, but they fainted not; famine, but they feasted on roots with a patient spirit. They built a house for God, then for themselves. They established education and the observance of a stern but august morality, then legislated for the smaller purposes of wealth and convenience. They gave their sons to God; through him, to virtue; and through virtue, to the state. So they laid the founda tions. Soon the villages began to smile, churches arose still farther in the depths of the wilderness, industry multiplied her hands, colleges were established, the beginnings of civil order completed themselves and swelled into the majesty of states. And now, behold, the germs of a mighty nation are manifest a nation of law, art, industry, and power, rushing on a career of expansion never equalled in the history of man! What addition, we are now tempted to ask, could any amount of wealth have made to the real force and value of these beginnings? Or, having a treasure in her sons, what is there beside, whether strength, growth, riches, or anything desirable, which a state can possibly fail of? Wealth is but the shadow of men; and lordship and vic tory, it has been nobly said, are but the pages of justice and virtue. But let us descend, for a few moments, to grounds of mere economy. Let it be granted, that wealth is the true and principal object of state polity. I am anxious to inquire, how wealth is to be created, and especially, in what form wealth is to be accu mulated. It would almost seem that the fancy which floats so delightfully before the minds of men, in their pursuit of private gain, must throw the same charm over national wealth. The THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 9 state is to become prodigiously rich, they seem to imagine, against her old age; and then she will be able, with the stock laid in, to support her great family at their ease, on the mere interest of the money. But how is her great wealth to be laid up, or in what shape? Not in notes and bills, certainly, that are due from one to another within the nation; for it adds nothing to the wealth of a family, that one of the sons owes another. Not in specie; for gold and silver are good for nothing in themselves, but only as they will buy something else. And if they were con fined within the nation, and not allowed to purchase articles from abroad, as the case supposes, they would only pass from hand to hand within the nation, and the prices of all articles would be raised, according to the plenty there is of gold and silver. Silver, perhaps, being as plenty as iron, a ton would be exchanged for a ton of iron, and the man who owns a hundred tons of it, would have it piled up in the street as rich as he now is with a few thousand dollars, and no more. But if not in notes and bills, not in specie, in what form is the national wealth to be laid up? In a cultivated territory, I reply, hi dwellings, roads, bridges, manufactories, ships, temples, libraries, fortifica tions, monuments; things which add to the beauty, comfort, strength, or productiveness, of the nation. But what are all these things, but the products and representatives of personal quality and force in the people? And what shall ever maintain them in goodkeeping or repair, but such quality and force? Taken together, they are scarcely more than a collection of the tools of industry and production ; and if a nation, without appli cation, or skill, or such a state of morals as permits the security of property, were to receive a country ready furnished with such a wealth, the productive farms would soon be impoverished, the towns decayed, the ships rotten, the stands of art and machinery dilapidated and wrecked. Only change the quality of the British people into that of the Mexican, and five years would make their noble island a seat of poverty and desolation. Where, then, is accumulation, in what form is wealth to be laid up, but in the personal quality and value of the people? This immaterial wealth, too, which many would think quite unsubstantial in its nature, is really more imperishable and indestructible by far than any other. There is never any amount of property and 10 HORACE BUSHNELL goods laid up by a nation, which the mere accident of a war, or an unsettled government, may not destroy, in a few years, so as to leave the nation virtually poor. But immaterial values, such as native capacity, attachment to home, knowledge, skill, cour age, and the like, are a stock, which ages only of reverse and declension can utterly consume. No failure of commerce, no famine, no war and conflagration desolating the land, no rapacity of conquest, can reach these treasures. Time only, with all his legions of ruin, can slowly master them. And if, perchance, a respite should be given, they will suddenly start up as a capital that had been invisible, and, in a few years, fill the land with all its former opulence. Take another aspect of the subject. The great foe to wealth which statesmen have to contend with, is dead consumption that which annihilates value without reproducing it. It can be shown, for example, from unquestionable data, that fashionable extravagance hi our people, such as really transcends their means to a degree that is not respectable; theatrical amusements, known to be only corrupt and vulgar in character; together with intemperate drinking, and all the idleness, crime, and pauperism, consequent, have annihilated, since we began our history, not less than three or four times the total wealth of the nation. This dead consumption is the great cancer of destruction, which eats against all industry and production. It must be kept out, or cut out, or the flesh must be more than supplied, else there is no advance of wealth. Now if economy is to furnish the law of civil administration, as according to current reasonings it is, let economy provide a remedy against this all-devouring and fatal consumption. And since it originates only in a corruption of quality in the people in a want of simplicity, temperance, providence, and good manners since the spendthrifts of the family are the bad sons, let the statesman take care not to edu cate spendthrift sons. Let him turn his whole attention to the great subject of preparing a just, provident, industrious people. Let him spare no possible expense for this object. Let him, in fact, forget all economy in his devotion to higher aims, and by that time he will be a consistent and thorough economist. But the distribution of wealth is a matter of more consequence to a state than its amount. When the Roman state was at the THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 11 height of its wealth, there were not more than twenty land holders in Italy; the rest of the people were dependents an idle, thriftless, profligate race, ripe for every possible mischief and sedition. There could not be a more miserable condition in any state; it permitted no such thing as character, law, security, or domestic comfort. But I will require it of any statesman to show how a more equal division of property can be effected, without robbery, unless by means of intelligence, application, frugality, devotion to home and family, in the breasts of the people. Let me add that the changes now rapidly taking place in New England, the broad and partially hostile distinctions that begin to display themselves, are sad omens, and leave us no time to squander in merely economical policies. It is farther to be noted, that the wealth of a nation must be defended, as well as constructed. We have not yet reached the day when mere principles of equity are a sufficient bulwark to nations. Even if the days of absolute conquest are past, there are yet a thousand liabilities to violent encroachments on the honor and rights of a people, which they cannot be passive under, without sacrificing a national spirit, and well-nigh dissolving the bonds of government itself. But where lies the strength of a nation s defence? In such things as money purchases ships, fortifications, and magazines of war? No! the real bulwarks of a nation are the bodies of her sons; or, I should rather say, the spirit and principles of her sons. They are public love, wisdom, and high command, attachment to home, and bravery. Courage is necessary to the spirit and true manhood of a people, though pursuing a policy even of non-resistance. And true courage is a high trait. It is not to be bought with money, not to be inspired by an"occasion. It cannot be infused into a mean-bred and sen sual people. It is the brother in arms of conscious integrity. In its highest examples it is supernatural, and by faith in God waxes valiant. How often has the single sentiment of courage been worth more to a people, in a merely economical estimate, than any possible amount of treasure? To seek farther illustration of a position so nearly self-evident as the one I advance, would only reflect suspicion upon it. The personal value of a people is the only safe measure of their honor and felicity. Economy holds the same place in their polity, which 12 HORACE BUSHNELL it holds in the life of a wise and great man a subordinate place, and when subordinate, honorable. But their highest treasures as a state, they behold in capable and manly bodies, just principles, high sentiments, intelligence, and genius. To cherish these in a people, to provide a noble succession of poets, philosophers, lawgivers, and commanders, who shall be the di recting head, and the nerves of action ; to compact all into one energetic and stately body inspirited by public love this is the noble study of true philosophic statesmanship. "Alas, sir!" exclaimed Milton, suddenly grasping this whole subject as with divine force, "a commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body; for look, what the grounds and causes are of single happiness to one man, the same ye shall find them to a whole state." Here, in a single sentence, he declares the true idea of a state, and of all just administration. But however correct in theory, such views, it will be suspected, are, after all, remote and impracticable. How, especially, can we hope to bring our intractable democracy upon so high a ground of principle? I cannot entirely sympathize with such impressions. History clearly indicates the fact, that republics are more ductile than any other form of government, and more favorable to the admission of high-toned principles, and the severer maxims of government. The confederate republics of Crete, and the daughter republic of Sparta, were no other than studied and rigorous systems of direct personal discipline upon the people, in which wealth and ease were in no wise sought, but sternly rejected. And in what monarchy, or even despotism, of the world, where but in plain republican Rome, the country of Cato and Brutus, is a censor of manners and morals to be endured, going forth with his note-book, and for any breach of parental or filial duty observed, for seduction of the youth, for dishonor in the field, for a drinking bout, or even for luxurious manners, inflicting a civil degradation upon the highest citizens and magistrates? The beginnings, too, of our own history, are of the same stern temperament, and such as perfectly to sym pathize with the highest principles of government. Indeed I have felt it to be, in the highest degree, auspicious, that the ground I vindicate before you requires no revolution, being itself THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 13 the true American ground. May we not also discover even now, in the worst forms of radicalism and political depravation among us, a secret elemental force, a law of republican feeling, which, if appealed to on high and rigid principles, would yield a true response? We fail in our conservative attempts, more because our principles are too low, than because they are too high. A course of administration, based on the pursuit of wealth alone, though bad in principle anywhere, is especially bad in a republic. It is more congenial to the splendors and stately distinctions of monarchy. It concentrates the whole attention of the nation upon wealth. It requires measures to be debated only as they bear upon wealth. It produces thus a more egregious notion of its dignity, continually, both in the minds of those who have it, and of those who have it not, and thus it exasperates every bad feeling in a republic, till it retaliates destruction upon it. But a system of policy, based on the high and impartial principles of philosophy, one that respects only manly bodies, high talents, great sentiments and actions, one that values excellence of per son, whether found in the palaces of the rich or the huts of the poor, holding all gilded idleness and softness hi the contempt they deserve such a system is congenial to a republic. It would have attractions to our people. Its philosophic grounds, too, can be vindicated by a great variety of bold arguments, and the moral absurdity of holding wealth in higher estimation than personal value, can be played out in the forms of wit and satire, so as to raise a voice of acclamation, and overwhelm the merce nary system with utter and final contempt. I ought to say, that no constitutional change in our system is requisite or contemplated. It is only necessary that we sustain the distinctness and high independence of the state governments. The general government is mainly fiscal and prudential in its sphere of action. The highest and most sacred duties belong to the individual states. It is the exact and appropriate sphere of these, to prepare personal wealth in the people. They should be as little absorbed, therefore, as possible, in the spirit and policy of the general government. Each State should have the interest, in itself, of a family, a sense of character to sustain, a love of its ancestors and its children, a just ambition to raise its quota of distinguished men, to be honored for its literature, its good man- 14 HORACE BUSHNELL ners, and the philosophic beauty of its disciplinary institu tions. But let us glance at some of the practical operations of our doctrine more particularly. The personal value of the people being the great object of pursuit, the first care of a state will of course be to preserve and ennoble the native quality or stock of its people. It is a well-known principle of physiology, that culti vation, bodily and mental, and all refinements of disposition and principle do gradually work, to increase the native volume and elevate the quality of a people. It is by force of this principle, long operating, that states occupying a similar climate have become so different in temperament, talent, and quality of every kind. In this principle, a field of promise truly sublime opens on the statesmen of a country. And yet, I know not that more than two or three lawgivers ever made the ennobling of their stock a subject of practical attention. The free mingling and crossing of races in the higher ranges of culture and character would doubtless be a great benefit to the stock. But the constant importation, as now, to this country, of the lowest orders of people from abroad, to dilute the quality of our natural manhood, is a sad and beggarly prostitution of the noblest gift ever con ferred on a people. Who shall respect a people, who do not respect their own blood? And how shall a national spirit, or any determinate and proportionate character, arise out of so many low-bred associations and coarse-grained temperaments, im ported from every clime? It was in keeping, that Pan, who was the son of every body, was the ugliest of the gods. It is well known, too, that vices and degraded manners have a sad effect in sinking the quality of a people. We hear of one whole people, who are in danger of dwindling to absolute extinction, by force of this simple cause. And let the day but come to any people, when it is true that every man participates in the infected blood of drunkenness, or any corrupt vice, and it will be a people as certainly degenerate, to some degree, in bodily stature and force, in mental quickness and generosity. Do I then speak of enforc ing morals by law? Certainly I do. Only a decent respect for the blood of the nation requires it. But the punishments declared against such vices as poison the blood of a nation, ought to be suitable; they ought to be such as denote only contempt. If it THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 15 would be too severe, in the manner of an ancient Roman punish ment, to inclose the delinquent in a sack, with some appropriate animals, and throw him into the water, let him somehow be made a mark for mockery and derision. But let there be no appearance of austerity in the laws against vice. Let cheerful and happy amusements be provided, at the public expense. Let the youth be exercised in feats of agility and grace, in rowing and the spirited art of horsemanship. Erect monuments and fountains, adorn public walks and squares, arrange ornamental and scien tific gardens, institute festivals and games for the contest of youth and manhood in practical invention, in poetry, philosophy, and bodily prowess. Provide ways and means, go to any expense, to enliven the state and make the people happy, without low and vulgar pleasures. The sums now expended, every year, in a single article of appetite and of dead consumption, would defray every expense of this kind. In the same view, great cities will not be specially desired, and all confined employments will be obviated, as far as possible. For it is not in great cities, nor in the confined shops of trade, but principally in agriculture, that the best stock or staple of men is grown. It is in the open air, in communion with the sky, the earth, and all living things, that the largest inspiration is drunk in, and the vital energies of a real man constructed. The modern improvements in machinery have facilitated production to such a degree, that when they become diffused through the world, only a few hands, comparatively, will be requisite in the mechanic arts; and those engaged in agri culture, being proportionally more numerous, will be more in a condition of ease. Here opens a new and sublime hope. If a state can maintain the practice of a pure morality, and can unite with agriculture a taste for learning and science, and the generous exercises I have named, a race of men will ultimately be raised up, having a physical volume, a native majesty and force of mind, such as no age has yet produced. Or if this be not done, if the race are to sink down into idleness and effeminate pleasures, as production is facilitated, the great inventions we prize will certainly result hi a dwarfed and degraded staple of manhood. Pass, now, from the subject of native quality and capacity, to that of personal and moral improvement. God has given eyes to the body of man, by which to govern his feet and guide his other 16 HORACE BUSHNELL motions. So he has given to the mind a regulative eye a fac ulty, whose very office it is to command all the others. But, sup pose some one to busy himself in devising a system by which men shall be enabled to walk by the sense of smell or of touch. It were not a more absurd ingenuity, than to attempt a state policy which shall govern men through their appetites, or their love of gain, or their mere fears. The conscience must be entered, order and principle must be established in the seat of the soul s regency; and then a conservative and genial power will flow down thence on every other faculty and disposition, every frame of bodily habit, every employment and enterprise, and the whole body of the state will rise with invigorate thrift and full proportion in every part. To this end, a state must be grounded in religion. Though not established as a part of the political system, it must be virtually incorporate in the principles and feelings of the people. If it were possible for a people to subsist without some kind of religion, it would be a mere subsistence without morals, with out a true public enthusiasm, without genius, or an inspired liter ature. The highest distinction they could possibly attain to, would be the advancement of material philosophy. Being wor shippers of matter, they might be good observers of matter, but only in the lower and individual aspects of things; the Higher Reason, which dictates all material forms and relations, and dwells in them, they could not perceive. " They that deny a God," says Bacon, "destroy man s nobility; for, certainly, man is of kin to the beasts by his body, and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. It destroys like wise magnanimity and the raising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a courage and generosity he will put on, when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God; which courage is manifestly such as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain." This confidence of a better nature is religious faith; and here it is that man begins to look beyond mere sense and outward fact in his thoughts. And in this point of view, religion is seen to be the spring of all genius. Genius is but an intellectual faith. It looks round on the world and life, and beholds not a limit, in some sense, not a reality; but the confidence, in all, of a better nature. The forms, colors, and THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 17 experiences of life, are not truth to it, but only the imagery of truth. Boundaries break away, thought is emancipated, a mighty inspiration seizes and exalts it; and what to others is fact and dead substance, to it is but a vast chamber of spiritual imagery. Colors are the hues of thought, forms embody it, con trasts hold it in relief, proportions are the clothing of its beauty, sounds are its music. Whose the thought is, its own reflected, or God s presented, it may never pause to inquire; or with the immortal Kepler, it may exclaim, in the pious ecstasy of a child O Lord, I think thy thoughts after thee! In either case, the world is changed it is no more the whole, but only the sign of things. The blank walls of sense are become significant, and a world beyond the world is beheld in distinct embodiment. Nearly allied to religion, as a power ennobling man, is rever ence for ancestors. There is something essentially bad in a peo ple who despise or do not honor their originals. A state torn from its beginnings is fragmentary, incapable of public love, or of any real nationality. No such people were ever known to develop a great character. Rome was not ashamed to own that she sprung of refugees and robbers, and boasted, in every age, her old seer Numa who gave her laws and a religion. Athens could glory in the fiction that her ancestors were grasshoppers, sprung out of the earth as an original race. England has never blushed to name her noble families from the Danish or Saxon pirates who de scended on her coast. Piety to God, and piety to ancestors, are the only force which can impart an organic unity and vitality to a state. Torn from the past and from God, government is but a dead and brute machine. Its laws take hold of nothing in man which responds; they are only paper decrees, made by the men of yesterday, which the men of to-day have as good right to put under their feet. What is it which gives to the simple enactment of words written on paper, the force of law a power to sway and mould a mighty nation? Is it the terror of force? Why does not all force disclaim it? Is it that some constituted body of magistrates enacts it? But how do the magistrates themselves become subject to it, in the very act of pronouncing it, as if it were uttered by some authority higher than they? This is the only answer: Law is uttered by the National Life not by some monarch, magistrate, or legislature, of to-day, or of any day, but 18 HORACE BUSHNELL by the state; by that organic force of which kings, magistrates, legislatures, of all times, have been but the hands, and feet, and living instruments; that force which has grown up from small and perilous beginnings, strengthened itself in battles, spoken in the voices of orators and poets, and been hallowed at the altars of religion. Glorious and auspicious distinction it is, therefore, that we have an ancestry, who, after every possible deduction, still overtop the originals of every nation of mankind men fit to be honored and held in reverence while the continent endures. I have not time to show in what way religion and a suitable reverence to ancestors may be promoted in our state and nation. If only a due sense of their dignity and necessity were felt, the means would not be difficult to reach. Only let every statesman, or magistrate, honor religion in his private life; let him say nothing, in his speech publicly, to reflect on the sacredness of religion; make no appeal to passions inconsistent with it in the people by that time wisdom will find out ways to do all which is necessary. So let every public man who has profaned the ashes of his ancestors, exulted in sweeping down their safeguards and landmarks, and excited the ignorant people to a prejudice against them, degrading to themselves and destructive to public love let him, I say, cease from his crime, and receive better feelings to his heart. And there, in the place where Washington sleeps, let the statesman who denies a monument because it is an expense, fall down and draw from the hallowed earth, if he may, some breath of justice and magnanimity. Beginning thus, I trust we might not cease till every spot signalized in our history is marked by some honorable token of national remembrance. There is not a nobler office for a state, than the education of its youth, or one more congenial to a just ambition. Abandoning the mercenary and merely economical policy, and ascending to higher views, it will behold its richest mines in the capabilities of its sons and daughters. Upon the cultivation of these it will con centrate the main force of its polity, and will produce to itself a glorious revenue of judges, senators, and commanders; wives to adorn and strengthen the spheres of great men; citizens who will make every scene of life and every work of industry to smile. Oh! I blush, for once, to think of my country! It has gone THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 19 abroad we ourselves have declared that we are an enlight ened people. And doubtless a republican nation, one too that has filled the world with its name, must be a nation of special culture. Suppose a commissioner were sent out from some one of the venerable kingdoms of the old world to examine and report upon our admirable systems of schools. First of all, he will say, when he returns, I found in America no system of schools at all, and scarcely a system in any one school. I ascertained, that in four states adjacent to each other, there were more children out of school than in all the kingdom of Prussia. Travelling through New England, which is noted for its schools, I observed that the schoolhouses were the most comfortless and mean- looking class of buildings, placed in the worst situations, without shades or any attraction to mitigate their barbarity. Into these dirty shops of education, the sons and daughters are driven to be taught. I found, on inquiry, that a man, for example, who would give a cheap sort of lawyer from ten to twenty dollars for a few hours service, is giving the professor of education from one to two dollars for a whole winter s work on the mind of his son. On the whole, I found that the Americans were very providently engaged in planting live-oak timber for the service of their navy in future generations, but I did not discover that they had any particular concern, just now, about soldiers, commanders, and magistrates for the coming age. The picture is, alas! too just. Indeed, the public are not altogether insensible to these things. I hear them often complained of by those who do not seem to understand that they are only the legitimate fruit of their own principles. What other result could possibly appear, in a country whose policy itself is only concerned with questions of loss and gain? A national literature consummates and crowns the greatness of a people. The best actions, indeed, and the highest personal virtues, are scarcely possible, till the inspiring force of a litera ture is felt. There cannot even be a high tone of general educa tion without a literature. A state must have its renowned orators and senators; the spirit of its laws and customs must be devel oped in a venerable body of judicial learning; its constitutions must have been clothed with gravity and authority by the admiration of philosophers and wise men; its beginnings, its 20 HORACE BUSHNELL great actions, its fields of honor, the names of its lakes, rivers, and mountains, must have been consecrated in song; then the nation becomes, as it were, conscious of itself, and one, because there is a spirit in it which the men of every class and opinion, nay, the earth and the air, participate. But, alas ! there must be something of true manhood and spiritual generosity, to produce such a literature. A mercenary mind is incapable of true inspira tion. The spirit of gain is not the spirit of song; and philosophers will not be heard discoursing in the groves of paper cities. Be sides, had our country been pursuing, as it ought, the noble policy of producing its wealth in the persons of its people, those relaxations by which the right of suffrage has been put into the hands of the unworthy, would never have been made. And then, after they were made, our most cultivated citizens would not have withdrawn from their country so despairingly; they would have come forward, in the spirit of public devotion, and contrib uted all their energies to the noble purpose of making our whole people, since they are called to rule, fit to rule. They would even have consoled themselves in that which they had feared, by the discovery of a philosophic necessity, that their country, at what ever sacrifice, should be completely torn from British types, in order to become a truly distinct nation. Least of all, would the best talents of the nation have lent themselves to the task of soberly reasoning out discouragement to our institutions, be cause they are not supported by noble and priestly orders. The worst radicalism which our country has ever suffered, has been this, which, under the guise of a sickly and copied conservatism, has discouraged all nationality, by demanding for the state that which is radically opposed to its fundamental elements, and which God and nature have sternly denied. A nation must be distinct, and must respect itself as distinct from all others, else it cannot adorn itself with a literature, or attain to any kind of excellence. And, in this view, the most efficient promoter and patron of American literature, is that man who has honored the constitution of his country by the noble stature of his opinions and his eloquence; who has stood calm and self-collected in the midst of factious doctrines and corrupt measures on every side, and whose voice has been heard in the darkest hours, speaking words of encouragement and hope to his countrymen. Fully THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 21 impressed with the grandeur of the British state and constitu tion, and copiously enriched himself by the wealth of British literature, he has yet dared to renounce a state of cliency, and be, in a sense, the first American. It is only needed now, that a voice of faith should break out in our colleges and halls of learn ing, and that our constitutions be set forth in their real grounds, and vindicated by a philosophy strongly and truly American, to hasten wonderfully the day of our literature. And the tokens are, that we must have a literature, not scholastic or cosmopoli tan, like that of Germany, which is the literature of leisure and seclusion; but one that is practical and historical, one that is marked by a distinct nationality, like the Athenian and the British ; one, too, it must be, of vast momentum in its power on the world. It will be eloquence, humor, satire, song, and phi losophy, flowing on with and around our history. And as our history is to be a struggle after the true idea and settlement of liberty, so our literature will partake in the struggle. It will be the American mind wrestling with itself, to obtain the true doc trine of civil freedom; overwhelming demagogues and factions, exposing usurpations, exploding licentious opinions, involved in the fearful questions which slavery must engender, borne, per haps, at times, on the high waves of revolution, reclining at peace in the establishment of order and justice, and deriving lessons of wisdom from the conflicts of experience. As American and characteristic, it will revolve about and will ever be attracted towards one and the same great truth, whose authority it will gradually substantiate, and, I trust, will at length practically enthrone in the spirit and opinions of our people. This truth is none other than, that LIBERTY is JUSTICE SECURED. Establishing this truth in a general and permanent authority, which I trust it may do in the very process of investing the same with a glorified body in letters, it will bring our history to a full consummation. It will place our nation on the same high platform with the divine government, which knows no liberty other than law; and there it shall stand immortal, because it has found the rock of immortal principle. But I must close. I have detained you too long, and yet I have only touched upon a few points in this vast subject, and with 22 HORACE BUSHNELL studied brevity. When I think of the amount of talent assem bled here, in this honorable society, and in the numerous band of young men preparing here to act a part in their country, a feeling of duty constrains me to address you personally. May I not hope, that the principle I have asserted, approves itself to the sober and serious conviction of your judgment? And have you not some generous kindlings of desire and purpose stirring in your breasts, that move you to be advocates and champions for your country, in a cause of so great honor? Feel, in every place and station, that you defraud your country, and, worse than this, defraud the honor of your own mind, if you do not resist, and, on every proper occasion, denounce every merely mercenary scheming policy of government. Remind your countrymen of their persons, and the nobler wealth of the mind. A field is open before you, wherein to win a just and holy renown. Be not afraid to be republicans. Be not afraid of a principle. He who has a principle is inspired. Doubtless there is some difficulty in sway ing the opinions and prejudices of our people. But the worst impediment truth has ever had to complain of, in our country, has been in its spiritless and distrustful advocates. There needs to be a certain exaltation of courage and inspired pertinacity in the advocates of truth. She must not be distrusted, or cloaked in disguises and accommodations. She must go before, in full unsoiled whiteness, and the majesty and spirit of her gait must invigorate her followers. Truth is the daughter of God. He pos sessed her in the beginnings of his way. Silence is her voice. The charmed orbs hear it forever, and, following and revolving, do but transcribe her word. The masses and central depths also know her presence, and the gems sparkle before her in their secret places. The buried seeds and roots inwardly know her, and pencilling their flowers and preparing then* several fra grances, send them up to bloom and exhale around her. She penetrates all things. Not laws, not bars, nor walls, can exclude her goings. Even prejudice, and the madness of the people, which cannot look upon her face, do yet behold her burnished feet with secret amazement. Understanding, then, that truth is almighty, let us become her interpreters and prophets. Have faith in truth. Install her in the affections of your youth, conse crate to her all your talents, and the full vigor of your lives, and THE TRUE WEALTH OR WEAL OF NATIONS 23 be assured that she will in no wise permit you to fail; she will fill you with peace and lead you to honor. In the principles I have now asserted, I have a full and immu table confidence. They are true principles. They have power to impress themselves. They only want enthusiasm to worship them, voices to speak them, minds to reason for them, and cour age steadfast and resolute to maintain them, and having these they cannot fail to reign. And in that, I see the dawn of a new and illustrious vision. I see the nation rising from its present depression, with a chas tened but good spirit. I see education beginning to awake, a spirit of sobriety ruling in business and in manners, religion animated in her heavenly work, a higher self-respect invigorat ing our institutions, and the bonds of our country strengthened by a holier attachment. Our eagle ascends and spreads his wings abroad from the eastern to the western ocean. A hundred mil lions of intelligent and just people dwell in his shadow. Churches are sprinkled throughout the whole field. The Sabbath sends up its holy voice. The seats of philosophers and poets are distin guished in every part, and hallowed by the affections of the people. The fields smile with agriculture. The streams, and lakes, and all the waters of the world, bear the riches of their commerce. The people are elevated in stature, both mentally and bodily; they are happy, orderly, brave, and just, and the world admires one true example of greatness in a people. THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON Delivered before the Alpha of Massachusetts, at Harvard University, August 31, 1837 I GREET you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, some thing else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere re mains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years? In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day, the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character and his hopes. It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to him- THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 25 self; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to an swer its end. The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole so ciety to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a profes sor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship. In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degener ate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men s thinking. In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student s behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, "All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one." In life, too often, the 26 RALPH WALDO EMERSON scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives. I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, with out circumference, in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geome try, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of plan etary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the find ing of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambi tious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight. Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR & leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philo sophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim. / A II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the Past, in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, by considering their value alone. The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age re ceived into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing. Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting Me into truth. In proportion to the complete ness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efli- 28 RALPH WALDO EMERSON cient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which at taches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious : the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions /of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this / book stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. If Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not I by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, / who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of |\ principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees. Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? WTiat is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favor- \ ite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence it is pro gressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 29 of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This 13 good, say they, let us hold by this. (They phi me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not hi his hindhead: man ) hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man ere- / ate not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; cinders ana smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative man ners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind s own sense of good and fair. On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years. Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his in struments. Books are for the scholar s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men s transcripts of then* readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining, we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruit ful." It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dry den, with the most modern joy, with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence 30 RALPH WALDO EMERSON afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some fore sight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see. I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggera tion of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, " He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and in vention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that as the seer s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, per chance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato s and Shakespeare s. Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and <*-ii.s <mpp he must learn by labo rious reading. ^Colleges, in like nunmer, have their indispensable office, to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of Various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year. THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 31 There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should ^recluse x a valetudinarian, as unfit for any handiwork or public labor as a penknife for an axe. The so-called "practical men" sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day, are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfran chised; and indeed there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. With out it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth. WTiilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The pre amble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. The world, this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the cir cuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action hi which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this by which expe rience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours. 32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe too the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, with out observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empy rean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing. Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoy ards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shep herdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replen ish their merchantable stock. If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in coun try labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 33 in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn imme diately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made. But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Un dulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expir ing of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity, these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of na ture because they are the law of spirit. The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a weariness, he hasyalways the resource to live. Character is higher thanxintellect.f Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.) The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truth? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature; out of terrible Druids and Berserkers come at last Alfred and Shakespeare. 34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties. They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self -trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appear ances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of obser vation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and the re sults being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, watching days and months sometimes for a few facts ; correcting still his old records; must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the dis dain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fash ions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self -accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self -relying and self- directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercis ing the highest functions of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. _He is the world s eye. He is the world s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retro grades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 35 heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its com mentary on the world of actions, these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, this he shall hear and promulgate. These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the^popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of Uny moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half man kind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadi ness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observa tion to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remember ing his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself. 36 RALPH WALDO EMERSON In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid danger ous times, arise from the presumption that like children and women his is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, see the whelping of this lion, which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance, by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. Yes, we are the cowed, we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt them selves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and invit ing nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Lin naeus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 37 Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his who works in it with seren ity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon. For this self -trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doc trine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approxi mations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stat ure. What a testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great per son, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man s light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him. Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power ; and power because it is as good as money, the "spoils," so called, "of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the 38 RALPH WALDO EMERSON upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unbound- able empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of ^Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country. Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not however that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced. Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hanker ing to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 39 eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet s unhappiness, " Sicklied o er with the pale cast of thought." It is so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that they find them selves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state. One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an as pect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The litera ture of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, is it not? of new vigor when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Proven gal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of ? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the 40 RALPH WALDO EMERSON news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurk ing, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the far thest pinnacle and the lowest trench. This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cow- per, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have differently followed and with various suc cess. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of John son, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood- warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients. There is one man of genius who has done much for this phi losophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated; I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imagi native of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection between nature and the affec tions of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual charac ter of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things. Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous polit ical movement, is the new importance given to the single per- THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 41 son. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state, tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pesta- lozzi, "that no man in God s wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all mo tives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indo lent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the com plaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, pa tience; with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; not to be 42 RALPH WALDO EMERSON reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each be lieves himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND INVENTION ON SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PROGRESS BY JOB DURFEE Delivered before the Alpha of Rhode Island, at Brown University, on September 6, 1843. THE influence of discovery in science, and of invention in art, on social and political progress, may certainly form an appro priate theme for an occasion like the present; and if, during the short time which has been left to us by the preceding exercises of the day, I should endeavor to draw your attention to this sub ject, rest assured that the attempt will not be prompted by a confidence in any peculiar qualification of mine for the task, but from a desire, in some manner, to fulfil a duty which, perhaps with too little caution, I undertook to perform. We are disposed, I think, to ascribe too much of human prog ress to particular forms of government to particular political institutions, arbitrarily established by the will of the ruler, or wills of the masses, in accordance with some theoretic abstrac tion. And this is natural enough in a country where popular opinion makes the law. But, to the mind that has formed the habit of penetrating beyond effects into the region of causes, it may, I think, appear that the will of the one, or the wills of the many, equally are under the dominion of a higher law than any that they may ordain; and that political and social institutions are, in the end, drawn or constrained to all their substantial im provements, by an order of mind still in advance of that which rules in politics, and flatters itself that dominion is all its own. If it be true that knowledge is power, then it would seem to follow that any change in the arts or sciences, favorable or unfavorable, must be followed by corresponding changes in society. And such, in fact, we find to be the result. When the arts and sciences become stationary, all social and political insti tutions become stationary; when the arts and sciences become 44 JOB DURFEE progressive, all social and political institutions become progres sive. The universality of this fact clearly demonstrates the necessary connection of cause and effect between scientific and social progress. And if the form in which this statement is made be correct, it does as clearly show which is the cause, and which the effect, and that we are not to seek for the causative energy of human progress in the wisdom of the political, but in that of the scientific and inventive mind. Let it moreover be recollected, that, at least in these our times, the scientific and inventive genius has a universality which elevates it above all human jurisdictions; that it belongs to the whole humanity; can be monopolized by no government; and that its discoveries and inventions walk the earth with the freedom of God s own messengers. This is an important position, which I shall presently endeavor further to confirm by some brief references to history. But though we may find the cause of human progress in the scientific and inventive genius of the race, still we may question the extent of its power over those institutions that are created and sustained by the social or political will. I shall ascribe to it, on the present occasion, none but the power of ordaining for those institutions their only true law of progress. It prescribes to them no particular form of government; but requires that every government, whether in theory despotic or liberal, should be so administered as to enable the human mind to put forth, in a manner consistent with order, all its powers for the benefit of humanity. It forces upon government, whatever be its form, the necessity of extending practical freedom to all. It requires it, upon the penalty of ceasing to exist, to carry out to the utmost extent, both in the social and political spheres, every important discovery or invention, and thus coerces, by a process its own, obedience to its supreme authority. But what is this progress? It may be a short, but it is a suffi cient answer for the occasion, to say, that it is the elevation of mind over matter; in the material universe it is the extension of the dominion of man over the powers and forces of nature; in humanity it is the orderly elevation of the high moral and intel lectual energies over the brute force of passion, prejudice, and ignorance. SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 45 In the realm of science and art, the most exalted geniuses and the brightest intellects that it contains are ever at the head of affairs. They are there, not by the appointment of government, nor by the election of the masses, but by a decree of the supreme Intelligence. And, if it be true, as I hope to demonstrate, that their discoveries and inventions rule in the grand course of events, it will afford some consolation to reflect, that, whether government falls into the hands of demagogue or despot (and it suffers equally from either), this high order of intellect doth, after all, by setting limits to their follies, guide and govern in the main. To it we bow with deferential awe to it we willingly own allegiance, and are proud to confess ourselves its subjects. Time, indeed, was, when this order of mind formed a union with government, and was itself despotic, or was ruled by des potism. Such seems to have been its condition in ancient Egypt such may be its condition still, under those oriental govern ments, where every change must operate a social disorganiza tion; but such, from the earliest date of Grecian freedom, has never been its condition in the sphere of western civilization. It has been subject to restraint, it has suffered persecution, but it has formed no necessary part of any local government. It has been under no necessity of limiting its discoveries, or shaping its inventions to suit particular political or social organizations. At that early date it cut its connection with these, and, by so doing, found the Archimedean standpoint and lever, by which it is enabled to move the world. But where and what is this point on which the scientific intel lect takes this commanding stand? It is not to be found in that space which can be measured by a glance of the eye, or a move ment of the hand. It is to be found only in the world of mind; and even there, only in that perfect reason which is at once a law to humanity and the revealer of all truth. It is a point which lies even beyond the extravagant wish of Archimedes. Perhaps Ire had unwittingly found it, when engaged in the solution of that mathematical problem which cost him his life; when, whilst the streets of Syracuse were thronged with bands of military plunderers, and the Roman soldier, amid shouts of triumph, entering his study, placed the sword at his throat, he exclaimed, "Hold, friend, one moment, and my demonstration will be fin- 46 JOB DURFEE ished." Far elevated above local interests, far above the petty strife and confusion of the day, it is a point from whose Olympian height all humanity is seen dwindled to a unit. It is in this eleva tion, above the world and its turmoils, that the scientific phi losopher interrogates the deity of truth, and communicates its oracles to the whole nether humanity; confident, that as they are true, whatever may be their present effect, they will ulti mately promote the progress of the race. Nor is he at liberty to abstain from interrogating this deity; to refrain from the efforts to discover, and consequently to invent, whenever a discovery is to be actualized by invention. That law which prompts the mind spontaneously to search for the cause of every effect, and for the most effectual means for the accomplishment of the end, is not superinduced by education. It comes from a source above man ; it is constitutional, therefore irresistible; and he makes his discoveries and inventions because he must make them. Now the sciences and arts, comprehending not merely the liberal and fine, but the physical and useful, consist of a logical series of discoveries and inventions, commenced at the earliest date of human progress and continued down to the present time, the last grand result being the sum of all the labors that have gone before it; nay, not unfrequently the sum of the blood and sufferings of the ignoble masses, as well as of the labors of the exalted philosophic mind. I mean not to say that this law of reason, which impels man to discover and invent, conducts him from step to step, from truth to truth, in a direct line to the far result; for he has his liberty, and he often deviates, not for a day merely, but for a generation; nay, sometimes for a w r hole epoch. But, however widely he may err, he at last discovers the error of the first false step that he has made; his false premise is brought to its reductio ad dbsurdum; and, with the benefit of all the experience, discipline, and knowledge that he has acquired by pursuing it to this result, he returns to the point of departure, and, with redoubled energy, follows out the demonstration direct, to its quod erat demonstrandum. Gentlemen, excuse me, whilst on an occasion so purely liter ary, I draw an illustration of this idea from a thought suggested by an invention in a branch of mechanic art. SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 47 I lately visited an establishment, perhaps in some respects the first of the kind in our country, for the manufacture of iron into bars. I stood by, and for the time, witnessed the operation of its enginery. I saw the large misshapen mass of crude metal taken blazing from the furnace, and passed through the illumined air to the appropriate machine. I saw it there undergo the designed transformation. It was made to pass repeatedly be tween two grooved revolving iron cylinders, of immense weight. At every turn of the wheel it took new form; it lengthened, stretched, approximating still its intended shape, till at the end of the operation it came forth a well-fashioned fifteen or twenty foot bar of iron, ready for the hand of the artizan, or the machine that was to resolve it into forms for ultimate use. When I had witnessed this process, I thought I did not want to go to the banks of the Nile to be assured either of the antiquity or the progress of the race. An older than the pyramids was before me; one which, though voiceless, told a tale that com menced before the Pharaohs, before the Memnon, before the Thebes. Here was a material which had been common to the historical portion of the human family for the space of five or six thousand years. Millions on millions of minds had been tasked to improve the process of its manufacture. I went back, in imagination, to that primitive age, when the first unskilful hand some fur-clad barbarian or savage drew a mass of the raw material from the side of some volcanic mountain. He con structed a vessel of clay for its reception, and, somewhat in imi tation of the process he had witnessed, he placed it over a heap of blazing combustibles. With long and patient labor and care, he reduced it to a liquid mass; and then cast it into the shape of some rude implement of husbandry or war. Exulting in his success, he brandished the instrument in triumph, and deemed it the ne plus ultra of human improvement. He disappeared; but he left a successor. I followed him, in imagination, and saw him take the art at the point at which his predecessor had left it. He had discovered that the material was not only fusible, but ductile; and with sweat and toil that knew no fatigue, he gradually beat the heated mass into the shape of something like a hatchet, or a sword. At this point he also dis appeared; but his successor came, and still improved on the 48 JOB DURFEE labors of his predecessor. Generation thus followed generation of apt apprentices in the art; they formed a community of mas ters skilful to direct, and of servants prompt to obey. They fashioned new implements as their numbers increased, and the wants of advancing civilization varied and multiplied. The master-minds studied, and studied successfully, all the various qualities and susceptibilities of the metal. They became skilful in all its various uses, in agriculture, commerce, manufactures and war. Yes, ye philanthropists! in war! For humanity actu ally armed herself against humanity to draw out and discipline the faculties of the human mind, and bring the art to perfection. She instituted a school of her own, and was herself its stern and unyielding preceptress. She chastened her laggard and truant children as with a rod of iron. I saw her force her sons into bond age by thousands aye, by millions. I saw them sweat and toil at the anvil like so many living machines. They were once free barbarians; but they were now in the school of civilization. They were learning something of the arts. They would not labor from the love of labor, but only from constraint and fear. Their willing task-masters grew strong and powerful in the labors of the barbarous masses, that superior knowledge and power had subjected to their will. They took counsel together, and still went forth to conquer and enslave. Ages, centuries, epochs passed away, and still the same process was going on. They built up for themselves a bright and glorious intellectual civili zation, that extended far and wide over the earth ; yet it was but the gilding of the surface; for it had its deep and dark founda tions upon mind in bondage, upon masses in slavery; and their power grew feeble from expansion. The numbers of the free would not suffice to sustain their dominion. And they sought for aid, but could conceive of none, save in the enslaved masses beneath them. And now came, improved by long ages of civili zation, the scientific and inventive genius to their aid. She glanced back upon the past; she discovered the point of depart ure from the progress direct, and the source of the errors whence this appalling result. She sought, and sought not in vain, to substitute the brute forces of nature for the labor of human hands. Then began the water-wheel to turn at the falls, and the trip-hammer to sound upon the anvil, and the manacles of the SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 49 slave to fall off, as improvement was built upon improvement, in regular consecutive order, till the burning bar shot from the perfected machinery almost unaided by human strength. This brought me to the process which I had just witnessed, and I thought I saw in it the grand result of the discipline and labor of the race for thousands of years. I thought I saw in it, not only the reality of a progress in the race, but the unquestion able proof of the existence of a law of progress, carrying on its grand process through the whole humanity by a logical series of causes and effects, from its earliest premises, in far distant antiquity, to its latest result; and that the law which rules in discovery and invention, is one and identical with that which governs in the progress of the race. I speak not here of particular communities or nations for nations, like men, decay and die but of the whole humanity, which is as immortal as the spirit of man, or, perhaps, as the divinity that rules it; which feeds and grows in one branch of its existence upon the decaying energies of another, and which is thus ever renovating its vital and intellectual energies out of the past, and, amid unceasing decay, enjoying a perpetual rejuvenes cence. On such an existence doth this law of progress ever act; constantly forming and energizing the individual intellect by the unceasingly accumulating wisdom of the past, and by appro priating the forces of nature to the uses of social man, it is, at this day, carrying on in the world of mind that work of creation which the Divine Author of humanity did but commence in the garden of Eden. There may be limits to man s capacities, but to the energies of nature which those capacities, acting under this law, may put in requisition, there are no limits. Each new discovery in science suggests the existence of something yet undiscovered; each new combination in art, on trial, suggests combinations yet untried; thus revealing, on the one hand, a law of suggestion, which, from the nature of mind, must ever act; and, on the other, objects and subjects of action which are as boundless and as inexhaustible as the universe. Now if this be, and must continue to be the true process of discovery and invention; and if, in its progress, as I hope to prove, it must constantly reflect itself into all social and political 50 JOB DURFEE organizations, we have an assurance of progress, not dependent, thank Heaven, upon carrying to their results any political abstractions, or any idea of popular sovereignty drawn from the perversions of revolutionary France; but upon a law of progress, which God has ordained for the government of humanity, and which is as certain and eternal in its operations as any law which governs the material universe. But let us see, by a brief glance at the page of history, whether this law of progressive discovery and invention, doth, or doth not, rule in social and political progress. And here let me premise, that the sciences and the arts, con sidered with reference to social and political progress, may be divided into two classes ; first, those which are necessary or use ful as aids or instruments of thought and sentiment; as among the sciences, grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry ; and among the arts, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the art of writing, or preserving the memory of the past. Second, those whose immediate object it is to enlarge our knowledge of nature, and improve the physical condition of man. These are the physical sciences, and useful arts improved by science. In the progress of the race, the first class is necessarily brought earliest to perfection. Man must be disciplined to think logi cally, and to communicate and preserve his thoughts and senti ments, before he can make any considerable progress in the phys ical sciences and useful arts. Hence it is, that, among the ancient nations of the earth, we find this high order of mind almost exclusively engaged in carrying the first class to perfection, whilst it devoted comparatively little attention to the physical sciences and useful arts. Indeed the useful arts seem to have been abandoned almost entirely to slaves. They were carried on by manual labor. Invention had not yet subjected the forces of nature to the human will, and that vast amount of toil, which is required to support a splendid civilization, was urged on by an immense mass of people in bondage. I would further observe, that as the scientific and inventive order of mind subsists, generally, independent of any necessary connection with any particular government, so its influence is not to be traced in the history of this or that people or commu nity merely, but rather in that of a common civilization; such as SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 51 that of classical antiquity, or modern Christendom, consisting of a community of nations, in which one government or society acts upon another, and from which, through this very diversity, that order of mind derives its power to coerce. It acts through one government on another, through one society on another, through society on government, and through government on society; its discoveries and inventions everywhere inviting the appropriate change, at first from policy, but if not adopted from policy, compelling its adoption, at last, by force of the principle of self-preservation. History enables us to show, in but a few instances, the effects which each succeeding discovery or invention produced on soci ety in the infancy of the race; but it does enable us to see their combined results in the form which society took under their dominion. In Egypt, the sacerdotal order was the depository of all the science and learning of the age; and that order, in fact, seems to have been the governing power. Now what were its sciences, real or pretended? Geometry, astronomy, astrology, and a mystic theology. These were studied as the great sciences of ancient Egypt, and carried out into their respective arts; and, to say nothing about their geometry and astronomy, have not the two last left the distinctive impress of their mysticism upon everything that remains of this ancient civilization? It appears in the labyrinth, the pyramid, the temple, and the hieroglyphics with which they were blazoned; and in the statuary, the sphinx, the veiled Isis, and mute Harpocrates, with which each entrance was sanctified. Society divided itself, spontaneously, into castes. Where there is progress, the highest order of intellect must lead, and the priesthood of Egypt, with the king at their head, neces sarily stood first. Next to them the warrior caste, by which all was defended or preserved. Beneath them, the mass consisting chiefly of slaves, or those who were elevated little above the con dition of bondmen. These were again divided into castes, corre sponding to the laborious arts which they followed, with, prob ably, each its tutelary deity. The son followed the occupation of his father, and society underwent a sort of petrifaction, from the arts which admitted of no change without destruction. This arrangement could not have resulted from the designs of a cun- 52 JOB DURFEE ning priesthood, establishing and ordaining the organization for their particular benefit. It must have grown up with the progress of the sciences and arts. Each art, newly invented or introduced, had its artisans, who transmitted, like the sacerdotal order, their peculiar mystery to their particular posterity. The governing power, since it embodied within itself all science, and took its constitution from it, might, after the arts had reflected them selves into society, have very naturally interfered to protect that social organization, into which, as mysteries, they spon taneously fell. But let us pass to Greece. No one doubts that Greece owed her civilization to her literature and arts. But to what was she indebted for the successful cultivation of these? It has been ascribed to the freedom of her political institutions. But, again it may be asked, to what were they indebted for that freedom? Is it not plain that they were indebted for it to the fact that her literature and arts early took root in the vigorous barbarism of distinct and independent communities, and that as her political institutions settled down into definite and fixed forms, they took their complexion and shape necessarily from the arts and litera ture cultivated by society? In Lacedsemon, the art of war alone was cultivated, and she was, for long, exclusively a martial State, but was finally obliged to give way to the influences operating around and within her. As to all the rest of Greece, it was un der the dominion of the fluctuating wills of the many, or the few, and there was nothing permanent to give regular progres sion and tendency to political and social institutions, but the arts and sciences cultivated. Greece commenced her civilization with colonies from Egypt and Phoenicia. They brought with them the arts and sciences, and something of the wealth of the parent countries, and in grafted all on her active barbarism. And here, again, the imme diate influence of the newly introduced sciences and arts, or of any particular disco very or invention, rarely appears in history, and is but dimly shadowed forth in the myths of the golden and heroic ages. But until they were introduced, Greece was peo pled by bands of roving savages. Piracy was an honorable pro fession; the coast could not be safely inhabited; one savage band was continually driven back upon another. Attica was spared SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 53 for its poverty. The Corinthians made the first great improve ment in naval architecture. They invented the war galley of three banks of oars; they constructed a navy of like craft. This was followed by great results; they cleared the Grecian seas of pirates; nations settled on the coast, and by like means kept them clear. The Mediterranean was laid open to honest traffic; commerce flourished; the arts flourished. The Grecian communi ties took the longest stride in the infancy of their progress from this simple improvement in naval architecture the longest with the exception of that made by the Trojan war. That war did for the Greeks what the crusades in modern times did for the nations of Europe it made them known to each other; disciplined them in a common art of war; made them acquainted with a higher civilization and its arts, and restored them to their country with a common history, and themes for their bards of all time. Greece, it is believed, presents the first instance of a civilized people in which the exercise of the powers of government and the almost exclusive cultivation of the sciences are not to be found in the same hands. The sacerdotal corporation in Greece did not embrace all learning, as in Egypt, and did not, as there, control the state. Science and art, absolved from political connection, stood then and there, on the same independent ground, as in our own age and country. Philosophy, it is true, was held in check by superstition; but government did not assume to restrain, control, or direct improvement in art and science. And now, what was the result of this independent and isolated existence of the scientific mind upon the social and political organizations of Greece? It seems to me to have been immense. Whatever of art or science was introduced from Egypt found no corresponding social organization in Greece, and the bondage of caste there never appeared and for this reason it is that of all the races of men the Grecian is the first to present us with an intellectual people; a people intellectual and progressive by force of its own internal and all-pervasive action. Science was no mystery, and each Greek was at liberty to cultivate whatever branch of knowl edge or art it to him seemed meet; and therefore it was that the Grecian society necessarily became free to the extent to which this cultivation could be carried, and there freedom stopped 54 JOB DURFEE there slavery commenced. Those who were consigned to the labors of the industrial arts, if it had been permitted, had neither the means nor the power to cultivate the sciences; and they were slaves. Every free Greek did or might cultivate grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, and geometry. And what was the product of these sciences? The fine arts. They improved language; they improved the power of expressing thought and sentiment; and they produced philosophers, poets, historians, orators, sculptors, painters, and architects. These produced an ever-enduring liter ature, and specimens in the fine arts destined to become models for all time. The sciences and arts of Greece became the sciences and arts of Rome and the Roman empire, and were diffused to the full extent of Roman conquest. I will not indulge in any common-place rhetoric about Gre cian civilization. You know what it was. The only point to which I would here call your attention is, that the arts and sciences of classical antiquity were not effects of the improved character of the social and political institutions of the epoch; but, on the contrary, that their improved character was the result of the scientific progress of the common mind, which prog ress went on in obedience to no law, save that which God has ordained for its government. But it was the liberal sciences and the fine arts that were mainly cultivated in this ancient civilization. Man had not learned to go abroad out of himself into nature to search for facts. He found the elements of the sciences and arts, which he almost exclusively cultivated, within his own mind, or within his immediate social sphere. He was preparing the necessary means, the instruments, by which he was in after times to explore the universe, and extend the sphere of social improvement by the physical sciences and useful arts. And now what was the consequence of this perhaps necessary restriction of discovery and invention? A superficial civilization, grand and imposing it is true, but still a civilization that went no further than the practically free cultivation of the predomi nant arts and sciences of the epoch; a civilization that did not penetrate the great mass of human society. The laborious indus try by which it was supported, was carried on by an immense SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 55 mass of unintellectual bondmen, who were to be employed by their masters, lest they should find employment for themselves. The useful arts became mysteries, and the secrets of nature remained secrets still. Everywhere, throughout this ancient civilization, whether Grecian or Roman, the same horizontal division of society pre vailed, and in portions of like ratio. A portion of the social mind, large, it is true, if compared with anything in preceding history, was cultivated; but still a very small portion, if compared with the masses in bondage. In Attica, the proportion of the freemen to the whole enslaved population, was as two to forty; in the Roman empire, at one time, as seven to sixty; and the bondmen subsequently so far increased, that armies sufficient for the de fence of the State could not be enlisted from the freemen. Beneath this bright covering of civilization, what a vast amount of intellectual susceptibility lay slumbering in the night of igno rance and bondage! The predominant arts and sciences of this epoch were at last brought to their perfection. They ceased to advance, and society became stationary. The mind of Asia and the south of Europe could go no further. It was the hardy vigor of the north, alone, that was competent successfully to use the instruments which this ancient civilization had perfected; to go out of the sphere of social man into nature; to regenerate and multiply the useful arts and sciences, and, by their means, to elevate the masses from the condition of bondage to the freedom of intellectual life. Northern barbarism, therefore, came; and it conquered, for this simple reason, that the arts and sciences of antiquity had not made the civilization of the epoch sufficiently strong to resist it. Gentlemen, we are not dealing with a history of events, but with the causes which produce them, and especially those changes which add permanently to the improvement of the social and political condition of man. I know you may follow these changes in the history of events, civil, religious, and military; but I am endeavoring to point out their origin in those causes which gave the institutions they produced shape, consistency, and duration; and to demonstrate, that they are not to be found in accident, or hi the arbitrary dictates of the human will, but in an eternal law of mind, which especially manifests itself in the arts and 56 JOB DURFEE sciences. For this reason it is not necessary to cite all history, but merely a number of its facts, sufficient to establish the posi tion. And now, lest I should exhaust your patience, I pass the gulf of the middle ages with this single observation, that it was a season during which Christianity was engaged in humanizing and softening the heart of barbarism, and thus qualifying its mind to take form under the influence of modern art and science ; and landing on the margin of our present civilization, I proceed to discuss the social and political effects of scientific discovery and invention in modern times. And here we have an oppor tunity of tracing those effects with historical certainty to their causes, and of proving, as I hope, to minds the most skeptical, the truth of our position. But, before doing this, I must speak of the social condition of the mass of society on which early modern discoveries produced their effects. Time will permit me to state it only in the most general terms; and perhaps, on an occasion like the present, and to such an audience, this is all that is necessary, or even proper. Guizot, in his admirable history of the civilization of modern Europe, dates the commencement of modern society in the six teenth century. But modern society came out of a pre-existent state of things, which state of things first manifested itself and became general in the tenth century, when Europe rose out of the bosom of a chaotic barbarism, and took distinct form in the feudal system. This remark, however, applies more particularly to the north and west of Europe. It was whilst this was the pre dominant system that she commenced and carried on the cru sades, and not only made herself acquainted with herself, but with the remnants of civilization in the east and south of Europe. It was not until the thirteenth century that she manifested a decided tendency to her present political and social organization. And it is to a mere glance at her condition at this period, that I would now invite your attention. In the east was the Greek, the remnant of the ancient Roman empire, still consisting of the same elements which distinguished it at the time of Constantine, a master class and a servant class. Those of the first class, eclipsed though they were, " had not yet lost all their original brightness. " They were still imbued with SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 57 something of the philosophy and literature of ancient Greece; and, in point of numbers, they bore perhaps about the same ratio as their progenitors to the immense mass of slaves beneath them. In Italy, were the Italian republics, exhibiting remnants of the ancient Roman municipal institutions. They cultivated the Latin literature, and were soon to be engaged in renovating the fine arts of classical antiquity, and were already, for the era, extensively employed in commercial enterprise. The ratio of the free to the bond was probably about the same as it had been during the Roman empire. Subject to these exceptions, all Europe fell under the feudal system, and certain corporations, called free cities, which, situated within the fief of some baron, wrested or wrung from him whatever privileges they could, by force or compact. There were no nations no governments on a large scale. Europe was dotted all over with baronies and these free cities. Each barony, whatever it might be in theory, was a little sovereignty. Each baron, with his retainers, under a load of armor, and armed with sword and lance, and other offensive weapons of the times, occupied his castle in the country. He willingly submitted to no law, save that of superior force. His kingdom was his fief, and his subjects were his vassals, who followed him in war, or tilled his land, or performed for him other laborious service. The free cities were walled; the dwelling of the burgher was not merely in law, but in fact, his castle, pro tected by tower and parapet; and the burgher himself, when he ventured abroad to thread the narrow lanes and crooked streets of his city, went armed with lance, and often under cover of armor. The Romish church presented the only element which pervaded all these little sovereignties and cities. Except among the clergy and the civilians, there were no scholars; and, to say nothing about their vassals, perhaps not one in a hundred of the noble barons themselves could either read or write. Nay, they were proud of their ignorance of those accomplishments. The author of Marmion means to give them their true character, at a much later period, when he represents the Douglas as exclaim ing " Thanks to St. Botham! son of mine, Save Gawain, ne er could pen a line; I swore it once, I swear it still Let my boy-bishop fret his fill." 58 JOB DURFEE It is true, that when the crusades ceased, something of that zeal which had originated and carried them on began to pass into new channels. Those immense masses that had passed out of the north and west of Europe, had made themselves acquainted with the advancing civilization of the Italian republics, and with the remnant of ancient civilization in the Greek empire. They had penetrated into Asia, and had heard and credited all the fables that oriental imagination could invent, of the wealth and splen dor of the gorgeous east, who with " richest hand Showered on her kings barbaric pearl and gold." And they returned to their respective countries with these fables, and stimulated a thirst for further knowledge; but above all, they excited the love of adventure and discovery, a yearning for the yet unexplored and unknown; breeding a vague but confi dent faith in a something vast, boundless, mysterious, that was yet in reserve for daring enterprise, or unyielding perseverance haply a true augury this of the discovery yet to be made on this side the Atlantic yet, however fertile their imaginations, the most ardent of them had not conceived the possibility of the existence of this continent. Here it lay, secreted in the western skies, beyond an ocean whose westward rolling billow, it was then deemed, broke on no shore toward the setting sun, await ing, in all the grandeur of waving forest, towering mountain, and majestically winding stream, the further discoveries of science, and the future wants of a progressive civilization. Now let us for one moment contemplate this condition of affairs throughout Europe this vast number of scattered petty sovereignties and municipal communities this general perva sive ignorance this enormous mass of vassals, serfs, and slaves, which underlaid and gave foundation to all; and then ask our selves, what process of legislation or compact, originating merely in the human will, could have resolved this jumble of conflicting materials into those organized nations and communities of nations, which now constitute the civilization of all Christendom. We can conceive of no process so originating, that could possibly have brought about this grand result. Yet human legislation and compact were the secondary causes by which it was accomplished. SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 59 But what, humanly speaking, was the primary cause? That is the subject of our inquiry. I find it in a necessary result of that law of scientific progress, which I have already pointed out; I find it in the grand revolution which at this time took place in the science and art of war; in one word, I find it in the invention of gunpowder. Start not with incredulity and aversion at the annunciation; the cause of causes is there. Tell me not of wars domestic and foreign, of treaties, of parliaments, of councils of state and church. They were the mere external symptoms of the action of the all-sufficient internal cause. Yes, the first cannon that projected the ball of stone or iron, announced, in its own voice of thunder, the final doom of the feudal system, the cen tralization of nations, the ultimate emancipation of the en thralled, and the establishment of a Christian civilization on a basis never more to be perilled by the inroad of barbarian, or the invasion of Turk. The revival of ancient learning might have done much toward again plating over society with the civiliza tion of classical antiquity; but neither that nor mere human legis lation could have overthrown the feudal system, centralized nations, penetrated, and finally emancipated the nether mass of bondmen, and forever shut out the inundations of barbarism. Feudalism gave way either immediately, in anticipation of the results of the discovery, or finally, under the direct operation of its physical force. What availed the Herculean arm, or giant muscular force? What availed the panoply of helmet, and shield, and coat of mail? Nay, what availed tower and trench, parapet and battlement, whether of baronial castle, walled city, or burgher s armed abode? They all crumbled into atoms, or stood scathed and powerless before the blast of this tremendous inven tion. Gunpowder, in the material world, is a most terrible leveller; it makes no distinction between the strong man and the weak. But in the world of mind, it is a most determined aristocrat. It establishes "in times that try men s souls," none but the aristoc racy of intellect. Nay, in the long run, it goes still further; for, since to command its service it requires national wealth, it per petuates power in the hands of those only who know how best to use it for the benefit of all. The barons abandoned their castles for the court of the sover- 60 JOB DURFEE eign suzerain or lord; and that lord became the most powerful whose resources were the most abundant. Immense wealth, such only as a people at least practically free can create, became neces sary in order to carry on a war of offence or defence. The suze rain, or king, was thus at once converted into the friend, and became the liberator of bondmen. Vassals and burghers became subjects and citizens; practically free. And their freedom was guarantied to them by no plighted faith of kings; by no lettered scroll of parchment; but by an irreversible law of necessity, en acted by this sovereign invention. What it did for individuals, it did for nations ; armies could no longer carry on war in a for eign country without keeping up a communication with their own; and to conquer a new country, was to establish a new base for military operations against others; and thus, from neces sity, was established a community of nations, in which the safety of all found a guaranty only in the independence and free dom of each. Hence comes that law of nations which is recog nized by all Christendom, and that sleepless vigilance which guards and preserves the balance of power. Gentlemen: After considering these consequences, permit me to ask you whether Christendom be indebted for her progress, thus far stated, to human legislation, guided by some abstract theory merely, or to the sovereign law imposed upon her by this all-controlling invention? When one nation had adopted this invention, all were obliged to adopt it, and Christendom having thus necessarily received this power into her bosom, shaped her policy by the necessities which it imposed. Indeed, she owed her then, and owes her present condition, not to the foresight of her counsels guided by the speculations of her theorists, but to this law of human progress, which has overruled her follies and sustained her wisdom. I have been considering an invention which begins its influ ence in the world of matter and reflects it inward to the world of mind. I now pass to another discovery or invention, that belongs to the same century, but which begins its influence in the world of mind, and reflects it outward to the world of matter. You will at once understand me to refer to the art of printing. Were human progress a mere result of fortuitous events, and not the necessary operation of a law of mind, proceeding from a SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 61 designing reason, these two discoveries, made about the same time, might be inscribed in the list of remarkable coincidences. But they belong to no such list. The invention of printing, like every other, may be traced from its first rude essays down through a logical series of discoveries and improvements, urged on by the conspiring action of the whole humanity, to its last grand result, as the necessary consequence of all that has pre ceded it. It was necessary that a large portion of the human race should be educated to the use of letters; that the art of reading and writing should become widely diffused; the materials for copying cheap, and the demand for copies beyond the capacity of the penman to supply. You may accordingly trace the growth, which produced this invention, from the first symbolic painting of thought on rock or tree, by roving savage, to the mnemonic hieroglyphics inscribed on pyramid and temple; then to charac ters representing words; then to those representing syllables; till the very elements of the human voice at last take representa tive form in the alphabet. In this form it branches forth beyond the sacerdotal caste, and, like the banyan tree, repeats itself by striking its far-reaching branches into fresh soil. It passes from the Egyptian into the Phoenician, thence into the stronger intel lectual soil of Greece; it multiplies itself throughout the Roman empire, at every repetition making still further demands upon the labors of the hand; it survives the middle ages, that its far- extending root and branch might draw increased vigor from the northern mind, and that nether mass of humanity, which is at length thrown open to more genial influences ; and then it is, that this stupendous growth of all time puts forth, as its last fruit, this wonder-working art of printing. Readers had multiplied with the revival of ancient learning, with the progress of eman cipation, with the love of the marvellous in romance, and the mysterious in religion, and demands for copies of great works, and especially for such as were sacred, or were so esteemed, could be satisfied in no way but by the labor-saving machinery of the press. Now the military art must date its rude origin at the same distant epoch. It must have grown by force of the same law of suggestion, and therefore must have almost necessarily produced its corresponding invention of gunpowder, during the same cen- 62 JOB DURFEE tury. Thus it was that one and the same law of progress con spired to perfect these two grand inventions at about the same time. Twin sovereigns, the one to commence its labors in the world of mind, the other in the world of matter. : And what were the effects of the art of printing, on social and political institutions? Did it take law from the human legislator, or give him law? Let us see. It created, for the first time in history, what may be called a public mind. Cabined and cribbed though it was, within the forms of an age of despotism and bigotry, that mind grew and expanded, till it felt the pressure of those forms as obstructions to its growth. It then reformed the legislator himself, and through him cast off its obstructions, and thereupon expanded, with a broader liberty, into a mightier stature. This mind thus shaped itself, not upon general speculating ideas, but upon natural tendencies and habits of thought, com ing from the hoary past, and common to all, and to which the inspiring influence of the press now gave an all-pervasive life Society was thus made to feel its existence through its organized entirety through all its institutions and interests; and on this regenerated feeling, common to all, was established a true sover eignty of public opinion. Do not misunderstand me. When I speak of public opinion, I do not mean the wild impulse of mi nority or majority; I do not mean popular agitation or efferves cence. I do not mean a state of mind indicated by mass meetings, barbecues, and the like. These may indicate a feverish state of the public mind, but they indicate no public opinion. On the contrary, they show that public opinion on the given subject is not yet formed. But I mean that opinion which is a natural, spontaneous growth, or proceeding from the organized whole; which is therefore in accordance with the political institutions, established interests, and the general moral and religious sense of a community. Until these are endangered, threatened or dis turbed, public opinion rests unmoved, and heeds not the angry discussions that are going on among the overheated partizans of the day. If, therefore, you would know what public opinion is, do not look to a party press that is doing what it can to draw forth an opinion favorable to the cause which it advocates, but look to SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 63 the established interests, the intellectual character, and the moral and religious sense of the people, which the whole press, in all the variety of its departments, has contributed to form, and from them estimate what the common judgment, hi the last result, must be. Public opinion, in our country, indulges in no abstract specu lations: it leaves them to the dreams of the theorist. In the full enjoyment of its own unobstructed freedom, it is never clamor ous, it is never violent. It moves only on great occasions, and under the pressure of some stern necessity; but, when it does move, it is irresistible; it bears down all opposition before it. The demagogue frequently attempts to imitate the incipient stages of this movement, by an artificial agitation of the masses. Yet his imposture is sure to be detected in the end, by the fraudful expedients to which he resorts in order to sustain that continued excitement in which alone he can live. Public opinion neither countenances such expedients, nor desires the agitation which they provoke. To it, all agitation is incidental, and results from extraneous causes, or from its partial manifestations. Sovereign in itself, it seeks not the aid of violently excited feeling, and when it unequivocally manifests itself, all agitation ceases, and the stream of events rolls quietly on. It is when the course of the waters is obstructed, and they are accumulating behind the obstruction, that this artificial, this counterfeit agitation begins. It is then that every monstrous thing, little and great, which peoples the flood, swells into unnat ural dimensions, and each, from the small fry to the leviathan, " Hugest that swims the ocean stream," creates for itself its particular whirlpool and circle of bubble and foam, deceiving the inconsiderate spectator into the belief that all this is the agitation of the onward rolling flood, the indication of the natural tendency and pressure of the mighty mass. Yet let but the master-mind, which alone is competent to view the entirety ab extra, open the sluice-way, or the accumulating wave break the obstruction down, and the tide rolls tranquilly on, swallowing up in its prevailing current, whirlpool, bubble, and foam, and little monster and great, and bearing them all quietly off to the ocean of eternal oblivion. 64 JOB DURFEE This is public opinion; the gravitation of the general mass of mind through all its institutions and interest towards its eternal centre; and when it so gravitates, it is always right; but this artificial agitation is generally wholly individual, and when it is such, it is always wrong; since its object, whatever may be the pretext, is wholly selfish. It is only when the agitation is natural, spontaneous, and comes from an effort to express the common wants and desires of a people, and is conducted with a religious reverence for public morals, for good order, and all truth, that it is ever the true harbinger of a genuine and enduring public opinion. A public opinion, based upon the generally received ideas of morality, religion, and law, doth in fact constitute the common conscience of a people; and it is this conscience which in every great and trying emergency makes heroes or cowards of us all, as we may chance to be right or wrong. It was a deep religious and moral feeling of this sort, for the first time brought into general activity by the diffusion of the Scriptures through the agency of the Press, which in the sixteenth century commenced and carried on the great work of religious reformation. The obstructions to its efforts were mountainous, and a deep and wide searching agitation went before it, often mingling error with truth. It touched, it moved that principle which lies beneath the deepest foundations of all that is human, and at once all social institutions were agitated as by an earth quake. It taught the human to give place to the divine. It dashed government against government, institution against institution, man against man; and urged on that series of reli gious revolutions, which for ages shook all Europe to its centre. It passed from religion into philosophy; it took form in politics; it produced its consequences in this country; it exploded, with most murderous effect, the combustible monarchy of France, and is to this day, with almost undiminished energy, passing down its tremulous agitations through the present into the boundless future. It changed the aspect of Christendom; it estab lished Protestantism and Protestant states, and reformed Romanism itself. Nobody can doubt that all these changes were the necessary results of the discovery of the art of printing. They date from the commencement of the reformation; but the reformation could SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 65 not have succeeded except by the aid of this art. Before this discovery, it had been repeatedly attempted both in church and out of church, and the attempts had failed; but after this dis covery, it was attempted by a poor obscure monk in Germany, and the attempt did not fail. It began in the social mind, and extended itself, after much agitation, by a regular and orderly process, through the legitimate legislation of each community, out into state and church. The creation of means by which the common mind, in every country of Christendom, may in an orderly manner produce every desirable and necessary change in government, is one of the important results of this discovery; but its general social results have been no less important. Let us go back, if we can, to the middle of the fourteenth cen tury. Let us place ourselves in the bosom of that country whence all our political and social institutions are directly or indirectly derived; nay, from which all our ideas of legal right and duty, of liberty and law, proceed; and now, as in the midst of that cen tury, let us see what the condition of the common mind is with out the aid of this art. The first thing, then, that must strike our attention, is the general apathy and indifference of the mass around us, as to all matters of general, social and political impor tance. There is no press, there are no newspapers, no periodicals, political, religious, literary or scientific. In the place of the light which should come from these sources on the common mind, a profound darkness prevails, beneath which, all thought and ac tion still rest in primeval slumber. But this is not all; there are no books in circulation or use, save those few that are transcribed on parchment by the slow and tedious operations of the pen. If we enter their public libraries, the precious manuscripts are chained to the tables, or are guarded with the vigilance of armed sentinels. If we enter their schools, the child is learning his alphabet from a written scroll furnished him by his master. What a mass of ignorance; aye, and of necessary bondage! How eagerly the million multitudes look up to the learned few for light and guidance! With what intensity of attention do they hang on the utterance of their lips, and how carefully do they treasure up, in their memories of iron, the oracles that fall on their ears ! Ah ! these are days when it well behoves the learned 66 JOB DURFEE to take heed what they say. They are rulers of necessity, if not of choice, and their words are law; and well may they subject themselves to some general rules of thought and speech, and become a corporate community, sacerdotal or other, that the masses may take organization beneath them. Well is it for humanity and human progress that they have this absolute masterdom, and can hold, in unqualified subjection, the blind passions and terrible energies that are slumbering under them! Now let us return to this our day and generation, and What a change ! The press is pouring forth its torrents of truth or falsehood; the land is whitened with its daily sheets; the labors of a whole literary life may be purchased by an hour s labor of the mechanic; reading is the pastime of man, woman, and child, of prince and peasant; and strange voices, laden with strange thoughts, come thick on the classic ear, from cottage, and garret, and cellar. Where is that awful intensity of atten tion, that necessary and salutary subjection of the masses to the learned few? Gone ! gone never to return ! Every individual has become an original centre of thought; and thought is everywhere tending to clash with thought, and action with action. What is it that preserves order in the midst of all this tendency to anar chy? Why, it is done by that public opinion which subsists from the organized whole, and which the press itself has created. It is that public opinion, which, by its mere vis inertias, sustains the law, and holds the struggling demon of discord down. It takes the place of the learned of old; and how important it is that its genuine authority should be sustained, and that no demagogue or insane enthusiast should be permitted to impose on the world its counterfeit! This invention came not from legislation, but on the contrary, from the independent progress of science and art. Unaided by human policy, it organized for itself an empire within the privacy of the human mind; and, gradually extending its dominion from spirit outward into matter, brought human legislation, at last, to follow reluctantly in the steps of its progress. And when, at length, the old world became too limited for the intellectual growth which it had generated, or ancient institutions so incor porated with the life of nations as not to admit of that change which its irrepressible expansion required, it was then that the SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 67 excess of this growth sought for and found in the newly discov ered western world, an ample theatre for its enlargement. A world newly discovered! and how? Why, by the progressive improvement of the art of navigation, aided by the then recent discovery or application of the virtues of the magnet; an art which had taken its birth at the first stage of the progressive humanity, and which has proceeded, pari passu, with other arts, under a common law of progress, and which consequently had its corresponding discovery at this very juncture of affairs. Under the government of Divine Providence, all is order and law; and notwithstanding the occasional outbreaks of human passion, and the perversity of the human will, that government compels its own puny creatures, whatever may be their motives, or however widely they may err, to shape their actions, at last, to its own grand train of events, and to carry out and fulfil its own great designs. All three of those wonderful inventions, gunpowder, printing, and the compass, were necessary to the successful establishment of the Anglo-Saxon colonies on these shores. A number of tem pest-driven Northmen doubtless discovered and colonized them in the beginning of the eleventh century; but their discovery was premature. It came not in the logical order of progress. The colonists necessarily failed to effect a permanent establishment. Their intercourse with the mother country was fraught with every peril of uncertainty; for, over fog- wrapt surge, or beneath cloud-invested sky, they wandered without compass or guide. The shores themselves were occupied by ferocious savages, and fire-arms were wanting to subdue them. And then, what availed it to add the forest and barbarism of the new world to the forest and semi-barbarism of the old? The invention of printing was yet wanting to reform the general mind of Europe, and to gener ate that spirit which in after times was to go forth to establish its emancipation on these shores, under the auspices of institutions to be formed from all that was select and glorious in the past. The establishment and development of the institutions under which we live, are due to no arbitrary enactments, suggested by abstract speculations, but are the necessary results of the opera tions of these discoveries and inventions, on the free growth of the Anglo-Saxon idea of liberty and law. 68 JOB DURFEE Thus the state of the arts and sciences, in the beginning of the eleventh century, was not such as to enable the progressive humanity to discover these shores, and to establish permanent dominion on this side the Atlantic. Their accidental discovery, at that time, yielded no useful results. But the progress of the arts and sciences in the fifteenth century had been such as to fur nish all the necessary means for the purpose; and the discovery and colonization of this continent followed as a necessary conse quence in the consecutive order of events. Its discovery then took its place, as a logical result of the grand series of discoveries and inventions that had preceded it, and thus became a new premise, or broader basis for the progressive action of the race. I might here dwell on the consequences of the discovery of America, and its settlement by civilized communities. I might show how those consequences reacted on the arts and sciences themselves, on the relations of nations, on their internal polities, their domestic habits, and social enjoyments; shaping their insti tutions and controlling their legislation. But I deem further historical illustrations unnecessary. The great truth that human progress is the result of an ever-active law, manifesting itself chiefly in scientific discovery and invention, and thereby con trolling legislation, and giving enduring improvement to all social and political institutions, cannot be a subject of historical question or doubt. It is a law as palpable in the history of the social mind, as the law of gravitation in the movement of matter. Indeed, I should feel that I owed a serious apology to my hearers for having detained them so long on this point, were it not for certain extravagant ideas which seem to be rife in the land. The advocates of those ideas would teach us that there is an absolute, undefinable popular sovereignty, which can, in a manner its own, and at any moment, carry a certain supposed natural equality into social and political life, and thereby elevate poor human nature, however rude and degraded its condition, at once, as by a sort of magic, into a state of supreme and absolute perfection. When this sovereignty does not itself act to this end, it invokes the legislature, which is supposed to be competent to do nearly as much. No doubt government can do much; it can suppress insurrection, it can repel invasion, it can enforce contracts, pre serve the peace, concentrate and protect the existing arts; but SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 69 all this is to organize, and sustain organization, and not to estab lish the natural equality. Yet this is all that government can do to promote human improvement; but in doing this, it does but act in obedience to that law, by which God governs in the prog ress of the race. The idea that legislation necessarily acts an inferior part in human progress, that this progress is governed by a law that overrules and controls political sovereignty, may be humbling indeed to the demagogue, who would make everything bend to the popular will. But there this law is, an undoubted and in controvertible reality, which will bear with no paltering, but de mands the obedience of all, on the penalty of degradation or ruin. The true statesman, the real promoter of human progress, at once recognizes, and feels proud to obey it. He feels that in so doing, he is performing the most elevated and dignified of duties. For though by legislation he cannot advance the entire humanity a single step, yet he may by legislation materially advance the nation for which he legislates. You may be able to add nothing to the light of the sun, yet you may concentrate his rays in a focus, and thus make a particular point as bright as the source from which they emanate. The statesman can concentrate the scattered arts; he may carry out each discovery and invention to all its available uses, and thus elevate the nation which he serves, to the head of the progressive humanity. Y r et if he would do this, he must not wait to be driven to the task, like a galley slave, by the rival and threatening policy of foreign governments. For the very fact that they coerce him, shows that they are already in his advance. Supposing that a people has already adopted the common arts and sciences, as far as they are available, there will still remain certain discoveries and inventions of more recent date, which are not fully applied, or carried to their necessary consequences. Among these, in modern times, there has always been some one susceptible of such universality of application, as would seem to merit the particular consideration of statesmen. Take, for instance, at the present time, the steam engine. What is suscep tible of more universal application? What, bringing out all its powers, can add greater energy and vigor to the arm of govern ment? What has, or can perform greater wonders? Not gun- 70 JOB DURFEE powder, not the compass, nay, not even the press. It may be made to toil in the field, and supplant the labor of the slave. It already works at the spindle, and the loom, and the forge, and the mine. It is even now, whilst I am speaking, moving over earth with the speed of wings, walking up the downward torrent, and triumphantly striding over the roaring billows of the Atlantic. Already, where in use, has it reduced the distance one half between man and man, nation and nation, of extreme islands and continents of the habitable globe. It has brought civilization into immediate contact with barbarism, and Christianity with heathenism. Unless all history be false, and the eternal laws of matter and mind nothing but a dream, there can be little danger in predict ing too much for the progress of this invention. Indeed, the danger is, that the most extravagant predictions will fall short of the reality. No matter what government first applies this invention to all its practical naval and military uses, other gov ernments must follow, however reluctantly, or cease to exist. Nay, should an unwonted apathy seize on all civilized govern ments, society would, at length, do the work to a great extent at their hands. The progress of this invention is ever onward, and will not cease until it has filled the world with its conse quences. Already has it coasted the shores of India, penetrated its in terior by river or road, invaded the empire of China, and roused the Chinese mind by its appalling apparition, from the long slum ber of centuries past. Ere long it shall bind subject Asia to Europe by bands of iron, and the Cossack and the Tartar, whilst feeding their herds on the banks of the Don and the steppes of southern Russia, shall start with amazement at the shrill whistle of the locomotive, and the thunder of the railroad car, as it sweeps on toward the confines of China. Can the monarchies of Europe slumber in security, whilst the immense Russian empire is thus centralizing and condensing its vast military resources and population at their backs? Never; their very existence must depend upon their resort to like means of defence or annoyance. And, from the heart of every monarchy of Europe, must diverge railroads to every assailable extreme; that when danger comes, and come it must, the whole war force of the nation may move, SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 71 at a moment s warning, with the speed of wings, to the extreme point of peril. The governments of Europe must become stronger internally and externally; more secure within and more formidable without, maugre the democratic tendencies by which they are threatened. Democracy is strong, but here is a power still stronger, that will have its course. It is a power with which governments will and must organize themselves, at their peril, whatever may be their form. And when thus organized, their endurance must be as that of adamant. Organized on like basis, our representative democ racy itself may be secure; but if not thus organized, it can only wait, with as much quietude as it may, to be gradually absorbed, and finally swallowed up by the strong organizations that may be brought to bear upon it. Think ye that the military progress of this invention in the old world is to produce no effect on the new; that the breadth of the Atlantic is to set bounds to its effects? The breadth of the Atlantic! Why, it has become a nar row frith, over which armies may be ferried in twelve or fifteen days, to land in slave or non-slaveholding States, at option; and that power, "whose home is on the deep," already transports over her watery empire, on the wings of this invention, her vic torious cannon. Other governments are little behind her in the application of this power. Thus menaced, have we strength to do our duty with dignity? Can we much longer be governed by factions? I am not suggesting a course of policy; I am simply carrying our premises to their necessary consequences; and to that end I ask: If we continue a free and independent people, must we not organize ourselves on the basis which this invention affords? Can we avoid it? Have we any choice but to radiate our country with communications for its defence, that the whole war force of the nation may be thrown with railroad speed on any point of danger? This system of defence may not be adopted till the shock of some foreign invasion, or some terrible internal convul sion, forces upon the government the necessity of adopting it; and then, if it be the will of God that we continue one people, it will, and must be adopted. When it is done, this union will be complete; its duration will depend on no written scroll of parch ment; on no variable popular breath; its strength on no constitu- 72 JOB DURFEE tional constructions changing to suit the temper of the times, but the constitution itself, resolved by the law of progress, shall take form, over the whole face of the land, in bands of iron. Such must be the political progress of this invention. Govern ment, in this country, has as yet done nothing, but society has done much. True to itself and its highest interests, it has been prompt in obedience to the law of progress. It has already ex tended, and still continues to extend the application of this sovereign invention. It has contracted, as it were, this country within half its former space. It has made a sparse population dense, and if a dense population has its evils, as in large cities it certainly has, the same invention offers an antidote. It can, without disadvantage, render those populations sparse. It can combine the morality and the occupation of a rural with the intellectual activity of an urban population. It will and must proceed on its mission, by force of the very law which gave it existence, till the civilization of Christendom, on the basis which it affords, has been fully accomplished, and then, by force of the same law, will it bear that civilization into the bosom of barbar ism, christianize the nations, and establish the dominion of the arts over the broad face of earth and ocean. Such is the nature of the law of progress. Ever adding to the triumphs of intellect, ever expanding the sphere of civilization, ever enlarging the domain of liberty and law, it began its political and social manifestations, as from a central point, in the sacer dotal caste of Egypt. It continued them in Greece, and there, with the fine arts and liberal sciences, expanded its influence over a wider compass. It reflected its action thence into the yet bar barous Latium. It created the civilization of Rome; Rome car ried that civilization abroad among the nations of the earth, and enstamped her image wherever she set down the foot of her power. Barbarism came to receive the teachings of this civiliza tion, at length christianized, and to open a sphere of action for the physical sciences and useful arts in the nether masses. Then came the era for deepening as well as widening the action of this law, by the aid of physical discovery and invention. Fire-arms resolved the feudal system into a community of nations. The press inspired that community with a common soul. The com pass revealed this western world, and pioneered to these shores SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 73 the select mind and choicest institutions of Europe. It still urged on its discoveries; it has nearly completed the exploration of the globe. And now comes this invention of Watt to perfect what these discoveries have begun, and then to penetrate into every part of the world, and to carry a Christian civilization wherever it penetrates. Springing, armed for its mission, from the head of the progressive humanity, it cometh forth the genuine offspring of that one Eternal Reason which hath ruled through all ages past. It embraceth within itself, struggling for utterance, the history of millenniums to come. It standeth before the portals of the future, but as no veiled Isis, as no mute and motionless Harpoc- rates. It hath a language its own; and as it moveth to its task, it talketh freely of its mission. Thou unambiguous prophet! what a voice for the future speaketh from the expanding volume of thy force! What a tale to the future is foretokened in the movements of thy demon strength ! Great fashioner of the des tinies of nations! Thou hast hardly commenced thy career of victory; but when it is finished, all lands and all seas shall lie beneath thy feet, at once conquered and glorified by thy con quest ! And now, gentlemen, if such be the law of human progress, if it must thus ever operate from the past into the present, and through the present to the future, and as by a sort of logical process, what becomes of those doctrines of social and political re form, with which our land is now so rife, and with which the pub lic ear is so incessantly abused? What becomes of those ideas of a natural, absolute, unlimited and uncontrollable popular sovereignty, which is at once to bring humanity to perfection by establishing a natural liberty and a natural equality in social and political life? There may be a dire clashing among some of the ideas that are thus brought forcibly together; but the wise advo cates of these doctrines see it not, feel it not. They have sundry naked abstractions, which they have created for themselves, or others for them, upon which, by their own unassisted wisdom, they hope to build up society anew, on an improved plan. They would cut clear from the past; they would establish a new theory of human nature, and base a human progress upon ideas and laws their own. Well! let them do it; but let them do it, as they must, with material their own. Let them create their world, and 74 JOB DUBFEE their man and woman, after their own image, and then, on their principles, run their course of events in rivalry with that of Divine Providence. But let them not lay their hands on those whom God has created after his image, and who are moving on to their high destiny under his divine guidance. Let them not undertake to substitute their will for His, their laws for His, over any except their own, and we shall then know what that progress is about which they are now so abundantly eloquent. In their estimation, all social and political institutions can be removed, by their sovereign wills, with the same ease that you take the glove from your hand, and any of their own imaginings substituted in their place. Their abstractions have no reference to the influence of the past on the present; no reference to the existing social or political organizations which have grown out of by-gone centuries; and it is not strange that they are utterly astonished to find, when they attempt to carry them into effect, that they are entering into conflict with all that the past has done for us. And then it is very natural for them to proceed, from lauding their own principles, to the abuse of the past; to the abuse of all our ancestral institutions and social and political ideas, as antiquated, and as obstructions to human progress. Gentlemen, the present state of human progress is a child, of which the hoary past is the venerable father. And the child bears the image and feels the pulsating blood, and enjoys the patrimony of its sepulchred parent. There is not an institution, or science, or art, of any practical value, nothing of the good or true, in social or political life, that has not come down to us as a creation, or as a result of the labors and achievements of the venerated dead; the dead, not of modern times merely, but of far-distant antiquity. The blood of ThermopylaB, of Marathon, and Platea, flowed not in vain for us. Homer sung, Plato mused, and Socrates moralized, for our benefit. For us Rome went forth in her invincible legion to conquer and humanize; for us Roman wisdom planned and Roman valor fought, and laid broad and deep the foundations of Christendom. Aye, some thing even of our nearer selves appears in the action of the dis tant past That blood, which now circulates warm through the Anglo-American heart, may be traced through centuries of light and shadow, of triumph and trial, in the Anglo-Saxon line. For SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 75 us it struggled under the Norman rule, and created our idea of liberty and law; for us it struck the harp of heaven in Milton, of nature in Shakespeare, and proclaimed the laws of the universe in the philosophy of Newton. O! let us build monuments to the past. Let them tower on mound and mountain; let them rise from the corners of our streets, and in our public squares, that childhood may sport its marbles at their basements, and lisp the names of the commemorated dead, as it lisps the letters of its alphabet. Thus shall the past be made to stand out in a monu mental history, that may be seen by the eye, and touched by the hand. Thus shall it be made to subsist to the senses, as it still lives in the organization of the social mind; an organization from which its errors have died out, or are dying, and in which nothing but its Herculean labors do, or are to endure. Yes, let us sanctify the past, and let no hand, w r ith sacrilegious violence, dare mar its venerable aspect. Change indeed must come, but then let it come by force of the necessary law of progress. So shall the pres ent still ever build and improve on a patrimony formed by the deeds of heroic virtue, and the labors of exalted intellect. So shall the great and glorious be added to the great and glorious, and the labors of the illustrious dead still be made fruitful by the labors of the illustrious living, time without end. Such is the nature of that inheritance which has come down to us from the past, worthy to be honored by every philanthropic feeling for the present, and cherished by every hope for the future. And now do these theorists expect us to renounce this patrimony, and go and build on their barren abstractions? commence a new progress on their empty expectations? And shall we do it? No, never, never, whilst humanity, through her grand organization of nations, yields a necessary obedience to the laws of the Supreme Reason, or Nature, through her universal frame of worlds, stands fast in the laws of her God! THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION BY ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY Delivered before the Alpha of Massachusetts, at Harvard University, August 28, 1845. MY friend and classmate, 1 who addressed you on your last anniversary, discoursed to you wisely and eloquently on the con nection between moral culture and literary success and eminence. I heartily thank him, that he has left open for me a kindred vein of thought, richer still, though to be worked, I fear, with a skill inferior to his. I refer to the connection between science and religion, a connection obvious when theoretically considered, and capable of actual verification in the authentic history of science; enjoying indeed, over a similar view of literature, this advantage, that literary worth is a matter of individual taste, and, if people choose to admire Voltaire or worship Goethe, none can gainsay them, while every new discovery or generalization in science is a fixed fact in the annals of the race, and every non- discoverer in the walks of science is an equally fixed and indis putable negative fact. Think not that I appear on this occasion in a professional capacity, and am going to inflict a sermon on an audience convened for a widely different purpose. Elsewhere it is my province to present religion in queenly robes, and with a voice of absolute command; here I ask you to regard her merely as a handmaid. Yet, should her fidelity as a servant win any heart to do homage to her as a sovereign, I shall have attained my ultimate desire and aim. But my design is to offer you such a view, as might be presented by a professedly scientific man of a sufficiently catholic mind to take religion into the circle of the sciences. There is a wide difference between knowledge and science. Isolated facts and phenomena are the materials of knowledge; science ascertains their laws, relations, and harmonies. Knowl edge may be acquired, retained, and transmitted by any man of 1 George Putnam. EDS. CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 77 ordinary powers and good memory; science is the creation of the few great minds, one of whom suffices to shed lustre upon an age. Of men popularly deemed scientific, and eminently so, the greater part make no contributions to the progress of science, and are incapable of aggression upon the vast domain yet uncon- quered. Of this class are many of those, who have great learning, write good books, and repeat difficult experiments, whose sole work is to decant old wine into new bottles, while others have planted the grapes, and trodden the wine-press. To the same class belong many of the discoverers of new facts and the invent ors of new processes, men of great skill and adroitness, but not necessarily of creative power. Science is the classification of facts under principles, of phenomena under essential laws ; and the progress of science consists in successive generalizations, each surpassing all that have preceded it in comprehensiveness and simplicity. The scientific discoverer is he who traces out laws or harmonies before unknown, or enlarges the scope of those already recognized. I propose, first, to exhibit to you the essen tial agency in this work of just and adequate religious ideas and sentiments, and then to justify my position by a cursory survey of the history of science. Scientific truths are not written upon the surface of nature; nor can they be ascertained by mere felicitous conjecture, which might range forever, and range in vain, among the numberless theories possible in every case. A false theory never suggests the true. Yes and A 7 o are the only answers which the scientific inquirer draws from nature; and whether he ever gets a Yes, depends on the shaping of his questions. The welcome answer is for him alone, who knows how to ask. In the fields of science, one reaps as he sows, takes what he brings. The most patient research cannot initiate into the mysteries of nature him whose antecedent conceptions of the objects of science are vague, nar row, or exaggerated. The successful inquirer must come to the investigation of facts, with adequate antecedent ideas, with the general outlines of his theory distinctly traced in his own mind. But whence is he to derive those antecedent ideas? How shall he frame his questions? How can he descend to the investi gation of parts and details with 1 just conceptions of the whole? 1 So reads the printed text. The author probably wrote "without." EDS. 78 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY Analogy must ask his questions, and shape his theories. And what is the basis of analogy? It is the general plan of the divine administration, the traits of the infinite mind portrayed in the constitution and course of nature. The attributes of God are the ultimate cause, his ideas, the archetypes, of all things. Just and lofty views of his character furnish therefore starting- points and data for philosophical research. They indicate the direction in which truth lies. They supply the essential outlines and elements of every department of science. On the other hand, ignorance or non-recognition of the divine attributes prompts fruitless questionings, leads into mazy paths that terminate nowhere, makes up false issues, and passes by truth within grasp, in the vain effort to arrive at those occult forces, which can only be resolved into the varied agency of the Creator. To commence with the simple idea of an infinite First Cause, where this has been ignored, man has always philosophized, as if he were the centre of the universe; and his theories have all partaken of his own littleness, his system of nature has been dwarfed, his conceptions narrow and inadequate. So it was in the ancient world. The boundless heavens were but a jewelled canopy for the dwellers upon earth, and the whole realm of mat ter and of mind was seen as through a diminishing lens. But the conception of an infinite Creator sends the beholder back from the centre to his true place in the remote circumference of the universe; and its bounds at once expand and recede before his enlarged vision. The stars, from spangles on the curtain of night, grow into clusters of rejoicing worlds; and the immeasurable Creator is mirrored forth in majesty and grandeur from every scene of nature and of life. Similar is the effect on science of the distinct recognition of the divine unity. Ancient philosophy could acquiesce in jarring elements and conflicting systems. It was content with partial generalizations. It sought not uniformity. It presupposed no harmony in nature. But modern science is led on, by faith in the divine unity, from complex to simple laws, from lower to ever higher stages of generalization. It assumes unity of purpose and result as the basis of its theories. Its aim is to trace out in crea tion the undivided Godhead. Its whole progress is the develop ment of more and more perfect and comprehensive harmonies. CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 79 It is constantly bringing isolated phenomena into the embrace of law, interlacing by subtle filaments of resemblance or analogy the most unlike classes of objects and tribes of being, tracing to their meeting-point divergent lines once deemed parallel. In astronomy, it has already belted the vast globe, the stars, the universe, with the inscription, GOD is ONE ; and now it is seeking marks of identity in heat, light, gravitation, the electric, the magnetic force, the vital principle, the medium of sensation and of voluntary motion, and will soon draw forth from these hidden powers, pervading all space and being, the echo of that sublime truth, with which it has girdled the heavens. Faith in the boundless benevolence of the Creator plays a no less important part in the development of science. On this also rests the doctrine of final causes, as applied to every form of organized existence. From this is inferred the beneficent design and tendency of all the adjustments and provisions of nature. Resting on the axiom of religion, GOD is LOVE, as the basis of all its theories, modern science has traced the footprints of a pater nal Providence in every portion of the outward universe. In the economy of animal and vegetable life, it has left no organ, no arrangement, without its ascertained use and end. From the darker and more terrific phenomena of nature, it has drawn forth voices of praise and gladness. The lightning, no longer a fiery winding-sheet, is hailed as a swift-winged minister of health. The eclipse, once beheld with awe and dread, has become a sub lime interlude in the harmony of the spheres. The wandering fires of the comet glow no longer with the lurid glare of wrath, but with rays of infinite love. Nor can the impulse thus given to inquiry cease, until the merciful ministry of the entire economy of nature shall be clearly defined and fully demonstrated, until the record of the divine paternity shall be transcribed from the New Testament upon every form of life and every portion of the outward universe. Thus do just conceptions of the Creator furnish adequate analogies for the scientific inquirer. But science is indebted to religion, not only for the analogy, which always shapes the lead ing question, but for the induction, which gives the final and comprehensive answer. General laws and principles, whether in physical or intellectual science, are to be reached only by indue- 80 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY tion. Observation, consciousness, and experience are necessarily limited in space and time, and can give but partial answers. Induction extends these answers through all space and all time, converts particular facts into all-embracing truths, and puts the universe within the grasp of science. The inductive philosophy, though so obvious that we can hardly conceive of a time when it was not recognized, rightly dates its promulgation with the age of Bacon, but it is to be regarded less as his discovery, than as the point of progress, which the human mind had attained, when he entered upon the stage. Aristotle indeed speaks of induction; but seems to have regarded it merely as a hypothetical and ten tative process, and had no idea of it as an instrument of bound less power for the discovery of truth and the increase of human knowledge. The only form of reasoning recognized for many ages was the syllogism, which adds nothing to the domain of science, but simply classes separate facts under laws previously known. Logic was thus employed in the analysis of such truths as were already the property of the human mind, and not in the enlarge ment of its orbit, and the expansion of its sphere of thought. The reason of this undoubtedly was the lack of a settled faith in the consistency, order and stability of the universe. The syllogistic mode of reasoning had its birth, when the heavens and earth were cantoned out among numberless conflicting deities, and when fickleness and caprice attached themselves to the highest idea of the divinity, which the mass even of philosophers could reach. And, during much of the time that intervened between the promulgation of Christianity and the Protestant Reforma tion, the prevalent conceptions of the Creator were but little elevated above those that had prevailed in the classic ages. The sublime theism of the Mosaic and the Christian Scriptures devel oped itself in the faith of Christendom by gradual and slow approaches; and the angelology and demonology of the middle ages hung as a heavy clog on the excursive powers of the human intellect. It was needful for the mind to be bathed, as it were, in Christian ideas, for many centuries, before it could look upon the system of nature as a symmetrical whole, reflecting from a past to a future eternity the image of one unchangeable Creator. Nor, till this stage had been reached, was it possible for the indue- CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 81 live philosophy to have birth. Induction is based on the immut- ableness of God, on the harmony of his attributes, on the self- consistency of his administration. It is indeed defined to be syllogism, with the unchangeableness of the Creator for a con stant term. I accept the definition. But this constant term transfigures syllogism from a pander to scholastic subtleties into the gatekeeper of the temple of eternal truth. Its aim is now onward and upward. It no longer delves in cloisters among paltry cabalistic terms, raking over the accumulated dust and rubbish of centuries; but it is out in the fields, on the waters, among the stars, it goes on the wings of the wind, it rides the lightning s flash, it floats on the ever-retreating confines of the unexplored and unknown, it lifts boldly, yet with rev erence, the veil that hangs over the throne of the Omnipotent. Such is the ministry to science of the fundamental doctrines of Christian theism. This ministry they can perform only for him who believes in them; and must needs perform it the most surely and effectually for him, who embraces them, not with a merely intellectual assent, but with adoration and love. I, there fore, next remark that a devotional frame of mind is eminently favorable to the pursuit of scientific truth. The affections, when fixed on worthy and lofty objects, instruct the intellect, and anticipate its more tardy processes. They apprehend truth by a consciousness of its moral adaptations and harmonies. They take intuitive views, which subsequent research and reasoning verify and confirm. A pure moral taste of itself constitutes a higher reason, which seldom misleads. It discerns instinctively those elements of fitness, symmetry, and beauty, which are insep arable from scientific truth. Thus a man of elevated moral and religious sentiments learns faster than he can reason. He often knows the result before he has weighed the arguments, so that what to others is proof, is to him mere verification. Take in the same department of science two persons of equal natural endow ments and mental culture, one of whom has developed, the other neglected and dwarfed the religious nature; you will find, in the first, a certain aptness and promptitude in the perception of resemblances and analogies, a tendency to seize at once upon the right point of view, a quickness of apprehension outspeeding the formal steps of analysis and proof, in fine, an affinity for truth, 82 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY as ready and infallible as that chemical affinity, which draws unlike material substances together, while, in the other, you will discern (even with an equal or superior aptness for the reception of positive proof), a blindness to many of the intrinsic marks of truth, an incapacity of anticipating results, and, in general, a mechanical condition of the thinking powers, indicat ing their subjection to a lower class of laws than those which govern the intellect, touched to finer issues by the spirit of sincere devotion. Devotional habits also enlarge and exalt the mind, performing for it the same office which the extensor muscles do for the limbs of the body, preserving it in full tension and vigor, with its excursive powers constantly reaching on and up for broader, loftier views, as in more perfect accordance with the glorious and infinite majesty of the Creator. A devout spirit also places a man in an enviable position for the exercise of his mental powers. The mind, in order to work to advantage, must be stable, calm, self-collected, released from the tyranny of the lower appetites and passions, and bound to its true orbit by a sense of duty and accountableness. If it be harassed by disturbing forces, its results are inadequate to its capacity. Now devotion puts the soul in its true place towards both God and man, checks its uneasy, restless flights, subdues appetite, bridles passion, makes conscience supreme, and enlists mind, heart and strength in the earnest pursuit of whatever is worthy the interest of a God-born immortal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." The devout man has that place, at the blending point of the rays of infinite wisdom and love. In all his great, essential interests, he is immovably fixed. He has his God-appointed centre of activity, where he may take his stand, and put forth to the utmost effect whatever power he has; and, if he be a great man, he can move the world, he can raise the world, can make new disclo sures of truth, search out higher laws of being, carry onward the knowledge of the race towards the uncaused Cause of all things, and enlarge the orbit of the human mind towards that of Him, whose goings forth are from eternity. Such are some of the essential offices, which religion discharges for science. To verify this view, I will ask you now to survey CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 83 with me the history of science. I hope to show you that, in point of fact, only men of religious faith, and for the most part only devout men, have been legislators in the realm of science, while the irreligious and unbelieving, who have obtained eminent reputation as scientific men, have been employed chiefly in verifying, arranging, and applying the laws and principles dis covered by a widely different order of minds. This distinction may be traced in ancient, no less than in modern, times. The few great men of classic antiquity, who enlarged the bounds of human knowledge, and who, even to our own day, exercise an admitted sway over men s minds, were all, to the full measure of their light, reverent and devout. On the other hand, the last traces of the influence upon mind of the atheistical philosophers of antiquity vanished ages ago. Nay, their very works have perished, and are known to us only by extracts and references in works of an opposite character. Of Plato, the almost Christian theist, we have voluminous writings extant; of Democritus, the father of the atheistical school of Greek philosophy, who wrote as much as Plato, not a word remains. Pythagoras and Plato present a striking analogy between their theological and their scientific attainments. Unlike in many of their speculations, they were both men of lofty spiritual yearn ings. They heard the still, small voice of the Almighty in the harmony of the spheres. They felt the pulsations of the Supreme Intelligence in the depths of their own consciousness. They could not rest in the low, gross conceptions that prevailed around them; but were spiritualists from the necessity of noble minds. Yet they could not "by searching find out God." From their low starting-point and limited means of culture, they could not reach the idea of a simple personal Deity; but acquiesced in a mystical, dreamy pantheism, their conceptions vague as they were vast. And before their minds there also floated visions of scientific truth no less vast, yet no less vague. Their ideas of the system of nature were lofty, but intangible. They beheld shad owy outlines in the misty sky; but could neither define them, nor fill them up. They, therefore, remained in embryo, like seed- corn in a mummy-case, till, beneath Christian culture, they put forth leaves, blossoms, and rich, ripe fruit. The annals of ancient science bear the name of but one truly 84 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY great discoverer, Archimedes; and all the records that we have of his life and labors, lead us to regard him as a man deeply penetrated with a sense of the infinite God, and convinced, in theory, of the all-embracing grasp of law and system in creation, antecedently to those discoveries which have made his name immortal. There were others, among the ancients, who rendered eminent service to science in the arrangement and classification of its materials; but their methods were artificial, and adapted merely to the preservation of facts for subsequent use. This was the sole merit of Aristotle, and, in later times, of Pliny, in natural history and science. This was all that Hipparchus and Ptolemy did for astronomy. The phenomena of the heavens had been observed from the earliest times; and an immense, chaotic mass of facts had been accumulated. These they reduced to some semblance of order, by hypotheses purely phenomenal as to their basis, and involved and complex to the last degree, which could not have had a momentary hold on human belief, had the idea of symmetry and perfectness in the system of nature once gained currency. They established, where there was wild anarchy be fore, a provisional government, to last till there should arise a lawgiver, who could write out the ordinances of the heavens, and measure the paths and bounds of sun and star. The waste of ancient science is an eminently instructive chap ter of the history of mind. A vast amount of fruitless labor was expended in mere cosmogony, which Christian theism has stricken from the list of sciences. The ancients thought them selves bound to account, by natural laws, for the primeval origin of all things. Modern science, while it marks the phases and revolutions of our globe and system for countless ages before man had birth, rests, for its ultimate ground, on the simple declaration of Moses, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It beholds in the divine fiat an adequate force and cause for the state of things where its last research termi nates, and lets the veil still rest on the pristine act of creative power. The author of that marvellous piece of smooth sophistry, Vestiges of Creation, has, indeed, sought to lift the veil; but has only succeeded in showing that the philosophy of atheism has not taken an onward step since the days of Lucretius, and in writing, in the clearest characters, upon his own labors the CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 85 inscription with which he sought to label the works of the Omnipotent, "E nihilo nihilfit" There was also a vast waste of intellect in the attempt to disinter the hidden forces of nature. The idea of power was developed much earlier than that of law. A sense of immeasur able power in creation oppressed the mind, ages before it awoke to the perception of order and harmony. Each of the great agencies in the material world was thought to be pervaded by a separate inherent force, in itself a sufficient cause for its own entire class of phenomena; and the attempted analysis of these imagined forces usurped the time, energy, and philosophical acumen, which, rightly directed, might have laid the foundation of the inductive sciences. Christian theism recognizes but one force, and that one, the indwelling and ever-working spirit of the Omnipotent in all space and time, the same in the nascent germ and the gravitating planet, in the wavelet of light from the remotest star and the throbbings of the human heart. This boundless force revealed and owned, science now has only to trace its varied modes of action, and to read the unchanging laws inscribed on creation by its Author and Father. Ancient science also wasted much of its strength in mere verbal analysis. A large amount of the reasoning of the ancients on scientific subjects was based on the established usus loquendi, and consisted in the mere application of terms, assuming their perfectness and adequacy, and the infallible truth of the ideas attached to them. They inferred the most comprehensive prin ciples from the names currently given to objects, or from the trivial phrases employed in common discourse. Thus Thales, when asked, "What is the greatest thing?" replied, "Space, for all other things are in the world, but the world is in it," a puerile conceit based on the ordinary colloquial use of the prepo sition. Aristotle s usual starting-point, on a course of reasoning, is, "We say thus and so in common language." I might, had I time, quote numerous examples of this kind from him, and not a few from other ancient writers. This mode of reasoning resulted from the place, which man then conceived himself to occupy in the creation. His own ideas were his only ultimate measure and standard of truth. His highest notions of the divinity were sub ordinated to his philosophy, and circumscribed within the metes 86 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY and bounds of an inflexible terminology. There was no distinct recognition of a supreme, independent, self-conscious Intelli gence, from whose immutable ideas, gradually unfolded to the reverent and truth-loving, finite minds might modify, correct, and enlarge their own conceptions. The mind of man was thus kept revolving from age to age in the same narrow circle, and filling the whole area of that circle with childish sophisms. We can minister to the growth of science, only by holding its terms as auxiliary and provisional, by modifying them to meet its enlarged necessities, and by deeming no idea ultimate or abso lute but that of God. But time forbids me to dwell longer on remote antiquity; nor will Arabian science claim more than a passing notice. The Mahometan theology, though in form recognizing the divine unity, was coarse, grovelling, anthropomorphic. It presented no large or lofty views of the divinity. It gave the mind no point of support in its search after truth. Arabian science was conse quently insignificant in its results and achievements. It pro duced immense and countless volumes; but they were collections of isolated facts, copies from the ancients, and prolix, jejune commentaries. The Arabs displayed great avidity for knowl edge, but no power of generalization; nor have they left a single name to be enrolled among the creative and legislative minds in the history of science. We pass to modern Christendom. Here great discoverers are not numerous. The sciences, that may now be regarded as the most nearly perfect, have been shaped from chaotic materials by the bold and rapid generalizations of a few master minds. In the kindred sciences of Mechanics and Hydrostatics, we have for the chief names Galileo, Pascal and Boyle, by whose side we can place no fourth as their equal. Galileo constantly recognizes the divine presence in nature, frequently takes the fundamental truths of religion for the premises of his arguments, and writes as one that is searching out the thoughts of God. Pascal, second to none in keen scientific insight, threw his fame as a philosopher into the background by the lustre of his religious character, by his apostolic fervor, saintly purity, and martyrlike self-denial. Boyle, in his investigation of natural laws, professed himself constantly under the guidance of religious ideas, and as a phi- CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 87 losopher viewed everything in its bearing upon the divine attri butes and administration . He, too, led an eminently religious life, expended large portions of his income for the translation and diffusion of the Scriptures, labored with consistent and persever ing zeal in all the then open departments of Christian philan thropy, and, in dying, by a generous bequest, made our own University the trustee of his pious purposes of the conversion and instruction of the North American Indians. Astronomy, as a definite and symmetrical science, owes its birth to the successive generalizations of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton; and for them faith held the torch to science, showed them the remotest stars in the embrace of the same guiding Providence, without which the sparrow falls not to the ground, prepared them to embrace laws simple as the divine unity, vast as Omnipotence. Copernicus defends his system of the universe by considerations drawn from the symmetry and harmony to be looked for in the works of God. Kepler, in expounding the motions of the planets, calls upon his readers to praise and celebrate with him the wisdom and greatness of the Almighty, and constantly adduces the divine attributes as rea sons for the laws that bear his name. Newton was a man of humble faith and of simple, childlike piety. He speaks of science as chiefly to be valued, because it brings us nearer to the knowl edge of the supreme First Cause. He finds traces of the Creator in every provision, law, and harmony of nature; and closes his Principia by a sublime tribute of praise to God. His law of universal gravitation, in its unity, simplicity, and comprehen siveness, seems the last generalization possible within the proper limits of astronomy, though gravitation itself will no doubt yet be proved identical with other material forces, and all the physi cal sciences brought into closer harmony than we can now imag ine. But, since Newton left the stage, it has been work and glory enough for subsequent astronomers to verify and apply his theories, to develop in detail the celestial mechanism, which he first saw at a glance. This, infidel philosphers, great in figures, like D Alembert and Laplace, have successfully done. And such as they can do the journey-work of science, can perfect the purely mechanical part of arrangement and calculation; but it is not for them to approach the oracles of truth, and hear those 88 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY responses, which, uttered in the ear of the devout philosopher, command light out of the darkness of age-long ignorance, and order from the chaos of ill-jointed theories and obsolete systems. The existence of chemistry, except in groping experiments and vague surmises, bears date less than a century ago; and many of its fundamental laws are yet undiscovered, or stand in the form of postulates, and need additional demonstration. But the dis coverers of its established principles fall easily into the ranks of the fathers of mechanical and astronomical science. To specify a few of these, Black, to whom we are indebted for the laws of latent heat, and for much of the earliest light thrown upon the chemistry of the gases, delighted to trace and exhibit the benefi cence of the Creator in those portions of the economy of nature, which he brought to view. Of Lavoisier, who first analyzed the atmosphere, discovered the properties of oxygen, and fully identified the laws of acidification and combustion, it is enough to say that he was ostracized in Paris, when everything but virtue was tolerated, and fell beneath the guillotine, when to be a good man was the only capital offence. We owe the theory of chem ical atoms, and the numerical laws of combination, which promise chemistry a place among the exact sciences, to Dalton, a simple-hearted, lowly, devout member of the Society of Friends. Second to none in the earliest ranks of scientific botany was Ray of Oxford, the first systematic writer on natural theology, whose numerous works in that department, full of profound learning, and redolent throughout with the breathings of an eminently devout spirit, furnished Paley with many of his richest materials and choicest illustrations. Linnaeus was full of religious sentiment, and in his lectures and on his excursions constantly expatiated with fervent eloquence on the divine wisdom and beneficence. He heard the voice of the Lord God among the trees of the garden, tracked his footprints in the hoary forests, plucked with devout admiration and love the humblest way side flower. In harmony with his blameless and beautiful life, was the inscription on the door of his lecture room, "Innocui vivite; numen adest" While there are some eminent botanists, of whose religious convictions and characters I can trace no record, I cannot find the name of a single known unbeliever, who CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 89 has left a distinct mark in the history of botany. But, in my apprehension, while descriptive and analytical botanists have been accumulating materials for the growth of their science, and while rapid progress has been made within the last few years in vegetable physiology and chemistry, botany, as a classificatory science, has received few permanent laws, has been enriched by few well-grounded generalizations, since the days of Linnaeus. Though I know nothing in the character of either of the Jussieus, which would predispose me, for the sake of my argument, to undervalue their labors, permit me to say (I am aware that the opinion will have a strangely obsolete sound in the ears of pro fessed botanists) that their Natural Orders have not in a scien tific aspect superseded the Linnsean system. I acknowledge the superior claims of the Natural Orders in a practical and officinal point of view. They are based on obvious and important char acteristics. They group together plants of kindred habits, prop erties, and uses. But the Linnsean system, founded on the number and position of the vital organs of the plant, keeps continually before the mind that beautiful network of correspondences and equivalents, those filaments of a uniform plan in boundless diversity, which bring the summer world around us into the closest harmony with the vast whole of nature, and draw the same voices of praise from the flowers and the stars. But in science I am of the unanointed laity; and would enter my dissent from the priesthood with unfeigned diffidence. We pass now to animal physiology. Here Galen seems first to have propounded theories, that will bear the light of modern times. He distinctly maintained the doctrine of final causes, and professed to be guided by it in his researches. His discoveries seem, from his own showing, to have resulted from his antecedent faith in the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator, a faith, which sustained him in the persevering and reiterated effort to arrive at uses and ends, which long eluded his inquiry; and he speaks with indignation of those (so called) philosophers, who imagine that symmetry fails and utility ceases, where their own powers of observation are at fault. He pursued all his investiga tions in the spirit of reverence and worship, and styled his great work "a religious hymn in honor of the Creator." The position of the valves in the veins must have been observed many cen- 90 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY turies before Harvey inferred from it the circulation of the blood; but the living tide, which had ebbed and flowed in millions of hearts for nearly six thousand years, awaited for its discovery the clear insight of a devout believer in the kindly use and ade quate end of every portion of the animal economy. Cuvier has performed for the kingdoms of animated nature the work which Newton wrought for the mechanism of the heavens. His general izations now seem final and complete. They bind together all tribes of being in one vast and beautiful system, pervaded by analogies and equivalent provisions; and reveal, in the structure and adaptations of the animal economy, numberless mysteries of divine wisdom, which had been hidden from the foundation of the world. He reached these sublime results, because his reli gious nature prompted him to look for unity and harmony in the works of God, to search everywhere for traces of the all-per vading and all-perfect Mind, to seek in the humblest zoophyte the expression of an idea of God, the not unworthy type of the Infinite Archetype. He wrought in glowing faith. He served at the altar of science as a priest of the Most High. Infidelity went from his presence rebuked and humbled. His soul was kindled, his lips were touched ever more and more with the fire of heaven, as, with waning strength and under the burden of bereavement, he still drew bolder, fuller harmonies, unheard before, from the lyre of universal nature. Says one who was present at the lecture, from which he went home to die, "In the whole of this lecture there was an omnipresence of the Omni potent and Supreme Cause. The examination of the visible world seemed to touch upon the invisible. The search into cre ation invoked the presence of the Creator. It seemed as if the veil were to be torn from before us, and science was about to reveal eternal wisdom." My limits have obliged me to cite but few of the great men of science. I might add many more, in the same and other depart ments. But I have named those, who, by the confession of all, hold the foremost rank; nor do I fear that the list of unbelieving philosophers can furnish a single name to be placed by the side of the least of these. The doctrine of my discourse, did it need additional proof, might find it in the records of infidelity, and especially in that CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 91 carnival season of unbelief, the age of the French Revolution. There never was a period of so much intellectual brilliancy as the reign of terror in France. The kingdom, the metropolis, swarmed with men of the highest and most varied culture. Voltaire, who had run the entire circle of all things that could be known, had indeed passed off the stage; but his versatile genius, his amazing industry, his defiant skepticism, gave tone to the age, of which, in default of all but demon- worship, he was the patron saint. I once saw a large collection of autograph man dates for the guillotine. Among the signatures, I recognized, as arch-murderers, many of the most accomplished men and writers of that or any age, chemists, mathematicians, philosophers, men who looked down upon the great of other times, as we look up to them. Half a century has elapsed, and their lights have almost all gone out. Here and there one flickers, and is suffered to burn to its last drop of oil by that Christian forbearance which quenches not the smoking flax. There is no strongly marked epoch in the world s history which, as to intellectual influence, is now so little felt as this. There remains not one of the un believing generation who is owned as a leading and controlling mind. On the grave of their idolized Voltaire it is hardly in good taste to cast another stone; for the arch-scorner (though pos sessed of brilliant and fascinating powers, which will preserve his lighter and less faulty works from speedy oblivion) , as regards all recognized authority and influence, now lies too low for scorn. Where confidence is demanded, none believe or trust him. His most voluminous works, and those by which he hoped to over throw the faith and revolutionize the opinions of Christendom, are mouldering, unhonored, and unread. The very nation that worshipped him now regard him as a mere word-juggler, made up of falsities and fallacies. And the only epitaph that posterity will inscribe on the sepulchres of the great men of his school, is that mystic word, traced by the unseen hand on Belshazzar s wall, " TEKEL : thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." But what lacked they? They had all that a merely material culture could give them. But they lacked that expan sion of intellect, that breadth of vision, which faith in God and heaven alone can give. I have in this discourse omitted all reference to mental phi- 92 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY losophy, not because I doubt that it depends for its successful cultivation on right and adequate religious ideas, but because its whole field is still sub lite, and I cannot therefore cite any great fundamental principles as resting on the same basis of established certainty with the law of gravitation, or the doctrine of final causes in physiology. The case however is different with the moral sciences, and under this name I include all those which relate to the laws of individual and social duty and well-being. In these sciences, there have been established many principles, from which the world will not recede; and they have been established through the agency of religion. In this class of results, not only the great truths of natural religion, but also the leading principles of Christian ethics have borne an essential part. There is not an admitted point in moral science, not an undisputed maxim in political economy, which rests not on those spiritual laws first revealed in the New Testament, though coeval with the human race. Thus the old doctrine concerning "the balance of trade," with the numerous selfish arrangements of international policy based upon it, has been eradicated by the recognition of that law of universal brotherhood, which, whether among individuals or nations, makes the good of one the good of all. The vast system of insurance, a science of itself, resting as it does in all its details on wide and bold generalizations, could have grown into being only under Christian culture. The idea of thus disarming the shafts of deadly calamity, as the electric conductor draws the thunderbolt harmless to the ground, could have originated only under the auspices of a religion, which bade men bear one another s burdens; and the whole system embodies in its general features, and is fast approaching in its modes of organization, the New Testament maxims of reciprocal helpfulness and charity. The modern doctrines concerning crime and punishment, and the more humane ideas of criminal jurisprudence, which are now in the course of successful demonstration, owe their origin and development solely to religious, Christian ideas of the nature, dignity, sacredness, and infinite worth of every human being, considered as an undying child of God, as in his wanderings and his sins the subject of the love of heaven, as never, while life lasts, beyond the power of divine truth or the pale of divine CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 93 forgiveness. The extension of kindred ideas to the true dignity and glory of nations is now leading great minds throughout Christendom to question the lawfulness and necessity of war, with its wasteful apparatus; nor will another generation have passed away, before the maxims, "Love your enemies," "Avenge not," "Overcome evil with good," will be deemed as essential laws of national policy, as they are now of individual Christian duty. But it was not my intention to enter upon the discussion of this class of topics, which would demand a separate discourse, and to which I could not now do the least justice without atro cious injustice to an already long-suffering audience. I have attempted to illustrate the connection of religion and science. The connection is not incidental or arbitrary, but inher ent and essential. The materials of both are the same, the thoughts of God. Religion reads them in their source; science in their developments. Brethren, scholars, men of science, yours is a priestly calling. You pursue it within temple gates and on holy ground. See that it be with pure and reverent spirits. Thus may you be leaders in the ever-onward movement of humanity towards the clear vision of truth in nature, and the sincere worship of Him, of whose ideas the universe is the transcript, its history the utterance. THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS Delivered before the Alpha of Massachusetts, at Harvard University, July 17, 1862, and repeated forty times during the ensuing year in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. From Orations and Addresses of George William Cur tis. Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. WHILE the horizon mutters, and our hearts and ears are strained and listening while brave men fight and fall, and the streets are sad with maimed and wasted soldiers while every home sits waiting for its victim, we will not try to avoid the im perial interest of the hour. What are they fighting for? What are they falling for? Why is the grief that bends over the young dead returning, so lofty and resigned? Ask them as they lie there. Could they speak, they would answer: "Not in vain we fell. t j Life was well lost for our country." ?\ But what is the cause of the country? We are fighting for the I j* ^Constitution, for the Union and the Government. But what is ^ ^the great purpose behind these, to secure which they were es tablished, and which consecrates and irradiates them to every true American? The answerjs familiar. That purpose is the security of civil and religious liberty. The principle of our na tional existence is liberty secured by law. And by liberty we a freedom more comprehensive than any other people, living or dead, has contemplated. The achievement of all other nations should be only wings to American feet that they may hasten to heights that Greek and Roman, that Englishman and Frenchman and German, never trod. Were they wise? Let us be wiser. Were they noble? Let us b$ nobler. Were they just? Let us be juster. Were they free? Let our very air be freedom. Seated in the temperate latitudes of a new continent, with free hands, free hearts, free brains, and free tongues, we are called to a destiny as manifest as the great heroism and the lofty prin ciple that made us a nation. That destiny is the utmost develop ment of liberty. Let those who will, cower before the chances that attend all development. Let those who will, despond and , i M THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY 95 despair of that perfect liberty with which God has made us all free. But let us now, here, hi the solemn moments which are deciding if there is to be a distinctive America, resolve that even ^ \ were the American system to fade from history, the American principle shoidd survive immortal in our hearts. Let us, then7 contemplate fte* American doctrine ofjiberty -/jio^jn any Lsingle direction, political, social, or moral; not in sany necessary but temporary limitation or detail; but in all the ample and jubi lant splendor of its^pirit and promise, lifting our eyes to see how beautiful upon tre mountains are the feet of its approach, mountains that we are iftwly climbing still, and are yet to climb, but the heavenly glory at whos n summits is the harbinger of day. It Is especially important thav we should all understand what the scope of that doctrine is, becdise of the incessant, unscrupu lous, and s^ecious-effortrwhicfals made to Belie, limit, and deride it. Our history for many years~is tie story of a systematic en deavor to debauch the national conscience and destroy the American idea. By the falsification d history; by the basest appeal to prejudices of race_andjiQlor; bj the solemn sophistry of theologians whtf adduce the divine tolerance of wrong-doing as a^Jjyine sanction of wrong; by the cold ant creakirfg effort of orators wlio, losing the sacred inspiration which iTtne Very bur den and glory of our history, virtually excuse this vanton war of some citizens upon the government, the nation, , n( l human liberty, because others have constantly professed theirf a ith in the fundamental principle of the government; by the n^st shame less falsehood and reckless pandering to selfishness a^d passion Jhejattempt is persistently making to destrov^tibe very root! Jof_the American doctrine of liberty ,~wTnchls the man rights based upon our common humanity. ~i tnat doctrine is the absolute personal and Political free- dom of every man; the right, that is to say, of evt^jy man to think and speak and act, subject to the equal righ^ of other men, protected in their exercise by common consent, ^ r law. It declares that men are to be deprived of personal liberty only for crime, and that political liberty is the only sure guarantee of personal freedom. These are the postulates of our civilization. Consequently our normal social condition is a constant enlarg ing of liberty; and any connivance at the permanent restraint of , u J 96 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS personal, political, or moral freedom, except from essential in- competency, as of youth or insanity, is a disturbance of the divine order in human development. The common humanity which is the source of aty equality of right is attested by the universality of language aad of religion in every race word answering to word, sacred tradition linked with tradition; but its loveliest witness is the universal sympathy of man with man\ The heart that leags to-day #ith the resound- : ng line of Homeric story; that finds in the Egyptian tombs of i Hassan the faint foreshadowing of reek temples, and in mute magnificence of the statue? oi Aboo Simbel a silence which it understands ;_^^ear^jthat Jbleeds with the wronged Indians of Hispaniola, and sing, with the African mother bring ing milk to the poor white mm Mungo Part; that blesses the American Nathan Hale grieving that he had but one life to lose for his country, and the Alican Toussaint 1 Ouverture dying a I 17 <L *- thousand deaths for his nee among the Jura mountains this J i <\ is the unerring heart of nan attesting his equal humanity J This V> is the eternal witness fiat, of every variety of race, complexion, -J \ capacity, intelligent, and civilization, it is the samp human family that streans across the ages,\its progressjike the flucr_*^w tuating iSftss c an advancing army, with its daring outposts an< -picfoefs, its steady centre, its remote wings, its dim and back ward resen es stretching many a mile from front to rear, over hills and valleys, over plains and rivers; here bivouacking in pastoral rej* ose there tossed upon the agonized verge of battle; but one gieat army still, with one heart beating along the end less line, ^ith one celestial captain, one inspiring, consecrated hope. But the c ommon humanity of men and the consequent equal- y of huma 11 rights, although obvious enough, have been but vaguely an d sentimentally acknowledged, even in the freest and airest ep-> cns - Pericles in the funeral oration recounts the splendor, the strength, the tolerance of Athens. How lovely the picture ^till! In that soft air, on that bright plain, life for a few ^as all /a festival. But in the golden noon of Athenian liberty there tfrere five hundred thousand inhabitants in Attica, and morp Ahan four hundred thousand of them had no .acknowl edged rights whatever. When we speak of Athenian liberty we TME AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY 97 mean only the privilege of a few fortunate men. So, too, Ro was but a few families. The Roman republic was a patrician class, that slew Tiberius Gracchus, the republican. The lan guage has no terms for human rights. The Roman mind could conceive "an empire, but not a man. Rome could conquer the world, but humanity defied her. Spartacus was a barbarian, a pagan, and a slave. Escaping, he summoned other men wh liberty was denied. His call rang through Italy like an autu storm through the forest, and men answered him like^clustering leaves. He dashed them against the ot 1 , thieves of their liberty, and three times he overwhelmed them. Flushed with vic tory and rage he turned his conquering sword at the very heart of Rome, and the terrified despot of the world at last crushed him with the energy of despair. He was not a man in Roman / eyes, but Rome tottered before him, and fell before his descend ants. He had no rights that Romans were bound to respect, but he wrote out hi blood upon the plains of Lombardy his equal humanity with Catoj and Csesar. The tale is terrible. History shudders with it still But you and I, Plato and Shakespeare, the mightiest and the meanest men/ were honored in Spartacus, for his wild revenge sho\ ed the brave scorn of oppression that beats immortal in the proud hea/t of man. . In all nj}if)s, indeed, there hav^ been ^ryirig ^g nrn "n +* liberty. In Athens, where both personal and political freedom were totally juiknown to the great bulk of the peoplf\ t-h ftrft 1 dmiKJTftss prvpjlnjj^ liberty nf t^r^ght and speech among^the happvAthenianJew. On the_other_hand, in "Puritan land, wnT^j^inost-fivery man was.a vo+ Ar , ^Higiomjiberty was^ . annihilate^. Yet neither in pagan Greece nor in Christian New \s * England was the true ground of liberty either seen or confessed. No, nor yet in old England to-day, upon whose shore we may set foot and hear the air ringing with the famous burst of Curran, that whoever touches that soil "stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal emanci pation. " The fiery rhetoric cannot make us forget what the in telligent English radical told Mr. Olmsted, that the farm laborers in certain districts of England whom Mr. Olmsted himself describes as more like animals than any negro or Indian or Chinese or Malay he ever saw although forming the most GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS numerous single class in the country, are not thought of in form ing an estimate of national character. That rhetoric cannot pre vent our wondering if a social system is yet safely adjusted, in which the\Marquis of Breadalbane rides upon his own estate seventy milelTfrom sea to sea, while five millions of factory la borers squeeze through life upon starvation wages. No siren elo quence can sing away the perception that British society is but a modified feudalism; and spite of the Englishmen whose names are hallowed, of the good and noble men who make Shakespeare and Milton possible Englishmen, who so plainly see and clearly say the truth of our great struggle despite these men, the instinctive sympathy of England with the Rebellion rather than with the government is not commercial only; it is deeper than that: it is organic; it is social and political. The comely feudalism of England a system of class privilege, not of human right stretches out its hand, muffled in cotton, to the hideous hag of /x ""^rhuman slavery over the sea, in whom it owns a ghastly kindred f 7 with itself. I But the habit of domestic political freedom in the American, colonies, which was almost universal, combined with the gener^ education which such freedom secures, and which their circum stances favored, forced the thinking men in the colonies to understand the grounds of the liberty wiiich they instinctively demanded. In grejitemergencies men always rise tojcar_dina] ^y principles, as^jn^ajjing out of sight of land^ the mariner look& yr /^Nup and steers by the sun and stars. In their golden maturity of j wisdom and strength, with a profound faith in principle which no other body of men have rivalled, and which their own sons have not even comprehended, our fathers began with God and human nature, founding their government upon truths which they dis- , dained to argue, declaring them to be self-evident. The wise \ West Indian boy, Alexander Hamilton, cried with the bright , V f ardor of conviction: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be ^ ^^ rummaged for among oM^parchments or musty records. They are written as with a^sunbeajri. in the whole volume of human nature, and can never Be erased or obscured by mortal power." James Otis, the fiery tongue of the early Revolution, declared that "the Colonists are men, the Qolonists are therefore free- born, for by the law of nature all men are free-born, black or THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY "Amen," said the gallant Richard Henry Lee, a Vir ginian when Virginian was a name of honor, "the right to life and the right to liberty are inalienable." John Adams responded, " My friends, human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty." The town of Providence, in voting for a Continental Congress, declared "personal liberty an essential part of the Natural rights of mankind." "Freedom," said the Virginian Gazette, "is the birthright of all mankind, Africans as well as Europeans." Then came the great Virginians, Madison, Mason, Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph, and their peers, with their Declaration of Rights, "All men are by nature equally free and have inherent rights, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursu ing and obtaining happiness and safety." And at last Thomas Jefferson, happy among men that his hand was chosen, gathered in one glowing psean the inspiration of the time, declaring the truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The fathers said what they meant and meant what they said. They / meant all men, not some men, and, calling God and the world to witness, they said all men. The Sons of the Morning sang to-{ gether, and the clear chorus rang through the world. And while one burning phrase, "Give me liberty or give me death," keeps our greatest orator s name fresh in our hearts forever, where is he who dares to call that principle "a glittering generality" that declaration of the only true ground of national honor and national pea*--e the "passionate manifesto of a revolutionary war"? " Who but must laugh if such a man there be? " Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? " .The American doctrine founds liberty in the natural of men. The conspiracy against liberty plants itself here and elsewhere upon a denial of that equality. Politicians whose hopes rest upon the popular ignorance and prejudice, and not upon the popular intelligence, furiously sneer at the idea of equality. It is important, therefore, that every man should un- c -erstand what human equality is. It is an elemental lesson, but the attack is made at the very foundation and must be met there. How then are we born equal? Clearly we are not all, or any . of us, equal in capacity, in circumstance, or condition. We are 100 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS * not equal in our height or weight; in the color of cur hair or eyes Does the doctrine imply that Benedict Arnold is equal in honcT to George Washington? That Martin Farquhar Tupper is equ *1 in genius to Shakespeare? or that Robert Toombs is equal In honor and heroic patriotism to Robert Smalls? No any mo^e ^ithan it declares General Tom Thumb to be the equal in statur e of the Belgian Giant, or Lucrezia Borgia of equal humanity wit} 1 > ^Florence Nightingale. ^jgM^Hinllfrg ^ichomde^lies our doctrine of liberty -T^rajT"e^R^ ^ ? And there is no limitation to this right. It is not true of some ^^ men and untrue of others. If any man has it, all men have it. What right have you to $>ur life and liberty that I, being guilt less, have not to mine? And if any man or society of men deny them to me and claim to take them away, what is the authority? *What can it be but brute force, which would have submitted Plato to any Persian bully, and jiid submit Christ to Herod. I am a weaker man than you am I less a man? If you steal my life or liberty for that, a stronger man may by the same right steal yoiirs. I am a duller man than you am I less a man? If f for that reason you defraud me, beware of wiser men than your self. I am a darker man than you am I less a man? If for that cause you enslave me, the idiot albinos are the born kings of men. The foundationjrf jiberl^v; in natural right was no boast of passionate rhetoric from the mouths of the fathers. They were neither dreamers nor visionaries, and they were much too earnest to be mere rhetoricians. Thus they were not hypocrites in the question of slavery. Their common sense is the most contemp tuous censure of our modern sophistry. We believe in the rights of man, they said, and of course slavery is wrong. But it is a question of fact as well as principle. The slaves are entitled to their personal freedom as much as we; now how, under all the circumstances, shall they soonest regain it wnth the least loss of every kind of liberty to every man in the land? We no more defend slavery because we hold slaves, than when we are ill we defend disease. Every man ought to be well, but, being sick, th ^ question is how most safely and soonest to be cured. Therefoi e when they established the government they made a fundamental law so peacefully expansive that it should gladly allow the dis- THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY 101 appeal ance of slavery which they contemplated and the utmost development of the freedom wLich they desigtttit}; Mi&dfuL df the rights of the political comm mitiee of which they were all members, they did not forget th< rights o^ mp whicifc pojitifcal. communities existed to protect. <; The last words of the Continental Congress, retiring before the new government, have a startling and tragical significance as we hear them through the raging tempest of this civil war l^ypEjre forgotten that the rights for wjiioh has conleudfiiare the rights of human nafureT^ithat solemn hour they charged us. Their lips, glowing with the words of a faith that shames us, calling God to witness, told us not to forget. We have forgotten oh, for the broken hearts, for the costly lives, for the blood-red land ! we have forgotten, and God is entering into judgment. So august is the American doctrine of liberty. It ought not to be less, for this only is absolutely universal. It is so vast that it promises endless progress. It is so pure that it requires the sincerest faith. Jit is so true that virtue alone can achieve it. Do we believe this doctrine? Do we believe that the right of per sonal, political, and moral liberty inheres in human nature and belongs to every man? I do not ask whether we think every Malay or Patagonian ought to vote, or whether the Grand Lama oughl^to turn himself into a Constitutional President of Thibet, but whether we agree that the cardinal principles of progressive civilization are the clear perception that every man is entitled to this liberty, and that our duty is the unwearied effort wisely to secure it for him. That in this country we owe a double allegiance, that we are citizens of a State and also of a nation, that the fundamental law leaves to the States in time of peace the absolute regulation of their domestic affairs, are truths which in no way conflict with our obligations as morally responsible men incessantly to wx>rk for the enlightenment and elevation of all men. Nor, because I am a loyal citizen of the\ . State of New York and of the United States, and honorably \ bound to respect the right of every State to care for itself, am 1 I required to shut my eyes or hold my tongue if the State of / California shall legalize murder or theft, or the State of Mas^/ sachusetts shall enact that all citizens who are more than sixty ^ 102 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS years old shall be enslaved. I may say nay, I am a traitoi t my Stale, to my country, to n y race, and to my Creator, if I do not say that, such laws ire most dangerous and wicked: - * anr for lh< v^ry simple rea on that whatever strikes at the . natural rights of any man in any State wounds every man in all the States and pierces the heart of. the nation. And manifestly it is only by the freest possible discussion in all the States of every question which affects/the national policy that that policy > can be wisely determined. j(Vhen, therefore, a man says regret fully that if the discussion of human rights could only have been suppressed in this country there would have been no civil war, he says merely that if we had but quietly consented to renounce the most precious of our Constitutional rights, we should have surrendered all the rest without a struggle. And he speaks truly. For if, by common consent and a deplorably false conception of State rights, the citizens of this country had allowed their tongues to be tied, had suffered the Constitution to be nullified, as it was in half the country, and no voice had protested and warned us of the sure and stealthy destruction of the principle of liberty in our national government by that of despotism, then when a little while had revealed the ghastly spectacle of that despotism crowning itself with the iron band of absolute power, it might well have been too late to recover the liberty at whose loss we had connived. O friends! we may pardon that voice, may we not, if it were acrimonious, . Jgggfflfinftte, vitupera tive, fierce,? Yes; but s^^JKithlaigry, jagge<J dart the TigElning stabs the stagnant body of the summer air a blinding glare, an aVful crash . but lo ! the soft splendors of the sunset follow, then shine the stars, and at last the ambrosial air of morning breathes coolness, health, and peace upon a world renewed. Taught by terrible experience, therefore, the danger of f orget- ting our doctrine of liberty, let us look at one or two of the more specious ways in which it is practically thwarted or denied; let us see where we are weak, that we may know where to strengthen ourselves. And, first, of liberty of thought and speech. These are indeed expressly^ affirmed in our fundamental laws; but you remember the startlingly direct remark of De Tocqueville, "I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY ( 103 r^edom of discussion as in America." The reason is obyious. Political and public success with us depend upon popular favor * and party votesjfcut, as the great mass of men everywhere are I comparatively iminstructed and prejudiced, the condition of their favor is rather conformity to their prejudices than appeal to their noblest instincts/ Yet the power of .public opinion in this coun- try and the danger of its debasement cannot be exaggerated, when you reflect that progress is truly practicable only when it is the result of the popular conviction. UntiHhe people are per suaded, the law is premature; and a law to be truly respected must represent the conviction of the nation. Therefore jj patriot in this country is he who sees most clearly what the na- ^ ho does what he can by plain and brave ,. ^ speech to influence it to that desire, and then urges and sup ports the laws which express it. But as public opinion is neces sarily so powerful with us, we fear it and flatter it, and so pam per it into a tyrant. How the country Jteems^ with conspicuous men, scholars, orators, politicians, divines, advocates, public teachers all, whose speeches, sermons, letters, votes, actions, are a prolonged, incessant falsehood and sophism; a soft and shal low wooing of the Public Alexander and the Public Cromwell, telling him that he has no crook in his neck and no wart on his nose. How many of our public men, our famous orators, have sharply criticised our life and tendency? How many have said what they thought, rather than what they supposed we wanted to hear? When we hear them or read them, instead of breathing . the pure mountain air of insight aqd inspiration, we are con- "* scious of thejsweet but, sickly breath of marshes and stagnant private slander, and public indignation have been the thumb screws, the boots, the rack, and the fagot with which American puttie opinion has punished American citizen^ who, .exercising only their constitutional rights, have honestly said what they honestly thought. In a system likejours, where almost every man has a vote and votesTas 1he~ i -nooses, public ppjnipn is really the government. Whoever panders to it is training a tyrant for our master. Who- GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS ever~enlightens it lifts people towards peace and prosperity. But there is no method of enlightening it but the freest discus- I sion. Stop the mouth and you .sfloy rivjj||^finy. Chain down _every"huinan right, but leave it the right of speech free, and it will presently unchain all the rest. And here let me say a word to avoid a possible misapprehen sion. We are engaged in a formidable and threatening struggle for the defence of the very existence of civil order, without which there can be no secure enjoyment of any right whatever, and for the maintenance of a government which by its lawful opera tion secures more justice, more liberty, more prosperity, and a more equal chance than could be hoped for from any other conceivable form. For the rescue and preservation of that gov- i eminent we stand in arms. And when \vc a< ropted war, we ^accepted tin conditions of war. When the rebellion announced itself at Sumter, there were but two methods open to us. One was to yield to it and avoid war by surrender and de struction of the government; the other was to take up arms. Instinctively, the nation chose war, and that choice was the earnest of its triumph/ But war "is totally inconsistent with the unrestricted enjoyment of personal and political rights. How ever consecrated, however inevitable, war secures its ends by brute force. It must have unity of sentiment or, that being im possible, it must disembarrass itself of criticism which would be armed opposition if it dared. WTien, therefore, battle, begins, debate ends, because then words are things. Whoever helps the enemy by his tongue or his hand necessarily does it at his peril. "Why," wrote Washington to Governor Trumbull of Connecti cut "why should persons who are preying upon the vitals of their country be suffered to stalk at large, whilst we know they will do us every mischief in their power?" Therefore when war is unavoidable, and holy as ours is, we must embrace it wholly and heartily for the sake of peace. You cannot carry the olive- branch and the sword together, for the olive will hide the s^ord, or the sword the olive. Whoever takes the sword in one hand and the olive-branch in the other is half-hearted as he is half -armed, and meets halfway the shameful defeat which his craven soul solicits. Whoever means w,ar and no one else has a right to make war takes the sword in both hands, hews his way to THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY 105 perfect victory, and then covers himself all over with olive- branches. War willingly accepted is the willing renunciation of rights for a certain time and for a particular purpose. All our rights are threatened by this rebellion.^ And it is to save the ^fundamentaFguarantee of tfiemUT tnat some are temporarily suspended, as when your eyesight is threatened you assent to temporary darkness in order to escape permanent blindness. \ ; Do we ask what is our security against the absolute destruc tion of those rights which war suspends? Nothing but the char acter and intelligence of the people. In our system the govern ment and the army are only the people. And it is by popular assent alone that any rights are suspended. The people in the * Constitution have clothed the President in time of war with al most absolute power. And well for us in this solemn hour that they are given to one who unites Washington s integrity to the democratic faith of Jefferson; whose loyal heart beats true to the heart of the people; who knows that their confidence is his only strength, and that the faster his foot and tA heavier his hand, the quicker and surer is the safety of all the liberties of every man in the land. But, again, our doctrine of liberty founds equal political knowledge upon natural human equality, and utterly repudiates arbitrary exclusion. Yet, not to insist upon the exception of the sexes, which you will regard as visionary, I pass to another. It is not only sex which works a deprivation of acknowledged right, but color also. If you commit a crime, you properly lose your political princi ples. But if you are born of the wrong color, you lose them also, or you enjoy them upon the most stringent conditions. There is a criminal complexion in America. If a man is born of any decree, of Hnskii^.*^ the American assumption is that he is an ignorant, degraded, idle, knavish rascal; and the assumption is founded upon the f act that we have done our best to make him so. In my State of New v ork the most industrious, temper ate, intelligent, moral, and v* "uable citizen, if he be of the crim inal complexion, must have In ed three times as long in the State as any other citizen, and must have paid a tax that no other voter pays, Lefore he can enjoy the right of voting. It is the sheerest nonsense to assume that such a man is a bad or dan- 106 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS gerous or incompetent citizen because he is not a white man, precisely as it would be to suppose that an idle, worthless vaga bond is a safe citizen because he is a white man. It is conceivable that free society should disfranchise the common drunkards, the hopelessly idle and ignorant and brutal, as well as those who have no respect for the rights of man, of whatever race or color they might be; but to proscribe virtue, intelligence, and a industry, which are the essential guarantees of civilization, be- f cause of the color of the man, is as reasonable .as to deny men the rights of citizenship because they have red hair or squint or wear square-toed shoes. Such a practice founds political liberty upon accident or incident, which have no moral character what ever, instead of grounding it upon natural human right. But we enjoy all our natural rights, not because we are of the Sem itic or non-Semitic families, not because we are Caucasians or Mongolians, not because we are Saxons or Obits, but^Jjficause we are inen^ /The difference of race has no more to do with right than 1e difference of height or strength. The moment we begin with any arbitrary exclusion we are drifting straight into despotism. If we may deny a man s rights because he is of- a certain color, we may equally deny them because- he is of a certain race or country or religion or profession. ~~^^ And we shall do so, for injustice breeds injustice. fThe habit ual denial of personal liberty to some persons of a certain color in this country, and of practical political liberty to the rest of the has naturally smoothed the way to other more dangerous invasions of the American doctrineJ^A^few years ginr p I n^t a in . lie. oil r*iu Jjidjjiija, who forcibly expressed bis policy by saying that he wished every darned negro in the country would kill a darned Paddy ? and then "be hung for it. A We laugh at the -^felravagance of the proposition, but we have recently witnessed the career of a party which virtually aimed to carry out this ludicrous scheme; not, indeed, by hanging but by disfranchise- ment. Its object was to leave those who were already deprived of personal liberty to their fate, and to restrict political liberty to men of a certain color who were born in the country and were I generally of one religious faith. Our doctrine o f liberty was already denied in the case of colored men. This new party ! proposed to add to that denial those of foreign birth, aiming es- tuse I T \ THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY 107 pecially at the Irishmen, who were the chief emigrants from for eign lands, and who were mostly of one church. It was simply a proposition of national suicide, for it sought to create a most y ^dangerous, because an immense, disfranchised body of citizens. 7? -With ^imcon^ciQUS-iiuaaQr it adopted the dark-lantern of the midnight thief as its symbol. With an infallible and unsus pected satire, the popular instinct dubbed it Know-Nothing, while this most peculiarly un-American of our political parties completed its comedy by soberly claiming to be distinctively American. But it is a happy fact for any man who believes that political liberty is based upon the rights of all men and not upon the whims of some, that its career was the shortest of any party in our history. But our late history shows us a far more dangerous, because more subtle and specious, denial of the doctrine of liberty denial which one of the nimblest and most adroit of our modern politicians thought to be the surest trap to catch the Presidency. Mr. Douglas, who had a frenzy to be President, who had watched very closely the current of political sentiment in the country, was persuaded that the long habit of indifference to human rights had deadened the sense of justice in the national mind. He was not a thoughtful scholar, and therefore did not know from the ex perience of all history that there is no law more absolute than the eternal restoration of the moral balance of the world by the vindication of justice. Nor had his wide and familiar intercourse with the most demoralized and degraded political epoch in our history supplied that necessary knowledge. He was the repre sentative politician of an era which had apparently lost all faith in ideas. His favorite dogma was the most satirical insult to the American~people, for it implied that their ignorant enthusiasm would honor him most who most cunningly denied the most cardinal principle of their national life. Apparently his dogma was the simple assertion of the right of the majority to govern, and nothing could be fairer than that. This is a democratic country, he said; the majority rules. Unhappily we quarrel about slavery in the territories. Very well; let us settle the ques tion by applying the fundamental rule. Let the majority de cide. Let the majority of people in the territory say whether they will have slaves. What can be fairer? cried Mr. Douglas, 108 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS leering at the country. What can be fairer? echoed a thousand { ^caucuses. The manner was blandishing. The sophism was a^^Tsparkling. It was a champagne that bubbled and whirled in > pbpular brain, until many a wise man feared that the conscience t dhgommon sense of the natjfm w* wholly rJriiggH, Jj was the doctrine of the sheerest moral indifference. "Liberty, hu man rights, they are only Barnes," he said, and with a frightful coinposure"aTi"d litter moral confusion he added, "I take the part of the white man against the black, and of the black man against the alligator." I am neither for slavery nor liberty, he said. I don t care which. But the nation, after all, was not drugged; it did care. Its interest, if not its conscience, was alarmed. His jovial reference of the rights of human nature to the whim or hatred or supposed interest of a majority was overborne by the refusal to leave them even to a majority. The two great parties of the country rallied around the essential principle involved. It was at once a question of liberty and of despotism. The par ties were in earnest. Yet he could not be in earnest, for he was only playing for the Presidency. * The mills of God ! there are no mills of God," he smiled and said; and instantly he was caught up and politically ground to powder between the whirring millstones of liberty and slavery. j^t^T^ I have called the principle dangerous. But we calinot exag- gerate its danger, fit is a poison which works still in our political* system, and it is as fatal to human liberty as it is repugnant to the spirit of our government and to the generous instincts of enlightened men, for it is the absolute denial of the American postulate of the equal and inherent rights of man and that goy- ernments exist to secure these rights^ Itjpjaces^the life, liberty, property, and welfare of every citizen, whatever his complexion or race or nationality, at t]^ mercy of ^majority. It was as serted, indeed, of a Territory; but if it be tolerable doctrine any where in the land that the majority can rightfully dispose of the liberty and other rights of a minority or of a single innocent man, then it is tolerable anywhere; in this State, for instance. And if, acting in due legal form, a majority should decide that the blind men should be hung, the crime would be strictly justi fied by this principle. "Oh, no," you say; "the State Constitu tion secures life and liberty except for crime." Yes, but why THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY 109 does it secure them? Simply because you have a right to your life and your liberty, which God, not the Constitution, gave you. The majority may refuse to allow you the exercise of that right, for a thousand Neros are more powerful than one Nero. They may express their refusal as law, and enforce it by the bayonet; as, a hundred years a^, it was the Engb sh law in Ireland that if a son informed against his father as a Papist, the father s prop erty should be given to the son; and as, eighteen hundred years ago in Judea, it was the law of Herod that all children under two years of age should be murdered. What then? Would it be right, justifiable, humane? Would any heart that was not black wj|ji passion, or min^J]iatw^sj[iot utterly spared with nophintTV. excuse it for a moment? No; the human instinct repels and scorns the plea. It is the rule of the King of Dahomey, of the pirate- ship, of the slava-market. Against the American doctrine of liberty it is the very unpardonable sin; and it is a happy au gury that the effort to make it the creed of what was called the Democratic party in this country shivered and annihilated that party by driving from it all the adherents of the great, true, universal democratic party of all times and of all coun tries, which eternally maintains that men as well as majorities have The tendency of all men and societies is to disregard moral principles as something too visionary, too abstract and im- practicable, for working-men and actual life. But it is as sure as sunrisejhat men and nations, either in their own lives and char acters or in those of their descendants, will pay the penalty of injustice aff3 immorality. For injustice breeds Ignorance, super stition, bestia!ity7"Barbarism, and the conflict of passions; while justice fosters intelligence, industry, mutual respect, peace, and good- will. We have not believed it, but the loss of our nationality will be the cost of our further disbelief. In all the history of civilization there is no spectacle so humiliating as the conduct of this nation towards one unhappy race. Their only offence is that we have injured them. The only excuse that we urge is that they submit. At the South a servile people, often degraded almost out of humanity, they are treated with the same familiarity as - the Arab treats his horse, but with more contempt. At the North, of insignificant numbers, they are held in the pitiful 110 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS scorn that paralyzes energy and hope. Well, they did not wish to be here. They are not a nomadic race; they would never have come if they had not been stolen for otir profit. Do we say that they show no desire of liberty, that we could respect their man hood if they would only rise and cut their masters throats, but that their tame subordination to slaver^proves them fit only to be slaves? True, if these four millions were of a less mild and flexible race, then, as the Syrian slaves of Rome closed in a death-grapple with the empire, nor relaxed their hold until a million lives were lost, so these slaves would long ago have hewn their way to freedom, or in blind despair the tortured Samson would have grasped the columns of the social temple and have dragged it down in direful ruin. But since this was not to be, since they are so soft and hopeless and submissive a race, we have believed that justice had no remedy, and that a race which could not help itself would be forever unavenged. [For many a year we r liaughty^ children of the Saxon race had seen rders enlarging, our population increasing, our States mul tiplying, our schools and churches and warehouses and railways and ships and telegraphs rising and swarming on every hand; had seen the whole continent shining witnour splendid statis tics; and in all the glittering years we had not felt the cotton harsh to the touch nor the sugar bitter to the taste, though we .knew that all that softness and sweetness grew in the ruin of a ^race. Our very birth-throe was justice, and we were unjust. Our very breath was human rights, and we destroyed them. Our very life was liberty, and we denied it. LikeJ^glghazzar, the na tion sat feasting, and if for evanescent moments it saw the awful words upon the wall, the feast was so splendid that its eyes were dazzled. We p_nijght. pvrnses and evasigns. It was a State matter, a local law, an institution doomed to perish before our progress. It was a pity yes, it was a pity, but don t talk about | it. Justice, liberty, human rights yes, yes; but the thing is so complicated, and rights are so dim and shadowy, and gold is so , bright and hard and doubles itself every year. And we sighed ] and smiled and sighed again. It is a State matter, a local law, I a system doomed to perish and even while we spoke it suddenly j towered before us a hideous, overpowering presence, like the f genie before the fisherman, kicked the casket of compromise and ) THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY 111 restraint into the sea, insolently declared itself the supreme lord , of the land, and the^octrme_oJLlibert i y a\treasonable liel > k\ We could be unjust, we thought, for if these slaves were men they would revenge themselves. Well, they have not grasped the sword, but how awful is their vengeance! They sit dis mayed and uncertain while civil war shakes its fiery torch across the land, dropping blood in its hideous path, stabbing wives, mothers, sisters, lovers, to the heart; dragging our young, our brave, our beautiful down to ghastly death; while through the fiery storm of wrath the voice of God cries to our shrinking hearts, as to cowering Cain in the Garden, " Where is Abel, whe: is Abel, thy brother? " p Gentlemen, by the }urid jight of this war we can read our duty very plainly. W T e are to remember that in every free na tion the public safety and progress require a double allegiance to the form and to the spirit of the government. By forgetting i the spirit of our own, we have imperilled both its form and its \ existence. Therefore, by the sublime possibility of the great com-^ monwealth made to be an intelligent, industrious, and free people; 5 conscious of our power against harm from within and without; by distance and character removed from foreign ambition, by watchful intelligence from domestic division; with justice as the bond of union at home and the pledge of respect abroad; by the warm blood of our best and dearest gushing at this moment for this faith let us vow, with the majesty of millions of con senting hearts and voices, that we will never again, God help ing us, forget that the cause of the United States 7.9 t>| of human nature, and that the permanent life of th^ nation the liberty of all its children. THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY BY FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH Delivered before the Beta of Massachusetts, at Amherst College, at Commencement, July, 1868. UNDER the old philosophy the highest word was CULTURE ; under the new philosophy the highest word is PROGRESS. The scholar of the old philosophy sought, by self-development and self-government, to educate himself to his highest worthiness. The Baconian devotes himself to the discovery of truth and to the progress of the race. The scholar of the old time the man of perfect culture, trained of all feats of mental activity, ready in all branches of knowledge, always under control, strong, alert, and graceful, the delight of all men, and women has often been held up to our admiration. Let us celebrate to-day the scholar of to-day, the servant of truth, the interpreter of nature. It is a central fact with the scholar of to-day, that he is a work ing member of a great brotherhood laboring together for the advancement of knowledge. Lord Bacon set forth his ideal of an organization of scholars in his House of Solomon in his romance of the New Atlantis ; but all the splendors of his prophetic im agination pale before the facts of to-day. The same general ends and means are, it is true, before us. We still seek "the knowl edge of causes and the enlarging of the bounds of human em pire to the effecting of all things possible. * We still use observa tion and experiment. But the instruments and operations of Solomon s House are child s toys and child s play compared with the wonderful enginery with which we vex and scrutinize earth, air, and sea; mind and matter; the present and the far off; and quicken the past and the future. Nor is the fraternity of workers less wonderful. No close corporation now embraces the conquerors of nature. The army of explorers overruns the whole world. The mightiest nations are privates in its ranks. The Czar of all the Russias keeps step THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 113 with the imperial democracy of America. He uses his whole empire as a cabinet and laboratory. He takes note of every drop of water that falls or lurks in the air, of every breeze that blows, every sunbeam that tints or warms, every tree and animal that knows the soil. His imperial government records the physical facts and the history of all its tribes of men, catches every form of speech that drops from living lips or lingers on old monuments, and sends out all in fair type for the great fraternity of scholars. It experiments on new forms of social organization, abolishes old penalties, institutes new rewards, new tenures, new schemes of education, new fashions of dress, and food, and manners. The American scholar has the same work before him. We are lawyers, doctors, preachers, editors, engineers, or teachers. We also scholars. "With that clause We make drudgery divine." Not a plant is so thoroughly known that the ablest botanist can write its biography. The lazy-limbed lad with live eyes may yet lie by the old wall around the College Campus, and watch the lichens with his microscope, and see facts as good as Robert Brown ever saw. New metals wait their finder, new coals, new secrets of growth in the soils, and all the unimaginable marvels which chemistry deals out with such a lavish hand from her infinite store. In these departments the value of organized la bor is fully recognized. We have associations of science, which every scholar can help, and where the chiefs of each depart ment are ready to receive the smallest contributions of fact or thought, and where no lover of science fails to obtain sympathy and honor. Cooperation and progress should be just as familiar to those who work in books and language. A perfect edition of Shake speare, or Chaucer, or Homer, or the Bible; or a complete dic tionary of our language, would be as helpful to the race as a per fect flora or fauna of North America. But such a work must accumulate the observations of a thousand scholars for a thou sand years. W r hat scholar has not passages in his favorite authors which he understands better than all the commentators? Who has not noted strange words, or meanings of words, unknown to 114 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH Worcester or Webster; or has not hit an etymology which has baffled the learned, or an illustrative sentence which opens the soul of a word with a new completeness? We should have a com mon hive for all these gatherings. Meantime, the Philological Society s Dictionary is waiting for just these facts and truths, and the press is always at our service. Scholars should reverence the powers of the press and use them. They too often sneer at what it is their sacred duty to serve. A knot of professional men will have their daily gibes at the crude columns of their local newspaper. \Vhy not send the broken meats from their tables and feast the rustics? But no duty has more peculiar claims on the American scholar than observation and experiment on man and his institutions, with a view to improve our social organization and government, and to establish sciences of mind, of ethnology and history, on their proper foundations. We already have organizations for the advance of social sci ence, and our scholars are making valuable contributions to the doctrines of general education; the treatment of the insane, the idiotic, and the criminal; of the causes of disease and crime; the laws of population; the adjustment of labor and capital. They are familiar with the fact that such problems may be in vestigated without mingling in party politics. But the same spirit may be carried into many questions of governmental organization and policy. Each New England town is a working model of the state, in which experiments may be tried with little danger. The American scholar has no excuse for being an idiotes. Many new questions are before us. Our government is a representative democracy. We call it a government of the people, it is really a government of the majority. In our day tyranny of the majority is worse than the tyranny of one man or a few men, because it has no restraint. Conscious weakness makes the few cautious. The King of Eng land has not dared a veto for generations. The majority vaunts its voice to be the voice of God. Where this form of atheism prevails, and minorities are regarded as opposers of manifest destiny the majority God and contemned as wicked in stead of being heard and conciliated as equals, tyranny of the majority impends. The liberal leaders of European thought sup- THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 115 pose that this danger may be averted by organizing all repre sentative assemblies, so that the governing bodies shall have the same proportion of parts which exists among the people themselves. Then all minorities would have weight in propor tion to their actual strength, all opinions held by able men would have able advocates in authority, and all able men would have their chance for a public career without bidding for the vote of a party. There are doubts and difficulties connected with the practical working of such a scheme, which can best be resolved by trying it, on a smaller scale, in our voluntary associations, our private corporations, and the directories of towns. Here our professional men and scholars might promote the trial, and study, and report the results. It is a question, again, how far it is desirable to introduce a new moral element into the balance of power by giving the vote to women. Other questions are connected with executive patronage. Year by year the host who live by their connection with political Rings, grows rapidly hi numbers, power, and shamelessness. No party can now safely defy them. No politician can safely refuse to recognize their leaders as his peers. They are fast com ing to control the state. They make our political life a perpetual scramble for spoils. All scholars know how vividly this state of things was depicted and predicted by Alexander Hamilton. It is now upon us, and it is a matter of life and death. Our states men are proposing means of relief. Shall the tenure of office be changed to good behavior? Shall the appointing power be held by Congress? l Shall it be vested in Boards of Examiners? As long as it is massed in a few hands, it will pay for organized cor ruption. But it might be diffused among the people. Each local officer might be chosen by the people of his locality. The power of removal, that right hand of the executive, would then give him dignity and authority without exposure to corruption. A trial of this system might be set on foot, if our professional men would refuse to sign papers recommending local officers, and urge the nomination by a vote of the precinct. Such nominations 1 Such a combination of the legislative and executive functions would over throw our system of government, and set up an oligarchy, too numerous for responsibility, too few to be out of the reach of Rings. 116 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH would be respected at Washington, and the plan grow in favor in proportion to its merits. Such are illustrations of the manner in which the American scholar may work for the republic and for man. I have dwelt on them the more because distaste for politics so much affects us. It is often urged that scholars should take up politics to purify them. What has been said would suggest that we should seek to withdraw as many questions of statesmanship and social science as we can from the sphere of party politics, and hand them over to the investigation and experiments of our scholars. Then our laws may answer to Bacon s noble description of those of Henry VII: "His laws, whoso marks them well, were deep and not vulgar, not made on the spur of a particular occasion for the present, but out of providence for the future; that he might make the estate of his people more and more happy, after the manner of legislators in the ancient and heroical times." It is to such scholarship as this, that the lovers of the race turn for that influence which shall make it possible to have a parliament of man, a federation of the world; and such scholars will be the peers in that parliament, the representatives of the general reason of mankind in the good time coming. If the essential characteristic of the scholar of to-day be his fellowship with the brotherhood of workers for progress; if devo tion to the conquest of nature, the discovery of truth, and the welfare of the race, be the root of true scholarliness, we may go on to develop several branches of the scholar s character. And first : The scholar of to-day should devote himself to some particular branch of study. To accomplish most we must use division of labor, and this most of all in discovery and invention. It is not the poet alone who is born. Newton, Faraday, Alexander Hamilton, Chief Justice Marshall, Bopp, Grimm, every success ful observer, and every creative genius, has his special fitness for his special field of truth. And though Macchiavelli divides mankind into those who see of themselves, those who see what is shown them by others, and those who neither see of them selves nor what is shown them by others, it is doubtful whether any pair of eyes was ever made that was not well worth looking through. The short-sighted see what is invisible to others. The observer must find the proper focus of his own eyes. And to all THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 117 men the new comes most as suggestion from the familiar, the long brooded over; whose very aspect comes to mind without effort; yea, in spite of effort; which haunts the thought by day and the dreams by night; which possesses one like a passion. He who would truly advance the empire of man must concentrate his sphere of thought. The scholar, armed at all points with glittering generalities, ready to bear his part brilliantly in a dis cussion of everything knowable and talkable, ashamed not to know when everybody lived and died, and all about the old battles of the kites and crows, as Milton says; and talking "Frensch ful faire and fetysly, Aftur the scole of Stratford atte Bowe," and other languages to match, is not the scholar we celebrate. Such a scholar is simple, not bound to shine, eager to hear, more eager to see for himself, glad to tell you what he has seen for himself, and well aware how little he has seen, as he has walked by the beach of the infinite ocean of truth. It is a further development of the same thought, that the stu dent should be wedded early to particular truths. He will not spend his life in general devotion to truth, without cultivating any one truth; celebrating and worshipping truth as a goddess, wooing and winning none of her daughters. It is well enough in the teens, this general laudation of truth, the open mind flush ing at every suggestion from man, or running brooks, or stones, or anything; but the old scholars, who, having linked their names with no science or art, revive their old flames for our bene fit in essays and orations, have the lackadaisical air of the old bachelor who proclaims himself the devoted admirer of the ladies. The lover of truth should fall in love betimes with some partic ular truth, should woo like a man with his whole heart, marry early, and be faithful as to a spouse for generation, fruit, and comfort. It should seem, in the third place, that our scholar will seek to learn facts and laws rather than to practice mental gymnas tics. It is a current thought, that the growth of the mind is analogous to that of the body, that education is a gymnastics. Discipline, not truth, is said to be the object of study. The search for truth is said to be better than the possession of it. 118 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH There is something in this view peculiarly fascinating to the young and strong. What college senior has not held his breath, as he has read Sir William Hamilton s absorbing citations of the exultant utterances of the heroes of literature. "Did the Almighty," says Lessing, "holding in his right hand Truth, and in his left hand Search for Truth, deign to tender me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request Search for Truth." We do not always remember that these exulting pinions droop at last, and that a philosophy of nescience is the end of this search. Good hunting and no game taken is a sorry jest. The savor of the venison is needed to stir us to repeat the chase. The joy of capture is needed, that we may return with ardor to the pursuit. There is, moreover, in all worthy growth, as in all magnanim ity, an emotional and moral element. A notable gymnastic cultivation of the attention, memory, judgment, generalization, inventive combination, and other intellectual faculties, may be made by chess puzzles. But the judgments of wisdom are the fruit of attention kindled by love, and directed by conscience; and all imagination, properly so called, proclaims the activity of the sesthetic emotions. The delight of the possession of truth is needed to warm the soil from which new thoughts are to spring. The time comes, when old books, old friends, old truths, the dear delights of our youth, come to be thrice dear as the recog nized root of all the growth of our manhood. There is, indeed, a plain analogy between the training of the special senses and gymnastics. The young scholar should be practised to see, as he is to walk. Particular mental processes which need to be often repeated, such as the application of the ground-rules of arith metic, or of the rules of grammar, have an analogy with gym nastics, in so far that practice enables us to perform them more rapidly, easily, gracefully, and accurately. The mind needs to be run in the right ruts. But the growth of the mind, the incubation and development by which it passes from imitation to creation, from one stage of power to another, learns to see one truth after another, has very little analogy with the operations of the body. Those who have studied man in history, especially those who work on his very soul as it is preserved in its progress by lan guage, cannot help feeling how completely inadequate are all THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 119 the phrases commonly used to express this progress, how com pletely unlike gymnastics is the conversion of an infant into a ripe scholar of to-day. The ablest savage left to train his own powers, is ages behind the dullest head that learns to use an Indo-European tongue. Some naturalists say that the human embryo passes through its stages of likeness to a plant, and to each lower order of animals up to man, completing in its due months the development of a million of millions of years. So the mind, by the aid of language and the mysterious leaven of truth, completes in its score of years the proper growth of ages. We are struck with wonder at the operations of genius. We tax our language to express the novelty and splendor of the changes it works in the world. We call it inspiration rather than gym nastics. But by the wonderful power of language and truth, we may repeat in ourselves these same marvels of perception and power. An attempt to analyze this process, leads only to profounder deeps of wonder. Plato was carried back by it to infinite ages of pre existent life. He thought these new ideas were only remi niscences; and the philosophic poets have chanted the noblest responses to the thought, as they have celebrated " those shadowy recollections Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing." But if we do not receive these thoughts of Plato, the word education does not express this process. The genius inspires us, magnetizes us. A magnet does not educate a piece of iron or steel. The wonderful thing is not a drawing out of power but some mysterious flowing in of power. Savage warriors imagine that the strength of those they conquer passes into them. The old Hebrew figures, too, are good. The mind is soil for seed. The germs of thought once dropped in the mind, grow while we sleep. We wake surprised at the greatness of the thought we took in over night, and it spreads its branches day by day, and year by year; nor do we always suspect what kind of seed is planted. The amaranth springs among the tares in the soul of a tinker s apprentice, "a weed of glorious feature." So man is a tree for graft, so he has his new births. We go 120 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH from grub to chrysalis, from chrysalis to butterfly. The history of the scholar s mind is not graphically given by any words which imply that it is a gymnastic, or solitary development. Even the nations do not often have an indigenous civilization; but are raised by the efforts of foreign races. The individual is lifted and expanded by communion with higher intelligences, mainly by the power of higher minds acting through speech, and by the inspiration of objective facts and laws. It is not the work ing of the mind, considered as gymnastics, which expands it when truth is gained, so much as the possession of truth itself. The effort swallows the leaven; the leaven leavens the whole man. The soul crawls in pursuit of truth; when it has it, it may flutter and soar in the play of its creative energy. There is work in getting a truth into the mind, there may be play in its pos session. The latter is the true progress, the greatness, and the glory of the soul. It would seem, then, that language is the scholar s tri * foster- mother. She takes the infant, and introduces him to nature by name. The senses give only indefinite apparitions, or, -tuitions. These become knowledge, information, when particular objects, qualities, or acts are singled out and examined. What shall be so singled out is determined almost wholly by language. The learner follows the names which his elders so eagerly teach him. Language in this way prompts and directs his classifications; she leads him on to reasoning, supplies him with instruments, and suggests the arguments. She is the interpreter between the scholar and the great discoveries of all time. Shapen into litera ture under the direction of the aesthetic faculty, language moulds his passions and sentiments to sympathy with the great hearts and souls whose words of fire she loves to repeat, lifts him from his feet with the great voice of eloquence, raises his religious feelings to supernatural elevation by her utterance of the re vealed word, and prompts him to graceful and noble utterancy, which may win all men to the truths he loves. Language is the nurse of science historically. The philosophy of Greece appears before us in the Socratic discussions as a child of language still in leading strings. Its questions and its argu mentation do not distinguish thought as thought, from the use of language. It was not till the development of geometry, that THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 121 coherent thinking was known, independent of the thoughts em bodied in popular speech. And though the sciences of to-day have their own language, the true scholar never so weans him self from this foster-mother of sciences and scholars, that he does not desire to confide his thoughts to her does not run to her with delight at each new discovery. It would seem, further, that the pursuit of truth in nature is analogous to the study of language. The great stone-book is the geologist s name for the earth. Says the botanist, Bernard Jussieu, "The perfect book is open to all; it is only necessary to learn to read it." "There is a certain character, or style," says Dugald Stewart on the hint of Sir Isaac Newton, "in the opera tions of the Divine Wisdom, ... in the perception of which philosophical sagacity and genius seem chiefly to consist." He who has interpreted one fact, learns to interpret another and another; - .^zing on one truth, we learn how to recognize its sister truths; > dving learned to read the handwriting on one page, we may turn to another and read with ease. An eminent educator has enforced his doctrine of "power-culture" by saying that Napoleon might have summoned all the force of his mighty mind, and struck out at a blow a new system of Mental Philoso phy! But such blows are never struck. Truth is not conquered; it is read. It comes to earnest, humble seekers. The mighty mother unveils her face to the child. He who is smitten with love for that face, into whose soul those divine traits are burned, seeks them forever, and traces them through all veils. It would seem, further, that our reader of nature, our lover of truth and progress, is least of all men pugnacious. It has ceased to be the scholar s fitting eulogy that he is a war-horse, even against error. In the first place, the history of errors shows that they are not quelled by fighting them. Witchcraft and like delusions show brave fight for centuries, then die, because men are lifted to a higher plane of thought by the power of new truths. The scholar, as he labors for the progress of the race, will seek to use the ex pulsive power of new truth, rather than arm himself and ride forth to give battle to monsters and chimeras. Such is the method which Lord Bacon inculcates. Such is the method of Christian progress. 122 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH So, in a subjective point of view, it would seem that struggles and skepticism are by no means a desirable propcedeutic for the scholar. There is a masterly pugnacity in man which makes us exult in battle and conquest. It is hardly weaker now than it was before Christ. Two thousand years of lip-assent to his teachings have hardly dimmed the warrior s glory. Our genera tion, indeed, begins to hear its heroes announce, "The empire is peace": "Let us have peace": and this is great gain. But the old Berserker blood still runs duly in our Puritan veins. The historian says: "It was ever the fashion of Cromwell s pike- men to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy," and the reverberation of that shout of stern exultation has not yet died in our Southern savannahs. The same blood shows itself in our intellectual efforts. Our very peace societies are pugnacious in putting down other people s wars, as well as in defending our own. It is characteristic of New England college culture to pride itself on its struggles. We go to our recitations with hearts of controversy. We enter the lists of debate in our society halls, as the knights came forth at the sound of the trumpet. We talk of these halls as arenas, where we may "drink delight of battle with our peers," and be fitted for the great battle of life. This temper has its honors. It is better than sensuality. It is better than stagnation. I confess to the relish of these delights. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." It is most truly a preparation for the battle of life. But the young Puritan no more needs a kindling of the spirit of battle than the young tiger needs to lap blood. And from the point of view which has been taken to-day, it may be seen that we are apt to overrate the influence of disputatious adroitness. Shakespeare s fools are the "smartest" men in his plays. Great men of action are seldom disputants, great men of thought perhaps still less so. The great thinker answers other men s arguments by stat ing the truth as he sees it. When we have been years out of col lege, we find that it is not the struggles of the recitation room, or the society hall, perhaps, that make epochs; but the summer evenings on the chapel steps, the simmering of thought and heart at the hearth of a friend, from which sprang the thoughts which made us free of the realms of beauty and truth. But whatever may be the thought of the fight against error THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 123 in other respects, its association with skepticism is surely un- scholarly. The scholar in these times should believe all he can. He must not stand of set purpose in a skeptical attitude. Yet our young men often feel as though they are only half -educated, if they have not doubted everything their elders believe. The bright-minded college student has his attack of skepticism as surely as the boy has his measles and whooping-cough. He doubts the existence of matter, of mind. The sciences in suc cession are shaken from their moorings. Mental philosophy, logic, political economy, history, religion, drift into the shadow of doubt. The seeds of truth, just germinating in his mind when he enters college, he pulls up for examination as recklessly as children take up the seeds in their garden beds. But fruitful truths, never to be doubted, should possess the mind of youth, and, by their proper growth, fill it and expand it from month to month, expelling errors as simply as day drives away darkness. It may be further remarked, that a scholarship of self-for- getfulness, of an objective direction and employment of the faculties, will show itself in literature. Instead of general flour ishes about the pursuit of the true, the beautiful, and the good the dumb-bells and vocal gymnastics of our culture, which our authors never will lay down the scholar of to-day will set to work on some science of plants, like Goethe, or at making a dictionary, like Jean Paul and Milton, or at ichthyology, or entomology, or social science any way to learn the handling of the keys which unlock the secrets of nature, any way to find the charm to open the heart-gates to the entrance of angels. New spheres of positive thought will thus be brought under the shaping power of the aesthetic faculty, and expressed in harmo nious utterance whose cadences have been caught afresh from nature. A new and greater Iliad, Kalawala, and Beowulf will be possible, simple, grand, natural, as the old folk-songs of heroes, but of a higher strain than the ages of kings and carnage ever knew. Our critics, too, will know the traits of nature, and never mistake the watching and recording of sensuality, which now threatens us with a new era in literature; never mistake these long-drawn eunuch dallyings of Swinburne or Whitman for the throes of virility, or a mountainous consciousness for manhood. 124 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH Much might be said of the relation of these views to educa tion. We have made a distinction between studies of gymnastic, and studies of incubation and development. A college must be in great part gymnastic: that is to say, it must be occupied in training students to working habits in the use of the laws of language and the simpler mathematics, and in actual manipula tion in the natural sciences. This gymnastic training should be on such subjects, and within such limits, as will most aid future progress. In Language, it would seem wrong to spend a long time in learning to talk a little bad Latin, or French, or German, so as to be ready if we ever should make a three weeks* tour of the continents. Learning to talk requires a wholly different gymnas tic from other mastery of speech. The Mathematics, in addition to their much commended virtues, are, I believe, the best intellectual safeguard against college pyrrhonism. I have known more than one who held by that anchor, when heaven and earth seemed to mix. The Natural Sciences do not always deserve their reputation as bread-and-butter sciences. Professors of Natural History ex pound the structure of the useless plants and animals. The great Jussieu cautions his collectors against varieties produced by cultivation. These should be left, he says, to the amateurs. Rumford may found a mechanical institute for real workers, but as soon as the lords and ladies begin to come to the lectures, the scheme changes. But the uses of manipulation cannot be over stated. Chemistry, the idlest of all text-book or lecture studies, is the best for the gymnastic of manipulation; Botany next. These make a new man of the obtusest and clumsiest. Preci sion, purity, dexterity, grace, of hand, eye, and mind, are their gift. To the more common gymnastic studies should be added the English Language and Constitutional Law. Latin and Greek are an admirable introduction to the freer and higher forms of speech which the advancing nations have since shaped for them selves. Representative passages of the representative works of the representative authors of the great epochs of modern thought should be studied in the light of modern philology, line by line, and word by word. And we should add scholarly judgment to THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 125 the instinct with which we speak our mother English, the growth of all the ages. Every college student should know the Consti tution of the United States better than the rules for syntax, by rote and by heart. The method to be used in the studies of incubation and de velopment is different from that in studies of gymnastic. The last begin with the simplest processes, and with tireless repeti tion lead on to the more powerful, rapid, and complex. The others almost reverse the process. The intellect and emotions must be roused at once. When the artist would awaken the per ception of beauty, he takes us first to St. Peter s. 1 The grand half-outlined thoughts of geology, exultant, all-embracing sys tems of the cosmos, the reconstruction of the primeval and the unwritten history of man from language, the records of old he roism looming large through the mists of antiquity, the thoughts of old thinkers interpreted by new thinkers, the strange beauty of old languages, anticipations of new truths hovering round the lips and eyes of genius, visions of the future, these have power to kindle the enthusiasm and quicken the intellect of youth. Nor should it be forgotten how far the greatness of New Eng land is due to the quickening of her common mind by the truths of theology. The Westminster Catechism is a battery that gives a rousing shock. It would fall in well with such views, if a considerable part of the college course should present a number of elective studies, in which each student might follow his own bent, in the pursuit of particular sciences or branches of learning, in connection with professors, who are themselves rejoicing in investigations and discoveries of their own. Thus far I have spoken as though culture and devotion to the progress of science and the race did not go together. It is often said that the individual withers as the race is more and more. It is said that devotion to objective results in some particular branch of knowledge changes man to a mere tool, a one-sided monster, a blacksmith s arm, a weaver s thumb, developed in but one direction, and hence not developed at all as man, a sacrifice to nature and material ends. If this were so, two of the highest principles in man would be 1 Corinne, iv, 3. 126 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH in conflict; for surely love of a beautiful manhood is a passion hardly less strong and noble than love of truth. No Amherst student of our day was not moved to admiration and longing by the vivid picture so masterly painted by our Professor of Greek, of Socrates the son of Sophroniscus, the statuary, as he takes his thought from the shaping of the marble figures around him, and resolves to mould his own character to the model of ideal beauty. It is said that happiness is not to be reached by direct pursuit, but is a bounty bestowed on him who works hard for worthy ends. May it not be so with culture? What is a beautiful char acter? What is a well-developed manhood? Is there beauty in dependent of all relations? Would Apollo s arm be beautiful wielding the blacksmith s hammer? Great men are not great in all things. In all works of art there is orderly subordination, a variety brought to unity by relations to something central and supreme. Every beautiful growth has its axis or centre of growth. So in men of admirable character there is some heroic trait, some axis of growth. Some supreme power shows itself, and the others work to heighten its effect. Nor are all men alike in their type of beauty. They are various as the departments of thought and life. A sincere devotion to some special sphere of labor, is the best means of harmonious development. As the advancing mind rises to higher relations of the special pursuit, the view widens, new powers are called forth, and brought into harmonious working with the old. Such is the harmony between the world and the soul that the leadings of nature may be trusted to the end. "Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man." Even the intuitions need exercise on nature for their full de velopment. How does space expand to the astronomer, time to the geologist, right to the student of God in history ! Nor will it befit this presence to pass over the more secret reason why truth and material nature so inspire and develop. What is truth, but fact seen as the embodiment of law, which is the will of God? And this complex of facts which we call nature, what is it but a material expression of the character of God? As the student of the tribes of nature seeks to rise from the history THE SCHOLAR OF TO-DAY 127 of individuals to a scientific knowledge of species, to conceive the types of genera and families, he is not abstracting and com bining by whim; these types were present to the mind of God before they were in nature. The attempt to find them, is an attempt to rethink the thoughts of God. And as in thinking the thoughts of the wise and great we enter into their life, so in reading the book of nature, we may be raised to communion with God, and rise above ourselves, height above height. This view of the sacredness of nature, plain to the ancient Hebrews, not unseen by Plato, lost by reaction from Grecian and Roman nature-worship, has been regained to our literature from the grandest of unchristian modern thinkers, the Jew of Jews, "God-intoxicated Spinoza." The true scholar will not fail to recognize, as its necessary complement, the central thought of the philosophy of Paul, the mystical union of man with Christ, by which the inmost fountain of the human will itself may be filled with the divine life, as the branch with the life of the vine. And if it be true in the intellect, that self-renunciation, devo tion to man and science, the objective direction and employment of the faculties is more favorable to the harmonious and orderly development of man, than any deliberate gymnastics, it can hardly be less so in morals and manners. God forbid that the grand old name of gentleman should ever be dissociated from the name of scholar. There are other types of the /caXo? icayaQos than the princes of the last generation who were the first gentlemen of Europe. He who does many things gracefully from a sense of his own worthiness, may yet fall short of the perfection of him who forgets himself in others, in truth, in God. There is no need in this presence to search history for illus trations. As I have been tracing these traits of the scholar of to-day, how often have my thoughts reverted to the Chris tian scholar who presided over this institution during our college days. 1 Always most earnest in his recognition of the great brother hood of scholars, he was one of the first to suggest, as he was the first to preside over, the American Association of Science. 1 Edward Hitchcock. 128 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH Wedded in youth to geology, he loved most that aspect of it which " seeks in golden chains to bind Science with reverence, liberty with law." Constant through life, giving his whole heart to truth, he rose from one stage of intimacy to another with the secrets of nature which are the revelation of God. Losing self wholly in the con templation of His ends, shrinking always from conflict and con troversy, regretting the loss of a day of doubt, believing every thing he could, a soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, 1 he was also a man to stand before princes, a man who could pledge noblemen at their own tables in his cup of cold water with a simple grace more beautiful than the color of their choicest wine. Few students of Amherst, while he was here, can have read Hawthorne s story of the Great Stone Face, without thought that its hero was with us. As he came in hours of sickness or trouble; or as, in his lectures, he kindled to the height of his great argu ment; or as, in the college chapel, when one read from the grand poem of Moses those scenes of creation so vivid to him, and the evening or the morning light saw that benign face instinctively turning upward, radiant with the gleam that never was on sea or land, the consecration of truth and goodness, who of us failed to remember those inspired utterances, dearest to every true scholar: " The pure in heart shall see God." "The beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." 1 "The best of men That e er wore earth about him, was a sufferer; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit; The first true gentleman that ever breathed." Thomas Dekker. INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN AMERICAN HISTORY BY ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK Delivered before the Alpha of Rhode Island, at Brown University, June 15, 1875. OUR theme should be fitting to the year of centennial anni versaries, of which we are passing the threshold. It is apparent that the present and few succeeding years, recalling the days of our first declared nationality and the series of measures in the council and the field which gave success to the declaration, will become henceforth memorable for festal days. We are to have a time of competitive celebrations marked by liberal pageant in token of martial events, and the sensuous parts of our na ture are likely to be worked to their capacity. Of all that which is to be commemorated the share most striking to the average every-day senses undoubtedly comes from the narrative of arms, and it meets a responsive magnet in a people under whose sober side touches of military spirit have always found quick reception. They have inherited a taste of the soldier s life. Descended from ancestors who for more than one hundred years after cisatlantic colonization were engaged in war or were every moment exposed to it, summoned now by these thick-coming anniversaries to recite the annals of the field and to realize in their own quickened pulse the rapture of victory, we need not wonder that they seize upon methods of commemoration the most demonstrative, the most cognizable by the outward senses; that they subordinate the oration to the spectacle; that they "Let the kettle to the trumpet speak, The trumpet to the cannoneer without, The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth." This is according to nature, this is Anglo-Saxon, this is Ameri can. But it belongs to an assembly of educated men to discharge the same duty in another mode of procedure. They penetrate beneath the surface of historical narrative, behind the scenery 130 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK of battles, among the more subtile forces of our national devel opment, which have been chief agencies in conducting us to the high situation from which the celebrants may now deliver their pyrotechnics. We cannot pass in review from our own advanced position over the stirring Revolutionary stage, over the broad and pic turesque colonial period, back to the more serious era of the advent and settlement, and not pay tribute to the age which went before them all, out of which they sprung, a part of which they were to the masters who directed the mind of England two centuries and a half ago, who came here in person and in representatives, whose association with our subsequent history is immortal. Our epic from the first embarkation down to the last admission of a State is especially interesting to the intelli gent inquirer for the spiritualistic, the intellectual element which preceded and gave it birth, animated it in all its parts, supplied its actors with motive power, which has made it the story of a people sprung from the best race of men at the time of its ma tured strength, and advancing to a higher plane of civilization than that upon which it began. The heroic courage, the sorrow and suffering, the adventure and enterprise which mark the century from 1660, when the colonies had acquired a fixed and homogeneous condition, down to declared independence, which gave to it in the reading the changing shades of serious annals and gay romance, were the natural flowering of the English mind under the training of an equal period preceding. The beginning of the American people was but the transfer to the transatlantic continent of an eclectic and adventurous portion of the English nation. These passing anniversaries carry us back indeed to stages of infancy as to numbers, as to material appointments and possessions, but in the higher forces of civilization, manhood, and culture, there was here from the start the same maturity which crowned the English communi ties in the golden age of Elizabeth and her successor. When ever you contemplate what that maturity was, how broad in studied letters and statesmanship, in progressive science and art, and especially how it bore on its advancing crest the prom ise of deliverance from spiritual bondage, you are contemplat ing the actual state of the mind of the planters of this nation INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 131 when they stepped from an old country to a new, only changing the scene of their life in the conflicts of their age. The spirit of Northern Europe was then for the first time in full activity under immense influences proceeding from the Reformation and the introduction of the art of printing. At Frankfort-on- the-Main the traveller walks from the public square, where the memorial group of bronze statues commemorates the introduc tion of printing, to the house in which Luther once lodged while in the flesh, feeling that he is venerating in authentic symbols the authors of a revolution of which the benefits have reached to every fireside in Christendom. Slowly overcoming the sleep of the Northern communities, and moving with the Divine assur ance which always accompanies every true reform, these resist less agencies at length imparted a stimulation to the mental habits of Great Britain which the successors of the Virgin Queen might check, indeed, but could not suppress. The publication of the results of maritime voyage and discovery on this conti nent spread a glamour over the spirit of curious and daring men, which scarcely the sternest disappointment and disaster could dispel. The tide was rising to its flood at the opening of the sev enteenth century. A higher poetry and philosophy, strange religious rhapsody and religious exploration, the lessons of an cient and heroic freedom brought out into alluring light by the changed tastes and opportunities for the old languages, a wider education, another dispensation over the domain of practical science and invention, a new destiny for the aim of benevolence and philanthropy, wisdom of every degree, conceits of every kind, but in all and through all a paramount and aggressive progress lighted the modern world on its pathway. For the next fifty years the air was exhilarant with intellectual vitality. The gen ius of change penetrated the palace, the closet, and the shop, and throughout the capital city of our race the vigil of night was kept faithful to the revolutionary studies. "God is decreeing," Milton said, "to begin some new and great period"; and then with quaint expression of the national self-consciousness which has never gone out of his countrymen from that day to this, he adds : What does God then but reveal himself, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen? Behold now this vast city; a city of refuge, the mansion- 132 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of belea guered truth, than there be pens and hands there, sitting by their studi ous lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas where with to present as with their homage and their fealty the approaching reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. Such was that age; and such was the strength of the Ameri can beginning. Out of that age and under that lead we came. Ours was not a transfusion of blood from one set of men into another; nor an offshoot; nor an engraftment; it was the re moval of ripening English minds in English bodies into an other country. During the fifty years of active emigration as good came here as were left behind. The early peopling of Vir ginia was by the average Cavaliers of the day, under the direc tion of higher grades of intellect at their lead, and there was soon present a large array of men of education, property, and condition; Maryland from the outset rose upon the shoulders of persons of high birth, moved to their destination by the best thought at home; the ships of Massachusetts brought here many of the choice sons of education, scholars in the languages, of culture the same that prevailed in England, not cosmic in deed as modern learning, for the old scholastic studies of the schoolmen then overlaid the universal mind of Europe. The names of these intellectual leaders are too many and too famil iar to need repeating; they rise at every recurring thought of the earliest religious freedom of the world in Maryland, and of the most powerful republican theocracy of the world in Massachu setts. Then we ought to consider that these heads of the nas cent provinces were in constant intercourse and contact with the best talent and wisdom of Europe, and that our separate colonial histories, down to the very day of independence, asso ciate the new country and the old by ties which linked together in personal relations the wise and great of both lands. Winthrop and Endicott, Cotton and Hooker, and their associated mana gers in the other provinces, brought with them and kept up afterwards acquaintance with the upper life on the other side. At one time or another, on this or the other side of the ocean, the heads of these provinces were in living familiarity with the INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 133 high discussions and high disputants under two reigns; they saw and heard Lord Bacon when he pleaded gently and wisely for toleration; they remembered Witgift speaking softly for them, and Bancroft with his frown; they caught light from all the central sources; they learned stability of faith from Pym and from Sidney, and public law from Hale and from Coke; they received direct communication and counsel from John Hampden; they read and perhaps saw acted the picturesque and Doric Comus of Milton, and they lived by the side of the prince of poets and the prince of philosophers, who in the lan guage of Macaulay made their age a more glorious and impor tant era in the history of the human mind than the age of Per icles or Augustus. It is their association with living genius and learning which is to us in this day a lingering inspiration, for such instruction of States lengthens out through the genera tions. It is something of value to us that the founder of Rhode Island kept her interest warm by the side of the throne through intimacy with the learned historian and premier Clarendon; that the Carolinas are imperishably related to Shaftesbury, the paragon of accomplished ministers, with John Locke, the philos opher so quaint, original, and great, whose framework of govern ment did not endure but whose benevolence survived to welcome the Huguenots of France; that the Covenanters of New Jer sey were saturated with the spirit of Milton while living, as they had been educated under the writings of George Buchanan who went before them; that over the wide South, first named Virginia, still lingers a memory that kindles to enthusiasm at the mention of their visitor, the incomparable, the thousand- souled Sir Walter Raleigh. In thus speaking of the early masters who have left their image in our history, I am indulging in no rhetorical illusion. The difficulty in our apprehension of the facts lies within our natural limitations. Remoteness of time casts a haze over our perception of the continuity and duration of mental influences in forming the character of States. If we could place ourselves in palpable connection with the generations which have passed, the tram of public educators would pass before us in life-like and august procession. But this can be only partially attained by grouping in speech the great personages of history. A ven- 134 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK erable and remarkable Chief-Justice of New England, dead within fifteen years, used to say that he once saw a man whose father had seen the first child born in the harbor of the Pilgrims; thus seeming to span with his own hand more than two cen turies of Massachusetts. But historical analysis and elimina tion furnish to the thoughtful student a sufficient thread for tracing the lines of descent in the life of communities. In the year 1637, about the time when a governing power was estab lished in the place where we are now assembled, he who was afterward the author of Paradise Lost, made a journey into Southern Europe. In Paris he met and was entertained by Grotius, who first wrote for freedom of commerce against mari time restrictions; while he remained there Descartes put to press his first great philosophical treatise, which is still quoted among the causes of change in modern thought; in Italy he turned aside to visit the injured Galileo, whose persecution was a feature of the ecclesiastical tyranny of the time; and in the album of an Italian nobleman at Genoa he wrote his autograph after that of Thomas Wentworth, the brilliant Earl of Strafford. We find, therefore, in this group of contemporaries, thus accidentally brought together, five first-rate figures that were directly allied to the advancement of our own country. Grotius, that "chief of men," who laid the foundation of international intercourse in the principles of justice, whose doctrines educated the colonies to an early and constant resistance of the navigation acts of Parliament which resulted in their independence; Descartes, the revolutionist philosopher, who enunciated the law of indi vidual consciousness and intellectual freedom, which at once became seminal and vital in every provincial organization on this side, and which to-day underlies the constitution of every American commonwealth; Galileo, one of the pioneers and one of the martyrs of the revolt of science, whose misfortunes under inquisitorial absolutism reached the ears of the brotherhood of reform and helped raise the party which swept with human rights over England and the new world in the West; Lord Strafford, who returned home to aid our cause under Charles, by his be trayal of the franchise of his country and our own, and after granting no lenity to our friends or our cause at length stretched his own neck upon the scaffold; and John Milton, who, unlike INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 135 his fellow-countryman and fellow-traveller, stood fast to the challenge of his conscience, and proclaimed in immortal prose the brave thoughts of the new dispensation, "In liberty s defense, a noble task, Of which all Europe rang from side to side," which have moved to triumphant deeds eight generations upon this continent. It acquaints us with the dignity of our pupilage thus to draw near in imagination to our instructors long de parted; it brings before our sight that splendid age from which we have derived our power, to call these masters around us; we are with them, and they are with us, when we see the blood of the first Governor of Massachusetts coursing among us in the person of a most accomplished descendant, and the blood of another flowing for a testimony to mankind under the heads man s axe; when we look upon the regicide judges face to face, Goffe and Whalley on the banks of our Connecticut, and Dix- well amid his studies in the shade of New Haven; when Ban croft and Macaulay only disagree whether Cromwell and Hamp- den actually took passage and went on shipboard for Boston; when we know that our own Raleigh was a member of the same club in London with Ben Jonson and Shakespeare; when every spirited youth of Massachusetts is stirred to the study of the martyred Sidney by his Latin on her arms. Quite possibly we do not often enough reflect how effectually the spirit of one man, of a few men, may decide the characteris tics of a people, the destiny of a State. Under the military sys tem of Europe in former ages it was within the power of a single man to conquer a city and write his name upon its walls, to modify, dismember, reconstruct a kingdom, and affix to it for a longer or shorter period his own projected will and law. Napo leon was the latest and the greatest of this order, but his imperial creations were quickly swept back to their original relations for though the sword may carve the pathway to a throne, it cannot engrave the enduring character of a people. But the moral agents in the forming of communities leave more lasting impressions, which are beyond the power of accident to remove or to change. All the laws of human condition, natural genera tion, veneration, imitation, faith, tradition, and memory com bine to perpetuate the mould of a commonwealth cast by a 136 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK master after the pattern of divine virtue, and every succeeding intellect of grasp and sway may add to its symmetry and its strength. Behold at our door the power of a man abiding through eight generations! Taught to shrink from the forms of arbi trary power whilst a boy lounging about the doors of the Star Chamber, taught law from the living lips of Coke, tolerant charity and reforming love from the private hours of Milton, many languages at Oxford where the classic statue of liberty broke in Grecian model on his sight, taught experience and trial, sorrow and courage in Massachusetts, Roger Williams came hither from fortunes as varied, as romantic as those of John Smith or Walter Raleigh, and planted the first purely free gov ernment on the globe. While Descartes was writing out in clear est dialectics, Williams was establishing in concrete and ever lasting form the absolute and unqualified freedom of conscience under human government. I do not know why I should not say, since it is true, that Massachusetts in her march of progres sive culture took two centuries almost to a year from his re moval out of her borders to strike from her own Constitution the last faded badge of the connection of the church and the state. The charter which he dictated to the Crown, alone of the original thirteen scarcely changed in essentials, still endures for his visible monument; but in the breadth of true catholicity, in the belief of the benevolence of human nature, in the cultiva tion of methods of peace and fraternity, in the predominance of a religious sect never at variance with any other, which have tided the life of his gifts and graces over the lapse of two hundred and forty years, the memorial of his invisible glory is reflected through all habitations and all hearts. The lessons of the teacher caught by the leaders of the following age have im parted a tinge and flavor to the culture of the State. Perhaps in imagination, perhaps in the discernment of reality, I seem to myself to trace the extension of the same intellectual freedom to another, who in the next century impressed his benevolent genius upon the souls of this island home. Berkeley gave to this people the four midway years of his life of spiritual amenity. Of every attainment, grace, and accomplishment, admired by every school of philosophy, while he maintained his own, be loved by Pope, and Swift, and Addison, while they hated each INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 137 other, beloved by all in that galaxy that continued the light of the reign of Anne over that of two Georges, he came and erected his bower of study among the cliffs of this coast. In letters, and in the walks of village life, he was to his generation a foun tain of instruction, and such fountains in a free commonwealth never dry. And in the century, still the next, another and kin dred spirit, native-born of the island, devoted to the State the latest years of his inspiring lessons, "the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love," so rich in the field of general literature, so pleading for a wider scope of popular education, for the en franchisement of man, for the world s peace, so aglow with the sweet influences of Christianity. To the scholarly and devout resident of Newport the whole scene, of cliff, and beach, and the breathing sea, takes on the aspect of a memorial imperish able to Berkeley and to Channing. Felicitous has been the lot of Rhode Island to have had distributed over her three centuries three intellectual masters, whose administration of her thought and aspiration was never colored by asceticism or gloom, was always stimulating, always serene, always encouraging, in full accord with the divine monosyllable that glistens from her shield. The term of active European emigration to this land covered rather less than the length of two generations, and all that we are, and all that we have, may in a large degree be traced back to the public character which was then established. The roll of those who came contained a number of leading minds as large proportionally as the roll of those who remained behind. Some thing that was chivalrous, something that was courtly, still adhered to those heads, much learning of the kind that then prevailed, of studied history and language, perhaps not yet much practised statesmanship, but as events soon showed, a great capacity for it. Vane and Williams, Endicott and Salton- stall, Winthrop the senior and the junior, Hooker and Cotton, were fair types of the leaders on both sides, most of them Eng lish university men, all of them such as led England on to the Revolution of 1688 and rescued her Constitution. I allow they became especially engrossed in the high mysteries of divinity, which became shaded by their forest abode, and took in the va garies of a larger freedom under a new sky. But as they erected 138 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK the altars of the church and the state upon the same Zion and within the same temple, the same subtlety which guarded the one, also guarded the other; the same enthusiasm, if you please, the same fanaticism, which sustained them in the pur suit of abstruse theology, also sustained them in the pursuit of a new liberty; the same extravagant rejection of authority which made them faithful dogmatists for the church, made them obstinate partisans for the state; the same conscious assur ance that made them polemics in religion, made them republi cans in politics. During the calm and study of the residence of their sect in Switzerland, by the "clear, placid Leman," in the reflection of light and shadow from the eternal monarchs of nature, their ideas of the unseen world had become consolidated, their ideas of the social, civil framework had become codified; they would have no sovereign in their hearts save God, no sov ereign in their laws not subordinated to their interpretation of Him; as the phrase goes, they would have a church without a bishop, a state without a king. Those were great ideas for that age, and they could only be enforced by great and original minds, comprehensive and flexible enough for the founders of a nation. Now, if you follow the history of the scene on which these views were acted out, you find that these actors, to their character as theologians, whatever you may think of that, soon added the acquired character of astute, wary and stubborn statesmen. As religionists and as politicians their path must soon divide; as religionists they carried everything in their own way and with a high hand, with none to obstruct them; as politicians the shad ows of kingly pretensions advanced gradually over the sea, en veloped them in darkness and shut them in to their wit s end. They were obliged to supplement religious zeal with a large worldly wisdom, and all the way from about 1640 to 1689 you observe in the directors of these provinces a growing genius for affairs, a chary taste for civil policy, a certain wise, strong sense of diplomacy. When the mailed hand of royal interference ap proached, so long as they were too feeble to resist, they were Fabian in their policy, and warded off the hour. On grave occa sions they convened their synods and held their fasts, but these became a school and an education; the pulpits were filled by acute teachers, who preached altogether on the right side; so that, INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 139 allowing for their greater share of prayer and praise, they had in their synods and their fasts all that we should have now in our best chosen constitutional conventions. There is nothing more interesting in all the life of these progenitors of our history than their studied use of diplomacy in the years covering the fall of the first Charles and the rise of the second, with Cromwell inter vening a period requiring them to act parts so delicate and so variant, with no electric cable to supply them in the evening with the policy for the next morning. Great results hung sus pended on the action of the ministers who assembled in their synods in Boston for there was not a newspaper published in America till the eighteenth century and they rapidly be came masters of the situation more by their reserved power in diplomacy than by their inspired power in theology. They were preparing their generation for a day of greater power, when the bell of revolution might safely strike the hour. That beyond question was the educational period of the coun try, as youth is the period for character in the individual life. It was her education under the champions of her freedom, fitted by endowment and culture to carry her through the tremendous process God had ordained. Such was their situation and their power. A kind of mediaeval port and mien, something like an intellectual feudalism, gave to them the walk of masters; they admonished others against the authority of kings and nobles, but they did not relinquish the authority due to themselves as chosen vessels of the divine purpose for the coming nation. Un der their treatment of kings and parliaments and commissions, their constituents and followers inhaled their first conception of an American nationality. Out of that robust and austere school came the broader culture and sweeter dispositions of later days. Advanced into the next century, those stern and dark features had become softened by another education, by schools and libraries more purely American, by a younger class of schol ars spread over the country from the university at Cambridge; but we ought never to forget that the schools, the libraries, and the university were estabh shed by them. Time was diffusing their mind like the waters of irrigation, which, as they receded from the shade and gloom of their source, took the warmth of the open field and the sparkle of the cheerful sun. Mankind 140 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK could not long live and be happy under the frowns of a puritani cal theocracy. At once the school of the church and the state^ as it approached the middle of the eighteenth century it exhib ited the manifestations of change; the work had been laid and transmitted to a different generation. Society had passed through the transformation which in Scotland would be necessary before she could welcome Walter Scott, and in America before she could trust herself in the arms of George Washington. From the church all that was superstitious, or cruel, or whimsical in the day of Cotton Mather had been burned away in the expi atory fires through which bodies politic must sometimes pass, and it rose with a fresh glory in the grandeur of Edwards, the learning of Cooper, and the heroism of Mayhew. The state, too, now shone with a majesty distinctively its own, and as cended to the respect of Christendom under the eloquence of Otis, the learning and strength of John Adams, the magnetic genius of Quincy and Warren, the wisdom of Franklin and the culture of Dickinson, and the unconquerable will of Samuel Adams. But all that larger growth and attraction, all that wider range of tastes and ambitions expanding grandly toward the high things of knowledge, were the long-wrought, the hard- taught product of the human mind, the human will, under the leadership of the age that had gone to its rest. A more critical urgency for action had now arrived. A better combined array of moral forces than that which led the colonies in the last years of their dependence and the first of their union we might search the centuries to discover. I take for granted you agree with me that the more cultivated minds take the lead in civil life. There is a theory that public revolutions proceed upward from the body of the people, and control, enforce the orders of intelligence above. I do not so read our own or any other history. At all times, as it seems to me, perhaps more ap preciably to our observation in times of great urgency in human affairs, the reasonings and generous sentiments of great intellects work their way into the common channels of the general mind, and fill the office of its directory; and the attempt to make our own country an exception to the rule is a suggestion of flattery which the people do not ask, and an illusion which the truth will not bear. The nature of men has not changed since the old INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 141 essayist declared that in the coalition of human society nothing is more pleasing to God, or more agreeable to reason, than that the highest mind should exercise the chiefest power. If it were not so, education could not advance upon individuals, nor en lightened progress upon nations. The lower strata of mind draw the electric fires of the higher masters. Heads of wisdom are better than princes to a state passing through its crises. They supply intellectual aliment to its thought, they impart sympa thetic activity to its torpid faculties. "Their speech betimes Inspires the general heart; its beauty steals Brightening and purifying through the air Of common Life." And there is another part of this law governing public opin ion, to which the whole race is subject; I mean the spontaneous, instinctive acknowledgment of intellectual authority, the law of faith, of confidence in superior intelligence. We are all of us and always under such a lead. Mr. Carlyle, who is the least of a literary demagogue, puts this truth home to every one of us after his own abrupt and grotesque manner: " Now if sheep al ways, how much more must men always, have their chiefs, their guides. Man, as if by miraculous magic, imparts his thoughts, his mood of mind, to man. Of which high, mysterious truth, this disposition to imitate, to lead and to be led, this impossi bility not to lead (and be led) is the most constant and one of the simplest manifestations." And the globe has not borne an other people who paid greater deference to such guides than our own. It is here that this law of our nature has freer and fuller play than in the countries which are overshadowed by rank and caste, by venerable heraldry and names artificial, extending over generations their charm. While a single family and its aris- tocratical connections monopolized the administration of Eng land during a generation, Chatham was admitted to power only because the Almighty had clothed him with characteristics which overawed mankind, and Burke never held any first-rate office at all under Government during the whole of his magnificent life. But in this country, rank having no existence, nothing else of conventional kind has taken its place, and it has never been pos sible for wealth, or any fiction, or any pretension to withdraw 142 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK for a length of time the body of its citizenship from following the directory of wisdom. In the long run of time you cannot fail to see that the hero-worship of our countrymen takes to some uncommon degree of lettered fame, some rare combination of intellectual powers, some form or manifestation of special genius or general capacity. Of our countrymen travelling by thousands in foreign lands, while one turns aside from Brussels to visit the scene of the battle of kings at Waterloo, ten others make the longer journey from London to Stratford to pay the tribute of their veneration at the tomb of Shakespeare. I return, then, to my topic, that in the dawn of this national independency there was at work upon popular opinion a wise, brilliant, and effective array of heads which is not easily paral leled. The colleges were in tune with the urgency, and the pul pits were filled by a ministry of patriotism toned by a cultivated wisdom. The field of civic discussion was under the training of a class of men in some of the colonies who would have adorned the best of commonwealths at the most brilliant of its periods; the same representative, scholarly statesmen upon whom Chat ham pronounced the remarkable eulogium, which Franklin from the gallery heard him deliver, and which has ever since been quoted with pride on these shores. For a classical, refined public speech, coming from studied men, but penetrating the universal heart, it was a golden age. It lifted upward and on ward to action every degree of mediocrity below it. Fifty names start up for mention which cannot be surpassed in our day. In the South were Rutledge, Gadsden, Peyton Randolph, Bland, the two Lees, most of them educated in both countries, ree n- forced by Jefferson and his peers, who breathed into the public spirit their own cultivated chivalry; in the centre was Dickinson, fresh from his law of the Temple at London, finished in elegant literature, whose thoughts passed in French over the other Con tinent, to whose support a little later came Franklin, direct from the society of Burke and Pitt, bringing his whole nature en riched for his country; in New England, too many rather than too few; of whom was Hopkins, who knew all poetry and all history, who, John Adams said, instructed him four years in committee-room in science and learning, whose old age to all coming in contact was an inspiration; of whom were the chiefs INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 143 of Massachusetts, whose roll rounds with the names of the two Adamses. Samuel Adams was something besides a pious and patriotic Puritan; his humanity was exquisite and his erudition was genteel, blending grace and attraction with the intensity of his appeal. John Adams educated the colonies to an intelligent comprehension of the situation which was necessary to go before action, and in this work he more completely than any other man of this nation illustrated the proverb that knowledge is power; his research was boundless and his talent was of every kind; he made history and the Scriptures, the classic, ancient ages, the principles of law and speculative philosophy familiar to the com mon understanding, while he rallied the learned professions and the schools of the land to the mighty work in hand. There were by that time as able lawyers here as the lawyers of the Crown, and he was at their head. Scarcely ever before had the spirit of a passing time called into such intensity of use every grace, every accomplishment and attribute of the upper sphere of the human mind, and never before had any people so confidingly trusted to it their hope and destiny. They would follow only the wisest and best; in their vast undertaking they would em ploy no mediocrity; Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts would have no less an agent in London than Benjamin Frank lin; New York with its salary of a thousand dollars would have no other than Edmund Burke. They believed that "a great em pire and little minds go ill together." To which roll in the hour of its need was added yet another the man of little less than divine virtue, the Father of his Country, the leader of her armies, the most glorious of her citizens, the founder and protector of her liberty, he who despised the name of king, yet himself was more majestic, whom God manifestly favored, that he was in all things his helper the unapproached and unapproachable Washington. Nor alone were their chiefs upon this side of the Atlantic. This national fabric was shaped, in part, by most expert hands of Englishmen. In the prolonged debates of many years there was a Parliamentary minority of the choicest and greatest of the realm, who spoke for justice under the influence of the proudest day of the British forum. By general consent the most flourish ing period of English eloquence extends for about half a century 144 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK from the maturity of Lord Chatham s genius to the death of Fox, and a good part of its most brilliant exhibitions was during the ten years which covered the American questions. Between the opening and the close of those questions passed across the stage Grenville, Barre, North, Camden, Mansfield, Charles Towns- hend, Fox, Burke, and the heaven-born orator, the elder Pitt enough for a nation s history and a nation s glory. The Parlia mentary literature of that school can meet the philosophical criticisms of Burke himself; it can stand the test of time and the admiration of ages, because it was founded in good reason and just sentiment. It was listened to in the speaking by some of our leaders from home sitting in the gallery, among whom were Quincy and Franklin; it came to these shores in fast-sailing packets, was spread from the ice-fields to the palmettoes by the wide-winged press, was repeated from mouth to mouth, floated in the air. It was not all upon our side of the questions, but it passed here under the hands of masters, was sifted of sophism and error, was sent forth, stirring grand sentiments of duty, and circulated, all inspiring, over the New World. Nor again to the schools of American and English authorities alone were our fathers of that day shut in for their tuition. From another continent, another tongue, and another religion they heard voices of lesson and sympathy. We are forever indebted to France for an early and a late infusion of lofty sentiment which has pervaded our public life. In the story of religious and romantic adventure displayed in exploring and settling this country the French enthusiasts stand out with radiant linea ments upon the historical canvas. Advancing always within the orders of the Catholic church, penetrating through primeval forests to the Far West, enduring every hardship and privation of pioneers, leaving their pathway in the wilderness everywhere blazed by the lily and the cross, ministering in their faith amid the vortex of savage tribes which whirled like angels of darkness around them, one after another yielding up their life in solitary martyrdom, in the extremest hour chanting in the Latin of the schools of France hymns which even then were a thousand years old, they have left in every French town of North America, in our written annals and unwritten traditions, the traces of their spiritual and intellectual heroism. Expelled at length as a polit- INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 145 ical power from this country by Great Britain, the Nemesis of history took in hand their vindication. While the gallant Wolfe, by a magical stroke, won to the British Crown every French possession east of the Mississippi, there were those at work in the silence of studies about the gay capital of France, engineer ing an intellectual revolution which, within twenty years, would sweep from these States the last vestige of British dominion. About the year 1763, when every thing here was ceded to the Crown of England, the spirit of a new philosophy was spread ing over France and radiating upon Great Britain and America. To those who were especially engrossed in the study it presented itself, perhaps under no deep sense of responsibility, as the fresh luxury of newly enfranchised minds, but to the world it bore the fruits of political revolution. The satire of Voltaire, aimed at the church which needed it much, fell with effectual blow upon the state which needed it more. The ethereal and radical eloquence of Rousseau circulated as an atmosphere; the young men crowded the benches and the salons of the new school in all the larger cities of the kingdom; and at one time, just before the declara tion of our independence, more than half a dozen of bold teachers of speculation, wit, levity, reason, and philosophy were seated around the throne as its premier and its advisers. It was the preparatory school for modern revolution. It was classical in its study of the ancient histories. It soon found its theory and passion impersonated in the youthful Lafayette, whose early readings had imaged in his reflection and love the models of lost republics, and quickly afterward it found the seal of its assurance in the treaty of alliance with the United States. The authorities of that keen, speculative, daring philosophy gave the touch of fate to American independence. And in the memorable recep tion of Benjamin Franklin at Versailles, when that brilliant court, destined so soon to pass away, was captivated by the decorous simplicity which the great American knew quite well when and how to wear, we behold the last ceremony in which old institutions and old prescriptions, represented by kings and nobles, bowed unawares before the divinity of a new liberty and a new world the ceremony in which that new liberty and new world, in its plain, untitled representative, returned the salute to the masters behind the throne who were moving the world to 146 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK revolution. I have never wondered that Jefferson, who after our peace passed four grateful years at Paris, intimate and favorite with its eminent philosophers, caught "the habit and the power of dalliance with those large, fair ideas of freedom so dear, so irresistible" to the French people. Almost a century has since passed, and his name is even now treasured in the hearts of the French leaders of opinion as that of a master and instructor an impressive illustration of the ceaseless international exchange of thought. Three years ago Charles Sumner came to my apart ment in Paris directly from an interview with the leader of the more advanced Republicans, now recognized as their leader probably by a larger number of men than any other living civilian in any country, the bold and eloquent Gambetta. He related to me the details of the conversation. Gambetta said: "What France most needs at the present time is a Jefferson." I will not keep back the reply of the great Senator: "You want first a Washington, and your Jefferson will come afterwards. * My limitations compel me to allusions only on the field of our history. We usually observe that the times requiring the larg est exercise of the intellectual forces, and so bringing into activity the supremest men, have been periods of civil, not of military events, those preceding or following the trial of war. Succeed ing to the Revolution came the exigent time for organizing under permanent forms the constitutional epoch. That term of seven years was the test to virtue, to the capacity for outlook and statesmanly projection, without the aid of any light re flected from older nations upon the questions to be adjusted here. If you reflect how divided this people were after the at tainment of independence; that all local traditions, prejudices, and attachments which had been buried in the war, then re turned with a risen life and vigor; that diversities of origin, blood, and temperament resumed their individual forces; that idiocrasies of religion became sympathetic with localities; that the vast bulwarks of the natural configuration of the continent frowned in the way of our unity, you only recall in part the division and distress of the people of the United States under the confederation. It soon grew to a public opinion which alter nated between national hope and national despair. The Con vention which assembled in 1787 to organize the fragmentary INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 147 elements which now constitute the most intense nation in ex istence, over which Washington presided, was in a capacious civic wisdom superior to any other of modern record superior, in my judgment, to that which had met in the same hall twelve years before, upon which Pitt had lavished his rhetoric of praise. Washington carried there a carefully prepared synopsis of the ancient examples, but amid the great questions and great de baters that surrounded him there is no evidence that he ever unrolled his manuscript. In the lead of the discussions, South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York figured with unchallenged supremacy. And when, afterward, the work of that body was submitted for the consent of the several states, the debate in popular meeting and in state conventions summoned to the front every giant mind. The scales were turned at last by the pure argumentation of two men. I have sometimes asked myself whether, under similar surroundings in our own day, beset with the same excitement and irritation, the present gen eration would in the same degree as that submit its judgment to the sway of a series of papers so calm, passionless, and dialectical as those which, under the name of The Federalist, Madison and Hamilton, but chiefly the latter, addressed to their country. With equal, with great effect, Madison in the Convention of Virginia, Hamilton in that of New York, made their great en dowments tributary to the solemn decision. Madison was born symmetrical for the highest dignities of the statesman, and cul ture completed the work; sound learning was added to a sound judgment, and his mind was illuminated for perspicacity and for perspective. He, and he alone, saved the Government in Vir ginia, where, though young in years, he was already a popular idol. The issue hung suspended upon New York, the last, the eleventh state which was necessary to make plenary the con sent and ratification, where it was carried after immense exer tions. All contemporary accounts and traditions still existing carry to the credit of Hamilton that imperial result. He was then thirty-one years of age, in the bloom of his faculties, the finest genius known to American public life. His ingenuous na ture and exquisite sensibility, from a Huguenot descent, the unshackled outline and clear order of his thought warmed to color by the fervor of a tropical birth, the flexibility, simplicity, 148 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK and delicious amenity of his style, as pure as Addison s, his far- distant search and reach, his climacteric ascending in argument, his judgment, which Washington said was "intuitively great," displayed him in his public efforts as one of nature s thinkers, orators, jurists, and statesmen. For an entire generation, not ending at his death, he was to one-half of his countrymen the interpreter of his era. He was a leader who never flattered his followers. To him, by consent of all, the civic chaplet falls for the decision which gave this Government to the North American Republic. In the wandering of a boy from college, straying many years ago among the tombstones which mark the ancient worthies of New Jersey, in the churchyard at Princeton, I stood by the side of a newly made grave, which bore as yet no trace of designation at its head. But I could not be ignorant as to its tenant after reading the inscription over the adjoining spot of earth consecrated to the sleeping dust of his kinsman, his an cestor, the glorified Edwards. It was the grave of Aaron Burr. "At the mention of that name the spirit of Hamilton starts up to rebuke the intrusion to drive back the foul apparition to its gloomy abode, and to concentrate all generous feeling on itself." I can illustrate my subject only by a brief allusion to our next and longer historical stage which followed under the Constitu tion. It was the era of development, bringing to the direction of the public life of this country all that splendid succession which opened with Marshall and Hamilton, Jefferson and Madi son, and closed with the death of Clay and Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, Webster and Everett an array not surpassed in recent time by the chiefs of English administration. It is familiar to many now living how trustingly the people hung upon their lips and took their direction in all the policies of growth and expansion. But it was a stage of greater signification than mere development; it was our historical period of inter pretation. As you know, at the close of Washington s active day all the questions and possibilities of questions touching the interpretation of the Constitution, which had been hushed in his sacred presence, flew into ceaseless activity, and with only an occasional interval continued to excite the general mind down to 1860, when the sword became the arbiter. During that INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 149 protracted discussion and discordancy the treatment of the sub ject assumed the highest forms of philosophical argument, and called into use the blended acuteness and breadth of jurists and statesmen. The existence of the government would be deter mined by the settlement of that question of interpretation, so complex, so profound, in many respects so metaphysical in its kind, that the people by whom it must be settled were largely compelled to accept upon faith the opinions of their champions; the grander the leadership, the more trustful the following. It narrowed down at length to but two men, of whom it may be said that one of them argued the country into the greatest of modern wars, and that the other prepared it for a successful deliverance. Since the death of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton no two men have held the intellectual trust of such large numbers and over so many years as Calhoun and Webster pending the questions of constitutional interpretation. Calhoun was the master of his school. Exemplar of high, attracting per sonal qualities, eloquent with a logic which was made fervid by intensity of conviction, reasoning unerring from his elements and rejecting every expedient or phenomenal modification, bringing to questions of construction the cold and unrelenting methods of science regardless of the assistant or opposing forces of practical reasons, he towered above his associates in belief and was followed by the undiscriminating ranks that sometimes understood and always trusted him. I do not believe we should have had the late war if he had lived, but his death left his school to drift into it upon the teachings of his lifetime. The vindica tion of the government by the sword in last resort must be traced as the logical result of the opposite school, over which his great rival presided. I do not overlook that Webster had profound and luminous associates in his high argument of twenty years for the true doctrine of the government, yet he was the acknowledged leader, the accepted champion and defender of the Constitution. And now that the Rebellion is by both sides conceded a failure, now that the principles which he maintained are by both sides admitted as a finality by trial of war, it is be coming to our intelligence and magnanimity to recognize the champion of the faith which carried us through. For nothing is more certain than that before the shedding of blood it was under 150 ALEXANDER HAMILTON BULLOCK his elucidation that the consolidation of the Union had become so assured in the convictions and affections of the people as to have prepared them for the conflict. To him above others we owe that sentiment of nationalism prevailing over statism, which became compacted and unified with the very fibre of the American people, and without which the Union would have parted at the touch of arms. He first made familiar to modern ears the principles upon which alone the government could live, and his pupils, his followers, were attached to the majority which upheld it to the last. It is time that all fair minds should turn from the cloud which shaded his closing days, to a full percep tion of his instructions which now shine with advancing splendor in the Constitution he defended. And in their enjoyment of the fresh, the final triumph of their government, which his active genius made doubly sure, if a just and grateful people shall divide its honors between the leaders of its thought and the leaders of its armies, as England divided her honors between Pitt and Wellington, then henceforth words of reproach scat tered by careless tongue over the grave of Webster will no longer be accepted as the language of duty or justice, but will be treated with only that degree of respect which belongs to ingratitude, to flippancy, and to folly. But it is time to draw these reflections to a close. I must not even glance at the later perhaps loftier part of our history, fresh in all our hearts as to its causes and its results, its immortal deeds and immortal actors. Let it all pass for another occasion. A duty remains for each generation of intelligent, educated citizens. The day of intellectual guidance never goes by. All these agencies and methods of a more diffused intellectual life, all these potent influences of a more distributed education over more numerous gradations of intelligence only render essential a higher standard for the higher masters. The advanced semi naries will still continue the advanced guard of a well-sustained nationality and liberty. Although the wants of the age have spurred into activity the wonderful divisions and sub-divisions of sciences and arts, and although the colleges must measurably pass under the change, yet so long as the springs of the human soul remain, a broad and liberal culture, all the generous senti ments which sciences can neither generate nor suppress, the INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN HISTORY 151 inspiring study of old language and old history, the freedom of general learning, the encreasing catholicity of modern ethics will still plead at the door of every college in the land for that sustenance upon which so many past leaders have thriven to usefulness and power. There are still juices in the old-time study for the best manhood of a nation. The colleges would be the last, the forlorn hope of a decaying people. It is our reasonable ex pectation that this Union will last through the ages, but if in the Providence of God, which stretches beyond our sight, its unity and glory shall ever pass away, let the last signal which shall be heard in its praise and defence come from the chiming bells of its universities. THE RELATIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION TO NATIONAL PROSPERITY BY CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS Delivered before the Alpha of Vermont, at the University of Vermont, June 27, 1876. I PURPOSE to speak to you to-day on the Relations of Higher Education to National Prosperity. I deem this subject appro priate to the season and the occasion, inasmuch as at the present time, as perhaps never before, thoughtful men and women are reviewing the history of our nation, and scrutinizing with some what more than usual care the foundations on which our govern mental structure has been reared. It is fitting, moreover, that on such an anniversary as this we should look to the future as well as to the past. It is as true as it is commonplace to say that in a few years the country with all its precious interests will be in the hands of those who are now leaving the schools. There is constantly going on a silent revolution which is taking the polit ical power out of the hands of those who held it yesterday, and placing it in the hands of those who are to wield it to-morrow. In scarcely more than a score of years, all those who are now in active life will have been gently crowded from the scene and a new generation will have taken their places. This mighty change, ever going on, like one of the great processes of nature, "silently, effectually, inevitably," is rolling the accumulated weight of all the knowledge and civilization of the world upon the rising gen eration, asking it to carry it on a little way, and then to hand it over to its successors. It is not yet half a generation since the outbreak of the great Civil War, and yet the men who then con trolled public opinion are passed away. Lincoln and Douglas, Seward and Stanton, Breckenridge and Sumner, Stevens and Greeley, are all gone. He whom the people have twice placed gratefully at the head of the nation was then struggling for a precarious existence in a Western city, and the best of the pres ent governors in the South was then a student in college. The HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 153 honored and the powerful of to-day were then the obscure and the unknown. But interesting as this silent revolution is of itself, its real importance springs from another cause. It comes rather from the momentous fact that, while we inherit the political duties and responsibilities of our fathers, we cannot inherit their skill and their knowledge. It is doubtless a benign, as it certainly is an impressive, provision of divine economy, that learning and skill cannot be transmitted from father to son. We may inherit intellectual appetites, but not intellectual possessions. All the knowledge, the art, the refinement in existence, must either be acquired by those who are assuming the active duties of life, or must perish with those who are putting off those duties, and be lost forever. It is for these reasons that in every civilized community the cause of education is a subject of momentous importance. It is for these reasons that it is impossible to preserve not to say to augment the general stock of intelligence without large and increasing expenditures for the education of the young. It is for these reasons that, the moment the zeal of the public in this direction begins to flag, the average intelligence of the com munity begins to decline. In our own country the cause of elementary education has flourished as almost nowhere else hi the world. Combined in fluences have contributed to this result. The cause has had many and eloquent advocates. Horace Mann, devoting the rare powers of his mind, the indomitable energy of his character, and the best years of his life to his favorite work; Edward Everett, pleading eloquently "the Importance of Education in a Republic," are but representatives of a great host of distin guished men who are entitled to the gratitude of the nation. And the nation honors them. Till the Republic is forgotten, they will be revered as among its greatest benefactors. Then in accord with this advocacy, has been the influence of our material prosperity. Every intelligent lad sees something of the glittering prizes that are offered to industrious effort. Fortunes rapidly accumulated have displayed, in our own coun try as nowhere else, their alluring and often irresistible charms. The- professions, seemingly overcrowded, and yet never full, 154 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS keep up an importunate voice of appeal alike to the ambitious and the indolent. Now the result of these apparently diverse influences upon society has been precisely what a priori might have been anti cipated. The voice of our educators has been simply reinforced by the voice of our materialism in demanding a thorough and comprehensive system of common school education. There is not a boy, there is not a laborer with a spark of parental desire for the prosperity of his child, who does not see that at least a common school education is the first condition of an ability to profit by the opportunities of life. But as soon as we pass beyond the domain of instruction purely elementary, we find that these two forces no longer act in harmony. The calls of ambition are now, not toward the schools, but toward the forum and the market; and consequently, whether these voices are simply discordant, or whether the voice of the educators is drowned and silenced amid the hoarse jargon of affairs, the result is the same, that while our common schools flourish and are the just pride of our country, our higher institutions of learning have been left, for the most part, either to perish, or to subsist upon the precarious favors of private benevolence. I am not so unjust as to attribute what seems to me to have been the languishing condition of American colleges during the past twenty-five years exclusively to the cause which I have assigned. There is, as it seems to me, another cause, and possi bly one that is still more important. I refer to the fact that a more or less radical change had taken place in public opinion concerning the relations of higher education to the state at large. It was the doctrine of the Puritan fathers and it is of great importance to note the fact a doctrine continued for a hundred and fifty years, through all the dark periods of our colonial and provincial history, that the encouragement of higher education was one of the great interests of the state. It was no doctrine of theirs, that the colleges were not, equally with the lower schools, entitled to the fostering care of the com monwealth. It seems never to have entered their imaginations, that university education, less than common school education, was the interest of the entire people. Two years before John HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 155 Harvard gave his name together with half of his estate and the whole of his library to the college at Cambridge, the General Court of Massachusetts had voted for the same purpose a sum equal to "a year s rate of the whole colony." President Quincy, in his History of Harvard University, declares that during the whole of the first seventy years of its existence, "its officers were dependent for daily bread upon the bounty of the General Court." Eloquent praises have been bestowed, and doubtless justly bestowed, upon the noble generosity of individual colonists for their sacrifices in order to establish "for learning, a resting place, and for science, a fixed habitation on the borders of the wilderness"; but it ought not to be forgotten that this noble generosity was but the smallest source of income to the Univer sity. It was to the more substantial gifts of the Legislature, that the prosperity of the college was chiefly due. Nor did this de pendence upon the General Court cease with the colonial days of Massachusetts. When a State constitution came to be adopted, that instrument devoted one entire chapter to the interests of the only college under its jurisdiction. " It shall be the duty," so runs the constitution, " it shall be the duty of all legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this com monwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and science, and all seminaries of them, especially the University at Cam bridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns." Thus it will be seen that Massachusetts considered the University as preeminently a part of her school system. The history of Yale is, in this respect, not unlike that of Har vard. President D wight, in his sketch of the college, assures us that "the beginning of this seminary" was at the General Court, held at Guilford in June of 1652. At that time it was decided after a full consideration of the question, that New England could not support two colleges, and, therefore, in order that they might not, by founding a new college, embarrass Har vard, the matter was indefinitely postponed. It was not until fifty years later that the college was actually founded. The same high authority which I have already quoted says, "The principal benefactor, both during this period and all which have succeeded, was the Legislature." In illustration of the method pursued it may be said that the General Court in its first charter 156 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS provided for an annual grant to the college a grant which was continued until 1755. In 1750 Connecticut Hall was reared from money chiefly contributed by the Legislature. In 1792 the Legislature granted money with which four new buildings were erected, a handsome addition was made to the library, "a com plete philosophical and chemical apparatus was procured," and finally, three new professorships were established. Thus down to the beginning of the present century Yale, no less than Har vard, was chiefly indebted to the State Legislature for the means of its prosperity and its advancement. Nor was this method of supporting the higher schools of learning confined to New England. The College of William and Mary, in the order of its establishment second only to Harvard, was founded by an endowment from the royal domain, and was supported, for the most part, by the income of " a tax of a penny a pound on tobacco exported to other plantations." In Mary land, South Carolina, and Georgia, the same provident care of the colleges by the State was inaugurated. And if in those states the cause of higher education was less prosperous than at the North, the fact was largely, if not chiefly, due to the earlier adoption of that policy of the multiplication of colleges which in the present century has spread over the whole country. Mary land, as early as 1723, provided for high schools in all the coun ties of the State. The early efforts of the State in the cause of education, as President Sparks has said, were "liberal, honorable, and worthy of the highest praise." But the Legislature made one fatal mistake. Instead of concentrating its resources on a single college or university, it divided its means, and raised three of its high schools to the rank of colleges. Jealousies ensued. In the course of a few years, it came to be seen that schools which, as academies, had been admirable, as colleges, were insignificant. So universal, indeed, became the dissatisfaction, that in 1805 the State withdrew its aid altogether; and thus, notwithstanding the munificent efforts of the State in its early history, its col leges at the beginning of the present century had dwindled into abject feebleness. In South Carolina, a wiser course was pursued, and, there fore, the cause of higher education escaped, though it barely escaped, the fate which befell it in Maryland. Although the HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY -157 State committed the error of establishing four colleges where but a single one could be supported, the nature of the mistake came to be seen and the proper remedy was applied. In 1801 the Legislature established the College of South Carolina on so liberal a basis that the other colleges at once descended to the rank of preparatory schools. Within a few years the State gave to the college at Columbia some $300,000, an amount which at the beginning of this century was truly magnificent. But no State ever made a better investment. During the first half of the present century the scholastic accomplishments and the political ability of the statesmen of South Carolina were the just pride of the State, as they would have been of any State. Thus, wherever we look, whether among the Puritans of New England, the Catholics of Maryland, or the Episcopalians of Virginia and South Carolina, we everywhere, down to the begin ning of this century, behold the same general educational con ditions, the same general habit of supporting the higher schools as well as the lower at the expense of the State. It is moreover interesting to note that it was hi schools thus endowed and thus supported that the master minds which framed this republic were developed. If, as we go to the " Mecca of this patriotic year," we see reason to rejoice in a national greatness or a national prosperity, it is because of the spirit and the wisdom of the men who were trained in schools thus estab lished and thus endowed. It was from inspiration gained from such sources that Thomas Jefferson, the man whom Lord Brougham pronounced the greatest champion of the political rights and interests of the common people that ever lived, could write in 1800, the very year of his election to the Presidency, and at the age of fifty-five, those words to Dr. Priestley, which can never fail to be a delight to every classical scholar who reads them: "I enjoy Homer in his own language infinitely better than Pope s translation of him. I thank on my knees Him who directed my early education, for having put into my possession this rich source of delight; and I would not exchange it for any thing which I could then have acquired, and have not since acquired." But we have now to note that as time advanced, new ele ments arose to complicate the educational problem. Local de- 158 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS mands and local jealousies began to find expression, and ere long came to be importunate, if not indeed imperious. A still more potent influence was the fact that the various religious denominations, as they came to be spread over the country, felt the need of educational support. They understood well that whether or not a state can thrive without educated statesmen, no religious denomination can push its way in the nineteenth century without an educated clergy. Accordingly, in the course of half a century, colleges, for these combined reasons, were planted by the score in localities where no more than a single one could be adequately supported. Now it is of the first importance to note the immediate effect of this policy, which was nothing less than to paralyze all efforts to secure appropriations for higher education from the State Legislatures. The reasoning which led to this paralysis was of the simplest nature possible. The State could not support all, and, therefore, no course was open but for it to withdraw its support altogether, and to turn over the interests of the colleges to the various religious denominations and to the localities in whose interests they had been individually established. Then began the system of private appeal; or rather, I should say, the system of private appeal already inaugurated in the numerous new colleges, came to be universally adopted in those that had already acquired renown. State support was now either with drawn altogether, or was meted out with a sparing hand. Then, a second consequence followed hard upon the first, indeed sprang directly out of the first. The fierce competition for students of such a superfluity of colleges kept down the educational standard; and after the still fiercer struggle for life made it necessary that the best talent of the college, as one of the victims of the system once sadly but somewhat facetiously described it, should be devoted to the work of exhorting the brethren and of expectantly waiting at the death-bed of the childless and the widow. Such a system could not but be pro ductive of deplorable results. It was impossible for men, how ever scholarly and learned they might be, and many of them were scholarly and learned, to beget and disseminate in the community either a high respect for collegiate honors or an ardent desire to obtain them. HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 159 It is perhaps worthy of note, in passing, that it was at this stage of our educational progress, that the discovery was made that it is unsafe to send young men to institutions receiving the patronage of the State. As we have already seen, the Epis copalians of Virginia, the Catholics of Maryland, and even the stern Puritans of New England, did not imagine for more than a hundred and fifty years that there was any dividing line be tween the methods by which the lower schools and the higher were to be supported. But now for the first time, the doctrine came to be entertained, that the youth of the land would be in danger in any other schools than in those directly or indirectly under the control of the churches. Fond parents who did not scruple to commit their tender and impressible children to the uncertain influences of unknown teachers and unknown school mates in the common schools, now strangely discovered, that, as soon as the child emerges from the impressible age and begins to assert an independence of thought and action, to send him to any other than a distinctively religious school, would be, at least, to imperil his faith and to jeopard his morals. Such, as it seems to me, are some of the influences which have been at work to embarrass and enfeeble the cause of higher education. I endeavor to present nothing more than the plain est picture in the plainest possible colors. If any one suspects that I have overdrawn it, I ask him candidly to look at the result. I ask him, if he is familiar with what a great university ought to be and is, to look over the magnificent array of States ad mitted to the Union since the Revolutionary War, and tell me how many colleges and universities there are that can be called worthy of the wealth and the enterprise and the general intelli gence of this country. And if some one replies that time is neces sary to develop our system, I answer that the Universities of Bonn and Munich and Berlin have all been founded since the beginning of this century, and that not one of them had been in existence a score of years before it had acquired world-wide re nown through the labor of its teachers and scholars. It is a fact, I think, of the greatest significance to us Americans, that Nie- buhr the father of modern history, and Liebig the founder of organic chemistry, and Hegel the author of the most influential school of modern philosophy, all acquired their imperishable 160 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS renown in universities less than a quarter of a century old. The youngest of the German universities, with the exception of the one founded in the territory acquired in the war of 1870, will this very year celebrate the semi-centennial anniversary of its organization, and can boast of some two hundred professors and scarcely less than two thousand students. This is the answer to the declaration that our colleges must be venerable before they can be great. But it is time to enquire what has been the influence of our so- called "system of higher education," upon the real educational condition of the country. What has been done in the way of encouraging young men to seek a collegiate education by this long array of two hundred and eighty-five colleges and uni versities, all of them entitled, so far as municipal law can bestow it, to the right of ranking themselves as schools of the highest learning? We are not left in doubt as to what the answer of this question must be. It would be easy to show a priori that this undue multiplica tion of colleges would diminish the esteem in which colleges and universities are held. But we are not left to the unsatisfactory conclusions of a priori reasoning. Statistics have been accumu lated which show conclusively what the tendency has been in different portions of the country. And what is this tendency? It is that, ever since the earliest period for which statistics have been preserved, the proportionate number of students seeking a collegiate education has steadily diminished. Nor is this diminu tion confined to any single portion of the country. In New Eng land as a whole, for example, the proportion of students in col lege in 1826 was one in 1513; in 1855 it was only one in 1689; in 1869 the ratio had declined so that there were only at the rate of one in 1927. In the country as a whole, according to the care fully prepared statistics of President Barnard, the number of students in college in proportion to the population was, in 1840, one in 1549; in 1860, one in 2012; in 1869, one in 2546. Thus it is obvious that the number of undergraduate students for thirty or forty years previous to 1870 was in our country not only diminishing, but that the diminution during the last ten years of the period, was especially remarkable. In all parts of the country, the sad fact stares us in the face that the training which HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 161 has long been considered essential to finished scholarship has been losing ground from year to year in the favor of the people. Now to this result it is probable that a number of causes have contributed. The prevailing mercenary spirit has doubtless exerted an influence. It is possible, moreover, that something has been lost from the fact that courses of study have not con formed to the public demand. But there is another cause which is probably far more important than these. It is the fact that the modern college has lost something of its former significance in the popular imagination. Ambitious young men who aspire to professional and political honors are not less numerous than were the same class fifty years ago. We cannot but believe that these young men would resort to the same means of helping themselves forward, if those means were to present to their ambition the same attractions. But the same attractions do not exist. A single one of our Western States has no less than nine univer sities and thirty-three colleges. Forty-two universities and col leges in a single State are not only sure to be insignificant, but, what is only less unfortunate, are sure to be thought insignificant. \Vhen the popular imagination attaches to the college but little importance, the ambitious youth is likely to eschew the college, and betake himself at once to the more attractive experience of the bar and the political arena. Now this is not a mere picture of the fancy; it is a representa tion which is seen from such statistics as have been accumulated to be absolutely true to the life. In the professions (with the possible exception of the clerical) and in positions of high polit ical trust, the proportion of college-bred men is considerably less than it was in the early years of this century. Of the signers of the Declaration, thirty out of fifty-six were college-bred. Of the Senate of the First Congress, fifteen out of twenty-six; while of the Forty-first Congress, the latest of which informa tion is accessible, the proportion was only seven out of twenty-six. If the investigation were to be carried to the House of Repre sentatives, the proportion would probably be still more un favorable. It is thus obvious that college graduates are politically less conspicuous than they were formerly, just as we have seen them to be less numerous. But there is another question to be asked. If, under the sys- 162 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS tern which has prevailed, the number of students going to col lege has diminished, what has been the effect of the system on the scholarship of those who graduate? On this point it is of course difficult to speak with positive assurance. But this may be said. The same public opinion which tends by its indiffer ence to prevent boys from going to college will at least be easily reconciled to a low standard of scholarship. Moreover it must be remembered that where indifference concerning high scholarship prevails, the fierce competition of small colleges must tend to depress rather than to elevate the standard. The struggle is often a struggle for life, and life too frequently depends not so much upon scholarship, as upon scholars. Every educator is aware that the greatest obstacle in the way of elevating the standard of scholarship is the difficulty of rais ing the preparatory schools; and this difficulty arises very largely, if not chiefly, from the fact that the necessities of the smaller colleges require them to accept of whatever preparation comes to their hand. If in those States which have a college in almost every county, the condition of the colleges is deplorable, the con dition of the preparatory schools is scarcely better. Hence it is that, whenever the standard of scholarship is raised, it has to be done both in reliance upon the exceptional excellence of a few tried schools, and in expectation that the size of the classes in college will be materially diminished. No college or university can prosper unless it is in some sense en rapport with the pre paratory schools, and therefore it is that the work of raising the standard of scholarship is both slow and difficult, little less than the fabled work of Sisyphus : ..." adverse nixantem trudere monte Saxum." But notwithstanding all these facts, interesting and signifi cant as they are of themselves, the most important question has not yet been reached. The question of transcendent importance is this: What has been the effect of our system upon the stand ards of attainment held up before the public? Are our profes sional men better fitted, or worse fitted, for their work than were men of the same class fifty years ago? Are our mechanics better, or are they worse? Are our statesmen and politicians men of broader culture, of more comprehensive views and of greater HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 163 integrity; or are they inferior to the same class of men of a hun dred years ago? Now I would not answer these questions of so vital impor tance in any pessimistic spirit. I desire to avoid exaggeration; and I concede that there is always a tendency to disparage the present in comparison with the past. I remember that Hesiod deplored the degeneracy of his own age and sang the glories of the days of his fathers. The Sophists of Greece were little but an organized body of quacks and complainers of the condition of their own time. Cicero mourned over the degenerate poetry of Bavius and Msevius; and the critics and grammarians of Alexandria in ridiculing the men of their time only succeeded in setting up "a kingdom of learned dullness and empty pro fession." England in the days of Walpole was openly governed by the belief that every man had his price; and even at the be ginning of the present century, seats in Parliament were openly sold to the highest bidder. I admit then, without reserve, that there have always been corrupt men in politics, and pretenders in literature and science. Greece had her Alcibiades, Rome had her Verres, and even our own Revolutionary age had its Arnold and its Aaron Burr. All this I concede. I admit that no age has been exempt from the affliction of pretence and dishonesty. Nor do I esteem it a reproach that the statesmen of to-day fall below the political stature of those who framed the Consti tution; for who can read the political writings of Jefferson, and Adams, and Hamilton, and Madison, and not count them as worthy to rank with the foremost men of all time, almost in deed with those intellectual giants who, according to the figure of Macchiavelli, rise far above the level of their fellow-men, and, stretching out their hands to each other across the interval of the ages, transmit to succeeding generations the torch of art and poetry and political science? In these days, so redolent of sweet memories of great men and great deeds, it is no disparagement, but an exaltation rather, to be allowed to sit at their feet and acknowledge their superior virtues. But though all these considerations have their weight, we ought not to be deterred by them from a rational examination of our own age; and after all concessions are made to that tendency of human nature of which I have spoken, I fear it will have to be 164 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS admitted, that we are living in an age of low standards and of cheap fame. Now I have no purpose to ring the mournful changes on the trite topic of political corruption and of pretentious and aspir ing ignorance. It may be, as has been said, that this is not so much an age of frauds as an age of the exposure of frauds; but whether this dictum be true or not, it is certain that there is throughout the country a growing tendency among thoughtful persons to take melancholy views of our political methods and our political tendencies. In regard to this political malaise I shall pause only to say, that, in every age and among every peo ple, there have been corrupt men and ignorant men, who have aspired to place and pelf; and furthermore, that always their aspirations have been ardent just in proportion to their pros pects of success. If in our time, or in any time, therefore, there is especial thrift of ignorance and dishonesty, the remedy is not in merely complaining of it, but in the slow and arduous work of so changing public opinion as to make its thrift impossible. It is coming to be a practical question whether we do not often exhaust our strength in attempting to reform bad men, when we should be devoting our energies to the work of selecting and using good men. It was a saying of Kant, that out of wood so crooked as that of which man is made nothing absolutely straight can ever be formed. The saying is but an amplification of a far higher au thority, and is doubtless true. But even Kant would admit that there are degrees of crookedness and perversity, and it therefore becomes a practical question to know how far the energies of the country ought to be exerted in correcting the perversity of perverse men. Surely the master mechanic does not expend his energies in trying to straighten the crooked wood with which the forests abound; and may it not be possible I ask the question simply as a query may it not be possible that the present age is using much of its strength in straightening crooked material when it should be devoting its energies to producing and making the best use of the best material? Shall I be thought quite wrong in suggesting that the business of straightening crooked wood, or, to drop the figure, of correcting perversity, has become almost a profession? Ah, but how difficult is the work! It has been well HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 165 said, that tendencies are stronger than men; and yet how often are specific remedies sought when only constitutional renovation would be efficient? How general is the must-do-something impulse whenever an evil is detected ! A desire to discover evils and a desire to correct them, ought not, of course, to incur our censure; but are not these desires through ignorance often utterly misdirected? One of the profoundest thinkers of the present generation has called attention to the fact that we always find among people, in proportion as they are ignorant, a belief in specifics and a con fidence in pressing the adoption of them. The Bushman believes that every death is occasioned by a witch, and that when the witch is killed, a countless number of deaths is prevented. But a belief in specifics is not confined to the heart of Africa. It pre vails in Europe and America as well. In Austria a great evil was thought to be the number of im provident marriages. When the Concordat made improvident marriages impossible, the reformers said: The evil is corrected. But straightway it was found that the principal result of the change was to increase enormously the number of illegitimate children; and when, to mitigate the misery of the foundlings, the government provided hospitals, the result again was to in crease greatly the number of infants abandoned. In England the Building Act was passed in answer to a de mand that something should be done to prevent the overcrowd ing of small houses and tenements. This Act, together with the Lodging-House Act accomplished its purpose; but it drove the vagrants into the streets and compelled them to sleep under bridges, or in the parks, or even, for warmth s sake, on the dunghills. It was confidently thought by Mr. Bradlaugh and others that the deplorable condition of the English peasantry could be relieved by the formation of leagues and unions and the organization of strikes, but Mr. Brassey, in his book on Work mid Wages, has conclusively shown that the influence of agitation among the laborers has been to frighten capital and to withdraw it from the active industries of agriculture and manu facture, and to place it in foreign bonds; thus in fact lower ing the price of labor by just so much as it has diminished the industrial pursuits. In France, during much of this century, a 166 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS belief in the omnipotence of specific remedies has been almost universal. Many of the people believed in the existence of a universal panacea for all their political ills, if only they could contrive to find it. In the time of the Revolution, Saint-Just declared that all the evils under which the country labored were caused by an abandonment of agricultural life; and his remedy, seriously proposed, was that all the people should be made to become farmers, and that the condition of voting should be the raising of four sheep per annum. A little later Fourier invented another method of curing the national ills; and demonstrated, apparently to the satisfaction of a large number of followers, that, if his mode of organizing society could only be generally adopted, " zebras would soon come to be as much used as horses, men would live three or four hundred years instead of seventy, and, what would be still better, the globe would soon have thirty-seven millions of poets equal to Homer, thirty- seven millions of philosophers equal to Newton, and thirty- seven millions of dramatists equal to Moliere." In Wisconsin the mass of the people believed that by control ling the price of freight irrespectively of charter obligations an immense advantage would be gained by the farmers, and there fore in spite of the warnings of all political economists the "Potter Law" was passed. The result was that feeble railroads were stopped, even the stronger ones could not negotiate a bond in England or elsewhere, construction ceased, and a subsequent Legislature had to hasten to repeal the law; but it was not until hundreds of thousands of dollars had been sacrificed. In the time of the Civil War men were perplexed to know how to keep down the premium on gold, as though the premium could be kept down, while millions of irredeemable paper were issuing monthly from the press and were called money. Con gress even, as it will be remembered, took the matter in hand, and like the English king, commanded the tide to retire; but the only effect was to increase the violence of the mocking surges, and Congress itself had to withdraw. Perhaps I might say that the same reformatory spirit grap pled with the tremendous evil of intemperance. Societies were formed for the purpose of combating it. The evil, prodigious of itself, by the natural accumulation of zeal, came to be greatly HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 167 magnified. The impression began to prevail that intemperance was enormously increasing, and that, too, in face of the fact that but a few generations ago sobriety was the exception, and that even so late as the days of our great-grandfathers, the man who had never been intoxicated was a rarity. Let us abolish intoxi cation altogether, cried men. Let us simply make intoxication impossible by prohibiting the manufacture and sale of all that can intoxicate. The cry carried the day; with what result we all know. Alas, in spite of all law, and all officers of the law, intem perance continued, and it is even now a question whether in one single State the evil has been diminished by prohibition. What ever may be the answer to this question, it is certain that pro hibitory laws are everywhere failing, and that men are every where beginning to realize that the appetite for strong drink is the most energetic and persistent perversity of human nature, has been certainly since the days of Noah, and will be probably until the millennium. So in regard to the matter of pure administration of govern ment. We cry out for honest men at the head of our govern ment, and we do well. God forbid that I should say aught against such a demand. But, my friends, let us not be deluded into the belief that honesty can work miracles. Ever since the days of President Jackson, there has been lurking in our political sys tem a poison, now torpid, now active, but ever increasing in virulence until at the present time it has permeated to the ut most extremity of the body politic. To put honest men in office so long as the virus is still working in the system, is merely to apply soothing and palliating lotions. It is well so far as it goes, but it goes only a little way. So long as there are forty thou sand and more civil offices hi the United States, subject to the irresponsible will of the magistrate, and so long as the maxim "to the victor belong the spoils " is practically in full force, there can be no assurance that government will be pure. England has passed through every stage of an experience not essentially un like that to which we are now subjected, and it was not until the nation adopted a system of thorough civil reform that the era of pure administration was inaugurated. It is not for us to hope for a return of administrative purity until we are ourselves willing to profit by the examples of other nations. We have to 168 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS return to our fathers methods, if we would have our fathers pure government return to us. The greatest man of modern science said that he knew not how it might seem to others, but that it seemed to himself that he had merely walked upon the shores of time gathering here and there doubtfully a pebble, while the great world of science lay beyond his knowledge. This was the declaration of a true sage, of a man whose judgment in all matters to which he gave his attention was scarcely inferior to his genius. The nine teenth century has inherited the fruits of Sir Isaac Newton s genius, but I fear it can hardly claim to have inherited his spirit. The American who has not yet made up his mind on every question of the day is almost a curiosity, and a genuine wonder is the man who reserves his judgment until he has com pleted his thinking. It became a legal maxim as early as the days of Tacitus that the more corrupt the state the more numerous the laws corruptissima republica, plurimae leges, and yet every winter spreads thousands of laws upon our statute books, so crudely framed and so ill digested, that no inconsiderable portion of the work of the next winter is to undo them. The pregnant words with which Pliny describes the young Italy of his generation, seem almost to have been written for the young America of ours : Statim sapiunt, statim sciunt omnia, neminem verentur, imitantur neminem, atque ipsi sibi exempla sunt. Now if these tendencies and habits, of which I have spoken somewhat at length, are evils, and I think you will all concede them to be such, how are they to be successfully combated? Surely not by the application of any such mere "specific" as those to which I have alluded. The first thing to be done is to acquire a complete understanding of the nature of the difficulty to be removed or remedied. It must be understood first of all that in the vast majority of instances, the evils, both political and social, which confront us, are not diseases, but are mere signs of diseases, not accidental effects, but inevitable results, of the habit of thought and the material condition of society. The history of the race unquestionably teaches this fact with the most unmistakable distinctness and I would that it were emblazoned upon every university and indeed upon every HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 169 church a fact well formulated by Lecky, that "the beliefs and the habits of a given age or people are mainly determined, not by specific and assignable reasons and arguments and ac tions, but by the general intellectual conditions of society, con ditions which cannot be suddenly created, but which can only be slowly brought about and materially changed by the com bined influence of all the forces of civilization." This, if I have not read history in vain, is one of its most important lessons. If it be true, as Emerson has said, that every man is a quotation from all his ancestors, it is no less true that every nation is a quotation from all its antecedents. And yet in the very face of this lesson men expect republics built on the traditions and habits of despotism to flourish, and await miraculous changes as the result of then* impotent legislation on some of the most fixed relations of society. Let us not hope that anything can effect a change in this respect excepting that more enlightened public opinion which comes from a more thorough and com prehensive knowledge of the history and experience of mankind. And for effecting this change the hope of the country is in its higher education. Lord Bacon affirmed that "a knowledge of the speculative opinions of the men between twenty and thirty years of age, is the great source of political prophecy." The great source of political prophecy, ah then, of what consummate importance is it, that our young men between twenty and thirty should think aright ! If the saying of Lord Bacon is true, and who can gainsay it? the hope of our country is not solely, not even chiefly in our common schools, but largely in our colleges and universities. In every country truly free it is, after all, the cultivated mind that is the controlling influence and motor of affairs. Its operation may not be obvious, we may not see it, we may not feel it, we may not weigh it, but like one of the forces of nature, though it works silently, its potent influence is every where present. The force of gravity is so gentle that we can scarcely perceive it; and yet its millions of gossamer threads bind the earth together and even keep the planets in their places. Such is the influence of cultivated mind on society. Though Martin Luther began by begging his bread for a "pious canticle" in the streets of Eisenach, and though he was opposed by the opinions and the corruptions of his time; yet, by his studious toil 170 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS of days and nights, he became able, as Lord Bacon said of him, "to summon all learning and all antiquity to his succor," and hence "was not only sustained by conquering armies and coun tenanced by princes, but, what was a thousand times better, was revered as a benefactor and a spiritual parent by millions of his grateful countrymen." I hold it to be the duty, I do not hesitate to use the strong old Saxon word, the duty, of every educator and of every seminary of higher learning to do what it can to modify the material tendencies of the age both by precept and by example. I am persuaded that what the age needs, and what our nation is sighing for, is not so much a wider diffusion of the ability to read and write, as a higher standard of excellence in morals, and in intelligence, and in learn ing, on the part of that class which creates, and inspires, and controls public opinion. A little learning may be better than no learning, but we must not forget that it becomes the "dangerous thing" of the proverb, when it only enables its possessor to lift himself into places of responsibility and power. Better lawyers, better physicians, better clergymen, better editors, better teachers, better legislators these are the need of the republic, and it is only by producing these that we can make it certain that the republic will be better directed. Within the past ten years the world has seen unrolled before its astonished vision a political panorama of most extraordinary and surprising interest; and yet how many have thought that it is chiefly remarkable, as an example of the value of higher edu cation upon national prosperity? At the beginning of the cen tury Prussia was torn, bleeding, impoverished, stripped of half her territory, by a foreign foe, and crushed under the cruel heel of a feudal nobility at home. But this feeble nationality fell under the immediate and the dominant influence of a great man and a great idea. The great thought of the Freiherr von Stein was, that if Prussia ever could be built up into a strong na tionality, it would be, not by devoting the chief energies of the country to the development of material resources, but to the development of men. And the whole nation was inspired with the idea, that whatever they might want a man for, the way to make the most of him, and get the most out of him for the na tion, was by giving him the most thorough general training, and HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 171 then the most thorough technical training. Royalty vacated its palaces at Berlin and at Bonn and universities were installed in its place. The dominant idea of the nation became this, that for every vocation in life, men must receive the best training which the nation could afford. And we of this decade have seen the result. The little nation of two generations ago has not only become in higher learning the educator of the world, but has become the strongest power of Europe. When put to the test, its generals could plan a cam paign which for comprehensiveness and unfailing certainty of result exceeded everything done under the great Napoleon, and the soldiers, after defeating the proudest legions of the world, could recreate themselves by writing and singing the Kutschke Lied in thirty-two languages. I hope I shall be pardoned for speaking a single word in con clusion to those who are about to graduate. The pride of a uni versity is her children. The great work of a university in in fluencing public opinion is chiefly through those whom she sends out with her honors. Do not, I charge you, do not go out with the impression that your education is completed. The young man who goes out from a university and straightway throws aside his books is unworthy ever to have been within a university. Remember, moreover, that the life of a scholar is a life of pro digious work. The Bishop of Exeter once said, and probably said truly, that of all work of permanent value, nine-tenths is drudgery. A generation ago when Mr. Choate was recognized as the great light of the American bar, the impression was rife that his genius was so colossal that he had but to stand upon his feet and perhaps with his long fingers shake up his tangled locks, in order to produce an oration that would carry sure conviction to an audience or a jury. But after his death it was revealed that no lawyer of his time prepared his cases with so minute care, and, what is of still greater interest, that during the most busy portion of his professional career, it was his rule to get at least an hour every day rescued from sleep or society or rec reation, for Latin or Greek or some other favorite study. Mr. Gowans wrote to the New York Times, that Mr. Choate, some ten years before his death, unexpectedly detained a day in New York, came into his store about ten o clock in the morning and 172 CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS enquired for the department of the classics. On being directed to them the great lawyer began his researches and so eager was he, that Mr. Gowans had to interrupt him in order to close the store at seven in the evening. Thus for nine hours Choate with neither food nor drink had pored over his work; and when asked what he had found, responded that he had been greatly excited over several Greek books that he had never read, and especially over a seven-volume edition of the famous commentary on Homer by the Greek bishop Eustathius of the twelfth century. This was the scholarship of the man who was popularly supposed to con vince juries by a kind of inspiration. When the old man eloquent, whose culture was the consum mate fruit of that earlier school of training of which I have spoken, was in the presidential chair, he "found time amidst the incessant calls and interruptions of his office to address a series of letters to his youngest son some of them written in the busiest portion of the session containing an elaborate analysis of the orations of Cicero, destined to aid the young man in the perusal of this, his favorite author. Some of these letters,** Mr. Everett declares, "would be thought a good day s work for a scholar by profession"; and yet, at the close of one of them, he adds that he is reading Evelyn s Sylva with great delight. The greatest lawyer of antiquity boasted that his philosoph ical studies had never interfered with his services to his clients and to the republic, and that he had only dedicated to them the hours which others give to their walks, their repasts, and their pleasures. Looking on those voluminous works which have been the delight of all subsequent time, we cannot but be surprised at the observation. But the very fact that his philosophical works bear the names of the different villas he possessed, indi cates that he composed them as the recreation of their respective retirements. They were all the result of that magic art in the employment of our leisure, which is said to multiply our days. Thus it is that the exhortation of Goethe, " Wie das Gestirn Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast, Drehe sich jeder um die eigene Last," (unhasting but unresting as the stars), is the condition and the accompaniment of every great excellence. Be assured then, HIGHER EDUCATION AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 173 gentlemen, that no mere longings and sighing for the rewards of greatness will bring either greatness or its rewards. Only after a life of earnest, and honest, and persistent striving may it be said of you : " For country and humanity he wrought, And, which is best and happiest yet, all this With God not parted from him But favoring and assisting to the end." THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS BY CHARLES HENRY BELL Delivered before the Alpha of New Hampshire, at Dartmouth College, June 29. 1881. IT was a sagacious monarch, in ancient times, who ordered that whenever he appeared in danger of being unduly exalted by the pride of grandeur and power, he should be reminded that he was but a man. In a like spirit now, while the echoes of the centennial bells yet linger in our ears, while poet and orator vie with one another in extolling the heroism of our sires, and the peaceful victories, not less renowned, of their sons, while the greatness, the glory, the intelligence, and the virtue of the Ameri can people are the theme of exhaustless eulogy, it may be wise to listen to a little unpalatable truth about ourselves, as a pre servative against an excess of self-conceit. So in lieu of a discourse upon scholarly themes, which might better befit this occasion, I shall ask your indulgence for pre senting some crude thoughts upon a failing which seems to have assumed national dimensions, the Worship of Success. Success is a word of varied import. In a higher sense, he only can be said to be truly successful who has accomplished some thing for the advancement of humanity. But in its popular acceptance, as we shall employ it here, the term signifies the acquisition of power, place, prestige, or wealth; the last of these especially, as that is the object of the efforts of the greatest num ber, and exercises the most potent sway over the popular mind. All people and all ages have had their heroes. Nature has from time to time produced her favorites, strong of will, un daunted in spirit, wise in purpose, leaders of men. In war they have come naturally to the front; in civil life they have filled seats at council boards; have been the heads of great enter prises; have been lords of the market and the exchange. Humble origin or the want of worldly advantages could throw no ob stacles in the way of their asserting themselves. They took the THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 175 foremost places by virtue of nature s patent of nobility, which was seen and recognized of all men. On these architects of their own fortunes the popular sym pathy has always been lavished. In honoring them, the masses felt that they were honoring their own representatives. The legend of William Tell, sprung from the humblest class of society, championing its cause, and scaling the heights of renown as the deliverer of his nation, is found to be but a repetition of earlier myths, which prove how loyally the popular heart has beaten in unison with the achievements of a child of the people, from the very infancy of the world. And the romance of Sir Richard Whittington, the runaway apprentice, summoned back by the prophetic refrain of the church bells to be thrice Lord Mayor of London, is but another instance of the faithful tribute of the popular admiration to success won by unaided manliness. But in times past, and in other lands, men have admired, but have not imitated. They looked up to the few transcendent beings who took their rise from the lower plane, and mounted to the lofty ether of opulence and power, as they might gaze at the stars in the heavens, marvelling at their brilliancy, but never dreaming of taking a place beside them. For great success was rare and exceptional, and too far out of the range of ordinary probabilities to influence the conduct of the great majority. Few, and only those who feel within themselves the spur of an ambi tion which despises difficulties, and counts life itself a secondary thing, have been encouraged by the scattered instances to a living faith that they too might fairly aspire to like favors of fortune. But not so in our own country. In no other land, at no other time, have the avenues to success in every department of human endeavor been so wide open to all as in this America at the pres ent hour. There is absolutely no bar to impede the progress of the humblest or the weakest. Every one has perfect freedom to make the most of his powers, and to win his way to the goal of an honorable ambition. Equal competition is the birthright of every citizen. He who starts at the foot of the ladder of for tune may as reasonably hope to reach the top as any rival who begins higher up. Every schoolboy carries in his satchel the possibility of the presidency. 176 CHARLES HENRY BELL Justly proud are we of this crowning feature of true democ racy. And no other people are so ready as our people to hail with plaudits every instance in which ability, courage, and per severance, come from what source they may, win honor or for tune. The history of such a career is common property, and a public encouragement; every step of its progress is studied and canvassed; and canonization, in the American calendar, is its consummation . Because these triumphs in our country are within the reach of the many, because they are not exceptional but normal, and are continually occurring within the observation of all, therefore it is that the popular admiration for success has entered more into the every-day life of our people, and more directly and powerfully affected their ideas and feelings and conduct. You may hear its expression in every place of public resort in the exchange, in the railway station, and even in the coun try store and the mechanic s shop, and from persons of every station and degree. Two men can hardly meet without com paring views respecting some one who has risen to be a public character by originating a new invention, by planning a shrewd speculation, by gaining a fortune, or by distancing competition in the political race. To be successful, in whatever direction, is to earn the right to general encomium. And the newspaper, faithful exponent of the fashions of the times, voices the popular sentiment by holding up to the widest recognition the merits of the men who succeed. It writes their biographies in superlatives; it chronicles their goings out and their comings in; it gives an inventory of their characteristics and their possessions; it calls in the engraver s art to preserve the lineaments of their countenances and the architecture of their dwellings. Kings have no private life it is said; but no king can live more constantly in the public eye than some of these suc cessful Americans. It could not but be that the worship of success thus evidenced by tongue and pen, has been a mighty incentive to ambition. In fact it has permeated and given character to the nation, so that now no one with a particle of self-reliance feels that there is any presumption in his desire to measure himself with the best of his fellows in the struggle for superiority. Our country- THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 177 men, alert and confident by constitution, and stimulated by climate, are thus spurred on to intenser activity by the vision of honor, or power, or riches, that is perpetually in the per spective. The push and drive of We on this side the Atlantic, especially in those centres where the loadstone of success exerts its greatest attractive force, is beyond example. Nowhere else under the sun is to be found so eager, restless, hurrying a mortal as the t} T pical American. He grudges the time he has to borrow from his business to take the nutriment which keeps his active body from collapse. Five minutes detention on the railway he resents as a personal injury. He would be glad if some ingenious Yankee would invent a more rapid method of transmitting the news of the market than the electric telegraph. He perils his limbs by leaping upon the platform of the last car at night, after it has got in motion, and then congratulates himself that he has not lost a moment s time since he set out on his daily gallop in the morning. His very diversions smack of haste and unrest. His horses must be the fastest, his yacht must outsail his neighbor s, his great anxiety seems to be to get through his pleasures as rapidly as possible. If he is overpersuaded to snatch a few weeks from his pressing avocations, for travel, he speeds like a rocket through cities rich in the monuments of antiquity; shoots a glance at the pyramids; despatches a gallery of the immortal works of art, as if he were doing it on a match against time; and honors a cathe dral which has been a thousand years in building, with a five minutes survey. Then, his appetite for business only sharp ened by his involuntary abstinence from it, he hies back to his daily round of hurry and worry. If the chief object of a republican form of government be, as it is defined, to secure the greatest good of the greatest number, then the only discrimination that ought to be recognized be tween the different occupations of men, is whether they are more or less useful to the majority. Those which render the most es sential service should be held in the highest honor. The indis pensable business of tilling the soil to supply the bodily needs, and the various arts for furnishing the housing and clothing of man, should rightfully have the precedence of all others; while those pursuits which simply grow out of the artificial wants, 178 CHARLES HENRY BELL whose purpose is to supply superfluities, should naturally take the lowest place. And there are indications that in the earlier and simpler stages of society, the useful manual occupations did receive due honor. Roger Sherman, the signer of the Declaration of Independence, began life as a shoemaker; Nathaniel Greene, the foremost fig ure of the Revolution next to Washington, worked at the forge. But modern notions have made a wide departure from the primitive simplicity. The humble industry of the hands is no longer respected, for the paramount reason that it does not promise a sufficiently ready access to the coveted goal of suc cess in life. It is obvious to the common understanding that mere wages for the longest lifetime would go but little way to wards making one a millionaire: and the times when men went to the plough for a military chieftain to lead their armies to vic tory, have long since departed. A youth of spirit, now, scouts the idea of chaining himself to a handicraft for a livelihood. He would consider it a condescension were he to use it as a stepping stone to something more promising. The only thing that would reconcile him to such a temporary bondage, would be an as surance that, after a short term of service, he might emerge from the chrysalis of a journeyman into the full-grown glories of a superintendent, a contractor, or a manufacturer. It is true that there are unattractive, even forbidding features about the humbler mechanical callings. They are prosaic; they are laborious; they are looked down upon by the self -consti tuted arbiters of society. But all this would hardly weigh a feather with Young America, if those callings only held out the prospect of an easy grasp of the prizes of life. Carrying the hod is severe exercise for the muscles; it is not work which fine gentle men affect; but let it once be understood that the hod carrier has a better chance than the rest of mankind to make himself the master of the commercial palaces which his labor contributes to erect, and his occupation, toilsome, repulsive, servile as it is, would be overflowing with recruits. If you have a question of this, you need only recall the early times in California, when auri sacra fames was found potent enough to draw the whole pop ulation to the mines, and to reconcile alike members of the learned professions, soft-palmed clerks, and children of luxury, THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 179 to the roughest companionship, the fare of the forecastle, and the toil of the galley slave. The more pretending callings, where brain work counts rather than hand work; where not earnings but profits are to be realized, possess the greatest attractions. They are regarded as the keys to the very gates of success. So our stalwart, broad-shouldered young fellows with mediocre understandings, neglect the work for which Providence fitted them, in order to crowd into places which women could fill better. They spoil good blacksmiths to make poor clerks. They believe they have thus entered upon the highroad to the realization of their fondest desires. They wait but to catch a smattering of knowledge of business before they think themselves competent to make their own way; and put their raw incapacity in competition with the shrewdness and thorough training of the veterans of the profession. To such a contest there can be but one ending. Sooner or later self- confidence learns that the capacity to master double entry may not be equal to solve the more intricate problems of commerce and trade. The waters which looked so invitingly smooth to adventurous youth, promising a safe and pleasant voyage to the haven of prosperity, are found on experiment to be filled with perils that none but the skilful and wary pilot can avoid. And so nine out of ten of the young men who enter mercantile life in our cities are the victims of their ill-judged, inordinate long ing to lay hold on success, by attempting pursuits for which they are fitted neither by nature nor by education. The reluctance to give to the preparation for one s calling in life the time requisite to a thorough mastery of its principles and its details is one of the marked characteristics of our coun try and our time. It springs largely from the impatience to be up and doing for one s self the feeling that an unnecessary hour spent in acquiring a profession is a step lost in one s prog ress to profit and distinction. Moreover, no man in this country feels wedded to his occupation. If one thing does not suit, there is no reluctance, at any stage of life, to try another. And it seems like sheer waste of time to go through a protracted course of preparation for a business that may be abandoned in a twelve month. Hence the fashion of apprenticeship to trades, which is so 180 CHARLES HENRY BELL rigidly insisted on elsewhere, and was universally practised here a generation or two ago, has well-nigh gone out of use. The generous bequest of Franklin to the cities of his nativity and of his residence, of sums to be lent from time to time to young men who had served out a regular apprenticeship to artisans, to enable them to set up in business for themselves, has for a long time sought in vain for such loans; there have been, and are, no borrowers to be found answering the proper description. Our legal scribes would be puzzled now to draw an indenture of apprenticeship, the language of which was at the tongue s end of their grandfathers. To advise a lad of our time to serve seven long years of his minority as a preliminary to becoming the master of an establishment, would be an unprofitable expenditure of breath. Seven months would seem to him a long probation. But what is the consequence of this contempt for the useful mechanic arts, which thus relegates them to the tender mercies of the men who are left over, after the more popular lines of life are filled? The answer is to be seen all about us. In the days of our grandfathers the smithery and joinery were gems of neat and elegant workmanship. The craftsmen took a genuine pride in turning out perfect wares. By studying the traditions of his art, and by long and patient manipulation, he produced results which are the wonder and despair of his successors of to-day. Months of labor were sometimes expended on the wainscoting of a single room; weeks, in fitting a floor, like the building of Solo mon s Temple, without sound of axe or hammer, but so accur ately that it required a keen eye and close inspection to discern a joint or a seam. In the colonial days the houses were adorned with articles of furniture "built upon honor," as the expressive phrase was; which stand to-day, after a century has tested with heavy hand every joint and fastening, as firm and strong as on the day when they were cunningly put together. But now r that no long and careful training is considered need ful for our artisans, now that our ambitious young men have a soul above the plane and the anvil, it has become no easy task to find a skilful workman. We do indeed see in our shops an abundance of manufactures, beautiful to the eye, which simu late the work of former days. But long before the genuine an tiques shall lose their comeliness or their solidity, the glued and THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 181 varnished shams of our present degenerate age will be resolved into their original materials. Were it not that the unsurpassed ingenuity of our countrymen has invented machinery for fash ioning nearly every needed object in metals, wood, and leather, we should be in danger of having all to become Robinson Crusoes, and to fit up our dwellings with our own hands. These United States present the strange anomaly of the most ingenious peo ple on earth being more destitute than any other of mechanics capable of doing thoroughly the commonest work. Nor is it the humbler employments alone that are filled by persons without adequate qualification. The learned profes sions come in for their full share, also. It is the same pernicious anxiety to be making rapid strides towards success which gives us so large a proportion of lawyers whose assurance and incom petence make shipwreck of their clients interests; of physi cians who prescribe drugs of which they know little for diseases of which they know less; of ministers of the gospel whose sacred profession alone screens their ignorance and presumption from exposure and indignant reprobation. And incredible as it ought to be, these pretensions have not always been without the sanction of legal enactments. The legislature of our own State was once so blind as to pass a law which entitled every applicant arrived at his majority, and sustaining a good moral character, to be admitted to practise in the courts as an attorney, without requiring of him an hour s previous study. And even now, in a neighboring State it is understood that any man who chooses to assume the title of "doctor," upon obtaining the certificate of the municipal officers of the place of his residence to his good moral character, may by law enjoy the same standing in court to recover fees as a physician, as the best educated medical man in the land. I re joice to say, however, that this legislative premium on ignorance and incapacity in the learned professions, has long since passed off the statute book in the former case, and will undoubtedly produce mischief enough in due time, to ensure its own repeal, in the other. A sound character for morality so much relied upon by the modern Solons is indeed an admirable basis on which to rear high professional attainments, but is not always found to be a safe substitute for them. 182 CHARLES HENRY BELL It is curious to note how loose a hold many men have upon the occupations they profess, in our country. Because one has been bred to a particular calling, it is by no means to be inferred that he will make it his permanent dependence. Change is rather to be expected. And the mere circumstance that he has no acquaintance with a business, seems the least of all obstacles to his undertaking it. Nothing is more common than to meet with one who has tried his hand at half a dozen vocations; though, as might be expected, it is not usual to find that he has made much of a figure in any. From a boyhood spent on a farm, the transition is easy to a clerkship in a store, and then to the position of proprietor; and if failure ensue, as is very probable, there is nothing to prevent one from becoming an agent for life insurance, or a vender of patent medicines; and when all other shifts for a livelihood are exhausted there always remains the resource of the Great West, ready with capacious maw to receive and inwardly digest and happily assimilate those who fail to find their true sphere of action in the older settlements. The mischief we have thus far been considering, the products of the exaggerated estimate placed by our people upon the value of success in life, though some of them are serious enough, are not of a character to affect the moral soundness of the com munity. We can submit to be ridiculed for our devotion to busi ness; we can survive, though we sadly feel, the neglect of im portant duties which that devotion occasions. We could trust to time to teach our young people more sensible ideas of the respectability of manual labor; as well as to demonstrate the hopelessness of all men becoming Rothschilds. But there are consequences far more serious than any I have mentioned, which have their origin in the worship of success. It casts a glamour over the moral vision. It has the effect to warp the standard of judgment, and to break down the distinction between right and wrong on the mind. The tendency is for men to regard everything that belongs to the successful as intrinsi cally proper and right. It is a law of the human constitution for us to condone whatever is faulty in those we admire; and only the rigid application of the rule of right will enable the sternest moralist to divest himself of such partiality. It is too much to expect of the great mass of mankind that THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 183 they should exercise so strict a censorship over their inclinations. To them the man who has succeeded is worthy of all admira tion; therefore admirable are all his qualities and appurtenances. His excellences, viewed through a magnifying medium, seem gigantic, like objects looming through a mountain mist; and e en his failings lean on virtue s side. Success, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. In like manner success lends its own coloring to the processes by which it has been attained. The Jesuitical maxim that the end sanctifies the means, applies here with full force. The glare of the rocket lights up the whole pathway that it has traversed. The vender of a quack nostrum, and the most learned master of the healing art; the pettifogger of the criminal courts, and the chancellor in his spotless ermine, when once the magic doors of success have opened to receive them, are blended into a com mon category; their antecedents sink out of view, and we for get the contrasts of their past in the kindred splendors of their present. Worse than this, callings the most demoralizing and perni cious in their tendency, are treated with tolerance and even clothed with a fictitious respectability, when they have con ducted to opulence and power. Speculation in stocks or in merchandise is one of the great sources of fortune. It does not necessarily involve any moral wrong. Scrupulous men, indeed, might prefer business which has more of utility and less of hazard attending it. But where one fairly risks his property on chances which are alike open to all, he cannot be said to be dishonest. But the heroes of the stock market and of the wheat exchange are not content to encounter the normal risks of trade. They cog their dice. They operate with resources that give them knowledge and power that others cannot have. They extort their gains from the necessities which they themselves impose upon their victims. The parties with whom they deal have no possible chance in their favor. The outcome of the operation is involved in no more uncertainty than the result of a sum in arithmetic. How much better is speculation of this kind than robbery on the highway? Dick Turpin, who plundered travellers on Houn- slow Heath, expiated his offences on the scaffold, but there was 184 CHARLES HENRY BELL a rude manliness in his crimes. He met his. victims on equal terms; they bore weapons as well as he; he risked his life when he rifled their purses. But the dishonest speculator the mod ern highwayman strips his victims in cowardly security. He is armed in proof, and they are utterly defenceless. There is neither honesty, manliness nor mercy in him. If he confined his depredations to his rivals of the street, his offence would be more pardonable; but every "corner" that is made in shares or in merchandise, takes money that can be ill spared from the pockets of the indigent the widow and the orphan. What treatment does the world give these spoilers of the com munity, these "honorable men" who fatten on the misfortunes of others? Does society shut its doors in their faces? Do people treat them as outlaws refuse to deal with them or to recog nize them? Far from it. Their magnificent dinners are eaten by the elite of the land; men of character doff their hats when they meet them in the street; the religious world accept the churches they build and the theological foundations they en dow, and utter no lisp of disapproval. Is it any wonder, then, that the great bulk of the community, witnessing the cordial recognition extended to these freebooters by those who should be the arbiters of morals, forget the flagrancy of their conduct, and learn to practise that all-too-easy lesson, that everything is to be forgiven to success. No offence committed by man is more sordid, and admits of less palliation than that of ministering, for the sake of gain, to another s appetite for strong drink. The sharper deprives us of our property only; the seller of intoxicating liquor takes prop erty, and health, and character; everything that man should hold most dear. He turns robust health into premature old age; he reduces industry and capacity to idleness and beggary; he changes man, created in the image of his Maker, into a brute, with but a single instinct remaining. How can we regard one who works such havoc with fair humanity but with loathing unutterable? Yet it is not upon the poor degraded wretches who with their own hands serve the waters of destruction to the victims of an unquenchable thirst, for a few pitiful coppers, that the woes and crimes of intemperance must rest. They are irresponsible un- THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 185 derlings, who know no better. We must go to the fountain head of the iniquity to the men who produce, and the men who dispense by wholesale, the supplies which make willing captives of the bodies and souls of the multitude of human beings, who but for that might lead lives of usefulness and respectability. These wholesale sinners have not the excuse of the others; they do know better. Their business demands of them superior in telligence and capacity, and they possess them. It is they who are to be held accountable for all that they do, by their own or by others hands, to destroy the health, paralyze the will, ob scure the reason, deaden the moral sense of their fellow-crea tures, and send them to a death which has no solitary ray of consolation. Woe to him that giveth his neighbor drink, said a wise man of old. But what says modern society? If the ruinous draft is only dealt out in barrels instead of glasses, if it brings in returns of tens of thousands of dollars, instead of paltry dimes, then the character of the act is changed. The manufacturers and dealers on a great scale are not to be put on a par with bar-tenders and saloon-keepers. They are successful; therefore though their victims are numbered by thousands, though they have filled the land with mourning, they have the odor of respectability, and their names are not to be uttered save with due regard and honor. I need not dwell upon other ways in w r hich the public con science is debauched by the deference which men pay to suc cessful violators of the moral and the civil code. The great power aggregated in corporate enterprises has encouraged bold and unscrupulous officials to do with impunity, and even with eclat, deeds which honor and honesty blush at. The temptations of political advancement have lured others to acts of corruption in our times, which shame the days of Walpole. But however much men would shrink from the acts, they rarely shrink from the doers of them. They hold their heads among the foremost, for their ventures, though hazardous and unlawful, were suc cessful. In short, the motto "Success is the test of merit," if not openly proclaimed, is practically acted on in the community. But enticing as it is to the youthful ear, it is fatally misleading. In truth success is not even the test of capacity. There are so 186 CHARLES HENRY BELL many contingencies which prevent the ablest from reaching the places of their aspirations; so many cases where the strong de cline to enter the lists for the life s prizes, and content themselves with the honorable private station, without a wish to figure upon the broader stage, so large a proportion of instances in which mere shallowness and audacity have been flung into prominence, like scum rising to the surface of the boiling cauldron, that it cannot be contended for a moment that success and ability go hand in hand. The battle of American life is assuredly not al ways to the strong. Still less does success imply merit. A glance over the country will convince the most skeptical that there is a greater propor tion of the disciples of James Fisk the lawless, than of Peter Cooper the philanthropist, in the ranks of the successful. It is hard for the multitude to conceive that the men whose lives are popularly denominated failures, are often entitled to more credit than the majority of the successful. A man of education and mental force chooses to make his home in a remote country village; with powers that would place him among the notables of the metropolis, and win him distinction not limited to a single hemisphere, he yet prefers to concentrate his interests and his life labors on the community in which he dwells. Content with little, with few anxieties, he can bestow all the treasures of his mind and heart upon the narrow circle to which he is a teacher and an exemplar. Instead of startling the world with the erratic and useless brilliancy of a meteor, his course is a steady light, which guides those within the sphere of its illumi nation to wisdom and contentment. Such a life was that of the brother of Thomas Hughes, a learned scholar, an accomplished gentleman, a genuine philan thropist. He devoted himself to the improvement of the hum ble folk about him, and his beneficent influence will be felt for generations to come. In the superficial, worldly sense he was not successful, for he gained none of the rewards that most men prize and strive for. But measured by the higher standard, how beautiful, how wholesome, how useful a career was his! How marked a contrast it presents to the troubled and fevered ex istence of the seeker after success; who, blind to the rich pos sibilities which Providence has placed within his reach, strains THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 187, his vision to behold distant glories, which may never be his, and even if attained, yield no substantial satisfaction. Far be it from me to utter one word in disparagement of a proper ambi tion. It is the force that keeps the world from stagnating. It has created the foremost names in science, in literature, and in art. It has promoted all the great movements for the advance ment of the human race. Without its elevating power it might almost be said that man would still be a dweller in caves, a com panion of the brutes. Ambition has helped forward many a grand and noble work, but it has also done foul injury and wrong. It has led to wars, wasteful destruction of property and wanton, wicked expenditure of life; to duplicity, intrigue, and falsehood; to the imprisonment and execution of some of the noblest of God s creatures, and to the elevation to places of power of some of the meanest and most worthless. There are ambitions noble, and ambitions ignoble. And while the passion for merely heaping up money, and for acquiring power to be wielded for selfish ends, is unworthy of a reasonable creature, the resolute desire to be useful and to leave the world better than we found it, is a duty. It may lead to high stations, commanding a wide influence, with labors and responsibilities proportionally extended; or it may carry one into a quiet eddy in life s stream, where he is free from the whirl and rush of the mighty current. One s duty may be as fully and as usefully per formed in the one position as in the other. The business of the world is to be carried on by many hands. We must have our leaders of tens as well as our leaders of thousands; nay, we need them more, and more of them. I have thus pointed out certain ills which are traceable more or less directly to success-worship in our land. Some of them are trivial, but yet were better dispensed with; others are mischiev ous, and ought to be extirpated with unsparing hand. It would be a consolation if we could feel that they were mending with time, but each succeeding year seems rather to add to their growth, and they were never more extended or fuller of evil portent than now. The public perception has become so warped and obscured by indulgence in this national foible, that like a faulty glass it distorts the objects seen through it, quite out of their true proportions. Petty matters occupy the whole field 188 CHARLES HENRY BELL of vision to the exclusion of those of real moment. Things of evil repute seem clothed in the garb of honesty and respecta bility. The need of some countervailing agency is urgent. The im portance of curing this epidemic of moral astigmatism cannot be overestimated. The illusions which have taken possession of our countrymen must be dispelled, and the problem of life must be studied from a fresh standpoint, so that its condition and possibilities shall assume their true relations. So long as success is the highest ideal which is recognized, men will value and seek it as the greatest good. Convince them that there are better and worthier objects to strive for, and you have gained the first step towards forcing them from their hallucination. And when success shall lose its hold on their ambition, it will cease to mis lead their moral judgment. Under the shadow of the walls of this venerable seat of learning we cannot hesitate whither we are to turn for the sorely needed help. There is a class of society whose training and attainments peculiarly fit them to work out this great deliverance. I refer of course to the educated class, to so many of whom I have the honor to address myself to-day. It is to you that your less favored countrymen naturally and rightfully turn for direction and guidance. None others are so capable as you to undertake the needed reform of public opinion. Your studies and mental poise and discipline have freed you from the popular proclivity to overvalue the objects of a sordid ambition, and have qualified you to weigh in impartial scales the worth of the various ends for which lives are spent; and from your lips instruction and argument fall with double weight. Teach your countrymen by your precept and example that while industry and attention to affairs are commendable, yet it is a poor and profitless existence which sacrifices all public duties, all culture, all social delights to the worship of mammon. The well-balanced life must embrace the whole round of human interests, responsibilities, gratifications. To pass through a world full of noble employments and rational pleasures without partaking of them or even being sensible of their existence, were punishment worse than the fabled tantalization of the nether sphere. THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS 189 The dignity of all honest labor is a lesson specially worthy of being impressed on the popular mind. A false pride induces our youth to look down on the plough and the work-shop. But there was more true elevation and respectability in the occupation of Elihu Burritt, blacksmith and linguist, than in the grovelling pursuit of success in which a horde of those who esteem them selves far above his level, are wasting life s golden opportunities, and squandering the powers that ought to be applied to better purposes. We need muscle in this world not less than we need brains. The arm to execute is fully as important a factor in modern civilization as the head to contrive. Neither can dis pense with the help of the other; neither has the right to claim the precedence of the other. They are twin forces, indispens able to the accomplishment of the growing demands of progres sive humanity. Alike but different, side by side they march in the van of all that serves, and beautifies, and ennobles the life of man; and so they deserve to be held in equal honor. It is not the sphere of one s work, but the work one does in his sphere, that determines his rank as a benefactor of the world. Act well your part; there all the honor lies. When a high officer in a neighboring State was reproached with having been a drum mer boy, "And didn t I drum well?" was his answer. If he did his duty in his station, no matter how humble the station was. And to do one s duty there must be preparation. Not often do men enter a profession armed cap-a-pie for its conflicts as Minerva sprang from the head of Jove. Patrick Henry indeed, though never a student, is said to have produced a maiden speech worthy of a veteran orator; but nature yields but one Patrick Henry in a generation. Ordinary persons must have schooling. We should see better work done in every depart ment of industry, physical and intellectual, if a thorough train ing were held indispensable to the privilege of practising each trade and profession. The educated class are under a special responsibility in rela tion to the moral influence exerted by successful men. If it were not that the occupants of leading positions in the community set the example of shutting their eyes to the sins of success, the great body of the people would not be so blind to them. You 190 CHARLES HENRY BELL who know the wrong and yet the wrong pursue, cannot wonder that those with less discrimination and feebler judgment should confound the wrong with the right. Let your teachings be un mistakable that no witchery of success can change the essential nature of things; that a knave is no less a knave though on the acme of prosperity, and an honest man is worthy of all respect though poverty be his sole possession; that no wealth or place can gild a bad character or a vile action. Make the same distinction in your public speech and de meanor, that you cannot fail to make in your private con science. If you set the example of honest dealing in your charac terization of others, you will be at no loss for followers : thank God, there is never any lack of volunteers in our country, when a manly or a courageous act is to be done. What a radical readjustment of society would be presented if each true leader of public sentiment were to shape his conduct towards the usurpers of the uppermost places, in conformity with his inward convictions! How many a self-sufficient no body, lifted by a caprice of fortune into factious importance, would subside into his native insignificance; how many a man of goodly seeming, but a knave at heart, would be cast down from the pedestal which success has reared for him, and would resume his proper place among paltry scoundrels! Pretension, meanness, dishonesty, would then be stripped of their borrowed plumage, and stand before mankind in their naked deformity. The Tweeds would be seen in their true colors in the palmy days of their triumph, exactly as in the retributive hour when justice clothes them in the felon s garb. Character would then resume its legitimate ascendency in the estimation of men success would cease to cast its baleful spell over the understanding of our people; and American so ciety, regenerated, purified, and elevated, would justify the proudest anticipations of the founders of the model republic. Educated men and women ! If this country is to be freed from false pride, freed from ignorant pretensions and unworthy am bitions, freed from the moral obliquity that springs from the Worship of Success, it is your duty, and it will be your glory, to accomplish its enfranchisement. THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC BY WENDELL PHILLIPS Delivered before the Alpha of Massachusetts, at Harvard College, June 30, 1881. A HUNDRED years ago our society was planted a slip from the older root in Virginia. The parent seed, tradition says, was French, part of that conspiracy for free speech whose leaders prated democracy in the salons, while they carefully held on to the flesh-pots of society by crouching low to kings and their mistresses, and whose final object of assault was Christianity itself. Voltaire gave the watchword, "Crush the wretch." "Ecrasez Vinfame" No matter how much or how little truth there may be in the tradition : no matter what was the origin or what was the object of our society, if it had any special one, both are long since for gotten. We stand now simply a representative of free, brave, American scholarship. I emphasize American scholarship. In one of those glowing, and as yet unequalled pictures which Everett drew for us, here and elsewhere, of Revolutionary scenes, I remember his saying, that the independence we then won, if taken in its literal and narrow sense, was of no interest and little value; but, construed in the fulness of its real meaning, it bound us to a distinctive American character and purpose, to a keen sense of large responsibility, and to a generous self-devotion. It is under the shadow of such unquestioned authority that I use the term "American scholarship." Our society was, no doubt, to some extent, a protest against the sombre theology of New England, where, a hundred years ago, the atmosphere was black with sermons, and where religious speculation beat uselessly against the narrowest limits. The first generation of Puritans though Lowell does let Cromwell call them "a small colony of pinched fanatics" in cluded some men, indeed not a few, worthy to walk close to 192 WENDELL PHILLIPS Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane was in my judgment the noblest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown. But Vane dwells an arrow s flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato "all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand years": so you can find in Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years of American civilization, with no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fenelon kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Mar shall possible; like Carnot, he organized victory; and Milton pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen preeminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serene faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other men we walk back ward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying reverently, Remember the temptation and the age." But Vane s ermine has no stain; no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in thought he stands abreast of our age, like pure intellect, belongs to all time. Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth heeding, "Young men, close your Byron, and open your Goethe." If my counsel had weight in these halls, I should say, "Young men, close your John Winthrop and Washington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir Harry Vane." The generation that knew Vane gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple pledge, Veritas. But the narrowness and poverty of colonial life soon starved out this element. Harvard was rededicated Christo et Ecclesiae; and, up to the middle of the last century, free thought in religion meant Charles Chauncy and the Brattle Street Church protest, while free thought hardly existed anywhere else. But a single generation changed all this. A hundred years ago there were pulpits that led the popular movement; while outside of religion and of what called itself literature, industry and a jealous sense THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 193 of personal freedom obeyed, in their rapid growth, the law of their natures. English common sense and those municipal insti tutions born of the common law, and which had saved and shel tered it, grew inevitably too large for the eggshell of English dependence, and allowed it to drop off as naturally as the chick does when she is ready. There was no change of law, nothing that could properly be called revolution, only noiseless growth, the seed bursting into flower, infancy becoming man hood. It was life, in its omnipotence, rending whatever dead matter confined it. So have I seen the tiny weeds of a luxuriant Italian spring upheave the colossal foundations of the Caesars palace, and leave it a mass of ruins. But when the veil was withdrawn, what stood revealed aston ished the world. It showed the undreamt power, the serene strength, of simple manhood, free from the burden and restraint of absurd institutions in Church and State. The grandeur of this new Western constellation gave courage to Europe, result ing in the French Revolution, the greatest, the most unmixed, the most unstained and wholly perfect blessing Europe has had in modern times, unless we may possibly except the Reforma tion, and the invention of printing. What precise effect that giant wave had when it struck our shore we can only guess. History is, for the most part, an idle amusement, the day-dream of pedants and triflers. The details of events, the actors motives, and their relation to each other, are buried with them. How impossible to learn the exact truth of what took place yesterday under your next neighbor s roof! Yet we complacently argue and speculate about matters a thousand miles off, and a thousand years ago, as if we knew them. When I was a student here, my favorite study was his tory. The world and affairs have shown me that one half of history is loose conjecture, and much of the rest is the writer s opinion. But most men see facts, not with their eyes, but with their prejudices. Any one familiar with courts will testify how rare it is for an honest man to give a perfectly correct account of a transaction. We are tempted to see facts as we think they ought to be, or wish they were. And yet journals are the favor ite original sources of history. Tremble, my good friend, if your sixpenny -neighbor keeps a journal. "It adds a new terror 194 WENDELL PHILLIPS to death." You shall go down to your children not in your fair lineaments and proportions, but with the smirks, elbows, and angles he sees you with. Journals are excellent to record the depth of the last snow and the date when the Mayflower opens; but when you come to men s motives and characters, journals are the magnets that get near the chronometer of history and make all its records worthless. You can count on the fingers of your two hands all the robust minds that ever kept journals. Only milksops and fribbles indulge in that amusement, except now and then a respectable mediocrity. One such journal night mares New England annals, emptied into history by respectable middle-aged gentlemen, who fancy that narrowness and spleen, like poor wine, mellow into truth when they get to be a century old. But you might as well cite the Daily Advertiser of 1850 as authority on one of Garrison s actions. And, after all, of what value are these minutiae? Whether Luther s zeal was partly kindled by lack of gain from the sale of indulgences, whether Boston rebels were half smugglers and half patriots, what matters it now? Enough that he meant to wrench the gag from Europe s lips, and that they were content to suffer keenly, that we might have an untrammelled career. We can only hope to discover the great currents and massive forces which have shaped our lives: all else is trying to solve a problem of whose elements we know nothing. As the poet his torian of the last generation says so plaintively, "History comes like a beggarly gleaner in the field, after Death, the great lord of the domain, has gathered the harvest, and lodged it in his garner, which no man may open." But we may safely infer that French debate and experience broadened and encouraged our fathers. To that we undoubtedly owe, in some degree, the theoretical perfection, ingrafted on English practical sense and old forms, which marks the founda tion of our republic. English civil life, up to that time, grew largely out of custom, rested almost wholly on precedent. For our model there was no authority in the record, no precedent on the file; unless you find it, perhaps, partially, in that Long Par liament bill with which Sir Harry Vane would have outgener- alled Cromwell, if the shameless soldier had not crushed it with his muskets. THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 195 Standing on Saxon foundations, and inspired, perhaps, in some degree, by Latin example, we have done what no race, no nation, no age, had before dared even to try. We have founded a republic on the unlimited suffrage of the millions. We have actually worked out the problem that man, as God created him, may be trusted with self-government. We have shown the world that a church without a bishop, and a state without a king, is an actual, real, every-day possibility. Look back over the history of the race: where will you find a chapter that pre cedes us in that achievement? Greece had her republics, but they were the republics of a few freemen and subjects and many slaves; and "the battle of Marathon was fought by slaves, un chained from the doorposts of their masters houses." Italy had her republics: they were the republics of wealth and skill and family, limited and aristocratic. The Swiss republics were groups of cousins. Holland had her republic, a republic of guilds and landholders, trusting the helm of state to property and education. And all these, which, at their best, held but a million or two within their narrow limits, have gone down in the ocean of time. A hundred years ago our fathers announced this sublime, and, as it seemed then, foolhardy declaration, that God intended all men to be free and equal, all men, without restriction, without qualification, without limit. A hundred years have rolled away since that venturous declaration; and to-day, with a territory that joins ocean to ocean, with fifty millions of people, with two wars behind her, with the grand achievement of having grappled with the fearful disease that threatened her central Me, and broken four millions of fetters, the great republic, stronger than ever, launches into the second century of her existence. The history of the world has no such chapter in its breadth, its depth, its significance, or its bearing on future history. W r hat Wycliffe did for religion, Jefferson and Sam Adams did for the state, they trusted it to the people. He gave the masses the Bible, the right to think. Jefferson and Sam Adams gave them the ballot, the right to rule. His intrepid advance con templated theirs^as its natural, inevitable result. Their serene faith completed the gift which the Anglo-Saxon race makes to humanity. We have not only established a new measure of the 196 WENDELL PHILLIPS possibilities of the race: we have laid on strength, wisdom, and skill a new responsibility. Grant that each man s relations to God and his neighbor are exclusively his own concern, and that he is entitled to all the aid that will make him the best judge of these relations; that the people are the source of all power, and their measureless capacity the lever of all progress; their sense of right the court of final appeal in civil affairs; the institutions they create the only ones any power has a right to impose; that the attempt of one class to prescribe the law, the religion, the morals, or the trade of another is both unjust and harmful, and the Wycliffe and Jefferson of history mean this if they mean anything, then, when, in 1867, Parliament doubled the Eng lish franchise, Robert Lowe was right in affirming, amid the cheers of the House, "Now the first interest and duty of every Englishman is to educate the masses our masters." Then, whoever sees farther than his neighbor is that neighbor s servant to lift him to such higher level. Then, power, ability, influence, character, virtue, are only trusts with which to serve our time. We all agree in the duty of scholars to help those less favored in life, and that this duty of scholars to educate the mass is still more imperative in a republic, since a republic trusts the state wholly to the intelligence and moral sense of the people. The experience of the last forty years shows every man that law has no atom of strength, either in Boston or New Orleans, unless, and only so far as, public opinion indorses it, and that your life, goods, and good name rest on the moral sense, self-respect, and law-abiding mood of the men that walk the streets, and hardly a whit on the provisions of the statute-book. Come, any one of you, outside of the ranks of popular men, and you will not fail to find it so. Easy men dream that we live under a government of law. Absurd mistake! we live under a government of men and newspapers. Your first attempt to stem dominant and keenly-cherished opinions will reveal this to you. But what is education? Of course it is not book-learning. Book-learning does not make five per cent of that mass of com mon sense that " runs" the world, transacts its business, secures its progress, trebles its power over nature, works out in the long run a rough average justice, wears away the world s restraints, and lifts off its burdens. The ideal Yankee, w r ho "has more THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 197 brains in his hand than others have in their skulls, * is not a scholar; and two-thirds of the inventions that enable France to double the world s sunshine, and make Old and New England the workshops of the world, did not come from colleges or from minds trained in the schools of science, but struggled up, forcing their way against giant obstacles, from the irrepressible instinct of untrained natural power. Her workshops, not her colleges, made England, for a while, the mistress of the world; and the hardest job her workman had was to make Oxford willing he should work his wonders. So of moral gains. As shrewd an observer as Governor Marcy of New York often said he cared nothing for the whole press of the seaboard, representing wealth and education (he meant book-learning), if it set itself against the instincts of the people. Lord Brougham, in a remarkable comment on the life of Romilly, enlarges on the fact that the great reformer of the penal law found all the legislative and all the judicial power of England, its colleges and its bar, marshalled against him, and owed his success, as all such reforms do, says his lordship, to public meet ings and popular instinct. It would be no exaggeration to say that government itself began in usurpation, in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest; that liberty and civili zation are only fragments of rights wrung from the strong hands of wealth and book-learning. Almost all the great truths relating to society were not the result of scholarly meditation, hiving up wisdom with each curious year," but have been first heard in the solemn protests of martyred patriotism and the loud cries of crushed and starving labor. When common sense and the com mon people have stereotyped a principle into a statute, then bookmen come to explain how it was discovered and on what ground it rests. The world makes history, and scholars write it, one half truly, and the other half as their prejudices blur and distort it. New England learned more of the principles of toleration from a lyceum committee doubting the dicta of editors and bishops when they forbade it to put Theodore Parker on its platform; more from a debate whether the Anti-Slavery cause should be so far countenanced as to invite one of its advocates to lecture; from Sumner and Emerson, George William Curtis, 198 WENDELL PHILLIPS and Edwin Whipple, refusing to speak unless a negro could buy his way into their halls as freely as any other, New England has learned more from these lessons than she has or could have done from all the treatises on free printing from Milton and Roger Williams, through Locke, down to Stuart Mill. Selden, the profoundest scholar of his day, affirmed, "No man is wiser for his learning"; and that was only an echo of the Saxon proverb, " No fool is a perfect fool until he learns Latin." Bancroft says of our fathers, that "the wildest theories of the human reason were reduced to practice by a community so humble that no statesman condescended to notice it, and a legislation without precedent was produced off-hand by the instincts of the people." And Wordsworth testifies that, while German schools might well blush for their subserviency, "A few strong instincts and a few plain rules, Among the herdsmen of the Alps, have wrought More for mankind at this unhappy day Than all the pride of intellect and thought." Wycliffe was, no doubt, a learned man. But the learning of his day would have burned him, had it dared, as it did burn his dead body afterward. Luther and Melanchthon were scholars, but were repudiated by the scholarship of their time, which fol lowed Erasmus, trying "all his life to tread on eggs without breaking them"; he who proclaimed that "peaceful error was better than tempestuous truth." What would college-graduate Seward weigh, in any scale, against Lincoln bred in affairs? Hence I do not think the greatest things have been done for the world by its bookmen. Education is not the chips of arith metic and grammar, nouns, verbs, and the multiplication table; neither is it that last year s almanac of dates, or series of lies agreed upon, which we so often mistake for history. Education is not Greek and Latin and the air-pump. Still, I rate at its full value the training we get in these walls. Though what we actually carry away is little enough, we do get some training of our powers, as the gymnast or the fencer does of his muscles : we go hence also with such general knowledge of what mankind has agreed to consider proved and settled, that we know where to reach for the weapon when we need it. I have often thought the motto prefixed to his college library THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 199 catalogue by the father of the late Professor Peirce, Professor Peirce, the largest natural genius, the man of the deepest reach and firmest grasp and widest sympathy, that God has given to Harvard in our day, whose presence made you the loftiest peak and farthest outpost of more than mere scientific thought, the magnet who, with his twin Agassiz, made Harvard for forty years the intellectual Mecca of forty States, his father s catalogue bore for a motto, "Scire ubi aliquid invenias magna pars eruditionis est;" and that always seemed to me to gauge very nearly all we acquired at college, except facility in the use of our powers. Our influence in the community does not really spring from superior attainments, but from this thorough train ing of faculties, and more even, perhaps, from the deference men accord to us. Gibbon says we have two educations, one from teachers, and the other we give ourselves. This last is the real and only edu cation of the masses, one gotten from life, from affairs, from earning one s bread; necessity, the mother of invention; respon sibility, that teaches prudence, and inspires respect for right. Mark the critic out of office: how reckless hi assertion, how care less of consequences; and then the caution, forethought, and fair play of the same man charged with administration. See that young, thoughtless wife suddenly widowed; how wary and skil ful ! what ingenuity in guarding her child and saving his rights ! Any one who studied Europe forty or fifty years ago could not but have marked the level of talk there, far below that of our masses. It was of crops and rents, markets and marriages, scan dal and fun. Watch men here, and how often you listen to the keenest discussions of right and wrong, this leader s honesty, that party s justice, the fairness of this law, the impolicy of that measure; lofty, broad topics, training morals, widening views. Niebuhr said of Italy, sixty years ago, "No one feels himself a citizen. Not only are the people destitute of hope, but they have not even wishes touching the world s affairs; and hence all the springs of great and noble thoughts are choked up." In this sense the Fremont campaign of 1856 taught Americans more than a hundred colleges; and John Brown s pulpit at Harper s Ferry was equal to any ten thousand ordinary chairs. God lifted a million of hearts to his gibbet, as the Roman cross 200 WENDELL PHILLIPS lifted a world to itself in that divine sacrifice of two thousand years ago. As much as statesmanship had taught in our pre vious eighty years, that one week of intellectual watching and weighing and dividing truth taught twenty millions of people. Yet how little, brothers, can we claim for bookmen in that uprising and growth of 1856! And while the first of American scholars could hardly find, in the rich vocabulary of Saxon scorn, words enough to express, amid the plaudits of his class, his loathing and contempt for John Brown, Europe thrilled to him as proof that our institutions had not lost all their native and distinctive life. She had grown tired of our parrot note and cold moonlight reflection of older civilizations. Lansdowne and Brougham could confess to Sumner that they had never read a page of their contemporary, Daniel Webster; and you spoke to vacant eyes when you named Prescott, fifty years ago, to aver age Europeans; while Vienna asked, with careless indifference, "Seward, who is he?" But long before our ranks marched up State Street to the John Brown song, the banks of the Seine and of the Danube hailed the new life which had given us another and nobler Washington. Lowell foresaw him when forty years ago he sang of, "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold sways the future: And behind the dim unknown Standeth God, within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own." And yet the bookmen, as a class, have not yet acknowledged him. It is here that letters betray their lack of distinctive American character. Fifty million of men God gives us to mould; burn ing questions, keen debate, great interests trying to vindicate their right to be, sad wrongs brought to the bar of public judg ment, these are the people s schools. Timid scholarship either shrinks from sharing in these agitations, or denounces them as vulgar and dangerous interference by incompetent hands with matters above them. A chronic distrust of the people pervades the book-educated class of the North; they shrink from that free speech which is God s normal school for educating men, throw- THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 201 ing upon them the grave responsibility of deciding great ques tions, and so lifting them to a higher level of intellectual and moral life. Trust the people the wise and the ignorant, the good and the bad with the gravest questions, and in the end you educate the race. At the same time you secure, not perfect institutions, not necessarily good ones, but the best institutions possible while human nature is the basis and the only material to build with. Men are educated and the state uplifted by allow ing all every one to broach all their mistakes and advocate all then* errors. The community that will not protect its most ignorant and unpopular member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves ! Anacharsis went into the Archon s court at Athens, heard a case argued by the great men of that city, and saw the vote by five hundred men. Walking in the streets, some one asked him, "What do you think of Athenian liberty?" "I think," said he, "wise men argue cases, and fools decide them." Just what that timid scholar, two thousand years ago, said in the streets of Athens, that which calls itself scholarship here says to-day of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions and fools decide them. But that Athens where fools decided the gravest questions of policy and of right and wrong, where prop erty you had gathered wearily to-day might be wrung from you by the caprice of the mob to-morrow, that very Athens probably secured, for its era, the greatest amount of human happiness and nobleness; -in vented art, and -sounded for us the depths of philosophy. God lent to it the largest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain peaks of the Old World : while Egypt, the hunker conservative of antiq uity, where nobody dared to differ from the priest or to be wiser than his grandfather; where men pretended to be alive, though swaddled in the grave-clothes of creed and custom as close as their mummies were in linen, that Egypt is hid in the tomb it inhabited, and the intellect Athens has trained for us digs to-day those ashes to find out how buried and forgotten hunkerism lived and acted. I knew a signal instance of this disease of scholar s distrust, and the cure was as remarkable. In boyhood and early life I was honored with the friendship of Lothrop Motley. He grew 202 WENDELL PHILLIPS up in the thin air of Boston provincialism, and pined on such weak diet. I remember sitting with him once in the State House when he was a member of our Legislature. With biting words and a keen crayon he sketched the ludicrous points in the minds and persons of his fellow-members, and, tearing up the pictures, said scornfully, "What can become of a country with such fellows as these making its laws? No safe investments; your good name lied away any hour, and little worth keeping if it were not." In vain I combated the folly. He went to Europe, spent four or five years. I met him the day he landed, on his return. As if our laughing talk in the State House had that moment ended, he took my hand with the sudden exclamation, "You were all right: I was all wrong! It is a country worth dying for; better still, worth living and working for, to make it all it can be!" Europe made him one of the most American of all Americans. Some five years later, when he sounded that bugle-note in his letter to the London Times, some critics who knew his early mood, but not its change, suspected there might be a taint of ambition in what they thought so sudden a conver sion. I could testify that the mood was five years old: years before the slightest shadow of political expectation had dusked the clear mirror of his scholar life. This distrust shows itself in the growing dislike of universal suffrage, and the efforts to destroy it made of late by all our easy classes. The white South hates universal suffrage; the so-called cultivated North distrusts it. Journal and college, social-science convention and the pulpit, discuss the propriety of restraining it. Timid scholars tell their dread of it. Carlyle, that bundle of sour prejudices, flouts universal suffrage with a blasphemy that almost equals its ignorance. See his words: "Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ." No democracy ever claimed that the vote of ignorance and crime was as good in any sense as that of wisdom and virtue. It only asserts that crime and ignorance have the same right to vote that virtue has. Only by allowing that right, and so appealing to their sense of justice, and throwing upon them the burden of their full responsibility, can we hope ever to raise crime and ignorance to the level of self-respect. The right to choose your governor rests on precisely the same foundation THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 203 as the right to choose your religion; and no more arrogant or ignorant arraignment of all that is noble in the civil and religious Europe of the last five hundred years ever came from the triple crown on the Seven Hills than this sneer of the bigot Scotsman. Protestantism holds up its hands in holy horror, and tells us that the Pope scoops out the brains of his churchmen, saying, "I ll think for you: you need only obey." But the danger is, you meet such popes far away from the Seven Hills; and it is some times difficult at first to recognize them, for they do not by any means always wear the triple crown. Evarts and his committee, appointed to inquire why the New York City government is a failure, were not wise enough, or did not dare, to point out the real cause, the tyranny of that tool of the demagogue, the corner grog-shop; but they advised taking away the ballot from the poor citizen. But this provision would not reach the evil. Corruption does not so much rot the masses: it poisons Congress. Credit Mobilier and money rings are not housed under thatched roofs: they flaunt at the Capitol. As usual in chemistry, the scum floats uppermost. The railway king disdained canvassing for voters: "It is cheaper," he said, "to buy legislatures." It is not the masses who have most disgraced our political annals. I have seen many mobs between the seaboard and the Mississippi. I never saw or heard of any but well-dressed mobs, assembled and countenanced, if not always led in person, by respectability and what called itself education. That unrivalled scholar, the first and greatest New England ever lent to Con gress, signalled his advent by quoting the original Greek of the New Testament in support of slavery, and offering to shoulder his musket in its defence; and forty years later the last professor who went to quicken and lift the moral mood of those halls is found advising a plain, blunt, honest witness to forge and lie, that this scholarly reputation might be saved from wreck. Singu lar comment on Landor s sneer, that there is a spice of the scoundrel in most of our literary men. But no exacting level of property qualification for a vote would have saved those stains. In those cases Judas did not come from the unlearned class. Grown gray over history, Macaulay prophesied twenty years 204 WENDELL PHILLIPS ago that soon in these States the poor, worse than another inroad of Goths and Vandals, would begin a general plunder of the rich. It is enough to say that our national funds sell as well in Europe as English consols; and the universal-suffrage Union can borrow money as cheaply as Great Britain, ruled, one half by Tories, and the other half by men not certain that they dare call themselves Whigs. Some men affected to scoff at democracy as no sound basis for national debt, doubting the payment of ours. Europe not only wonders at its rapid payment, but the only taint of fraud that touches even the hem of our garment is the fraud of the capitalist cunningly adding to its burdens, and increasing unfairly the value of his bonds; not the first hint from the people of repudiating an iota even of its unjust additions. Yet the poor and the unlearned class is the one they propose to punish by disfranchisement. No wonder the humbler class looks on the whole scene with alarm. They see their dearest right in peril. When the easy class conspires to steal, what wonder the humbler class draws together to defend itself? True, universal suffrage is a terrible power; and, with all the great cities brought into subjection to the dangerous classes by grog, and Congress sitting to register the decrees of capital, both sides may well dread the next move. Experience proves that popular governments are the best pro tectors of life and property. But suppose they were not, Bancroft allows that "the fears of one class are no measure of the rights of another." Suppose that universal suffrage endangered peace and threat ened property. There is something more valuable than wealth, there is something more sacred than peace. As Humboldt says, "The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is a man." To ripen, lift, and educate a man is the first duty. Trade, law, learning, science, and religion are only the scaffolding where with to build a man. Despotism looks down into the poor man s cradle, and knows it can crush resistance and curb ill-will. Democracy sees the ballot in that baby-hand; and selfishness bids her put integrity on one side of those baby footsteps and intelligence on the other, lest her own hearth be in peril. Thank God for His method of taking bonds of wealth and culture to share all their blessings with the humblest soul He gives to their THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 205 keeping! The American should cherish as serene a faith as his fathers had. Instead of seeking a coward safety by battening down the hatches and putting men back into chains, he should recognize that God places him hi this peril that he may work out a noble security by concentrating all moral forces to lift this weak, rotting, and dangerous mass into sunlight and health. The fathers touched their highest level when, with stout-hearted and serene faith, they trusted God that it was safe to leave men with all the rights He gave them. Let us be worthy of their blood, and save this sheet-anchor of the race, universal suf frage, God s church, God s school, God s method of gently binding men into commonwealths in order that they may at last melt into brothers. I urge on college-bred men that, as a class, they fail in repub lican duty when they allow others to lead in the agitation of the great social questions which stir and educate the age. Agita tion is an old word with a new meaning. Sir Robert Peel, the first English leader who felt himself its tool, defined it to be "marshalling the conscience of a nation to mould its laws." Its means are reason and argument, no appeal to arms. Wait patiently for the growth of public opinion. That secured, then every step taken is taken forever. An abuse once removed never reappears in history. The freer a nation becomes, the more utterly democratic in its form, the more need of this outside agitation. Parties and sects laden with the burden of securing their own success cannot afford to risk new ideas. "Predomi nant opinions," said Disraeli, "are the opinions of a class that is vanishing." The agitator must stand outside of organiza tions, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect, no party to save, no object but truth, to tear a question open and riddle it with light. In all modern constitutional governments, agitation is the only peaceful method of progress. Wilberforce and Clarkson, Rowland Hill and Romilly, Cobden and John Bright, Garrison and O Connell, have been the master spirits in this new form of crusade. Rarely in this country have scholarly men joined, as a class, in these great popular schools, in these social movements which make the great interests of society "crash and jostle against each other like frigates in a storm." 206 WENDELL PHILLIPS It is not so much that the people need us, or will feel any lack from our absence. They can do without us. By sovereign and superabundant strength they can crush their way through all obstacles. "They will march prospering, not through our presence; Songs will inspirit them, not from our lyre; Deeds will be done while we boast our quiescence; Still bidding crouch whom the rest bid aspire." The misfortune is, we lose a God-given opportunity of making the change an unmixed good, or with the slightest possible share of evil, and are recreant beside to a special duty. These "agita tions" are the opportunities and the means God offers us to refine the taste, mould the character, lift the purpose, and edu cate the moral sense of the masses, on whose intelligence and self-respect rests the state. God furnishes these texts. He gathers for us this audience, and only asks of our coward lips to preach the sermons. There have been four or five of these great opportunities. The crusade against slavery that grand hypocrisy which poi soned the national life of two generations was one, a con flict between two civilizations which threatened to rend the Union. Almost every element among us was stirred to take a part in the battle. Every great issue, civil and moral, was in volved, toleration of opinion, limits of authority, relation of citizen to law, place of the Bible, priest and layman, sphere of woman, question of race, State rights and nationality; and Channing testified that free speech and free printing owed their preservation to the struggle. But the pulpit flung the Bible at the reformer; law visited him with its penalties; society spewed him out of its mouth; bishops expurgated the pictures of their Common Prayer-books; and editors omitted pages in republish- ing English history; even Pierpont emasculated his class-book; Bancroft remodelled his chapters; and Everett carried Wash ington through thirty States, remembering to forget the brave words the wise Virginian had left on record warning his country men of this evil. Amid this battle of the giants, scholarship sat dumb for thirty years until imminent deadly peril convulsed it into action, and colleges, in their despair, gave to the army that help they had refused to the market-place and the rostrum. THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 207 There was here and there an exception. That earthquake scholar at Concord, whose serene word, like a whisper among the avalanches, topples down superstitions and prejudices, was at his post, and, with half a score of others, made the exception that proved the rule. Pulpits, just so far as they could not boast of culture, and nestled closest down among the masses, were in finitely braver than the "spires and antique towers" of stately collegiate institutions. Then came reform of penal legislation, the effort to make law mean justice, and substitute for its barbarism Christianity and civilization. In Massachusetts Rantoul represents Beccaria and Livingston, Mackintosh and Romilly. I doubt if he ever had one word of encouragement from Massachusetts letters; and, with a single exception, I have never seen, till within a dozen years, one that could be called a scholar active in moving the Legislature to reform its code. The London Times proclaimed, twenty years ago, that intem perance produced more idleness, crime, disease, want, and mis ery, than all other causes put together; and the Westminster Review calls it a "curse that far eclipses every other calamity under which we suffer." Gladstone, speaking as Prime Minister, admitted that "greater calamities are inflicted on mankind by intemperance than by the three great historical scourges, war, pestilence, and famine." De Quincey says, "The most remark able instance of a combined movement in society which history, perhaps, will be summoned to notice, is that which, in our day, has applied itself to the abatement of intemperance. Two vast movements are hurrying into action by velocities continually accelerated, the great revolutionary movement from political causes concurring with the great physical movement in loco motion and social intercourse from the gigantic power of steam. At the opening of such a crisis, had no third movement arisen of resistance to intemperate habits y there would have been ground of despondency as to the melioration of the human race." These are English testimonies, where the state rests more than half on bayonets. Here we are trying to rest the ballot-box on a drunken people. "We can rule a great city," said Sir Robert Peel, "America cannot;" and he cited the mobs of New York as sufficient proof of his assertion. 208 WENDELL PHILLIPS Thoughtful men see that up to this hour the government of great cities has been with us a failure; that worse than the dry- rot of legislative corruption, than the rancor of party spirit, than Southern barbarism, than even the tyranny of incorporated wealth, is the giant burden of intemperance, making universal suffrage a failure and a curse in every great city. Scholars who play statesmen, and editors who masquerade as scholars, can waste much excellent anxiety that clerks shall get no office until they know the exact date of Csesar s assassination, as well as the latitude of Pekin, and the Rule of Three. But while this crusade the temperance movement has been, for sixty years, gathering its facts and marshalling its arguments, rallying parties, besieging legislatures and putting great States on the witness-stand as evidence of the soundness of its methods, schol ars have given it nothing but a sneer. But if universal suffrage ever fails here for a time, permanently it cannot fail, it will not be incapable civil service, nor an ambitious soldier, nor Southern vandals, nor venal legislatures, nor the greed of wealth, nor boy statesmen rotten before they are ripe, that will put universal suffrage into eclipse : it will be rum intrenched in great cities and commanding every vantage-ground. Social science affirms that woman s place in society marks the level of civilization. From its twilight in Greece, through the Italian worship of the Virgin, the dreams of chivalry, the justice of the civil law, and the equality of French society, we trace her gradual recognition; while our common law, as Lord Brougham confessed, was, with relation to women, the opprobrium of the age and of Christianity. For forty years, plain men and women, working noiselessly, have washed away that opprobrium; the statute books of thirty States have been remodelled, and woman stands to-day almost face to face with her last claim, the bal lot. It has been a weary and thankless, though successful, struggle. But if there be any refuge from that ghastly curse, the vice of great cities, before which social science stands palsied and dumb, it is in this more equal recognition of woman. If, in this critical battle for universal suffrage, our fathers noblest legacy to us, and the greatest trust God leaves in our hands, there be any weapon, which, once taken from the armory, will make victory certain, it will be, as it has been THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 209 in art, literature, and society, summoning woman into the polit ical arena. But, at any rate, up to this point, putting suffrage aside, there can be no difference of opinion : everything born of Christianity, or allied to Grecian culture or Saxon law, must rejoice in the gain. The literary class, until half a dozen years, has taken note of this great uprising only to fling every obstacle in its way. The first glimpse we get of Saxon blood in history is that line of Tacitus in his Germany, which reads, "In all grave matters they consult their women." Years hence, when robust Saxon sense has flung away Jewish superstition and Eastern prejudice, and put under its foot fastidious scholarship and squeamish fashion, some second Tacitus, from the Valley of the Mississippi, will answer to him of the Seven Hills, " In all grave questions we consult our women." I used to think that then we could say to letters as Henry of Navarre wrote to the Sir Philip Sidney of his realm, Crillon, "the bravest of the brave," "We have conquered at Arques, et tu n y etais pas, Crillon" (You were not there, my Crillon). But a second thought reminds me that what claims to be litera ture has been always present in that battle-field, and always in the ranks of the foe. Ireland is another touchstone which reveals to us how absurdly we masquerade in democratic trappings while we have gone to seed in tory distrust of the people; false to every duty, which, as eldest-born of democratic institutions, we owe to the op pressed, and careless of the lesson every such movement may be made in keeping public thought clear, keen, and fresh as to principles which are the essence of our civilization, the ground work of all education in republics. Sydney Smith said, "The moment Ireland is mentioned the English seem to bid adieu to common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots." "As long as the patient will suffer, the cruel will kick. ... If the Irish go on withholding and forbearing, and hesitating whether this is the time for discussion or that is the time, they will be laughed at another century as fools, and kicked for another century as slaves." Byron called England s union with Ireland "the union of the shark with his prey." Bentham s conclusion, from a sur- 210 WENDELL PHILLIPS vey of five hundred years of European history, was, "Only by making the ruling few uneasy can the oppressed many obtain a particle of relief. * Edmund Burke Burke, the noblest figure in the Parliamentary history of the last hundred years, greater than Cicero in the senate and almost Plato in the academy Burke affirmed, a century ago, " Ireland has learned at last that justice is to be had from England, only when demanded at the sword s point." And a century later, only last year, Gladstone himself proclaimed in a public address in Scotland, "England never concedes anything to Ireland except when moved to do so by fear." When we remember these admissions, we ought to clap our hands at every fresh Irish "outrage," as a parrot-press styles it; aware that it is only a far-off echo of the musket-shots that rattled against the Old State House on March 5th, 1770, and of the warwhoop that made the tiny spire of the " Old South " trem ble when Boston rioters emptied the three India tea-ships into the sea, welcome evidence of living force and rare intelligence in the victim, and a sign that the day of deliverance draws each hour nearer. Cease ringing endless changes of eulogy on the men who made North s Boston port-bill a failure while every leading journal sends daily over the water wishes for the success of Gladstone s copy of the bill for Ireland. If all rightful gov ernment rests on consent, if, as the French say, you "can do almost anything with a bayonet except sit on it," be at least consistent, and denounce the man who covers Ireland with regi ments to hold up a despotism which, within twenty months, he has confessed rests wholly upon fear. Then note the scorn and disgust with which we gather up our garments about us and disown the Sam Adams and William Prescott, the George Washington and John Brown, of St. Peters burg, the spiritual descendants, the living representatives, of those who make our history worth anything in the world s annals, the Nihilists. Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resistance of a people crushed under an iron rule. Nihilism is evidence of life. When "order reigns in Warsaw," it is spiritual death. Nihilism is the last weapon of victims choked and manacled beyond all other resistance. It is crushed humanity s only means of making THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 211 the oppressor tremble. God means that unjust power shall be insecure; and every move of the giant, prostrate in chains, whether it be to lift a single dagger or stir a city s revolt, is a lesson in justice. One might well tremble for the future of the race if such a despotism could exist without provoking the bloodiest resistance. I honor Nihilism; since it redeems human nature from the suspicion of being utterly vile, made up only of heartless oppressors and contented slaves. Every line in our history, every interest of civilization, bids us rejoice when the tyrant grows pale and the slave rebellious. We cannot but pity the suffering of any human being, however richly deserved; but such pity must not confuse our moral sense. Humanity gains. Chatham rejoiced when our fathers rebelled. For every single reason they alleged, Russia counts a hundred, each one ten times bitterer than any Hancock or Adams could give. Sam Johnson s standing toast in Oxford port was, "Success to the first insur rection of slaves in Jamaica," a sentiment Southey echoed. "Eschew cant," said that old moralist. But of all the cants that are canted in this canting world, though the cant of piety may be the worst, the cant of Americans bewailing Russian Nihilism is the most disgusting. I know what reform needs, and all it needs, in a land where discussion is free, the press untrammelled, and where public halls protect debate. There, as Emerson says, " What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticu late speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the charter of nations." Lieber said, in 1870, "Bismarck proclaims to-day in the Diet the very principles for which we were hunted and exiled fifty years ago." Submit to risk your daily bread, expect social ostracism, count on a mob now and then, "be in earnest, don t equivocate, don t excuse, don t retreat a single inch," and you will finally be heard. No matter how long and weary the waiting, at last, "Ever the truth comes uppermost, And ever is justice done. For Humanity sweeps onward: 1 Where to-day the martyr stands, A On the morrow crouches Judas Vr With the silver in his hands; 212 WENDELL PHILLIPS "Far in front the cross stands ready, And the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday In silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes Into History s golden urn." In such a land he is doubly and trebly guilty who, except in some most extreme case, disturbs the sober rule of law and order. But such is not Russia. In Russia there is no press, no debate, no explanation of what Government does, no remonstrance allowed, no agitation of public issues. Dead silence, like that which reigns at the summit of Mont Blanc, freezes the whole empire, long ago described as "a despotism tempered by assas sination." Meanwhile, such despotism has unsettled the brains of the ruling family, as unbridled power doubtless made some of the twelve Caesars insane: a madman, sporting with the lives and comfort of a hundred million of men. The young girl whis pers in her mother s ear, under a ceiled roof, her pity for a brother knouted and dragged half dead into exile for his opin ions. The next week she is stripped naked, and flogged to death in the public square. No inquiry, no explanation, no trial, no protest, one dead uniform silence, the law of the tyrant. Where is there ground for any hope of peaceful change? Where the fulcrum upon which you can plant any possible lever? Macchiavelli s sorry picture of poor human nature would be fulsome flattery if men could keep still under such oppression. No, no ! in such a land dynamite and the dagger are the neces sary and proper substitutes for Faneuil Hall and the Daily Advertiser. Anything that will make the madman quake in his bedchamber, and rouse his victims into reckless and desperate resistance. This is the only view an American, the child of 1620 and 1776, can take of Nihilism. Any other unsettles and per plexes the ethics of our civilization. Born within sight of Bunker Hill, in a commonwealth which adopts the motto of Algernon Sidney, sub libertate quietem (accept no fceace without liberty), son of Harvard, whose first pledge was "Truth," citizen of a republic based on the claim that no government is rightful unless resting on the con- THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 213 sent of the people, and which assumes to lead in asserting the rights of humanity, I at least can say nothing else and nothing less no, not if every tile on Cambridge roofs were a devil hoot ing my words ! I shall bow to any rebuke from those who hold Christianity to command entire non-resistance. But criticism from any other quarter is only that nauseous hypocrisy, which, stung by three penny tea-tax, piles Bunker Hill with granite and statues, prat ing all the time of patriotism and broadswords, while, like another Pecksniff, it recommends a century of dumb submission and entire non-resistance to the Russians, who, for a hundred years, have seen then* sons by thousands dragged to death or exile, no one knows which, in this worse than Venetian mystery of police, and their maidens flogged to death in the market place, and who share the same fate if they presume to ask the reason why. "It is unfortunate," says Jefferson, "that the efforts of man kind to secure the freedom of which they have been deprived should be accompanied with violence and even with crime. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end." Pray fearlessly for such ends: there is no risk! "Men are all tories by nature," says Arnold, "when tolerably well off: only monstrous injustice and atrocious cruelty can rouse them." Some talk of the rashness of the uneducated classes. Alas! ignorance is far oftener obstinate than rash. Against one French Revolution that scarecrow of the ages weigh Asia, "carved in stone," and a thousand years of Europe, with her half-dozen nations meted out and trodden down to be the dull and con tented footstools of priests and kings. The customs of a thou sand years ago are the sheet-anchor of the passing generation, so deeply buried, so fixed, that the most violent efforts of the maddest fanatic can drag it but a hand s-breadth. Before the war Americans were like the crowd in that terrible hall of Eblis which Beckford painted for us, each man with his hand pressed on the incurable sore in his bosom, and pledged not to speak of it : compared with other lands, we were intellec tually and morally a nation of cowards. When I first entered the Roman States, a custom-house official seized all my French books. In vain I held up to him a treatise 214 WENDELL PHILLIPS by Fenelon, and explained that it was by a Catholic archbishop of Cambray. Gruffly he answered, "It makes no difference: it is French." As I surrendered the volume to his remorseless grasp, I could not but honor the nation which had made its revo lutionary purpose so definite that despotism feared its very lan guage. I only wished that injustice and despotism everywhere might one day have as good cause to hate and to fear everything American. At last that disgraceful seal of slave complicity is broken. Let us inaugurate a new departure, recognize that we are afloat on the current of Niagara, eternal vigilance the condition of our safety, that we are irrevocably pledged to the world not to go back to bolts and bars, could not if we would, and would not if we could. Never again be ours the fastidious scholarship that shrinks from rude contact with the masses. Very pleasant it is to sit high up in the world s theatre and criticise the un graceful struggles of the gladiators, shrug one s shoulders at the actors harsh cries, and let every one know that but for "this villainous saltpetre you would yourself have been a soldier." But Bacon says, "In the theatre of man s life, God and His angels only should be lookers-on." "Sin is not taken out of man as Eve was out of Adam, by putting him to sleep." "Very beautiful," says Richter, "is the eagle when he floats with out stretched wings aloft in the clear blue; but sublime when he plunges down through the tempest to his eyry on the cliff, where his unfledged young ones dwell and are starving." Accept proudly the analysis of Fisher Ames: "A monarchy is a man-of- war, stanch, iron-ribbed, and resistless when under full sail; yet a single hidden rock sends her to the bottom. Our republic is a raft, hard to steer, and your feet always wet; but nothing can sink her." If the Alps, piled in cold and silence, be the emblem of despotism, we joyfully take the ever-restless ocean for ours, only pure because never still. Journalism must have more self-respect. Now it praises good and bad men so indiscriminately that a good word from nine- tenths of our journals is worthless. In burying our Aaron Burrs, both political parties in order to get the credit of magna nimity exhaust the vocabulary of eulogy so thoroughly that there is nothing left with which to distinguish our John Jays. THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC 215 The love of a good name in life and a fair reputation to survive us that strong bond to well-doing is lost where every career, however stained, is covered with the same fulsome flat tery, and where what men say in the streets is the exact opposite of what they say to each other. De mortuis nil nisi bonum most men translate, "Speak only good of the dead." I prefer to con strue it, "Of the dead say nothing unless you can tell something good." And if the sin and the recreancy have been marked and far-reaching in their evil, even the charity of silence is not permissible. To be as good as our fathers we must be better. They silenced their fears and subdued their prejudices, inaugurating free speech and equality with no precedent on the file. Europe shouted "Madmen!" and gave us forty years for the shipwreck. With serene faith they persevered. Let us rise to their level. Crush appetite and prohibit temptation if it rots great cities. Intrench labor in sufficient bulwarks against that wealth, which, without the tenfold strength of modern incorporation, wrecked the Grecian and Roman States; and, with a sterner effort still, summon women into civil life as reenforcement to our laboring ranks in the effort to make our civilization a success. Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever back ward. "New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, Who would .keep abreast of Truth. Lo! before us gleam her camp-fires! We ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly Through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future s portal With the Past s blood-rusted key." THE SOCIAL PLAINT BY ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS Delivered before the New York Alumni, May 23, 1892. Reprinted from The New World, June, 1892. Is the social body, economically speaking, well or ill? It is certainly complaining, and suffers painful attacks. Some tell us that these are purely superficial, and that the subject is, after all, in the best of health. Others will have it that the case is truly serious, so that naught but blood-letting will restore nor mal tone and strength. Still others declare the patient hopelessly gone. Not taking sides, at least with this or that extreme, and not presuming to suggest either diagnosis or treatment, we will in this paper attempt an examination and registry of symptoms. Let it be distinctly understood that the criticism to follow is not of this or that man, or of particular men at all. Individuals are only in the rarest instances to blame for any ills from which society may suffer. They, the good as well as the bad, are the creatures of the system in which they are bound up ; and in gen eral, so long as this is unchanged, they cannot be censured for proceeding as they do. Wrongs that individual action might conceivably cure are often due to ignorance, which, in economic matters, is still terribly dense. To represent employers as so many heartless Shylocks, each bent upon getting from the poor his pound of flesh, betrays slight preparation for discussing the relations of labor and capital. What is commonly said against the existing economic order needs sifting, of course. The fact of poverty is not necessarily a just impeachment of this order. Many of the poor are poor because of indolence or thriftlessness, for which they deserve to suffer. Even if laziness is sometimes constitutional, unless it can be shown that the constitution has derived its perverse bent from social maladjustments, suffer ing through such laziness may be, sociologically considered, not an evil at all, but of remedial tendency, and therefore a good instead. THE SOCIAL PLAINT 217 Nor is it a proper complaint that some are better off than others. They may have wrought or economized better. We feel as by a sort of intuition that gain gotten by the honest, open use of one s own powers, without artificial or accidental advantage of any kind, is earned, that it belongs to the possessor, so that no other has any right to view his possession as a hardship. That the gain has arisen through superior native endowment no un prejudiced mind would regard as impairing the title, unless this has worked its victory through craft and cunning. It is only accidental or artificial advantages to which our moral sense objects. We should, however, not abate sharp criticism of our economic doings, if the evil attaching to them seem inevitable. Though it seem so, it may not really be so, and in troubles thus perilous to humanity s advance, we have no right to remit efforts at reform so long as a ray of hope remains. Conveyance of one s thought across this continent in an hour, and of one s body in a week, was formerly deemed impossible. Poverty may yet dis appear. Nor does one at all bar out or weaken an indictment of soci ety s ways by inquiring for the complainant s theory of remedy. He may state grievances truly, though neither a theorist nor a practitioner. Perhaps no help whatever is in store. Very many have hope on this point rather than confidence. Shall we, there fore, call evil good? Nay, not even were an oracle from heaven to declare all hope vain. That unrighteousness can never be banished from the earth does not turn it into righteousness. If the exploiting of the weak by the strong, and of the honest by the cunning, the unwilling beggar, the starving babe, the gaunt woman sewing twenty continuous hours at the machine for the wage of a shilling, and the agricultural laborer, who just man ages, by agonizing toil, year in and year out, to keep death s clutch soft upon his throat, if these are perpetual phenomena, so surely are they perpetual wrongs, and with our living and our dying breath they ought to be proclaimed as such. Evaporating, then, the agitator s plaint, we find solid matter about as follows: In the first place, many men are rich, either altogether without economic merit, or wholly out of proportion to their economic merit. This will have to be admitted, however 218 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS loosely and largely one interprets economic merit; or however great allowance we make for intellectual labor in its various kinds. By economic merit is meant the quality which attaches to any human action, or line of action, in virtue of its advanta- geousness, on the whole, and in the long run, to the material weal of the community. It assumes three forms. A man may claim economic merit, when and so far as he is a wage-earner in any useful calling; when and so far as he earns economic profits, that is, secures profits by effort and agency of a genuinely eco nomic kind, without trick, theft, monopoly, or any artificial ad vantage; and when and so far as he owns capital as distinguished from unproductive wealth. Capital is productive wealth. Hence a holder of capital must be, indirectly at any rate, a wealth-user. Such a functionary is called economically meritorious at this point, not as a final judgment, or to beg the question against Socialists, but provisionally, for the sake of argument. One could doubtless grant that this is a lower form of merit than would be realized were the holder also a worker; yet in society as at pres ent organized, the mere holder of capital must be regarded as deserving well. We see this instantly if we suppose owners of capital to consume it instead of retaining it. We waive for the moment the question whether private capital is, on the whole, administered as well, as truly for society s good, as if society owned and administered it all, although the difference is cer tainly smaller than Socialists contend. These, then, wages-earning, profits-earning, and interest- earning, are the three forms of economic merit; but it goes almost without saying that wealth comes to many who are not meritorious in any one of these ways, and to many others out of all proportion to their merit. Some flourish by gambling; whether this takes place at the faro table or on the stock exchange, makes no difference. The gambler produces nothing, yet he lives, and often thrives. This means that he is a leech, the rest of us having to share our blood with him. The immeasurable evils which have fastened upon stock operations all honest people be wail, and with justice. It is, of course, difficult to lay down a fair and tenable definition of legitimate speculation. The best one, perhaps, tests legitimacy by genuine intention to transfer the goods. It is pleasing to know that a professed intention to trans- THE SOCIAL PLAINT 219 fer is insisted upon in all the regular exchanges, whenever "fu tures" are trafficked in, and is implied in the printed forms of contract provided for such transactions. The precise difference between an exchange and a "bucket-shop " is usually declared to be, that in the latter the "puts," "calls," "straddles," and the rest, are nothing but bets on the market prices. Bucket-shops are doubtless the more exclusively given up to this practice, but, in spite of rules, it is dreadfully prevalent in the exchanges as well. 1 We can see that proper speculation is advantageous. It acts like a governor to a steam-engine, preventing prices from rising so high or falling so low as they otherwise must. Shocks in the market that but for it would be terrible, are so distributed by it as to render them least harmful. The effect of absolutely wise speculation would be to annihilate speculation. Honest specula tion is, therefore, negatively productive, like the work of judges, army, and police; it is not creative of wealth, but preventive of loss. Gambling manifestly lacks this saving character. It does not steady prices, but the reverse. At best it but transfers prop erty from pocket to pocket. Other economic parasites fatten on the produce of cheating, stealing, and robbery. Such, of course, earn nothing: as little when they proceed by "freezing out" small stockholders, or by forming sub-corporations to secure all the profits of main corpo rations under forms of law, or by creating artificial "corners" or artificial fluctuations in prices, as when they deftly pick your pockets or bravely throttle you upon the road. Individuals often secure great fortunes by mere chance, happening to be so circum stanced at some felicitous phase of business meteorology as to fill their buckets from the golden shower. Such beneficiaries are, of course, not thieves; on the other hand, they are not creators, but only receivers of social wealth. Multitudes more prey upon society through monopoly. This may be created consciously and artificially, as in some of the great trusts now so numerous, or it may arise bond fide, in a nat ural way, without self-seeking on the part of any one, through well-meant but unwise legislation. The mere existence of monopoly in any quarter is no sign of wrong. Many monopoly 1 Compare, on this general subject, More s Utopia, chap. xn. 220 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS concerns actually earn a large part of their profits, and some earn all. So far, they are not to be condemned. But the gains of others are clearly inequitable; they are not, like genuine wages or profits, a blessing to all society, but are simply so much sub tracted from the social store, impoverishing society for the mo nopolists behoof. Many mistakenly suppose monopoly to exist only where every sort of competition is absent. It is not neces sary, in order that an establishment, or a banded group of establishments, may put an undue price upon its goods, that it should directly control the entire production. Immediate mastery of a majority is practically the mastery of all. This is demonstrable at once a priori and from experience. One can maintain a monopoly until his competitors, offering at a lower price, produce enough to supply the market. Up to that limit their competition is formal only; they in fact participate in the extraordinary gains. Albert Schaeffle, 1 with many others, has pointed out that Ricardo s law of rent applies in a sense, under established industrial habits, to all business. The goods of any given kind, sold at a given hour, in any given market, bring not the cost of their production plus a fair profit, but the cost of the part of them, be it never so small, which cost the most. On all the cheaper portions some one has a bonanza. If such cheapness was begotten of skill, careful oversight, or any other form of strictly economic activity, the abnormal profit was earned. In any event we must regard it as legitimate, existing conditions being presupposed; but in ninety-nine per cent of such cases the bonanza can be traced more or less completely to mere luck. The case is nearly the same if riches are acquired by simple shrewdness, even though this falls short of criminality, provided the shrewdness is not an element in economic merit. During our war, for instance, telegraph lines being then not extensive in the East, a certain sharp cotton speculator used to cause every steamer approaching Calcutta from Europe to be boarded far out, and the tendency of cotton ascertained and signalled to him long before the ship touched. A fleet vessel of his own, with steam up, would be waiting at the outer anchorage, which, on receiving word from the proprietor by another signal to "buy" or "sell," sped to carry this command to all his agents in the 1 Bau und Leben des socialen Korpers, m, 431, 435. THE SOCIAL PLAINT 221 Pacific cotton ports, where its execution swelled his gold pile by millions every time. Such gains may be technically legitimate, and in international trade perhaps unavoidable; but, so far as the internal economic system of any country offers facilities for such gold-winning extraordinary, as in great land speculations, all will feel that it is still imperfect. If he who is unduly enriched by a monopoly has himself cre ated the monopoly, we are quite sure to condemn the man; but we often do this without observing that just such evils as he has effected befall us each day, in ways for which not men but the economic system is at fault. The unfair gain which accrues to multitudes from protective and other laws, hurts society only in the same way as the unearned increment of land values does. In a vast majority of cases the taker of pure economic rent earns nothing, however honestly or truly he may have earned the capital with which he bought the privilege of rent-taking. The main difference is, that protective laws, so-called, are young, while land laws are so old that most people, and, with regret be it added, some economists, take them as ordinances of nature or of God. One of the worst evils of the sort now under survey, making some men rich at others expense, and wholly apart from eco nomic merit, is fluctuation in the purchasing power of money. It is peculiarly bad, because it is sweeping in its operation, and also because it works so silently and subtly that only the trained mind can see what is doing. If general prices fall, holders of money and of titles calling for money grow rich by cutting cou pons, taking to themselves so much of society s pile for no equiv alent whatever, of course making the rest in like degree poorer. If general prices rise, the reverse infelicity occurs. Special atten tion is called to the fact that it is quite immaterial whether the fatal change in the value of money arises from new plenty or new scarcity of money itself, or because of extra dearness or cheapness on the part of general commodities. It is as truly a source of robbery in the one case as in the other. In addition to the cheat which all general price fluctuations entail, falling prices have the additional baneful effect of painfully discourag ing industry and production, an effect which has had as much to do as any one thing with the hard times of recent years. 222 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS Through rise and fall in money values, then, as well as through mere luck, through monopoly, through theft, and through gambling, it actually does come to pass that, under our present economic practice, one section of society eats, drinks, and is merry, in whole or in part, at the expense of the rest, very much as if the latter were slaves. On the other hand, the counterpart of this proposition, a great many men are poor without the slightest economic demerit. They are people who do the best they can, and always have done so; they are not dissipated, indolent, thriftless, or prodigal of children, but quite free from these vices, being in every way exemplary citizens and worthy members of the com munity. Yet they are poor, often very poor, never free from fear of want, doomed for life to the alternative of hard labor or star vation, and as thoroughly cut off from all means of culture proper, as completely precluded from the rational living of life, as were the Helots of old Sparta. Such human beings are to be found in every city of the world. They are less numerous in America than in Europe, but America has them, too. Let him who doubts read Mrs. Helen Campbell s Prisoners of Poverty, or better, go among these poor people, converse with them, and judge for himself. 1 It has been carefully computed that in representative districts of East London no less than 55 per cent of the very poor, and fully 68 per cent of the other poor, are so because of deficiency of employment, 2 while only 4 per cent of the very poor, and none of the other poor, are loafers. It is estimated that 53 per cent of the needy in New York City suffer for work instead of aid, and the willing idlers among those are certainly no more numer ous proportionally than in London. According to the "Massa chusetts Labor Statistics* for 1887, almost a third of the people in that State returned as usually engaged in remunerative toil 1 For the poverty of East London, see Mr. Charles Booth s Labour and Life of the People, vol. i. G. P. Putnam s Sons. 1889. 2 Ibid., p. 147. These are invaluable statistics. Of the four thousand cases on which they are based, among the very poor, 14 per cent are so from drink or thriftlessness in the family, 27 per cent from illness, infirmity, size of family, or from one of these causes combined with irregular work. Among the other poor, 13 per cent of the families suffered from drink or lack of thrift, 19 per cent from illness, size of family, etc. THE SOCIAL PLAINT 223 were unemployed during nearly a third of the census year, 1885; the working people of the State, as a whole, averaged to be employed at their main occupations less than eleven months of the year. These results are not far from normal for this country, while for most others they are much too good to be normal. It must be admitted that the extreme division of labor has wrought its curse as well as its blessing. According to the Massachusetts statistics only about one in eighteen of those deprived of their usual employments turned to another. Most well-to-do people, whether millionaires or ordinary bourgeois, know, in effect, absolutely nothing about the truly poor. Mr. H. M. Hyndman does: "I have watched friends of mine who have had to go round week after week, month after month, maybe, seeking for a job. Such men do not parade their griefs; never, or very rarely, ask a middle-class man for help, and would utterly scorn to beg. Yet, as a highly skilled artisan said to me only a few days ago, * I would almost as soon go beg ging bread as begging work; they treat you as if it were a favor you asked. I have watched such men, I say, skilled and unskilled, too, and the mental effect upon them of these long periods or short periods of worklessness is more depressing than I can describe. Let a man have been never so thrifty, if he has a wife and children, a few weeks of idleness sweep away his savings; then he begins to pawn what little things he has; later he gets behind with his rent. His more fortunate comrades help him, this is invariable, so far as I have seen, among all classes of laborers; and then, if he is lucky, he gets into work again; if not, his furniture goes, and he falls into dire poverty. All the time not only has the man himself been suffering and losing heart, but his wife has been fretting herself to death and the children have been half -fed. In the winter-time, when the uncertainty of getting work becomes, in most of our great industrial cities, the certainty of not getting it for a large percentage of the laboring men and women, things are, of course, at their worst. After having vainly trudged from workshop to workshop, from factory to factory, from wharf to wharf, after having, perhaps, fought fiercely, but unsuccessfully, for a few hours work at the dock gates, the man returns home, weary, hungry, half dead, and ashamed of his growing raggedness, to see his home with- 224 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS out firing or food, perhaps to go to bed, in order to try and forget the misery around him." But is not the condition of the poor continually improving? Yes, and no. Undoubtedly the average wage- worker can earn more pounds of wheat, meat, and coal, and more yards of cloth, by twelve hours work to-day than fifty years ago, and probably enough more to make up for the greater unsteadiness of labor now. Mr. Giffen s statistics for England are well known. In the industries figured upon by him, wages have advanced since 1820-25 between 10 and 160 per cent. The average may be about 50 per cent. The English income-tax, per capita, has increased as follows: in 1865-69 it was 14; in 1870-74, 15 6s.; in 1875-79, 17 4s.; and in 1880-84, 17 2s. There are endless figures of the same tenor, which we need not cite. Mr. Giffen says that the wealth of Great Britain advances at the rate of three per cent yearly; population, only 1.3 per cent. How speed ily, at this pace, may we not expect poverty to be extinguished ! For this country the improvement is at least no less; we doubt if it is greater. Mr. Edward Atkinson s roseate pictures of labor ers progress are familiar to all. The French savant, M. Cheval- lier, has surveyed, as best he could, the whole industrial world, and is very sure that the laborer has advanced everywhere. In all probability the figures usually presented upon this sub ject, taken literally and for the time to which they relate, are not false. Materially, the workingman is gaining a little. Well may we rejoice that his wage is no longer the scanty four shillings a week, fixed for Warwickshire hands in 1588, under Queen Elizabeth s Statute of Labourers. His very discontent, by a well-known law of human nature, proves that he is profiting. Yet many representations, as commonly pressed and under stood, mislead. Thus when Mr. Goschen, a few years ago, fol lowing Mr. Giffen s line of argument, 1 showed that the number of small fortunes and incomes in England was increasing faster than large, faster than fortunes in general, faster than popula tion, he did not touch the really poor at all. He dealt with in comes from $750 a year upwards, estates under $5000 in value, house rents of $100 and on, small shareholdings, small insurance policies, and the like. But what is all this to the caravans of poor 1 London Times, weekly, October 9, 1887. THE SOCIAL PLAINT 225 fellows with starvation incomes, or none at all? Is it not almost mockery to argue hope from a more felicitous distribution of "estates," "rents," "policies," and "shares," in Britain, when English villages, unable to give employment, are emptying their impoverished sons and daughters into the cities at the rate of sixty thousand or seventy thousand yearly, only to make their situation, if possible, worse yet; when, as a report of Mr. Burnett, labor correspondent of the Board of Trade, assures us, the sweat ing system is forcing men and women to work sometimes for thirty-three, and even thirty-six, consecutive hours to avoid starvation, and when the hungry hordes of East London poor, but for the Christian work done among them, or for fear of the police, would speedily march to the sack of the West End ! 1 In our own country one hears equally inconclusive utterances regarding the masses welfare. On reading them, we sometimes really pity the mill-owners, and wonder why they do not take work as hands in the mills. The common statement about wages as increasing faster than income from invested wealth, neither has, nor can have, statistical proof, because we have no public or even private registry of profits. 2 So, too, the apparent fact that a greater and greater proportion of the nation s product goes year by year as wages, does not necessarily imply a rising rate of wages, but may accompany falling wages, and it will do so if population increases faster than wages fund. And when wages statistics are adduced to show improvement, nothing can exceed the recklessness with which they are sometimes made and handled. Wages of superintendence frequently swell the appar ent average. Account is rarely taken of shut-downs and slack work, or of those unable to find work at all. The system of fines, often as vicious as it is common, is also ignored. 3 In many respects, indeed, the toiling masses are no whit better off to-day than in England four centuries ago. The late Thorold Rogers, describing the Plant agenet and Tudor age, declares that then "there were none of those extremes of poverty and wealth 1 The Earl of Meath, Nineteenth Century, January, 1889. 2 The recent statistics of the Massachusetts Bureau, 1891, appear to be excel lent, so far as they go. 8 These errors, which, of course, he could not correct, must be allowed for in M. E. Chevallier s Les Salaires au XIX e Siecle, a very instructive work on the whole; the author is, however, too hostile to cooperation and profit-sharing. 226 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS which have excited the astonishment of philanthropists, and are now exciting the indignation of workmen. ... Of poverty which perishes unheeded, of a willingness to do honest work and a lack of opportunity, there was little or none. The essence of life was that every one knew his neighbor, and that every one was his brother s keeper." The fact is, that while the poor man has been getting on, he has not retained his old-time closeness to the average weal. Let us take a rubber strap, fasten one end, and extend the other till the length is doubled. If, now, we note the changes in the relative positions of points between the middle and the fixed extremity, we shall find that each, though farther from the end than before, is also farther from the middle; that, besides, the points nearest the end have moved least, those near est the middle, most. Of those between the middle and the free end, all are now further beyond the middle than before, while each has gained the more the remoter it was at first. Much in this way has society stretched out in the matter of economic welfare. There, at the fixed point of dire poverty, stand the mighty masses, as they have always stood. Our heaping up of wealth, Pelion upon Ossa, elevates them no iota. Their neighbors have removed from the dead point a little, but the centre has gone away from them still more. Those nearer the average at first, and yet beneath it, have drifted further from the fixed extreme, but not one among them is so close to the middle as he began. Only when you pass beyond the average do you come to men who have gained upon the average, and these have accom plished this in proportion to the advantage which they had at the start. 1 While the poor man should be very glad that his toil brings him more and better food, raiment, and shelter than once, the fact that it does so is no sign that his condition is "improved" in the sense in which this expression is usually understood. Richer 1 We do not forget the difficulty of laying a solid TTOV <rr& for this analysis. The personnel of "the rich" and of "the poor" of course changes incessantly. A penniless fellow strikes "pay gravel," and is a millionaire; another man just as suddenly falls from opulence to rags. Still a irov <rru> is attainable. The economic fortune of many an identical man, family, or community, which for the last fifty years shows no break, paroxysm, or absolute change of any kind, can be seen to have altered greatly in relation to the material welfare of the country as a whole. THE SOCIAL PLAINT 227 supply for one s mere bodily wants does not signify that one is getting forward, or even holding one s own, in humanity s general advance. Let man, as a race, remove further and further from the condition of brutes, and let me, in the mean time, keep as near to the average of human weal as ever, that is what I want. So long as I am falling behind the average comfort, wel fare, culture, intelligence, and power, it insults my manhood to remind me that my sweat commands per drop a little more bread. "It is written, man shall not live by bread alone." And in this higher life, the only one in respect to which it is really worth while to discuss the question at length, hosts of men in civilized countries are making no progress whatever, but are relatively losing ground. To be sure, "the workman is now a freeman, and, compared with his progenitors, an educated man. If not taught in the schools, he has learned from the increasing progress which he beholds everywhere around him. In the railway carriage he visits the great towns; the newspaper gives him intelligence of all that is going on from day to day in the most distant portions of the earth; he hears discussed, with more or less accuracy and information, the leading topics of the age. So, life itself for him is a great public school. But when he beholds the vast accumula tion of wealth in the hands of the higher classes, which affords to them luxury, the ease, the social distinction, and the means of enjoyment denied to him, and when he reflects that this wealth is mainly created by the toil of himself and his fellow-laborers, he is naturally filled with discontent and envy, wherein may yet, perhaps, be found the seeds of anarchy. Amid such circumstances he is exposed, on the one hand, to the teachings of socialistic advocates; and, on the other hand, to the inculcation of the doc trine of passive obedience, and to that blasphemous as well as puerile philosophy which would enjoin him to submit meekly, in the name of reason or religion, to a condition of things which is abhorrent to every sentiment of justice and to every feeling of humanity." 1 From this point of view, the wages-system itself, inevitable as it after all seems to be, is yet an evil, at least in comparison with the older one of masters, associates, and apprentices. It has 1 Rees, From Poverty to Plenty, pp. 65 seq. London, Wyman & Sons, 1888. 228 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS become the order of things for human beings to work on a gigantic scale for other human beings as servants, menials, serfs, being granted access to the means of production not in their own right as men, but by the gracious favor of their more lordly fellows. The effect is to put a stain upon toil as dishonorable. If you are verdant enough still to speak of the "dignity of labor," people smile at you. That old aphorism has gone to the rubbish-pile. Witness the pride of many bourgeois aristocrats, who boast of it as a special claim to consideration, that neither they nor their ancestors ever got a living by work. Equally significant is the assumption, both haughty and common, of capitalists, that they are the "guardians" of labor. But every one notices that wage-workership is widely regarded less humbling in proportion as it ceases to involve subjection to individuals. As a rule, work for a private coiporation even, is more desired than work for A or B; work for a great public corporation, responsible to society, is still more desired; work for churches and educational institu tions is yet more sought after; while work for the state is so enticing that even at the most moderate wages, and in spite of an all too insecure tenure, a hundred applicants scramble for every post. How slight is even the economic betterment usually alleged, compared with what, from foreknowledge of the character of the age, one would have been justified in anticipating. Such prog ress in all the industrial arts, such cheapening of wares, such opening of new continents in North and South America and in Africa and Australia, the richest in bread-yield and beef-yield of any beneath the sun, should, it would seem, have annihilated poverty. Yet the amelioration is only well perceptible for wage- workers as a class, and for the unskilled it is hardly this. Still less can any general law of economic progress, covering the centuries, be established. On the contrary, the passing of this age of industrial advance and of world- wide land utilization with so slight gain in the ordinary comforts of life on the part of the laboring man, goes far to preclude all hope of great improve ment for him under present economic conditions. Thorold Rogers noticed that the trades correctly cited by Mr. Giffen as showing an advance of wages since 1833 have each had the advantage of a trade-union, and Rogers apparently THE SOCIAL PLAINT 229 cherished strong hope that unions were to introduce the labor ers millennium. I am unable to share this pleasing view. Each trade-union will benefit its own members, not unmixedly, in deed, because it always levels downward more or less hi quality of work and hi wages; but trade-unions often operate against one another, and they continually keep down instead of elevat ing the unskilled masses. Even an industrial trust, like the Knights of Labor, cannot exert its central power without forc ing the abler and better workmen to make common cause with the poorer, so as greatly to impede production; nor will such an organization ever be in condition to enforce a general strike, because of the "scab" laborers constantly ready and competent for so many kinds of work. To exclude foreigners, which, so long as our protective laws continue, would be just, would not rid us of "scab" help. The increase of home population would soon furnish this. It is hard to see any likelihood under the pres ent economic system, unless a good deal modified, of any such continence on the part of the laboring masses in our cities as will deliver them for any length of time from the grip of Ri- cardo s iron law. Self-interest will never do it. This is a point where the laissez-faire theory of society most visibly breaks down. Morality and higher intelligence would do it, but we fear that these can never be engendered in sufficient degree amidst the existing poverty and strife of classes. One has a right to complain touching the idle wealth which the present order of things heaps up, and the still greater quan tities of wealth which are wasted out and out. If any one of our numberless millionaires wishes to turn some millions of capital into non-capital wealth in the form of needlessly large houses and grounds, gorgeous equipage and clothing, fancy wines and viands, or works of art never to be seen but in his own house, there is nothing to hinder him and much in the way of example to tempt him. Yet his act abstracts these millions from the wage- fund as permanently and effectually as if they were sunk hi the mid-Atlantic, leaving many a work-seeker to hunger or starva tion, who, had the man built factories or railways with his pelf, might have been well off. It is amazing in view of this process, continually going on, to hear some of our brightest thinkers arguing as if poverty were 230 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS always due to the fault of the people who suffer from it, as if there were some providence or natural law which would make it impossible for one man ever to smart for the misdeeds of an other. Not seldom the exact reverse occurs. This, in fact, is one of the very worst vices of present industry, that it not sel dom visits curses upon men for results which they had not the slightest hand in originating. It is said that profits are justifiable because the employer takes risks, a position entirely just so long as the present system prevails. But it is not the profit- maker alone who is involved in the risks he takes. His help are bound up with him, and if he is proved to be rash, while he him self will only have to surrender this or that luxury, they may starve or freeze. When over-production, again, either alone or aided by over-speculation or by those changes in the value of money already referred to, has evoked a commercial crisis, the poor, who have had nothing whatever to do with causing it, are its most pitiable and helpless victims. Socialists have said none too much about the cross purposes which, of necessity, prevail in our unregulated production. Let the business man be as careful as he may, under the prevalent business methods he cannot but take most dangerous risks. There are now only the roughest means for ascertaining what the next season s demand for this or that line of goods is to be, and still poorer chance for learning what the output by com petitors is to be. Notwithstanding all that trusts have so ex cellently done to forecast and regulate output, 1 every year s operation of many a manufactory is to a great extent a game of hazard. Lines of business are over- wrought, begetting glut and necessitating sales below cost; needless plant is set out, which must decay or burn. Losses in these ways are crushing, and are so much the more sad in that they are intrinsically needless. Through such waste of capital, interest rises, and wage-yielding businesses which might have flourished are prevented from starting. Prices fluctuate abnormally, deranging and discour aging industry. Mills that were in operation close, the operatives, who had absolutely no part in the errors which brought the crisis, 1 A merit of the trust-system usually not recognized. Compare the author s article on "Economic Reform Short of Socialism," in The International Journal of Ethics, April, 1892. THE SOCIAL PLAINT 231 being the chief sufferers. One earnest writer refers to such dis locations of industry all the economic troubles of the time. 1 We see here, again, that poverty does not always befall men by their own fault, but very often through the crime or stupidity of others. We have space merely to name a few unfortunate features not so strictly of an economic nature, which attach to the prevalent industrial course of things. W T ealth is for man, not man for wealth. It is conceivable that a given line of production should favor the amassing of wealth in a most eminent degree, and yet be so baneful ethically, for instance, as not to deserve toleration. To be laid to the account of the existing economic dispensation is most of the fraud and villainy in industrial life. If you are a grocer, and other grocers sand their sugar, you must, or, unless you have immense capital, leave the business. If you manu facture clothing, and the fashion in that line of production is to beat sewing- women down to starvation wages, you must do thus, or you are lost. You may wince or protest, but your position is such that you cannot obey conscience without becoming a martyr. This is why the best men in a trade do not fix its maxims and practices, but the worst. It is a fact that our present plan of industry presses men with indescribably strong motives to gamble, to depress wages to the utmost, and to cheat in the quality of wares. Many resist nobly. Many others yield, but with a stout inward protest which would do honor to them were it known. People dislike to do wrong; but in hundreds of cases, if not as a rule, they must do wrong or fail in business. The meanest man undersells the noblest and, either financially or morally, drives him to the wall. 2 Honesty is often as uneconomical in face of the customer as in face of the tax-assessor. Out of this murderous competition there is a sur vival not of the fittest but of the unfittest, the sharpest, the basest. When great wealth has been amassed, even honestly, another fearful pressure is brought to bear upon its possessor to regard it too much as an end, and to bend all his energy to the further 1 W. Smart, The Contemporary Review, 1888. 2 Read, in Mrs. Helen Campbell s Prisoners of Poverty, the chapter entitled "Two Hospital Beds." 232 ELISHA BENJAMIN ANDREWS swelling of the pile, how inordinate soever it may be. He over works himself; he takes colossal risks; he frets; he passes sleep less nights. He forgets his obligations to family, society, and God. He reads naught but market-reports. Think, he does not; he only reckons. Such a life is not rational, and its general prevalence through generations cannot but make us more a race of Babbage calculators than of moral beings. Lastly, much of the wealth itself, invested in idle or positively harmful luxuries, is lost to society as truly as if sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Any one who will reflect can easily make himself heart-sick by computing what a large proportion of existing wealth has been put into forms that not only do not afford wages to labor, but are a moral if not an economic disadvantage to the owners themselves. This is not condemning luxury, but only useless and damaging luxury, which, of course, no economist can approve; nor can any one else do so, without repudiating al truism and going over to the baldest egoism in ethics. I do not believe that socialism is coming; but I expect a moral growth of society which will bring with it many changes, some of them radical, in the economic structure and methods of so ciety. Workingmen s complaints are not all wanton and they cannot be dismissed with a puff. That pleasing optimism which views all increase of wealth as inevitably, under natural law, a blessing to wage-workers, is very shallow. Both the socialist on the one hand and the laissez-faire theorist on the other are in too great haste to generalize. At present our business is the analysis of social conditions, deep, patient, and undogmatic. EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS BY ANDREW DICKSON WHITE Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Alumni in New York, November 23, 1896; before the Mu of New York, at Vassar College, in 1906; before the Theta of New York, at Cornell University, May 29, 1913; and as a lecture at various universities and colleges, among these Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Michigan, Wisconsin, Roanoke, and Butler. IT is certain that the theory of an evolutionary process of some sort in the universe has taken fast hold upon thinking men. Especially is this the case as regards the life of man upon our planet. I shall not dwell upon the relation of man s structure and life to the structure and life of other animals, but simply point out the fact, in passing, that all that great array of sciences which have been brought to bear upon the history of humanity, from the earliest prehistoric times in which we can trace man by his works, show evidences of his upward evolution. You need hardly be reminded that, from the rudest stone implements of the drift, down to the time when recorded history opens with the general use of iron, we see everywhere the proofs of this evolution from lower to higher: evidences that man is not a "fallen being," but a risen being. But, while a quiet evolution is easily seen in the long series of ever-improving implements, laws, policies, ideas, and institu tions, a more violent process is no less evident. More and more it becomes clear that the same law of evolution extends even through national catastrophes. The old doctrine of ever-recur ring cycles of national birth, growth, and death, the doctrine of national catastrophes without any effect, save possibly to point a moral or adorn a tale, has virtually disappeared; more and more it is seen in historic times, as in prehistoric, that there has been not only an evolution, quiet and gradual, but also an evolution in which not only each national struggle but every national catastrophe is a part. Thinking upon the many examples which might be cited, we distinguish two uses of the word "evolution": first, its larger 234 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE use, which includes every sort of development, regular or ir regular, swift or slow, spasmodic or steady; secondly, its more restricted use, which confines it to the more regular processes to growth in the main quiet, even, and peaceful. In this latter restricted sense I shall use the word "evolution" in this ad dress; and I purpose to deal with the distinction between de velopment by growth, in obedience to improving environment, and development by catastrophe, between progress by evolu tion and progress by revolution. Thus far the progress of humanity, as regards political, social, and religious questions, seems to have been, far more largely than we could wish, by catastrophes. Among the examples of this violent progress, let us look first at some which come espe cially near us. Take, first, the process by which the British colonies on this continent were finally separated from the mother country. Two ways were before those entrusted with leadership in Great Britain during the last hah of the last century; the first was that indicated by Burke and Pitt; it was large, just, mild, statesman like. Both these men labored for the supremacy of right reason in American affairs: Burke s speech on Conciliation with America is probably the foremost piece of forensic reasoning in the English language, and possibly the foremost in any lan guage. Could these men of right reason have had their way, the American colonies would have remained for many years longer attached to the mother country; the sturdy, vigorous, English and Scotch emigration, instead of being diverted into other channels, to Canada, the Pacific Islands, India, and South Africa, would have continued to enrich and strengthen the civil ization of this Republic ; the separation, when it did come, would have been natural and peaceful; the population of these states would thus have had a far greater proportion of that Anglo- Saxon element which would have enabled it to assimilate the masses of less promising elements which have since flooded us, and which, if we do not act in time, may possibly be the new barbarian invasion fated to end this empire, as the old barbarian invasions ended the Roman Empire. But evolution by right reason was not to be : if Pitt and Burke were apostles of evolution, George III, doggedly conservative, EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 235 and sundry Americans, fiercely radical, were apostles of revolu tion; and the revolutionary method prevailed. The result was the immediate loss of much precious Anglo-Saxon blood: for large numbers of the best and truest men and women, who were loyal to the mother country as a matter of conscience, were driven beyond our borders; still worse, the inflow of Anglo- Saxon blood from abroad was stopped almost completely. Though men like Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, Jef ferson, Madison, and Marshall, built most nobly upon the foundations already laid, and did their best to prevent bitter ness between the two nations becoming chronic, every thinking man will now at least suspect that the evolutionary process the peaceful development of constitutional liberty in the colonies as their controlling environment, and their gradual assumption of state and national dignity would have saved great suffer ing to mankind, and probably in the long run would have pro duced a stronger republic and a sounder democracy. Take next the French Revolution. In the time of Louis XVI, the greatest statesman that France had produced, and possibly the most unsuccessful that Europe has produced, was Turgot. He strove to develop free institutions by a natural process, and thus to avert a catastrophe. Turgot saw that the old despotism was doomed, that the new era must come; therefore it was, that he proposed a system for the general education of the people for the gradual development of political practice, and for the gradual assumption of the duties of free men, first in the prov inces, and finally in the nation at large. By comprehensive political measures he sought to develop an environment which should fit the people gradually and safely to possess their rights, and to discharge their duties. He stood at the parting of the ways; could the nation have gone on in the path of peaceful evolution marked out by him, it is, humanly speaking, certain that constitutional liberty would have been reached within a few years, and substantial republicanism not long after. What weary years would have been avoided, the despotism of the guillotine, of the mob, of the recruiting officer; twenty years of ferocious war; millions of violent deaths; billions of treasure flung into gulfs of hate or greed ! But on the other side, against Turgot, stood the forces which 236 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE made for progress by catastrophe: the ultra-conservatives, like poor Marie Antoinette: the leading nobles, the leading church men; and hating them, but really their truest allies for evil, the ultra-radicals, like Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and their like. Both sets of fanatics, conservative and radical, worked together for revolution : conscientiously intriguing, orating, lying, mur dering; creating an atmosphere and an environment, first of fanaticism, and finally of hypocrisy, in which all noble thought seemed to perish. In spite of the work of Turgot, and of all those who caught his spirit : men like Bailly , Lafayette, Mira- beau, who exerted themselves in behalf of progress by evolu tion, there was progress by catastrophe; the Paris massa cres, the La Vendee massacres, the Avignon massacres; the Red Terror and the White Terror, Revolutionary wars and Imperial wars; Jacobin despotism and Napoleonic despotism; the first in vasion and the second invasion, the first indemnity and the sec ond indemnity; the Bourbon reaction and the Commune, the whole line of sterile revolutions and futile tyrannies, each bring ing forth new spawn of intriguers, doctrinaires, declaimers, and phrase-makers. Take next our American Civil War. That a contest between slavery and freedom was drawing on many years before 1861, all men see now; but various American statesmen saw it then, and they tried to avert it. Only one man presented a great statesmanlike measure: that man was Henry Clay. A son of Virginia, and worthy of descent from the great line of Virginia statesmen, he proposed to extinguish slavery gradually, natu rally, by a national sacrifice not at all severe; in fact, by a steady evolution of freedom out of servitude. His plan was to begin at a certain year and to purchase those newly born into slavery, until gradually, through the extinction of the older members of the African race by death, and the enfranchisement of the younger by purchase, slavery should disappear. l It was a great, statesmanlike plan. It might have cost twenty-five millions of dollars. Revolutionists on both sides opposed it: revolutionists in the South would have none of it, for it was contrary to their theory that slavery was a blessing, sanctioned by the Bible, 1 See Schurz s Life of Henry Clay (Boston and New York, 1887), vol. II, p. 317. EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 237 and embedded in the Constitution: revolutionists in the North would have none of it, because it was contrary to their theory that one man ought not to buy another. The result we all know : slavery was indeed abolished, but, instead of being abolished by a peaceful evolution involving an outlay of twenty-five mil lions of dollars, it was abolished by the most fearful of modern revolutions, at a cost, when all the loss is reckoned in, of ten thousand millions of dollars, and of nearly, if not quite, a mil lion of lives, and these on the whole the noblest lives the nation, North and South, had to give. Thus had we political and social progress by catastrophe rather than by growth, progress, not by evolution, but by revolution. History is full of such examples: let me give one, finally, be ginning further from our time, but ending nearer it. In the latter half of the last century the Empire of Germany was the very seat and centre of unreason and injustice. Its political in stitutions were a farce, in which not one great national purpose could be properly served. Its judicial institutions were a jungle in w^hich lurked every sort of legal beast of prey. Its social in stitutions were based on conventionalism : its religious institu tions were enveloped in an atmosphere made up of public intoler ance and private disbelief. Then arose a true man, Joseph II: he attempted to save the empire by appealing to right reason; by stimulating thought, and diminishing despotism; by infusing humanity into the laws, and simplicity into the administration of justice; by promoting a better education; in fact, by develop ing an environment sure to produce, naturally and peaceably, a better future. All his efforts were rejected, and he died of a broken heart. But the progress he sought has been accomplished by wars extending through a whole century; by the sacrifice of innumer able lives and untold treasure; by the humiliation into the dust of those who opposed the evolutionary method, indeed, by the destruction of their rights, of their privileges, of their im munities, nay, of themselves; and, finally, by the blotting out of the old German Empire under Austria, and the establishment of the new German Empire under Prussia. The ruling classes would have none of the kindly reasonableness of Joseph II, the apostle of evolution, and they had to be crushed out and ground 238 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE out of existence by Napoleon and Bismarck, apostles of revo lution, men of blood and iron. And, at this moment, we have in one of the greatest nations of the world an example of the same revolutionary process as distinguished from the evolutionary. In the middle years of this century, Russia, having been steadily developed in ways more or less rude by the efforts of Peter the Great, Catherine II, and Nicholas I, found itself under the control of a just and kindly czar, Alexander II. He accepted the spirit of his time; freed the serfs throughout his vast realm, forty millions in all, guaranteed lands to them, abolished a mass of absurdities, in fused a better spirit into old institutions; improved the laws, in creased justice, developed local self-government, and prepared the way for a constitution. It was my fortune, as a young man, holding a subordinate diplomatic position at St. Petersburg in 1854 and 1855, to see this transition from the stern beneficence of the first Nicholas to the more kindly beneficence of the second Alexander. Everything seemed moving in the steady, peaceful evolution of a strong constitutional empire, when suddenly, between the extreme votaries of despotism on one hand and of nihilism on the other, all was dashed in pieces; the czar was a mangled corpse in the streets of St. Petersburg; a policy of ex treme reaction set in. In Russia, under this system, I have re cently lived for two years. Occasionally, those who favor a more peaceful evolution have seemed to gain momentary control, but it seems likely that the progress of Russia is to be by revolution; that the attempt to hold back modern thought by dams and bulwarks will go on until the flood rises too high and a catas trophe comes, a breaking away of dams and bulwarks under revolutionary pressure, to be followed by successive floods of devastation, reactionary and revolutionary. The question now arises, is this the necessary law of human progress? Must the future of mankind be no better than the past, in this repect? An orator has recently answered this ques tion with a phrase: he tells us that "all great reforms must be baptized in blood." But is this the law of the future? There is much, indeed, to support this view. Take the simplest prin ciples of our Anglo-Saxon liberty: before they could be se cured, blood was shed throughout England and throughout the EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 239 United States; one king lost his head, another his crown; and another, the fairest colonies on which the sun ever shone. Take the simplest thing in religion, the elementary principle of tolera tion: before it could be established the world had to wade through the religious wars of the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years War, battles, massacres, and executions innumerable. The possibilities of human unreason are indeed vast, and might lead us to take a sad view of the future, as we are forced to take a sad view of so much in the past; but, on the other hand, there is much to give us hope. The very law of evolution itself seems to encourage us. It would seem to show us that not only better results but better methods may gradually be evolved. This better side of human progress is seen in every country: an early display of it to our race came in Great Britain in 1688; it came again in the year 1832, and it has been shown by various peaceful reforms during our own history. The whole question is a question of price : the development of the race is to go on; the one question is, what price shall we pay for it? Must we still secure it, as so often in the past, by these vast sacrifices, or may it be secured in the future by reason and the spirit of justice? That eminent historian and political thinker, Goldwin Smith, once said, "Let us never glorify revolution." That he was right, the recent history of various countries proves abundantly. Early in the present century, glorification of the first French revolution became a French fashion, a political fad; in this fashion and fad Thiers, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo led. The consequences were the futile French revolution of 1830, the calamitous French revolution of 1848; the monarchy of Louis Philippe, as the result of the first; the tyranny of Napoleon III, the Prussian invasion, the surrender at Sedan, and the Com mune catastrophe, as the result of the second. So, too, through out the first half of the present century, on this side the Atlantic there was a steady glorification of our revolutionary struggle with England. What was best hi it the great constructive part by men like Washington, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall was comparatively little thought of. What was most orated upon in ten thousand little hamlets was the destruc tive part, the beauty of resistance to authority, the glory of 240 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE breaking up an empire, the forcible wresting of human liberties and rights; and verily we had our reward. This glorification of revolution, North and South, helped to promote our Civil War. Let us then accept this advice from one who has labored and sacrificed much for human liberty in its best sense; "let us never glorify revolution." What, then, shall we glorify? What shall be the ideal of po litical conduct? The answer is simple: let us glorify the evolu tion of a strong moral sense in individuals and in nations; of well-being and well-doing; of clear and honest thinking; of right reason; of high purpose; of bold living up to one s thought, reason, and purpose; let us glorify these, let these be our ideals. And what shall be the aim of practical effort? The answer to this question, too, is simple: let us strive to clear the way for a steady, healthful evolution, for the unfolding of a better future. First, as to the evolution of the individual man: While every man owes a duty to society, he also owes a duty to himself as a man, and this is not less a duty to society; that duty is the evolution of his own powers, physical, intellectual, moral, re ligious. The nation, after all, will never be better than the men and women who compose it. Remember Carlyle s great ques tion: "How out of a universe of knaves shall we get a common honesty? " Complaints regarding the low tone of public morality and of corruption in the public service constantly ring in our ears : all sorts of checks and balances are proposed, and these are well; but, after all, until there is a preponderating mass of indi viduals, each detesting oppression and wrong, each loving right reason, each having in himself a standard of truth and justice, each willing to fight or make sacrifices to maintain this standard, we can hope little for a better evolution as regards the public at large. In this evolution of individuals as bearing upon that of the nation, I would say, that the first thing needed is will-power, exercised first of all in self-control: the great Dr. Arnold gave it as a result of his long and close observation among young men, that the difference between them, which makes them suc cessful or unsuccessful in their after-life, is simply a difference in will-power. Do we not everywhere see this? Do we not every where see men, who know better, yielding where they ought to EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 241 stand firm, giving themselves up to parties, conventions, cau cuses, bosses, demagogues? Addressing any body of young men, I would say, begin here and now your own individual evolution by this cultivation of will-power; for it marks the difference be tween the strong man and the weak man, between the successful and the unsuccessful. Give yourself the physical basis of will power, a strong body; give yourself the intellectual basis, a well- trained mind; give yourself the moral basis, standing firm among your fellows here and now for what is decent, right, and just, against the trickster and the boor; standing firm for what is best in yourself, against what is worst in yourself; above all, cultivate your own personal will-power by deciding what is right for you to do, and say, "I will," and on deciding what is wrong for you to do, and say, "I will not"; stand firm by such decisions, "firm as a stone wall." That is not so easy as de claiming on what this neighbor of yours ought to have done, or what that public man ought not to have done; but it is better, better for the country, better for you. If you enforce your will on this little kingdom which God has given you, you will find little trouble in enforcing it throughout far greater dominions. Thus under the law of evolution will come the survival of the fittest, and you will be the fittest. Take next the material evolution of the country at large. That a nation like this, comparatively new, must expend a large part of its labor in developing the material basis of its civiliza tion, is certain. All about us we see evidences of this, some in progress by growth, some in progress by catastrophe. In American business, far too large a part thus far seems played by catastrophes. In the record of demoralizing speculation, of financial crises, of periods of widespread bankruptcy, we have, indeed, a material progress on the whole, but a progress which is not normal, which costs the happiness and lives of millions, which grinds tender-hearted women and children to powder be tween its upper and nether millstones, which fills lunatic asy lums, which ought to fill prisons. If we do not develop better methods, it is to make the existing American race short-lived, nervous, dyspeptic, sure to die out and be succeeded by races of tougher fibre under that inexorable law, the survival of the fittest. 242 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE Such results of progress by revolution every one can see by looking about him. Everywhere are efforts to outwit the laws of finance, which are simply laws of nature. France tried this twice, and thought she could become rich by great issues of fiat paper money; as a result, came bankruptcy and poverty; and, to this hour, hatred of any tampering w r ith the currency is burnt into the very souls of the French peasantry. Other nations have committed themselves to financial revolutions in defiance of the laws of nature, and always with the same result. Is it not better to labor for progress by evolution? Would it not be well to have more respect for simple, straightforward, deter mined, productive labor; less attention to subversive theories, and short, doubtful roads to prosperity; more honor to those who worthily develop agriculture, or manufactures, or trade; less deification of phrase-makers, sensation-mongers, stump dema gogues, and partisan gladiators? The question has frequently been asked whether our universi ties and colleges produce their share of business men; and a very high authority in business circles has declared that they do not. But he failed to note one or two points of great im portance. First, university graduates, according to a recent authority, form only about one-half of one per cent of the whole population, while they hold nearly sixty per cent of the more important positions in the country. Secondly, he failed to note the fact that until very recently our universities trained men almost exclusively for what are known as the "learned profes sions," and not at all for business in the ordinary sense of the word; whereas, within the last few years, almost all institutions for advanced instruction have been developing courses fitting men for the pursuits in life which lead more directly into great business operations, and therefore, to act far more powerfully upon material development than heretofore. Thirdly, he missed the fact that, in spite of the prevalence of the old system of training hitherto, every large college class shows a certain num ber of men engaged successfully in business. Fourthly, while very few of the colossal millionaires of the country have been educated at our higher institutions of learning, there is one thing of which every university graduate may well be proud, and this is, that, among those who have piled up great fortunes EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 243 by scoundrelism, there is, so far as known, not one university graduate : the great plundering schemes of the country have not been conducted by men trained in our universities. In this field of material progress our higher institutions of learning seem to have helped the better evolution, rather than those schemes and enterprises which give the environment that produces revolu tion. I can think of no better use of the surplus capital of our men of wealth than the strengthening of these institutions by creat ing or enlarging in them departments of history and political and social science. In every one should be more and more professorships, lectureships, fellowships, scholarships; libraries having reference to political economy, finance, international law, corporation legislation; the best methods reached in our own and other nations in dealing with pauperism, insanity, in ebriety, crime, and the various evils with which modern society has to grapple. Here is the true way of providing for an evolu tion which may be relied upon to forestall revolution. Take next the more special development : what it is now we all know, the outcome of some good through much evil. Great questions have been settled, great questions are coming on. These may be divided between questions general, sectional, and municipal: glance for a moment at each. Some are already seeking the solution of these questions by revolution: thus far, with little apparent success. But who shall say what may come when this nation, opening its gates freely to the dregs of all other nations, shall have a vast proletary- mass who discover that the accredited political teachers are giving them phrases instead of real reasonings? What shall be done? I would only say that the evolutionary method would seem fitly begun by a more thorough attention to political and administrative subjects in our universities; by the study of the comparative legislation of different countries and of the differ ent states of this Union; by careful study of finance, not in the special pleadings of demagogues, but in treatises of the great masters; by a careful investigation of methods of reform tried in all parts of the civilized world. And next I would say, by training men to think, speak, and write on such subjects in the light of the best modern thought and experience, thus 244 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE bringing the results obtained by university research to bear upon the people at large. Take a few typical examples: and, first of all, the popular view of the most serviceable anchor which is left us, our judiciary system. The Supreme Court of this nation is indeed its great est jewel; it seems to have been created by our fathers in a moment of Divine inspiration. When that court shall be gone or discredited, this Republic will be really ended. Its subor dinate courts are also excellent. Our State courts are most of them good; but after all there is nothing more necessary in or der to keep our judiciary, and above all, our elective judiciary, what it ought to be, than an evolution in the people of a higher sense of the judicial function. More and more we should assist the growth in the popular mind of the truth that a rapidly rotating, poorly paid, cheap judiciary is the most costly luxury which a people can indulge in, that it is folly for the people to pay starvation stipends to judges who protect our highest in terests, while millionaires and corporations employ lawyers who have proved their right to demand fees equal to a king s ransom. Again, as regards crime and penalty. While the whole sub ject should command the attention of the best minds in our universities, more and more there should be evolved in the peo ple at large the idea of true mercy as against spurious mercy, the idea of well-considered mercy towards the great mass of hard-working, law-abiding citizens, rather than a weak lenity towards the vicious brute who lives by preying upon the law- abiding part of the community, whose profession is crime, whose joy is murder. An eminent judge once said to me, "The taking of life by due process of law, as a penalty for the greatest crimes, seems the only way of taking life to which the average American has any objection." The judge was right: there is throughout this Republic a widespread legal superstition favoring the pro tection of criminals. Safeguards which were created in the Middle Ages, to protect citizens against kings, and feudal lords, and robber knights, are now used to protect criminals against justice. There should be a quiet evolution out of this supersti tion, an evolution of better ideas taking form in better laws; laws promoting more prompt, more efficient, more common-sense dealing with criminals, and especially with professional criminals. EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 245 The enemy of individual liberty to-day is not King John, not King George, not the feudal lord; but the criminal, and espe cially the professional criminal. We have all seen the sickly sym pathy with blood-stained ruffians, we have all heard the plati tudes confounding crime with misfortune; to meet these, there should be developed more healthful modes of thought, the idea that crime is not mere misfortune, that crime is crime; that the criminal is a criminal. There should be developed legislators who will strengthen the laws against high crime and make pro cedure more speedy. 1 There should be developed a healthy, manly, womanly determination to fight criminals, to exterminate them. The passion for fishing and hunting is doubtless a survival of the earliest instincts of the human race; let this survival take better forms. I trust there are those here who will go forth to fish for plunderers, to hunt for scoundrels, vigorously, merci lessly. I trust that we shall have by and by a prevailing senti ment that the most inglorious thing a man can do is to prostitute his talents in aiding and defending crime and criminals, and that one of the most glorious things he can do is to prove his manliness by fighting them. So, too, in regard to public office: it is well, indeed, in the recurring political revolutions, to fight demagogues and to tear them from their thrones; here, too, that survival of the earlier instincts, that passion for fishing and hunting, may find a healthful satisfaction. But the more quiet evolutionary process should also be borne in mind: more and more should the effort be to evolve, out of the present loose indifference to sound political ethics, the sim ple idea that public office is not a reward for mere partisan hench men, not a personal favor to be dealt out by one individual to another, not a coinage in which tricksters pay their debts at the expense of the public; but to use a truism, which from the mouth of a great public man has become a great vitalizing truth, that "public office is a public trust." Let this idea be developed through the pulpit, through the press, by public meetings. Thus will come an environment which will force a better evolution in politics. More and more should we seek to evolve in the popu lar mind the simple idea that the highest fidelity is not the fidelity of party workers to party leaders, or of the leaders to 1 See an article by Josiah Flynt in The Forum for February, 1897. 246 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE the workers, or of both to the party; but that it is fidelity to the community, to the commonwealth, to truth, and to justice. Take next a local question : the government of our cities. Here we touch the weakest part of our system. Our cities are the rotten spots in the body politic, from which, if we are not care ful, decay is to spread throughout the whole system. For cities make and spread fashions, opinions, ideals. Simply as a matter of fact, our cities are the worst governed in the civilized world. In them there is the maximum of expenditure with the minimum of good result. The cause is not far to seek: we are making the same mistake which ruined the mediseval city republics : govern ing them by partisan mobs, with no proper check or balance. Under our present system periodical revolutions are our only safeguard, revolutions tearing down officials as soon as their plundering becomes unbearable. Far better would it be to evolve truer ideas of municipal government. These ideas seem to me mainly two: first, the idea that cities are not political bodies, that the question in electing a mayor or alderman is not what he thinks of national questions, but what he can do as to city questions. Simple as this idea is, it is very scantily developed as yet. The other idea is that, as the city is a corporation, as it has to do not at all with political interests, but with corporate interests, paving, sewage, lighting, water supply, repression of crime, care of the public health, public comfort, public in struction, those should have some control who have to pay for all these things. Why may we not evolve out of our present city system, in addition to a board of aldermen elected by all the citizens, a board of control elected by taxpayers, without whose consent no franchise should be granted and no tax levied? Take next our constitutional and legal evolution. Here the field is vast, but one or two subjects may be taken as typical. Amid so much that has been gained by catastrophes in the past, so much that is preparing the way for catastrophes in the future, are some things evidently to be accomplished by the evolution ary method. In international law there has been for several generations, and there is still going on, a steady evolution of righteousness, justice, and mercy. War has been rendered less and less cruel, less and less far-reaching; and now in our own times has been evolved, in better form than ever before, the EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 247 principle of international arbitration. Here, happily, our own country has taken the lead. Probably the future historian will point to the arbitration between our own country and Great Britain as the greatest thing in the career of President Grant. Undoubtedly the securing of an arbitration tribunal to settle the Venezuelan question will pass into history as the great triumph of President Cleveland, and the general arbitration treaty will give glory to all who aid in it. Here has been prog ress by evolution: the thought of Grotius developing out of the thought of Ayala and Gentilis, the thought of Vattel out of the thought of Grotius, the thought of a whole line of thinkers in this field since, each evolving something of good out of the thoughts of his predecessors. A splendid growth, slow but strong, bearing the richest fruit of peace and mercy for man kind. So much for our exterior policy. Now for a moment as to our interior policy. Among the vast number of considerations which come to me in this field I will single out but one. I trust that our universities and colleges are to educate more and more men who can bring the press to bear upon the process of interior political evolution. Especially is it to be hoped that one great gap will be filled. Let me call your attention to the simple fact that, among all the constitutional nations of the world, ours is the only one which has in its newspapers no real account of the doings of its national legislature. Under every other constitutional gov ernment on the face of the earth the newspapers read by the men in the streets, as a rule, give to the people, when their legislatures are in session, careful, consecutive accounts of the doings of their representatives. Our own country, supposed to exist by virtue of the eternal vigilance of its sixty millions of people, has for the masses nothing, usually, like any correct, consecutive summary of the doings of those who make its laws. We see now and then some meagre account of this or that great measure; but the mass of public measures, what they are, who promote them, all this is mainly unknown. A comparison of The Congressional Record with the reports in our daily papers will at any moment estab lish the truth of this statement. The beauty of this Senator s curls, the size of that Representative s feet, the apparel of the other cabinet officer s wife, a joke from this statesman, a sneer 248 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE from that, a bit of balderdash from the other, these things are telegraphed immediately. The steady progress of our pub lic affairs, wrought out by the earnest efforts of Senators and Representatives, is not telegraphed, not even written. And when the accounts of public affairs are sent us, what a travesty upon a report to a great people of the doings of its representatives. We have long letters over Mr. Blank s "great fight" in the Senate, the "great fight" being, generally let us say, a gran diloquent wrangle over some appointment in a custom-house. We have reports, fulsome or denunciatory, of another Mr. Blank s great speech on the Administration, in which it is proved that the present or late President is Antichrist. What we need, first of all, and what I trust the next genera tion of journalists will give us, are simple, fair summaries of the doings of our representatives in the national and state coun cils. Such reports would give us better ideas of political per spective. The country would be finally educated into seeing that some of the "great fights" we hear so much of, some of the "greatest efforts" of men s lives which seem to resound among the spheres, and some of the so-called great men who seem to strike the stars with their lofty heads, are but futile bubbles on the stream of our national life; while other things and other men of real greatness would be revealed. We should then come to see the greatness of such measures as the Morrill Bill of 1862, which established in every State of this Republic a strong centre for scientific and technical instruction, and so has made a far more lasting mark on the destinies of the nation than all the fights of all the political gladiators. Let me give one more example to illustrate my meaning. Sev eral years ago, an effort was made to impeach the President of the United States. The current was strong, and most party leaders thought best to go with it. One Senator of the United States refused. William Pitt Fessenden, of Maine, believing the im peachment an attempt to introduce Spanish-American politics into this country, resolutely refused to obey the mandate of his party as expressed at its state convention and at its national con vention; resisted the entreaties of relatives and friends; stood firmly against the measure; and finally, by his example and vote, defeated it. It was an example of Spartan fortitude, of Roman EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 249 heroism, worthy to be chronicled by Plutarch. How was it chronicled? It happened to me to be travelling in Germany at that time, and naturally I watched closely for the result of the impeachment proceedings. One morning I took up the paper containing the news, and read, "The impeachment has been defeated; three Senators were bribed." And at the head of the list of the bribed Senators was the name of Fessenden. The time will come when his statue will commemorate his great example; the time will also come, I trust, when we shall have a great body of citizens who demand honest, fair, consecutive reports of the doings of our representatives, and a body of men fitly trained to make such reports, reports as fair and full as our present chronicles of boating, base-ball and foot-ball, lawn tennis, and bicycling. But, in preparing the way for political evolution, there are some things to be avoided. First, I may mention the pressing of reforms for which the necessary conditions are not yet de veloped. Frederick the Great said that Joseph II always took the second step before he took the first. Though this was but a sneer, it points to a difficulty in many reforms. Second, the pressing of changes which are foreign to our institutions, habits, and thoughts, and which can never become part of our organic growth. Take one proposal out of many. It is sometimes urged that American political life would be bettered if the members of our Cabinet sat in the Senate or the House, as is the case in Eng land. The system works well in the mother country, why not in the United States? I answer, simply for the same reason which causes it to work so badly in most, if not in all, of the continental governments of Europe. The system does not fit into our insti tutions, which presuppose a separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial powers. In England, that old system has grown naturally out of the earlier history and present cir cumstances of the nation, and works well. Elsewhere, as a rule, it has been a mere foreign expedient, and has worked ill. Said an eminent French historian and statesman to me: "Monsieur, under the Empire I was Minister of Public Instruction during seven consecutive years; since that time six years have elapsed under the Republic, and France has had seven different Ministers of Public Instruction." One of the very best Secretaries of State 250 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE the nation has ever had, Mr. Hamilton Fish, could not have stood for a day against the badgering of the f actionists opposing him in the national legislature. It is doubtful whether even such Secretaries as John Quincy Adams and Richard Olney could have done so. Under the proposed system the steady occupation of the national legislature would be cabinet-making; every thing else would be sacrificed to the caballing against every new Cabinet as soon as it began its work. Every growth, to be nor mal and healthful, must, as a rule, be an evolution out of what precedes it, and, very rarely indeed, the insertion of any new inorganic institution. Take finally the general moral progress: I will not entangle myself in the reasonings of Buckle as to the impossibility of any progress in morals; I will try simply to draw a truth from a com parison between two concrete examples. Just at the end of the last century, two great European states were in dire trouble: Austria had rejected the efforts of Joseph II, and was once more abject under a stupid despotism; Prussia had fallen away from the theory and practice of Frederick the Great, and was under the second of the only two contemptible Hohenzollerns in history. Owing to the lack of proper moral conditions in its people and government, Austria came under the heel of Napoleon at the battle of Austerlitz; a year later, Prussia came under that same iron heel at the battle of Jena; both nations lay utterly prostrate. It is clear to us now, as we look back, that the condition pre cedent to an uplifting of these nations was a thorough evolution of moral strength in their rulers and their people : Prussia began such an evolution, manfully, nobly, quietly. The moral system of Kant was evolved the categorical imperative, the ethical idea of duty, "thou shalt, thou shalt not." It took hold of the foremost men in the land; it was infused into poetry, especially into the drama by Schiller, and into song by Arndt; it was in fused into prose, and especially into his addresses to the German nation by Fichte. From scores of professors chairs, from hun dreds of pulpits, from myriads of newspapers, it was implanted in the thoughts and translated into the actions of millions of men. It gave to old men the patriotic fire of youth; it gave to young men the steadiness of veterans. The result was the gradual abolition of the serf system in Prussia, by Stein; the creation of EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 251 a nation trained for war, by Scharnhorst; the physical harden ing and strengthening of the people, by Jahn; and, at last, the great uprising, the freedom war of 1813, the battles of Leipsic and Waterloo, the lifting-up of Prussia, the coming of the Emperor William and Bismarck. And so was evolved the new German Empire. Not from mellifluous popular oratory, not from vague declamations about rights, not from hysterical ap peals to feeling, but from the stern sense of moral duty extend ing from king to peasant. With Austria it was different : that empire took refuge in sub stitutes for morality : instead of such thinkers as Kant, develop ing a moral sense, there came ecclesiastical leaders who thought to save the nation by forcing all teachers, even those in mathe matics and the natural sciences, to take oath that they believed in the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin. Instead of such statesmen as Stein, working to give a moral environment to statesmanship, there came Metternich, trusting to intrigue: instead of Frederick William III, founding the University of Berlin, where competent men were allowed entire freedom to seek and proclaim truth as truth, there came the Austrian Em peror Francis, declaring that the sole aim of university instruc tion is to make pious and obedient subjects; instead of a system of instruction controlled by large-minded laymen, there came a system of instruction wholly in the hands of priests; and so, instead of the evolution of a moral sense, Austria had an evolu tion of new dogmas and ceremonials, and, instead of the evolu tion of religion, an evolution of ecclesiasticism. The results are before us. W T ith the hardiest and best soldiers in the world, Hun garians, Tyrolese, Croatians, Austria has been humiliated in every campaign since, beaten steadily in her wars with Na poleon; beaten in the struggle with her Hungarians, and only saved from them by the humiliating intervention of Russia; beaten by the French in 1859; beaten by the Prussians in 1866; then, after defeat in war, beaten just as completely in diplomacy, first by Cavour, then by Bismarck: driven out of Italy, driven out of Germany; forced to give up her sway over the old German Empire, forced to give up all part in the new German Empire, forced to give up her position in the front rank of continental states. 252 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE To sum up, then, as regards the development of a national morality, Prussia has advanced by a steady evolution of the moral sense in her people, a moral sense taking shape in earn est thought, in steady work, in heroism, in self-sacrifice; so that she has presented one of the most glorious chapters in the history of human progress. On the other hand, Austria has progressed by catastrophes, and she has progressed somewhat: she has at last granted toleration, the sway of the priesthood over education has been diminished, her laws have been bettered. In these contrasting examples, and in many others which might be adduced, are lessons for us: they hint to us the value of the cultivation, the diffusion, the exaltation of the simple, strong principles of ordinary morality, of righteousness, the righteousness which exalteth a nation. Every other sort of thing is prescribed to us as a nostrum : putting the name of God into the constitution; sending the Salvation Army among our peo ple; ritualism; camp-meetings; sensational preachers, and other sorts of dervishes; twelfth-century methods, supposed thirtieth- century methods. But when each of these has had its little day, when all have flickered out, there still shines in the moral heaven this great truth, written through all history on the life of every people, on the heart of every true man, "Righteousness exalteth a nation." Better customs, better laws, and a better adminis tration of laws, to the evolution of these a primal necessity is the cultivation of the simple, strong moral sense in the child, in the youth, in the man, in the family, and in the school, the cultivation of righteousness. Not the declaration of belief in this or that theological statement, but righteousness, which means "right-ness," right-doing, right dealing, the cultiva tion of this in the individual man and in society. Here, then, gentlemen, is the application of the doctrine I would lay before you to-day. During the months recently passed, with vision more or less clear we have looked over the edge of the abyss into which every other great republic thus far has been plunged to its ruin. We have been rescued by a great and inspiring effort, an effort worthy of the best days of any republic. How shall that effort be continued? Some of you are fitted to work in the more quiet fields; fitted to discover truth, to unveil beauty, to develop goodness, to strengthen justice, to produce EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION, IN POLITICS 253 the environment which will aid in evolving a better future. Some are to strive in the more stormy fields; to promote the better evolution more directly, in open combat with wrong, in open wrestle with unreason, in open battle with demagogues, in courts, in caucuses, in legislatures, in councils, in the pulpit, in the forum, through the press. My first word to both these classes is : strive to secure progress toward a better and nobler future, by processes evolutionary rather than revolutionary; by study, rather than by dogmatic assertion; by argument, rather than by declamation; by appeals to reason, rather than to prejudice; and to the nobler construc tive imagination, rather than to the "sensation sickness." My last word is, do not lend yourselves to unreason or injustice; do not prostitute your genius or talents; keep your faith in human liberty; keep your courage amid the storms of Democracy; never despair of the Republic. THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN Delivered before the Zeta of New York, at Hobart College, June 20, 1900. From Learning and Other Essays, by John J. Chapman, published by Moffat, Yard and Company. IF one could stand on the edge of the moon and look down through a couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be apparent that everything that happened on the earth is directly dependent on everything else that happened there. Whether the Italian peasant shall eat salt with his bread, de pends upon Bismarck. Whether the prison system of Russia shall be improved, depends upon the ministry of Great Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield is in power, there is no leisure in Russia for domestic reform. The lash is everywhere lifted in a security fur nished by the concurrence of all the influences upon the globe, that favor coercion. In like manner, the good things that happen are each the product of all extant conditions. Constitutional government in England qualifies the whole of western Europe. Our slaves were not set free without the assistance of every liberal mind in Europe; and the thoughts which we think in our closet affect the fate of the Boer in South Africa. That Tolstoy is to-day living unmolested upon his farm instead of serving in a Siberian mine, that Dreyfus is alive and not dead, is due directly to the people in this audience and to others like them scattered over Europe and America. The effect of enlightenment on tyranny is not merely to make the tyrant afraid to be cruel, it makes him not want to be cruel. It makes him see what cruelty is. And reciprocally the effect of cruelty on enlightenment is to make that enlightenment grow dim. It prevents men from seeing what cruelty is. The Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor you of his. Every ukase he signs makes allowance for you, and on the other hand, the whole philosophy of your life is tinged by him. You believe that the abuses under the Russian govern- THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 255 ment are inscrutably different from and worse than our own; whereas both sets of atrocities are identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, in taste and smell and substance than your prejudice is willing to admit. The existence of Russia narrows America s philosophy, and misconduct by a European power may be seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on the following day. More Americans have abandoned their faith in free government since England began to play the tyrant than there were colonists in the country in 1776. Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, the same language. The life that has been transplanted to North America during the last three centuries, is European life. From your position on the moon you would not be able to understand what the supposed differences were between European and American things, that the Americans make so much fuss over. You would say, "I see only one people, splashed over different continents. The problems they talk about, the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their education and catch- words are identical. They are the children of the Classics, of Chris tianity, and of the Revival of Learning. They are homogeneous, and they are growing more homogeneous." The subtle influences that modern nations exert over one another illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But if we turn to ancient history we find in its bare outlines staggering proof of the interdependence of nations. The Greeks were wiped out. They could not escape their contemporaries any more than we can escape the existence of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor Assyria Persia, nor Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, nor Rome the Goths. Life is not a board ing school where a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of the rest. He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much here as we are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal of such is our civilization. Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest con clusion of science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every individual of that population has an influence 256 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN as certain and far more discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the solar system? A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitution of the United States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter inces santly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind. We have an inherited and stupid notion that the East does not change. If Japan goes through a transformation scene under our eyes, we still hold to our prejudice as to the immutability of the Chinese. If our own people and the European nations seem to be meeting and surging and re-appearing in unaccustomed roles every ten years, till modern history looks like a fancy ball, we still go on muttering some old ignorant shibboleth about East and West, Magna Charta, the Indian Mutiny, and Ma homet. The chances are that England will be dead-letter, and Russia progressive, before we have done talking. Of a truth, when we consider the rapidity of visible change and the ampli tude of time for there is plenty of time we need not despair of progress. The true starting-point for the world s progress will never be reached by any nation as a whole. It exists and has been reached in the past as it will in the future by individuals scattered here and there in every nation. It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing conditions as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts to their own kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their own nation. You will think I have in mind poets and philo sophers, for these men take humanity as their subject, and deal in the general stuff of human nature. But the narrow spirit in which they often do this cuts down their influence to parish limits. I mean rather those men who in private life act out their thoughts and feelings as to the unity of human life, those same thoughts which the poets and philosophers have expressed in their plays, their sayings, and their visions. There have always THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 257 been men who in their daily life have fulfilled those intimations and instincts which, if reduced to a statement, receive the names of poetry and religion. These men are the cart-horses of progress, they devote their lives to doing things which can only be justi fied or explained by the highest philosophy. They proceed as if all men were their brothers. These practical philanthropists go plodding on through each century and leave the bones of their character mingled with the soil of their civilization. See how large the labors of such men look when seen in his toric perspective. They have changed the world s public opinion. They have moulded the world s institutions into forms expres sive of their will. I ask your attention to one of their achieve ments. We have one province of conduct in which the visions of the poets have been reduced to practice yes, erected into a department of government through the labors of the phil anthropists. They have established the hospital and the re formatory; and these visible bastions of philosophy hold now a more unchallenged place in our civilization than the Sermon on the Mount on which they comment. The truth which the philanthropists of all ages have felt is that the human family was a unit; and this truth, being as deep as human nature, can be expressed in every philosophy even in the inverted utilitarianism now in vogue. The problem how to treat insane people and criminals has been solved to this ex tent, that every one agrees that nothing must be done to them which injures the survivors. That is the reason we do not kill them. It is unpleasant to have them about, and this unpleas antness can be cured only by our devotion to them. We must either help the wretched or we ourselves become degenerate. They have thus become a positive means of civilizing the modern world; for the instinct of self-preservation has led men to deal with this problem in the only practical way. Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will be cared for. You may lie awake at night drawing up reasons for doing some thing different with this disgusting Chinaman who, some how, is in the world and is thrown into your care, your hospital, your thought but the machinery of your own being is so constructed that if you take any other course with him than that which you take with your own people, your institution will in- 258 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN stantly lose its meaning; you would not have the face to beg money for its continuance in the following year. The logic of this, which, if you like, is the logic of self -protection under the illusion of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bottom of all human progress. I dislike to express this idea in its meanest form; but I know there are some professors of political econ omy here, and I wish to be understood. The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick. It is to teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not accorded to them because they cure the sick, but because they stand for love, and responsibility. The appeal of physical suffering makes the strongest attack on our common humanity. Even zealots and sectaries are touched. The practice and custom of this kind of mercy have therefore become established, while other kinds of mercy which require more imagination are still in their infancy. But at the bottom of every fight for principle you will find the same senti ment of mercy. If you take a slate and pencil and follow out the precise reasons and consequences of the thing, you will always find that a practical and effective love for mankind is working out a practical self-sacrifice. The average man cannot do the sum, he does not follow the reasoning, but he knows the answer. The deed strikes into his soul with a mathematical impact, and he responds like a tuning-fork when its note is struck. Every one knows that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The child takes his nourishment from the tale of heroism as naturally as he takes milk. He feels that the deed was done for his sake. He adopts it; it is his own. The nations have always stolen their myths from one another, and claimed each other s heroes. It has required all the world s heroes to make the world s ear sensi tive to new statements, illustrations and applications of the logic of progress. Yet their work has been so well done that all of us respond to the old truths in however new a form. Not France alone but all modern society owes a debt of gratitude to Zola for his rescue of Dreyfus. The whole world would have been degraded and set back, the whole world made less decent and habitable but fcr those few Frenchmen who took their stand against corruption. Now the future of civil society upon the earth depends upon the application to international politics of this familiar idea, THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 259 which we see prefigured in our mythology, and monumental ized in our hospitals the principle that what is done for one is done for all. When you say a thing is "right," you appeal to mankind. What you mean is that everyone is at stake. Your attack upon wrong amounts to saying that some one has been left out in the calculation. Both at home and abroad you are always pleading for mercy, and the plea gains such a wide re sponse that some tyranny begins to totter, and its engines are turned upon you to get you to stop. This outcry against you is the measure of your effectiveness. If you imitate Zola and attack some nuisance in this town to-morrow, you will bring on every symptom and have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same, for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation is the same, for if a man can resist the in fluences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition. The public influence is the same, for every citizen can thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect. But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, nor to Parisians is this force confined. It goes out in all directions, continuously. The man is in communication with the world. This impulse of communication with all men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice, cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of the same non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that stops messages, that strikes dumb the speaker and deafens the listener. You will find that it makes no differ ence whether the non-conductor be a selfish oligarchy, a military autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of humanity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only an evil because it stifles men. Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to Albany and watch what it is that comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the pre cinct. It is a note from a friend of your father s offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentlemen have a mind to get heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputation, and a close enemy of most men who wish you well. And what will you get in return? Well, if I must for the 260 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN benefit of the economist, charge you up with some selfish gain, I will say that you get the satisfaction of having been heard, and that this is the whole possible scope of human ambition. When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that you cannot proclaim. Refuse to accept anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech, no matter what other power you lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded execution ers. As for your own private character, it will be preserved by such a course. Crime you cannot commit, for crime gags you. Collusion with any abuse gags you. As a practical matter a mere failure to speak out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and when the utterance of an uncalled-for sus picion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. It will bind and gag you and lay you dumb and in shackles like the veriest serf in Russia. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don t be gagged. The choice of Hercules was made when Hercules was a lad. It cannot be made late in life. It will perhaps come for each one of you within the next eighteen months. I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their mes sages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," rea sons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my power for good." Next year comes, and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. The great oc casion that was to have let him loose on society was some little occasion that nobody saw, some moment in which he decided to obtain a standing. The great battle of a lifetime has been THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 261 fought and lost over a silent scruple. But for this, the man might, within a few years, have spoken to the nation with the voice of an archangel. What was he waiting for? Did he think that the laws of nature were to be changed for him? Did he think that a "notice of trial" would be served on him? Or that some spirit would stand at his elbow and say, "Now s your time"? The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time. And the compensation for beginning at once is that your voice carries at once. You do not need a standing. It would not help you. Within less time than you can see it, you will have been heard. The air is filled with sounding boards and the echoes are flying. It is ten to one that you have but to lift your voice to be heard in California, and that from where you stand. A bold plunge will teach you that the visions of the unity of human na ture which the poets have sung, were not fictions of their im agination, but a record of what they saw. Deal with the world, and you will discover their reality. Speak to the world, and you will hear their echo. Social and business prominence look like advantages, and so they are if you want money. But if you want moral influence you may bless God you have not got them. They are the pay ment with which the world subsidizes men to keep quiet, and there is no subtlety or cunning by which you can get them with out paying in silence. This is the great law of humanity, that has existed since history began, and will last while man lasts evil, selfishness, and silence are one thing. The world is learning, largely through American experience, that freedom in the form of a government is no guarantee against abuse, tyranny, cruelty, and greed. The old sufferings, the old passions are in full blast among us. What, then, are the advan tages of self-government? The chief advantage is that self-gov ernment enables a man in his youth, in his own town, within the radius of his first public interests, to fight the important battle of his life while his powers are at their strongest, and the powers of oppression are at their weakest. If a man acquires the power of speech here, if he says what he means now, if he makes his point and dominates his surroundings at once, his voice will, as a matter of fact, be heard instantly in a very wide radius. And so he walks up into a new sphere and begins to accomplish JOHN JAY CHAPMAN great things. He does this through the very force of his insist ence on the importance of small things. The reason for his graduation is not far to seek. A man cannot reach the hearts of his townsfolks, without using the whole apparatus of the world of thought. He cannot tell or act the truth in his own town with out enlisting every power for truth, and setting in vibration the cords that knit that town into the world s history. He is forced to find and strike the same note which he would use on some great occasion when speaking for all mankind. A man who has won a town-fight is a veteran, and our country to-day is full of these young men. To-morrow their force will show in national politics, and in that moment the fate of the Malay, the food of the Russian prisoner, the civilization of South Africa and the future of Japan will be seen to have been in issue. These world problems are now being settled in the contest over the town- pump in a Western village. I think it likely that the next thirty years will reveal the recuperative power of American institu tions. One of you young men might easily become a reform President, and be carried into office and held in office by the force of that private opinion which is now being sown broadcast throughout the country by just such men as yourselves. You will concede the utility of such a President. Yet it would not be the man but the masses behind him that did his work. Democracy thus lets character loose upon society and shows us that in the realm of natural law there is nothing either small or great: and this is the chief value of democracy. In America the young man meets the struggle between good and evil in the easiest form in which it was ever laid before men. The cruel ties of interest and of custom have with us no artificial assist ance from caste, creed or race-prejudice. Our frame of govern ment is drawn in close accordance with the laws of nature. By our documents we are dedicated to mankind; and hence it is that we can so easily feel the pulse of the world and lay our hand on the living organism of humanity. THE AMATEUR SPIRIT BY BLISS PERRY Delivered before the Delta of New York, at Columbia University, and before the Delta of Massachusetts, at Tufts College, in 1901. Reprinted by permission from The Atlantic Monthly, August, 1901. ONE interesting result of the British struggle in South Africa has been a revival among Englishmen of the spirit of self-exami nation. The unexpected duration and the staggering cost of the war have brought sharply home to them a realization of na tional shortcomings. When every allowance has been made for the natural difficulties against which the British troops have so gallantly contended, there remains a good deal of incontro vertible and unwelcome evidence of defective preparation, of inadequate training. The War Office maps were incomplete; the Boer positions were ill reconnoitred; British officers of long experience were again and again outgeneraled by farmers. Of the many frank and manly endeavors to analyze the causes of such a surprising weakness, one of the most suggestive has been made by the Hon. George C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton Col lege. In an article published not long ago, he inquires whether his countrymen may well be called, not, as formerly, "a nation of shopkeepers," but, with more justice, a nation of amateurs. "Conspicuous as are the virtues of British soldiers and British officers," he remarks, "these virtues are essentially the virtues of the amateur, and not of the professional, arising from the native vigor of our national temperament, and not from intelli gent education or training." 1 The distinction here made between the amateur and the pro fessional is one that, for ordinary purposes, is obvious enough. The amateur, we are accustomed to say, works for love, and not for money. He cultivates an art or a sport, a study or an em ployment, because of his taste for it; he is attached to it, not because it gives him a living, but because it ministers to his life. 1 The Nineteenth Century, October, 1900. 264 BLISS PERRY Mr. Joseph Jefferson, for instance, is classed as a professional actor and an amateur painter. Charles Dickens was an amateur actor and a professional novelist. Your intermittent political reformer is an amateur. His opponent, the "ward man," is a professional; politics being both his life and his living, his art and his constant industry. In any particular art or sport, it is often difficult to draw a hard-and-fast line between amateur and professional activity. The amateur athlete may be so wholly in earnest as to take risks and to endure hardships which no amount of money would tempt him to undergo. Amateur philanthropy is of great and increas ing service in the social organism of the modern community. Many an American carries into his amusement, his avocation, such as yachting, fancy farming, tarpon fishing, the same thoroughness, energy, and practical skill that win him success in his vocation. And yet, as a general rule, the amateur betrays amateurish qualities. He is unskilful because untrained; desultory because incessant devotion to his hobby is both unnecessary and weari some; ineffective because, after all, it is not a vital matter whether he succeed or fail. The amateur actor is usually interesting, at times delightful, and even, as in the case of Dickens, powerful; his performance gives pleasure to his friends; but, nevertheless, the professional, who must act well or starve, acts very much better. In a country where there is a great leisure class, as the Warden of Merton points out, amateurism is sure to flourish. "The young Englishman of this great leisure class," he says, "is no dandy and no coward, but he is an amateur born and bred, with an amateur s lack of training, an amateur s contempt of method, and an amateur s ideal of life." The English boy at tends school, he adds, with other boys who are amateurs in their studies, and almost professionals in their games; he passes through the university with the minimum of industry; he finds profes sional and public life in Great Britain crippled by the amateur spirit; in the army, the bar, the church, in agriculture, manu facturing, and commerce, there is a contempt for knowledge, an inveterate faith in the superiority of the rule of thumb, a tendency to hold one s self a little above one s work. Similar testimony has recently been given by Dr. Mandell THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 265 Creighton, the late Bishop of London, in a posthumously pub lished address entitled A Plea for Knowledge. "The great defect of England at present," confesses the bishop, "is an inadequate conception of the value of knowledge in itself, and of its impor tance for the national life. We have a tendency to repose on our laurels; to adopt the attitude that we are no longer professionals, but high-minded and eclectic amateurs. . . . We do not care to sacrifice our dignity by taking undue care about trifles." * With the validity of such indictments against a whole nation we have no direct concern. But they suggest the importance of the distinction between the amateur and the professional spirit; they show that a realization of this distinction may affect many phases of activity, personal and national, and how far- reaching may be its significance for us as we face those new con ditions under which the problems of both personal and national life must be worked out. Amateurs, then, to borrow Mr. Brodrick s definition, "are men who are not braced up to a high standard of effort and proficiency by a knowledge that failure may involve ruin, who seldom fully realize the difficulties of success against trained competitors, and who therefore rebel against the drudgery of professional drill and methodical instruction." One may accept this definition, in all its implications, without ceasing to be aware of the charm of the amateur. For the amateur surely has his charm, and he has his virtues, virtues that have nowhere wrought more happily for him than here upon American soil. Versatility, enthusiasm, freshness of spirit, initiative, a fine recklessness of tradition and precedent, a faculty for cutting across lots, these are the qualities of the American pioneer. Not in the Italians of the Renaissance nor in the Elizabethan Englishmen will one find more plasticity of mind and hand than among the plain New Englanders of 1840. Take those men of the Transcendentalist epoch, whose individuality has been for tunately transmitted to us through our literature. They were in love with life, enraptured of its opportunities and possibilities. No matter to what task a man set his hand, he could gain a liveli hood without loss of self-respect or the respect of the community. Let him try teaching school, Emerson would advise; let him 1 Contemporary Review, April, 1901. 266 BLISS PERRY farm it awhile, drive a tin peddler s cart for a season or two, keep store, go to Congress, live "the experimental life." Emer son himself could muse upon the oversoul, but he also raised the best Baldwin apples and Bartlett pears in Concord, and got the highest current prices for them in the Boston market. His friend Thoreau supported himself by making sandpaper OF lead pencils, by surveying farms, or by hoeing that immortal patch of beans ; his true vocation being steadily that of the philosopher, the seeker. The type has been preserved, by the translucent art of Hawthorne, in the person of Holgrave, the daguerreotypist of The House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave was twenty-two, but he had already been a schoolmaster, store keeper, editor, peddler, dentist. He had travelled in Europe, joined a company of Fourierists, and lectured on mesmerism. Yet "amid all these personal vicissitudes," Hawthorne tells us, "he had never lost his identity. He had never violated the inner most man, but had carried his conscience along with him." No doubt there is something humorous, to our generation, in this glorification of the Yankee tin peddler. Yet how much there is to admire in the vivacity, the resourcefulness, the very mobility, of that type of man, who was always in light march ing order, and who, by flank attack and feigned retreat and in every disguise of uniform, stormed his way to some sort of moral victory at last! And the moral victory was often accompanied by material victory as well. These men got on, by hook or by crook; they asked no favors; they paid off their mortgages, and invented machines, and wrote books, and founded new com monwealths. In war and peace they had a knack for getting things done, and learning the rules afterward. Nor has this restless, inventive, querying, accomplishing type of American manhood lost its prominence in our political and social structure. The self-made man is still, perhaps, our most representative man. Native shrewdness and energy and practical capacity qualities such as the amateur may possess in a high degree continue to carry a man very far. They have fre quently been attended by such good fortune as to make it easy for us to think that they are the only qualities needed for suc cess. Some of the most substantial gains of American diplomacy, for instance, have been made by men without diplomatic train- THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 267 ing. We have seen within a very few years an almost unknown lawyer, from an insignificant city, called to be the head of the Department of State, where his achievements, indeed, promptly justified his appointment. The conduct of the War Department and the Navy has frequently been entrusted to civilians whose frank ignorance of their new duties has been equalled only by their skill in performing them. The history of American cabi nets is, in spite of many exceptions, on the whole, an apotheosis of the amateur. It is the readiest justification of the tin peddler theory, the theory, namely, that you should first get your man, and then let him learn his new trade by practising it. "By dint of hammering one gets to be a blacksmith," say the French; and if a blacksmith, why not a postmaster, or a postmaster gen eral, or an ambassador? The difficulty with this theory lies in the temptation to exag gerate it. Because we have been lucky thus far, we are tempted to proceed upon the comfortable conviction that if we once find our man, the question of his previous apprenticeship to his call ing, or even that of his training in some related field of activity, may safely be ignored. The gambler is in our blood. We like to watch the performance of an untried man in a responsible position, much as we do the trotting of a green horse. The ad mitted uncertainty of the result enhances our pleasure in the experiment. In literature, just now, we are witnessing the ex ploitation of the "young writer." Lack of experience, of crafts manship, is actually counted among a fledgeling author s assets. The curiosity of the public regarding this new, unknown power is counted upon to offset, and more, the recognition of the known power of the veteran writer. Power is indeed recognized as the ultimate test of merit; but there is a widespread tendency to overlook the fact that power is largely conditioned upon skill, and that skill depends not merely upon natural faculty, but upon knowledge and discipline. The popularity of the "young writer" is, in short, an illustration of the easy glorification of amateur qualities to the neglect of professional qualities. This tendency is the more curious because of our pronounced national distaste for ineffectiveness. The undisguisedly amateur ish traits of unskilfulness and desultoriness have not been popu- 268 BLISS PERRY lar here. If we have been rather complaisant toward the jack- of -all-trades, we have never wholly forgotten that he is "master of none." In the older New England vernacular, the village ne er-do-well was commonly spoken of as a "clever" fellow; the adjective was distinctly opprobrious. And, indeed, if the connois seur is the one who knows, and the dilettante the one who only thinks he knows, the amateur is often the one who would like to know, but is too lazy to learn. Accordingly, he keeps guessing, in an easy, careless, "clever" fashion, which is agreeable enough when no serious interests are at stake. He has transient affec tions for this and that department of thought or activity; like Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, he has "gone into that a good deal at one time." Mr. Brooke is a delightful person in fiction, but in actual life a great many Mr. Brookes end their career at the town farm. Even this would not in itself be so lamentable a matter, if it were not in the power of a community of Mr. Brookes to create conditions capable of driving the rest of us to the town farm. " Dilettanteism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur search for truth, this," says Carlyle, "is the sorest sin." The amateur search for truth has always flourished, and is likely to flourish always, in the United States. That the quest is inspiriting, amusing, sometimes highly rewarded, one may readily admit. But if it promotes individualism, it also produces the crank. If it brevets us all as philosophers, it likewise brands many of us as fools. Who does not know the amateur economist, with his "sacred ratios," or his amiable willingness to "do some thing for silver"? The amateur sociologist, who grows strangely confused if you ask him to define sociology? Popular preachers, who can refute Darwin and elucidate Jefferson "while you wait," if you do wait? Amateur critics of art and literature, who have plenty of zeal, but no knowledge of standards, no anchor age in principles? The lady amateur, who writes verses without knowing prosody, and paints pictures without learning to draw, and performs what she calls "social service" without training her own children either in manners or religion? Nay, are there not amateur college professors, who walk gracefully through the part, but add neither to the domain of human knowledge nor to the practical efficiency of any pupil? THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 269 But the roll-call of these dependents and defectives is long enough. The failures of the amateur search for truth are often brilliant failures. Its occasional successes have often been bril liant, too. Yet the real workaday progress, the solid irretrace able advance in any art or profession, has commonly been made by the professional. He sums up in himself both connoisseur- ship and craftsmanship. He not only knows, but does. Pasteur was a professional, and Helmholtz, and Huxley. John Marshall was a professional. Mr. John Sargent is a professional, and so is Mr. Secretary Hay. If the gifted amateur desires to learn his relative rank when compared with a professional, the way is easy. Let him chal lenge the professional! Play a match at golf against the dour Scotchman who gives lessons for his daily bread. He will beat you, because he cannot afford not to beat you. Shoot against your guide in the North Woods. You will possibly beat him at a target, but he will hit the deer that you have just missed; you can cast a fly on the lawn much farther than he, but he will take more fish out of the pool. It is his business, your recreation. Some one dear to you is critically ill. It seems cruel to surrender the care of the sick person to a hireling, when you are conscious of boundless love and devotion. But your physician will prefer the trained nurse, because the trained nurse will do what she is told, will keep cool, keep quiet, count the drops accurately, read the thermometer right; because, in short, he can depend upon a professional, and cannot depend upon an amateur. What is true of the sport, of the art, is even more invariably true in the field of scientific effort. How secure is the course of the Fachmann, who by limiting his territory has become lord of it, who has a fund of positive knowledge upon all the knowable portions of it, and has charted, at least, the deepening water where knowledge sheers off into ignorance ! It is late in the day to confess the indebtedness of our generation to the scientific method. How tonic and heartening, in days of dull routine, has been the example of those brave German masters to whom our American scholarship owes so much! What industry has been theirs, what confidence in method, what serene indifference to the rivalry of the gifted amateur ! I recall the fine scorn with which Bernhard ten Brink, at Strassburg, used to waive aside the 270 BLISS PERRY suggestions of his pupils that this or that new and widely ad vertised book might contain some valuable contribution to his department. "Nay," he would retort, " wissenschaftliche Bedeu- tung hat s dock nicht." Many a pretentious book, a popular book, even a very useful book, was pilloried by that quiet sentence, "/ has no scientific significance." To get the import of that sen tence thoroughly into one s head is worth all it costs to sit at the feet of German scholars. There speaks the true, patient, scientific spirit, whose service to the modern man was perhaps the most highly appraised factor when we of the Western world tried to take an inventory of ourselves and our indebtedness, at the dawn of the new century. For to be able to assess the scientific bearing of the new book, the new fact, upon your own profession proves you a master of your profession. Modern competitive conditions are making this kind of expert knowledge more and more essential. The success of German manufacturing chemists, for example, is uni versally acknowledged to be due to the scientific attainments of the thousands of young men who enter the manufactories from the great technical schools. The alarm of Englishmen over the recent strides of Germany in commercial rivalry is due to a dawn ing recognition of the efficacy of knowledge, and of the training which knowledge recommends. It is the well-grounded alarm of the gifted amateur when compelled to compete with the pro fessional. The professional may not be a wholly agreeable an tagonist; he may not happen to be a "clubable" person; but that fact does not vitiate his record. His record stands. Is it possible to explain this patent or latent antagonism of the amateur toward the professional? It is explicable, in part at least, through a comparison not so much of their methods of work where the praise must be awarded to the professional as of their characteristic spirit. And here there is much more to be said for the amateur. The difference will naturally be more striking if we compare the most admirable trait of the amateur spirit with the least admirable trait of the professional spirit. The cultivated amateur, who touches life on many sides, per ceives that the professional is apt to approach life from one side only. It is a commonplace to say that without specialized train- THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 271 ing and accomplishment the road to most kinds of professional success is closed. Yet, through bending one s energies unremit tingly upon a particular task, it often happens that creation nar rows "in man s view," instead of widening. Your famous expert, as you suddenly discover, is but a segment of a man, over developed in one direction, atrophied in all others. His expert- ness, his professional functioning, so to speak, is of indisputable value to society, but he himself remains an unsocial member of the body politic. He has become a machine, as Emerson declared so long ago, "a thinker, not a man thinking." He is uninterested, and consequently uninteresting. Very possibly it may not be the chief end of man to afford an interesting spec tacle to the observer. And yet so closely are we bound together that a loss of sympathy, of imagination, of free and varied activ ity, soon insulates the individual, and lessens his usefulness as a member of society. Surely we are playing an interesting com edy, here between heaven and the mire, and we ought to play it in an interested way. We can afford to be human. Scientific Method is a handmaiden whose services have proved indispen sable. No one can fill her place. We should raise her wages. But, after all, Personality is the mistress of the house. Method must be taught to know her station, and "She is the second, not the first." No doubt there is a temptation, in such a comparison of qual ities and gifts, to dally with mere abstractions. None of us have known a wholly methodized, mechanicalized man. But none the less we may properly endeavor to measure a tendency, and to guard against its excess. There are few observers of American life who believe that specialization has as yet been carried too far. Yet one may insist that the theory of specialized functions, necessitated as it is by modern conditions, and increasingly demanded as it must be as our civilization grows in complexity, needs examination and correction in the interests of true human progress. It is not that we actually meet on the sidewalk some scientific Frankenstein, some marvellously developed special faculty for research or invention or money-making, which domi nates and dwarfs all other faculties, though we often see something that looks very much like it. It is rather that thought- 272 BLISS PERRY ful people are compelled to ask themselves, How far can this special development this purely professional habit of mind proceed without injury to the symmetry of character, without impairing the varied and spontaneous and abundant play of human powers which gives joy to life? And the prejudice which the amateur feels toward the professional, the more or less veiled hostility between the man who does something for love which another man does for money, is one of those instinctive reac tions like the vague alarm of some wild creature in the woods which give a hint of danger. Let us make the very fullest acknowledgment of our debt to the professional spirit. Many of our best inheritances, such as our body of law, represent the steady achievements of pro fessional skill, professional self-sacrifice. The mechanical con veniences and equipments in which the age abounds, all this apparatus for communication and transportation, have been wrought out for us by the most patient, the most concentrated activity of professionals. The young man who is entering medi cine, the law, business, the army, the church, finds himself ranked at once by his power to assimilate the professional experi ence of older men. Some day, let us trust, the young man who desires to serve his country in her civil service, her consular and diplomatic service, will find himself, not, as now, blocked by an amateurish system of rewards for partisan fealty, but upon the road to a genuine professional career. The hope of society, no doubt, depends largely upon those men who are seriously devot ing their energies to some form of expert activity. They are the torch-bearers, the trained runners who bear the light from stage to stage of the heaven-beholden course. And at least in the immediate future the necessity for unwearying professional endeavor will be more pressing than ever before in the history of the world. " Cities will crowd to its edge In a blacker, incessanter line; . . . The din will be more on its banks, Denser the trade on its stream." Ours must be, not "a nation of amateurs," but a nation of professionals, if it is to hold its own in the coming struggles, struggles not merely for commercial dominance, but for the THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 273 supremacy of political and moral ideals. Our period of national isolation, with all it brought of good or evil, has been outlived. The new epoch will place a heavy handicap upon ignorance of the actual world, upon indifference to international usages and undertakings, upon contempt for the foreigner. What is needed is, indeed, knowledge, and the skill that knowledge makes pos sible. The spirit with which we confront the national tasks of the future should have the sobriety, the firmness, the steady effectiveness, which we associate with the professional. Yet is it not possible, while thus acknowledging and cultivat ing the professional virtues, to free ourselves from some of the grosser faults of the mere professional? The mere professional s cupidity, for instance, his low aim, his time-serving, his narrow ness, his clannish loyalty, to his own department only, his lack of imagination, his indifference to the religious and moral pas sions, to the dreams, hopes, futilities, regrets, of the breathing, bleeding, struggling men and women by his side? It is not the prize-fighter only who brings professionalism into disrepute, nor the jockey that "pulls" a horse, the oarsman that "sells" a race, the bicyclist that fouls a rival. The taint of profession alism clings to the business man that can think only of his shop, the scholar that talks merely of letters, the politician that asks of the proposed measure, "What is there in this for me?" To counteract all such provinciality and selfishness, such loss of the love of honor in the love of gain, one may rightly plead for some breath of the spirit of the amateur, the amator, the "man who loves"; the man who works for the sheer love of working, plays the great complicated absorbing game of life for the sake of the game, and not for his share of the gate money; the man who is ashamed to win if he cannot win fairly, nay, who is chivalric enough to grant breathing space to a rival, whether he win or lose! Is it an impossible ideal, this combination of qualities, this union of the generous spirit of the amateur with the method of the professional? In the new world of disciplined national en deavor upon which we are entering, why may not the old Ameri* can characteristics of versatility, spontaneity, adventurousness, still persist? These are the traits that fit one to adjust himself readily to unforeseen conditions, to meet new emergencies. 274 BLISS PERRY They will be even more valuable in the future than in the past, if they are employed to supplement, rather than to be substi tuted for, the solid achievements of professional industry. If we are really to lead the world s commerce, though that is far from being the only kind of leadership to which American his tory should teach us to aspire, it will be the Yankee charac teristics, plus the scientific training of the modern man, that will enable us to do it. The personal enthusiasm, the individual initiative, the boundless zest, of the American amateur must penetrate, illuminate, idealize, the brute force, the irresistibly on-sweeping mass, of our vast industrial democracy. The best evidence that this will happen is the fact that it is already happening. There are amateurs without amateurish ness, professionals untainted by professionalism. Many of us are fortunate enough to recognize in some friend this combina tion of qualities, this union of strict professional training with that free outlook upon life, that human curiosity and eagerness, which are the best endowment of the amateur. Such men are indeed rare, but they are prized accordingly. And one need hardly say where they are most likely to be found. It is among the ranks of those who have received a liberal education. Every higher institution of learning in this country now offers some sort of specialized training. To win distinction in academic work is to come under the dominion of exact knowledge, of approved methods. It means that one is disciplined in the mechanical processes and guided by the spirit of modern science, no matter what his particular studies may have been. The graduates whose acquisitions can most readily be assessed are probably the ones who have specialized most closely, who have already as under graduates begun to fit themselves for some form of professional career. They have already gained something of the expert s solid basis of accurate information, the expert s sureriess of hand and eye, the expert s instinct for the right method. But this professional discipline needs tempering by another spirit. The highest service of the educated man to our demo cratic society demands of him breadth of interest as well as depth of technical research. It requires unquenched ardor for the best things, spontaneous delight in the play of mind and char acter, a many-sided responsiveness that shall keep a man from THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 275 hardening into a mere high-geared machine. It is these qualities that perfect a liberal education and complete a man s usefulness to his generation. Taken by themselves, they fit him primarily for living, rather than for getting a living. But they are not to be divorced from other qualities; and even if they were, the educated American can get a living more easily than he can learn how to live. The moral lessons are harder than the intel lectual, and faith and enthusiasm, sympathy and imagination, are moral qualities. Here is some young scholar who has been taught the facts of history, trained to sift historical evidence, to compare historical periods, to trace historical causes; but has he imagination enough to see into the mind and heart of the historical man? He has been taught to analyze the various theories of society and govern ment; he has learned to sneer at what he calls "glittering gen eralities"; yet has he sympathy enough, moral passion enough, to understand what those glittering generalities have done for the men and the generations that have been willing to die for them? Such secrets forever elude the cold heart and the calcu lating brain. But they are understood by the generous youth, by the man who is brave enough to take chances, to risk all for the sake of gaining all. It is for this reason that the amateur football game, for all its brutalities, has taught many a young scholar a finer lesson than the classroom has taught him, namely, to risk his neck for his college; yet no finer one than the class room might afford him if his teacher were always an amator, a lover of virility as well as of accuracy; a follower not of the letter only, but of the spirit which makes alive. "Our business in this world," said Robert Louis Stevenson, a craftsman who through all his heart-breaking professional toil preserved the invincible gayety of the lover, "is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits." In this characteristically Ste- vensonian paradox there is a perfect and a very noble expression of the amateur spirit. He does not mean, we may be sure, that failure is preferable to success, but that more significant than either success or failure is the courage with which one rides into the lists. It is his moral attitude toward his work which lifts the workman above the fatalities of time and chance, so that, whatever fortune befall the labor of his hands, the travail of his soul remains undefeated and secure. THINGS HUMAN BY BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER Delivered before the Beta of Illinois, at the University of Chicago, June 17, 1901. Reprinted by permission from The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1902. MAN is unquestionably a highly rational being. Still, if you travel and observe, from the mouth of the Danube to the Golden Gate, you will find most men wearing a coat with a use less collar marked with a useless " V "-shaped slash, and decorated with two useless buttons at the small of the back, and one or more useless buttons at the cuffs. The collar, the slash, and the buttons are there in answer to no rational need; it is not a common climate nor a common racial need of protection against climate that they represent, but a common civilization whose form and ritual they mutely confess. Over this entire area those who aspire to be of the Brahmin caste deck their heads for wedding, funeral, and feast with a black cylindrical covering, suited, so far as we can discern, neither to avert the weapon of the adversary or the dart of the rain, nor to provide a seat whereon man may sit and rest himself. And as for the women contained within this same area we behold that the amplitude of the sleeve, the disposition of the belt, and the outline of the skirt all obey the rise and fall of one resistless tide which neither moon nor seasons control. Wherever civilization and education have done the most to make individuality self-conscious and rational, there it is that individuality seeks most earnestly to merge itself in the external confessions of membership in the body of the whole. What it openly seeks in the matter of external confession it however unconsciously assumes in all the inner framework and mould- forms of manners, customs, morals, law, art, and faith. The statement of creeds, the standards of morals, the forms of art men adopt without regard to race and blood, or to climate and natural environment. They have them and hold them as his torical endowment, and their lives, no matter how they may THINGS HUMAN 277 struggle to make them otherwise, no matter how they may think they succeed, are formal more than they are rational, are his torical more than they are begotten of the day. It is because man is a social being that he is an historical be ing, and a social being he surely is first and foremost. Individual ism and the theory of individual rights are late discoveries. The "Individual" is scarcely more than a dried Praparat, an isola tion developed in the glycerine and preserved with the alcohol of the philosophico-legal laboratories. Some very wise people assume to have found out a century or so ago that society and the social compact were created out of a voluntary surrender of individual rights. This holds good much after the manner of Mr. O Toole s interpretation of the power house at Niagara, " The machinery what pumps the water for the Falls." It is because man is a social being that he is an historical be ing. This does not mean that by nature he maintains a family tree or revels in historical research. The very social order, in which as the inseparable condition of his existence he finds him self, is an historical deposit, an historical resultant. It is indeed history itself, history pressed flat, if he only knew it, or rather, history itself is the attempt to raise the flat pictures into relief and give them depth. The historical interpretation constitutes the only genuine explanation of those complexities of condition and usage which characterize the social fabric, and in default of historical per spective most men at all times and all men at most times simply marvel and conform. This elaborate and unaccountable struc ture of laws, usages, and religion impresses the normal, untaught mind as a thing too solid, too intricate, and too vast to have been fashioned by the minds and hands of men such as those of the day. Only gods or heroes could have devised it. Hence it is that the age of heroes always precedes the age of history. But Homer prepared the way for Herodotus, in that the explanation by way of the gods and the heroes offers a first satisfaction to the first groping quest as to how this marvel of society and state could have come to be. And yet neither of the two methods that by the heroes or that by history does more than skim the surface. For most purposes, and for the great mass of the matter, we simply, with more or less protest, conform, and are content 278 BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER to restrict that individual inquiry and origination which we like to call freedom to the close limits of some snug private domain well fenced from the common and the street. The labor is too vast, the hope of remuneration too doubtful, the ultimate bene fit too questionable, for us to assail the well-established conven tional orthography of society. It is evidently more rational to spell the word could with a cood. It may be that some will find it a moral duty to truth or to the rising generation so to do, and perhaps they will do it merely for the purpose of setting a good example. But with all the complexity of interests attaching to the use of written Eng lish as a social vehicle over the great English-speaking domain, it looks veritably as if the good example were like to be seed sown by the wayside. And even if it should take root and bear its ample fruit of phonetic spellings, would it yet represent a gain to have shut the language of the present off from the past, and made the English of Shakespeare and Milton a dead lan guage to the readers of the next generation? We live in a great society with all the centuries of English thought since the days of Elizabeth, and the written English in the form of a more or less established conventional orthography is the bond thereof. It is very irrational; it is very illogical, so the reformer and radi cal tell us, and they are undoubtedly correct. But the interest ing feature of the matter is that for these persons the question is herewith settled, and orthography is sentenced forthwith to violent death. If orthography is illogical they esteem it com petent for them to say, "So much the worse for orthography"; but if orthography serves a high and necessary purpose and still is illogical, may it not be competent for us to say, "So much the worse for logic"? We may indeed suspect that all this logic has been far too shallowly conceived. I have not introduced this allusion to spelling and spelling reform with any desire to stir the peaceful minds of my readers unto strife, nor is it my purpose to embroil myself with the Spell ing Reform Association in this or in any other connection. The fact is, nothing furnishes a better illustration of the human- social institutions such as we are discussing than does language, and especially in those features of its life which reveal the proc esses of standardizing, and the tendency toward cooperation THINGS HUMAN 279 and uniformity. The forces which make toward establishing the uniformity of the so-called laws of sound are ultimately, as social forces, the same as those which create the standard literary idioms or Schriftsprachen and the conventional orthographies. They are all one also with those social instincts that develop the standard formulas of courtesy, the usages of etiquette, fash ions in dress, standards of taste in literature and art, the con ventions of manners and morals, the formal adherences of reli gion, and the established law and order of the state. These are all of them the "things human" that go with man as a social, historical being, and, of them all, language as an institution ut terly human, utterly social, utterly historical affords the clearest illustrations of those principles which hold sway in this field of humanity pure and undefiled; and so it is that the speech-re former in every guise from the Volapiikist to the phonetic speller is typical in general outlook, method of thought, and plan of procedure for all the theorist-reformers who have ever hung in the basket of a phrontisterion. We hold no brief for Toryism, or against the reformers, but to the end that that social-mind- edness which we incline to stamp as historical-mindedness may be sufficiently set forth and characterized; we are constrained to point a contrast and isolate for use as a foil the extreme op posing type of mind and attitude of life. It is seldom that we find a man who is all one, or all the other. The concept theorist and doctrinaire is ordinarily obtained as an abstraction from many men s actions in many different fields, and yet single speci mens have been found of almost typical purity. I imagine, for instance, that the somewhat ill-defined term "crank" represents a struggle of the language to label an article of humankind which has been absolutely sterilized from the taint of historical-mind edness. The name crank is, I believe, a title we reserve for other people than ourselves, and in the exercise of our own peculiar forms of crankhood we prefer to allude to what we call "our principles." It becomes therefore a somewhat dangerous task, to deal with the concept crank, lest we seem to be laying pro fane hand upon the sacred ark of principle, even though it be only to steady it along the rough way of human life. I presume there is nothing of which we are more weakly proud, especially we men, than our logic. And yet it is our logic that 280 BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER too often makes fools of us. In fact, plain logic is usually too simple an apparatus for the need. The data for the construc tion of a perfect syllogism can only be obtained from an artifi cially prepared cross-section of life, which never does it jus tice. To operate with plane geometry and neglect the third dimension on the axis of historic order is to do offence unto the constitutive principle of human social life. To be human is to be social, to be social is to be historical, and human judgments, to be sound, must be historical judgments. Those judgments which, in life affairs, appear to be the soundest, and which be tray that priceless thing termed in common parlance common sense, are based on a contingent reasoning that frankly con fesses the incompleteness of its syllogisms. The leap across the gap in the syllogistic structure is akin to that the spark of wit and humor takes, and the direct intuitions in which women are believed to deal with such success are much the same, though the syllogistic structure is only sketched in dotted lines. Pure reason and plain logic have been always much com mended to us as a guide of life. They level the rough places and make the crooked paths straight. For the sorest problems they furnish the easiest solutions. Their prophets are such as have withdrawn from the world, and in the quiet of their bedcham bers have thought out the formulas of life. The clearest visions that are vouchsafed to living men concerning the great prob lems of international finance are shown unto these men in the breezy freedom of the prairie, far from the stifling bustle of Wall Street and its confusion of established facts. Inasmuch as life is not logical, these men generally find that most things in life are to be disapproved of, and incline to be pessimists. For the same reason they are unlikely to be coopera tively inclined, and criticize more than they create. As it is much easier, by reason of its shallow rationality, to formulate pessimistic discourse than optimistic, it follows that these peo ple, and people who temporarily assume their role, are more in evidence in the public press and on the public platform than their relative numbers or importance would really justify. It certainly would be an unwarranted generalization if I should assume to find the source of all pessimism in this pseudo- logic of life, much of it having of course a physical and indeed THINGS HUMAN 281 specifically hepatic source, but it is well to mark the genetic relation between the two, for pessimism is as false to life as logic is. In human life, and in all things human, the inspiring, life- giving, creative forces are the inseparable three, hope and confidence and sympathy. They are positive; they draw mate rials and men together, and scatter not asunder; they construct and not destroy. For human use it is evident that criticism was intended by Providence as a purgative, not as a food. Our occupation with the phonetic-spelling reformer as type of the logical or pseudo-logical doctrinaire has for the time car ried us away from the characterization of that historical order in human life with which this discourse on things human had its beginning, and which we had ventured to call the orthography of human society. Every year of our swiftly unfolding national history brings to our view with startling emphasis some illustration of the great fact that our national life is composed out of social condi tions intricately dovetailed and interlaced, which have their roots in a history too complex for the easy analysis of the politi cal theorist. On every hand a warning comes for political so briety and patience. It is now about a quarter of a century since an amendment to the Constitution extended the ballot to the negro of the South. The action was taken in deference to the evidently logical application of certain principles of human right believed to be well established. Those who aggressively favored the action were men of noblest purposes, of undoubted patriot ism, and of positive moral enthusiasm. The case was to them so clear as to leave no room for hesitation or doubt. The logic of war had enforced the logic of reason. Time, however, has now done its clarifying work, and behold, in spite of all the logics, the social facts that were there, lying in wait, have re asserted themselves. In the name of consistency a violence had been done. Despite all our aversion to the evasion of the writ ten law, the people of the North, so far as one may infer from public expressions, have quietly, slowly, withdrawn from the field of protest, leaving the historical facts to do their own sweet will and work, community by community, State by State. War and logic prevailed at the first, the historical facts prevail at the end. 282 BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER We as a people are said to come of a practical-minded stock, and that practical-mindedness which made the English Con stitution asserts itself continuously in our national life, as we show over and over again our capacity flexibly to adjust our selves, both as people and as government, to the changing con ditions which arise about us and reshape our duty and our oppor tunity. The recent decisions of the Supreme Court, tangled as they seemed at first report, resolve themselves into a plain sig nificance as regards their main bent. The letter of the law writ ten in view of distinctly different conditions and for radically different purposes and safeguards cannot restrain the people through their representatives in Parliament or Congress from devising means of procedure that shall satisfy existing needs. Whether we assume to live by written or unwritten constitu tion, it will always be, with a people such as we by spirit and tradition are, the constitution written in the people s life and work that holds the sway supreme. There must be after all some deep philosophy in Mr. Dooley s apprehension that whether the flag follows the Constitution or the Constitution the flag, the decisions of the Court follow the election returns. Five years ago we were in the midst of a frenzy of popular logic on the currency question which has now so far abated, leaving so few traces that it cannot be considered urisuited for mention under the far-famed shelter of the academic freedom. The supporters of the doctrine of the free coinage of silver were, I believe, in the main sincere. The doctrine was easier to under stand and advocate than its opposite. Its simple, crystalline logic appealed particularly to large masses of people who are impatient of complicated historical instruction, but to whom, as to all of us humans, it is a high satisfaction to think they are thinking. The opposing doctrine labored under the embarrass ment of being founded in the historical facts of established inter national usage, but in its good time the historical logic prevailed over its shallower counterpart, as it must needs always do. It is always a prolific source of danger in a government such as ours that parties are tempted to set forth in platforms far- reaching policies which seek their grounding in smoothly stated a priori principles of right and government. These strokes of radicalism, like the French radicalism and its argument from THINGS HUMAN 283 the state of nature, serve to clear the air, though usually at high cost, and we should not like to see them utterly withheld from the people, and a politics of organizational and personal strug gles utterly displace them. The safer and more veracious use of the party platform will be that which deals with questions with in practical range and proposes policies in reference to existing actual conditions. It is not necessary to explore the ultimate problem of the origin of evil and original sin every time a hen roost is robbed. The manners and morals of any social community at any given time constitute a firm historical deposit, with sanctions and guarantees so strong that the hammer and acids of analyzing reason find it an ill-paid task to stir them. There are men who have thought it worth while to raise persistent protest against that gentle convention which garbs us in the dress coat. It would be an easy matter doubtless to prove after reflection its unworthiness as protection for the lungs or thighs, and it might be difficult to defend it against a proposition to redispose its material by transfer from back to front, but the dress coat is there, and convenience uses it rather than serves it. This is far easier than to think out a new coat on eternal principles every year. In general the issue does not appeal to the interest of the great public, and no one is likely to find his political fortunes advanced by any manipulation thereof. That institution of civilized society, the family, framed through the uniting of one man and one wife until death do them part, is an institution confirmed in the testings and pains and joys of centuries of human experience. It is anchored and framed and jointed into the very fabric of society, until society is un thinkable without it. In the presence of a social structure so established, and whose existence and purity are bound up with the very life of society, there is no place for the small query- ings of the theorist. If he abides among us he will conform. Society cannot tolerate, and will not, that one family be dis solved and another "announced" at the instance of some per sonal convenience or some shallow logic of affinities. There is a certain law and order which human society must insist upon as a prior condition to all discussion regarding forms and mechanism of government and distribution of rights and 284 BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER privileges. The first thing to do with a debating society is to call it to order. The first thing to teach a child is to do what it is told to do, and for the reason that it is told to. Other reasons await the more placid opportunity afforded by complete paci fication. We have of late, in educational matters, been travers ing a period of much experimenting and much unsettling of views and aims and methods. One may not therefore with any confidence expect a general agreement upon any proposition, however elementary. It has seemed to me nevertheless that there ought to be agreement, even if there is not, concerning one thing, namely, that our aim in educating is to make the individual more effective as a member of human society, I would indeed venture to make it read, "effective for good." If education addressed itself simply to the development of the individual as an unclothed immortal soul, the mundane state would scarcely be justified in its present interest. It is as a pro spective member of society and a citizen that the pupil claims the interest of a school-supporting state. An education which now accepts this definition of its aim cannot admit itself to be in first line a branch or dependency of biology. Children are little animals surely enough, but it is for our practical purposes immeasurably more important that they are incipient social beings. That the biological theory of education has exercised in many a detail an injurious influence on the practice of the schools I believe has not escaped the attention of many of us. One leading result has been a groping vagueness that has pos sessed the minds of teachers and professors of teaching them selves, a vagueness which has arisen through cutting loose from the solid piers of the historical facts, close akin to that which we mark in the vagrant discipline which seeks to deal with society apart from history and decorates itself with the name of sociology. The education that educates remains in spite of all the vivi sections and post-mortems a training, a training that adapts and fits the little barbarian to his civilized environment, an environment in part natural, to be sure, but preeminently so cial and historical, a training that makes him punctual, dutiful, obedient, conscientious, courteous, and observant, self-con trolled, law-abiding, and moral, and gives him sobriety of judg- THINGS HUMAN 285 ment, and encourages health to abound, health of body and mind, which is no more nor less than sanity. In the attitude toward human life there abide the two con trasted types. One is the voice crying in the wilderness, the man clad in skins, ascetic, teetotaler, radical, reformer, agitator; and of him they say he hath a devil, he is a crank. His mission is to awake with a ringing "Repent" the dormant public mind and stir the public conscience, but in him is no safe uplifting and upbuilding power. His errand is fulfilled in a day, and after him there cometh one whose shoe latchet he is unworthy to loose, the man among men, the Man-Son, living the normal life of men, accepting the standing order, paying tribute unto Caesar, touching elbows with men of the world, respecting the conventions of society, healing and helping men from the com mon standing-ground of human life. The call which comes to the university from the need of the day is a call for trained men; not extraordinary specimens of men, but normal men; not eccentrics, but gentlemen; not stubborn Tories or furious radicals, but men of sobriety and good sense, men of good health and sanity, men trained in the school of historical-mindedness. HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME BY FELIX EMANUEL SCHELLING Delivered before the Delta of Pennsylvania, at the University of Pennsylvania, June 18, 1902. NEARLY five generations of men have come and gone since this society sprang into life; its purpose the nurture and encour agement of liberal studies by a public recognition of those whose young steps have begun worthily to tread the pathways of the humanities. The idols that men rear and worship change as men change; and time sheds tears or bestows mockery on the broken images of the ideals that have been but are no more. No symbol that has roused the spirit of human devotion can be a thing wholly unworthy or without its significance. It is of some of these idols in education, fallen or yet upright, that I wish to speak to you. And I wish especially to dwell on the spirit that once reared them on their pedestals and brought them honest devotees, rather than to dilate on the iconoclasm that has shat tered their beauties in indiscriminate destruction. Retrospect is the privilege of age; prophecy, the foible of youth. I can lay claim to your indulgence for neither. The pres ent is only a passing link in the swiftly running chain of time. It fixes the eye but for a moment. He that neglects the past neglects that which has made him what he is. He that neglects the promises and the warnings of the present as to things to come, as to things which he may help to shape in their coming, is already floating, a mere piece of wreckage on the ocean of time. The humanities, the liberal arts: these words call up to the minds of many of us, who are not wholly unlettered, a thing in some mysterious manner connected with the study of the classics, a something opposed to science and to the study of nature, a something very impractical and very desirable to possess, if you do not lose bread and butter by it; a thing much talked of at commencements, and happily, for the most part, HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME 287 forgotten meanwhile. Indeed, the popular conception of the humanities is not unlike an Eton boy s knowledge of Latin and Greek, not so much a definite conception as an ineffaceable im pression that there really are such tongues, and that it is a very disagreeable thing to have much to do with them. The humani ties ! the very term is redolent of times long gone and smacking of generations before the last. Beside glittering, new-minted epithets like "sociology," "criminology," and "degeneracy," the very word "humanities" looks dim and faded in this new century which has entered upon its run with the gathered momentum of a hundred years of effort behind it. No word is constant in its significance; nor is the expression, "the humanities," an exception to this rule. The humanities, "those studies which involve the mental cultivation befitting a man," have varied with the ideal of manhood; and the man of one age, derided and misunderstood, has often become the cari cature of the next. In the Europe of the fourteenth century the idea of "humanity" was habitually contrasted with that of divinity; and "the humanities" were conceived of as constitut ing the body of secular learning as distinguished from theological erudition. In that conception of manhood which transmuted each full-grown male into a miniature steel fortress, bristling with weapons and offence, cherishing his honor, his lady and his life supereminently as things to fight for, the humanities could be nothing if they were not unclerical. What had chanting priests to do with the graces of courtly young manhood, any more than they had to do with the exercise of arms or with the grand me nage of horses of war? But though this ideal was unclerical, it harked backward to the classics; for whether it was in the songs of the courts of love, in the romances of chivalrous King Arthur, the Cid or Charlemagne, in protracted discourses on morals, or the calamities that had befallen great heroes, the ancients were recognized as the only source of that sweet but profane learning wherein the heathen world of old had excelled and to the charm of which all subsequent ages have been fain to subscribe. Hence the arts and graces which dignified life and made it beautiful poetry, music, and the knowledge of tongues, especially the classical tongues, came, with the Renaissance, to be recog nized as the studies which involved the mental and aesthetic 288 FELIX EMANUEL SCHELLING cultivation most properly befitting a man. And, however far the violence and barbarism of the earlier Middle Ages may have frustrated these ideals from a realization measurably complete, their bare existence tended not a little to the amelioration of the social conditions of those times. As the world emerged into the greater stability of modern political life, while adhering as yet to much of the antique charm and picturesqueness of the mediaeval times, it was to this ideal of cultivated manhood that Sir Philip Sidney conformed. Among the cares of war, of colonization and statecraft, in assid uous attendance upon an incomparable, but variable and exact ing, queen, Sidney none the less found time to cultivate the humanities in the practice of poetry after the manner of the ancients as well as in the ardent modern Italian way, in the com position of chivalric and pastoral romance and in the discussion with his friends of Aristotelian poetics and Machiavellian polity. The paragon of social and political graces, the generous patron of learning, the rare poet and passionate lover, the courtly and chivalrous gentleman, the man of simple and unblemished loyalty and faith, all of these was Sidney, adored as the ex ample and the idol of his time. And Sidney was so adored be cause of the perfection with which he fulfilled the Renaissance ideal of the humanities in their effect on vigorous young English manhood. In the sweeping revisions and restatements to which Bacon submitted all the formulas of his age, the humanities by no means escaped. Neglecting historical significance and current popular notions alike, Bacon retained the contrast between hu man and divine learning and, by a simple return to roots, de fined the humanities as human philosophy: "Which hath/ to use his words, "two parts. The one considereth man segregate or distributively, the other congregate or in society. Humanity consisteth of knowledges which respect the body and of knowl edges which respect the mind." 1 In modern parlance it is anatomy, psychology, and what is now somewhat vaguely called "sociology," which Bacon considered as the threefold humani ties or studies appertaining to man; and the last "sociology" (if I may venture again on the use of so disputed a term), Bacon 1 The Advancement of Learning, Bacon s Works, ed. 1841, u, 201. HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME 289 could have conceived only in the logical sense in which it em braces all study of language, literature, history, politics, archae ology, and art. We may thus accredit to Bacon a remarkable widening of the earlier conception of the humanities and ascribe to him, as well, the earliest recognition of science as among them. With the coming of the eighteenth century the conception of the humanities had undergone another transformation. The century opened with the smoke of a trivially momentous contro versy rolling heavily to windward. This discussion concerned the relative merits of ancient and modern learning. Sir William Temple had just succeeded in proving to his own complete satis faction that the ancients were really the superior poets. To the achievement of this result he was compelled, wittingly or in nocently, to omit any mention of the names of Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Calderon, Moliere, or Milton. Temple, moreover, enthusiastically praised several Greek writers whose works it may be more than suspected he could not read. Years later, Oliver Goldsmith addressed the world in his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, an inquiry for which that delightful essayist and dramatist was fitted chiefly by his triumphant completion of a protracted career of idleness pursued at at least three of the most learned universities of the British Islands and the continent. There were good scholars in the England of the eighteenth century, but the cultivator of the amenities of literature felt that an apology was due the world for his aberrations from the practical highways of life. The great poet, Gray, preferred anonymity to any repute that might come to him as the author of his famous Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; and Horace Walpole concealed the authorship of his novel, The Castle of Otranto, as if it were a flagrant offence for a gentle man to sully his hand with the penning of romance. Indeed, the age which produced such artistic trivialities, such delicate arti cles of vertu as the letters of this same Horace Walpole or that impeccable code social for the guidance of youth by my Lord Chesterfield, his Letters, equally artistic and equally fragile surely such an age could have little need to emphasize the antithesis between "the humanities" and divine learning. But the eighteenth century had its distinctions, none the less, and 290 FELIX EMANUEL SCHELLING was painfully careful to construct an impenetrable barrier be tween such knowledge as might be presumed to adhere, like clay, to vulgar, everyday mankind, and the finer humanities which could appertain to fastidious gentility alone. "A cad, my son,* said an eighteenth-century father, in reply to a question as to the habitat and earmarks of that common and unpleasing variety of the human species, "a cad, my son, is a man whose Latin quantities are out at heel. Beware of him." Such was the shibboleth of that age. The word "humanity" had come to mean "polite learning," not the studies which involve the mental cultivation befitting a man, but, emphatically and avowedly, those studies which involve the mental cultivation supposedly appropriate to the fine gentleman. In England the superstition is still cherished that if a young man be carefully trained to pass a competitive examination, winning from his fellows in Catullus or in the fragments of the obscurer Greek lyrists, he may somehow prove in time the better ruler for Punjab or Sindh. This superstition and is it wholly a superstition? is based in part on a sentiment that the gentle man, after all, is very good material with which to begin. It is the gentleman ordinarily, and not the cad, who has had alike the leisure and, what is far more important, the temper to study Catullus, or the disposition to expend time on the Greek frag ments. And it is the man, after all, that has been developed by these impractical studies; and, with the man, those lesser things, the gentleman and the potential governor of Punjab or Sindh. Nay, is it in any wise superstitious to believe, in England or elsewhere, that a sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut? and that without the necessary prelimi naries of whetting, pointing, and tempering, many a pretty thrust and trick of swordsmanship must prove in the end but vain? The earliest American college was conceived as a school pre paratory to the study of divinity; for few save the intending clergy could spare the time to acquire learning, on its face a thing so unimperative to the needs of everyday colonial life. As time went on it was felt that the languages of Greece and Rome had a value besides their use as lights wherewith to search the Scriptures. With the example of English education before HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME 291 them, with men who had come to the New World with the learn ing, the habits, and the prejudices of the universities of England and Scotland, the American college set up its ideal of the hu manities, and in so doing naturally interpreted the liberal arts to mean primarily the classics, often the classics alone. This ideal has abided despite many attacks, if somewhat battered of late; and it has shown throughout the period of its maintenance the mingled strength and weakness that distin guish a principle nearly, but not quite wholly, true. There is little need that I should rehearse to you who know it so well the strength of that ideal which upholds the advantages of a classical education; or tell how we may claim that no modern tongue can afford in its organic structure the discipline of Latin and Greek, in which, in the words of John Stuart Mill, "every sentence is a lesson in logic." Nor need I tell how we can view no modern language with the completeness with which we can view these tongues of the past, or with the certainty as to the stability of the scientific facts which they present; how the lit erature of the ancients, especially that of Greece, affords us un equalled examples of the perfection and harmony of literary art, and may as soon be omitted from the study of the student of general literature as antique sculpture may be omitted from the study of art; or how in the study of ancient philosophy we travel back, so to speak, along those rays of light that have illumined the world for twenty-three centuries to that Greek prism, the crystal sides of which are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that centre of light wherein lies focused the concentrated radiance of all human learning. These things are known to most of us and acknowledged by all except those in whom ignorance or want of opportunity has bred contempt for what they have not, or those whom the life-sapping blight of hand-to-mouth utilitarianism has stricken deaf and blind, but unhappily not dumb. The opponents of classical studies, if not of the humanities in a larger sense, have been for the most part two; first, the ex ponents of the superior advantages which they claim for a purely scientific education, and, secondly, the utilitarians. Who can deny the force of the enticing appeal that bids us return to na ture and read in the spacious volume which she lavishly spreads before us year after year the absorbing story of this visible world? 292 FELIX EMANUEL SCHELLING Even the demand, sometimes made in the past, that scientific studies be substituted all but wholly for the older humanities might be in a measure excused from that natural and creditable zeal which is born of the fervor of propaganda. Indeed, the demands of these reformers were often not more unreasonable than the replies of men blindly adherent to the traditions of a system of education antiquated and no longer effective. But this warfare is now a thing of the past. No one now denies the value, even the imperative need, for science as an integral part of the education of the day; just as few any longer refuse to recognize the liberalizing influences of the study of our own and of foreign modern tongues. There is no weakness in a strenuous advocacy of a study of the classics; there is much unwisdom in claiming for the classics alone that liberalizing influence which they possess in so high a degree, but which they share with many other studies. There is positive falsity in the position which some have taken, the attitude of opposition to the study of science; and there is absolute injustice in the denial of the liberalizing capabilities of a study of the sciences liberally con ducted. No subject to which man can give his studious attention, no subject wherein a man may discover truth to add by his dis covery to the sum of human knowledge or to create therewith newer and juster views than those which obtained before, should be denied a place among the humanities. But the subject must be pursued with that disinterestedness, that freedom from ul terior motives of practical utility, which alone can permit a free play of its liberalizing elements. It is their practical uselessness that is, their inapplicability to ulterior ends which has given and will continue to give to the classics, with pure math ematics, aesthetics, and philosophy, a palpable advantage over the sciences and modern languages among the humanities. In a word, the measure of the educational value of the humanities lies in their practical inutility. A sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut. And now that this battle is won and science has taken her place beside her sister, the arts, in administering that cultiva tion which is befitting the man, we begin to recognize to the full the value of this broader conception of the humanities. We have learned that neither our arts nor our young bachelors are con- HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME 293 slant quantities to be combined with the inevitable result of the union of two chemical elements. We have learned that men may be liberalized by the mathematics and biology and remain illiberal in the atrium of Greek poetry or among the arcana of ancient philosophy. We have learned, in short, that men can no more be educated after one pattern than fitted on a single last; that neither the chivalrous type of Sidney, the virtuosity of Walpole, nor the clerical cut of old New England can suffice for all ages and climates; but that age strides after age and that our ideals in education, like our ideals in all things else, need adapta tion to present needs and the exercise of a wise but conservative foresight for the future. Indeed, in the recognition of all this we may now well pause to inquire if the habit of change has not grown inveterate upon us and if, in our zeal to fit the individual at the present moment, we have not lost sight of his own future development and of the relations of each to all. The present is no moment for supine self -congratulation. The humanities to-day are front to front with an attack in com parison with which all previous menaces sink into insignificance itself. We have no longer to fight for the study of Greek or to relegate to her proper place the exorbitant claims of the youngest and boldest of the sciences. We are in struggle for the very principle of liberality in education itself, and, worst of all, our enemy is within, and is often a neighbor or a brother. Practical utility is by far the most insidious enemy of modern education and the chiefest barrier to the attainment of that higher intel lectual and spiritual life toward which the nobler members of the race are striving. And by utility here I mean not that broad and philosophical outlook which recognizes the ultimate value and potency of all things human by the completeness and success with which each performs its function in life; but that cheap reckoning up of commercial values, that near-sighted and nig gardly view of man and life in the light of petty immediate gains, that reduction of things, both human and divine, to monetary standards which paralyzes liberal and disinterested endeavor and fills our learned professions save the mark ! with expert but narrow and unlettered men. Utility in education demands that we hurry our boys into the professional schools before they are ready for college, or thrust them through or out of college 294 FELIX EMANUEL SCHELLING before they are old enough to appreciate their advantages. Utility demands that we interlard the humanities with technical and professional work by turning as many studies as possible into their practical applications. Utility demands devices of short cuts and special courses and the invention of specific courses which it is hoped may prove alluring to the uncultured and the uninformed. In short, utility in education destroys the very ideal for which the university was created and transforms the institution in which it becomes a ruling incentive from the leader and guide of the community at large into a submissive follower in the wake of a degenerating public opinion. The excellence of American technical and professional schools is our glory and our pride. Where ingenuity, adaptability, tech nical aptitude, and energy which tires not nor is daunted are in demand, American technical education need yield to none. If American lawyers are at times a little less grave in their learn ing, they are more agile in their thought than their cousins across the water; if American divines are less frequently historians and philosophers than British divines, if American diplomacy is somewhat more rough and ready, and a trifle less successful in finesse, nay even though not quite all the scientific discoveries, from the circulation of the blood to the Roentgen rays and wire less telegraphy, have been made in America, we yet can have nothing but pride for the learning, the skill, the success, and the firm and resistless forward tread of those who grace the learned professions in America. But if our professions are to advance, even if they are to continue what they are, depend upon it that an increasing technical standard, a course of greater length, more laboratories and minuter specialization cannot alone ac complish it. More important than all these things, more im portant than specific qualifications, are the temper of mind, the outlook of the student entering upon professional studies, and the attitude which he takes toward his chosen career. This at titude is the product of school and college life, and is acquired by subtle influences which build up character or undermine it. If the golden calf of utility is worshipped in the class-roorn as well as in the streets, and perhaps even in the family, the student s attitude will become that of the alert and active devotee of that philosophy whose one mandate is, "Succeed!" Such a man may HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME 295 reach in later life a certain worldly success, but he will remain in all essentials a professional quack and an influence working, according to his power, more or less for evil. If, on the other hand, the liberalizing power of the humanities, be their content what it may, has been exerted to the full upon him, the young professional student will appreciate his responsibilities as well as his capabilities, and holding both as a sacred trust, live a power among his fellow-men, working for good. Our concern is first with the man. The man once made, all else will follow. We are sometimes told that the moral tone of the university is lower than that of the outside world, that the mingled re straints and freedom of college life, nay, even the pursuit of learning itself, make not for righteousness, nor probity, nor ideal conduct. The logic of such doctrine as this is the abolition of learning. Far better were it that these walls should stand for all time a blackened ruin than that they should foster the school of iniquity and degradation which such a notion infers. That young men, a large part of whose daily life consists in the honest fulfillment of the allotted task, that men habitually in contact with refined, disciplined, and trained minds, in touch with the best that is known and thought and filled with the ideals which the wisest who have lived before them have held up to the ad miration of the world, should live by moral standards lower than those of the street, the mart of trade, or the polls, is an error gross and palpable. And yet it is not altogether inconceivable that were the humanities stricken from the curriculum of our col leges and learning cultivated solely for the worldly advancement and prosperity to be gained by it; were this beloved university of ours which Heaven forbid to degenerate so far as to train mere politicians, mere quacks, and mere pettifoggers, such imaginings as these might not seem to us so wholly grotesque. Religion has no such aid and abettor as the disinterested pur suit of learning. Morality has no closer ally than a liberal educa tion. Without education religion shrinks back into primitive superstition. Without education morality fades like a dying em ber blown into momentary glow by brute terror of the law. I confess that I am deeply concerned at the increasingly prac tical bias which is given to our everyday education, and the in vasion of the college and even of the secondary school by subjects 296 FELIX EMANUEL SCHELLING into which an alleged or actual utility enters to the detriment of their liberalizing power. I confess that I view with mistrust the enormous emphasis which we attach to facts statistically jug gled; the undue weight which we give to speculative theories untested by competent knowledge of past speculative thought; as I view with alarm the minuter specialization of subject mat ter in college and university, when intrusted, as it sometimes is, to men to whom the humanities in any sense are a dim recollec tion of the secondary school. It is for you, my younger brothers of Phi Beta Kappa, to recognize some of these things, and recog nizing their nature, to stand firm for that openness of spirit, that quality of disinterestedness, that elevation of thought, and that unquenchable faith in high ideals which is the most precious outcome of your sojourn with the humanities. I respect the ingenious application of scientific principles to matter that trains our engineers, our chemists, and our phys icists to mechanical skill and technical precision. I admire the nice complexities of applied science, and procedure perfected by experience and precedent, which we call, respectively, the pro fessions of medicine and of law, and which train competent guardians of our property, our rights, and our lives. I honor the patient and indefatigable spirit of research that wins for men, inch by inch, new lands in the territory of the unknown. And I bow before that abnegation of self that lives for the spiritual welfare of men and offers with brotherly hand the consolation and the stay which religion alone can give. But I do maintain withal that it is in the untechnical studies, the unprofessional studies, be their content, let me say once more, what it may; it is in those studies alone which are pursued without the possi bility of transmutation into terms of practical utility that we can hope to find the elements which draw forth the undeveloped man within, which set forth lofty and unselfish ideals, and which, in a word, do really educate, elevate, and humanize. When James Russell Lowell defined a university as a place in which nothing useful was taught, he uttered no mere idle paradox. I am afraid that we are doing a great deal of useful work in this university, work which has its place here, but work which should not be permitted to usurp all places. The greatest need in the education of to-day, a need greater than short cuts HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME 297 to the professions, training for city councils or state legislatures, preliminary courses to speculative philanthropy or air-ship building, is the restoration of the humanities to our college courses in a larger proportion than has been theirs for many a day. Where the line is to be drawn which shall divide the train ing of the man from the training of the engineer, the lawyer, or the physician is a matter comparatively unimportant. That such a line should be drawn is an imperative need of the moment, a need which temporizing can only make more clamorous in its just demand. Among the humanities that are with us or are to come, let us welcome every subject that can enlarge the horizon of the stu dent and give him truer, saner, and more liberal views of man and life. It is not the topic which determines these qualities, but the spirit in which the subject is pursued, a spirit which demands a rigorous exclusion from its purview of all that is narrow and material. In a frank recognition of the liberalizing influences of the study of science and of the close relations of modern lan guages, history, and philosophical speculation to the develop ment of the contemporary man, I cannot but affirm it as my conviction that the languages of the ancients, their art, litera ture, philosophy, and archaeology, will long continue the most fruitful of the humanities, not only because of their valuable content and their incomparable position as to all that has come after, but because of their splendid isolation from the possi bility of measurement and appraisement by utilitarian stand ards. Depend upon it that the sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut. Depend upon it that the true glory of the humanities, whether gone, present, or to come, like the glory of art, of literature, and the glory of religion itself, is the immeasurability of all these priceless things by ma terial standards, and the imperishability of their spiritual worth, significance, and potency. JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS BY ALBERT SHAW Delivered before the Alpha of Virginia, William and Mary College, in Richmond, April 13, 1904. IN 1904 there was held at St. Louis a great exposition whose object it was to exemplify the amazing progress that Mr. Jeffer son foresaw as a result of his acquisition of the trans-Mississippi country. In the following year there was a creditable exposition in Oregon to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Jefferson s expedition under command of Lewis and Clark. In 1907 comes the celebration of the noteworthy completion of three hundred years of English-speaking men in the Common wealth of Virginia. In these commemorations of the opening decade of our twenti eth century, Mr. Jefferson stands forth as in many respects the most conspicuous figure. A multiplicity of speeches, brochures, biographical studies, and historical reviews of the Jeffersonian period has within recent years attested the marked revival of in terest in the career of this eminent Virginian. I could not hope to add anything, not indeed so much as a single suggestion, con cerning Mr. Jefferson s personality or public career to that which has become the common stock of knowledge in Virginia, where the great sons of the Commonwealth are kept in memory by accomplished speakers and writers. All that I shall venture to do is to attempt some reflections upon what I may call the carrying power and the vitality of Mr. Jefferson s political opin ions and doctrines. It is not necessary to agree with every opinion Mr. Jefferson ever expressed, or to applaud every attitude or act of his public career, in order to be counted among those who admire him sincerely and profoundly, and who find his writings a marvellous repository of political wisdom and knowledge. His was a very long period of active statesmanship and public influence. That period reached its zenith in the first term of his incumbency of JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 299 the office of President, about a hundred years ago. He entered the Presidency with a thoroughness of training and a ripeness of experience beyond that of any other man who has ever attained this high office. As might have been expected, his first inaugural address was one of great dignity and elevation of sentiment, a stately utterance, a model and a classic in form and in breadth and serenity of view. He had been called to guide the affairs of what he described as "a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye." It was, indeed, a wide and fruitful land. But Mr. Jefferson himself was ordained by Providence to make it vastly wider, and in many ways to enhance its fruitfulness. Our population at that time was only a little more than five millions, and our domain was bounded by the Mississippi River on the west, and by the European colonies of Florida and Louisiana on the south. He lived to see our population grow to about twelve millions, with the Florida Purchase consummated and with every reason to be lieve that in due time the joint occupation of the Oregon country by the United States and England would terminate in our ac knowledged control of the region traversed by Lewis and Clark all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But, as I have said, it is Mr. Jefferson s views rather than his achievements that belong to my theme. Though of a philosophical and reflective habit, and himself a diligent student of the past experience of men grouped in politi cal communities, Mr. Jefferson s own eyes were usually turned forward rather than backward. His was an eminently practical mind; and he used history chiefly as the touchstone by which to test current opinions and tendencies for the sake of an ever- better future. All political principles and theories, all the history of the past, all the implements and methods of statecraft, were studied by Mr. Jefferson with the one concrete object of enabling him and his colleagues (to quote from that same inaugural ad dress), "to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all em barked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world." Now, just as Mr. Jefferson himself examined the doctrines of 300 ALBERT SHAW the English and French philosophers, humanitarians, and econ omists, with a view to the establishment of his own opinions, so I find myself at present disposed to consider not so much the problems that lay before our countrymen a hundred years ago as our own problems of to-day, except as those of the former period may have some bearing upon the issues that confront us now as we have fairly crossed the threshold of a new century and are casting about us for wise courses, still finding ourselves "amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world." And I have asked myself, What valid, trustworthy, and still enduring basis have the principles of Mr. Jefferson as applied to our own present and immediate future? Have we outlived his generalizations? Was he, to a large ex tent, superficial and specious? Was he a doctrinaire in a sense that should now cause us to distrust his practical conclusions? Was he sentimental and visionary? Was he hasty in pronounc ing radical and sweeping verdicts? Did he allow his love of glit tering expressions and abstract dicta to impair his judgment? Did he reason to permanent conclusions from isolated instances or merely transient phenomena, and thus violate scientific methods? Political philosophers come and go. Hah* a dozen new ones, who were the vogue ten or twenty, or even five, years ago, are now confessedly obsolete. They do not stand the test of time. Yet there must be some principles of government, of national policy, of social and political ethics, approaching nearly enough to essential truth and justice to meet the fluctuations of at least one century, and to hold some rightful claim to popular confidence and allegiance. Men must hold by some opinions; what, then, shall they be? Many things in outward circumstances have changed more profoundly in the past one hundred years than in a thousand years preceding. The production of wealth, for example, has been greater by far since the death of Mr. Jefferson than were the total accumulations of the world through all the ages down to that date. Moreover, there has been most marvellous develop ment of population; and every one feels that we are entering upon new and unknown periods of transition at an ever-accelerat ing pace. What landmarks can we keep in view, or by what JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 301 charts and compasses shall we be guided as we embark on mo mentous new voyages? In these inquiries, I have in mind, not so much the world at large as the people of the United States; and I have particularly in mind two or three lines of questioning. One of these has to do with our national position and policy, as re spects other nations and the world at large. Another, with some of our internal problems of government and politics, and per haps a third, with the economic and social status of the individ ual citizen the outlook, so to speak, for the average man under fast-changing methods of production and distribution. And a fourth might have to do with the relation of the state itself to industry and economic society. Further, in alluding to some of these present-day problems, I would like to make test, incidentally, at least, of the doctrines and opinions of Thomas Jefferson, to see if they hold good, and if Jefferson is still entitled to be looked upon as a prophet and a guide. I shall not try to use any rhetorical art whatsoever to heighten the effect of my own conclusions as respects the essen tial qualities of the body of political doctrine taught by Mr. Jefferson; and I shall make haste, therefore, to anticipate some more detailed avowals by declaring in advance, and in general terms, my strong belief in Mr. Jefferson as an enduring prophet. I find myself wondering again and again how that fine and lucid intelligence of his could, by the time he was thirty years old, in provincial Virginia, a hundred and thirty years ago, have be come so perfectly emancipated. When to-day I reread his utter ances, the one thing that impresses me above all else is the fresh ness, the modernity, of his way of looking at everything. The openness and the freedom of his mental processes seem to bring him across the chasm of the middle of the nineteenth century to a place with thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Huxley at their best period. Since Jefferson s time, we have had few public men of large vision. At least these later statesmen, if endowed by nature with capacity to formulate principles, have not enjoyed as favorable opportunities. They have been involved in con troversies over immediate issues, and have been in the position of men in the thick of the woods, hindered by the trees from see ing the forest. Compared with Jefferson, in practical statesman ship, John Bright seems a limited though a congenial spirit; and 302 ALBERT SHAW Mr. Gladstone, a similarly versatile and capacious mind, but with prejudices of class and creed that yielded only painfully and slowly through a hah century of experience. Our own Websters and Calhouns and Clays seem merely a part of a past epoch. Jefferson s thinking seems to reach to the things of to-day, while those men of the forties and fifties appear almost as re mote as the figures of Plutarch s time. Lincoln s thought had, doubtless, much of the quality that survives, and, among our later men, I think you will some day give a larger place to Seward than either North or South has yet accorded him. But for flexibility of mind, and for perennial freshness of doctrine and statement, it seems to me Jefferson must still bear the palm. It must be remembered that the launching of a new and pow erful nation has not been a frequent occurrence in the history of the world. The erection of a sovereign state to take its place as a member of the family of nations has almost invariably been a matter of sheer force, of bloody violence, of titanic struggle, rather than one of a calm and philosophic shaping of political institutions. Thus, never elsewhere has either the forming of a new state or the political remaking of an old one been accom panied by any such magnificent setting forth of the practical and theoretical principles of government, of politics, of jurisprudence, of international law, and of foreign and domestic statesmanship, as that which attended the formative period in the United States. During this memorable period, George Washington held the first place as a man of action and of noble and sagacious leader ship, while in all deference it may be said that he held second place as a man of reflection and as the exponent of distinctively American opinion. His colleague and friend, Thomas Jefferson, held a place second to Washington only as a leader in actual affairs, and a place unquestionably the very first as a formulator of opinion and an exponent of our American system of popular democratic government. And all this I say, without abatement of one particle of the admiration I entertain for the powerful statesmanship of Alexander Hamilton, for the learning and per suasive logic of James Madison, for the wisdom and greatness of John Jay, and for the constructive intellect and priceless services of John Marshall. How many others there were in that noble company of Americans, many of them young men, who were JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 303 brought to great elevation of view, as evinced in their work in the Continental Congress, then later in the discussions that con trolled the framing and adoption of the Constitution, and in the executive, legislative, and judicial acts and decisions, and the diplomacy, of the period that ended, let us say, with the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who passed away on the same Fourth of July, in the year 1826. Of some of these men as of Washington, and perhaps Ham ilton it must be said that they were "born great." Most of them had "greatness thrust upon them" by the sheer force of circumstances that developed their best capacities. These men were compelled to study the position of their young republic, both as regards its domestic structure, and also as related to the world at large, in a period when the struggles and convulsions of Europe were stirring men s minds and causing them to see things in new lights, with renunciation of old prejudices. Thus they were lifted above the commonplace. It was impossible to go on in ruts. Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin must, I think, in any case, have achieved greatness without the stimulus of exceptional circumstances, through the inherent power of minds of rare energy and of still more rare versatility to which, in both cases, was added the gift of abstract and philosophical reasoning, and, finally, a touch of that something we call genius and do not try to explain. In the very nature of things a new English-speaking common wealth, emerging in that particular period, must have formulated for itself some doctrines and general opinions. The circumstances were of a well-balanced sort as respects what one may call the relative exigencies of domestic and foreign problems. Thus our statesmen were able to work out schemes, both of doctrine and of practical policy, that in spite of vicissitudes and profound changes of the nineteenth century have had momentum enough to project themselves, without much serious deflection, across the line of a new century. And now, if I mistake not, the coun try has reached a juncture where once more the relative exigen cies of domestic and external problems not only permit us but also compel us to try again to take our bearings as respects un derlying principles and national attitudes and policies. To the wholesome and normal mind some principles and creeds 304, ALBERT SHAW are necessary if for no other reason than to serve as a working hypothesis. And it is eminently true in the conduct of public affairs, that for wise results there must be some admitted prin ciples of government and some fixed landmarks of policy. Other wise, disastrous mistakes will be made and recognized only too late. The word "policy," as applied to a nation s affairs, though broad enough to include all general and fixed trends of action, may well be restricted to external relationships. In my use of it I have in mind more particularly the intentions and aspirations, as well as the actual conduct, of a nation, in its dealings with other countries and its plans as to the world at large. For some countries the problems of foreign policy are so del icate and difficult that they cannot very well be discussed openly. Thus at times British, German, and Russian policy must be learned by inference rather than by any frank or responsible avowal. The United States in this respect has occupied a favor able and fortunate position, and we have usually found it to be both safe and wise to discuss freely and openly the principles having to do with our relations toward other countries. During the past century American policy has had its pivot in what we commonly call the "Monroe Doctrine, * and what the Euro pean nations refer to as "Monroeism." Those who find it suffi cient, in discussing the Monroe Doctrine, to recall the exact wording of a particular utterance formulated by John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State in President Monroe s second ad ministration, fail to appreciate the underlying fact. This precise utterance did not make our American policy, but was simply a timely and valuable expression of a policy that had been shaping itself for a quarter of a century previous, that had found a partial and, in so far, authoritative expression in Washington s Farewell Address. If I have studied aright the history of American policy, it was Thomas Jefferson, as Washington s first Secretary of State, and as our foremost exponent of national doctrine and principle, who incomparably more than any one else thought out, de veloped, and expressed the ideas that we have in mind when we mention the Monroe Doctrine. It was he whose teachings made this doctrine the one great fixed landmark to guide us in our relations with the world at large. JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 305 As the Louisiana Purchase was the foremost single act of do mestic statesmanship in our national history during the last century, so the evolution of the Monroe Doctrine was the one great feature of our statesmanship as it dealt with external affairs. It was an achievement of such overshadowing greatness that in comparison with it everything else falls into the background. What, in its fundamental aspect is the Monroe Doctrine? Jefferson saw the group of European nations engaged in almost incessant warfare with one another, changing boundaries through conquest, making and breaking alliances, struggling painfully for release from the shackles of mediaeval systems, in response to new ideas of popular progress; and through it all he foresaw with wonderful clearness the gradual evolution of a better order of things and the ultimate establishment of a peaceable, modern concert of European nations, working its way by hard experience out of the old military balance of power. He anticipated the breaking-up of the Turkish Empire and the extension of the European system across the Mediterranean into Africa and be yond the Bosphorus and the Caucasus into Western Asia. He had no misgivings at all about the future outworking of the spirit of human liberty and of democratic and industrial progress in those blood-stained regions of the Old World. But, meanwhile, he conceived of a new American world based on principles of equality and freedom, and beginning its political career at a point of human emancipation which it might well take Europe two centuries to attain. And he believed that this new and beneficent system in the Western Hemisphere should be allowed to work out its destiny without alliances or entangle ments with the European nations, both for the happiness of our own people and also for the subsequent benefit of the rest of man kind. I do not say that Jefferson was alone in entertaining this great conception, yet I have not the slightest doubt that he held it, in all its wide and varied aspects, with far more clearness of vision than any other man just as I know that he expressed it better than anybody else either before his day or since, down to our own time. While we were still bounded by the Mississippi River on the west, and inclosed on three sides by the territorial possessions of European powers, with all of Central and South America, and 306 ALBERT SHAW every dot of the West Indies held as crown colonies by European sovereigns, Jefferson saw more vividly, and announced with more boldness and definiteness than any public man at Washing ton has ventured to assert down to our own day, the necessary ultimate dominance of the United States, and the high policy that must be followed in pursuance of a faith in our manifest destiny. He believed that the whole Western Hemisphere must be brought out from under European control, and that the Ameri can Republic must assume the leadership in the development of democratic institutions throughout the New World. In 1805 he declared: I know that the acquisition of Louisiana has been disapproved by some, from a candid apprehension that the enlargement of our territory would endanger its Union. But who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively? The larger our association, the less will it be shaken by local passions; and, in any view, is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children than by strangers of another family? With which shall we be most likely to live in harmony and friendly intercourse? So strongly did he feel the necessity of a period of isolation in the working out of our own experiment, that he went so far at times as to say frankly that he would like to see us as wholly cut off from European influence as China itself then was. This, of course, was for the sake of that distinctive growth of an Ameri can nationality, and an American system, for which he believed a period of seclusion and of obscurity might be valuable. He never, of course, forgot the ultimate reaction of our example upon the character of the European countries. Thus, a little more than a hundred years ago, he wrote to an American states man: A just and solid republican government maintained here will be a standing monument and example for the aim and imitation of the peo ple of other countries. In another letter, fifteen years earlier, a year before the fram ing of the Constitution, Mr. Jefferson had shown the breadth of his view by writing : Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled. JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 307 He was fearful at that time lest the Spaniards should be too weak to hold South America. His view on that subject is too interesting to be allowed to be forgotten. He did not believe that the Spanish colonies were capable of republican self-govern ment, and he thought it best that they should remain quietly under the domination of Spain until our own population should have been sufficiently advanced to gain the territory from the Spaniards "piece by piece," to quote his own phrase. Thus, even as early as 1786, Jefferson foresaw the inevitability of our ex pansion, until we had acquired the Floridas, the Louisiana coun try, Texas, and the great Spanish domain of California and northern Mexico. With some prescience, seemingly, of the infelicity of our hav ing to wrest such territory away from a Spanish-speaking Ameri can republic, such as Mexico became, he had hoped that Spain would hold on until we could emancipate the territory piece by piece and develop it into happy, self-governing States in our own Confederation. In these days of the railroad, the telegraph, the fast steamship, and the daily newspaper, large confederacies seem easily enough possible. But we must not underestimate the boldness of Thomas Jefferson in declaring, a hundred and twenty years ago, that it would be feasible not only to bring the whole of North America under our one federal government, but even pos sible to bring in South America also. In later years, when prob lems of practical statesmanship, rather than the bold survey of future destiny more habitually occupied his mind, he contented himself with strong declarations in favor of the acquisition of Cuba by the United States, and of the annexation of Canada at the first convenient opportunity. Undoubtedly it was his opinion indeed, he expressed it often in private letters that the War of 1812 would result in our taking and keeping Canada as compensation for our many and substantial grievances against England. This was not due to any unfriendliness toward Great Britain, but to the belief that it would make for stable equilibrium all around, and be better for everybody concerned. He looked forward to a confederated North America, and to a South America at least wholly inde pendent of Europe and developing under our friendly auspices. He wrote to Baron von Humboldt in 1813 as follows: 308 ALBERT SHAW The European nations constitute a separate division of the globe, their treaties make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage our selves. America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe. The insulated state in which nature has placed the American continent should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans which separate us from them. To another foreign correspondent he wrote several years later: Nothing is so important as that America shall separate herself from the systems of Europe and establish one of her own. Our circumstances, our pursuits, our interests are distinct; the principles of our policy should be so also. All entanglements with that quarter of the globe should be avoided if we mean that peace and justice shall be the polar stars of American societies. Finally, before the great enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, President Monroe wisely consulted the venerable states man then in retirement at Monticello, and he received from Mr. Jefferson an ever-memorable letter, from which I may quote the following sentences : Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle our selves in the broils of Europe. Our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and peculiarly her own. She should, therefore, have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe. This, all things considered, is perhaps the best and clearest statement, as it is the boldest, that has ever been made of the doctrine so repeatedly set forth by Jefferson, though nominally attributed, on account of one official utterance, to one of Jeffer son s most steadfast disciples. Fifteen years earlier than this, in writing to Governor Claiborne, who was then administering the Louisiana Territory at New Orleans, as if in prophetic fore cast of actual applications of his principles of policy, Jefferson had said, respecting Cuba and Mexico: "We consider their in terests and ours as the same, and that the object of both must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere." Nearly sixty years later we applied this specific principle to the case of Mexico, and expelled a French army and an Austrian dynasty. JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 309 Mr. Seward, one of the greatest successors of Jefferson, and one of the few of our more recent statesmen who have seemed to comprehend the principles of American policy, had the honor to enforce our views in the case of Mexico. The reasons would have seemed ample, a very few years later, either before or after the Virginius incident, for the enforcement of that principle in the case of Cuba. But the views that then prevailed were rather those of legalists and diplomatists than those of masters of Ameri can policy in the large sense. And so it remained for our country, in a better period, and in the fullness of time, to enforce the Jeffer- sonian principles of policy in the case of an island concerning which Jefferson in 1823 had written: I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most inter esting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. It must be borne in mind that Mr. Jefferson was always con sciously working out a permanent rather than a temporary line of policy, and that he always had in mind the rapid extension and great growth of the nation. Thus, writing to Baron von Hum- boldt not long after the census of 1810, which had shown our population to be a little more than seven millions, he declared : In fifty years more the United States alone will contain fifty millions of inhabitants, and fifty years are soon gone over. The peace of 1763 is within that period. I was then twenty years old, and of course remem ber well all the transactions of the war preceding it, and you will live to see the period equally ahead of us; and the numbers which will then be spread over the other parts of the American hemisphere catching long before that the principles of our portion of it, and concurring with us in the maintenance of the same system. Humboldt actually lived to see the population of the United States alone more than thirty millions, and to see the independ ent South American states living under constitutions modelled after ours, and concurring in the main in our views of a distinc tive American international policy. In his population estimates, Mr. Jefferson had probably cal culated upon our union with Canada, which would have resulted in the much more rapid development of that region. Writing to James Monroe, in 18.01, he declared: However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid 310 ALBERT SHAW multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern, continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws. What other man, in 1801, foresaw so clearly the great growth of the English-speaking races and the widespread establishment of their social and political institutions? Writing to Mr. Madi son on the Florida question in 1809, Jefferson declared: We should then have only to include the North [meaning Canada], in our confederacy, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation; and I am persuaded no constitu tion was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government. It is not necessary to pause to inquire how far Jefferson s specific forecasts have been verified in the course of a hundred years; but it is to be remarked that he was dealing consciously with a larger future than a single century. In short, the states men of to-day, for large, fresh, and sweeping views toward the still future horizon, should look through the lenses provided by Thomas Jefferson. It remains true, as he pointed out, that the policy of Europe is essentially belligerent and aggressive, while the policy of America is essentially pacific. It remains true, moreover, that it must be a principal aim of our policy to promote the development of the Canadian half of North America in harmony with that of our own half, with a view to ultimate voluntary political union. If Jefferson were alive, he would still hold this to be the largest unfulfilled aspira tion to be noted in the items of a future public policy. In view of the great development of our Pacific seaboard, it would have been in strict keeping with all of Mr. Jefferson s views to advocate the territorial acquisition of the Isthmian strip that connects North and South America with a view to cutting a ship canal on our own soil. Although such a costly project was by no means ripe for action in his day, Mr. Jefferson more than once expressed lively interest in the possibility of an inter- oceanic canal. And let it be said with the utmost emphasis, nothing would have been further from Mr. Jefferson s views than the placing of this strictly American enterprise under the political auspices of the great powers of Europe, although such a plan was proposed in the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty by an Amer- JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 311 lean Secretary of State in 1850, and again proposed in 1900. Fortunately, the preponderant sentiment of the country was aroused to a perception of the vital bearings of the question; and we may rest assured that Americans will henceforth remem ber Jefferson s idea that the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea are essentially American waters, and that an American interoceanic canal must come under the full control of the American political system. Jefferson advocated ample coast defences, and a navy ade quate to our purposes of protection. If at one time he seemed not to favor an ambitious naval policy, it was for immediate reasons which he ably explained. The naval predominance of England was so great that we could not then hope to rival England on the sea, and an inferior navy would be likely to be sacrificed in a British war. John Adams, himself the stanch advocate of a vig orous naval policy, declared in his old age that he had always regarded Mr. Jefferson as the Father of the American Navy. A study of Mr. Jefferson s views, with reference to their appli cation to our existing conditions, would probably lead to the con clusion that he would now favor the steady development of our new navy, but would limit the standing army as closely as pos sible. As early as 1799 he wrote to Elbridge Gerry: I am for relying for internal defense on our militia solely, till actual invasion. But several years later, in correspondence with some one else, he made this very notable utterance : None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important. And in his last annual message, in 1808, as his second Presi dential term was ending, he declared to Congress : For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organ ized and armed militia is their best security. You will remember that in 1813, several years after his retire ment, in the light of our current experiences in the pending war with Great Britain, he wrote to James Monroe that " We must make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education; we can never be safe until this is done." In short, Jefferson be- 312 ALBERT SHAW lieved in a citizen soldiery, to be composed, if necessary, of prac tically all the young men in the country, none of whom should have grown up without becoming familiar with the use of weapons or without being sufficiently drilled and trained to admit of ready organization. For the supply of officers he would make sure that young men in academies and collegiate institutions should have some especial training in military tactics and the art of war. After the experience of a hundred years, we have arrived at no wiser view than this. While England has begun to talk of con scription and great standing armies, after the continental fashion, it behooves us to see clearly our own path and hold fast to the principle that ours must be an armed and disciplined nation, which for that very reason can dispense with a large standing army. The question must naturally arise, what relation our position and policy in the Philippines bears to the American policy of iso lation as set forth by Mr. Jefferson. I shall make no ingenious attempt to reconcile one thing with another. It is not necessary to prize consistency above all else. But in this particular in stance, I am unable to find any denial, or even any weakening, of the Monroe Doctrine principle. Mr. Jefferson and his col leagues were dealing with two opposing systems, one the Euro pean, the other the American. These systems had relation to such parts of the world as were at that time within the sphere of ordinary commercial intercourse, or were related under the principles of international law, recognizing one another by the exchange of ambassadors or other agents. At that time there was little trading in the Pacific Ocean, the most important perhaps being the regular moving of the Spanish galleons from Mexico to the Philippines, and vice versa. China and Japan, Korea and Siam, had no connection or intercourse with Europe and Amer ica. Australia had not been colonized. A wholly new situation has arisen since then. A new com merce has come into existence, and the far East has been aroused from the slumber of centuries. With our great Pacific seaboard, we must needs be vitally interested in the new commerce and the new affairs of the Pacific Ocean and its bordering countries. The European system remains, and it must continue to dominate Europe, Africa, and the western part of Asia. The American JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 313 system also remains, and so long as we are true to the policy laid down by our forefathers it will continue to dominate the West ern Hemisphere of North and South America. But there has been rapidly evolving a third system that of the far East, or the Pacific in which China and Japan have a great part to play, and in which we also have interests, as have several of the European powers. These new interests of ours had become im portant before we had fairly recognized them. A war in asser tion of the Monroe Doctrine brought us temporarily to Manila, and we remained at Manila for reasons that had no reference at all to the Monroe Doctrine, but rather to our new Pacific inter ests and responsibilities. I have no reason to mention this topic except by way of these passing suggestions. The Monroe Doctrine more than ever is the great cardinal principle of our policy. Our chief territorial ex pansion is to be in our own hemisphere, where conditions favor the settlement of English-speaking men. Our position in the Philippines is exceptional, and is perhaps to be modified in due time to the form of a mere friendly protectorate. Of one thing we may be assured, and that is that our mission there is destined to be one of beneficence to the inhabitants themselves. I must confess myself at a loss to understand the logic of those who would quote the Declaration of Independence as showing con clusively that our presence in the Philippines is contrary to Jef ferson s principles of democracy and self-government. Mr. Jefferson had some sense of historical processes, and also some clear recognition of the need of considering the element of time. He pointed out with frequency that circumstances had brought our people in the American colonies to a position where, beyond any other people of any period, we were fitted to enter upon the experiment of a democratic republican state. Our col onies had been growing for more than a century and a half, and had been evorving the American citizen and the American self- governing community. Until these two developments had taken place there could have been no successful American republic. Even in 1774 and 1775 Jefferson s views of the inherent rights of men, as respects self-government, had to do not with the higher attributes of national or imperial sovereignty, but with the prac tical, every-day rights of communities to order their own local 314 ALBERT SHAW affairs and to take part in imposing the taxes that they were themselves to pay. It was the denial of these ordinary rights of local, concrete self-government to the American colonies that led them to the verge of a revolution that otherwise would not have been defensible. In other words, the American Revolution was not, either in Jefferson s mind, or in that of any other leader, founded upon abstract conceptions of the rights of individual men, but rather upon practical grievances. The established order of the world required the exercise by some accountable government of the responsibilities of sover eignty at Manila. In that exercise the United States became the legal successor of Spain. It became incumbent upon us, however, in regard to the people themselves, to assert as rapidly as possi ble our own views of the value of individual citizenship and of self-government in communities, as a foundation for the larger institutions of the province, the state, or the nation. Mr. Jefferson s letters to James Madison, Thomas McKeen, Governor Claiborne, and various others, about a hundred years ago, relating to the gradual evolution of government in the pur chased Louisiana Territory, disclose a practical statesmanship that makes it clear, even down to the minute details, how Jeffer son would have approached the task of initiating and developing a government for the Philippine Archipelago. And I may add that I do not see any appreciable difference of philosophy or principle between the Jeffersonian views and those which Gov ernors Taft and Wright clearly expressed, and which were sup ported at Washington by Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and by Mr. Root as Secretary of War. We do not show our belief in democracy at home by forcing the ballot into the hands of school children, but rather by our definite purpose so to train the school children that in due time they may come into a valuable heritage of citizenship. In like manner we shall fulfill every duty and observe every principle of democracy in the Philippines if we introduce popular and repre sentative institutions just as rapidly as may be consistent with the maintenance of order and the enforcement of justice be tween man and man. It is not impossible, furthermore, that our experience in the Philippines and elsewhere may help us to understand better the JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 315 evolutionary character of some of our problems nearer home. We have at times found the difficulties confronting our demo cratic institutions to be so disheartening that we have allowed the pessimists to raise their insidious doubts as to the funda mental value of democracy and as to the future of our system. Here, again, I do not know any wiser teacher to follow than Mr. Jefferson, nor any better dictum than that the ultimate cure for the ills of democracy is to be found in democracy itself. In Jefferson s time it required great faith and clear insight to hold in an unqualified manner to the novel doctrine of the right- mindedness, capacity, and wisdom of the plain people, and to the view that government should rest on the broadest possible basis. Rousseau and other French writers, it is true, had promulgated such ideas. But they argued in the sphere of abstract discussion, and not at all in that of practical politics. Such views in England were of slow and cautious growth, and even to our own day it is the taxpayer rather than the man who casts a British ballot, while a single proprietor may vote in as many different places as he owns property. The practical doctrine of democracy, that is to say, of the plain people as the depository of political power, the doctrine so firmly held in a later period by Abraham Lincoln, was, above all, the Jeffersonian doctrine. Of all the men who had lived in the world up to his time, he expounded that idea most influentially. It was his leadership of a school of American politics and statecraft, more than anything else, that gave firm establishment to the broad democratic experiment in this country. "The only orthodox object," he declared, "of the institution of government, is to secure the greatest degree of hap piness possible to the general mass of those associated under it." In his Notes on Virginia, written in 1782, his observations on government were in a vein well indicated by the following quotations : Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe deposi tories. To render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. On the same page he declared : The influence over government must be shared among all the people. If every individual which composes their mass participates in the ulti- 316 ALBERT SHAW mate authority, the government will be safe: because the corrupting the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth; and public ones cannot be provided but by levies on the people. In this case every man would have to pay his own price. The government of Great Britain has been corrupted because but one man in ten has a right to vote for members of Parliament. The sellers of the government, therefore, get nine tenths of their price clear. For a period of more than fifty years, seemingly without a moment s misgiving, Jefferson proclaimed this political gospel of popular self-government. Many of the half-hearted repub licans of his time favored some vestiges of hereditary or aristo cratic or exclusive institutions. Jefferson never compromised with any of these opinions. Early in his career he wrote to Gen eral Washington, "Experience has shown that the hereditary branches of modern government are the patrons of privilege and prerogative." Since he wrote those words, the world has had a further experience of such an hereditary institution as the Brit ish House of Lords, through an added century and a quarter; and Mr. Jefferson s views remain so sound and judicious that they might have been written yesterday. "The true foundation of re publican government," he wrote at a later period, "is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property, and in their management." It must be remembered that the idea of an unrestricted suf frage was a very novel one at the beginning of the nineteenth century. What Mr. Jefferson s views had always been he made clear in a letter to a citizen of Virginia which he wrote in 1800. He explained that the new constitution of Virginia had been formed when he was absent attending a session of Congress; and then he added, "Had I been here [in Virginia], I should probably have proposed a general suffrage because my opinion has al ways been in favor of it." In notes and proposals for Virginia constitutions at several earlier periods, Mr. Jefferson had not wholly ignored the prevailing sentiment in favor of a property qualification. But he had practically nullified such a limitation by admitting any man who was liable to militia duty. I must not dwell tediously upon this point, although to my mind it has a significance not merely historical or academic, but practical in a concrete and immediate sense. Mr. Jefferson s arguments for JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 317 a large electorate were many-sided, and they were to my mind as a whole unanswerable. But it would be highly unjust to his doc trine of the suffrage to say that he proclaimed the efficacy of uni versal suffrage, at all times and under all circumstances, as sure to work out good results. As a general maxim he was ever proclaiming the inherent right, and also the advantage, of self-government. But he was a states man, and he recognized facts in any given situation. And so his maxims about self-government presupposed a certain degree of preparation and fitness. Thus, after he had purchased Louisiana from France, he did not for a moment allow his well-known phi losophy of the right of self-government to obscure his practical judgment as to the immediate work in hand. In December, 1803, he wrote to DeWitt Clinton as follows : Although it is acknowledged that our new fellow-citizens in Louisiana are as yet as incapable of self-government as children, yet some in Con gress cannot bring themselves to suspend its principles for a single moment. The temporary or territorial government of that country, therefore, will encounter great difficulty. Two or three years before that, in a letter to John Breckin- ridge, he pointed out a radical difference between our American people and the people of France, in that, while our countrymen are impressed from their cradle with the sacredness of the law of majority rule, the people of France, on the other hand, to quote his exact words, "have never been in the habit of self-govern ment, and are not yet in the habit of acknowledging that fun damental law of nature by which alone self-government can be exercised by a society I mean the lex majoris partis." Mr. Jef ferson, of course, had no doubt whatever as to the applicability in due time of the principles of self-government in Louisiana on the one hand and in France on the other. He did not waive his ideal, but merely recognized the necessity of preliminary processes. In his later years he came more and more to point out the need of character and intelligence in the individual citizen. Thus, in commenting in a letter to a foreign correspondent in 1814, on a new constitution that had been drawn up for Spain, he wrote: There is one provision which will immortalize its inventors. It is that which after a certain epoch disfranchises every citizen who cannot read 318 ALBERT SHAW and write. This is new, and is the fruitful germ of the improvement of everything good, and the correction of everything imperfect in the pres ent constitution. This will give you an enlightened people and an energetic public opinion. And I might make other citations, showing an acceptance by Mr. Jefferson of the plan of an educational restriction. In this there was nothing inconsistent with his previous arguments in favor of a wide extension of the franchise. The system against which he had been fighting was one which tended toward the per petuation of privileged classes in the community. The educa tional qualification, as he favored it, had no such tendency. Its object was not to make permanent exclusion of the masses from an equal part in the work and privilege of government, but rather to provide an added incentive to diligence and effort on the part of every young man to fit himself to meet the tests. There has been a period in our recent history during which more honor has been paid to Jefferson s general maxims than to his practical statesmanship. It was precisely because he believed so deeply in the people and in their essential equality of rights and of legal status, that he attached so much importance to the work of making them fit to be entrusted with the exercise of their natural rights as members of the political community. Thus Jefferson would have said if I have any understanding of the principles of his statesmanship that it was the great business of the people of America, in the critical period after the year 1865, not to confer the franchise indiscriminately upon all com ers, but rather to seek by every means and by every sacrifice to qualify all comers and especially their children for the future exercise of the franchise in an intelligent and responsible manner. I do not think, then, that we have paid the highest honor to Jeffersonian principles in the North by admitting to the franchise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of foreigners unable to speak the English language, densely ignorant of our forms of government, and to a large extent unable to read even the Lat- inic dialects or the Slavonic jargons of the regions from which they have come. It is not strange, under such circumstances, that the government of our great cities has been corrupt and in efficient. The conditions of immigration in Jefferson s time were JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 319 so different that, while he made many observations on the sub ject that still possess value, there is not much in his writings of direct application to our recent and present experiences on that score. It may be clearly inferred, however, that Mr. Jefferson would have favored some measure to restrict the coming of un desirable immigrants in excessive numbers; and it is even more fairly to be inferred that he would have extended the franchise to such immigrants only upon evidence in each individual case of the possession of proper knowledge and capacity to take part in the government of American communities. With respect to pending franchise questions in the Southern States, I have no word of a controversial nature to utter. An electorate once broadened to the utmost possible limits is a diffi cult thing to contract. The ultimate aim of statesmanship, doubt less, should be the broadening of the base of popular government. But I do not think there is any gain in a hastening of the process. After all, Mr. Jefferson s greatest contribution to the system of democracy as applied in practice was his doctrine of the rela tion of the government to education. He believed that the com munity as a whole should confer upon every child the opportun ity to acquire a common education, and such practical knowledge as would best fit it for its place in the industrial and political community. To his mind this was the best way to meet the inequalities of wealth and condition that otherwise would dis turb the equilibrium of a democratic state. If he had lived to our day, and had found large elements of population unqualified to exercise the electoral franchise, he would doubtless have advised such groups or factors that their true interests lay in other directions than politics and government. But with equal emphasis he would have urged upon the community at large the still more important fact that there must be extraordinary effort used to elevate every part of the citizenship of the country. All classes, races, and nationalities must inevitably suffer some harm and loss through the degradation of any single ele ment or factor of the population; and on the other hand, each element of the community must experience some distinct gain as a result of every effort made to improve the intelligence and general condition of any other element or factor. Happily, there are not wanting the signs that the country is coming to an under- 320 ALBERT SHAW standing of this fact. The most eager pupils of our public schools in New York, Chicago, and many other Northern cities are the hundreds of thousands of children from the homes of parents who do not speak the English language. The lives of American statesmen and the principles of American government form the themes and topics that more than all others attract and inspire those sons of Italian, Russian-Polish, and Hungarian parents in the tenement quarters of New York and Chicago, as they throng the free circulating libraries for books, and as they meet in their boys clubs and debating societies. I have no doubt whatever as to the useful future of these boys as American voters, although I have had many misgivings as to the propriety of enfranchising their fathers. There was danger, a few years ago, lest these schools might give to the children of hard-working though ignorant immigrants just enough smattering of book knowledge, and just enough con tact with people of better economic and social condition than their parents, to spoil them for the places they ought to fill. Care ful investigation twelve or fifteen years ago convinced me that along with the immeasurable good our public schools were accomplishing, they were also doing some serious, though inci dental harm. They were detaching the sons of immigrants from manual pursuits, while not helping them to anything better. But the schools are now adapting themselves to the new condi tions they have to meet, and they are everywhere giving empha sis to the idea of the great dignity and value of labor, while more and more they are combining manual training and the teaching of practical arts with mental and moral discipline, and with instruction in language, numbers, and geography, in drawing, and in the elements of science. Mr. Jefferson s broad schemes of education were scientific enough and flexible enough to admit all such later differentiations as the kindergarten and the practical trade school, as well as the older grammar school and the uni versity. To Mr. Cabell in 1820 he wrote: Promote in every order of men the degree of instruction propor tioned to their condition and to their views in life. Upon nothing was his heart more set than upon the systematic ordering of education, so that its benefits might be thoroughly JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 321 distributed. Circumstances have made it possible to carry out his views of a State system more perfectly perhaps in such North western Commonwealths as Michigan and Wisconsin than any where else in this country. And where such systems exist at their best, it is wonderful to note their potency in the assimila tion of the new and seemingly unpromising relays of immigrants that have come in recent years from Eastern and Southern Europe. The South has responded splendidly of late, at great sacrifice, to the demand for schools ; and I am confident that there will be no relaxation of effort. Nevertheless there cannot be too frequent a re-reading of the views of Mr. Jefferson upon the importance of education, and upon its fundamental place in a democracy. His views of the relation of education to the state were adopted early in his career, and were propounded with his very latest breath. I deem it remarkable that he should have declared in a letter to Madison as early as 1787 that the task and function of giving "information to the people is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of the government." Even in our own day it seems a bold and advanced idea to declare, without any reserve or qualification, that education is the first duty and chief function of government. The whole civilized world is only now beginning cautiously to recast itself upon a glimmering concep tion of the truth of that idea. Mr. Jefferson stated it again in his first inaugural message. In 1810 he wrote to John Tyler: I have two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength. 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the chil dren of each will be within reach of a central school in it. In later writings he advocated a special tax for the creation and maintenance of his system of schools graded from the pri mary classes to the university. His vindication of the duty of the community to draw by taxation upon the resources of the rich to pay for the schooling of the poor was so complete that nobody has ever been able to improve upon it. And this doctrine of his, in its various implications, goes to the heart of the new social and industrial conditions we see about us in this twentieth century. The Jeffersonian principle is that the 322 ALBERT SHAW supreme and imperative duty of the state is the training of the people to be good citizens and useful and capable members of society; and again and again is it set forth in the utterances of Mr. Jefferson that the safety and well-being of the state lie along this path of its duty and its burden. We have emerged with startling suddenness upon a period of undreamt-of industrial combinations and prodigious aggrega tions of productive capital. There are moments when it seems as if the concentrated power of the new industrial society is becoming so great that it must subordinate to its purposes the organs and agencies of the political society. In many particular instances, temporarily at least, such subordination has been too visible to be denied. The only remedy lies in the training of the individual citizen. Industrial combinations will work evil, or they will work good, according as the community itself is pre pared to shape them to the common advantage. It is not true that the man is diminishing in importance as compared with the dollar. Fortunately, just the opposite is demonstrably the case. The new industrial combinations rest even more necessarily upon the cooperation of talent and skill than upon the dead weight of united capital alone. There never was a time when it so much behooved the young man to invest in himself, and when the relative value of personal training and acquired aptitude was so great in comparison with that of accu mulated capital. The ultimate goal in a democracy is not strife and discord, but political harmony and concord; and it is similarly true that in the economic life of the community the better hopes reach far beyond the wastefulness and strife of the old competitive sys tem, and demand the substitution for it of cooperative methods and scientific organization. We are certainly entering upon a period of unified effort, from which there can be no return to the competitive system as it has existed heretofore. And respecting this new and close organization of industry, several methods of future control are readily conceivable. One method is that of control by individuals, or by syndicates com posed of comparatively few men whose fortunes can be told in hundreds or thousands of millions. A second method is that of the radical enlargement of the functions of the political com- JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 323 munity, so that the people themselves, organized as the state, may assume control, one after another, of the great businesses and industries of the country. A third method is that of the gradual distribution of the shares of stock of industrial corpora tions among the workers themselves and the people at large, until in one industry after another there shall have come into being something like a true cooperative system managed on public representative principles quite analogous to the carrying on of our political institutions. Mr. Jefferson declared himself clearly and strongly against any arbitrary limitation of individ ual wealth. He was willing to have governmental experiments tried, and was not, as many people suppose, the apostle of the unqualified doctrine that government is a necessary evil, that the best government is the one that governs least, and in any case the functions of government should be negative rather than positive. The tendency of his teaching was, indeed, toward as little interference in industrial affairs on the part of government as circumstances would permit. This, however, was always sub ject in his teaching to the broad principle that the object of government is to promote the well-being and happiness of the greater number, and that its practical functions may therefore be varied from time to time to meet new conditions. Thus all the new functions of municipal government, in a period when the majority are coming to live under urban condi tions, are strictly in harmony with the Jeffersonian teaching. If the common welfare should sometime in the future demand the municipal operation of street railways, or even the national ownership and operation of the general railroad system, surely the shade of Mr. Jefferson would not arise to utter any warning whatever. In his own day he observed that strong men as a rule make their own fortunes, and that under our laws of inheritance wealth tends in the third or fourth generation toward a distribution that robs it of any particular danger to the less fortunate members of the community. There is no reason at this moment to regard Mr. Jefferson s opinion on that subject as out of date. In other words, Jefferson s dictum holds perfectly good to-day that our governmental safety lies in numbers; and that concen trated wealth, whether in individual or corporate hands, cannot 324 ALBERT SHAW possibly in the long run take away any of the liberties or rights of an enfranchised people intelligent enough to know what it wants. We must to some extent pass through the phase of indus trial control at the hands of individuals holding disproportionate wealth and power; but this can last only a little time. The growth of the general wealth of the country is at a higher rate than the aggregation of riches in the hands of multi millionaires. There was a time when the man of moderate fortune could afford to be without any training for a place in the professional or business world. But the fixed fortune now yields much less income; while the newer demands of life require a larger outgo. Even the skilled laborer has steadily shortening hours and con stantly increasing wages. The future belongs clearly to the workers, and they in due time will become the associated capital ists. I believe it will come to be a matter of comparative indiffer ence whether the political society that we call the state gradu ally absorbs the industrial organization, or whether the two shall run on indefinitely side by side. In either case the principles of democracy must have a higher potency than ever; and more than ever they must rest upon the basis of a universal training for citizenship and for honorable membership in the local and the general community. "One good government," Jefferson ob served, "is a blessing to the whole world" having reference to its illuminating example. In 1823, in a letter to Albert Gallatin, he declared, with a wisdom that the flight of years only serves to illustrate : The advantages of representative government, exhibited in England and America, and recently in other countries, will procure its establish ment everywhere in a more or less perfect form; and this will insure the amelioration of the condition of the world. It will cost years of blood and be well worth them. Let me conclude with one more quotation from Thomas Jefferson, which I must commend to the doubters and pessimists, and which seems to me to embody as much political, economic, and ethical wisdom, applicable to present conditions, as any other single utterance from the pen of any other American states man. What I am about to quote was written by Mr. Jefferson in 1817 to a friend in France, M. de Marbois: JEFFERSON S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 325 I have much confidence that we shall proceed successfully for ages to come, and that, contrary to the principle of Montesquieu, it will be seen that, the larger the extent of country the more firm its republican struc ture, if founded, not on conquest, but in principles of compact and equality. My hope of its duration is built much on the enlargement of the resources of life, going hand in hand with the enlargement of terri tory, and the belief that men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them. THE AGE OF ERUDITION BY JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON Delivered before the Beta of Illinois, at the University of Chicago, June 12, 1905. THE invitation with which your committee has honored me was, I believe, at first expressed in the form of a request that I should deliver "this year s Phi Beta Kappa Oration." Even at the outset, when the invitation was incautiously accepted, the name "oration" seemed sufficiently formidable. As time went on, and May, that month so lauded by the poets, but in the academic world so melancholy with committee meetings and masters examinations, ran its appointed course, it began to be plain to the anxious orator that "Phi Beta Kappa Address" was as large a title as the future product would bear. Now that eleven more of the "daughters of Time, the hypocritic days" of June, have passed away, with augmented apprehension and modesty he invites your attention to a few Phi Beta Kappa remarks or observations. It is almost an established convention that Phi Beta Kappa orations or addresses or remarks should deal either with some aspect of public affairs or with some general educational topic. The orator, addresser, or remarker of the present year asks your indulgence if he departs wholly from this convention. A peace able person, "Who never set a squadron in the field, Nor the division of a battle knows More than a spinster," he has no disposition to comment on the recent progress of war fare in either Manchuria or Chicago. He is conscious of no mis sion to make public the simple thoughts of a cloistered student upon the ever-changing forms and issues of politics, "fanciful shapes of a plastic earth." As to discourse on general educational topics, he is too much amazed at the prodigious and ceaseless flood of such discourse to undertake to augment it, too doubtful whether any talker on general themes of education can make an THE AGE OF ERUDITION 327 impression on the wearied minds of 1905 save by paradox or by one-sided exaggeration. It is possible that our deluge of educa tional talk may fructify like the floods of Father Nile; but is it not first requisite that it should subside? At all events, the sub ject chosen for the present occasion is a concrete and restricted topic in the history of scholarship. It has seemed possible that such a theme might be of interest to a society whose common bond is that of attainment in scholarship, especially, perhaps, in humanistic studies; nor ought those who are devoted to such studies to neglect the history of them, lest they fall into that provincialism in respect to time, that chauvinism for the twen tieth century, so to call it, which is almost as narrowing as local provincialism. In view of our modern specialization, it will not be thought unnatural, though doubtless regrettable, if the dis course seems to be most often of historical scholarship, less fre quently and less precisely of scholarship in other fields. The episode of which I choose to speak I call the Age of Erudi tion. By this is meant a period in the history of scholarship ex tending from about 1650, or in some countries from about 1620, to about 1750. It is, perhaps, well known that in the history of literature the phases of development through which one nation passes are often identical with those through which other na tions pass at the same time. Thus, romanticism was a modula tion of key in the general intellectual life of Europe, and not of France alone or of Germany alone. Not less is this true in the history of learning. Its phases are pan-European, not merely national. The philologians of the early Renaissance were, in all countries, mainly occupied with the search for the manuscripts of classical authors, and with the construction of commentaries upon them. They were for the most part dilettanti, interested more in the form than in the substance of the classical writings. The philologians of the sixteenth century, on the other hand, all over Europe, were of a graver and more austere variety, seeking with a similar eagerness the remains of classical, and now also of ecclesiastical, antiquity, but applying to their interpretation a power of thought which had been unknown to their predecessors, and a new determination to extract from the records of the past a solution of mooted questions in church and state. That fash ion of classical scholarship which laid most stress on the in- 328 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON genious emendation of texts was a European fashion, and not solely the local mode of Leyden or of Oxford. In the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century the study of antiquity, in all parts of Europe, widened almost suddenly and at a bound from the confined pursuit of dynastic, political, and literary in formation into the broad consideration of all aspects of ancient life, public and private, based on the most catholic range of materials, literary, epigraphic, and monumental, interpreted in the new and brilliant light furnished by comparative philology, comparative religion, and comparative jurisprudence. Similarly, in the history of historical scholarship there are times and seasons. As we come down from the period of the Renaissance, we pass through several successive climates of thought, fashions of historical expression and publication, which succeed each other almost simultaneously in all countries of Europe. The Renaissance had its own phase. Its historians, as we might expect, deficient in originality and criticism, strove mainly to imitate in literary forms the venerated historical writers of classical antiquity. Then came the Reformation and the brilliant age of Elizabeth and of Philip II, and we find, every where in Europe, a new crop of historians, no longer Italianate dilettanti, but men of affairs, statesmen like Raleigh and De Thou and Sarpi, soldiers like Davila and Montluc. History, for the first time in many ages, is deemed a worthy employment for great minds, who see in it the evolution of states, the course of God s providence, the touchstone of politics. Out of such a phase developed next that Age of Erudition with which we are concerned. The difference was as wide as that which separates Amadis of Gaul or the Faery Queen from the Pilgrim s Progress. Europe had definitely turned its back on chivalry and become pedestrian. An age of prose set in, an age of orderliness and regularity. After the Thirty Years War and the Great Rebel lion, physical science, especially mechanics and astronomy, the most mathematical of the physical sciences, took the place of theology as the object of the keenest intellectual interest. From such an age we see the world deriving humanistic and historical fruits of a peculiar type. Prodigies of learning are much more abundant than prodigies of genius. Sober and orderly accumulation of material is the mode. The presentation THE AGE OF ERUDITION 329 of texts and of historical documents in the completest abundance is more esteemed than the production of narrative histories or brilliant discourses upon antiquity. Folios are more in favor than octavos or duodecimos, Latin more than the vernacular. The chief reviewer of Mascou s Teutsche Geschichte declared with enthusiasm that it was so good that it was a pity it had not been written in Latin. An English traveller reports that when he spoke to Dom Jean Mabillon of the then recent dis coveries at Palmyra, and of some of the treatises to which they had given rise, the great scholar expressed his regret that these, being pure matter of erudition, had been written in English. "He apprehended, he said, that it would be with us as it had been in France, where, from the time when they had begun to cultivate their own language so attentively, they had begun to neglect Greek and Latin." But no qualitative description can give an adequate concep tion of the work of that age, for one of its most salient traits is the prodigious quantity of its published achievement. Within the hundred years which have been defined, and making no ac count of any books but those filled with original documents for early ecclesiastical and mediaeval history, it may be computed that France alone produced more than four hundred folio vol umes of such material alone. Even from the commonplace mer cantile point of view, so enormous a mass is surely impressive. That it could be absorbed at all speaks volumes* if one may say so, for the intellectual digestion of the contemporary public, and is nothing less than astounding to the present age, the age of primers and manuals and "vest-pocket editions," which has substituted Liebig capsules for the mighty roasts of Branksome Hall. Though the light of genius might be absent from the work of the age, it would be a mistake to suppose that this wonderful mass of scholarly achievement was the mere fruit of laborious industry, purblind or indifferent as to relative values and as to the higher uses of learning. That this was not the case, that a conscious purpose ran through these gigantic labors of accumu lation, is plain from the intelligence and methodical skill with which the sciences auxiliary to history and to the study of the classics were then developed, and with which monumental books 330 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON of reference were prepared. On the side of the classics, indeed, this was perhaps the main achievement of the age. In pure classical erudition the men of the sixteenth century, the Scali- gers and Casaubons and Lipsiuses, might claim a higher distinc tion than Bentley or Gronovius. But the science of inscriptions was given a new advancement by Fabretti and Muratori. The Sieur du Cange brought out his encyclopaedic dictionaries of late and mediaeval Greek and Latin. Mabillon by his classical treatise De Re Diplomatica laid securely and for all time the foundations of the science of diplomatics. Others gave system atic and scientific form to chronology and palaeography, to bibliography and numismatics. Such folio dissertations on the auxiliary sciences, or such encyclopaedias of learning as Bayle s Dictionary, showed that the age, myopic though it might be, was at least partly aware that, besides accumulation, the proper development of European learning demanded order, scientific method, critical attention, and careful thought as to what was worth while and what was not. The result is that, while the scholarship of our time would often desire texts more critically executed, few of the mighty folios of that age are by reason of their subjects deemed useless by the modern student. Its great series of mediaeval chronicles, of saintly biographies, of the letters and documents of kings and popes and prelates and monasteries and ecclesiastical councils, its volumes of patristic literature or of provincial and local materials, are still the inexhaustible quarry of the historian. There is no large subject in the history of the church or of the Middle Ages which can be thoroughly studied without recourse to some of the col lections prepared for us by the dauntless industry of the Age of Erudition. Whence came these enormous powers of accomplishment? How was that age enabled, without the modern appliances of labor-saving and time-saving literary machinery, devoid of the typewriter and the Library Bureau, to pile up these stupendous pyramids of knowledge? Sometimes we are prone to attribute it to superior health and physical endurance. We think of Leibniz, able to work each day without leaving his chair for eighteen hours at a stretch, or of the marvellous Magliabecchi, who, except in winter, never went to bed, but slept in his chair when drowsi- THE AGE OF ERUDITION 331 ness at length overcame him, the bed meanwhile, like all other articles of furniture in his strange apartment, remaining covered with a disordered mass of books. But alongside of these miracles of digestion and endurance we have Dom Jean Mabillon, patient sufferer of innumerable headaches, and his master, Dom Luc d Achery, who during the last forty-six years of his life, years of incessant scholarly activity, marked by prodigies of accumula tion, was never able to leave the infirmary of his convent. With greater security we may in part attribute the quantity of work performed by these erudites to the simplicity of their lives. The modern scholar is hindered by a multitude of dis tractions. He must lecture to classes. He must conduct a semi nary. He must attend innumerable committee meetings. He must do his part in the vitally important work of insuring that neighboring colleges do not outstrip his own in numbers. He must appear at educational conventions, and seem to say some thing not already said a thousand times. He must prepare a textbook. Perhaps he must collect money for Alma Mater. Perhaps, pushed by the unchastened social ambition of his wife or of his own divided heart, he must make his way into society, that strange unquiet society of the American rich, in essence so hostile to the austere pursuits of learning. Contrast all this with the calm life of the cloister, the even existence of Selden or of Muratori, and we may see one reason for more solid achieve ment. It may be doubted whether Magliabecchi s indifference to slumber aided more in the building up of his extraordinary scholarship than the little device in the door of his apartment whereby he was able to inspect his visitors and exclude all who would waste his valued time. How great the simplicity which marked the life of at least the Benedictine scholars, may be judged by a report made to Louis XIV, by La Reynie, his lieu tenant of police, from which it appears that each of them cost the government on the average only 437 livres and a fraction (say eighty-five dollars) per annum surely an economical endowment of research. But, beside the simplicity of the individual lives of scholars, there was a profitable simplicity in the organization of society. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we have said, loved order and regularity. Society, as if instinctively, organized 332 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON itself well and effectively. In this well-arranged society the cul tivators of erudition fell naturally into their proper place. The world of scholars was distinct from that of litterateurs. Madame de Sevigne, in all her letters, never once mentions Mabillon, the glory of contemporary French scholarship. On the other hand, Mabillon and his correspondents, it is said, in all their epistles mention Racine but once, and no other contemporary literary writer at all. Scholars were not under temptation to struggle after literary and popular success, losing thereby, no doubt, much that gives to the best of historical writing immortal charm, but gaining in the power of purely erudite achievement. It was not that their lives were, as a rule, secluded. Distinguished so ciety resorted to the cloisters of Saint Germain des Pres, or lis tened to the mordant tabletalk of John Selden. But there was, spontaneously carried into operation, a division of functions between the pursuers of learning and the cultivators of belles- lettres, which gave the former the opportunity to follow their severe muse with undistracted attention. So little true is it that the lovers of erudition were secluded from the world, that we may count it distinctly as one of the causes of their astounding productivity that they enjoyed in abundant measure the favor of the great. The patronage which persons of high position in that age bestowed on literary men in no wise prevented them from visiting with similar encourage ment the labors of the learned. They appreciated that distinct ness of the two classes of which we have spoken, and conceived of both alike as contributing to the glory of their reigns or their countries. The treatise De Re Diplomatica was dedicated to Colbert, who sought in vain to reward with a pension its modest and humble author. Baluze was Colbert s librarian. The elec- tress Sophia was the intimate friend of Leibniz. Without the aid of her daughter, the electress Sophia Charlotte, the Prussian Academy would not have come into existence. The great chan cellor Somers, the lord high treasurer Harley, were devoted and invaluable friends of erudition. Queen Christina patronized it in her eccentric but ardent manner. That the Grand Monarque himself was as appreciative of the achievements of special scholarship as of the labors of poets and dramatists might not be supposed. It may, therefore, not be without interest to see in THE AGE OF ERUDITION 333 the simple-minded narrative of one of the brethren, how King Louis XIV exhibited his favor toward one of the monastic au thors belonging to the Congregation of St. Maur. The episode concerns the history of the town of St. Denis, by Dom Felibien. Says the narrator : Before the book was published, Dom Felibien, accompanied by the prior of St. Denis, went to present it to the king, and was introduced into the cabinet of his Majesty by the cardinal of Noailles. After the prior had paid his compliments briefly, the author presented his book, begging the king to receive it with the same kindness with which he had in former times received divers works which M. Felibien, his father, had composed for his service. The king read the whole of the title-page, [and made some comments upon the engraved frontispiece]. He ran through the first pages, and coming upon the plan of the town of St. Denis, "There," said he, "is a town which cost us a good deal in former tunes," referring to the civil wars of 1652. Again he turned over the pages of the book for some time, and said: "There is a good book." Then, closing it, he said to the prior of St. Denis: "Father, I thank you; pray to God for me during my life and after my death." "Sire," an swered the prior, "the whole kingdom is too deeply interested in the preservation of your Majesty to fail in this." On going out from the grand cabinet of Versailles, Dom Felibien and his prior went to present the work to Messeigneurs the Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Duke of Berry, his brother, who received it very favorably. After hav ing made their present to the chancellor, they went to Saint-Cyr to offer a copy to Madame de Maintenon. Some days afterward Dom Felibien went with Dom Mabillon to St. Germain-en-Laye, where he presented his history to the young king of England, James HI [the "Old Pre tender"], who received the present with evidences of joy and esteem. He presented it to the Duke of Orleans, who promised to read it. Eight days after this memorable distribution the king, seeing the Cardinal de Noailles, said to him: "Really, Monsieur le Cardinal, I did not suppose that the history 7 of Saint-Denis could be so varied and agreeable as it is. I have found the reading of it extremely interesting. It must be that Father Felibien has had good memoirs as materials, especially for what relates to my reign, for I find him very exact." These praises had no sooner proceeded from the mouth of the king than the new history became an object of interest to all the court, which occupied itself with it for several days. In consequence, the sale of the work was so rapid that in six weeks more than two hundred copies were disposed of. Let us not forget to mention that the Duke of Perth wrote to Dom Felibien on behalf of the king of England, as follows: "The king has carefully examined your work, Father, since the time when you pre sented it to him. He is charmed with it, and has ordered me to thank you cordially on his behalf. * 334 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON Still further pursuing the reasons for the extraordinary fertil ity we have noticed, we may attribute much of it to the excep tional extent of the habit of mutual cooperation. Because these scholars worked in quietness and somewhat in seclusion from the world, we are not to think of them as working in isolation so far as other scholars were concerned. On the contrary, they main tained a correspondence that is striking in its range. The National Library at Paris possesses more than twelve hundred letters addressed to Abbe Nicaise, by more than one hundred and thirty correspondents living in France, Italy, Holland, Prussia, and Switzerland; yet Abbe Nicaise was but a provincial scholar, by no means of the highest repute. Mabillon maintained a correspondence on matters of scholarship, which put the dis coveries and conclusions of each at the service of his friends, with numberless men of similar tastes princes of the Holy Roman Empire like the cardinal bishop of Minister or the abbot of Dissentis, curators of books and manuscripts like the librarian of St. Gall, official historiographers like Leibniz, professors of Oxford or of Leyden, Jesuits at Trent and councillors at Copen hagen, cardinals and noble archaeologists and simple Benedictines at Rome to say nothing of the stream of letters which, in an age when journals of erudition hardly yet existed, flowed from every part of France to his humble cell at Saint Germain des Pres. Extensive travels, long tours of search for manuscripts, still further contributed to bring all the great scholars of Europe into mutual association. But a more organic union of forces was put into practice, and formed one of the most salient characteristics of the period. In that earlier age of solid learning of which we have spoken, roughly corresponding to the sixteenth century, there had been little of this. Elizabethan Englishmen, Frenchmen of the civil wars, Dutchmen of the heroic age, were not easy to combine. But the seventeenth century, with its instinctive love of order and system, readily fell into the habit of cooperation, and saw its value in application to tasks too vast even for those giants of erudition. When Heribert Rosweide, professor in the Jesuit College at Douay, formed the vast design of the Ada Sanctorum, in tending to incorporate in it all the original documents for the THE AGE OF ERUDITION 335 lives of all the saints of the Roman Church, with scholarly intro ductions and annotations, Cardinal Bellarmine, to whom the project was described, exclaimed: "Has he discovered that he will live two hundred years?" The cardinal was not deceived as to the magnitude of the task. Nearly three hundred years have passed away, and the Ada Sanctorum is still unfinished. Perhaps, indeed, the twentieth century will not see its comple tion, for the last-published of its gigantic folio volumes, the sixty- sixth, advances but a little way among the saints of early November. But when Heribert Rosweide died, in 1629, with little more accomplished than the collecting of a large mass of mediaeval manuscripts, the organization and discipline of the Jesuits proved ready means of insuring the continuance of his work. The authorities of the Society of Jesus ordered a distin guished young scholar named John Bolland, or Bollandus, to continue it. Bolland entered upon his labors with enthusiasm, indefatigable zeal, and mature good judgment. He engaged in a most extensive correspondence, and manuscript materials from all quarters of the globe accumulated in enormous abundance in his little garret rooms in the Jesuit House at Antwerp. The plan formed by Bollandus was even wider than that of Rosweide, and before long he saw that he could never hope to accomplish more than a small fraction of it alone. In 1635 he took as asso ciate Godfrey Henschen, a scholar of the highest rank and of great originality, who enlarged the scope of the work much beyond the project of Bolland. The first two volumes, embrac ing, in the order of the Roman calendar, the saints for January, appeared in 1643; the next three, for February, in 1658. Mean while a third had been added to the little band, in the person of Daniel Papebroch, who for fifty-five years devoted himself to this great task, and who was perhaps the greatest of all the Bollandist fathers. Twenty-three folio volumes, replete with learning and contributing immensely to the knowledge of mediae val history, remained to attest the industry and high scholarship of these first three. The value of a collection of mediaeval biographies of saints may perhaps demand a word of explanation. Constituted as mediaeval society was, with piety and edification so great a con cern, with the clerical class so widely influential and almost 336 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON alone educated, the lives of saints came naturally to constitute the most extensive branch of biography. Sometimes, as in the case of St. Dunstan or St. Louis, St. Francis or St. Olaf, the saint occupied such a position in the world that the records of his life constitute an important part of the most conspicuous civil and ecclesiastical history of his time. But in the fortunate democracy of the Roman Church, saints might spring from any walk in life and play their part on a humble as well as on a conspicuous stage. Therefore their pious biographers, relating human lives with a degree of detail which historians never thought of bestowing on any but kings, give us, quite without intending it, invaluable glimpses into the actual existence of classes in mediaeval society of whose obscure and inarticulate mode of life we should other wise learn nothing at all. But the Bollandist Ada Sanctorum was not simply a col lection of saints lives printed one after another. Prefaces and annotations brought out the importance to history of each piece, and expended a great wealth of learning in discussion of the historical points involved. Critical treatises of wider scope are inserted, such as that dissertation on mediaeval charters, Father Papebroch s Propylceum Antiquarium, which, by attacking the genuineness of the Merovingian charters of the Benedictine abbey of St. Denis, elicited Mabillon s more scientific and authoritative treatise. Further, not a few esssays on points of purely secular history appear in the vast repository. Jesuits as they were, the Bollandists were marked by a thorough honesty and a scrupulous fidelity, and an independent spirit of historical criticism was maintained by them in every subsequent genera tion. No finer example could be found, either of scholarly candor or of scholarly humility, than the letter which Papebroch wrote to Mabillon after reading the famous treatise De Re Diplo- matica by which his own work on the subject had been demol ished and superseded : I avow to you that I have no other satisfaction in having written upon the subject than that of having given occasion for the writing of a treatise so masterly. It is true that I felt at first some pain in reading your book, where I saw myself refuted in so unanswerable a manner; but finally the utility and the beauty of so precious a work soon over came my weakness, and, full of joy at seeing the truth in its clearest THE AGE OF ERUDITION 337 light, I invited my companion to come and share the admiration with which I felt myself filled. Therefore have no hesitation, whenever occa sion shall arise, in saying publicly that I have come over completely to your way of thinking. I beg for your affection. I am not a man of learn ing, but one who desires to learn. The successors of the first Bollandists, in the first part of the eighteenth century, did not maintain the same high level of excellence. But the work went on with undiminished industry, and was feeling the effects of a certain revival of historical studies in the middle period of that century, when the Pope sup pressed the Jesuit order, in 1773. The prestige of the Bolland ists saved them for a time from the Austrian government, but finally Joseph II dissolved them, in 1788, when only the seventh volume for October had been completed. On the invasion of the Austrian Netherlands by the French revolutionary armies, their priceless library was dispersed, part burned and part hidden. With their subsequent history we have perhaps no concern. It will suffice to say that in 1836 the society or group was reconsti tuted by four learned Belgian Jesuits, under the auspices of the first king of the Belgians, Leopold I; that the work has since then steadily advanced under the conduct of three or four devoted scholars; that their present establishment is in the Col lege St. Michel at Brussels; and that the November and Decem ber saints may be relied on to furnish occupation for a century more. But, the Bollandists apart, the leading place in erudite labors can by no means be claimed for the Jesuits. That preeminence belongs rather, in France especially, to the Benedictines, and particularly to those of the Congregation of St. Maur. One of the results of the Catholic Counter-Reformation had been the reform of the monastic orders. An important feature or conse quence of such a reform was the revival of monastic studies. Such labors were among those enjoined upon the members of the regular orders, their houses preserved great accumulations of manuscripts, and the monastic principles of humility and obedi ence placed the services of all at the disposal of the gifted few, and made those few willing to labor, year after year, at tasks which could be finished only by the toil of successive generations; in other words, to labor for the fame of their order or congrega- 338 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON tion, rather than their own individual fame. One of the most important works of the class we are considering bears on its title- page no other sign of authorship than "by two Benedictines of the Congregation of St. Maur." The Congregation of St. Maur had been founded early in the reign of Louis XIII. The chief seat of its scholarly activity was the abbey of Saint Germain des Pres. The first superior-general, Dom Gregoire Tarisse, and the librarian of the abbey, Dorn Luc d Achery, very early in the history of the congregation planned most of the gigantic enterprises which were to occupy for a cen tury the brethren of that convent and to make it the chief glory of French scholarship. Under the general supervision of Achery and afterward of Mabillon, they poured forth vast series of chronicles of France, of writings of the Fathers, of lives of Bene dictine saints, of charters and documents, ponderous works on ecclesiastical antiquities or on the auxiliary sciences, histories of religious houses and bodies, provincial histories, and great col lections of miscellaneous mediaeval literature. Though none rivalled the Benedictines of St. Maur, other orders such as the Dominicans and Franciscans did their part by labors of similar character and intention. From papal librarians, working amid the splendors of the Vatican, to Brother Michael O Clery compiling the Annals of the Four Masters in his lonely hut in the ruined convent at Donegal may we not say to Cotton Mather and Thomas Prince in the pastoral studies of the Old North and Old South Churches? the tribes of ecclesi astics were stirred by a common impulse to preserve in worthy fashion the records of the past. Not alone in the ecclesiastical world, however, was the drift toward organization and cooperation manifest. It has sometimes been said that the Royal Society of London was founded by Charles II, soon after the Restoration (1662), in order that eager minds might occupy themselves in the safe fields of physical science rather than in the volcanic areas of politics. However strong such a motive may have been in the mind of a king who, as he said, had made it his first principle of action that he would not set out again on his travels, we are obliged to seek for wider explanations when we see the Academy of Sciences at Paris brought into existence only three years later, the French Acad- THE AGE OF ERUDITION 339 emy already in existence for almost a generation, the Prussian Academy instituted in 1700, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres the next year, the St. Petersburg Academy a few years later, to say nothing of those more especially historical academies, in Madrid and Lisbon, in Copenhagen and Stock holm, which followed before long. Academies founded by the government, and able to combine, direct, and utilize for the nation s good the various scientific endeavors of its most active minds, corresponded to a definite desire of the age. The prime motive is plain in the correspondence of Leibniz, the wonderful polymath who best represents the mind of the closing seven teenth century, respecting the foundation of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. That famous body, to-day the foremost of such establishments, had indeed a quaint assortment of ori gins. Erhard Weigel had planned for a society which should seize the opportunity presented by the year 1700 for the reform of the calendar in the Protestant German states, and which should be sustained by enjoying a monopoly of the sale of alma nacs. The electress labored for an astronomical observatory. The elector added provisions looking toward the purifying of the German language and the study of German history and institu tions. But above and behind all stood the fundamental idea of the comprehensive genius who was truly the founder of the acad emy, and who ever since he was twenty-one had not ceased to labor toward such an end the idea of forwarding productive investigation instead of reproducing in dogmatic form the Aristotelian or any other system, and of forwarding it by con sultation and cooperation on the part of an organized body representing the best and most serviceable intellects of Bran denburg and Prussia, and perhaps eventually of all Protestant Europe. The works put forth by the academies were much of the same genus as those brought out by the Benedictine and other such establishments, except that in the field of history they made choice of civil historical material, rather than ecclesiastical, for the substance of their great series, as was natural to corporations having so close a relation to the state. But if it has become abundantly clear what sort of labors characterized the age which we have called the Age of Erudition, 340 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON and why they were so extensive, it is time to inquire why just such an age supervened when it did. If the main interest of political history lies in the endeavor to trace relations of cause and effect, surely not less important is it for an audience of scholars to attempt to do this in the history of scholarship. But neither in politics nor in letters and learning do effects flow with mechanical simplicity from single and plainly perceptible causes. The Age of Erudition, we may be sure, had divers origins. We have seen that it was to a large extent identical with the age of Louis XIV, to a less extent with the age of Queen Anne. But probably we are not warranted in supposing that it came either because of or in spite of the brilliant literary development which we are accustomed to associate with those two names; for, as we have seen, the world of letters and the world of scholarship had little to do with each other. Even the historians and the historical scholars were classes apart a condition observed also in our own age, and poignantly lamented by those who can admire but one variety of excellence. It is probable that a more definite connection can be traced between the despotism of Louis XIV and his contemporary monarchs and the type of historical writing which in their day takes the leading place. When Antonius Sanderus began the publication of his Flandria Illustrata, the Spanish viceroy of the Netherlands confiscated a part of it because he gave too full and interesting an exhibit of the ancient municipal liberties of the Flemish towns. When Giannone, exiled from Italy for having spoken too freely in his History of Naples, was living quietly at Geneva, he was induced to attend mass in a Catholic village on the Savoyard side of the boundary, seized by agents of the king of Sardinia, and imprisoned at Turin for the rest of his life. When such conditions prevailed in Europe, it would not be surprising if scholars felt a strong impulse to keep to the safe ground of classical archaeology or the editing and publication of historical documents. But it should be remembered, on the one hand, that despotism was not unknown in previous centuries, yet did not cause an age of erudition; and, on the other hand, that the government of Queen Anne or of the Dutch Republic was not despotic, yet Madox and Strype and Rymer and Aitzema are of precisely the same type as Du Cange or Muratori. THE AGE OF ERUDITION 341 Deeper causes must be invoked. Perhaps there is always an encyclopaedic tendency in the age next after one of brilliant lit erary achievement; a desire, after men of genius have had their way with the world for a season, soberly to take account of stock, to sum up what has been accomplished, to survey it methodically with a view to its relation to what is still unper formed. The sense that great things have been done, though in an unsystematic manner, leads to the desire to preserve their results in systematic compilations. So Grsevius and Meursius gather into their Thesauri the dissertations and the philologi cal notes which their more brilliant predecessors, the Scaligers and the Turnebuses of the sixteenth century, have thrown off in such extraordinary profusion. Where the historians of the Elizabethan age, experienced often in the public affairs of their respective countries, write out of full minds and rely upon the statesman s insight or the soldier s rapid vision and clear mem ory, those who come after them, presumably by way of reaction, are prone to rely rather on completeness of evidence, industri ously gathered and carefully sifted and arranged. It may be worth while to call to mind that the great writers of classical antiquity were presently followed by a crop of critics and com pilers, the Alexandrian Greeks and the Roman makers of ency clopaedias, Cassiodorus and Martianus Capella. Again, after the brilliant thirteenth century, the century of Dante and Frederick II, of St. Francis and Alfonso the Wise, we find in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries an age of erudition bearing many of the tokens of that which we have been contemplating this morning. The historians of that time, in particular, quite with out the originality or mental grasp which marked some of their predecessors in the great days of mediaeval historical writing, set themselves to the making of great compilations into which they essayed to bring all the good historical material on which they could lay their hands. That such encyclopaedic works were what their public desired is plain from the fact that of Higden s Polychronicon, the chief English repertory of this sort, more than a hundred manuscripts are extant, though it is a poor thing and of enormous extent. But after all, if we fix our minds chiefly on those of the seven teenth-century erudites who came first on Ussher and Selden 342 JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON and Rosweide and Duchesne we shall be likely to conclude that the cause of their work and of its peculiar quality was a desire for a real and permanent solution of questions which the preceding age, that age of turmoil and ferment, of civil and reli gious struggle, had raised, but had not answered. Ussher un questionably studied in order that church controversies might be settled. Selden, with a broader mind, worked in order that great questions in church and state might be settled by appeal to the past, or at least viewed sub specie ceternitatis. A passage in the dedication to his History of Tythes paints to the life his attitude : The neglect or only vulgar regard of the fruitful and precious part of it [antiquity], which gives necessary light to the present in matter of state, law, history, and the understanding of good authors, is but pre ferring that kind of ignorance which our short life alone allows us before the many ages of former experience and observation, which may so accumulate years to us as if we had lived even from the beginning of time. Selden s thought is profitable for all those who, in any manner, historically or philologically, occupy themselves with the records of the past. There are many signs that we have entered on a period, in respect to these studies, not dissimilar to that Age of Erudition which we have been considering a period distin guished more by extensive accumulation and critical sifting of the evidences than by new endeavors toward their interpreta tion. Learned periodicals take the place of the correspondence of the erudite Benedictines; universities, and philological and historical societies, that of the religious orders. Governments, acting through academies or archive-establishments or scientific missions, carry on that work of productive investigation which Bacon and Leibniz desired. Individual foundations for research cooperate with them. The academies themselves are carrying the work of scientific organization a step higher, as witness the Cartell of the five leading German academies, and the Interna tional Association of Academies. The mind of scholars is, in general, occupied with problems of much the same order as those which prevailed two hundred years ago. In such a time it is important to bear in mind those lessons of concentration and modest limitation of individual work which the story of the THE AGE OF ERUDITION 343 Benedictines may teach; and to be comforted against the dry- ness of such an atmosphere by remembering that, when the Age of Erudition had done its work of accumulating and sifting evi dence, there emerged upon the Europe of 1750 the coordinating and philosophical ideas of the Aufklarung, of Turgot, Montes quieu, Hume, and Voltaire. Above all, it is salutary to compel our minds to travel, as Selden s did, beyond the passing fashions of the day or the century, and to see our work in the light of jthe long history of human endeavor after truth, conscious, on the one hand, that the form of our work is transitory; conscious, on the other hand, that the main currents of scholarship are parts of an eternal process. ACADEMIC FREEDOM BY CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT Delivered before the Theta of New York, at Cornell University, May 29, 1907. MY subject is Academic Freedom, a difficult subject, not as yet very well understood in this country, but likely to be of in creasing interest and importance throughout the coming century. I have divided my essay into three parts : the first dealing with academic freedom for teachers; the second with academic free dom for students; and the third with university administration as a type of free government in general. ACADEMIC FREEDOM FOB TEACHERS In a democracy, and in the political and social organizations to which democracy takes kindly, there are some new difficulties in regard to academic freedom for teachers. The principal new difficulty is the pressure in a democracy of a concentrated multi tudinous public opinion. The great majority of the people in a given community may hold passionately to some dogma in reli gion, some economic doctrine, or some political or social opinion or practice, and may resent strongly the expression by a public teacher of religious, economic, political, or social views unlike those held by the majority. In parts of our country at this mo ment liberty of thought and speech on certain topics is, to say the least, imperfect for men who do not coincide with the prevail ing opinions and sentiments of the community in which they dwell. Even in colleges and universities in those parts a teacher holding unpopular opinions could, until very recently, hardly escape the alternative of silence or banishment. The teaching of history in schools and colleges is watched with great suspicion by different parties in church and state, lest some unwelcome ACADEMIC FREEDOM 345 lessons of present application be drawn from the history of the past. Professors of economics are not even supposed to be free in some American communities which have held for generations with great unanimity the doctrine of protection. The endowed institutions are by no means exempt f rom^this strong pressure of public opinion; for they are sensitive to threats that the stream of gifts on which they depend will be cut off. This multitudinous tyrannical opinion is even more formidable to one who offends it than the despotic will of a single tyrant or small group of tyrants. It affects the imagination more, because it seems omnipresent, merciless, and irresponsible; and therefore resistance to it re quires a rare kind of moral courage. For this difficulty there is no remedy except the liberalizing of the common people, or at least of the educated class. To be sure, there is another mode of pre venting free teaching on dangerous subjects, which is quite as effective as persecution and much quieter, namely, the omission of all teaching on those subjects, and the elimination of reading matter bearing on them. Thus the supreme subject of theology has been banished from the state universities, and from many of the endowed universities; and in some parts of the country the suppression of Bible-reading and prayer at the opening exercises of the schools, in deference to Roman Catholic objections, has resulted in the children s getting no direct ethical instruction whatsoever. A comical illustration of this control by omission is the recent suggestion that Shakespeare s Merchant of Venice ought not to be read in any school where there are Jewish chil dren; because it contains an unamiable and inaccurate represen tation of the character of a Jewish money lender. A long tenure of office for teachers is well-nigh indispensable, if a just academic freedom is to be secured for them. In the absence of laws providing for it, this long tenure, after suitable periods of probation, is only to be secured in this country through the voluntary, habitual action of school committees and boards of trustees. In this respect, great improvements have been made all over the country through the reforms in the structure or com position of the committees which govern the free schools and of the boards of trustees for institutions of higher education; but much still remains to be done. So long as school committees insist on annual elections of all teachers, and boards of trustees 346 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT of colleges and universities claim the right to dismiss at pleasure all the officers of institutions in their charge, there will be no security for the teachers proper freedom. We have, however, learnt what the proper tenure for a teacher is. Teachers in every grade of public instruction from the lowest to the highest, when once their capacity and character have been demonstrated, should hold their offices without express limitation of time, and should be subject to removal only for inadequate performance of duty or for misconduct publicly proved. To procure this ten ure for teachers, wherever it does not now obtain, should be the special care of all persons who believe that education is the prime interest of the commonwealth, and that teachers should enjoy perfect liberty within the limits of courtesy and of a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." In the institutions of higher education the board of trustees is the body on whose discretion, good feeling, and experience the securing of academic freedom now depends. There are boards which leave nothing to be desired in these respects; but there are also numerous boards that have everything to learn with regard to academic freedom. These barbarous boards exercise an ar bitrary power of dismissal. They exclude from the teachings of the university unpopular or dangerous subjects. In some States they even treat professors positions as common political spoils; and all too frequently, both in state and endowed institutions, they fail to treat the members of the teaching staff with that high consideration to which their functions entitle them. In the newer parts of our country, it has of course been impossible to find at short notice men really prepared to discharge the difficult duties of educational trusteeship; and it will take generations yet to bring these communities in this respect up to the level of the older States and cities which have had for generations abun dant excellent material for such boards of trustees. In the institutions of higher education there is usually found an organized body of the permanent teachers called a faculty. This body exercises customary powers delegated to it by the board of trustees; and its determinations are ordinarily made by a majority vote after more or less discussion. It deals with questions of general policy affecting both teachers and students, and its votes may sometimes limit the freedom of its own mem- ACADEMIC FREEDOM 347 bers. Such restrictions, however, as proceed from a faculty are not likely to be really oppressive on individuals; for every voter in a faculty is likely to remember that he himself may hereafter be unpleasantly affected by the same kind of majority vote which he is thinking of taking part in against a resisting colleague. As a rule, the faculty of a college, professional school, or uni versity is the real source of educational policy and progress so much so, that the vitality of any institution may best be measured by the activity and esprit de corps of its faculty. Is the faculty alert, progressive, and public-spirited, the institution will be active and increasingly serviceable; is the faculty sluggish, uninterested, and without cohesion, the institution will probably be dull or even retrograde. If a faculty chooses, it can really limit academic freedom; but it is not likely to do so, because its mem bers will not deny to others the freedom they desire for them selves, unless, indeed, on rare occasions, and for short periods. A faculty is much more likely to limit unduly the academic free dom of students than of teachers; and yet, even in this field, it is harder and harder for a lively and enterprising faculty, represent ing any adequate variety of university subjects, to restrict the just freedom of students. Interference with the academic freedom of an individual pro fessor is in these days more likely to come from his colleagues in the same department than from the faculty as a whole. Of course, in those institutions which maintain only a single teacher for each subject, there is no competition among teachers of the same subject, and no departmental organization which may become formidable to the individual teacher; but many of our colleges and universities have^now got beyond that elementary stage, and have considerable groups of teachers working on one subject, as for instance, the classics, the modern languages, the mathematics, history, government, economics, philosophy, the physical sciences, and the biological sciences. These groups of teachers, whatever called divisions, departments, or schools have lately acquired in some American universities very real powers, and among these powers is partial control over the teach ing of the individual teachers within each group. The senior professor of the group sometimes has a formidable amount of restrictive power. This danger to liberty is diminished in some 348 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT institutions by disregarding seniority in selecting the chairmen of departments or divisions, and making frequent changes of chairmen in those departments which have many members. The points at which danger to freedom exists are, first, the assign ment of subjects to the younger members of the department; secondly, the direct access of advanced students to all members of the department; and thirdly, the exchange of subjects year by year among the various members, old and young. At any one of these points it is easy for a department to become despotic, particularly if there be one dominant personage in it. The exercise of power by a division, department, or school should therefore be carefully watched by the president, the dean of the faculty, or some committee of the faculty; so that the just liberty of all members of the department may not be invaded. The prodigious stream of benefactions to institutions of edu cation in the United States, which has now been flowing in in creasing volume ever since the Civil War, has brought upon the endowed institutions a new risk in regard to academic freedom. So far as state institutions are also in a measure endowed, as is the case with the University of California, the same new risk is incurred by them. The risk is all the greater because the living benefactor plays in these days a part even more important than that of the dead benefactor. Ought the opinions and wishes of a living benefactor to influence the teaching in the institution which he endows? In general, the answer must be in the nega tive; because teaching which is not believed to be free is well- nigh worthless. It inevitably loses its intended effect on those who listen to it. It has no effect even on those who agree with, or are pleased with, its general tenor. Nevertheless, benefactors have certain rights in this respect. They may fairly claim that their benefactions entitle their opinions and sentiments to be treated with consideration and respect, and not with contumely or scorn, in the institutions they have endowed, or by the pro fessors whom their gifts support. If their benefactions are for general uses and not for the support of any specific courses of instruction, they may fairly claim that subjects likely to be taught in a manner repulsive to them should be omitted alto gether, unless some serious public obligation requires the insti tution to include them. The mere lapse of time will probably free ACADEMIC FREEDOM 349 an endowed institution from embarrassments of this nature, not chiefly because the living benefactor will die, but because the burning questions change so frequently with the rapid progress of society. Thus, the choice between Calvinism and Channing- ism was a burning question seventy years ago; but now few people take keen interest hi it. In like manner, a few years ago academic freedom was seriously impaired during the discussion about the relations of gold and silver to a stable currency; but now all heat has gone out of that controversy. For two genera tions protection and free trade have been hot subjects; but in a few years they will be stone cold, because the practice miscalled protection will have become inapplicable to American industrial conditions, and, indeed, manifestly injurious to both manufac tures and commerce. Any slight interference with academic free dom which time will certainly cure may be endured with equa nimity for a season, in consideration of great counter-balancing advantages. There is another university authority who can, if he choose, put limits to academic freedom for a time the president. The president of moderately long service has probably been con cerned with the selection and actual appointment of a large majority of the teaching staff in his institution. He has also probably had to do with the step-by-step promotion of nearly everybody connected with the institution. For these reasons his wishes may have undue weight with the individual professor who desires to make changes in his subjects or methods of instruction. Some presidents are, therefore, careful how they bring any re strictive pressure to bear on teachers; but others are careless in this respect, or deliberately attempt to control the nature or quality of the instruction given by individual teachers, particu larly in what they regard as critical or dangerous subjects. In American institutions few presidents possess dangerous consti tutional or charter powers in this respect, and none should exer cise such powers. A president may of course remonstrate with a professor who seems to him to be exceeding the just limits of academic freedom, and he may properly give distinct advice when consulted beforehand by any member of his staff on a question relating to academic freedom; but he should never attempt to impose his judgment or his will on a teacher. 350 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT The real liberty of a teacher to teach as he wishes to may be closely limited by the customs or habitual usages of the institu tion with which he is connected, even more than by the direct action of the constituted authorities. Every earnest and pro gressive teacher desires to be freed, as much as possible, from routine details which admit of little variety, and have ceased to be instructive or otherwise beneficial to himself. If his habitual duties involve much work of this character, his own rate of prog ress in knowledge and efficiency will be checked, and his enthu siasm may be chilled as the years go on. Routine is an enemy to progress, and to real mental liberty. Again, in every teacher s life there is apt to be a large element of year-by-year repetition. Year after year he reads the same authors with his classes, or he deals with the same subjects in his laboratory teaching, and even with the same materials for illustrating his subjects. He may be held to an unreasonable degree of repetition by the faculty, by his department, or by two or three colleagues who refuse to exchange with him. As years go on, it is easier for him to follow a routine, or to use again his manuscript notes grown yellow and brittle with age, than to change his habits, or to ven ture into comparatively new fields. Routine and repetition have done their work. They have limited his freedom, and therefore his growth. In all teaching, at whatever grades, there must be elements of routine and repetition, but excess of these indispen sable elements is to be guarded against in every possible way, both by the teacher himself and by the authorities to whom he is responsible; for the teacher s efficiency depends primarily on the maintenance of his vitality and enthusiasm. The prudent teacher in school, college, or university will keep a sharp lookout on two other risks to which American teachers are exposed; they will beware of doing too much teaching and of undertaking too much administrative work. The teacher for life absolutely needs to reserve time and strength for continuous acquisition and development on his own part. He must not be always giving out information and influence. He must have time to absorb, to feed his own growing powers, and to rekindle his own enthusiasms at the great lamps of literature and science. The university teacher ought to keep time and strength to con tribute a little to the advancement of his own subject. This he ACADEMIC FREEDOM 351 cannot do if teaching or administration, or both, take up all his time or all his energy. He should therefore aim at regulating his academic life in such a way that these higher purposes may be fulfilled; and this good end in each individual case should be fur thered by every academic authority and influence. These are some of the subtler elements in a well-composed academic freedom. Professors and other teachers, who should be always teaching or making researches, need to be relatively free from pecuniary cares; so that their minds may run on their work. To this end they should have fixed salaries, and retiring allowances; so that they may adjust their scale of living to their earnings, and not have to think about making money, or to feel anxiety about disability or old age. This detachment from ordinary pecuniary or livelihood anxieties is an important element in their mental freedom, and for the right kind of person a strong inducement to the profession. The teacher ought always to be a person disposed to idealism and altruism; and he should have abandoned once for all the thought of measuring his success by the size of his income. In the best managed universities, colleges, and school systems a teacher is always free to accept promotion in another institu tion or school system, although in most cases he may properly consider himself bound to finish, where he is, an academic year begun. It is inconvenient for the institution which the pro moted teacher leaves to lose him; but in the long run institutions which are liberal and cordial in such dealings will have a better staff than they would have if they tried to hold their successful teachers to long contracts against the will and to the disadvan tage of those teachers. This feature of academic freedom has far-reaching good effects on the profession and the nation, as appears conspicuously in the educational history of Germany, and the present condition of the leading educational institutions in the United States. Finally, academic freedom for teachers is properly subject to certain limitations which may best be described as those of courtesy and honor. They resemble the limitations which the manners of a gentleman or a lady impose on personal freedom in social intercourse. The teacher in a school, or the professor in a 352 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT college or university, may properly abstain from saying or doing many things which he would be free to say or do if it were not for his official position. He may properly feel that his words and acts must inevitably have an effect on the reputation and influ ence of the institution with which he is connected. This senti ment undoubtedly qualifies or limits the freedom he would other wise exercise and enjoy. Many a professor in this country has felt acutely that he was not entirely free to publish in journals or books just what he thought on controversial subjects, if he put in connection with his signature his official title as professor. Doubtless some difficult cases of this sort arise in which the rep utation of an institution is unfavorably affected temporarily by the publications, or public speeches, of one or more of its officers, but no satisfactory defence against this kind of injury has yet been invented; since the suppression of such publications does infinitely more harm to the general cause of education that it can do good to the institution concerned. Most learned societies declare in some conspicuous place within their customary pub lications that the society is in no way responsible for the opinions or conclusions of the individual contributors; but it is hardly practicable, even if it were desirable, for a university, college, theological seminary, or school of technology to put a like decla ration on all the publications made by their officers. The only satisfactory defence of the institutions against the risks under consideration is to be found in the considerateness and courtesy of the teachers concerned, and in their sense of obligation to the institutions with which they are connected, and of the added weight which their official position gives to their personal opinions. When I was first President of Harvard College I got a lesson on this subject from one of the most respected of the Harvard professors of that day. He had recently made to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences a communication which dealt in a novel way with one particular aspect of the financial credit of the United States; and this communication had been warmly attacked by several of his fellows in the Academy, including some influential Boston business men. He was in the act, however, of issuing a manual for schools and colleges, in which he had incor porated the questionable doctrine, and on the title-page of this ACADEMIC FREEDOM 353 book he had put under his name his professorial title in Harvard University. As the time approached for publishing the volume the plates of which he owned his mind misgave him with regard to the propriety of proclaiming this unusual and con troverted doctrine in his capacity as professor in Harvard Uni versity, and he therefore asked me, as President, what the Presi dent and Fellows of Harvard College would think on that point. I was obliged to tell him that the President and Fellows would prefer to have that doctrine omitted from the book, unless, in deed, he were willing to omit from the title-page his own official title as a Harvard professor. The result was that the trouble some chapter was omitted; but the professor lost all interest in his entire manual, and insisted on selling the plates to his pub- Usher, and foregoing his royalty on the sales of the book. The incident taught me that the best defence of an institution against abuses of academic freedom was to be found hi the sense of duty and honor which obtains among its officers. FREEDOM FOR STUDENTS The college student coming from a good secondary school has probably had some small amount of choice among the subjects provided at his school towards admission to college. He may arrive at his college with more Latin and Greek and less modern languages, or the reverse. He may offer himself in several sci ences, or in not more than one. His choice in this respect may have been closely limited, and yet not without serious effects on his subsequent career. When he reaches his college, normally at eighteen or nineteen years of age, he ought to find at once a great enlargement of his freedom of choice among studies. This is for the student the first element in a just academic freedom. By close attention to his own individual problem, and to his own antece dents, and with a little assistance from an expert in the list of courses and the schedule of hours, he will have no difficulty in finding the courses most suitable for himself. In the freest elec tive system there are plain fences marking out the feasible tracks. These fences are in most cases the natural and inevitable se quences of the courses offered in the several subjects of instruc tion. A few may be arbitrary and artificial, such restrictions being probably the results of inadequate resources in the college 354 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT itself, or of some policy inconsistent with its general regime of liberty. The choice of studies made in any individual case may be very wisely modified, or fundamentally changed, by the stu dent s choice of teachers. This choice among teachers is a very valuable element in academic freedom for the student. The newcomer at a college may not possess the information needed to enable him to exercise this freedom; but during the first half- year or quarter of residence most students can acquire sufficient information about the different teachers of the subjects which interest them to enable them to exercise discreetly this freedom of choice among teachers. Having found his best teacher, the stu dent ought to find himself free to follow him for several years. Unfortunately faculties are more likely to interfere with this par ticular liberty than with any other, as for instance by enacting that philosophy, or economics, or political science shall not be accessible to any student before the Sophomore year. Under a broad elective system in the arts and sciences the students will always make many choices of single courses which interest them, or look to them profitable; but there will also be a great variety of voluntary groupings of courses, and the liberty to make an appropriate grouping is a very important part of academic freedom for the student. Such groupings are often determined by the student s foreknowledge of his professional career, or if this knowledge is lacking, by his own. selection of kindred subjects, all of which commend themselves to his taste or his judgment. This liberty to make groupings, each one for himself, is another important element in a just academic free dom. Almost all students who decide on their profession early in their college course make groupings which will further them in their professional career, and in their preparation therefor; and for the student there is no safer principle of selection among appropriate college subjects. A student who lacks this clear guid ance may most safely depend for guidance in the choice of his studies on the tastes and capacities of which he is conscious. Among the multitude of culture courses which a large college offers, the safest selection for the individual student is that of courses in which he has the capacity to achieve something con siderable. Interest in a subject is an indication of fitness for its study, or, in other words, a student is much more likely to sue- ACADEMIC FREEDOM 355 ceed in a subject which interests him strongly than hi a subject which does not. Achievement and gain in power are the true rewards of persistent exertion, and the best spurs to further ef fort. The college student ought to be free to specialize early in his course, or not to specialize at all; to make his education turn on languages, mathematics, history, science, or philosophy for example or on any mixture of these great subjects. The college student may reasonably expect to find himself free from attempts to impose opinions on him. These attempts may be made by his teachers, or by intimate comrades, or by groups of companions and friends, or by mass-meetings. He has a right in these days to be free from the imposition of opinions, whether attempted by elders or associates, by one individual or a multitude. He has also a right to be free from all inducements to cant, hypocrisy, or conformity. On this account, voluntary attendance at all religious exercises is a valuable element hi aca demic freedom. No student ought to be able to suppose that he will gam anything towards high rank as a scholar, or social stand ing, or popularity among his fellows by any religious observance or affiliation whatsoever. A mercenary or profit-seeking spirit in religious practices is very injurious to young people, and is peculiarly repulsive hi them. The student who needs pecuniary aid in college, or desires employment in which he can partly earn his livelihood, ought to find an absolutely free competition for such assistance on merit only, without regard to any opinions or practices of his. It is highly desirable that college students should be free from care for their livelihood during the whole period of education, accept ing support from their parents or other loving friends. To give this support is the precious privilege of parents, to accept it the precious privilege of children. Nevertheless, it is one of the best results of democracy that young men of capacity and character find it possible to obtain a prolonged education for the profes sions or for business, although they are obliged to support them selves wholly or in part during the long period of strenuous study. Endowments, the bounty of the state, or the facilities for obtain ing appropriate employment which colleges now provide, pro cure this freedom for thousands of young Americans every year. The young men thus aided to attain a larger and freer career 356 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT should invariably feel bound in after life to pass on and amplify the privilege they enjoyed. 1 Finally, the student ought to find himself free to determine the method of his daily Me with no more restrictions than the habits and customs of civilized society necessarily impose. His problem will be to regulate his own Me wisely by self-control in liberty. Up to his entrance to college his mode of life has prob ably been regulated for him by home rules, or school rules; and he has been almost constantly under the observation of parents, or teachers, or both. Now, at college, he should be free. He will probably make some mistakes, at first, about eating and drink ing, sleeping, taking exercise, arranging his hours for work and for play, and using his time; but his mistakes will not be fatal or beyond remedy, and he will form habits based on his own ob servation and experience and his own volitions. These are the habits that prove trustworthy in adult life. As in the outer world, so in the comparatively sheltered college world, freedom is dan gerous for the infirm of purpose, and destructive for the vicious; but it is the only atmosphere in which the well-disposed and resolute can develop their strength. Under any college regime, whether liberal or authoritative, a very valuable though danger ous part of the student s freedom is his freedom to choose his comrades, or habitual associates. That choice will show in every individual case whether the young man possesses moral principle and firmness of character or not. If the choice is good, he will be safe in liberty; it the choice is bad, he will be unsafe under any regime. The student ought to choose his own comrades de liberately, and after some study of the accessible variety of asso ciates. To be forced to accept an unknown group of permanent associates within three weeks of entering college is an unfortunate limitation of academic freedom. I have thus far spoken as if academic freedom were one thing for teachers and another thing for students; and, indeed, the aspects and results of that freedom for the mature men whose life work is study and teaching, and for the youth who are only beginners in the intellectual life, are somewhat different. Never theless, in a college or university there is a perfect solidarity of interests between teachers and taught in respect to freedom. A teacher who is not supposed to be free never commands the ACADEMIC FREEDOM, 357 respect or personal loyalty of competent students, and students who are driven to a teacher are never welcome, and can neither impart nor imbibe enthusiasm. The real success of a college or university teacher in the long run depends on his training up a few sincere and devoted disci ples. To this process, freedom on both sides is essential. The student must be free to choose the same teacher for several years, and the teacher to hold the same student. There must be a vol untary cooperation of tastes, capacities, and wills for years. As a rule, enduring influence is won only by a teacher who thus brings up a few congenial, cooperative disciples capable of carrying on and developing their master s work. The duration of the mas ter s influence depends on the capacity of his disciples to go be yond him, and develop his ideas under new conditions; and for this development they in their turn will need a genuine freedom for themselves, and for their students. Such is the rapid prog ress of science, letters, and art in these days that the old ideas can only live as they are transmuted into the new; but for the just development of the new out of the old, freedom is indispen sable. All truth-seeking needs freedom, and in a university teachers and taught ought to be constantly seeking truth to gether. Even partial truth makes free; and every sincere searcher for the next glimpse of truth beyond the present limits of knowl edge needs not only a perfect candor in his own soul, but freedom from all artificial external restraints on the flights of his intelli gence and good will. UNIVERSITY GOVERNMENT AS A TYPE The government of a good college or university in the United States, which is free from denominational or political control, foretells the type of the best ultimate forms of human govern ment. It is a government in which there is no use of force. There is some police inspection, and a constant watchfulness against disease, fire, noise, and similar evils, but no prison, no physical punishment, the least possible interference with the personal conduct of the governed, and a generous amount of good will between all members of the community. The citizens, or con stituency, of this government are selected persons as regards intelligence, good will, and cooperative purpose. Exile from the 358 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT community is the sole penalty for misconduct, inefficiency, or unworthiness. The government is not arbitrary, and yet it pos sesses large elements of discretion. It habitually acts under rules and usages, yet it is progressive; it does not permit a perverse individual to injure the main body, but its dealings with the in dividual are always in the direction of reformation, education, and recovery from downfall, and exile is never resorted to until many efforts at recovery and reformation have failed. Ven geance on the sinner, and the satisfaction of justice by punish ment, are absolutely excluded from its discipline, as in the first place unworthy of any intelligent ruler or governor, and also as completely ineffective towards either individual or community improvement. There are no elective bodies analogous to Senate and House of Representatives, and yet there are legislative bodies and an executive. Long tenure, and life office play a great part in university organization, and as a rule there is no jealousy or distrust of long-service executives, provided they are consid erate and fair. On the contrary, in universities the governed generally exhibit a decided preference for an experienced execu tive of proved capacity, and a dislike for changes in executive departments. The principle of authority is very little applied in good univer sity government. Respect is paid to age, if it remains vital, and to experience, especially to intensive experience; but mere sen iority counts for very little, and an administrator s influence is supported chiefly on his persuasiveness, or power of discerning a good reason for a proposed action and then stating it convinc ingly. In the government of the American universities, sentiments have a large place, as indeed they should have in all government. Among these sentiments are a strong love for the site and sur roundings of the university an affectionate memory for the fields and hills, the streams or lakes within sight of which years of rapid intellectual and spiritual growth were passed; down right affection for teachers who greatly stimulated the intellec tual life of their students; and among the members of the uni versity staff itself, admiration and affection for certain colleagues whose traits of character, wit, or charming personal idiosyncra sies especially commend them to their brethren. Occasionally a ACADEMIC FREEDOM 359 college administrator who is also a preacher from pulpit or plat form wins for the time being an extraordinary influence over large numbers of young men by the purity and force of his charac ter, and the high spirit of his instruction and exhortation. These sentiments, like all the higher loves, grow up in a freedom which knows no admixture of fear, compulsion, or domination. They are all noble, refined, and inspiring sentiments. To develop them in the highest degree is one of the chief objects of academic freedom. A university should be entirely free from the highly restrictive bonds described in the words caste, class, race, sect, and party. In its best form it already is so. These formidable restrictions on individual liberty should play no part in its organization or its discipline. The world has had quite enough of these ancient means of dividing mankind into antagonistic sections. Every university should exert a strong unifying interest in these re spects. I have said that the university form of government is a proph ecy. It really foretells the ultimate form of all good government among men a government based on cooperative intelligence, almost universal good will, and noble loves. Its leaders are of a new sort which deserves study. A modern university, being a voluntary cooperative asso ciation of highly individualistic persons for teaching and for advancing knowledge, is thoroughly democratic in spirit, and everywhere its objects are to train productive mental power in the young, to store such power in a selected group from the next older generation, and to apply this stored power to the advance ment of knowledge. This peculiar kind of democratic associa tion needs leaders or managers; but the work of a university is so different from ordinary governmental and industrial work, that we are not surprised to find that the university leader or manager is a different kind of leader from that common in gov ernments and industries. It is an interesting question, therefore, what sort of leadership a university needs; what contribution to academic freedom the right sort of university leader makes; and what sort of freedom he needs for himself. University administration is usually, and in chief part, ad ministration by a selected expert who has had opportunity to prove his capacity. He ought also to be an advanced student in 360 CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT some field of knowledge historical, economic, linguistic, sci entific, or artistic, it matters not which and a student who has learnt by experience what research or scholarly productive ness is and implies. Like the-caj>tain of industry, or the political ruler, he must have skill, capacity, and knowledge; must be in ventive and constructive in his thinking; and must welcome care and responsibility. His inducements to laborious and responsible service are, however, different from those which are effective with other sorts of leaders. A high salary, or the prospect of lux ury for himself and his family, will not tempt him. These in ducements will not draw the right kind of man into university administration any more than into teaching or research. He cannot be induced to do his best work by offering him any money prize, and he will manifest no desire whatever for arbitrary power over masses of human beings, or for what is ordinarily called fame or glory. The effective inducements will be the pros pect of eminent usefulness, public consideration, the provision of all real facilities for his work, enough relief from pecuniary cares to leave his mind free for invention and forelooking, long tenure, and income enough to secure healthy recreations. He will not wish to receive a salary so high as to distinguish him widely from his colleagues the professors, except so far as the proper discharge of his functions involves him in expenditures from which they are exempt. He will want to work with a group of associates whose pecuniary recompense and prospects are not very unlike his own. This educational expert will set a high value on freedom for himself. He will hope that trustees, faculties, alumni, and the supporting public will permit him to carry out his own plans and previsions, or those which he espouses. He will hope that the responsibility he carries will entitle him to a certain deference for his judgments from his colleagues and the academic bodies. In short, a just academic freedom for the head of a university is more important than for any other person or group of persons connected with the university, for the reason that in education, as in every other function of democratic government, and every branch of the national industries, the problem how to create and develop real leadership is the most serious problem which confronts democratic society. ACADEMIC FREEDOM 361 In all fields, democracy needs to develop leaders of high in ventive capacity, strong initiative, and genius for cooperative government, who will put forth their utmost powers, not for pecuniary reward, or for the love of domination, but for the joy of achievement and the continuous mounting satisfaction of ren dering good service. This is just the kind of leader that democ racy ought to produce for highly organized industries and for public service. The military commander is necessarily an auto crat; the hereditary ruler may be either a despot or a figurehead; the present type of industrial captain is too often governed by motives and pursues ends which are neither altruistic nor ideal istic. None of these types is good for the democratic leader of the future, whether he is to serve in some great industry, in government, or in a university. At this moment the university administrator makes the best use now made of the powers of individualism on one hand, and of collectivism on the other, and understands better than any other leader in the world that in order to have successful cooperative action on the part of thousands of human beings, special emphasis must be laid on brotherhood in that admirable trinity freedom, equality, and brotherhood. The American university gives an effective demonstration of the good results of the voluntary association in common work of many independent and unlike individuals possessing the maxi mum of good will; and academic freedom is, therefore, a good type of the considerate, humane freedom which will ultimately become universal. THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Delivered before the Delta of Massachusetts, at Tufts College, June 18, 1907. THIS is the era of criticism, in which people read novels, not to find out how the heroine is rescued, but to analyze the rela tive influences of Anthony Trollope and Balzac on the mind of the author. But what have critics to do with American democ racy, so big, so lusty, so confident, so thick-skinned against the arrows of the theorists? Why should prophets lift their voices in a "Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion," when ease is vis ibly the last thing that Americans seek or comprehend? Surely it was of the democracy that Job s friend spoke: "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? . . . When he raiseth up him self the mighty are afraid. . . . He beholdeth all high things : he is a king over all the children of pride." Possibly Leviathan is willing to be told of his strength and sleekness; and American democracy has in many respects de veloped, justified, and passed on to the rest of the world, ideals of great moment. The first is the power of man over nature. The same immense courage and imagination which caused the early settlers to assail the wilderness has carried their children all the way to the point where they have occupied almost all the tillable land, and are now imprisoning the mountain rivers to widen the area of settlement. Without cessation, with un stinting labor and sacrifice, the American has taught the world a lesson in subduing a continent; and to the whole people has been communicated the eager, restless, and somewhat material istic characteristics of the West. As a part of this process the Americans have established once for all the possibility of a democracy in an area immense and various. The Roman Republic was but the centre of a spider web; the mediaeval type of a republic was a walled city; the Federal Union covers half a continent, and includes communi ties of many kinds, fastened together by bands of steel. The THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY 363 railroad section hand, the fireman on a river steamer, the for eign-born laborer hewing a tunnel through the Rocky Moun tains, have been helping to weld the Republic together, and thus to transfer popular government to children s children. Nor has this been the work of a single race. Every nation of Europe and some of other continents have sent their sons, who after a few years are become all Americans. That a conquering race should force its civilization upon the conquered is familiar in history; but our modern Voelkerwanderung melts away into the ideals, the standards, and the institutions of the English race that they find here. National ideals have not only fused foreign races, they have interfused the English strain. With all the divergences of East from West, of North from South, the American is recognized as a type; and there is substantially one American civilization. In the multitude of churches, one Christianity; in the variety of peoples, one national language; with schools of every sort, a common principle of education. Throughout the United States, women are admitted to a social and economic liberty hardly to be matched anywhere in the world. There is a common hope fulness, a common patience with evils against which a virile people ought to strive; a common fatalistic expectation that things will come about, whether preparations are made before hand or not; from end to end of the country, there is almost a mournful likeness of political institutions, everywhere a gov ernor, everywhere a legislature of two houses, everywhere the same kind of courts: the most ingenious people in the world were long the least eager to try experiments in governing. Within this society of uniform aims, there is a nearer ap proach to a common understanding of the classes than in other countries. W T ages are high, and the best-paid workmen are materially better off than many of the professional class. It is easy to make money and to lose it, so that in the country, except for the exotic settlements of wealthy persons, people hardly understand class distinctions. They are sharp enough in the larger communities, where race is set off from race : the wealthy mill owner from the doctor and lawyer; the professional classes holding aloof from the mill bosses and tradesmen; these business men out of social relation with the mill hands; and the toilers 364 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART setting up their own social divergences among themselves. Yet these bounds are not hard and fast: the son of a laborer may go to college and continue thenceforth among professional men, and the son of the mill owner may lose his money and social standing together. The one rigid social exclusion is that of the negroes, who are in many parts of the country excluded from what considers itself society. Many groups of foreigners do not learn English, but their children commonly seek to identify themselves with America. The greatest success of democracy has been in establishing as an unquestioned national ideal the doctrine of fundamental rights. The common man does not stop to consider whether these are natural rights, or civil rights resulting from compact. He only knows that he and his neighbors have them, and that the frame of government must be built upon them: hence he intui tively insists on the ideal that public authority should be limited; that the effective place of limitation is in the state and federal constitutions; and that it is the duty of the courts to keep the other departments of government within these constitutional limitations. The ideal of indefeasible rights automatically carries with it the ideal of equality; and behind it a conception of justice as the foundation of human relations. And down to the bottom of the whole mass of society penetrates the thought that justice must not be denied to one individual or class, lest part of its pro tection be taken from some other person or group. The might and majesty of government seems opposed to the ideal of natural right, the more so in a country like the United States, where government is appealed to for many kinds of ser vice; but the conflict between the mass and the many, between the collective and the individualistic, is softened by the ideal of representation. The representative is hedged about with "thou shalt nots." The national ideal of popular government in the United States is how to give power while withholding it; how to elect representatives who shall still be responsible to their constit uents; how to select lawmakers and then to pass laws over their heads by the referendum; how to choose legislators by majority vote and yet make them regardful of the rights of the minority. To secure responsibility is the most difficult task in popular government; and the most that can be said is that somehow, THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY 365 notwithstanding party spirit and party control, the people in the long run usually obtain through their representatives what they think essential for their welfare. The history of the United States abounds in proofs that democ racy has made some lamentable failures; from John Adams s Discourses on Davila, published before the Federal Consti tution was adopted, all the way to the discouraged generaliza tions of Lecky, we have heard of democracy s changeableness; of its contempt for tradition and experience; of its impatience of authority; of its love of the flatteries of the common demagogue; of its dislike of really great characters; of its effort to pull every thing down to its own level. One only needs to read the daily newspapers, to study the cartoons and comic Sunday supple ments, in order to realize the materialistic and commonplace side of American society. "It seems, at first sight, as if all the minds of the Americans were formed on one model, so accurately do they correspond in their manner of judging," said Tocqueville in his Democracy in America in 1835. This lack of the sense of relief, of the distinction between the high and the low, is shown hi the tawdriness of the popular dramatic shows; in the ugliness of most American cities; in such incredible public buildings as the old Chicago City Hall, the Cleveland Soldiers Monument, the Boston County Court-House. Compare, for instance, the city of Memphis with the city of Geneva, in the laying-out of the highways, the taste of private residences, the architecture of business and public buildings; yet Memphis is the wealthier city of the two. The untidiness of the outward works of man reflects the con fusion and the dirt of many phases of American government. Why should a rich and inventive people endure rifts both in the street pavements and in the public conscience? Why should city governments be so much less profitable from the business point of view to their stockholders, the public, than railroads and insurance companies? Why should people put up with rapid transit commissions that are ten years in coming to a decision, and with courts which allow a dozen appeals in the same case? Why should the public service, in efficiency, in interest in its performance, be so far below the usual standards for the manage- 366 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART ment of corporations? Perhaps one explanation is the national tradition that the affairs of government can be directed by any intelligent man, which is the transfer of the ideals of the town meeting and the county convention to the affairs of a nation. To admit that lifelong experience makes a man a better legisla tor or governor seems to be a denial of the doctrine of equality. Therefore American democracy is fairly open to the charge of an indulgence of, if not a preference for, mediocre men in public life. There are United States Senators, members of the only body of the kind where rotation in office does not yet prevail, who remain there for years without offering a public bill, mak ing a striking speech, or figuring in any way except as a party counter when the vote comes to be taken. In cities and in States, such departments of public works as street building, street cleaning, and waterworks are controlled by a succession of laymen, who may or may not take the opinion of their engi neers. Contempt of the expert, confidence in the untried, or rather willingness for party advantage to put the lesser man in the larger place, are fairly chargeable to democracy. The larger the extent of government, the more opportunity for its falling into the hands of party men, who may not be con tent with simple inefficiency; but who carry on the public ser vice with a view to the next election, or to keeping one or another faction of the party in control of the party machinery. Party spirit was weak in colonial times, reached its fiercest and most relentless point in the two civil wars of the Revolution and of the Rebellion; but somewhat declined during the last quarter- century. Perhaps parties, like the religious denominations, are less active, because neither side believes the other to be wholly given over to evil. There is also a large "unreliable," that is independent, vote, which looks forward to some distinct reform and is willing to reach it indifferently by voting for the candi dates of party A, party B, or a third party. Nevertheless, most of the voters in the United States throughout their lives vote "the straight ticket" of a particular party, and accept the prin ciple of standing ready to "vote for the devil, if he gets the regu lar nomination." The converse of this intense party spirit, and another evil fairly attributable to democracy, is the apathy of the voter who, THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY 367 accused of being "on the fence," replies, "Of course I am; it s the only clean place." In most other countries the rich man, or the member of a family distinguished in public service, inherits or seeks for, a part in public life; in America some representa tives of that class get into politics by the simple process of pay ing party campaign expenses for a sufficiently long time; others by native ability and popularity, backed up by wealth; the larger number either will not strive for uncertain honors, or look upon politics as outside their life and interests. Democracy is chargeable also with a changeable and restless spirit, which interferes with the formation of fixed and conserv ative ideals. Immigration has something to do with it, and reemigration still more. In 1900, 14,000,000 native Americans were not living in the State in which they were born. As Tocque- ville said of this habit of mind, "In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it be fore the roof is on : he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing : ... he settles in a place, which he soon afterward leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere." In this change of environment, people confuse or lose their ideals; public men appear and disappear; national standards are lost or confused. Allied with this unrest is a national love for excite ment upon which thrives the worst influence in America, the sensational press. When people prefer scare head-lines and big red type to an accurate account of what goes on in the world, what becomes of that sane and rational public opinion which alone can save democracy? Democracy must also meet the current belief that its ideals do not exclude the most scandalous corruption. Nor is it an answer to say that the English boroughs were corrupt and that there was a Tweed Ring nearly fifty years ago. In national, state, and municipal government, from time to time some revela tion comes to show how many public officers look upon govern ment as a cow to be milked. Corruption is no monopoly of popu lar governments: never was there fouler public service than under the French Second Empire. American democracy must, however, accept the responsibility of condoning the bribed and consorting with the bribers. The best public men, whether they will or no, are likely to find that votes have been obtained for 368 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART them by the use of money or of corrupt influence. No frame of government can prevent corruption; but there are few civil ized parts of the world in which a man known to depend upon the worst methods can hold his constituency and year after year retain his political power. Democracy may make many failures and yet not be a failure. Are there dangers which seriously threaten the national ideals? The territorial extent of the United States is a just ground for alarm. The continental area is neat, compact, and nearly all included in statehood, but the West Indies lie near by, and the appetite for islands grows by what it feeds on, so that we must look forward to a likely annexation of Cuba and a possible addi tion of the island of Santo Domingo. Alaska can be cared for; but the Isthmus strip, if it is, as President Hayes said, "a part of our coast line," causes some disagreeable reflections as to the status of the Central American regions lying between the coast line and our present boundary. Probably the United States can assimilate all its present territory, except the Philippine Islands: with the best will in the world, they are too far away, too alien, too imbued with hopes of a different destiny, to accept national ideals and become an undisputed part of the American empire. Otherwise the danger of sectional divergence seems to have passed away. Almost all the European countries have to deal with irreconcilable regions: England has Ireland; Germany has Posen; Austria has Hungary; even Belgium has Flanders. No such region exists within the United States. The North and South still have different ideals as to the negro race; but they are united by personal relationship, commerce, and common standards. The East, the Middle West, and the Pacific Slope are interdependent for supplies and for outports. So long as the East furnishes capital for the development of the West, there will be quarrels over public finance; but there will also be an intimacy of business interest, corresponding to the free exchange of people and of ideas. It is still possible that rivalries other than sectional may spring up among different classes or interests. Such an influence is the feeling of the farmer against the merchant and manufac- THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY 369 turer; of the producer against the middleman and the consumer; they are always struggling among themselves to fix their rela tive shares of the national output. Jeffersonian Republicans, Jacksonian Democrats, post-bellum Greenbackers, Grangers, and Populists have all carried these rivalries into politics. This is a division, however, which does not apply to the workman or the city dweller, who have their own contests. The operative and the skilled workman, on one side, and the employer on the other, have opened up a battle which rages throughout the West ern world. It especially disturbs democracy because it brings the most personal and passionate issues straight into party issues and elections; and because one body of contestants aims at the reconstruction, if not the destruction, of existing government. The strife between labor and capital is like, though not the same as, the struggle between the poor and the rich, which hardly existed previous to the Civil War, because there was no prole tariat, nor any massed and organized wealth. Conventional democracy with manhood suffrage would seem in every such contest between poor and rich to assure the victory to the most numerous class; and it is the effort of the rich to fortify them selves against superior numbers that has led to much of the political corruption in America. So far the remedy has been the ease with which the poor man acquires property, the prop erty holder becomes well off, and the well-to-do man enters the ranks of the rich. That ruin is the future portion of American democracy, that its cherished ideals doom it to failure, has been the belief of many observers. Even Tocqueville, who argued that some repub lics might endure, regretfully predicted that democracy "will in the end set all the guarantees of representative government at nought." Edward A. Freeman in 1863 wrote a book on fed eral government which came down to "the disruption of the United States." Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in 1880, after prov ing to his own satisfaction that American government was a kind of plagiarism of English government, went on to deplore its downfall. Mr. Lecky, a more genial spirit, was nevertheless convinced that democracy had not established itself anywhere as a permanent form of government. 370 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART When all these dangers have been examined, there is still hope of the permanence of American democracy, because three cen turies of experience have shown that there are national ideals stronger than any destructive forces. The first of these is what Bryce calls "the intense faith which Americans have in the sound ness of their institutions, and in the future of their country." Americans are as well acquainted with their own defects as most people, besides the incomparable advantage of having them pointed out from week to week by The Nation ; and they ex pect as a people that "to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant." They have that faith of eventually arriving in port which makes the sailor; and if there are wrecks they are few in proportion to the shipping. The essential principles of democracy spring up fresh and vigorous with each new genera tion. Nor does democracy endure simply because people think it is a good thing. It lives and will live because no rival system can take its place. Monarchy is as impossible as theocracy; even the one-man power of a military dictator is too far away to be even a respectable dream. Communism or even collectivism is impossible, first because there is no such thing as putting a hundred million lively people back to where the Indians began; still more because so many of the voters have more property now than they could ever get under any system of collective ownership and distribution. My Uncle Mowry once tried to argue his Irish neighbor out of socialism. "But, Rafferty, you have more than the average now; if property were equalized you would be worse of!." "Ah, now, the idea! There s Tim Shaugh- nessey that lives at the bottom of my garden; if all the property in the world was divided, he d have a hundred dollars. I d get that!" Socialism, whatever the vague term may mean, is impossible because it lies outside the life experience of the Anglo-Saxon race. The trades unions move in that direction, and if they were now, or could in the nature of things become, a majority of the voters or a majority of the physical strength of the country, they might make the experiment of a socialistic commonwealth; but it is contrary to all the ideals of individualism, of equal opportunity, of restraint on government, of inherent rights, THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY 371 which for ten generations have been the meat and drink of Ameri cans. Paternalism is impossible, if by the term is meant govern ment support and direction of all great enterprises: the protec tive tariff looks that way, but it is impossible to say what the policy of the country will be on that subject, even ten years hence; the present status of railroads looks that way, but so does the traditional control over highways and navigable streams. And paternalism flatly collides with the federal ideals of which the nation is the chief exponent. An oligarchy of commercial associations is impossible, because, though the great corpora tions and the great labor unions can up to a certain extent unite to control prices and to influence government, they cannot make their interests harmonize with those of the day laborer and the farmer. Associations of all kinds are the creatures of law: if they are small they antagonize the community; if they are large enough, they become the community. The whole notion of cor porate control militates against the ideals of rotation in office, against constitutional restrictions on association; against the national dislike of minority governments. Any new type of government, any serious impairment of democracy, must fight against a system of national, state, and local governments as well established and as capable of protect ing themselves as any in the world. There is a national rever ence for the Federal Constitution, akin to that of earlier genera tions for the Scriptures. State constitutions and local charters are more easily altered; but, because they are made and can be unmade by the popular will, there is every reason for obeying them. The lack of a professional class of officials makes gov ernment weak and expensive, but it prevents the growth of a bureaucracy, which might substitute itself for the democratic system. As everybody is free, and most men have the suffrage, people do not push and pull in the effort to get higher up in the scale of political privilege. And the experience of America shows that, notwithstanding a dangerous laxity towards small com motions and especially toward the violence of organized labor, there is a potential vigor which comes to the rescue whenever state or national government is threatened. Few indeed are the people who have any desire for a sweeping change of govern ment; few are the ideals which crumble before the force of a 372 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART changing public opinion. "In Russia," said a Russian, "every thing is prohibited, and everything is done." In the United States, where nothing is prohibited, the only thing that is done is to hold public meetings and to write inflammatory editorials. When it comes to a decision, Americans are profoundly influ enced by the ideal of private interest in orderly government, and by the conservatism and slowness of change characteristic of Anglo-Saxons. The spirit of the people, their written consti tutions, and the temper of mind of their public servants are all against sudden and violent changes. Hence the United States is likely not only to endure, but to endure free. The greatest statesmen and shrewdest observers may mistake the signs of the times, as witness Hamilton s errors. Even Mr. Godkin, whose pessimism was so mellowed by the buoyancy of the Irishman, pointed out that "We cannot tell whether a government is successful or not without seeing how long it lasts. The first duty of a government is to last. A govern ment, however good, which does not last, is a failure"; and he protested against "denying to any democratic society the capac ity and determination to remedy its own defects in some direc tion or other by some means or other." President Eliot sums up as "some of the new principles and forces which make for the permanence of the Republic: toleration in religion; general edu cation; better domestic relations; attention to the means of pub lic health and pleasure; publicity; corporation service; increased mutual dependence of man on man, and therewith a growing sense of brotherhood and unity; the greater hopefulness and cheerfulness of men s outlook on man, the earth, the universe, and God; and finally, the changing objects and methods of religion and its institutions. It is the working of these principles and forces, often unrecognized, which has carried the republic safely through many moral difficulties and dangers." It was Lincoln who appealed to the underlying confidence and expectation of the Republic in the hearts of common men, when he said in 1864: "But this government must be preserved, in spite of the acts of any man or set of men. It is worthy of your every effort. Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality. To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions. The present THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY 373 moment finds me at the White House, yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father s." It is one thing to desire that democratic ideals shall still domi nate America; it is another to see clearly what the influences are which make democracy certain. Perhaps the most obvious is a national ideal of public interest, as a guiding force in public life. The willingness to serve in unpaid commissionerships, legislatures, and constitutional conventions; the readiness in periods of national danger, such as the Revolution and the Civil War, to make great personal sacrifices for public weal, to pay heavy taxes, to give to the soldiers, and above all to offer one s lif e for one s country, while these last the Republic seems secure. For America is infused with two ideals, which though they seem to be contrary are really adjuncts to each other. The first is the high level of common sense, which shows in the plain and practical spirit of the average man; in the widely diffused belief that it is a bad thing to break the law; in the adherence to old forms and traditions, combined with a willingness to look new ideas in the face. Even when the laws are disregarded there is a feeling that the law in the abstract is something to be cher ished and obeyed. Law is respected, but law is not sacred in the sense that it cannot be discussed and altered. Americans legis late too much, yet seldom go to extremes. No people has ever shown a greater genius for arriving at middle ways, by adjust ments like the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Electoral Commission of 1877. Associated with this calm and prosaic good sense is an imagi nation, with which Americans are too little credited. It ac counts for the myths which have grown up about the great men of the past, such as the idea that the Southern planters of the seventeenth century were cavaliers, or that the Puritans were entirely spiritual in their aims; such as the hagiology of the Revolutionary worthies, and especially the stories of Washing ton s boyhood; such as the legend of Dr. Marcus Whitman, all of which are as well substantiated as the story of William Tell or of Sinbad the Sailor. American imagination, however, goes far beyond the ascription of impossible virtues to ances- 374 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART tors. It means a national capacity of expecting national great ness, an interest in great events, a desire to share a great destiny. It means that public sentiment is emotional, idealistic, some times heroic. Common sense and imagination both go to make up that force of public opinion which is perhaps the most hopeful na tional ideal of America. To no other end exist parties and politics than to influence this great goddess of reason. Public opinion is formed by party chieftains, phrased by the press, imposed by the watchful managers on a weary people. Public opinion normally tends to smooth out the erratic and unconventional views of reformers and objectors. It is a stream turned this way and that by various artificial obstacles, sometimes dammed up, sometimes stagnant: wait for the spring freshet and it will carry everything before it! It is not a stream, it is a glacier, confined between granite walls, crushing down to powder everything that falls upon it; and woe betide the man or the party that hopes to wall it in! Within its limits, it is always moving, al ways pushing, never relenting, and it will and must in the end have its way. The purpose, the service, of American democracy is to transform this crude and monstrous force into a power which may express itself in human government. Neither democracy nor any other form of government takes care of itself, or operates of itself. Democratic ideals, like all others, must be put into force through human agencies; and the success of public opinion depends on finding those who may reflect it. That democracy can recognize character is shown by the history of the United States. In colonial times no men of genius were pocketed for want of appreciation; the Revolution fashioned a group of popular heroes; and, notwithstanding the infusion of foreign elements, the American people act as one in their relation to their leaders. It is true that, since the Civil War, men who would formerly have gone into political life as almost the only arena of distinction are now satisfied with the humbler task of making money; but somehow men have come forward at every epoch to represent their countrymen. So far from obscuring greatness, it is democracy which gives the great est opportunity to the otherwise village Hampdens. In no country has the promising boy or girl such a likelihood of getting THE HOPE OF DEMOCRACY 375 the necessary training and finding an adequate field. There is some pith in Josiah Quincy s quip that Copley had gone to Eng land and become a lord, because lords were the natural product of England; and that he remained in America and became a sovereign, because sovereigns were the products of America. Everybody is part of the American nation, and everybody hopes to make his capacities felt. Again, in a republic it is not the mass but the individual that must be called upon for the work of government; yet a sense of common needs and of common methods gives inspiration to that spirit of reform which is one of the most striking American ideals. Conservative and influenced by precedent as Americans are, disgracefully willing sometimes to put up with bad condi tions, they never recognize anything as hopeless. The enormous vested interest of slavery was broken to pieces by the advancing spirit of democracy; corporations and trusts totter before the same mighty force. There is always in America the healing spirit of self-criticism and self-condemnation. Social workers say that there is nothing so hopeless as a community that is satisfied with itself, and the ideal of American democracy is to make things better. Above union, and above the development of the fittest, stands the ideal most important for democracy, that of finding and following leaders. Americans love an honest man, and that means not only one who does not steal, but the consistent and candid statesman, who can disagree with public opinion if necessary, and whose policy is open, aboveboard, and free from secret ties. Americans love a man of courage, who has positive opinions and adheres to them, who can resist pressure; they would rather have obstinacy than a facile will; they want a man who can stand against influence, abuse, and misrepresentation. Americans love a belligerent leader, because they believe that the forces of evil are belligerent and tenacious. They want a leader of constructive power, who can draft legislation and force it through by the weight of his will, backed up by public senti ment. Such a man, whether mayor, governor, cabinet officer, or president, has the enthusiastic confidence, the vital support, and the personal affection of his countrymen. The American nation is a majestic, irresistible combination 376 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART of human wills, shaped by a multitude of individuals, each transi tory, each active in itself, yet still the great shape moves on. More than a century ago Fisher Ames remarked that "mon archy is a ship, which sails well, but may run upon a rock; the republic is a raft which can never sink; but then you have your feet in the water all the time." Ours is a raft which carries a mighty nation, which in a blundering and sidelong fashion still steers by the old stars. If American history means anything, if three centuries of effort manfully and persistently spent upon producing a form of government that will do its work and yet will never wear out, have been at all worth while, if the hopes and expectations of a great people avail, Republica esto perpetua I DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM BY EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS Delivered before the Beta of California, at Leland Stanford, Jr., University, May 21, 1907. THE vision of the idealist is often counted a most unpractical thing. If it has its value, it is surely not a value due to its aid in the solution of the pressing problems of the day. If Democ racy, "great purblind giant," is plunging, headlong and leader- less, into the sea of problems which its own nature has evoked, it is not the idealist who will save it. If from the turmoil of that seething ocean rise voices which question the very existence of the mighty triumphant giant, if the mist takes form and the wraiths of other systems shake their ominous fingers, if, in a word, men doubt Democracy itself, it is not idealism which will help. So men have thought since idealism first flashed its bright ray over human life. So they think to-day; and to-day as always idealism calls them to come aside and reason together and learn that the shimmering glory of the sunlight is as needful to life as the brown earth and the furrowing plow and the bent back of the toiler. The stream of higher human thought which has expressed for twenty-five centuries the reflection of the Western world upon its meaning and its destiny, has flowed for the most part in two great channels. Sand-bars and green islands divide, broad shin ing shallows link together, but the deep currents lie apart, here one limpid with the blue of heaven, yonder one brown, laden with the soil of earth. We call these streams by various names as they flow down between the banks of the centuries, they widen, they narrow, they grow shallower, they deepen. The blue catches more of heaven s own color, and again it fades pale; the brown waters shimmer under some windswept sky like bur nished metal. Astonishing change and variety everywhere ap pear, but no man confuses the two main currents. For these two currents are figures of the two fundamental types of human thought. The one type represents the experience of man with 378 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS his ideas and ideals, the other his experience with the world of sense. The long line which begins with Plato shows its unmistakable kinship with the Master. Utterly different from Plato s gorgeous wonder-world, where poetry and myth jostle with dialectic subtlety, and logic and human life go hand in hand, is the cool, clear reasoning of Aristotle. Utterly different again the scholastic theology of Aquinas and the God-flooded thought of Spinoza and the profound analysis of Hegel; and yet one knows that in that real world of philosophic thought, of which Dr. Schiller writes so charmingly, where the Master sits on his great stone chair, not only Aristotle but all these others will gather around him and listen to his words and differ with him yes, but in their manner seeming always to say, "Thou art my Master and my Teacher thou." In similar fashion around some other master, perhaps a Democritus, will gather the distinguished figures of another long line : Lucretius and Occam and the Ency clopsedists and Hume, and in our own time Spencer and Huxley and many another great philosophic scientist. Differing as they do individually, these two groups, the idealists and the empiricists, show each its own special characteristics, each its own special point of departure, which I have roughly indicated as, for the one group, man s experience with his ideas and ideals, for the other, his experience with the world of sense-perception. It would be interesting to carry the comparison further, but our concern to-day lies with this eternal contrast of point of view, method and result, only so far as it serves to bring into clearest light the fundamental and essential character of both in human thought. Thought cannot go far unless it assumes that there is a fundamental sanity in experience. If it makes such assumption, it is driven to the conclusion that any element which has entered continuously and powerfully into human thought must have its ground in reality. Idealism cannot have played its role and be a dream. Empiricism cannot have served men as it has and be false in method and result. We are dealing not with mutually exclusive systems, but with contrasted points of view both of which are necessary to the full interpretation of experience. DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 379 We may (although of course it is not my purpose to speak in any detail of the justification of these systems), after the manner of the modern pragmatist, find the justification for both in that they work. They contribute to human need. They en large human experience. They stimulate human progress. The empirical point of view lies at the beginning of all scientific prog ress. It masters for us the world of sense. The idealistic point of view interprets our highest aims and aspirations, gives consist ency and careful expression to our spontaneous religious feel ings, and warrants our longing for some kind of finality. But if both are justified, two points are clear. The first I have already mentioned. The systems are not really mutually exclu sive. They are simply opposite ways of approach to the world problem. A true idealism will necessarily include empiricism. A true empiricism will not be complete until it has reached an idealistic setting. The second point which is clear is that the well-founded objections which may be urged against any system, be it empirical or idealistic in character, touch only the particu lar system involved. They do not invalidate the point of view and the real meaning for human life. The history of philosophy in that respect is precisely parallel to the history of Christian theology. One system after another crumbles away before attack; but the root of them all, the vital Christian experience, survives, and before the dead branch is fallen to the ground another is shooting forth, sap-filled and leafy. We show the in consistency of Spinoza s system, we refute Hegel and point out the monstrous corollaries of his logic; but we have scarce slain the leader before we are fencing with a dozen of his followers. In our time, in England and America, we see Hegelianism losing its hold, chiefly, I believe, because it does not interpret adequately the freedom of the individual; but if we were to infer that there fore idealism is losing its hold on the modern world, we would be vastly mistaken. The scientific movement which found its best expression in the fine ethical sense of Huxley, and a crude philo sophical definition in Spencer, has been pushed back by pragma tism, the modern philosophy of common sense, and pragmatism is fighting the battles of idealism, and idealism calls itself personal and disowns Hegel or follows Hegel and lands in a dim and flat atheism. Is it proof that there is no substance in it all? Not 380 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS so; but revelation, to any wise and seeing eye, that the thing is ineradicable. Human life is frankly idealistic and must be so. That is our first ground. And now we shall ask ourselves what this idealism means. The pedant, the logician, the lawyer will have you define to a hair s breadth; but who that from the hill top has seen the vast stretches of ocean melt into the undefined horizon, or in the throbbing life of humanity has felt the power of undefined need and unreasoning aspiration, who that in the spring-time of his youth has shouted for unmeasured joy, will ask for measured definition? It is meaning that we want. It is significance that we need. For idealism, then, it is to get to the root of its hold upon human life and its significance for it. In the schools we must discuss its problems and its grounds; we must bring to play our dialectic skill but, of the school no longer, what we want is meaning, message, purpose, power in a word, What has it to do with life? We can dismiss the definer as you will remember Plato dismisses him: "But whether, (Glaucon), such a city exists or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he who has seen it will live after the manner of that city." What then has idealism to do with life? The fundamental assertion of idealism is that the hidden reality of the world is revealed in the high spirit of man, that truth and beauty and goodness and all ideal things belong not only to the ideal world of man s hopes, but to the real world itself, that God is what man would be. The whole world of sense is as the ancient phi losophy of the ancient cradle of our race described it a veil. The true idealist doubts not its empirical reality, but in it and through it he discerns always the shining of the ideal. The world is aglow with heavenly light. The invisible is visible. With the eye of faith this idealist endures as seeing that which is invisible. He possesses the transfiguring eye which unveiled to those disciples on the mountain top the meaning of their Master s life. Nature and man have glory other than that which the senses know. Scudding clouds, high towering redwoods, deep moist brook bottoms, tall drooping ferns, shimmer with a divine radi ance which gives them meaning; hard burning pavements, long ribbons of glistening metal, vast steely skeletons, and many- windowed walls; clanging bells, rattling wheels, noise, turmoil, the transfiguring eye has seen it all in the great sweep of his- DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 381 tory, read it in the light of that city whose pattern is in heaven "dear City of God." And so, too, whether it be the degraded woman in the lamp glare, the confessing corruptionist on the stand, or the hero-saint whose life-blood flows for his fellows, the idealist understands it all as but the distorted reflection or the faint foreshadowing of the real. The true end is not yet. It is very clear that such idealism as this may easily lie open to the charge that it concerns itself with things too far removed from practical life to be effective. The abundant glory of the visions may prompt to the cry, "Let us abide here and build for ourselves tabernacles." The delight of keen mind-play or the easy joy of day-dreaming may withdraw the idealist from the practical world and his ideals may find little contact with the common life of men. It may be so, but it does not need to be so. Plato did not think it so. In the very phrase I quoted a moment ago he insisted that the man who had seen the vision of the city in heaven must "live after the manner of it." More could write of Utopia, but none the less be a power in the prac tical issues of his day. And this I believe the true idealist will ever be, and the more potent because his eye is ever upon the ideal. For what is the essence of the attitude towards the world and its problems which this vision of the ideal creates? It lies in the fact that the idealist sees in all the common issues of life not the immediate ends alone but the large final ends towards which society is working. If the clamor is for bread, he remembers that man shall not live by bread alone. If the cry is for arbitra tion of a labor dispute, he sees not only the need of peace, but the whole meaning of man s upward struggle and the real ques tions which lie at issue concerning the final destiny of human society. Thus he is fitted, of all men fitted, to get values right, to see what practical and immediate solutions mean, and to forecast in some way their relations to the permanent and un changing ideals. It is to describe this kind of practical idealism that I have chosen the phrase "prophetic idealism." It is not to add another to the many varieties of philosophical idealism. They may fight out their battles in the books and journals and the unromantic lecture halls which do duty for the Garden and the Porch and the Symposium of the brave days of old. It is 382 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS enough for most of us that we should feel that the idealistic attitude, the meaning of idealism, is justified as an ineradicable possession of human life and a necessary aspect of human experience. It is enough for us to feel that whether we approach it metaphysically or historically, our natural idealism, our spontaneous religious response to the best as being likewise the real, is justified. Then let us get to work. Then let us be prophets. History knows no more magnificent line of men than the prophets of Israel. They were idealists through and through. They lived in the very air of the City of God. They expected its glowing battlements to be builded before their eyes; but they grappled with the earnestness and force of men of this common earth with the problems which their own troublous times presented. They suggest the phrase, and it is in that spirit that I would ask you to approach some of the problems which are to-day involved in the rapid progress of democracy. What has an idealism which is sure of itself, as I have tried to suggest to you it may be sure of itself, to say to us? What light, what guidance, what hope has it to give? It is not to be wondered at that men are questioning the very grounds of democracy itself. Its sudden growth and the vast changes in its form which a century has seen, make that inevi table. Hardly four generations have passed since Rousseau was giving expression to the underlying motives of the French Revolution and men had begun to talk about the Social Con tract and the source of political authority. Free government of any really democratic character scarcely existed outside some of the colonies in America. England had won freedom, but she had not become a democracy. France seemed helpless at the feet of the Bourbons. In Germany, Italy, Spain the thing was a dream. The swift years have passed. The progress of scientific discovery has knit the world into one fellowship. Disturbances on its remotest bounds are felt at the heart of civilized life. The interests of mankind have been wondrously communized, and with this growing unity the whole centre of power has changed. The politics of the world reflect no longer the intrigues of rival dynasties, but the desires and ambitions of the people themselves. Even in Russia a Douma has been called. Even in those mysteri- DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 383 cms empires of the East there are rising men trained in the ways of the Western world whose conceptions of government involve the final appeal to the people. In these four generations the world about which civilization concerns itself has grown from a few favored nations of Europe and a thin strip of American seaboard to include practically all the nations of the earth. And in all this vast assembly of the peoples the centre of power has changed from the few to the many, from the kings to the people. That would be a fearful test of any system of government. It is a fearful test of democracy. The world has seen nothing like it. The democracies of the ancient world were but little things and their theory incomplete. The types of government which have existed in civilized nations have had their age-long tests in slow social changes, slower opening up of new countries, and compar ative isolation. But the triumph of democracy thus carried in a century over the whole earth has subjected it to a strain abso lutely without precedent. Parallel to these changes have gone economic developments which have altered within a less period the whole problem of democracy. It was once a problem of man s relation to govern ment, a purely political problem. Jefferson could define an ideal democracy in this way: "A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. 1 It seemed to him enough that the police power should be effectively exerted and unjust taxation be avoided; then were opportunity at hand and freedom won. But a century has discovered to us that to keep men from injur ing one another does not mean only the police power effectively exerted: that injury is done in a thousand ways which the police power does not reach, and that to leave men free to regulate their own industry is to leave them free to sacrifice the many in the interests of the few. It seemed as if democracy had achieved its end when every man was given a hand in the making of the law, when political equality was won. But no sooner was that done than the problem was shifted further back, and became not a political but an industrial and social problem. When Dr. Devine says that our modern ideal is "a nearer approach to 384 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS equality of opportunity," it is a social ideal of which he speaks. In other words, political equality of opportunity has been won. It is social and industrial equality of opportunity that we are now seeking. But here again democracy has another terrible strain put upon it. Before ever it has worked out in any half successful way the details of its political ideal, there are forced upon it all the vast and complicated problems of its social implications. Then, too, this same wonderful century has seen a great over turning of the methods of men s thinking. The joyous ration alism of the days of the Illumination is gone forever. Men see that history is no artificial product of a carefully worked out agreement; they see that a new world cannot be programmed into being after a few hours debate or a quiet evening s discus sion of the philosophers. Institutions have grown and changed form with the centuries. Democracy is a product of certain plain historical conditions. Why should it not vanish away as it has come? Thus it has come to pass that between the change in the way of approach to such problems and the fearful strain put upon it in its applications, men have begun to challenge even the prin ciples of democracy. A good deal of this challenge is uncon scious. Men revere the giant even as they stretch the threads to tie him down. A good deal of it is indirect. Men are hardly ready to enter the ring with so formidable a foe. They will blacken his character a little, besmirch his good name, show how clumsy he is, how he crushes some of the pretty flowers by his path, how he is dull of mind and perhaps cruel and selfish of heart, this Leviathan of modern days. If he is all that, then it follows Oh, nothing follows. We were just photographing our Master, the People, as he plunged along. I am not exaggerating. We are all perfectly familiar, for ex ample, with the ground taken in the questions arising through the contact of superior and inferior races awkward ground to stand on sometimes when one of the inferior races appears sud denly in the lists, suncrested, full armed. Familiar, too, are we all with the scorn poured out upon that document once counted well-nigh heaven sent, which dared to assert that government rests upon the consent of the governed. How the greedy wor- DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 385 shippers of Mammon chorused that we had moved on to braver days and nobler deeds and higher principles than our fathers knew! How the political power- worshippers cried of the need of sacrifice ! Yes, how the religious journals found casuistry to suit the need! Government, cries their protagonist, rests upon the consent of the governed? Nay, but upon the "will of God and the pattern of his law." Forward, then, ye worshippers of God. Fear not your manifest destiny. Let the meek wait to "in herit the earth." Ye cannot wait. It is yours to subdue it. Power is adored among us, and power wills not democracy. The Big Stick involves vastly more than a quick method in politics and an easy mark for the cartoonist. It is symptomatic. Only the other day, in an address on True and False Democ racy, the president of one of our leading universities implied that true democracy means practically the entrusting of almost unlimited power to the single executive, and throughout he seemed to shudder as he heard the thunderous step of the peo ple. He called it the mob. These more general questionings are followed by numbers of detailed problems. Universal suffrage, negro suffrage, the suf frage for alien races, the problems of race relationships, of edu cation and of lawlessness all open out upon the stability of democracy. Careful studies raise questions of the limits of democracy. A recent writer has tried to forecast the possible permanency of a system which should realize the tendencies prevailing in England to-day. Finally liberty is invoked and men are asked whether democracy has or has not furthered personal liberty. There is a kind of pathos in that famous book of Lecky s now ten years old Democracy and Lib erty. "Democracy seems inevitable," he says, "but where is liberty?" But back of it all is the growing fear that the Giant Democracy may turn out to be the Monster Socialism, masquerading. Men shudder at the mob. They tremble lest the red, white, and blue stripped off, the monster shall appear clothed in red alone. "The great purblind giant Democracy with the heart and intel ligence of the child and drunk with the wine of a sentimental magnanimity, has," says a recent writer, "been chosen to lead us through strange ways before we have done with him." It is 386 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS socialism he fears. It is the dread of socialism which is the source of many a doubt of democracy. I have said enough to recall to you the ominous questions, the hesitant attitude, the confusing doubts, which have taken the place of the glad enthusiasm of a century past. I have hinted enough to suggest to you that the prophetic idealist does not share this age spirit, but with the gladness of an earlier age and the calm certainty born of his vision of the permanent ends towards which society is working and the fundamental spiritual facts upon which it is built, proceeds to play his part in the working out of the problem. It is part of his rooted faith that democracy is of the world order. Men are free spirits in God s world, and whatever their outward condition, they bear the same fundamental relation to God. No differences in con dition affect the relationship. No inequalities of endowment or equipment impair it. Every man stands like every other, one of this vast assemblage of free spirits linked together by their common relations to the Supreme Spirit. Such they are and such they must ever be. In Democracy, then, he sees that ideal becoming actual. He hears that word which brings kings and emperors to the dust, which casts the mighty from their seats and exalts the humble and meek. He sees that such a fundamental fact in the world of the ideal must mean, as it works out in the actual world, the same kind of equality. He sees that that is what democracy has achieved in political affairs. It has said that men must be equal before the law. It has not said that they must be equal in their knowledge of the law. It has not said that they must render equal service or have equal reward. It has said that they must be equal in their relations to government. In all the inequalities of nature it sees, often with unseeing eye, that which the idealist understands so well, that a man is always a free spirit, a divine unit in God s world. "By misery unrepelled, unawed By pomp or power, thou seest a Man In prince or peasant, slave or lord, Pale priest or swarthy artisan. Through all disguise, form, place or name, Beneath the flaunting robes of sin, Through poverty and squalid shame, DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 387 Thou lookest on the man within! On man, as man, retaining yet, Howe er debased and soiled and dun, The crown upon his forehead set, The immortal gift of God to him." Thus the idealist understands the eternal meaning of democ racy; but he does not dream about it. He is a prophet, too, and he puts his faith into practice. The vision does not grow dim before his eyes, however dim the crown may seem to him who has not the transfiguring eye. He trusts the people, that is the first practical precept. He knows the cheap cry that the mere adding together of a multitude of average intelligences does not produce wisdom. That is perfectly true. He knows, too, that the judgment of the people may again and yet again be less wise than the judgment of the one. He knows that majorities do not make right. He knows that there must be clear- visioned leaders. But he knows likewise that the people are not a mob, and that, as it is a fact that there is a mob- consciousness which may lead to evil such as no individual member of the mob would have wrought alone, so there is a consciousness-of-the-people which does clarify the mind and exalt the will of the individual to deeds of heroism and sacrifice such as he would not and could not achieve alone. It is the subtle working of the eternal idea in the common world order. But behind all that, he sees that there can be no solid and lasting order which is not founded in the equal sharing of all. Social order must ideally be for all, and therefore it must be of all. Otherwise it violates the fundamental relationship of men to one another in the republic of God, and violating that relation ship it must totter to its ruin. This is only saying over, with regard to the eternal order, what Fiske says of the practical basis of democracy: that "it rests upon the ultimate interest of every man in good government." He is content, therefore, with a less satisfactory government which is upon permanent founda tions instead of craving a more satisfactory government which has no lasting character. Of course he will mourn over the fail ures, the errors, the corruptions of the people s rule. He will well understand (and being a man he will now and again find his heart going out in sympathy towards) the cry of Carlyle, "Oh, 388 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS for a Willelmus Conquestor, a conquering William, a big burly William Bastard!" Is it not true that "a child in this William s reign might have carried a purse of gold from end to end of England"? True, O worshipper of heroes, true but this William died and with him died the order which he made. For it was not founded upon a lasting ideal. It grew not from beneath. It was forced from above. It denied the God-set crown. It seemed to take account of facts; but it did not. Is it a matter of going, of direction? Better then to go wrong in the right direc tion than right in the wrong direction. And thus there is discovered to him the note of all his efforts, the motif of his striving. The fault lies not with democracy as such, but in the incompleteness of man s understanding of democracy. Man must be trained, educated, lifted. He must learn to know his ideal worth and lift himself to it. In the words of that fine idealist, the poet Schiller (a very different being, by the way, from that keen-witted Schiller who bids fair soon to hold the centre point of interest in English philosophy), in Schiller s words, "the individual must become the state, by the phenomenal man ennobling himself to the ideal man." A far look ahead that is, to be sure; far beyond what the world of to-day with its self-seeking greed, its low ideals, its utter con tent which the phenomenal presents to our gaze. A far look ahead and along a path uncertain, oft unlighted, winding, a very "wood of Errour." What chances of wrong going, what certainties of mistake, what heart-burnings and strivings but what of that? Democracy is willing to take chances. Its ideals abide, and through the dark foliage gleams the light of day. Because he lives in this vision of the end and understands, therefore, that all achievement which falls short of that is only relatively good, the prophetic idealist is far removed from the doctrinaire. The doctrinaire is a programmist. He has, for example, the rights of man at his tongue s end. He has a pro gramme which will exactly express those rights. That, and that only, is satisfactory. In dealing with other programmes and other views he does not seek their meaning and essential value, but sets attention upon details, seeks flaws, criticises consistency. If an idealist falls into this habit of mind, it is because he has lost touch with the actual and his ideal is become itself a pro- DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 389 gramme. For programme and ideal are totally at variance. A programme is wooden, mechanical, dead fitted together like a box to hold certain conditions. An ideal is living, growing, the possession of living and growing minds, searching into infinite meanings. If it is nebulous, it is not because its light is not bright, its spectrum vivid, but because it lies so far away. The pro phetic idealist who has not lost touch with the actual, regards programmes therefore as guesses at method, as suggested ways of reaching the ideal. He is not bound down to one programme. He is free to accept or reject, to gather here and cast away there. He seeks the meaning of every programme and is interested in the programme itself only as its meaning helps to make the ideal more real. When Franklin in 1754 proposed his scheme of Federation for the American Colonies, the programmist was up in arms. It was easy to see mistakes, to point out the difficulties in the way, to stress the lack of desire upon the part of the people for any such union. The programmist made his points and tri umphed. But I suspect Franklin thought little of the pro gramme itself. I am sure many an idealist, dreaming of his country s future, thought little of the programme, but quietly rejoiced that an ideal had been presented. The programme was only a guess at method. It is in that spirit that the prophetic idealist approaches the question of socialism. As he reads socialistic literature, and con siders its frankly destructive tirades, its distorted economics, its reversed values, its mechanical ideas of progress, as if true prog ress could be forced from without in and men made righteous by law, its huge top-heavy state, he sees that here we have a programme which would recreate the social order by the simple fiat of a vote and then, its creative day passed, rest in an eternal Sabbath. This he sees, but he does not meet the issue as does the other programmist. Rather, he says, what have we here for deep meaning, what relation does this vast unwieldy and unworkable programme bear to the realization of that state which shall adequately express men s real relation in the repub lic of God? Here we come to sliding ground, to quicksand foot ing. But courage! We know the real relations of men. We should have some light to help us understand the movement 390 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS which has taken such hold upon multitudes. I shall not emulate Schaffle and discourse to you upon the quintessence of socialism. I find this quintessence but a bald programme of the impossible. Yet will I venture to say to you what seems to me the essence of socialism, the true meaning which inhabits it. On the one hand, surveying the hold which the caste idea has still upon men, the special privilege, the upper and the lower, intending thereby naught of wealth of service or loyalty of life, but only outward condition, the socialist lifts up his cry of pro test. He would have democracy realize itself by establishing such conditions as will once and for all eliminate this undemo cratic consciousness from the state. The suffrage has not done it; for the powerful and the rich still herd their retainers to the polls as in days of old they herded them to battle, and as of old they count themselves of loftier kind. Socialism will wipe away this distinction, will crush this class spirit, will create a real brotherhood. Will it do it by programme? What of that? Is the programme unworkable? What of that? The prophetic idealist will rejoice in this forcing of the ideal upon the con sciousness of men. He will guide its true strivings. He will ignore its pitiful weaknesses. On the one hand that on the other socialism has a meaning for the industrial order. To many it seems as if that meaning lies in the abolition of private prop erty, and the complete control of the individual life by the state. I venture to think that although that is the programme of social ism, the ideal which it is seeking thus blindly may be expressed in a very different way. What socialism sees and here the idealist must agree with him is that democracy cannot be realized until in the industrial order as in the political the same relation between men, that is to say equality, is established. You establish equality towards government by giving each man a vote. But the share in government differs. To some more, to some less; but each in the same relation. The socialist ideal as distinguished from its programme is that the same thing must exist in industry. The division into owners and wage-earners must gradually be done away. In every industry the relation of each man to the whole must be the same. All owners, all workmen. Idle ownership squandering its millions must cease. Precarious wage-earning must cease. To him who in the com- DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 391 mon industry contributes much, be it in brains or work or wealth, much shall be given each in his own degree but each in the same way. Whether or not I have touched at all upon this elusive essence, time will show; but my point as to the attitude of the prophetic idealist will be clear if I add a word as to what he will do prac tically. If he is right he will take every opportunity to discour age a leisure class, to encourage a sense of ownership upon the part of wage-earners; that is, to give them the sense of property in the industry or occupation in which they have a part. Such remedial steps as profit-sharing and sliding scales which reward long service, will meet his support. He will try in all economic and political questions to throw his weight to the working out of this ideal, the democracy of industry following the democracy of politics. In this, as in any other problem, his method of ap proach is to find the meaning of it, its relation to the ideal, and then with flexible programme and no abstract principles, to take advantage of every opportunity to further that which will unveil to men the ideal. This may be well illustrated again by the question of suffrage and the consent of the governed. The prophetic idealist has no abstract doctrine of the rights of man. He has no such doc trine because he is absolutely sure of the fundamental relations of men. He can quite understand that (granting the responsi bility resting upon this nation) the fulness of self-government cannot be at once conferred upon our so-called colonial posses sions. But he can also see that those theories which, alas, have been decided to be the law of the land, and according to which the nation has indefinite right of sovereignty and control quite apart from the purpose of ultimate erection of its dependencies into self-governing States, are utterly subversive of the eternal meaning of democracy. If this nation is to be the first messenger of the new social democracy to the world, she must put such theories behind. She must arise in her clear vision of the ideal and assert her old-time faith. Only upon the consent of the governed can a national life rest. Let him who will take the noble words and prick their life out. To the idealist they stand as one great affirmation of the ideal which abides forever. Thus the idealist understands his principles. Thus he sug- 392 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS gests his methods of approach to the problems of democracy. And thus he discovers to the world a new standard of values. May I, in closing, speak a few moments of that standard of values, for it brings us to that most vital point in the considera tion of democracy, the question of liberty. The supreme worth to the idealist is the individual soul or the things which belong to the soul life. In that he is again but giving philosophical expression to the eternal message of Chris tianity. In all his problems he sees the man as the end. " In prince or peasant, slave or lord" he sees the man. Pomp and privilege in others nor comfort and indulgent desire in self can blind his eye to the man. The soul of one man is in his eye supremely more worthful than the properties of any corporation. He estimates all values by this standard. He sees that all ques tions of property must be settled ultimately by the relation to the one question of man s higher development. He is not affrighted by the cry of vested rights endangered, because he knows that in God s universe no man has any vested right beyond that of keeping his soul clean before God and in minister ing love towards his fellow-men. His whole conception of prop erty is bound up in trust and service. He seerns to see as he reflects upon the great changes of the years gone by, remember ing the common lands of his forefathers, remembering the shift ing doctrines of property and the changing habits even from the early days of Rome to our own, he seems to see that all have been conditioned by their relations to the highest life of man. There is nothing fixed <ibout the whole evolution except that any theory or practice which impairs the true life of large num bers of men must ultimately fail. Do not mistake me. I am not making a plea for the abolition of private property. I am merely pointing out that the idealist looks through property to the man and sees the justification of property only in its service to man. And thus he realizes a profounder concept of liberty. If you run over the first chapter of that book of Lecky s, to which I have referred, you will see that the liberty of which he is thinking when he asks concerning the fruits of democracy is largely a liberty of holding property and doing what one will with one s own. The lauded representative character of the pre-reformed Parliament of England lies in the fact that it represents prop- DEMOCRACY AND A PROPHETIC IDEALISM 393 erty. That is a common notion. Commoner still is the confu sion of liberty with doing as one pleases, on which conception Matthew Arnold let play his satire with such effect. But the idealist sees that true liberty lies in identifying one s own inter ests with those of all, because in the ideal world there is no other possible liberty than that complete subordination of one s self to God and the whole body of free souls. He sees that true liberty is not curtailed when property rights are curtailed for the benefit of all. If private property must be sold that a rail road go through and the public be served, what difference is there in principle that all the operations of the railroad be public and its profits go to the people who give its franchise as well as to the stockholders? What to go further what is it that the men of the future shall be hedged about on this side and on that, by restrictions and directions in ways that seem utterly arbitrary to us of to-day? It is not the true liberty of civilized man which is infringed. It is that spurious liberty which belonged to the forest ranger of our earlier national Me. True liberty consists in not wanting for ourselves that which we will not grant to all. It is entering into the common life, putting aside special privileges, denying ambitions of indulgence or of power; ready, not only to serve for the common weal, aye, but to suffer as well. You remember Lowell s noble words, "No! True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And with heart and hand to be Earnest to make others free." It matters not whether it be the slavery of cotton-field and overseer s lash, or that of factory and slaughter-house where the scourge is pinching poverty and the terror of the "lost job." Here follows, too, upon the supreme value of the soul-life the liberty of reward. It is complained that too many social ideals and too many present-day policies rob men of the liberty of re ward commensurate with great service. But I ask you, is man so tangled in the flesh, so trammelled in the matter of the world, that he cannot shake himself free, but must condition his highest activity upon gain of gold and power? So political economy has falsely thought, with experience of ideal revolts staring her in the face. So good men, high in purpose, teach to-day unmindful 394 EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS of their own unpaid service. But no idealist dare think so. No prophetic idealist will so approach the problems of his age. He knows that the eternal reward is in the eternal soul values, that where these lie open to men (and the gates of heaven are never closed) men will seek and strive and work and suffer and rejoice, and in it all find liberty. Less and less will their souls revolt from hampering restrictions, for more and more will they know true liberty in the common life, the identification of self-interest with the interests of all. Is there any more urgent need to-day for the prophet s work than just that he shall reveal to the world this ideal of freedom freedom of property, freedom of reward? After all, his whole message, his whole understanding of his mission, sums up in that. It is the last word. What is his democracy if it bring not liberty? What is his method if it lead not to liberty? What is his valuing of a soul if it mean not that the soul shall be free? But what, once more, is this liberty which he would win if it be not the free dom to look beyond the trammelling and cloying and glutting satisfactions of sense into the world of the ideal, freedom to live in that world, freedom to strive for a liberty in this world such as alone can last, the liberty of the democracy of God, where a man s soul counts first, and all else counts as nothing. Liberty! It is his unswerving faith. Liberty is approached in the actual republic of men, as the actual bears likeness to the eternal republic of God, where no spirit thinks of other destiny than to will as God wills and to serve the whole republic. THE ATTITUDE OF THE SCHOLAR BY EDWIN AUGUSTUS GROSVENOR Delivered before the Alpha of North Carolina, at the University of North Carolina, May 29, 1909. I COUNT it a privilege and an honor to stand upon this plat form and be welcomed as the guest of this University. Nowhere can the patriot and the American feel more at home than upon the historic soil of the Old North State. Between North Carolina and New England always has there existed a special bond. The two were founded by men of equally earnest purpose and lofty ideas. Lexington, Concord, Bennington, are the northern synonyms of Mecklenburg, the Cowpens, and King s Mountain. In all the subsequent years the children of North Carolina and New England have been faithful to the right, as God gave them to see the right, and have performed their part manfully and well. In this academic centre, on this classic hill, where for generations heroism and consecration have set their seal upon the brow of learning, the stranger, like them of old in an exalted presence, may well repeat, It is good for us to be here. The subject on which I desire to speak is, THE ATTITUDE OF THE SCHOLAR. It is a subject of peculiar interest to the company which by its presence graces and dignifies this hall. It is a subject, appro priate at any gathering of our fraternity and deserving the can did consideration of Phi Beta Kappa men. But its selection has been determined in my mind by a stronger motive than the mere matter of fitness or the possible interest attaching to its discus sion. Concerning the attitude of the scholar: his attitude towards a never stationary but an always moving world; toward mental conditions, never permanent or fixed but always in course of modification and change; toward innovation and revolution in educational method and subject and process; toward the transformation, partial or entire, of studential life through its 396 EDWIN AUGUSTUS GROSVENOR manifold development there are several certain things that may well be said. Nor can one conceive a more becoming place in which to say them than in this presence of the studious and learned, of great teachers, of men of international influence and fame, and of youth enthusiastic, ardent, dreaming the dreams of a high ambition, the foot advanced toward a resplendent future. Theodore, the Metochite, died at Constantinople near the close of the thirteenth century. His exploits have so faded from the minds of men, that, even in this scholarly company, the mention of his name evokes little association. Yet in rank at the Byzantine court he was second only to the emperor, and in variety and immensity of learning he was the foremost in a city, then the most refined and cultivated city in the world. His asso ciates and disciples carved this inscription upon his tomb : This man was in learning the glory of mortals. Weep aloud, heav enly Muses. This man is dead. With him all learning has died also. I take it that the survivors who composed this epitaph were sincere. I believe the epitaph was without exaggeration the hon est expression of their discouragement and dismay. When he, their glory, their central sun, their source of inspiration, had departed, what was there left? To them all learning had died also. Yet to us how non-existent is the man they mourned, less substantial than a shadow, fainter than an echo, less real than a memory. Like those mediaeval scholars around the tomb of Theodore the Metochite, so in other ages men have stood, lamenting at what they deemed was the burial-place of learning. With the same dull thud the sods fell upon Aristotle, Erigena, Erasmus, Newton, Bentley, Porson, and upon the still forms of the many more, who in various lands and countries were esteemed the incarnation of science, and letters and philosophy, themselves magna decora seculorum. Of their once radiant names a few are still distinct and luminous; the great majority are lost in oblivion, or can be faintly puzzled out in the graveyard of time. But the intellectual world has none the less sped on; a sunshine no less bright has constantly lit the intellectual sky; and the step of eternal intellectual progress has not ceased to beat. There has been neither reversal, nor paralysis, nor delay. THE ATTITUDE OF THE SCHOLAR 397 Like the mediaeval scholars around the tomb of Theodore the Metochite, to-day some stand, lamenting, one the dethronement of the classic Greek from its old-time primacy, one the welcome well-nigh universally accorded to the elective system, one the incorporation of activities outside the class-room into the stu dent s life. Bewildered at the subsidence of the accredited and the old, and at the inrush to the contemporaneous and the new, more than one man hah* audibly repeats: All learning has died also. No other language, comparable to the Greek, has the art or experience of man devised since the world began. In shaded definiteness of expression, in capacity to sound every note of the human soul, in vibrating variety of grace and pathos and satire, all other languages have followed the Greek, as the disciples did their master, afar off. It is a truism that the masterpieces of Greek philosophy and history have in all ages since rarely been approached, and never been surpassed. But how much of this priceless wealth, except as the teacher told him, did the student realize or even know, plodding laboriously through lexicon and grammar? I recall a square, low-studded room, a few maps and engrav ings upon the dingy walls, in Johnson chapel, at Amherst College. Back of the desk sat the greatest teacher that I have ever known. Before us boys the dead corpse of a dead language arose, wreathed in life and beauty at his touch. But only the king could draw Excalibur from its sheath. At least in our study of the Greek the inspiration was flashed less from the matchless tongue than from the tongue of the matchless teacher. Eliminating the factor of the man at the desk, recognizing the rudimentary knowledge of the student, confessing that all teach ers are not profoundly gifted, it is difficult to discern wherein the study of Latin or Italian or German or French is not as stimu lating and productive in the ordinary class-room as the study of Greek. The elective system in determination of courses is attended by the fallibility and imperfection of all things human. But it is far preferable to the stern system of our sires, whereby the mind was driven through an iron groove with no volition of its own. Capacity of rational choice distinguishes the man from the brute. 398 EDWIN AUGUSTUS GROSVENOR That the student exercise decision is more important than that his decision be wise. Granted the fullest freedom, not always will he choose that which is best. But in the very act of choosing, he is ennobled; he is made more manly by the dignity and re sponsibility of choice. Under the former system were developed teachers, physicists, and jurists, theologians, men of business and affairs, men of patriotism and thought and action. Under the present system with confidence we look for the same result in no inferior measure. To education, as in all the work of humanity the same principle applies. No one custom is eternally supreme. "For God fulfills himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." During these later years the college has experienced an inva sion from what are called outside interests. The scholastic mon astery with its cloisters, wherein our fathers burned midnight oil in pursuit of a diploma, has become a village or city in which young men reside. Not the elective system but the inrush of activities, unconnected with the class-room, has transformed under-graduate life. These activities are multifarious, numerous, and all-pervading. They are of every sort, aesthetic, athletic, fraternal, inter-collegiate, literary, philanthropic, political, religious, social. Their performance is attended not only by satisfaction and pleasure, but by a sense of obligation and responsibility. They divide attention with the routine of a daily lecture or lesson. Their discharge necessitates frequent absence from college, especially on the part of upper-classmen. There is no question that in themselves those activities are legitimate and helpful, often disciplinary, largely educational, and in gen eral of benefit. But against their exercise the serious argument may be urged that they trespass upon class-room work, that they exact an undue proportion of the student s strength and time, and that parents, when sending their sons to college, have no such activities in view. This argument it is not my purpose to either confirm or refute. This however must be said. Those activities are in keeping with the spirit of the age. As long as the age desires them they will constitute an integral part of col lege life. I, at least, would not enter a son of mine or, if the THE ATTITUDE OF THE SCHOLAR 399 halcyon period of youth returned, would I wish to enter myself as a student in any institution where such activities were not found. Sometimes the eye is jaundiced by disappointment, age or disease. Then, as to the mediaeval sages at the tomb of Theodore the Metochite, it seems as if all learning had died also. Last week I received a letter from a venerable and venerated alumnus of my own college. Toward the close he wrote: "I seri ously suspect that Amherst is not what it was forty or fifty years ago. In general it seems to me that the spirit and philosophy of all our colleges has changed." There was a certain subtle, selfish comfort in the thought that by this all, he included every other institution in the land, even the far-famed University of North Carolina to which I was going. He continued, "The spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to study has given way to a contrary ambition, the pursuit of amusement and pleasure." Then in conclusion came the climax. "Were the teaching of present professors wiser, would such be the outcome of their teaching?" Thus were summarized and rebuked the teacher and student of to-day. Doubtless a longer letter would have embraced univer sity presidents, boards of overseers, or visitors or trustees, and all the alumni of the last twenty-five years in a common con demnation. Not long ago, after a Phi Beta Kappa banquet, I listened to an elaborate address of the president of a well-known university. The institution, of which he was the head, had in the past given to the nation its full share of illustrious men. Doubtless some of its present under-graduates are to become equally beneficent and renowned. But through the speech of that eminent president breathed only the doctrine of scholarly despair. He said: "I have been laboring under the conviction for a long time that the object of a university is to educate, and I have not seen the uni versities of this country achieving any remarkable or disturbing success in that direction. ... I have found everywhere ... a note of apology for the intellectual side of the university . . . learning is on the defensive, is actually on the defensive among college men." I know not which should be deprecated the more, the sentiment herein expressed or the cynicism of the utterance. On the lips of a prominent teacher and distinguished author, 400 EDWIN AUGUSTUS GROSVENOR both the sentiment and the cynicism are unnatural and un worthy. Sleeplessness by night or a disordered physical system must be responsible for such a distorted vision. Instead of a paean he sounded a threnody; instead of a note of courage, a lament. Not with dirges but with bugle calls and beating drums are men sent into battle. One of old time has said : In much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Helen Hunt Jackson voices the same truth in the query whether "The mark of rank in nature Is capacity for pain, And the anguish of the singer Makes the sweetness of the strain." He who knows the most realizes the infinity of knowledge which he can never know. From each peak scaled unfolds a horizon, ever expanding, always more difficult to grasp. The standard of measurement rises faster than the rate of progress. Nor can full satisfaction be attained from the accomplishments of other men. Effort on their behalf is beaten back, baffled and vain. They who do the best might do so much better. They who achieve the most might achieve so much more. Surely the people is grass. And the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The difference between the highest and the lowest, between the wisest and the most brutish, is after all but the difference be tween blades of grass. The scholar is naturally a conservative. No other body of men is by tradition and training so conservative as a college faculty. Each college faculty moves along a path, every foot of which has been noted by the long experience of wise and virtuous pre decessors. Not chance or conjecture but long experience has determined what and how much is of value, and of how much value upon the way. Indications are supplied, as along the trolley tracks of a country road, of where to go slow, where to turn out, where to stop. Should any one question these weighty judgments of long experience, he might be charged with rashness and irreverence. The presumption always lies against the intro duction of any additional factor. Upon the claim of recognition of some new factor must rest the burden of proof. It is an indis- THE ATTITUDE OF THE SCHOLAR 401 putable fact that no device of man is confronted by greater diffi culty of readjustment than is a college curriculum. Possilization rather than recrystallization would appear to be the inevitable result. The common sense of the American educator has been stronger than his logic. Or in better words, the logic of circumstances has been too mighty for the logic of theory; and the logic of theory has had to bow. This was the less difficult in that in America the college and the state were alike young. They grew up almost side by side. The heart of the college, despite the seeming austerity of its mien, beat responsive to the demands of the hour. Old courses of instruction were modified or discarded, new subjects were introduced and expanded, every rising want was supplied with a promptness and facility unknown in any other country on earth. The grip of transmitted form and content in matters of education was indeed strong. But its strength was weakness compared with the mortmain that held and still holds the schools and seminaries of Europe in its rigid clutch. With the hoary antiquity and majestic aloofness of many an Old- World univer sity, no American institution can compare. Those gray and hallowed piles, worn by the feet and dimmed by the dust of uncounted throngs of students through hundreds of years, loom on their site apart from the living nation that ebbs and flows outside. Their time-hallowed formularies are slow to change. The new knocks long and grows old in knocking before it finds acceptance upon the roll. The glory of the American college and of the American schol arship is not the refinement and culture, which the college devel ops and which that scholarship displays. It is not the splendor and luxury of the lecture-rooms and libraries wherein that scholarship is nursed. It is not the erudition of its teachers though that erudition be profound. These things are indeed precious but they do not constitute its crown. The distinctive features of American scholarship are its readiness to receive, its facility to adapt, and its many-sided breadth. These three are the inheritance of the American scholar which the American college has bequeathed him. To an equal birthright the alumnus of no foreign institution is the heir. Herein is the American col- 402 EDWIN AUGUSTUS GROSVENOR lege unique. In disposition and ability to confer such bequest the American college stands alone. Guided by the college hand, suffused by the college spirit, eye- moistened by the college memories, the scholar advances upon the stage. He has made his own the immortal dictum of the Latin master, nihil humanum alienum a me puto. With sympa thies broad as the race, free from suspicion and without guile, welcoming the good from whatsoever source it comes, ready for each emergency as it arises, he stands forth in the light of heaven, God-fearing, man-serving, self-confident, and serene. Such then is the attitude of the scholar. Such then should be the attitude above all of every Phi Beta Kappa man. The fraternity of Phi Beta Kappa was founded more than a hundred and thirty years ago at Williamsburg in Virginia by five great-hearted students of that world-honored institution, the College of William and Mary. Aspiration for achievement in noble service prompted their intimate union. Though the years have piled upon it, and it has now become the monopoly of the distinguished and the learned, Phi Beta Kappa in the dom inant motive of its association remains the same as at its begin ning. "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncalled for) but to live by law, Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, to follow right, Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence." These words, breathed by Tennyson upon the lips of Pallas, are the expression of its soul. Election to membership in the Phi Beta Kappa is an honor, whether conferred upon under-graduate college student or upon man or woman reckoned eminent by the world. And yet, let not the fraternity, and let not one of its chapters, be regarded by others or regard itself as a mere honor society. Let its roster never serve as a mere catalogue of past and finished individual distinctions, great or small. Let it not merely record the name, but stimulate the energies of each initiate. Let no one of its sons and daughters rest content in the contemplation of that he has already done. In it let there be no place for pedantry or arro- THE ATTITUDE OF THE SCHOLAR 403 gance or self-conceit. Over it let the spirit of aspiration and reverence and humility continually abide. I am well aware that the sons of this institution need no words of encouragement from a stranger, though that stranger be a friend. But this is Senior Class Day. The Phi Beta Kappa exercises of this hour are buttressed be tween preceding and succeeding exercises of the Senior Class. As to departing soldiers we would stretch out our hands and call for the cheer. On every member of the class of 1909, 1 invoke all prosperity and success, assured that in the years to come, as now, theirs will ever be the attitude of the scholar. WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? BY JOSIAH ROYCE Delivered before the Mu of New York, at Vassar College, in 1909. From Wil liam James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life. Copyright, 1911, by The Macmillan Company. I DO not venture to meet this company as one qualified to preach, nor yet as an authority in matters which are technically theological. My contribution is intended to present some thoughts that have interested me as a student of philosophy. I hope that one or another of these thoughts may aid others in formulating their own opinions, and in defining their own reli gious interests, whether these interests and opinions are or are not in agreement with mine. My treatment of the question, What is vital in Christianity? will involve a study of three different special questions, which I propose to discuss in order, as follows : 1. What sort of faith or of practice is it that can be called vital to any religion? That is, By what criteria, in the case of any religion, can that which is vital be distinguished from that which is not vital? 2. In the light of the criteria established by answering this first question, what are to be distinguished as the vital elements of Christianity? 3. What permanent value, and in particular what value for us to-day, have those ideas and practices and religious attitudes which we should hold to be vital for Christianity? The term "vital," as here used, obviously involves a certain metaphor. That is vital for a living organism without which that organism cannot live. So breathing is a vital affair for us all. That is vital for an organic type which is so characteristic of that type that, were such vital features changed, the type in question, if not altogether destroyed, would be changed into what is essen tially another type. Thus the contrast between gill breathing WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 405 and lung breathing appears to be vital for the organic types in question. When we treat the social and mental life which is characteristic of a religion as if it were the life of an organism, or of a type or group of organisms, we use the word "vital" in accordance with the analogies thus indicated. If, with such a meaning of the word "vital," we turn to the religions that exist among men, we find that any religion presents itself to an observer as a more or less connected group: (1) of religious practices, such as prayers, ceremonies, festivals, rituals, and other observances, and (2) of religious ideas, the ideas taking the form of traditions, legends, and beliefs about the gods or about spirits. On the higher levels, the religious ideas are em bodied in sacred books, and some of them are emphasized in formal professions of faith. They also come, upon these higher levels, into a certain union with other factors of spiritual life which we are hereafter to discuss. Our first question is, naturally, What is the more vital about a religion: its religious practices, or its religious ideas, beliefs, and spiritual attitudes? As soon as we attempt to answer this question, our procedure is somewhat different, according as we dwell upon the simpler and more primitive, or on the other hand upon the higher and more reflective and differentiated forms or aspects of religion. In primitive religions, and in the religious lives of many of the more simple-minded and less reflective people of almost any faith, however civilized, the religious practices seem in general to be more important, and more vital for the whole structure of the religious life, than are the conscious beliefs which accompany the practices. I say this is true of primitive religions in general. It is also true for many of the simple-minded followers, even of very lofty religions. This rule is well known to the students of the history of religion in our day, and can easily be illustrated from some of the most familiar aspects of religious life. But it is a rule which, as I frankly confess, has frequently been ignored or misunderstood by philosophers, as well as by others who have been led to approach religions for the sake of studying the opin ions of those who hold them. In various religious ideas people may be very far apart, at the same moment when their religious practices are in close harmony. In the world at large, including 406 JOSIAH ROYCE both the civilized and the uncivilized, we may say that the fol lowers of a cult are, in general, people who accept as binding the practices of that cult. But the followers of the same cult may accompany the acceptance of the cult with decidedly different interpretations of the reason why these practices are required of them, and of the supernatural world which is supposed to be interested in the practices. In primitive religions this rule is exemplified by facts which many anthropologists have expressed by saying that, on the whole, in the order of evolution, religious practices normally precede at least the more definite religious beliefs. Men come to believe as they do regarding the nature of some supernatural being, largely in consequence of the fact that they have first come to follow some course of conduct, not for any conscious reason at all, but merely from some instinctive tendency which by accident has determined this or that special expression. When the men come to observe this custom of theirs, and to consider why they act thus, some special religious belief often arises as a sort of secondary explanation of their practice. And this belief may vary without essentially altering either the practice or the religion. The pigeons in our college yard cluster about the be nevolent student or visitor who feeds them. This clustering is the result of instinct and of their training in seeking food. The pigeons presumably have no conscious ideas or theories about the true nature of the man who feeds them. Of course, they are somehow aware of his presence, and of what he does, but they surely have only the most rudimentary and indefinite germs of ideas about what he is. But if the pigeons were to come to con sciousness somewhat after the fashion of primitive men, very probably they would regard this way of getting food as a sort of religious function and would begin to worship the visitor as a kind of god. If they did so, what idea about this god would be to them vital? Would their beliefs show that they first reasoned abstractly from effect to cause, and said, "He must be a being both powerful and benevolent, for otherwise his feeding of us in this way could not be explained"? Of course, if the pigeons developed into theologians or philosophers, they might reason thus. But if they came to self-consciousness as primitive men generally do, they would more probably say at first: "Behold, WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 467 do we not cluster about him and beg from him, and coo to him; and do we not get our food by doing thus? He is, then, a being whom it is essentially worth while to treat in this way. He re sponds to our cooing and our clustering. Thus we compel him to feed us. Therefore he is a worshipful being. And this is what we mean by a god; namely, some one whom it is practically use ful to conciliate and compel by such forms of worship as we practice." If one passes from this feigned instance to the facts of early religious life, one easily observes illustrations of a similar process, both in children and in the more primitive religions of men. A child may be taught to say his prayers. His early ideas of God as a giver of good things, or as a being to be propitiated, are then likely to be secondary to such behavior. The prayers he often says long before he sees why. His elders, at least when they follow the older traditions of religious instruction, begin by requiring of him the practice of saying prayers; and then they gradually initiate the child into the ruling ideas of what the practice means. But for such a stage of religious consciousness the prayer is more vital than the interpretation. In primitive religions taboo and ritual alike precede, at least in many cases, those explanations of the taboos and of the ritual practices which inquirers get in answer to questions about the present beliefs of the people concerned. As religion grows, practices easily pass over from one religion to another, and through every such transition seem to preserve, or even to increase, their sacredness; but they get in the end, in each new religion into which they enter, a new explanation in terms of opinions, them selves producing, so to speak, the new ideas required to fit them to each change of setting. In this process the practices taken over may come to seem vital to the people concerned, as the Mass does to Catholics. But the custom may have preceded the idea. The Christmas and Easter festivals are well-known and classic examples of this process. Christianity did not initiate them. It assimilated them. But it then explained why it did so by saying that it was celebrating the birth and resurrection of Christ. It is no part of my task to develop at length a general theory about this frequent primacy of religious practice over the defi- 408 JOSIAH ROYCE nite formulation of religious belief. The illustrations of the process are, however, numerous. Even on the higher levels of religious development, where the inner life comes to be empha sized, the matter indeed becomes highly complicated; but still, wherever there is an established church, the term "dissenter" often means in popular use a person who will not attend this church, or who will not conform to its practices, much more consciously and decidedly than it means a person whose private ideas about religious topics differ from those of the people with whom he is willing to worship, or whose rules he is willing to obey. Nevertheless, upon these higher levels a part of the religious requirement very generally comes to be a demand for some sort of orthodoxy. And therefore, upon this level, conformity of practice is indeed no longer enough. However the simple-minded emphasize practice, the religious body itself requires not only the right practice, but also the acceptance of a profession of faith. And on this higher level, and in the opinion of those con cerned with the higher aspect of their religion, this acceptance must now be not only a formal act but a sincere one. Here, then, in the life of the higher religions, belief tends to come into a position of primacy which results in a very notable contrast be tween the higher and the simpler forms and aspects of religious life. When religions take these higher forms, belief is at least officially emphasized as quite equivalent in importance to prac tice. For those who view matters thus, "He that believeth not shall be damned," an unbeliever is, as such, a foe of the religion in question, and of its gods and of its worshippers. As an infidel he is a miscreant, an enemy not only of the true faith but per haps of mankind. In consequence, religious persecution and religious wars may come to seem, at least for a time, inevitable means of defending the faith. And those who outgrow, or who never pass through, this stage of warlike propaganda and of persecution may still insist that for them it is faith rather than practice which is the vital element of their religion. To what heights such a view of the religious life may attain, the Pauline epistles bear witness, "Through grace are ye saved." And grace comes by faith, or in the form of faith. WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 409 II So far, then, we have two great phases or stages of religious life. On the one stage it is religious practice; as such, that is for the people concerned the more vital thing. Their belief is rela tively secondary to their practice, and may considerably vary, while the practice remains the unvarying, and, for them, vital feature. On the other, and no doubt higher, because more self- conscious, stage it is faith that assumes the conscious primacy. And on this second stage, if you believe not rightly, you have no part in the religion in question. That these two stages or phases of the life of religion are in practice closely intermingled, every body knows. The primitive and the lofty are, in the religious life of civilized men, very near together. The resulting entangle ments furnish endlessly numerous problems for the religious life. For in all the higher faiths those who emphasize the inner life make much of faith as a personal disposition. And this emphasis, contending as it does with the more primitive and simple- minded tendency to lay stress upon the primacy of religious practice, has often led to revolt against existing formalism, against ritual requirements, and so to reforms, to heresies, to sects, or to new world religions. Christianity itself, viewed as a world religion, was the outgrowth of an emphasis upon a certain faith, to which its new practices were to be, and were, secondary. On the other hand, the appeal that every religion makes to the masses of mankind is most readily interpreted in terms of prac tice. Thus the baptism of a whole tribe or nation, at the com mand of their chief, has been sometimes accounted conversion. A formal profession of a creed in such cases has indeed become an essential part of the requirements of the religion in question. But this profession itself can be regarded, and often is regarded by whole masses of the people concerned, as a ceremony to be performed obediently, and no doubt willingly, rather than as an expression of any highly conscious inner conviction. In conse quence, an individual worshipper may come to repeat the creed as a more or less magic charm, to ward off the demons who are known not to like to hear it; or, again, the individual may rise and say the creed simply because the whole congregation at a certain point of the service has to do so. 410 JOSIAH ROYCE In particular, since the creeds of the higher faiths relate to what are regarded as mysteries, while the creed must be repeated by all the faithful, the required belief in the creed is often not understood to imply any clear or wise or even intelligent ideas about what the creed really intends to teach. Even in empha sizing belief, then, one may thus interpret it mainly in terms of a willing obedience. The savage converted to the Roman Catholic Church is indeed taught not only to obey, but to profess belief, and as far as possible to get some sort of genuine inner belief. But he is regularly told that for his imperfect stage of insight it is enough if he is fully ready to say, "I believe what the church believes, both as far as I understand what the church believes and also as far as I do not understand what the church believes." And it is in this spirit that he must repeat the creed of the church. But his ideas about God and the world may meanwhile be as crude as his ignorance determines. He is still viewed as a Chris tian, if he is minded to accept the God of the church of the Christians, even though he still thinks of God as sometimes a visible and "magnified and non-natural * man, a corporeal pres ence sitting in the heavens, while the scholastic theologian who has converted him thinks of God as wholly incorporeal, as not situated in loco at all, as not even existent in time, but only in eternity, and as spiritual substance, whose nature, whose per fection, whose omniscience, and so on, are the topics of most elaborate definition. Thus, even when faith in a creed becomes an essential part of the requirements of a religion, one often meets, upon a much higher level, that primacy of the practical over the theoretical side of religion which the child s prayers, and the transplanted festivals, and the conceivable religion of the pigeons illustrate. The faithful convert and his scholastic teacher agree much more in religious practices than in conscious religious ideas. Meanwhile this very situation itself is regarded by all con cerned as by no means satisfactory. And those followers of the higher faiths who take the inner life more seriously are never content with this acceptance of what seems to them merely external formalism. For them faith, whether it is accompanied with a clear understanding or not, means something essentially interior and deep and soul-transforming. Hence they continually WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 411 insist that no one can satisfy God who does not rightly view God. And thus the conflict between the primacy of the practical and of the right faith constantly tends to assume new forms in the life of all the higher religions. The conflict concerns the question whether right practice or right belief is the more vital element in religion. Well-known formulas, constantly repeated in religious instruction, profess to solve the problem once for all. But it remains a problem whose solution, if any solution at all is reached, has to be worked out afresh in the religious experience of each individual. m Some of you, to whom one of the best-known solutions of the problem is indeed familiar enough, will no doubt have listened to this statement of the conflict between the primacy of religious practice and the primacy of religious belief with a growing impa tience. What right-minded and really pious person does not know, you will say, that there is only one way to overcome this opposition, and that is by remembering that true religion is never an affair either of mere practice, apart from inner sincerity, or of theoretically orthodox opinions, apart from other inner experiences and interests? Who does not know, you will say, that true religion is an affair of the whole man, not of deeds alone, nor of the intellect alone, but of the entire spiritual attitude, of emotion and of trust, of devotion and of motive, of con duct guided by an inner light, and of conviction due to a per sonal contact with religious truth? Who does not know that about this all the best Christian teachers, whether Catholic or Protestant, are agreed? WTio does not know that the Roman Catholic theologian who converts the savage regards his own personal salvation as due, in case he wins it, not to the theoretical accuracy of his theological formulations, but to the direct work ing of divine grace, which alone can prepare the soul for that vision of God which can never be attained by mere reasonings, but can be won only through the miraculous gift of insight pre pared for the blessed in heaven? Who has not learned that in the opinion of enh ghtened Christians the divine grace can for this very reason be as truly present in the humble and ignorant soul of the savage convert as in that of his learned and priestly con- 412 JOSIAH ROYCE fessor? Who, then, need confound true faith with the power to formulate the mysteries of the faith, except in so far, indeed, as one trustingly accepts whatever one can understand of the teachings of the church? It is indeed, you will insist, grace that saves, and through faith. But the saving faith, you will continue, is, at least in the present life, nothing theoretical. It is itself a gift of God. And it is essentially a spiritual attitude, at once practical and such as to involve whatever grade of true knowl edge is suited to the present stage of the soul in question. Herein, as some of you will say, the most enlightened and the most pious teachers of various religions, and certainly of very various forms of Christianity, are agreed. What is vital in the highest religion is neither the mere practice as external, nor the mere opinion as an internal formulation. It is the union of the two. It is the reaction of the whole spirit in the presence of an experience of the highest realities of human life and of the universe. If any of you at this point assert this to be the solution of the problem as to what is vital in religion, if you insist that such spiritual gifts as the Pauline charity, and such emotional experi ences as those of conversion, and of the ascent of the soul to God in prayer, and such moral sincerity as is the soul of all good works, are regarded by our best teachers as the really vital ele ments in religion, you are insisting upon a solution of our problem which indeed belongs to a third, and no doubt to a very lofty phase of the religious consciousness. And it is just this third phase or level of the religious consciousness that I am to try to study in these conferences. But were such a statement in itself enough to show every one of us precisely what this vital feature of the higher religions is, and just how it can be secured by every man, and just how our modern world, with all its doubts and its problems, is related to the solution just proposed, I should indeed have no task in these lectures but to repeat the well-known formula, to apply it briefly to the case of Christian ity, and to leave the rest to your own personal experience. IV But as a fact, and as most of you know by personal experience, the well-known proposal of a solution thus stated is to most of us rather the formulation of a new problem than the end of the WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY ? 413 whole matter. If this higher unity of faith and practice, of grace and right-mindedness, of the right conduct and the clear insight of the knowledge of what is real and the feeling for the deepest values of life, if all this is indeed the goal of the highest reli gions, and if it constitutes what their best teachers regard as vital, how far are many of us at the present day from seeing our way towards adapting any such solution to our own cases ! For us, the modern world is full of suggestions of doubt regarding the articles of the traditional creeds. The moral problems of our time, full of new perplexities, confuse us with regard to what ought to be done. Our spiritual life is too complex to be any longer easily unified, or to be unified merely in the ways useful for earlier generations. Our individualism is too highly conscious to be easily won over to a mood of absorption in any one univer sal ideal. Our sciences are too complicated to make it easy for us to conceive the world either as a unity or as spiritual. The church is, for most of us, no longer one visible institution with a single authoritative constitution, but a variety of social organi zations, each with its own traditions and values. The spirit of Christianity, which even at the outset Paul found so hard to formulate and to reduce to unity, can no longer be formulated by us precisely in his terms. Hence, some of us seek for some still simpler, because more primitive, type of Christianity. But when we look behind Paul for the genuinely primitive Christian ity, we meet with further problems, one or two of which we are soon to formulate more precisely in this discussion. In brief, however vital for a religion may be its power to unify the whole man, outer and inner, practical and intellectual, ignorant and wise, emotional and critical, the situation of our time is such that this unification is no longer so presented to us by any one body of religious teaching, that we can simply accept it from tradition (since in the modern world we must both act and think as individuals for ourselves), nor that we can easily learn it from our own experience, since in these days our experience is no longer as full of the religiously inspiring elements as was the experience of the times of Jonathan Edwards, or of the Reforma tion, or of the founders of the great mediaeval religious orders, or of the early Christian church. If this unity of the spiritual life is to be reconquered, we must indeed take account of the old 414 JOSIAH ROYCE solutions, but we must give to them new forms, and adopt new ways, suited to the ideas and to the whole spirit of the modern world. Hence the proposed solution that I just rehearsed is sim ply the statement of the common programme of all the highest religions of humanity. But how to interpret this programme in terms which will make it of live and permanent meaning for the modern world, this is precisely the religious problem of to day. To sum up, then, our answer to the first of my three problems; namely, What form of faith or of practice can be called vital to any religion? I reply: In the case of any one of the more primi tive religions it is, in general, the religious practices that are the most vital features of that religion; and these practices, in gen eral, are vital in proportion as they are necessary to the social life of the tribe or nation amongst which they flourish, so that, when these vital practices die out, the nation in question either dwindles, or is conquered, or passes over into some new form of social order. Secondly, in the higher religions, because of the emphasis that they lay upon the inner life, and especially in the world religions, such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity, belief tends to become a more and more vital fea ture of the religions in question, and the beliefs such as mono theism, or the acceptance of a prophet, or of a longer or shorter formulated creed are vital to such a religion in ways and to degrees which the preachers and the missionaries, the religious wars and the sectarian conflicts of these faiths illustrate, vital in proportion as the men concerned are ready to labor or to die for these beliefs, or to impose them upon other men, or to insist that no one shall be admitted to the religious community who does not accept them. But thirdly, as soon as religious beliefs are thus emphasized as over against religious practices, the religious practices are not, thereby, in general set aside or even discouraged. On the con trary, they generally grow more numerous, and often more im posing. And consequently, in the minds of the more ignorant, or of the less earnest, of the faithful there appears throughout the life of these higher religions a constant tendency to revert to the more primitive type of religion, or else never, in fact, to rise above that type. Hence, even in the religions wherein conform- WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 415 ity is understood to imply a sincere orthodoxy, the primacy of ritual or of other practice over against faith and the inner life constantly tends to hold its own. There arises in such religions the well-known conflict of inner and outer, of faith and merely external works. This conflict remains a constant source of trans formations, of heresies, and of reforms, in all these higher reli gions, and is in fact an irrepressible conflict so long as human nature is what it is. For a great mass of the so-called faithful, it is the conformity of practice that thus remains vital. But the teachers of the religion assert that the faith is vital. And now, fourthly, the higher religions, especially as repre sented in their highest type of teachings, are deeply concerned in overcoming and in reducing to unity this conflict of formal observance with genuine faith, wherever the conflict arises. The proposed solution which is most familiar, most promising, if it can be won, and most difficult to be won, is the solution which consists in asserting and in showing, if possible, in life, that what is most vital to religion is not practice apart from faith, nor faith apart from practice, but a complete spiritual reaction of the entire man, a reaction which, if possible, shall unite a right belief in the unseen world of the faith with the inner perfection and blessedness that ought to result from the indwelling of the truth in the soul, and with that power to do good works and to conform to the external religious requirements which is to be expected from one whose soul is at peace and lives in the light. In a word, what this solution supposes to be most vital to the highest religion is the union of faith and works through a com pleted spirituality. Meanwhile, as we have also seen, just our age is especially beset with the problem: How can such a solution be any longer an object of reasonable hope, when the faiths have become un certain, the practices largely antiquated, our life and our duty so problematic, and our environment so uninspiring to our religious interests? So much, then, for the first of our three problems. v It is now our task to consider the second of our questions. How does this problem regarding what is vital to a religion appear when we turn to the special case of Christianity? 416 JOSIAH ROYCE Our review of the sorts of elements which are found vital upon the various levels of the religious consciousness will have pre pared you to look at once for what is most vital about Chris tianity upon the third and highest of the three levels that I have enumerated. It is true that in the minds of great masses of the less enlightened and less devoted population of the Christian world certain religious practices have always been regarded as constituting the most vital features of their religion. These practices are especially those which for the people in question imply the obedient acceptance of the sacraments of the church. Of course for such, faith is indeed a condition for the efficacy of the sacraments. But faith expresses itself especially through and in one s relation to these sacraments. Such emphasis upon reli gious practices is inevitable, so long as human nature is what it is. But Christianity is obviously, upon all of its higher levels, essen tially a religion of the inner life; and for all those in any body of Christians who are either more devout or more enlightened the problem of the church has always included, along with other things, the problem of finding and formulating the true faith; and such faith is, to such people, vital to their religion. In con sequence of its vast successes in conquering, after a fashion, its own regions of the world, Christianity has had to undertake upon a very large scale, and over a long series of centuries, the task of adapting itself to the needs of peoples who were in very various, and often in very primitive, conditions of culture. Hence, in formulating its faith and practice, it has had full experience of the conflict between those who in a relatively childlike and prim itive way regard religious practice as the primal evidence and expression of the possession of the true religion, and those who, on the contrary, insist primarily upon right belief and a rightly guided inner life as a necessary condition for such conduct as can be pleasing to God. Where, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, the effort to reconcile these t^vo motives has the longest traditional expression, that is, where the most elabo rate official definition of the saving faith has been deliberately joined with the most precise requirements regarding religious practice, the conflict of motives here in question has been only the more notable as a factor in the history of the church, how ever completely for an individual believer this very conflict may WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 417 appear to have been solved. In the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, in the theory of the conditions upon which their validity depends, and of their effects upon the process of salva tion, the most primitive of religious tendencies stand side by side with the loftiest spiritual interests in glaring contrast. On the one hand the doctrine of the sacraments appeals to primitive tendencies, because certain purely magical influences and incan tations are in question. The repetition of certain formulas and deeds acts as an irresistible miraculous charm. On the other hand the life of the spirit is furthered through the administration of these same sacraments by some of the deepest and most spiritual of influences, and by some of the most elevated forms of inner life which the consciousness of man has ever conceived. That there is an actual conflict of motives involved in this union of primitive magic with spiritual cultivation, the church in ques tion has repeatedly found, when the greater schisms relating to the validity or to the interpretation of her sacraments have rent the unity of her body, and when, sometimes within her own fold, the mystics have quarrelled with the formalists, and both with the modernists, of any period in which the religious life of the church was at all intense. Most of you will agree, I suppose, as to the sort of solution of such conflicts between the higher and lower aspects of Christian ity which is to be sought, in case there is to be any hope of a solution. You will probably be disposed to say: What is vital in Christianity, if Christianity is permanently to retain its vitality at all in our modern world, must be defined primarily neither in terms of mere religious practice nor yet in terms of merely intel lectual formulation, but in terms of that unity of will and intel lect that may be expressed in the spiritual disposition of the whole man. You will say, What is vital in Christianity must be, if anything, the Christian interpretation of human life, and the life lived in the light of this interpretation. Such a life, you will insist, can never be identified by its formal religious practices, however important, or even indispensable, some of you may believe this or that religious practice to be. Nor can one reduce what is vital in Christianity merely to a formulated set of opin ions, since, as the well-known word has it, the devils also believe, and tremble, and, as some of you may be disposed benevolently 418 JOSIAH ROYCE to add, the philosophers also believe, and lecture. No, you will say, the Christian life includes practices, which may need to be visible and formal; it includes beliefs, which may have to be discussed and formulated; but Christianity is, first of all, an in terpretation of life, an interpretation that is nothing if not practical, and also nothing if not guided from within by a deep spiritual interest and a genuine religious experience. So far we shall find it easy to agree regarding the principles of our inquiry. Yet, as the foregoing review of the historical con flicts of religion has shown us, we thus merely formulate our problem. We stand at the outset of what we want to do. What is that interpretation of life which is vital to Christian ity? How must a Christian undertake to solve his problem of his own personal salvation? How shall he view the problem of the salvation of mankind? What is that spiritual attitude which is essential to the Christian religion? Thus our second problem now formulates itself. VI Amongst the countless efforts to answer these questions there are two which in these discussions we especially need to face. The two answers thus proposed differ decidedly from each other. Each is capable of leading various further and more special formulations of opinion about the contents of the Christian religion. The first answer may be stated as follows : What is vital about Christianity is simply the spiritual attitude and the doctrine of Christ, as he himself taught this doctrine and this attitude in the body of his authentic sayings and parables, and as he lived all this out in his own life. All in Christianity that goes beyond this all that came to the consciousness of the church after Christ s own teaching had been uttered and finished either is simply a paraphrase, an explanation, or an application of the original doctrine of Christ, or else is not vital, is more or less unessen tial, mythical, or at the very least external. Grasp the spirit of Christ s own teaching, interpret life as he interpreted it, and live out this interpretation of life as completely as you can, imitating him and then you are in essence a Christian. Fail to compre hend the spirit of Christ, or to live out his interpretation of life, WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY ? 419 and you in so far fail to possess what is vital about Christianity. This, I say, is the first of the two answers that we must consider. It is an answer well known to most of you, and an emphasis upon this answer characterizes some of the most important religious movements of our own time. The second answer is as follows: What is vital about Chris tianity depends upon regarding the mission and the life of Christ as an organic part of a divine plan for the redemption and salva tion of man. While the doctrine of Christ, as his sayings record this doctrine, is indeed an essential part of this mission, one can not rightly understand, above all one cannot apply, the teach ings of Christ, one cannot live out the Christian interpretation of life, unless one first learns to view the person of Christ in its true relation to God, and the work of Christ as an entirely unique revelation and expression of God s will. The work of Christ, however, culminated in his death. Hence, as the historic church has always maintained, it is the cross of Christ that is the symbol of whatever is most vital about Christianity. As for the person of Christ as his life revealed it, what is vital in Chris tianity depends upon conceiving this personality in essentially superhuman terms. The prologue to the Fourth Gospel deliber ately undertakes to state what for the author of that Gospel is vital in Christianity. This prologue does so by means of the familiar doctrine of the eternal Word that was the beginning, that was with God and was God, and that in Christ was made flesh and dwelt amongst men. Abandon this doctrine, and you give up what is vital in Christianity. Moreover, the work of Christ was essential to the whole relation of his own teachings to the life of men. Human nature being what it is, the teaching that Christ s sayings record cannot enter into the genuine life of any one who has not first been transformed into a new man by means of an essentially superhuman and divine power of grace. It was the work of Christ to open the way whereby this divine grace became and still becomes efficacious. The needed trans formation of human nature, the change of life which according to Christ s sayings is necessary as a condition for entering the kingdom of heaven, this is made possible through the effects of the life and death of Christ. This life and death were events whereby man s redemption was made possible, whereby the 420 JOSIAH ROYCE atonement for sin was accomplished. In brief, what is vital to Christianity includes an acceptance of the two cardinal doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement. For only in case these doctrines are accepted is it possible to interpret life in the essen tially Christian way, and to live out this interpretation. Here are two distinct and, on the whole, opposed answers to the question, What is vital in Christianity? I hope that you will see that each of these answers is an effort to rise above the levels wherein either religious practice or intellectual belief is over emphasized. It is useless for the partisan of the Christianity of the prologue to the Fourth Gospel to accuse his modern oppo nent of a willingness to degrade Christ to the level of a mere teacher of morals, and Christianity to a mere practice of good works. It is equally useless for one who insists upon the suffi ciency of the gospel of Christ simply as Christ s recorded sayings teach it to accuse his opponent of an intention to make true religion wholly dependent upon the acceptance of certain meta physical opinions regarding the superhuman nature of Christ. No, the opposition between these two views regarding what is vital in Christianity is an opposition that appears on the highest levels of the religious consciousness. It is not that one view says : "Christ taught these and these moral doctrines, and the practice of these teachings constitutes all that is vital in Christianity." It is not that the opposing view says: "Christ was the eternal Word made flesh, and a mere belief in this fact and in the doc trine of the atoning death is the vital feature of Christianity." No, both of these two views attempt to be views upon the third level of the religious consciousness, views about the whole interpretation of the higher life, and of its relation to God and to the salvation of man. So far, neither view, as its leading defenders now hold it, can accuse the other of lapsing into those more primitive views of religion which I have summarized in the earlier part of this paper. And I have dwelt so long upon a pre liminary view of the relations between faith and practice in the history of religion, because I wanted to clear the way for a study of our problem on its genuinely highest level, so that we shall henceforth be clear of certain old and uninspiring devices of con troversy. Both parties are really trying to express what is vital in the Christian conception of life. Both view Christianity as a WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY ? 421 faith which gives sense to life, and also as a mode of life which is centred about a faith. The true dispute arises upon the highest levels. The question is simply this: Is the Gospel which Christ preached, that is, the teaching recorded in the authentic sayings and parables, intelligible, acceptable, vital, in case you take it by itself? Or, does Christianity lose its vitality in case you can not give a true sense to those doctrines of the incarnation and to the atonement which the traditional Christian world has so long held and so deeply loved? And furthermore, can you, in the light of modern insight, give any longer a reasonable sense to the traditional doctrines of the atonement and the incarnation? In other words : Is Christianity essentially a religion of redemption in the sense in which tradition defined redemption? Or is Chris tianity simply that religion of the love of God and the love of man which the sayings and the parables so richly illustrate? However much, upon its lower levels, Christianity may have used and included the motives of primitive religion, this our present question is not reducible to the terms of the relatively lower conflict between a religion of creed and a religion of prac tice. The issue now defined concerns the highest interests of religious life. In favor of the traditional view that the essence of Christianity consists, first, in the doctrine of the superhuman person and the redemptive work of Christ, and, secondly, in the interpretative life that rests upon this doctrine, stands the whole authority, such as it is, of the needs and religious experience of the church of Christian history. The church early found, or at least felt, that it could not live at all without thus interpreting the person and work of Christ. Against such an account of what is vital in Christianity stands to-day for many of us the fact that the doctrine in question seems to be, at least in the main, unknown to the historic Christ, in so far as we can learn what he taught, while both the evidence for the traditional doctrine and the interpretation of it have rested during Christian history upon reports which our whole modern view of the universe disposes many of us to regard as legendary, and upon a theology which many of us can no longer accept as literally true. Whether such objections are finally valid, we must later consider. I mention the objections here because they are 422 JOSIAH ROYCE familiar, and because in our day they lead many to turn from the tangles of tradition with a thankful joy and relief to the hopeful task of trying to study, to apply, and to live the pure Gospel of Christ as he taught it in that body of sayings which, as many insist, need no legends to make them intelligible, and no metaphysics to make them sacred. Yet, as a student of philosophy, coming in no partisan spirit, I must insist that this reduction of what is vital in Christianity to the so-called pure Gospel of Christ, as he preached it and as it is recorded in the body of the presumably authentic sayings and parables, is profoundly unsatisfactory. The main argument for doubting that this so-called pure Gospel of Christ contains the whole of what is vital in Christianity rests upon the same considerations that led the historical church to try in its own way to interpret, and hence to supplement, this gospel by reports that may have been indeed full of the legendary, by metaphysi cal ideas that may indeed have been deeply imperfect, but by a deep instinctive sense of genuine religious values which, after all, was indispensable for later humanity, a sense of religious values which was a true sense. For one thing, Christ can hardly be supposed to have regarded his most authentically reported religious sayings as containing the whole of his message, or as embodying the whole of his mission. For, if he had so viewed the matter, the Messianic tragedy in which his life work culmi nated would have been needless and unintelligible. For the rest, the doctrine that he taught is, as it stands, essentially incomplete. It is not a rounded whole. It looks beyond itself for a comple tion, which the master himself unquestionably conceived in terms of the approaching end of the world, and which the church later conceived in terms of what has become indeed vital for Christianity. As modern men, then, we stand between opposed views. Each view has to meet hostile arguments. Each can make a case in favor of its value as a statement of the essence of Christianity. On the one hand the Christ of the historically authentic sayings, whose gospel is, after all, not to be understood except as part of a much vaster religious process; on the other hand the Christ of legend, whom it is impossible for us modern men longer to conceive as the former ages of the church often conceived him. WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 423 Can we choose between the two? Which stands for what is vital in Christianity? And, if we succeed in defining this vital element, whatcan it mean to us to-day, and in the light of our modern world? Thus we have defined our problems. Our next task is to face them as openly, as truthfully, and as carefully as our opportunity permits. vn Let us, then, briefly consider the first of the two views which have been set over against one another. The teachings of Christ which are preserved to us do indeed form a body of doctrine that one can survey and study without forming any final opinion about the historical character of the narratives with which these teachings are accompanied in the three Synoptic Gospels. The early church preserved the sayings, recorded them, no doubt, in various forms, but learned to regard one or two of the bodies of recorded sayings as especially impor tant and authentic. The documents in which these earliest rec ords were contained are lost to us; but our gospels, especially those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, preserve the earlier tradi tion in a way that can be tested by the agreements in the reported sayings as they appear in the different gospels. It is of course true that some of the authentic teachings of Christ concern mat ters in regard to which other teachers of his own people had already reached insights that tended towards his own. But no body can doubt that the sayings, taken as a whole, embody a new and profoundly individual teaching, and are what they pre tend to be; namely, at least a partial presentation of an interpre tation of life, an interpretation that was deliberately intended by the teacher to revolutionize the hearts and lives of those to whom the sayings were addressed. Since a recorded doctrine, simply taken in itself, and apart from any narrative, is an un questionable fact, and since a new and individual doctrine is a fact that can be explained only as the work of a person, it is plain that, whatever you think of the narrative portions of the gospels, your estimate of Christ s reported teachings may be freed at once from any of the perplexities that perhaps beset you as to how much you can find out about his life. So much at 424 JOSIAH ROYCE least he was; namely, the teacher of this doctrine. As to his life, it is indeed important to know that he taught the doctrine as one who fully meant it; that while he taught it he so lived it out as to win the entire confidence of those who were nearest to him; that he was ready to die for it, and for whatever else he believed to be the cause that he served; and that when the time came he did die for his cause. So much of the gospel narrative is with all reasonable certainty to be regarded as historical. So far, then, one has to regard the teaching of Christ as a perfectly definite object for historical study and personal imita tion, and as, in its main outlines, an accessible tradition. It is impossible to be sure of our tradition as regards each individual saying. But the main body of the doctrine stands before us as a connected whole, and it is in its wholeness that we are interested in comprehending its meaning. Now there is also no doubt, I have said, that this doctrine is intended as at least a part of an interpretation of life. For the explicit purpose of the teacher is to transform the inner life of his hearers, and thus to bring about, through this transformation, a reform of their individual outer life. It is, furthermore, sure that, while the teaching in question includes a moral ideal, it is no merely moral teaching, but is full of a profoundly religious interest. For the transformation of the inner life which is in question lias to do with the whole relation of the individual man to God. And there are especially two main theses of the teacher which do indeed explicitly relate to the realm of the superhuman and divine world, and which therefore do concern what we may call religious metaphysics. That is, these theses are assertions about a reality that does not belong to the physical realm, and that is not confined to the realities which we contemplate when we consider merely ethical truth as such. The first of these religious theses relates to the nature of God. It is usually sum marized as the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. In its fuller statement it involves that account of the divine love for the individual man which is so characteristic and repeated a feature of the authentic sayings. The other thesis is what we now call judgment of value. It is the assertion of the infinite worth of each individual person, an assertion richly illustrated in the parables, and used as the basis of the ethical teaching of Christ, WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 425 since the value that God sets upon your brother is the deepest reason assigned to show why your own life should be one of love towards your brother. VIII So much for the barest suggestion of a teaching which you all know, and which I have not here further to expound. Our pres ent question is simply this: Is this the whole of what is vital to Christianity? Or is there something vital which is not contained in these recorded sayings, so far as they relate to the matters just summarily mentioned? The answer to this question is suggested by certain very well- known facts. First, these sayings are, in the master s mind, only part of a programme which, as the event showed, related not only to the individual soul and its salvation, but to the reform of the whole existing and visible social order. Or, expressed in our modern terms, the teacher contemplated a social revolution, as well as the before-mentioned universal religious reformation of each individual life. He was led, at least towards the end of his career, to interpret his mission as that of the Messiah of his people. That the coming social revolution was conceived by him in divine and miraculous terms, that it was to be com pleted by the final judgment of all men, that the coming king dom was to be not of this world, in the sense in which the Roman Empire was of this world, but was to rest upon the directly visible triumph of God s will through the miraculous appearance of the chosen messenger who should execute this will, all this regarding the conception which was in Christ s mind seems clear. But, however the coming revolution was con ceived, it was to be a violent and supernatural revolution of the external social order, and it was to appear openly to all men upon earth. The meek, the poor, were to inherit the earth; the mighty were to be cast down; the kingdoms of this world were to pass away; and the divine sovereignty was to take its visible place as the controller of all things. Now it is no part of my present task to endeavor to state any theory as to why the master viewed his kingdom of heaven, in part at least, in this way. You may interpret the doctrine as the church has for ages done, as a doctrine relating to the far-off 426 JOSIAH ROYCE future end of all human affairs and to the supernatural mission of Christ as both Savior and Judge of the world; or you may view the revolutionary purposes of the master as I myself actually do, simply as his personal interpretation of the Messianic tradi tions of his people and of the social needs of his time and of the then common but mistaken expectation of the near end of the world. In any case, if this doctrine, however brought about or interpreted, was for the master a vital part of his teaching, then you have to view the resulting interpretation of life accordingly. I need not say, however, that whoever to-day can still find a place for the Messianic hopes and for the doctrine of the last judgment in his own interpretation of Christianity has once for all made up his mind to regard a doctrine, and a deeply problematic doctrine, a profoundly metaphysical doctrine about the person and work of Christ, and about the divine plan for the salvation of man, as a vital part of his own Chris tianity. And now, in this same connection, we can point out that, if the whole doctrine of Christ had indeed consisted for him in re garding the coming of the kingdom of heaven as identical with the inner transformation of each man by the spirit of divine love, then that direct and open opposition to the existing social authorities of his people which led to the Messianic tragedy would have been for the master simply needless. Christ chose this plan of open and social opposition for reasons of his own. We may interpret these reasons as the historical church has done, or we may view the matter otherwise, as I myself do. In any case, Christ s view of what was vital in Christianity cer tainly included, but also just as certainly went beyond, the mere preaching of the kingdom of heaven that is within you. But one may still say, as many say who want to return to a purely primitive Christianity: Can we not choose to regard the religious doctrine of the parables and of the sayings, apart from the Messianic hopes and the anticipated social revolution, as for us vital and sufficient? Can we not decline to attempt to solve the Messianic mystery? Is it not for us enough to know simply that the master did indeed die for his faith, leaving his doctrine concerning the spiritual kingdom, concerning God the Father, and concerning man the beloved brother, as his final WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 427 legacy to future generations? This legacy was of permanent value. Is it not enough for us? I reply: To think thus is obviously to view Christ s doctrine as he himself did not view it. He certainly meant the kingdom of heaven to include the inner transformation of each soul by the divine love. But he also certainly conceived even this spiritual transformation in terms of some sort of Messianic mission, which was related to a miraculous coming transformation of human society. In the service of this Messianic social cause he died. And now even in Christ s interpretation of the inner and spiritual life of the individual man there are aspects which you cannot understand unless you view them in the light of the Messianic expectation. I refer to the master s doctrine upon that side of it which emphasizes the passive nonresistance of the individual man, in waiting for God s judgment. This side of Christ s doctrine has been frequently interpreted as requiring an extreme form of self-abnegation. It is this aspect of the doc trine which glorifies poverty as in itself an important aid to piety. In this sense, too, the master sometimes counsels a certain indifference to ordinary human social relations. In this same spirit his sayings so frequently illustrate the spirit of love by the mention of acts that involve the merely immediate relief of suffering, rather than by dwelling upon those more difficult and often more laborious forms of love, which his own life indeed exemplified, and which take the form of the lifelong service of a superpersonal social cause. I would not for a moment wish to overemphasize the mean ing of these negative and ascetic aspects of the sayings. Christ s ethical doctrine was unquestionably as much a positive individu alism as it was a doctrine of love. It was also as genuinely a stern doctrine as it was a humane one. Nobody understands it who reduces it to mere self-abnegation, or to nonresistance, or to any form of merely sentimental amiability. Nevertheless, as it was taught, it included sayings and illustrations which have often been interpreted in the sense of pure asceticism, in the sense of simple nonresistance, in the sense of an unworldliness that seems opposed to the establishment and the prizing of definite humani ties, yes, even in the sense of an anarchical contempt for the forms of any present worldly social order. In brief, the doctrine 428 JOSIAH ROYCE contains a deep and paradoxical opposition between its central assertion of the infinite value of love and of every individual human soul, on the one hand, and those of its special teachings, on the other hand, which seem to express a negative attitude towards all our natural efforts to assert and to sustain the values of life by means of definite social cooperation, such as we men can by ourselves devise. Now the solution of this paradox seems plain when we remember the abnormal social conditions of those whom Christ was teaching, and interpret his message in the light of his Messianic social mission with its coming miraculous change of all human relations. But in that case an important part of the sayings must be viewed as possessing a meaning which is simply relative to the place, to the people, to the time, and to those Messianic hopes of an early end of the existing social order, hopes which we know to have been mistakenly cherished by the early church. I conclude, then, so far, that a simple return to a purely primi tive Christianity as a body of doctrine complete in itself, directly and fully expressed in the sayings of Christ, and applicable, without notable supplement, to all times, and to our own day, is an incomplete and therefore inadequate religious ideal. The spiritual kingdom of heaven, the transformation of the inner life which the sayings teach, is indeed a genuine part, yes, a vital part, of Christianity. But it is by no means the whole of what is vital to Christianity. IX I turn to the second of the answers to our main question. According to this answer, Christianity is a redemptive religion. What is most vital to Christianity is contained in whatever is essential and permanent about the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement. Now this is the answer which, as you will by this time see, I myself regard as capable of an interpreta tion that will turn it into a correct answer to our question. In answering thus, I do not for a moment call in question the just- mentioned fact that the original teaching of the master regarding the kingdom of heaven is indeed a vital part of the whole of Christianity. But I do assert that this so-called purely primitive Christianity is not so vital, is not so central, is not so essential to WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY ? 429 mature Christianity as are the doctrines of the incarnation and the atonement when these are rightly interpreted. In the light of these doctrines alone can the work of the master be seen in its most genuine significance. Yet, as has been already pointed out, the literal acceptance of this answer to our question, as many still interpret the answer, seems to be beset by serious difficulties. These difficulties are now easily summarized. The historical Christ of the sayings and the parables, little as we certainly know regarding his life, is still a definite and, in the main, an accessible object of study and of interpretation, just because, whatever else he was, he was the teacher of this recorded interpretation of life, whether or not you regard that recorded interpretation as a fully com plete and rounded whole. But the Christ whom the traditional doctrines of the atonement and of the incarnation present to us appears in the minds of most of us as the Christ of the legends of the early church, a being whose nature and whose reported supernatural mission seem to be involved in doubtful mysteries mysteries both theological and historical. Now I am not here to tell you in detail why the modern mind has come to be un willing to accept, as literal reports of historical facts, certain well-known legends. I am not here to discuss that unwillingness upon its merits. It is enough for my present purpose to say first that the unwillingness exists, and, secondly, that, as a fact, I my self believe it to be a perfectly reasonable unwillingness. But I say this not at all because I suppose that modern insight has driven out of the reasonable world the reality of spiritual truth. The world of history is indeed a world full of the doubtful. And the whole world of phenomena in which you and I daily move about is a realm of mysteries. Nature and man, as we daily know them, and also daily misunderstand them, are not what they seem to us to be. The world of our usual human experience is but a beggarly fragment of the truth, and, if we take too seri ously the bits of wisdom that it enables us to collect by the observation of special facts and of natural laws, it becomes a sort of curtain to hide from us the genuine realm of spiritual realities in the midst of which we all the while live. Moreover, it is one office of all higher religion to supplement these our frag ments of experience and ordinary notions of the natural order 430 JOSIAH ROYCE by a truer, if still imperfect, interpretation of the spiritual reali ties that are beyond our present vision. That is, it is the business of religion to lift, however little, the curtain, to inspire us, not by mere dreams of ideal life, but by enlightening glimpses of the genuine truth which, if we were perfect, we should indeed see, not, as now, through a glass darkly, but face to face. All this I hold to be true. And yet I fully share the modern unwillingness to accept legends as literally true. For it is not by first repeating the tale of mere marvels, of miracles, by dwell ing upon legends, and then by taking the accounts in question as literally true historical reports, it is not thus that we at present, in our modern life, can best help ourselves to find our way to the higher world. These miraculous reports are best understood when we indeed first dwell upon them lovingly and meditatively, but thereupon learn to view them as symbols, as the products of the deep and endlessly instructive religious imagination, and thereby learn to interpret the actually definite, and to my mind unquestionably superhuman and eter nal, truth that these legends express, but express by figures, in the form of a parable, an image, a narrative, a tale of some special happening. The tale is not literally true. But its deeper meaning may be absolutely true. In brief, I accept the opinion that it is the office of religion to interpret truths which are in themselves perfectly definite, eternal, and literal, but to inter pret them to us by means of a symbolism which is the product of the constructive imagination of the great ages in which the reli gions which first voiced these truths grew up. There are some truths which our complicated natures best reach first through instinct and intuition, through parable and legend. Only when we have first reached them in this way, can most of us learn to introduce the practical and indeed saving application of these truths into our lives by living out the spirit of these parables. But then at last we may also hope, in the fulness of our own time, to comprehend these truths by a clearer insight into the nature of that eternal world which is indeed about and above us all, and which is the true source of our common life and light. I am of course saying all this not as one having authority. I am simply indicating how students of philosophy who are of the type that I follow are accustomed to view these things. In this WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 431 spirit I will now ask you to look for a moment at the doctrines of the incarnation and of the atonement in some of their deeper aspects. It is a gain thus to view the doctrines, whether or no you accept literally the well-known miraculous tale. There has always existed in the Christian church a tradition tending to emphasize the conception that the supernatural work of Christ, which the church conceived in the form of the doc trines of the incarnation and the atonement, was not a work accomplished once for all at a certain historical point of time, but remains somehow an abiding work; or, perhaps, that it ought to be viewed as a timeless fact, which never merely happened, but which is such as to determine anew in every age the relation of the faithful to God. Of course, the church has often con demned as heretical one or another form of these opinions. Nev ertheless, such opinions have in fact entered into the formation of the official dogmas. An instance is the influence that such an in terpretation had upon the historic doctrine of the Mass and of the real presence, a doctrine which, as I have suggested, combines in one some of the most primitive of religious motives with some of the deepest religious ideas that men have ever possessed. In other less official forms, in forms which frequently approached, or crossed, the boundaries of technical heresy, some of the medi- seval mystics, fully believing in their own view of their faith, and innocent of any modern doubts about miracles, were accustomed in their tracts and sermons always and directly to interpret every part of the gospel narrative, including the miracles, as the ex pression of a vast and timeless whole of spiritual facts, whereof the narratives are merely symbols. In the sermons of Meister Eckhart, the great early German mystic, this way of preaching Christian doctrine is a regular part of his appeal to the people. I am myself in my philosophy no mystic, but I often wish that in our own days there were more who preached what is indeed vital in Christianity in somewhat the fashion of Eckhart. Let me venture upon one or two examples. Eckhart begins as follows a sermon on the text, "Who is he that is born king of the Jews" (Matthew n, ) : "Mark you," he says, "mark you concerning this birth, where it takes place. I say, as I have often said: This eternal birth takes place in the soul, and takes place there precisely as it takes place in the ,432 JOSIAH ROYCE eternal world, no more, no less. This birth happens in the essence, in the very foundation, of the soul." "All other crea tures," he continues, "are God s footstool. But the soul is his image. This image must be adorned and fulfilled through this birth of God in the soul." The birth, the incarnation, of God occurs then, so Eckhart continues, in every soul, and eternally. But, as he hereupon asks : Is not this then also true of sinners, if this incarnation of God is thus everlasting and universal? Wherein lies then the difference between saint and sinner? What special advantage has the Christian from this doctrine of the incarnation? Eckhart instantly answers: Sin is simply due to the blindness of the soul to the eternal presence of the incarnate God. And that is what is meant by the passage: "The light shin- eth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Or again, Eckhart expounds in a sermon the statement that Christ came "in the fulness of time"; that is, as people usually and literally interpret the matter, Christ came when the human race was historically prepared for his coming. But Eckhart is careless concerning this historical and literal interpretation of the passage in question, although he doubtless also believes it. For him the true meaning of the passage is wholly spiritual. WTien, he asks in substance, is the day fulfilled? At the end of the day. When is a task fulfilled? When the task is over. When, therefore, is the fulness of time reached? Whenever a man is in his soul ready to be done with time; that is, when in contempla tion he dwells only upon and in the eternal. Then alone, when the soul forgets time, and dwells upon God who is above time, then, and then only, does Christ really come. For Christ s com ing means simply our becoming aware of what Eckhart calls the eternal birth ; that is, the eternal relation of the real soul to the real God. It is hard, in our times, to get any sort of hearing for such really deeper interpretations of what is indeed vital in Chris tianity. A charming, but essentially trivial, religious psychology to-day invites some of us to view religious experience simply as a chance play-at-hide-and-seek with certain so-called subliminal mental forces and processes, whose crudely capricious crises and catastrophes shall have expressed themselves in that feverish agitation that some take to be the essence of all. Meanwhile WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 433 there are those who to-day try to keep religion alive mainly as a more or less medicinal influence, a sort of disinfectant or anodyne, that may perhaps still prove its value to a doubting world by curing dyspepsia, or by removing nervous worries. Over against such modern tendencies, humane, but still, as interpretations of the true essence of religion, essentially trivial, there are those who see no hope except in holding fast by a literal accept ance of tradition. There are, finally, those who undertake the task, lofty indeed, but still, as I think, hopeless, the task of restoring what they call a purely primitive Christianity. Now I am no disciple of Eckhart; but I am sure that whatever is vital in Christianity concerns in fact the relation of the real individual human person to the real God. To the minds of the people whose religious tradition we have inherited this relation first came through the symbolic interpretation that the early church gave to the life of the master. It is this symbolic interpretation which is the historical legacy of the church. It is the genuine and eternal truth that lies behind this symbol which constitutes what is indeed vital to Christianity. I personally regard the supernatural narratives in which the church embodied its faith simply as symbols, the product indeed of no man s effort to deceive, but of the religious imagination of the great constructive age of the early church. I also hold that the truth which lies be hind these symbols is capable of a perfectly rational statement, that this statement lies in the direction which Eckhart, mistaken as he often was, has indicated to us. The truth in question is independent of the legends. It relates to eternal spiritual facts. I maintain also that those who, in various ages of the church, and in various ways, have tried to define and to insist upon what they have called the "Essential Christ," as distinguished from the historical Christ, have been nearing in various degrees the comprehension of what is vital in Christianity. What is true must be capable of expression apart from legends. What is eternally true may indeed come to our human knowl edge through any event that happens to bring the truth in question to our notice; but, once learned, this truth may be seen to be independent of the historical events, whatever they were, 434 JOSIAH ROYCE which brought about our own insight. And the truth about the incarnation and the atonement seems to me to be statable in terms which I must next briefly indicate. First, God, as our philosophy ought to conceive him, is indeed a spirit and a person; but he is not a being who exists in separa tion from the world, simply as its external creator. He expresses himself in the world; and the world is simply his own life, as he consciously lives it out. To use an inadequate figure, God ex presses himself in the world as an artist expresses himself in the poems and the characters, in the music or in the other artistic creations, that arise within the artist s consciousness and that for him and in him consciously embody his will. Or again, God is this entire world, viewed, so to speak, from above and in its wholeness as an infinitely complex life which in an endless series of temporal processes embodies a single divine idea. You can indeed distinguish, and should distinguish, between the world as our common sense, properly but fragmentarily, has to view it, and as our sciences study it, between this phenomenal world, I say, and God, who is infinitely more than any finite system of natural facts or of human lives can express. But this distinction between God and world means no separation. Our world is the fragmentary phenomenon that we see. God is the conscious meaning that expresses itself in and through the totality of all phenomena. The world, taken as a mass of happenings in time, of events, of natural processes, of single lives, is nowhere, and at no time, any complete expression of the divine will. But the entire world, of which our known world is a fragment, the totality of what is, past, present, and future, the totality of what is physical and of what is mental, of what is temporal and of what is enduring, this entire world is present at once to the eternal divine consciousness as a single whole, and this whole is what the absolute chooses as his own expression, and is what he is conscious of choosing as his own life. In this entire world God sees himself lived out. This world, when taken in its whole ness, is at once the object of the divine knowledge and the deed wherein is embodied the divine will. Like the Logos of the Fourth Gospel, this entire world is not only with God, but is God. As you see, I state this doctrine, for the moment, quite sum- WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 435 marily and dogmatically. Only an extensive and elaborate philo sophical discussion could show you why I hold this doctrine to be true. Most of you, however, have heard of some such doctrine as the theory of the Divine Immanence. Some of you are aware that such an interpretation of the nature of God constitutes what is called philosophical Idealism. I am not here defending, nor even expounding, this doctrine. I believe, however, that this is the view of the divine nature which the church has always more or less intuitively felt to be true, and has tried to express, despite the fact that my own formulation of this doctrine in cludes some features which in the course of the past history of dogma have been upon occasion formally condemned as heresy by various church authorities. But for my part I had rather be a heretic, and appreciate the vital meaning of what the church has always tried to teach, than accept this or that traditional formulation, but be unable to grasp its religiously significant spirit. Dogmatically, then, I state what, indeed, if there were time, I ought to expound and to defend on purely rational grounds. God and his world are one. And this unity is not a dead natural fact. It is the unity of a conscious life, in which, in the course of infinite time, a divine plan, an endlessly complex and yet per fectly definite spiritual idea, gets expressed in the lives of count less finite beings and yet with the unity of a single universal life. Whoever hears this doctrine stated, asks, however, at once a question, the deepest, and also the most tragic question of our present poor human existence: Why, then, if the world is the divine life embodied, is there so much evil in it, so much dark ness, ignorance, misery, disappointment, warfare, hatred, dis ease, death? in brief, why is the world as we know it full of the unreasonable? Are all these gloomy facts but illusions, bad dreams of our finite existence, facts unknown to the very God who is, and who knows, all truth? No, that cannot be the answer; for then the question would recur: Why are these our endlessly tragic illusions permitted? Why are we allowed by the world-plan to be so unreasonable as to dream these bad dreams which fill our finite life, and which in a way constitute this finite life? And that question would then be precisely equivalent to the former question, and just as hard to solve. In brief, the prob- 436 JOSIAH ROYCE lem of evil is the great problem that stands between our ordinary- finite view and experience of life on the one hand and our con sciousness of the reasonableness and the unity of the divine life on the other hand. Has this problem of evil any solution? I believe that it has a solution, and that this solution has long since been in substance grasped and figured forth in symbolic forms by the higher reli gious consciousness of our race. This solution, not abstractly stated, but intuitively grasped, has also expressed itself in the lives of the wisest and best of the moral heroes of all races and nations of men. The value of suffering, the good that is at the heart of evil, lies in the spiritual triumphs that the endurance and the overcoming of evil can bring to those who learn the hard, the deep but glorious, lesson of life. And of all the spiritual tri umphs that the presence of evil makes possible, the noblest is that which is won when a man is ready, not merely to bear the ills of fortune tranquilly if they come, as the Stoic moralists required their followers to do, but when one is willing to suffer vicariously, freely, devotedly, ills that he might have avoided, but that the cause to which he is loyal, and the errors and sins that he himself did not commit, call upon him to suffer in order that the world may be brought nearer to its destined union with the divine. In brief, as the mystics themselves often have said, sorrow wisely encountered and freely borne is one of the most precious privileges of the spiritual life. There is a certain lofty peace in triumphing over sorrow, which brings us to a con sciousness of whatever is divine in life, in a way that mere joy, untroubled and unwon, can never make known to us. Perfect through suffering, that is the universal, the absolutely neces sary law of the higher spiritual life. It is a law that holds for God and for man, for those amongst men who have already become enlightened through learning the true lessons of their own sorrows, and for those who, full of hope, still look forward to a life from which they in the main anticipate joy and worldly success, and who have yet to learn that the highest good of life is to come to them through whatever willing endurance of hardness they, as good soldiers of their chosen loyal service, shall learn to choose or to endure as their offering to their sacred cause. This doctrine that I now state to you is indeed no ascetic doctrine. It WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 437 does not for a moment imply that joy is a sin, or an evil symp tom. What it does assert is that as long as the joys and successes which you seek are expected and sought by you simply as good fortune, which you try to win through mere cleverness through mere technical skill in the arts of controlling fortune, so long, I say, as this is your view of life, you know neither God s purpose nor the truth about man s destiny. Our always poor and defective skill in controlling fortune is indeed a valuable part of our reasonableness, since it is the natural basis upon which a higher spiritual life may be built. Hence the word, "Young men, be strong," and the common-sense injunction, "Be skilful, be practical," are good counsel. And so health, and physical prowess, and inner cheerfulness, are indeed wisely viewed as natural foundations for a higher life. But the higher life itself begins only when your health and your strength and your skill and your good cheer appear to you merely as talents, few or many, which you propose to devote, to surrender, to the divine order, to whatever ideal cause most inspires your loyalty, and gives sense and divine dignity to your life, talents, I say, that you intend to return to your master with usury. And the work of the higher life consists, not in winning good fortune, but in transmuting all the transient values of fortune into eternal values. This you best do when you learn by experience how your worst fortune may be glorified, through wise resolve, and through the grace that comes from your conscious union with the divine, into something far better than any good fortune could give to you; namely, into a knowledge of how God himself endures evil, and triumphs over it, and lifts it out of itself, and wins it over to the service of good. The true and highest values of the spiritual world consist, I say, in the triumph over suffering, over sorrow, and over unrea sonableness ; and the triumph over these things may appear in our human lives in three forms : First, as mere personal fortitude, as the stoical virtues in their simplest expression. The stoical virtues are the most elementary stage of the higher spiritual life. Fortitude is indeed required of every conscious agent who has con trol over himself at all. And fortitude, even in this simplest form as manly and strenuous endurance, teaches you eternal values that you can never learn unless you first meet with positive ills of for- 438 JOSIAH ROYCE tune, and then force yourself to bear them in the loyal service of your cause. Willing endurance of suffering and grief is the price that you have to pay for conscious fidelity to any cause that is vast enough to be worthy of the loyalty of a lifetime. And thus no moral agent can be made perfect except through suffering borne in the service of his cause. Secondly, the triumph over suffering appears in the higher form of that conscious union with the divine plan which occurs when you learn that love, and loyalty, and the idealizing of life, and the most precious and sacred of all human relationships, are raised to their highest levels, are glori fied, only when we not merely learn in our own personal case to suffer, to sorrow, to endure, and be spiritually strong, but when we learn to do these things together with our own brethren. For the comradeship of those who willingly practice fortitude not merely as a private virtue, but as brethren in sorrow, is a deeper, a sweeter, a more blessed comradeship than ever is that of the lovers who have not yet been tried so as by fire. Then the deep est trials of life come to you and your friend together; and when, after the poor human heart has indeed endured what for the time it is able to bear of anguish, it finds its little moment of rest, and when you are able once more to clasp the dear hand that would help if it could, and to look afresh into your friend s eyes and to see there the light of love as you could never see it before, then, even in the darkness of this world, you catch some faint far-off glimpse of how the spirit may yet triumph despite all, and of why sorrow may reveal to us, as we sorrow and endure to gether, what we should never have known of life, and of love, and of each other, and of the high places of the spirit, if this cup had been permitted to pass from us. But thirdly, and best, the triumph of the spirit over suffering is revealed to us not merely when we endure, when we learn through sorrow to prize our brethren more, and when we learn to see new powers in them and even in our poor selves, powers such as only sorrow could bring to light, but when we also turn back from such experi ences to real life again, remembering that sorrow s greatest les son is the duty of offering ourselves more than ever to the prac tical service of some divine cause in this world. When one is stung to the heart and seemingly wholly overcome by the wounds of fortune, it sometimes chances that he learns after a WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 439 while to arise from his agony, with the word: "Well then, if, whether by my own fault or without it, I must descend into hell, I will remember that in this place of sorrow there are the other souls in torment, seeking light; I will help them to awake and arise. As I enter I will open the gates of hell that they may go forth." Whatever happens to me, I say, this is a possible result of sorrow. I have known those men and women who could learn such a lesson from sorrow and who could practice it. These are the ones who, coming up through great tribulation, show us the highest glimpse that we have in this life of the triumph of the spirit over sorrow. But these are the ones who are willing to suffer vicariously, to give their lives as a ransom for many. These tell us what atonement means. Well, these are, after all, but glimpses of truth. But they show us why the same law holds for all the highest spiritual life. They show us that God too must sorrow in order that he may triumph. Now the true doctrine of the incarnation and of the atonement is, in its essence, simply the conception of God s nature which this solution of the problem of evil requires. First, God expresses himself in this world of finitude, incarnates himself in this realm of human imperfection, but does so in order that through finitude and imperfection, and sorrow and temporal loss, he may win in the eternal world (that is, precisely, in the conscious unity of his whole life) his spiritual triumph over evil. In this triumph con sists his highest good, and ours. It is God s true and eternal triumph that speaks to us through the well-known word: "In this world ye shall have tribulation. But fear not; I have over come the world." Mark, I do not say that we, just as we natu rally are, are already the true and complete incarnation of God. No, it is in overcoming evil, in rising above our natural unreason ableness, in looking towards the divine unity, that we seek what Eckhart so well expressed when he said, Let God be born in the soul. Hence the doctrine of the incarnation is no doctrine of the natural divinity of man. It is the doctrine which teaches that the world will desires our unity with the universal purpose, that God will be born in us and through our consent, that the whole meaning of our life is that it shall transmute transient and temporal values into eternal meanings. Humanity becomes 440 JOSIAH ROYCE conscious God incarnate only in so far as humanity looks god- wards ; that is, in the direction of the whole unity of the rational spiritual life. And now, secondly, the true doctrine of the atonement seems to me simply this: We, as we temporally and transiently are, are destined to win our union with the divine only through learning to triumph over our own evil, over the griefs of fortune, over the unreasonableness and the sin that now beset us. This conquest we never accomplish alone. As the mother that bore you suffered, so the world suffers for you and through and in you until you win your peace in union with the divine will. Upon such suffering you actually depend for your natural existence, for the toleration which your imperfect self constantly demands from the world, for the help that your helplessness so often needs. When you sorrow, then, remember that God sorrows, sorrows in you, since in all your finitude you still are part of his life; sor rows for you, since it is the intent of the divine spirit, in the plan of its reasonable world, that you should not remain what you now are; and sorrows, too, in waiting for higher fulfilment, since indeed the whole universe needs your spiritual triumph for the sake of its completion. On the other hand, this doctrine of the atonement means that there is never any completed spiritual triumph over sorrow which is not accompanied with the willingness to suffer vicari ously; that is, with the will not merely to endure bravely, but to force one s very sorrow to be an aid to the common cause of all mankind, to give one s life as a ransom for one s cause, to use one s bitterest and most crushing grief as a means towards the raising of all life to the divine level. It is not enough to endure. Your duty is to make your grief a source of blessing. Thus only can sorrow bring you into conscious touch with the universal life. Now all this teaching is old. The church began to learn its own version of this solution of the problem of evil when first it sorrowed over its lost master; when first it began to say: "It was needful that Christ should suffer"; when first in vision and in legend it began to conceive its glorified Lord. When later it said, "In the God-man Christ God suffered, once for all and in the flesh, to save us; in him alone the Word became flesh and WHAT IS VITAL IN CHRISTIANITY? 441 dwelt among us," the forms of its religious imagination were transient, but the truth of which these forms were the symbol was everlasting. And we sum up this truth in two theses : First, God wins perfection through expressing himself in a finite life and triumphing over and through its very finitude. And sec ondly, Our sorrow is God s sorrow. God means to express him self by winning us through the very triumph over evil to unity with the perfect life; and therefore our fulfilment, like our exist ence, is due to the sorrow and the triumph of God himself. These two theses express, I believe, what is vital in Christianity. THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION BY BARRETT WENDELL Delivered before the Alpha of Maryland, at Johns Hopkins University, April 24, 1909. From The Mystery of Education and Other Academic Performances, by Barrett Wendell. Copyright, 1909, by Charles Scribner s Sons. OF all the honors which can come to an American man of let ters, none is more insidiously flattering than such an invitation as yours; for the sum and substance of a Phi Beta Kappa orator s message must always be the expression of his own opinion a matter generally and relentlessly assumed of interest only to himself. Invited to give it to others, his first acknowledgment of the privilege must be the expression of humble and hearty thanks to those whose goodness and loving-kindness have afforded him the opportunity. His next must be the perplexing inquiry of what range of opinion to set forth. Things in general offer an inconveniently extensive field of observation. Some corner thereof, not too highly illuminated, must evidently be sought; and if that corner chance to be habitually a lurking-ground of his hearers, as well as of his own, so much the better for everybody. This line of exploration has brought me, without much hesita tion, to a region familiar to us all. Your generous summons has called me from the eldest conservatory of education in our coun try to gladden, or sadden, a passing hour in the history of its most luxuriant seminary. I shall make no further apology for inviting your attention to some opinions of mine concerning the Mystery of Education. For education, as we know it nowadays, is indisputably a mystery, in the full, baffling sense of that fascinatingly ambigu ous word. It is the occupation, the trade if you will, the metier or mestier or ministerium, with which the waking lives of most of us are concerned; and, furthermore, there hovers about it, im palpable but certain, some such quivering atmosphere of filmy, phantasmagoric glamor as made unearthly to profane eyes the vanished and impenetrable mysteries of primal Greece. What these were, one begins to wonder; and, if one be old THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 443 enough to have experienced the obstacles to culture presented by despairingly thumbed pages of Liddell and Scott, one turns, if only from schoolboy habit, to see what they have to say about it. Mvcmjpiov is there, safe and sound; it proves to mean nothing more nor less than mystery the kind of thing immemorially practised at Eleusis, and still perhaps vital to the being of those among our fellow-citizens who enjoy describing themselves by knightly titles, and walking about in fantastically uniformed processions. But the saving grace of Liddell and Scott is an absorbing passion for getting at the roots of things, if they can. So a parenthesized reference leads us straight from Mvo-Tijpiov to M 1*77775 which fragment of musty lore turns out to signify one initiated. Even though still nowhere, we may feel, we are beginning to start on the road somewhere. A mystery clearly involves initiation; and initiation implies that, if the mystery is to persist, somebody and, in all likelihood, almost everybody - has got to be left out. Furthermore, to revert to Liddell and Scott, the very existence of the substantive MUO-TTJ? hangs on that of the verb Mueo> to initiate; and this calls to mind the obvious truth that in order to initiate anybody into anything there must always be somebody else to perform the process of initiation. What manner of somebody this may be, Liddell and Scott finally proceed to intimate. Mveo) to initiate they derive from Mvco, where they leave us; and M.VCO they define "to close, to shut; especially of the lips and eyes, to wink" Mvo> seems elemental, at least so far as Liddell and Scott go; according to them, it is derived from nothing short of the heart of nature. Wherefore, perhaps, they freely permit themselves that beauti fully imaginative pregnancy of definition. As one puts aside the exhausted volume, one can hardly help reflecting that if we keep our lips closed and solemnly wink at one another, nobody else need ever know that we do not know all about it. Some of us do, perhaps ; beyond question a good many of us talk as if we did, and write, and publish, until less confident heads begin to swim with the sad self -consciousness of compara tive ignorance. Of a few facts we can happily feel sure. This Education with a fine, big capital E is doubly a mystery: it is not only a trade or occupation, but, as I pointed out a good many years ago, it is such an object of faith in these United States 444 BARRETT WENDELL of America, and perhaps everywhere else in this twentieth cen tury of the Christian Era, that we may fairly regard it as a cult, almost as a religion. Those of us who, for better or worse, are called on, so far as may be in our power, to preserve and to guide it, are charged with an office almost priestly. Harvard is not only a conservatory nor Johns Hopkins only a seminary; both are sanctuaries. Membership of the Phi Beta Kappa conse quently has its grave side as well as its happy; for it marks one special degree of initiation into a mystery held peculiarly rever end in our own time and country. So long as reverence preserves a mystery, initiates of any degree may rest content. In any venerable mystery, however, trade or cult, one great virtue has always been difficulty of access. Those who are not admitted to its secrets, never quite sure of what the secrets are, hold them in awful respect. Even though the secrets themselves be trivial or outworn, too, the fact that whoever attains them must work vigilantly, and bear sharp scrutiny, makes the mere attainment a token of power; for the masters are thus chosen by a pitiless process of selection a process favorable to the quality of man or beast. The moment the process of selection begins to relax, though, the moment people begin to attain something which looks like initiation without arduous effort, vigorous concentration, devoted self -sac rifice, the great safeguard of any mystery begins to weaken; the mystery itself, indeed, is threatened with dissipation. Now, to my mind, this reverend mystery of ours is not at present so secure from dissipation as we are disposed comfortably to assume. A good many facts, at least, generally supposed to be tokens of its enduring strength, may certainly be presented rather in the light of something like symptoms of disease. The unprecedented extension of popular education at public expense, for example, is magnificently generous. We are proud of our free schools, primary, secondary, and technical; of our free universities, and of our philanthropic schemes for bringing academic degrees by rural delivery to the doors of laborers, and their sons and their daughters. All the same, nobody can deny that this process does a good deal to make easy what used to be hard, and thus to impair its moral value. Again, something sim ilar is true of our public library system. When to learn German THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 445 in Massachusetts a subsequently eminent scholar had to import both his text and his dictionary, he knew that they were precious tools, with which he set to work heroically and successfully. Nowadays, when everybody can have such things for nothing, people seem generally disposed to regard them only as tiresome playthings. Still again, when school books had to be bought, the children who owned them or at worst the parents of such children were reminded, if only by the demand on their pock ets, that books are, or ought to be, objects of value. In these new times, when every public school throughout our country provides free text-books as well as free instruction, the pauperi zation of learning has gone so far that you can hardly persuade well-to-do undergraduates at our older colleges to regard the expenditure of fifteen or twenty dollars a year for books they must study as anything else than an imposition on your part, impelling them on theirs to wasteful extravagance. Another and a different force at present tending to dissipate our mystery may perhaps give rise to more divergence of opinion ; but whether you welcome it or deplore it, you cannot neglect it. A century ago, education, generally confined to men, enjoyed the kind of respect which we have been accustomed, from eldest time, to associate with the conception of virility. At present the general practice of coeducation combines with the luxuriant growth of colleges, and the like, especially designed for women who mature earlier than men, and consequently listen and recite somewhat more acceptably than normal males under the age of twenty-five to produce a latent suspicion that educa tion, if not learning, may soon prove something like what a skeptical Italian once pronounced the Catholic Church to be cosa eccellente per le donne. On this point, two observations occur to me; according to divers authorities the presence of many women in any given kind of classes such as those in English literature generally drives men, for self -protection, into other fields of culture; and one reason why may perhaps be shadowed in a somewhat frivolous comment on American manners lately made by an evidently unsympathetic observer namely, that the regular feminine form of the word cad in the United States appears to be co-ed. That this pleasantry, whatever you may think of its taste, is 446 BARRETT WENDELL comprehensive, nobody would pretend. It brings instantly to mind, in contradiction, an incident said to have occurred not long ago at an American public school for girls. A skilful and devoted woman there had long maintained in her classes a high standard of instruction, attested by unflinchingly definite marks or grades. The story runs that a new superintendent disap proved her methods. If in a given class, for example, no pupil displayed anything higher than mediocrity, no grades of special commendation were returned. The superintendent directed her thereafter to give the best pupil in any class the highest mark allowed by the scale one hundred per cent, let us say and to grade the others according to this fortuitous standard. The process he is understood to have believed encouraging to the unfortunate or the stupid. The teacher declined to obey him, conscientiously holding that a high grade ought to certify high scholarship. For this insubordination she was presently re moved to a position of less dignity. In other words, she was severely disciplined for an attempt to maintain a definite stand ard of attainment. As a natural consequence, the reports of her successor indicated a gratifying improvement in the quality of pupils at the school in question, which made almost everybody happier; and, as the good woman with unpractical ideals hap pened to die within the year, no harm has ensued to anybody or anything except this reverend mystery of ours. The benevolent lowering of standard has perhaps done something toward a local dissipation of its glamor. Now whether such matters as these seem portentous of better days to come, or of worse, we can hardly deny that they concern us, so far as we are priests of the cult of education or initiates of its mystery. Very likely the mystery had grown too dense some manner of dissipation may doubtless be good for it. We are bound to acknowledge, however, that a considerable process of dissipation is now going on, and therefore that we cannot pru dently rely much longer on the old formulas and rituals. Taking things at their very best, we cannot much longer rest assured that those who penetrate to our secrets must do so by an ardu ously selective process, and that those who linger outside will justly feel the courageous dignity of whoever finally wins his right to place therein. We have not lost our basic faith; we are THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 447 beginning to perceive, however, that if our faith is to be sus tained, we must understand it, and exemplify it, and assert it otherwise than in the past. For one fact, I believe, we must candidly admit. At this mo ment more thought is given to education, more effort devoted to it, more expense lavished on it of time and of energy as well as of unstinted gift, public and private than ever before. Yet there is room for doubt whether the practical result of it has ever been much less palpable. There are moods, indeed, when some of us must fall to wondering whether educational processes were ever before so indefinite in purpose, or quite so ineffectual. This brings us to the question of what we mean by education. Without attempting precise definition, which might involve end less dispute, we may, perhaps, agree on two or three common places, sufficient for our purpose. Man, to begin with, whether you take the word to mean the individual or the species, has the misfortune to be conscious. Sooner or later his consciousness makes him aware that, at least as he knows himself by any process as yet developed or devised, he is a thing surrounded by other things, or by something else. A convenient name for this inconvenient circumstance is environment. Some of it, like his clothes, his friends, and his enemies, is close at hand; some, like the Antarctic Pole, or the Moon, or the planets, or the stars, or space unfathomable and time without end, is vanishingly remote. There it is, however, everywhere about him, perceived and un- perceived, inextricably intermingled, various, indefinite, infinite if you will, yet, so far as it surrounds man, a unit, in that it is not himself. Now that innocent little adverb not implies one aspect of man s environment, from his point of view important. Whatever else not stirs in your mind, it cannot help reminding you of the un comfortable fact that there is such a thing as contradiction. Environment, on the whole, contradicts man with a persistence sure at last to be fatal; for he generally suffers a good deal, and by and by he dies. Meanwhile, as we have seen, he is conscious; and his consciousness manifests itself in thought, in speech, in work, in play, in behavior. Thus he himself is part of the environ ment of the generations which have kindled to consciousness and faded into ashes before him, and of those destined to do so when 448 BARRETT WENDELL his own little flame has flickered out. He is a torch-bearer, if you like the pretty old metaphor, carrying the gleam of life through the darkness of environment which must forever enshroud the instant concentrated in his allotted term of years. The better he carries his torch, the less flickering the light thereof, the happier he, the happier those to come, and the more content we may fancy the vanished fathers who have confided it to his passing care. Metaphor is perhaps leading us astray. Without its aid, the while, we might hardly have understood so well as now what we mean by believing that man is at his best when best adjusted to his environment; and that the best means we know of helping him toward adjustment is our reverend mystery of education. All of which, together with its vagueness, has a comfortable sound of precision. If we are at all right, the problem of educa tion begins to look refreshingly simple. Ascertain what environ ment is, and what man is. State the consequent formula of adjustment in approximate terms; we all admit that ultimate exactitude is beyond human power, but that we can practically get along without it. And there we are. We can hand over the formula to those who, even if slow to discover it, can probably use it as well as we. Thereupon we may devote our own energies to higher things. When we begin to scrutinize environment, however, it turns out to be disconcertingly elusive. Take it scientifically, if you will: astronomy reveals to us a universe where everything is on the way from somewhere to somewhere else; so does geology; so does biology; so do history, and economics, and sociology, and physics, and chemistry. The fact is certain; the process is observable everywhere, in various phases, some of them un pleasantly explosive. These occasional explosions, particularly when they take place in the immediate neighborhood of man, excite alert desire to know what they mean. In certain details, such as the arrangement of electric wires in the turrets of war ships, we can find out, and do something to mend matters; but generally we can only recognize things which blow us up as manifestations of a fact which, for want of a better term, we are apt nowadays to describe as force. Nobody knows what it is; nobody knows why it exists; nobody knows whence it comes, or whither it goes; yet nobody can help admitting, the while, that THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 449 every atom of human environment embodies it, more or less active or latent. In a single word, we can find no better defini tion of environment than by declaring it to be force. Which may not seem to help us much until we remind ourselves that thereby we assert it to be something never fixed, never at rest, always instinct with the protean movement of life. Of all the manifestations of force which consciously affect man, none are more instantly palpable than such as involve his control over the animate, and still more the inanimate, condi tions of nature. When he learned to tame domestic animals, for example, his relation to environment manifestly changed; so, still more, it was changed by his discovery that he could subject to his use what he so long deluded himself by supposing to be the element of fire. The very terms by which we still describe remote ages of social development the Age of Stone, the Age of Bronze, and so on remind us of the old changes of environing force which demanded new adjustments to meet their unprece dented conditions. By the time when man began to record himself, he was ap proaching what we call civilization, of which, in ultimate sim plicity, the chief conditions seem to have been mastery of fire, of metal, of wheels, and of sails. The Egyptians had these, and the Homeric heroes; the Romans had little else; and until the Nineteenth Century there was not much else anywhere, except gunpowder and printing presses. Even under these fairly simple conditions, adjustment to environment was no child s play. Study thereof, and of its various misadventures, remains the chief occupation of traditional scholarship everywhere. In con sequence, I remember few more pregnant hours than I passed, some dozen years ago, at the feet of a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa orator who pointed out that the Nineteenth Century with its final mastery of steam and electricity was really the begin ning of a new ethnological epoch, as different from any of the earlier periods as that of metals was from that of chipped flints. The fact seems to me undeniable. Environment is now pressing on us under new conditions and at an unprecedented rate. It would have been comfortable to follow the Harvard orator not only in his assertions but in his conclusions. Some of his hearers, however, seemed indisposed to agree without reserve that every- 450 BARRETT WENDELL thing would always be all right if everybody should devote all his energy to the science or the art of engineering. Environment nowadays and, so far as any one now on earth is concerned, henceforth proves to be not only force, but force in all the complexity of unprecedented epochal condi tions, which nobody can pretend to understand. The only cer tain fact about it, at least to my thinking, is that on which I touched a moment ago. Throughout our lifetimes the rate at which it has moved has been swiftly accelerating. Think of any thing you like as it was in the year 1900; or, better still, turn to what you wrote about any conditions surrounding you ten years ago. You may count yourself a prophet if you find your experi ence much other than that of a friend of mine who lately read over some observations on contemporary England set down, to the best of his ability, in the last year of the Nineteenth Century. He found hardly a word to alter, he said; only, with old-age pen sions grinning in his face, and Mr. Lloyd George s Budget voted to meet them, the essay impressed him as a document from times as remote as those of the Tudors or the Plantagenets. Ten years hence, one may venture to guess, the conditions of to-day may well seem prehistoric. It is to nothing less than this environment of indefinitely accelerating force that modern education attempts to adjust man. This first term of our problem thus proves rather less manage able than it sounded. Contenting ourselves, however, with humble recognition that environment is accelerating force, we may now go on to consider what man is, whom we have got somehow to try to adjust to it. He is conscious, beyond question; and he has paid himself the compliment of describing his con sciousness by the somewhat hyperbolic name of intelligence. We may grant, indeed, that whether he can really understand anything or not, he will always suppose that he can. Intelligent, therefore, we will call him for our momentary purpose of defini tion. Even more clearly, he is at once the product of certain natural forces such as ancestors and history and himself a source of similar natural forces, more or less destined to affect other people. He can beget children, preach sermons, make works of art, or trouble, or mistakes. In other words, he can somehow accumulate force from his environment, and somehow THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 451 radiate it thereto. For our purposes, I believe, we may best accordingly consider him as an intelligent focus of force. That metaphorical definition has the baffling fault of imma teriality; unless I am quite mistaken, a focus is only a point, with neither length, breadth, nor thickness to disturb its ethe real purity. To think any further, we need something a little more substantial. We may liken man, therefore, not to a focus pure and simple, but to the focal instrument most familiar to our everyday habits of mind namely, a lens, such as gathers, and concentrates or disperses, rays of light. His relation to the force which he collects and radiates is something like that of an object-glass or of a burning-glass to the phase of force which we now figure to ourselves in the guise of light-waves or heat-waves. The most important error in our simile is that man, as we con ceive him, differs from a piece of glass or crystal in the matter of intelligence. However erroneous our notion may be proved by the sympathetically accelerated intelligence of times to come, we cannot yet habitually imagine the lens of commerce as flexibly and consciously sensitive, or as ever troubled with desire to know what it is about. Man, considered as a focal lens of force, on the other hand, is so troubled all the time, inevitably and rightly. Rightly, I say, because we shall hardly disagree that if his intelli gence languish, he will neither gather nor radiate force with any but accidental effect, and yet that if his intelligence grow exces sive it will somehow cloiid or paralyze his focal powers. He has never yet been at his ideal best; doubtless to use a favorite phrase of old Increase Mather he never will be until the second coming of Our Lord. He is nearest his ideal best when his intelligence and his focal powers, cumulative and radiatory alike, are most nearly balanced. To illustrate what I have in mind, we may perhaps turn to a few examples of it. Somewhere in the work of John Stuart Mill, if I remember rightly, he points out the indisputable truth that, so far as man is concerned with material things, human activity may be reduced to the power of taking something from some where and putting it somewhere else. If, with this principle in mind, we turn our attention to a fine art, such as cookery or architecture, we shall soon come to agree that the best artists the best cooks or the best architects are those who best know 452 BARRETT WENDELL what to take and where to put it, and who are not troubled by hesitant indecision in the process. Eggs or spices, stone or wood or metal, lie ready at hand; so do fire and machines, ovens and engines and derricks. ^Eons of experiment have proved what can be done with them. Here are a few of the countless rays of force ready for concentration in the little human focus prepared to gather them. Let him use intelligence enough to gather them selectively, and half his work is done; if, meanwhile, his intelli gence has served him to gather among them rays which the next man would have neglected, his half-done work is done in the manner sometimes called original and sometimes great. If he is really to achieve anything, the while, let alone origi nality or greatness, the other half of his focal task must be per formed as well; he must put these ingredients or materials, which he has taken from somewhere, in the precise somewhere else where his intelligence leads him to suppose that they most happily belong. He must concentrate or radiate them into his own sauce, or his own cathedral. If he do this right, he has made them a new centre of force bodily or spiritual, or both. Others than he will eat and give thanks, or kneel in adoration, and otherwise do their own focal work the better for his. If he do his work amiss, however, the sauce will be unsavory, the cathedral unstable or ugly, both useless, or at best short of the usefulness which might have been theirs. In such regrettable event, when you come to consider why things have gone wrong, you will gen erally find that it is either because he has gathered his material stupidly, or has used it stupidly, or has stopped to think how not to be stupid until he has unwittingly become more impotent than if he had not stopped to think at all. In other words, his intelligence and his focal powers have got out of balance. Or take a more subtle instance, or at least a more complicated. Man, we all know, is a political animal; and nowadays he is here abouts rather disquietingly active in this aspect. A good deal of our public conduct must turn on majority votes, cast for im mensely various reasons, of self-interest, of patriotic or moral principle, of prejudice or invincible ignorance, of carelessness or of what presents itself to the voters in the light of intelligence. As American citizens, men alone or collected are tremen dously focal centres of force. On what they think, or on what THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 453 they think that they think, about sundry matters must depend what they do, or at least what they try to do, about them. On what they really do, purposely or not, must considerably depend our national welfare. At this moment, for example, certain general questions are in the air. Without venturing even to suggest answers, I shall ask you to agree that we shall hardly waste the little time demanded for reminding ourselves of the kind of political force at present environing us. Every one admits nowadays, as a general prin ciple, that special privilege is objectionable; yet protected indus tries are honestly demanding what seems like special privilege to many of our citizens; and, with equal honesty, labor unions are demanding what seems equally like it to some others. Again, a generally admitted principle asserts that direct taxation should fall proportionately on everybody, so that everybody may be aware of just what degree of legal imposition he is called on to bear. If there be an exception to this principle, it is that those who impose a direct tax should be willing to bear at least their full share of it; otherwise you have what has generally been called confiscation, to greater or less degree. Yet not only pop ular prejudice but the utterances of eminent statesmen and of far from radical newspapers are vigorously informing us that a graduated tax on inheritances and incomes a tax which com pletely spares the majority, who are poor, and despoils the mi nority, who are rich is obviously correct in principle. Still again, and putting aside the predatory forces thus called to mind, there is room for great difference of opinion concerning the proper function of legislation. To some it appears clear that no legislative act can be healthy, and probably that none can really be operative, which contradicts custom; equally respect able thinkers believe heart and soul in imposing righteousness on humanity by legislation. It is said that an American legisla ture once placed the Ten Commandments on a Statute Book by a considerable majority. It is certain that prohibitory legisla tion, theoretically contrary to the rights of the individual, and practically neglectful of the regular conduct of civilized mankind, commands wide approval, even if mitigated by narrow sympathy. The function of our courts is equally unsettled in the public mind. Some highly desirable citizens hold that the business of 454 BARRETT WENDELL judges is to define and to maintain the law; others, of stainless patriotism, urge that if the law chance to be unpopular, or other wise unacceptable, a judge who should maintain it probably deserves impeachment, and certainly ought to be defeated in case he hold his seat by popular vote and present himself for reelection. How these questions, and the numberless more which they may suggest, should be answered, we need not dis pute. We shall agree, I hope, that man can answer them best when he can best perceive on the one hand what they mean, and on the other what consequences his answer will involve. In other words, political man, like man the artist cook or architect is at his best when his intelligence and his focal powers are most nearly balanced. Now such balance is evidence of the nearest possible adjust ment of man to his environment of our focal lens of force to the force amid which it lives out its little span of life ; and to help toward some such adjustment is one chief function, as we have already seen, of this perplexing mystery of ours the mystery of education, which we profess, and cherish, and revere. So far as we profess it, we must begin to feel, our work in this world has an aspect full of stimulus both imaginative and moral, which a good many of us focally blind, if you will are accustomed nowadays to neglect or to ignore. It cannot help affecting man artist, political animal, and countless things else. It cannot help either stimulating or impairing his power of adjustment to his environment. We sometimes speak of the humanities as if they were a separate and almost negligible part of such work as is ours in this world. Technically, I will cheerfully grant you, they are; but only because we have confined the name to limits far more narrow than its meaning. Plays with words may ob scure truth or conceal it; they can never avert it. Whether we will or not, the true office of education, from beginning to end, is irresistibly, tremendously, magnificently human. When I touched on this point a little while ago, you may remember, I mentioned an opinion here and there held by serious observers to the effect that educational processes are, neverthe less, at this moment remarkably indefinite in purpose and in effectual in result. If there be reason for this and I fear that few of us can feel complacently certain of the contrary it THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 455 should seem sadly to follow that we who are engaged in the con duct of education nowadays leave something to be desired in point of professional efficiency. Take, for example, the condition in which we find the study of languages, ancient and modern Greek or Latin, French or German or English. A student who can currently read a foreign language, after a good many years of nominal devotion to it at school and at college, is as remarkable as a black swan or a white crow; a student who emerges from a course of earnest instruction in English composition with per ceptibly, or at least with incontestably, firmer command of his pen for general purposes than he had to begin with, has hardly yet had the benevolence to cross my path. Something analogous is true of work in literature, in history, in philosophy; it seems more or less true wherever my observation has extended. The most comforting comment on it takes the form of assurance that, inasmuch as ideals would no longer be ideals if they were attain able, an idealist so fatuous as to look for anything like ideal results is doomed to disappointment. Refreshed by this, one is presently confronted with another fact, less debatable. It is from these very students that our own colleges, other colleges, schools everywhere, the country in gen eral yearly select the teachers charged with the task of instruct ing younger human beings in subjects so far from mastered by themselves. If the consequent predicament were local, all we should need anywhere would be to ascertain where what we try to do is done better than we do it, and to correct our errors accordingly. So far as I am aware, however, search for such light has hardly led us beyond regions of darkness indistinguish able from our own; this seems as extensive as the North Ameri can Continent, if not, indeed, as the modern world. One sadly recalls the story of the student who made pilgrimage to a cele brated institution of learning, for the purpose of sitting at some body s feet, and complained that, alas, he could find no feet to sit at. Humble in spirit though we may be, it is not granted us to perceive others demonstrably much better than ourselves. So there we are. We all do our best; we all know that those who study under us may be trusted to do theirs, at least when charged with responsibility. The trouble is not moral. Yet we ourselves, on the whole, teach ill; and those whom we teach, ill-taught, 456 BARRETT WENDELL teach in turn rather more ill still; and those whom they have taught surge up to us year by year, to be taught on, less and less ready to understand what little teaching we have begun to learn how to give them. There is trouble here, at first baffling. As focusses of force, we all begin to seem despairingly out of adjustment. Unless our line of reasoning has been all wrong, however, we may presently con clude that when any of us is out of adjustment it must be for one of three reasons : either intelligence, or cumulative power, or radiatory power is disproportionate excessive or defec tive, as the case may be. The immediately consequent con sideration to which I shall invite your attention may, perhaps, have its allurements; for it is evidently an intelligent though cursory scrutiny of a matter dear to us all namely, the con dition of our own intelligence, so far as we are teachers or scholars. One thing seems instantly clear. At this moment our intelli gence is alive and wide-awake. Yet a very little retrospect will probably convince us that it has waked up pretty lately. In old times, as the times of our youth have acceleratingly become, the purpose of teaching was chiefly disciplinary, and the method authoritative. I remember, for example, the anecdote of a schoolmaster in an old New England seaport, who was trying to teach a stubborn boy the elements of navigation. He made some statement about logarithms, and the boy inquired how he knew it was so. The teacher pulled a knife out of his pocket: "What s that?" he asked. "A pen-knife, * said the boy. "How do you know?" asked the teacher. "I don t know how I know," answered the boy, "but I know I know." "Very well," said the teacher, "that is the way I know logarithms"; and thereupon he proceeded with the lesson this part of which the boy never forgot. The principles and methods thus exemplified had one great merit : they remarkably developed and strengthened in pupils the power of concentrating attention, by sheer force of will, on uninteresting matters. Apart from this, they had no obvious effect on what intelligence the pupils may have possessed. We have bravely changed all that. One reason why our intelligence is so wide-awake nowadays may perhaps be found in the fact that the intelligence of our predecessors was THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 457 almost asleep. So long as force is force and life is life, the story of both will be one of action and reaction. Now our scientific friends, I believe, tell us that reaction and action are ultimately equal. Those of us who are not initiated into the mysteries of science are accordingly driven toward the conclusion that if the one gets us nowhere, the other will get us nowhere else. Matters might be worse. The old teaching had its merits, after all; though it was not very intelligent, and though its focal selection of force was extremely limited, it man aged to radiate with considerable exactitude and with some approach to intensity. It did not know what it was about; but it came fairly near accomplishing its blind and traditional pur pose. The chief trouble lay in the fact that blind tradition can hardly lead to such variation as is nowadays adored under the name of progress. When intelligence began to wake up, the air seemed thrilling with promise. We would ask ourselves what we were about; we would get rid of outworn obstacles; we would direct all our energies straight to the point, as soon as the point was found; and such beings as should result from these millen nial new adjustments would evince the infinite perfectibility of human nature. So we went to work, and so we are at work still. We know what we are about far more nearly than people knew a century ago. We have got rid of many obstacles without always making sure that they were needless; we have attempted, for example, to cure the reluctance of pupils by allowing them from kindergarten to elective courses at college the luxury of the slightest possible strain on unwilling attention. Yet we have not incontestably improved the pupils, nor yet so certainly ascertained just where to direct our energies as to direct them anywhere with quite the intensity of our rule-of -thumb predeces sors. Earth, in fact, is no nearer heaven than it used to be. At times, indeed, some of us, still resolved to get there or to know the reason why, grow sensible of doubt whether the time is not at hand when we may best sit down, with good cigars, and think out the reason why. Thus ruminating, we should probably come to the conclusion that one reason why is that we have been trying too hard to understand what we are about. We all know the sermons which have been preached from the text of Hamlet. We all know, as 458 BARRETT WENDELL well, that academies have never yet produced great works of art; and some of our friends assure us that what we cherish as our intelligence shrinks to nothing beside that of certain Ori ental sages devoted to life-long contemplation of their own navels. One might go on, world without end. The sum and sub stance of it all would be that some inkling of why the teachers of to-day are inefficient, or, in other words, ill-adjusted to their environment, may perhaps be found in a reactionary awakening of intelligence to a degree where it begins to be inhibitory. Now our previous considerations should assure us at this point of something comfortably near a fact. So far as intelligence can be inhibitory in its effect on man, as a focus of force and therefore so far as it can interfere with him as an agent or a sub ject of education it must do so by interfering either with his focal power of gathering force or with his equally focal power of radiating it. Our question thus becomes more definite; and the moment we inquire, in the first place, if, how, and when intelligence has come to meddle with the cumulative powers of our little human lenses, we can begin to discern an obvious answer. In the good old times, we have agreed, intelligence was torpid. Awakened, and directed toward the state of education at the period of its awakening, its honest conviction, quite warranted by the momentary facts, was that education had become stupidly conventional. People learned things by heart, all the way from the alphabet to geom etry and the Odes of Horace; what they had thus learned they repeated to others who tried to learn from them; they were get ting to resemble Mohammedan scholars, required to commit to memory the Koran and all the orthodox glosses on the sacred text, and supposed to need no more knowledge this side of Para dise. The consequent counsel of intelligence was that you should try to understand what you know before you proceed to do any thing else with it. This reaction we may agree to have been healthy, like the awakening of intelligence which stimulated it. Very clearly, there was chance for improvement. We must set ourselves to work selectively. We must not rest content with accepting and imparting knowledge; we must scrutinize it, and acquire it. We must test what comes to us, proving all things, and holding fast THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 459 only to that which is good. Torpidity had lulled our cumulative powers till they were starving for want of use. Here was the place where healthy reaction would surely bring about a new adjustment, better for the whole universe. That the reaction has done a great deal of good I should be the last to deny. We can hardly imagine nowadays what vast fields of inquiry, familiar and remote, still lay fallow a generation or two ago. A generation or two ago hardly any one could have imagined how few to-day would remain unbroken by plough or even harrow. The harvests garnered in libraries all over the world are rich beyond the dreams of scholars whom you and I can remember; and these treasures, in their crude form generally to be described as theses, are true treasures, in that they imply something more than hard and conscientious work; they could never have been wrested from their hidden lairs without the inspiration of devoted enthusiasm. It has all been worth while. So we press on still, competitively eager to gather and to garner more and more. But some of us, the Lord knows why, are begin ning to wonder whether, on the whole, we have not gone rather too far. No one could pretend that intelligence has here proved inhibitory to education by any process of repression. If it be true, however, that intelligence is inhibitory at all, here is a point where the trouble may perhaps partly lie, by reason of an over-development as fatal to balance as atrophy itself. We have strayed long enough in the misty regions of metaphor. It is time to consider just what we mean. Nothing can remind us more distinctly than the subjects of theses to which candi dates for the degree of doctor of philosophy, or the like, have consecrated months and years of earnest work. Here are two or three. I remember at Harvard, not many years ago, one in Latin, certified as creditable by such of my colleagues as can currently read that learned language, on the methods of hair- dressing practised in imperial Rome. I have been informed, by the way, if I remember rightly, that the scholar who wrote it was not exceptional for personal tidiness. I remember another entitled "De ea quaos dicitur attractione in enuntiationibus relativis apud scriptores Grcecos" which means, I believe, "Concerning what is called attraction in relative constructions used by Greek authors." A third concerned the tenure of land in the dominions 460 BARRETT WENDELL of Brandenburg under the sovereignty of the Groat Elector; the writer of this is said by one of his examiners to have displayed boundless ignorance of shipping laws and tariffs in English- speaking regions; but he was so unique an authority on Branden burg real estate that he was declared proficient in economic history. Any one familiar with modern American universities must have plenty of similar memories. Pretty lately, for example, my attention as a student of literature in America has been called to a printed thesis which professed to make some contribution to the literary history of Colonial Pennsylvania, and to another about the "Heralds of American Literature." The latter dealt with works written in America between the Revolution and the year 1800. This stagnant period had already been exhaustively treated by the late Professor Tyler; he had omitted, however, to emphasize the important truth that certain letters of Joel Barlow, or some such forgotten worthy, are preserved in the Public Library of Southport, Connecticut. To turn to foreign fields, there is no degree anywhere more worthily sustained than that of Doctor of Letters, at the Uni versity of Paris. Among the theses presented there by candidates in Modern Literature a generation ago was the admirable work of the late Professor Beljame on "The Public and Men of Letters in England during the Eighteenth Century." Whoever has had the pleasure of reading it must have recognized its permanent value in defining how English literature passed from the stage of dependence on patronage to that of self-support, derived from willing readers who stood ready to purchase. The book throws new floods of light into the toiling garrets of Grub Street. The very fact, however, that a brilliant French student should have turned his attention to so limited a field of English literature implies that the field of French literature was approaching ex haustion. The subjects of some later theses produced in France imply the same fact there concerning the literary history of England. Here are a few of them: "The Youth of Wordsworth," "Robert Burns," "George Crabbe," "John Thelwall," "Edgar Allan Poe," "Nathaniel Hawthorne," "Ralph Waldo Emerson," "Oliver Wendell Holmes," and "William James." I have reason to believe, indeed, that a serious French candidate has lately considered a project of presenting for the Doctorate of Letters THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 461 at the Sorbonne a punctilious study of the work of Mr. William Dean Howells. By this time the conclusion toward which our course of specification has tended must loom clear. The healthy reaction ary impulse of intelligence toward investigation has got to a point where a rapidly increasing amount of investigating energy must be devoted to inquiring what there is left to investigate. One can imagine, indeed, an approaching future when the mere discovery of some uninvestigated corner of any field of study imaginable shall be hailed with tumultuous learned ovation all over the world as abundant and overflowing evidence of such power as should command the highest possible degree, from the most rigorous of academic tribunals. When this rapturous vision begins to fade into the light of common day, any of us who may have yielded ourselves to its allurements must awaken to its chief meaning for us here and now. If we momentarily agree to consider your teacher or your scholar as if he were a man, and therefore an intelligent focus of force, and if we ad mit that he is at present inefficient for want of adjustment to his environment, we can hardly avoid perceiving that one rea son why may be found in an inhibitory excess of intelligence which has resulted in over-stimulated exhaustion of his focal power of accumulation. To put the case more simply, we are all at our best men or teachers or scholars when we know, with the least hesitation, what we possess, and what we want, and what to do with both If we devote ourselves too strenuously to hunting for what we want, we run the risk of forgetting what we have, of not know ing why we want what we want, and of losing all conception of what on earth we shall do with anything, whether already in our possession or by and by to be got there from somewhere else. That string of words has a thread of meaning, to hold it together; and nothing short of what sounds preposterous could have brought us without shock to a recent incident in my professional life. Preposterous or not, it will serve our next and almost our last purpose; this is evidently to consider what sort of radiance we teachers nowadays diffuse among the students at our feet. In one of my classes there was a youth of deserving aspect, who did me the honor to follow my lectures attentively. So I 462 BARRETT WENDELL felt duly grateful; and when he asked whether he might consult me about his plans in life, I was more than glad to put my wis dom at his service. Within a few weeks, it presently transpired, he had come for the first time into possession of an encyclopaedia. The joys of ownership had impelled him to plunge deep into the volumes. He had thereupon perceived, with genial precision, one thing which was the matter with learning, as previously imparted to him. It had been presented only in fragments; as he put the case, everything had been awfully specialized. That his encyclopaedia was composed by specialists he cheerfully conceded; that its contents were even more fragmentary than his college courses he was equally ready to admit. He urged, however, that there was a good deal more in the encyclopaedia than the best specialist of them all could ever pretend to know. This granted, he went on, with divinely synthetic impulse, to opine that, if you could put this material completely together, you would know everything. Within the present limits of human knowledge, I agreed, some such statement of ideal omniscience might be accepted. Then came his memorably explosive burst of imagination. Like all good men, he was humble in spirit, yet desirous of doing good. The good he most wished to do was to preserve others from the intoxicating enticements of specializa tion. Could he do this better, he asked, than by consecrating his life to the task of instruction at some fresh-water college, where, with the sole aid of his encyclopaedia, he might hope in due time to become the titular "Professor of Everything *? Comment on this incident seems needless. I have tried to recount it literally, nothing extenuating nor aught setting down in malice. It left me certainly a sadder man, and perhaps a wiser. That boy, no doubt, talked like a fool; but, when he went away, there seemed to me something else than folly in the mem ory of him. He had dimly perceived, and in his own stammering way he had fearlessly tried to express, a truth pregnant for you and me. For if you and I, as teachers or scholars, as priests or initiates of the mystery of education, threatened on all sides by unmeaningly impious dissipation of our mystery, and bewildered by the accelerating rush of environment all about us, are to give due account of ourselves to the future, we must bestir ourselves to be dynamic. THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 463 To be dynamic as teachers, and thus, so far as we can, to make dynamic in turn those who come within our influence, is the earthly duty of our profession. Again, you may well feel, I am losing myself in fine, big words. Even so, there is comfort for us all looming in sight. These vagaries have already strayed so long that they cannot stray much longer. They may leave us nowhere, to be sure; if they do, they will have done at worst only what education now does to most of its patients; and few of us yet are ready to declare in consequence that education is not worth while. Indeed, I remember few more inspiring eulogies than that which a professor of my acquaintance once privately pronounced on a newly departed colleague. The career just gently closed, he declared, had been among the most memorably useful in the whole history of the field of learning which it had striven to cultivate. By faithful adherence to wrong methods, in pursuit of wrong ends, it had conclusively demonstrated what ought not to be done. Next to triumphant success, my friend declared, this is, perhaps, the highest achievement within the range of human endeavor. All the same, most of us are ambitious enough to cling to the last infirmity of noble minds, and not to rest content with the prospect of a usefulness based on the fact that we shall unintentionally have been useless. So far as we desire to know what we shall do to be saved, accordingly, we must still inquire, though never so hastily, what we mean by dynamic, as we have just used that impressive word. Intelligent, living lenses, we have agreed to imagine ourselves, focally collecting and radiating certain streams of the constantly accelerating force which surges about us, no one knows whence or whither; and our function, so far as we are teachers, and priests or initiates of the mystery of education, is to mould other lenses at once so firmly and so flexibly that they shall do their own work better, So, on and on, to furthest time. All this work, whether ours or theirs, is done best when intelligence best selects, best combines, and best radiates itself nobly submis sive to the quiveringly balanced conditions of its task. Thus we have generalized. All that we can now do more is to attempt, if only for an instant, to translate our generalization into some thing like specific terms. In choosing those nearest my own experience, I do only what 464 BARRETT WENDELL I should eagerly expect any one else to do under similar circum stances. For a good many years I have been mostly a teacher of literature, whose business has been, so far as in me lay, to under stand it, and to impart understanding of it to others. Among those others, year by year, there have always been a few who desired to become teachers of literature themselves; as a rule, these men have decided to prepare themselves for their life work by winning the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Over and over again we have accordingly found ourselves deep in discussion of how such students should concern themselves with literature. If we had all agreed about anything, we should not have been human. Unless I am wholly mistaken, the while, hardly any of us would deny that literature is among the enduring expressions of history; that among other expressions of history, equally sig nificant and memorable, are the other fine arts and philosophy; and, to go no further, that the vehicle of literature is language. Here, instantly, are other rays or streams of the force surging about us, not to be disdained or neglected by those whose chief duty is concerned with the vibrant rays of literature alone. There was never work of literature, from the Homeric poems to the yellow journalism of these United States of America, not the better to be understood for understanding of the words put together in its making, of the historical and social conditions collected at the moment of its utterance, or of what men were painting and building and moulding and singing and dreaming in the world about it. No doubt, all this is already far too much for any man of letters to gather firmly in any conscious focus. None the less, if he forget the existence of a single ray of it, he forgets at his peril. The most frequent phase of such disaster used to be the pedantry of the grammarians; at present it is pressed hard by the gossipy minuteness of the antiquarians. Our higher duty is not to neglect, but to select, and to reject that is, so far as our focal business is cumulative. Then, within our inmost selves, must come the flash which can synthesize into new combination the rays of force, from near and far, most needful for our radiant purpose. Finally must come expression in no wise an end in itself, nor an idol to be worshipped for intrinsic monstrosity or grace, but an inevitable condition of imparting our synthesis to other minds than our own. We are THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION 465 at our best when we select best, when we best fuse anew the vagrant rays which we have selected, and when our expression flows forth with the clear white heat of fresh and living fusion. So, at least, it has come to seem to me, after thirty years of plodding work, none too fruitful. There is left us only the ques tion of how we should apply all this to the patients in our charge, suffering until we can turn them adrift with what hope of sur vival may inhere in the mystic letters Ph.D. The answer is short and, for a wonder, simple. Doctors of philosophy must earn their degrees chiefly by writing theses. So far as these theses can stimulate at once intelligent power of selection, of fusion, and of expression, they are priceless means of education. So far as they either exaggerate or repress intelligence, or selective power, or power of fusion, or expression itself, they may begin to do more harm than good; and harm, like good, and everything else, is infinite in its possibilities. Concerning the present condi tion of such theses I will not further inquire. What the future condition of them might conceivably be we will leave to the dreamers. Whereof you will more than probably have found me one. Imperfectly focal, I fear, and dimly radiant this effort of mine to set forth opinion must seem. All I can urge in excuse for having made such demand on your attention is the tremendous truth that this mystery of ours the mystery of education still retains the marvellous power of commanding enthusiastic national faith. To any of us who have come to feel this, and therewith the gravity of our responsibility, no earnest effort to confront it can seem a waste of time. So if any of you have found food for thought in my belief that our real task is the fashioning of living lenses which shall intelligently accumulate and radiate streams of the accelerating force in which we are all surging toward we know not what, our hour together is justified. For it will have done its own little part to encourage our mystery toward the high hope that in the years to come education may help make human forces not explosive but constructive. THE SPIRIT OF LEARNING BY WOODROW WILSON Delivered before the Alpha of Massachusetts, at Harvard University, July 1, 1909. Reprinted by the permission of President Wilson and of The Harvard Graduates Magazine. WE have fallen of late into a deep discontent with the college, with the life and the work of the undergraduates in our univer sities. It is an honorable discontent, bred in us by devotion, not by captiousness or hostility or by an unreasonable impatience to set the world right. We are not critics, but anxious and thought ful friends. We^a.rq neither oynios nor pessimigtSxJait honest lovers of a good thing, of whose slightest deterioration we are jealous. We would fain keep one of thefinest instrumentalities ~bf our national life from falling short of its best, and believe that by a little care and candor we can do so. The American college has played a unique part in American life. So long as its aims w r ere definite and its processes authorita tive it formed men who brought to their tasks an incomparable morale, a capacity that seemed more than individual, a ] touched with large ideals. The college has been thejeat of ideal The liberal training which it sought to impart took no thought of any particular profession or business, but was meant to reflect in its few and simple disciplines the image of life and thought. Men were bred by it to no skill or craft or calling; the discipline to which they were subjected had a more general object. It was meant to prepare them for the whole of life rather than for some particular part of it. The ideals whichjay at its heart were the general ideals of conduct, of right living, and right thinking, which made them aware of a world moralized by principle, steadied and cleared of many an evil thing by true and catholic reflection and just feeling, a world, not of interests, but of ideas. Such impressions, such challenges to a man s spirit, such inti mations of privilege and duty are not to be found in the work and obligations of professional and technical schools. They can not be. Every calling has its ethics, indeed, its standards of right THE SPIRIT OF LEARNING 467 conduct and wrong, its outlook upon action and upon the varied relationships of society. Its work is high and honorable, grounded, it may be, in the exact knowledge which moralizes the processes of thought, and in a skill which makes the whole man serviceable. But it is notorious how deep and how narrow the absorptions of the professional school are and how much they are necessarily concentrated upon the methods and in terests of a particular occupation. The work to be done in them is as exact, as definite, as exclusive as that of the office -and the shop. Their atmosphere is the atmosphere of business, and should be. It^.doesnotbeget generous comradeships or any ar dor of altruistic feeling such^as the college begets. It does not contain that general air of the world of science and ofTetters in which the mind seeks no special interes$, but feels every intimate impulse of the spirit set free to think and observe and listen, listen to all the voices of the mind. The professional scKool differs from the college gs middle age difrers from youth* It; gets the spiritToT the college only by imitation or reminiscence or contagion. This is to say nothing to itsoiscredit. Its nature and objects are different from those of the college, as legiti mate, as useful, as necessary; but different. The_collfi2e.ls the* 1 r of the f*.nl]pgtt is tojiberalize and moraL object of the ^fofessibnal ^^ scjKooX-IQo--feffttB-yyf a speciaKask. "Afi3 this is true^faU vocational study. using the words tihgfl.1i,gffi-ftini mrtrni in r&roadest sigriificanceTand I am" very well aware that fam speaking in the terms of a ideal, a conception, rather than in the terms of realized facti^E have spoken, too, of what the lege did "so long as its aims were definite and its processes authoritative," as if I were thinking of it wholly in the past tense andwished to intimate that rtwas once a very effective and ideal thmgTut~EaoTnow ceased JxjLgxisti so that one wouloTl y, f that I thought the college lost out of our life and the present a time when such influences were all to seek. But that is only because I have not been able to say everything at once. Give me leave, and I will slowly write in the phrases which will correct these impressions and bring a fruepicture to light. The college has lost its defmiteness of aim, and has now for so WOODROW WILSON ng a time affected to be too modest to assert its authority over its pupils in any matter of prescribed study that it can no longer ^ claim to be the rutfturWr ^pjj^* ^ once was J but tne college is neither dead nor moribund, and it has made up for its relaxed discipline and confused plans of study by many notable gains, which, if they have not improved its scholarship, have improved the health and the practical morals of the young gentlemen who resort to it, have enhanced their vigor and quickened their whole freer choice of studies has imparted to it a stir, an air reedom and individual initiative, a wealth and variety of instruction which the old college altogether lacked. Th opment of athletic sports and the immoderate addiction of undergraduates to stimulating activities of all sorts, academic and unacademic, which improve their physical habite, fill their lives y/ith interesting objects, sometimes important] and chal lenge their powers of organization and practical management, have unquestionably raised the tone of morals and of conduct in our colleges. and have given them an Interesting, perhaps valu- aKIerconnection with/modern society and the broader popular interests of the day* No one need regret the breaking-up of the dead levels of the old college, the introduction and exaltation of modern studies, or the general quickening of life which has made of our youngsters more manly fellows, if less docile pupils. There had come to be something rather narrow and dull and morbid, no doubt, about the old college before its day was over. If we gain our advances by excessive reactions and changes whreh change too much, we at least gain them, and should be careful not to lose the advantage of them. Nevertheless, the evident fact is, that wej\ay<? no^ for a lr>ng changes which have ) (^disorganization, andjtjs our plain and immediate duty to form our plans f< nization. We nusrfeexamine the coll ge, reconceive it, reorganize it. Tt js the rootofour intellectual life as a nation. It Is not only the instru mentality through which we must effect all the broad prelimi nary work which underlies sound .scholarship; it is also our chief instrumentality of catholic enlightenment, our chief means for " giving widespread stimulation to the whole intellectual life of the country and supplying ourselves with men who shall both com- THE SPIRIT OF LEARNING 469 prehend their age and duty and know how to serve them supremely well. Without, t.hp An^n ran college our young men would be too exclusively shut in to the pursuit of individual inter ests^ would lose tne vital contacts andemulations which awaken them to those larger achievements and sacrifices which - irighesrol^gcts~of^ducation in a country of free citizens, /where the welfare of tnejcpmmonwe5t springs out^of the ^character V " purposes of the private citizen. The college will be found to lie somewhere very near the heart of American social training and intellectual and moral enlightenment. The process is familiar to every one by which the disintegra tion was brought about which destroyed the old college with its fixed disciplines and ordered life and gave us our present pi-oblem of reorganization and recovery. It centred in the bieak-up of the old curriculum and the introduction of the principle that the student was to select his own studies from ? great variety of courses, as great a variety as the resources of the college and the supply of teachers available made possible. But the change could not in the nature of things stop with the plan of study., It held at its heart a tremendous implication: the implication of full manhood on the part of the pupil, and all the untrammelled choices of manhood. The pupil who was mature and well in- "^formed enough to stuav what he cfiose WPS also by ^implication matige_enQ to rbriflftp fris rtwn associations and ways of lifp riculum without restr lint or suggestion; and the varied, absorb ing college life of our day sprang up as the natural offspring of * the free election of studies. There went along with the relaxation of rule as to what under graduates should study, therefore, an almost absolute divorce between the studies and the life of the college, its business and its actual daily occupations. The. teacher. .ceased to look upon himself as related in any responsible way to the life of his pupils^ to what they should be doing and thinking of between one class exercise and another, and conceived his whole duty to have been performed when he had given his lecture and afforded those who were appointed to come the opportunity to hear and heed it if they chose- The teachers of this new regime, moreover, were most of them trained for their teaching work hi German 470 WOODROW WILSON si ties, or uy American) universities in which the, lfo x - Q r*T ti nTlfl **" r>Kjort r>f thft UiaLn^iinivA TlF sities were, consciously^ or unconsciously, reproduced. They thifilTof their pupils, therefore, as men already disciplined by some general +rn.ining{giipji HQ tJip^prnj^^gyninasium gives? and seeking in the university special acquaintance with particular studies, as an introduction to special fields of information and inquiry. They have never thought of the university *"* fl ^nm. munitv^teacEers and pupils : theyjjiink of it, rather, as a-bpjiy teachers and investigatorsJo.ffliQmlk^^ seri^ L/ously desire specialized kinds of knowledge. They are specialists importedlnto an American system which lias lost its old point of view and found no new one suitable to the needs and circum stances of America. They do not think of living with their pupils and affording them the contacts of culture; they are only acces sible to them at stated periods and for a definite and limited service; and their teaching is an interruption to their favorite work of research. J Meanwhile, the constituency of the college has wholly changed. It is not only the bookish classes who now send their sons to college, but also the men of business and of affairs, who expect their sons to follow in their own footsteps and do work with which books have little connection. In the old days of which I have spoken most young men who went to college expected to enter one or other of the learned professions, expected to have to do with books and some of the more serious kinds of learning all their lives. Books were their proper introduction to the work v that lay before them; learning was their natural discipline and ! preparation. But nowadays the men who are looking forward to the learned professions are in a minority at the college. Most ^undergraduates come out of an atmosphere of business and wish a breeding which is consonant with it. They donoi wish learning/, They wish or.iy a certain freshening of their faculties for the miscellaneous cos a general acquaintance with what men are doing and saying in their own generation, a certain facil ity in handling themselves and in getting on with their fellows. They are much more interested in the incidental associations of college life than in the main intellectual occupations of the place. .They want to be made men of, not scholars; and the life led at THE SPIRIT OF LEARNING 471 college is as serviceable for that as any. of the tasks set in the class-room. If they want what the formal teaching offers them at all, it is for some definite and practical purpose connected with the calling they expect to follow, the business they expect to engage in. Such pupils are specially unsuitable for such teachers. / Here, then, is our situation. Here is the little world of teachers J and pupils, athletic associations, musical and literary clubs, social organizations and societies for amusement, class-room and playground, of which we must make analysis, out of which we 1 1 must get a new synthesis, a definite aim, and new processes of -authoritative direction, losing nothing that has been gained, J \reco vering what has been lost. All the fresh elements we have/ gained are valuable, many of the new points of view are those from which we must look upon the whole task and function of the college if we would see it truly; but we have fallen upon an almost hopeless confusion and an utter dispersion of energy. We must pull the whole inorganic thing together under a new conception of what the college must be and do. The chief and characteristic mistake which the teachers and v< ^ governors of our colleges have made in these latter days has been \\*\TP fWntpTJ f hpmfiAlvpq linH thpir plans t.QO sively to4helmsiness J i the very commojoplacebusiness, of instru<> hnvp nf pnnngh re.g? r ^ejijj^life of the mind. / The "^ JJYft K Y ;TTgfir "^tion. It_is^no prolix gut to be~stuifeci./ The real intellectuallife of a body of undergraduates, If there 67 any, manifests itself, not in the class-room, but in what they do and talk of and set before themselves as their favorite objects between classes and lectures. You will see the true life of a col lege in the evenings, at the dinner-table or beside the fire in the groups that gather and the men that go off eagerly to their work, where youths get together and let themselves go upon their favorite themes, in the effect their studies have upon them when no compulsion of any kind is on them and they are not thinking to be called to a reckoning of what they know. . - The effects of learning are its real tests, the real tests alike of / I its validity and of its efficacy. The mind can be driven, but that^, {v^ is not life. Tjfe is vpJunjju-v or unconscious. It is breathed in * out of a^ sustaining atmosplierei It is shaped by environment. * It is habitual, contiguous. productive. It does not consist in tasks performed, but in powers gained and enhanced. It cannot be communicated in class-rooms if its aim and eirid is the class room. Instruction is not its source, but only its incidental means /and medium. . / i Here is the key to the whole matter: the object of the college, /ff I as we have known and used and loved it in America, ds i no /// /scholarship (except for the few, and for them only by way o introduction and first orientation), but thejintellectual and spirit- ual lif el Its Me and discipline. are meant to be a process oTfrrepa- raTlogrnot a process of information. ^By the intellectual and spiritual life I meafr the life which enables tihfi r" nr l *- and make pfopeFuse of the modern world a.nc\ ajfl fa Qjgp^- j^unjties. The object of a liberal training is not learning, but dis~~ cipline and the enlightenment of the mind. Tl^e educated man is to be discovered by his point of view, by the temper ofr his inindr by his attitude towards life and his fair way of thinking. He can see, he can discriminate, he can combine ideas and perceive whither they lead; he has insight and comprehension. His mind, is a practised instrument of appreciation. HjeLas^mjpj^jipt contribute light than heat to a~ctiscussion, and will oftener tEan arinther show the power of uniting the elements oJ_^iiim5nr suBject in a whole view; he has the knowledge of the world whirh A Do_one^can have who knows only his own generation or only his V\ownJasL / Whg^we should^ seek to impart in ourc^llejes^thereforo, is not so much leanungTrseTTafc^^ You can att^youngmeri; and you calTmTparTit^to them in the three or four years at your disposal. It consists in the power to distinguish good reasoning from bad, in the power to digest and interpret evidence, in a habit of catholic observation and a pref erence for the non-partisan point of view, in an addiction to clear and logical processes of thought and yet an instinctive desire to interpret rather than to stick in the letter of the reason ing, in a taste for knowledge and a deep respect for the integrity .of the human mind. It is citizenship of the world of knowledge, but not ownership of it. Scholars are the owners of its varied plots, in severalty. If we recognize and accept these ideas, this conception of the Impart t THE SPIRIT OF LEARNING 473 function and the possibilities of the college, there is hope of av general understanding and accommodation. At present there is a fundamental misunderstanding. The teachers in our colleges are men of learning and conceive it their duty to impart learn- / ing; but their pupils do not desire it; and the parents of their w pupils do not desire it for them. They desire something else which the teacher has little thought of giving, generally thinks it no part of his function to give. Many of the parents of our > modern undergraduates will frankly tell you that what they want for their sons is not so much what they will get in the class room as something else, which they are at a loss to define, which * they will get from the associations of college life : and many more would say the same thing if they were equally ingenuous. I know what they mean, and I am free to say that I sympathize with them. They understand that all that their boys get in the class-room is instruction in certain definite bodies of knowledge; that all that they are expected to bring away from their lectures and recitations is items of learning. They have consorted with college men, if they are not college bred themselves, and knowv how very soon items of knowledge slip away from them, no mat- * ter how faithful and diligent they may have been in accumulat ing them when they were students. They observe that that part of the college acquisition is very soon lost. College graduates will tell you without shame or regret, within ten years of their graduation, that they remember practically nothing of what they learned in the class-room; and yet in the very same breath they will tell you that they would not have lost what they did get in college for anything in the World; and men who did not have the chance to go to college will everywhere be found to envy them, perceiving that college-bred men have something / which they have not. What have they got, if learning is to be* left out of the reckoning? TEey have got manliness, certainly, espnTde corpTthTtraining of generous comradeships, a notable development of their social faculties and of their powers of appre ciation; and they have lived under the influence of mental tasks of greater or less difficulty, have got from the class-room itself, from a quiet teacher here and there, some intimation, some touch of thespirit of Iearmng._ If they have not, they have got only what coulcf no doubt be got from association with generous, self- *v* *iy j 474 WOODROW WILSON ^respecting young men anywhere. Attendance on the exercises of the college was only a means of keeping them together for four years, to work out their comradeships and their mutual infections. . I said just now that I sympathized with men who said that \ 4 what they wanted f or jhejr_song in fnllgrgjwg.sjiot wh*t th^y 1 got in the^ class-room so much as what they got from the life and associations of the place; but I agree with them only if what is to be got in the class-room is nothing more than items of knowl edge likely to be quickly lost hold of. I agree with them; but I see clearly what they are blindly feeling after. They should desire chiefly what their sons are to get out of the life and asso ciations of the place; but that life and those associations should be freighted with things they do not now contain. The processes of lifej tViA ^ftpfa^nnnfr ^c>- nnfinpjntinn, are the only things that have ever g<Sf any real or permanent hold on men s minds. These are the conducting media for every effect we seek to work on the human spirit. The undergraduate should have scholars for teachers. They should hold his attention steadily upon great 1 .tested bodies of knowledge and should insist that he make him- 4 self acquainted with them, if only for thqj nonce/But they will give him nothing he is Kkely to carry with him through life if \ they stop with formal instruction, however thorough or exacting Ithey may make it. Their permanent effects will be wrought upon his spirit. Their teaching will follow him through lircTonly if they reveal to him the meaning, the significance, the essential validity of what they are about, the motives which prompt it, the processes which verify it. They will rule him, not by what they know and inform him of, but by the spirit of the things they expound. And that spirit they cannot convey in any formal manner. They can convey it only atmospherically, by making V their ideals tell in some way upon the whole spirit of the place. How shall their pupils carry their spirit away with them, or the spirit of the things they teach, if beyond the door of the class- \ room the atmosphere will not contain it? College is a place of X initiation. TTtq ^ffort.s are atmr>spfreriq-_ They are wrought by i imrjrsert>y J not penetrate beyohdTtne doors bf the class-room are lost, are imrjrsert>y associaticln, by emulation. The voices which Nre void or, consequence and power. No thought will obtain or liveHhere for\ tie transmission of which the prevailing \ THE SPIRIT OF LEARNING 475 atmosphere is a non-conducting medium] I^mm^^entlemen get from their years at college only manliness, esprit de release~of their social gifts, a training in give and take7a~catholic taste~~in men, and t.hp~s gainedmuch, frut theyjiave not gained what a collegeshoul ^ j gjveTtEeiiL It IhoulcTgive them insight into the spirit, a sense of having lived and formed theii nffiendships amidst the gardens of the mind where grows the tree J of thejmowledge of good and evil, a consciousness of having \ taken on them the vows of true enlightenment and of having 1 undergone the discipline, never to be shaken off, of those who / seek wisdom in candor, with faithful labor and travail of spirit./ These things they cannot get from the class-room unless the spirit of the class-room is the spirit of the place as well and of its y/ life; and that will never be until the teacher comes out of the "class-room and makes himself a part of that life. Contact, com panionship, familiar intercourse is the law of life for the mind. The comradeships of undergraduates will never breed the spirit / of learning. The circle must be widened. It must include the older men, the teachers, the men for whom life has grown more serious~an6TTo whom It has revealed more of its meanings. So longluTinslruction T andTife do not merge in our c^IIegesT^o-iong .v as what the undergraduates^do and~wliat theysre tattghtoccupyA / l ^ long will the college be ineffectual. Looked at from the point of view at which I stand in all that I have been saying, some of the proposals made hi our day for , the improvement of the college seem very strangely conceived, y It has been proposed, for example, to shorten the period of gen eral study in college to (say) two years, and let the student who has gone the distance our present sophomores have gone enter at once upon his professional studies or receive his certificate of p-aduation. I take it for granted that those wh# have formu- > <" lated this proposal never really Jmew^a,sopKompre in the flesh,./ I) They say, simply, that the studies of our present sophomores are as advanced as the studies of seniors were in the great days of our grandfathers, and that most of our present sophomores are as old as our grandfathers were when they graduated from the pristine college we so often boast of; and I dare say that is WOODROW WILSON all true enough. But what they do not know is, that our sopho more is at the age of twenty no more mature than the sophomore of that previous generation was at the age of seventeen or eigh- Jteen. The sap of manhood is rising in him but it has not yet reached his head. It is not what a man is studying that makes him a sophomore or a senior: it is the stage the college process has reached in him. A college, the American college, is not a ^body of studies: it is a process of development. It takes, if our observation can be trusted, at least four years for the completion of that process, and all four of those years must be college years. cannot be school years: they cannot be combined with school years. The school process is an entirely different one/The college is a process of slow evolution from the schoolboy ana the schoolboy s mental attitude into the man and his entirely altered view of the world. Nit can be accomplished only in the college environment. The environment is of the essence of the whole effect. If-Jrou wifihJ*F create-a-college, therefore, and are wise, you will seek to create a life. We have allowed ourselves to grow very anxious and to feel very helpless about college athletics^ They play too large a part in the life of the undergraduate, we say; and no doubt they do. There are many other things which play too large a part in that life, to the exclusion of intellectual interests and the dissipation of much excellent energy: amuse- of all kinds, social preoccupations of the most absorbing sort, a multitude of activities which have nothing whatever to do with the discipline and enlightenment of the mind. But that is , because they are left a free field. Life, at college, is one thing, * the work of the college another, entirely separate ariefrfe limit. The lifeTs the field that is leftTreetoT athletics not only buTalso for every other amusement and diversion. Studies are no part of that life, and there is no competition. Studvis the work which V / inteiaurjgtsthe lif e, introduces an embarrassing am yelement into it. S \ the interruption^ the interference. trvv*^^^^ *^\^ ( r This is not to say that 4here-aJe not a great many undergrad- ^juates seriously interested in study, or that it is impossible or even difficult to make the majority of them, the large majority, ** pass the tests of the examinations. It is only saying that the *v .*. / un [ THE SPIRIT OF LEAENING 477 studies do not spring out of the life of the place and are hindered by it, must resist its influences if they would flourish. I have no jealousy of athletics: it has put wholesome spirit into both the physical and the mental life of our undergraduates There are , fewer morbid boys in the new college which we know than there , were in the old college which our fathers knew; and fewer prigs, J too, no doubt. Athletics are indispensable to the normal life of young men, and are in themselves wholesome and delightful, besides. In another atmosphere, the atmosphere of learning, they could be easily subordinated and assimilated. The rea son they cannot be now is that there is nothing to assimilate them, nothing by which they can be digested. They make their own atmosphere unmolested. There is no direct compe tition. ) >The same thing may be said, for it is true, of all the other amusements and all the social activities of the little college world. Their name is legion: they are very interesting; most of them are in themselves quite innocent and legitimate; many of them are thoroughly worth while. They now engross the attention and absorb the energies of most of the finest, most spirited, most gifted youngsters in the undergraduate body, men fit to be scholars and masters hi many fields, and for whom these small things are too trivial a preparation. They would not do so if other things which would be certain to^rig these very men were J fn competition with them, were known and spoken of and per vasive in the life of the college outside the class-room; but they | are not. The field j g ^Jgar for all these littl^a^ ^**^ as it is clear for athletics. Athletics has no serious competitor except these amusements and petty engrossments; they have no serious competitor except athletics. The scholar is not in the game. He keeps modestly to his class-room and his study and must be - looked up and asked questions if you would know what he is thinking about. His influence can be set going only by the delib erate effort of the undergraduate himself who looks him up and stirs him. He deplores athletics and all the other absorbing and Bon-academic pursuits which he sees drawing the attention of his pupils off from study and serious preparation for life, but he , will not enter into competition with them. He has. never dreamed of such a thing; and, to tell the truth, the life of the place is 478 WOODROW WILSON organized in such a way as to make it hardly possible for him to do so. He is therefore withdrawn and ineffectual, > ^ It is the duty of university authorities to make of the college a society, of which the teacher will be as much, and as naturally, a member as the undergraduate. When that is done other things will fall into their natural places, their natural relations. Young men are capable of great enthusiasms for older men whom they have learned to know in some human, unartificial way, whose quality they have tasted in unconstrained conversation, the energy and beauty of whose characters and aims they have learned to appreciate by personal contact; and such enthusiasms are often among the strongest and most lasting influences of their lives. You will not gain the affection of your pupil by any thing you do for him, impersonally, in the class-room. You may gain his admiration and vague appreciation, but he will tie to you only for what you have shown mm personally or given him in ultimate and friendly service. CertainJLajn,4iiat it is impossible to rid our colleges of these . * , _ *. *-"* compete with study and drive out the spirit of learn ing by the simple device of legislation, in which, as Americans, we have so childish a confidence; or, at least, that, if we did suc- ceed in driving them out, did set our house in order and sweep and garnish it, other equally distracting occupants would crowd in to take their places. For the house would be empty. There must be life as well as study. The question is, not of what are* to empty it, but with what must we fill it? We must fill it with the things of the mind and of the spirit; and that we can do by introducing into it men for whom these things are su premely interesting, the main objects of life and endeavor, teachers who will not seem pedagogues but friends, and who can by the gentle infectkm of friendliness make thought a general contagion. JPo thatJcreate the atmosphere and the contacts oJ a society made up of 4nen young and old, mature and adolescent, it* I serious anTgayJand j|jffu)wi]l create an emulation, a saturation? union of parts in a common life T in which all question^ of a -and proertionjadll ^ol^eJLb^msd^^v^So soon as the things which now dissipate and distract and dissolve our college life/eejjjie t js which should coordinate and regulate and inspire "It in direct contact with them, /geLtheir ardor and THE SPntTT OF LEARNING 479 their competitiom they will fall into their proper places, will become pleasures and cease to be occupations, will delight our undergraduate days, but not monopolize them. They are exag gerated now because they are separated and do not exchange impulses with those greater things of whose presence they are sopaetimes hardly conscious. ^S T o doubt there are many ways hi which this vital association may be effected, but all wise and successful ways will have this in common, that they will abate nothing of the freedom and self- government which have so quickened and purified our colleges in these recent days of change, will have no touch of school sur veillance in them. You cannot force companionships upon under graduates, if you treat them like men. You can only create the conditions, set up the organization, which will make them natu- ral. The scholar should not need a statute behind him, jyfcf ?"*i of learning should not covet the support of the spirit and organi sation of the piirsery g j It will prevail of its own grace and power if you will but give it a chance, a conducting medium, an air in v which it can move and breathe freely without effort or self- consciousness^ If it cannot, I, for one, am unwilling to lend it artificial assistance. It must take its chances in the competition and win on its merits, under the ordinary rules of the game of life, where the most interesting man attracts attention, the strongest personality rules, the best organized force predominates, the most admirable thing wins allegiance. We are not seeking to orce a marriage between knowledge and pleasure; we are simply trying to throw that they will fall in loyejwjth nnp another. We are seeking to exposeJite-ttadejgniduate when he is most susceptible to the best and most stimuIaun^flStaeuces of~thejiniyerstty in the^Sope" an3~&eEf.Jtliat no sensible fellow fit for a career caioTeiist~the infection. / P lfta th ^ n * S t*M g tlmt WP " W delilrer at - el y *^< niirselves / to make a home for thy spirit of learning :^hat we reorganize our colleges on the lines of this simple conception, that a college is not only a body of studies but a mode of association; that its Icourses are only its formal side, its contacts and contagions its realities. It must become a community of scholars and pupils, a free community but a very real one, in which democracy may 480 WOODROW WILSON work its reasonable triumphs of accommodation; its vital proc- esses of union. 1^ am not suggesting that young men be dra gooned into becoming scholars or tempted to become pedants, or have any artificial compulsion whatever put upon them, but only that they be introduced into the high society of university J ideals, be exposed to the hazards of stimulating friendships, be introducedJnto the easyjconjraaeships of the republic of letters . By thjgjrnftqiis thp nlass-rnnm itsHf might finme^ftjTcome to Seem a ^art of life.^. THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT BY PAUL SHOREY Delivered before the Zeta of Ohio, at Oberlin College, on May 31, 1910. A SPEAKER who discourses on so large and vague a theme as "The Unity of the Human Spirit" must first of all convince his audience that there is a unity in his own mind that to himself at least the high-sounding title conveys a definite and intelligible idea. Clever writers, from the witty Lucian down, always begin with a story. They wind themselves into their subject like a ser pent, as was said of Burke, and leave to the reader the pleasure of divining for himself their central thought. But my thesis, as I foresee, will involve itself in such a maze of caveats, exceptions, qualifications, and illustrations that I must give you the clue to my intentions at the start by a direct and downright statement of my simple meaning. Our age has lost, or is losing, its faith in principles and stand ards. We of course admit the indefeasible right of the majority to determine the prevailing fashion, either in biology or bonnets. Dollars and votes furnish a practical rule for the measurement of practical success. In physical things, we accept on faith the standards prescribed by the exact sciences. But for the spiritual values that elude these tests we have no fixed measures that we trust, and we are skeptical of their existence. Our temper is that which the historians of philosophy ascribe to the generation of sophists whom Plato satirized. There is no standard but sub jective opinion, and the plausible eloquence of the speaker who can carry his audience with him. From these uncertainties of an age of transition, we are to be redeemed my scientific friends tell me by the construction of a new scale of moral and spiritual values whose graduations will be determined by the principles of biology and the law of evolu tion. It may be so, but the scale is not yet available for use, and I do not meddle with prophecy. Meanwhile, my thesis is that those who are not willing to abandon themselves to limitless 482 PAUL SHOREY subjectivity, or pin their faith to the guesses of each new system- builder, will still find the best approximation to working stand ards and principles in the sublimated common-sense of mankind, as expressed in the higher literature of Europe, from Homer to Tennyson, from Plato to John Stuart Mill. And my text is Tennyson s line, "Read the wide world s annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend." If I were going to try to prove this principle to you, we should at once find ourselves plunged over head and ears in metaphysics. Any one who sets up an absolute criterion is at once challenged to produce his own credentials, and then proof of these, and so on in an infinite series. The doctrine of the relativity of all opinion seems the one certain outcome of a philosophy of evolution, though curiously enough, if you ask me for the most plausible statement of it, I should have to refer you to Jowett s trans lation of Plato s " Thesetetus," or Walter Pater s paraphase of Lucian s "Hermotimus," in his charming "Marius the Epicu rean." But, to waive metaphysics, even if you should concede that the wisdom of the world is somewhere, somehow contained in the world s best literature, you might still ask who is to deter mine what literature is best, and what doctor of eclecticism is to sift from it the residuum of abiding truth. And the answer, "the combined and resultant judgment of those who know it best," though practically sufficient, might seem reasoning in a circle to a disputatious and metaphysical mind. I shall not, then, attempt to prove anything in the fifty minutes allotted to me. I shall merely endeavor to anticipate some of the misconceptions which the bare enunciation of the principle may have suggested, to exhibit its value as a corrective of some exaggerations of modern popular philosophies, to illustrate a few of its possible applica tions, and lastly to dwell for a moment on the practical helpful ness to our culture and the sentimental values of the idea. Though my title speaks of the unity of the human spirit, it virtually means, as you perceive, the identity of the highest European thought of the past two or three thousand years. It means that despite the immense progress in dominion over Nature and in the organization of industry the resemblances of age to age are greater than we are inclined to suppose, and that the obvious differences concern rather the average level or gen- THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 483 eral diffusion of intelligence than the quality of the highest intel lects from generation to generation. It means that the subtlest thought and the noblest ideals of the best European minds to day are not inadequately represented by some one even in the centuries that we stigmatize as dark or frivolous. It means that the recognition of this larger unity ought to qualify the contempt or condescension which each generation feels for its immediate predecessor; that it overrides many of the superficial historical generalizations summed up in such expressions as the classical, the mediaeval, the romantic, the modern, the scientific spirit, or in such capitalized abstractions as Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Classicism, Romanticism, etc.; and lastly and chiefly that it does in very truth provide those who are in com munion with it with standards and principles of judgment and taste which the a priori dogmatism of the new sciences of man and society cannot replace. To define our idea further by negations, it is not to be confused with the truism that in the fundamentals of life and experience all men are one, nor with the half-truth that there is nothing new under the sun, though each of these commonplaces contributes to its illustration. There is doubtless a deal of human nature in the remotest ages and most alien races as there is in the most diverse social classes. "The Colonel s lady and Judy O Grady are sisters under their skin." "Bei den alten Aegyptern gab es auch Kinder," the ancient Egyptians had children too, says a German wit, in the footnote to one of Ebers Egyptian novels. "We are very slightly changed From the semi-apes who ranged India s prehistoric clay," sings Kipling. And to prove the Egyptian a man and a brother he adds, "Who shall doubt the secret hid Under Cheops pyramid Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several millions?" Emerson, the prophet of Unity, generalizes the thought in his essay on history. "All inquiry into antiquity," he says, "all curiosity respecting the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Ohio circles, Mexico, Memphis, is the desire to do away with this wild, say- 484 PAUL SHOREY age, preposterous, there or then, and introduce in its place the here and now. It is to banish the not me and supply the me. It is to abolish difference and restore unity." This is true, though not the truth we are now seeking. It is true that in proportion as we study with intelligent sympathy the architecture, the art, the poetry even of the remotest peoples, they not only interest us as antiquarians or philologists, but reveal their common human quality. But what we are now seeking is the identity in the higher reason of what is best everywhere with what is best in ourselves, not the mere psychological and dramatic identifica tion of our ordinary selves with what seems alien and strange, but proves to be common humanity. The unity of literature and the unity of the human spirit means for us the identity of the imaginative reason in all its authentic products, wherever we find them. And in fact we find them chiefly in Homer and the Bible, and in the European culture that proceeds from these fountain-heads. To the professors of the new sciences of sociol ogy and comparative literature, this will seem a very narrow view. Science demands that we survey mankind with compre hensive view, from China to Peru. But in our quest for a spirit ual unity and continuity of tradition that will practically serve our education, our culture, and our humanity, we must for the present exclude China and Peru, even as Kant did in his "Idea of a Universal History," and as the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes did the other day in his programme for the study of world literature. The brotherhood of man and the unity of the human race is a great and inspiring idea, but it is not the specific idea which we are studying. "O Callicles," says Socrates to the skeptical pupil of the Sophists, "if beneath all our differences there were not a sameness of feeling present to the mind of each of us, no man could tell his own feeling to another." The sons of Homer in every age speak to our minds and hearts, the sons of Confucius not yet, however it may be in the centuries to come, about which I do not undertake to prophesy. Still less is our principle to be confounded with the schoolboy s, the pedant s, or the moralist s thesis that there is nothing new under the sun. It is, I believe, George Eliot who somewhere says that conversation could not go on without a tacit agreement to ignore the fact that everything has been said better than we can THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 485 say it. And she has described the blighting effect on Dorothea s girlish enthusiasms of Mr. Casaubon s production of a classical parallel for every idea and fancy which Rome suggested to her young imagination. So I will not read you my list of Greek and Latin anticipations of the most characteristically modern famil iar quotations in Bartlett. The French moralist, La Bruyere, two hundred and fifty years ago, began an original book, as originality goes, with the remark, "Everything has been said and a modern author comes too late by the seven thousand years during which men have been thinking." Even in this utterance he has been anticipated by at least two Greek poets, not to speak of Solomon. Modern science and invention have convinced us once for all that, however it may be in the realm of familiar quo tation and moral truism, in the material world Solomon was wrong. Telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, and "palace lin ers" equipped with the apparatus of wireless communication, are something new under the sun. And these great changes in the outward circumstance of life inevitably affect our ideas. "The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." But just how much they are widened is one of the most interest ing and most neglected of inquiries, and one that will never be intelligently studied so long as our definition of progress is "any old thing that comes along," and our conception of an original idea is one that is new to those whose reading does not go back of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. Physical science holds on her undeviating course, and we all bow before her. But meta physics and psychology, the so-called sciences of man, compara tive literary criticism, and the sound philosophy of history are all waiting on that fuller knowledge of the history of the human spirit which culminates in the recognition of its higher unity. The time and energy needed for this we waste on the premature, abstract constructions of the pseudo-sciences, and in the writing and study of up-to-date textbooks in them. The status of phi losophy depends almost wholly on the precise degree of its de pendence on physical knowledge. This can be learned only by noting just what the older thinkers could and could not achieve without such knowledge. Instead of this, we content ourselves with the unverified, a priori assumption that their thought must have been childish, and that the new biology, the new physics, 486 PAUL SHOREY and the new physiological psychology have transformed the problems as much as they have altered the fashions of the terminology of philosophy. The first condition of philosophic and comparative literary criticism is knowledge, a knowledge of the history of common place, of the repetition of old ideas in new form, and of the rare emergence of new ideas. We relegate this to the domain of ped antry, parallel passage mongering, and plagiarism hunting, and accept in its stead mastery of the impressionistic epithet, or a priori correlations of social and political structure with forms of literature. Our accepted guides may be prodigies of erudition in some chosen modern specialty. From the larger point of view of the total human spirit, they are grossly illiterate capable, to take a trifling but typical example, of quoting as characteristic of eighteenth-century thought a passage of Bolingbroke s "Re flections on Exile" literally translated out of Seneca. You will not suspect me of the pedantry of implying that everybody must read Seneca. My point is simply that a false conception of prog ress and a fetish worship of the up-to-date make us waste on tenth-rate modern systematic treatises the time which our stu dents need for the world books that exhibit in true perspective the development of the human spirit. A nearer illustration is furnished by our attitude towards the great men of the Victorian age. Twentieth-century thought has undoubtedly attained some points of view overlooked or under estimated by Macaulay, Mill, Carlyle, Arnold, or Tennyson. Nothing could be more instructive than to observe how much or little of this is real gain, and how much is merely a new fashion of terminology or metaphor borrowed from physical science a substitution of "apperception" for association, or "reaction" for conduct. But that would demand discriminating study. It is far easier to dismiss Tennyson, with Mr. Wells, as the dainty phrase-maker of the mid- Victorian bourgeois compromise, and to ask with Professor James, "What was there so significant in John Mill?" I have just been reading Mill s recently published letters, and re-reading the essays on Coleridge, on Bentham, on Utilitarianism, on "The Conflict in America," on Grote s Plato, and others in the five volumes of "Dissertations and Discus sions," and I find this significance at least in Mill: that his writ- THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 487 ings remain to-day a far safer and saner guide for thoughtful undergraduates than the popular successes and the textbooks of the past ten years with which the reference shelves of all the large elective courses are filled. They will learn from him lessons of comprehensive and consecutive thinking, judicial weighing of all considerations pro and con, temperance and precision of expression, and scrupulous fairness to opponents, which they will hardly get from the undigested mixtures of biology, nervous anatomy, anthropology and folk-lore, answers to questionnaires, statistics, and reports from the pedagogical or psychological seminar, with a seasoning of uncritical historical and illiterate literary illustration, that compose the made-to-order textbooks of pedagogy, sociology, ethics, and psychology on which their minds are fed. And if they are told that Mill s thought is now superseded because it antedates evolution, the conservation of energy, and the radio-active physics, they can find no more pleasant or instructive Socratic exercise than pressing their in formant to show them precisely where Mill went astray from ig norance of these imposing generalizations. And if they will read the essay on "Civilization," published in 1836, they may still re tain in their vocabulary the convenient phrase "twentieth-cen tury thought," but they will certainly be more sparing of its use. This exaggerated faith in progress which we abuse to depreci ate the nineteenth century was itself one of three or four domi nant nineteenth-century ideas which seem to contradict the con ception of the unity of the human spirit, and which require to be checked and corrected by it. Nineteenth-century thought as a whole was a reaction against a very narrow but real faith in the unity of human reason. The philosophers of the French Enlight enment conceived man as one, but that one was a polished, let tered, eighteenth-century Frenchman. "Peut-on etre Persan?" is a naive phrase of French satire which embodies this sentiment. You don t really expect us to believe that you are not a French man, but a faraway Persian it s too absurd. The hymn of man and universal brotherhood, as they sang it, ran : "Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little frosty Esquimau, Little Turk or Japanee, Oh, don t you wish that you were me?" 488 PAUL SHOREY If he did wish it, they were quite ready to adopt and enlighten him. But French psychology, French lucidity and wit, the lit erature of the grand si&cle, the criticism of Boileau, the tragedy of Racine, the philosophy and science of the "Encyclopaedia," these were the norm and measure of humanity, past and present, for them. Wherever, in contemporary Europe, in Medicean Italy, in Augustan Rome, in Periclean Athens, they divined qualities akin to these, they recognized men and brothers. The rest were Goths and barbarians. This point of view, slightly modified, was that of the English writers of the so-called Classical Age. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a true child of the eighteenth century when she said that in all her travels she had found but two kinds of people, men and women. Now, there is a kernel of truth in this doctrine. The error lay in recognizing and assimilating only so much of the exotic or the past as matched their own ordinary selves, instead of looking for the identity of their higher selves with the best in all the past, however quaintly disguised. In its reaction against this view, the nineteenth century was led to exaggerate its own three great ideas, the idea of relativity, the idea of evolution, and the new historic method of judging every age by the standards of its time spirit. We have already agreed to waive the metaphysics of relativ ity. If all things are relative and subjective, yet some things are relatively more stable than others, and these become for prac tical purposes our norms. Measures of some sort we must have. Standards and ideals that hold good for the past three thousand years of European culture will serve. We may cheerfully concede that they may not hold for inter-glacial man, or for the hairless and toothless biped who will supplant us when evolution shall have wrought its perfect work. Heraclitus proved that beauty is relative by the argument that the handsomest man is to a god as the ugliest ape is to man, and a French writer on aesthetics says that in order to know whether monkeys are really and truly ugly we should have to get the opinion of the monkeys. But in spite of these ingenious gentlemen, we may dogmatize so far as to affirm that the Hermes of Praxiteles, or the Theseus of the Parthenon are absolutely more beautiful than a wilderness of monkeys carved in ivory by deft Japanese or Hindoo hands. THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 489 Another less abstract use of this idea of relativity is found in the picturesque enumeration of the diversity of custom and belief. If the gentlemanly and philosophic Parsee merchants of Bombay are shocked at our burial of the dead, while we revolt from the thought of exposing them to vultures on high sunlit towers, are not all ideas of decency the mere conventions of habit? "Pretty justice!" cries Pascal, "truth on this side of the Pyrenees, falsehood on that." This method is as old as the father of history. Herodotus relates that King Darius summoned the priests of an Indian tribe whose custom it was to eat their parents and asked them for what price they would consent to burn the bodies in the Greek fashion, and they cried aloud and bade him not blaspheme. The proposal to adopt the Indian cus tom was rejected with equal horror by the Greeks present. Thus, the historian concludes, Pindar was right in affirming that cus tom is lord of all. A similar anecdote is related of Pyrrho, the founder of skepticism, and the device has always been a favorite one with skeptics, satirists, and philosophic historians. A little treatise of an unknown Greek sophist employs it to prove the subjectivity of all ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The worthy bishop Eusebius uses it to establish the capricious freedom of the human will, in defiance of climate and the stars. It is felt as a satiric undertone in the quaint absurdities of Sir John Mandeville s "Voyage and Travail"; Montaigne and Montesquieu make constant use of it. It is still an effective retort on a priori cocksureness. It is perhaps most plausible to us in its application to literary and aesthetic controversy. All such debates, it has been said, in the end resolve themselves into this, "I have more taste than you." The Ibsen, I did not say the Gibson, girl smiles at the heroine of Jane Austen whom "those exquisite verses of Cowper drove wild." Cowper does not agitate her bosom. But if she had been born a hundred and fifty years ago his verses would have "driven her wild" too, and in place of Botticelli and the Hermes she would have adored Guido Reni and the Apollo Belvedere. Voltaire s judgments of Shakespeare and Dante and Milton, and the Quarterly reviewer s opinion of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, survive merely as jests or warn ings. 490 PAUL SHOREY By a clever use of such instances, a plausible writer can con vince a willing public that there are no real standards of literary taste, style, or correct usage; that if Colonel Roosevelt writes, "The bear laid in wait," if President Taft proclaims that "our prosperity is predicated upon good crops," if Tolstoi argues that "King Lear" is a bad tragedy, and Brunetiere affirms that "Plato reasons like a sophist and thinks like a child," -these emi nent persons are as likely to be right as is my finicking scholar who eschews these locutions and rejects these judgments. I do not propose to debate the question here. It is enough to remind you of Matthew Arnold s dictum that "somewhere, somehow, such matters are settled by the consensus of the competent." And I will add that, due allowance made for accidental slips, idiosyncrasies, and whims, the competent are those who know, and they are much more nearly at one in their estimates than appears to superficial observation. Nearly all grotesquely false literary judgments are due to defective knowledge. The public does not perceive this, because it confuses different kinds of competence, and mistakes the merely verbal scholar on the one hand, or the brilliant phrase-maker on the other, for the serious and critical student of literature. But the majority of those who are really acquainted with the world s best books are in substan tial agreement about them, and M. Anatole France, who amuses himself by sustaining the thesis of the relativity of all literary opinions, is in fact more certain of the quality of a good line in Virgil than he is of anything else in the world. Closely akin to the idea of relativity is the idea of evolution. How can we affirm absolute ideals and standards, if our habits, our opinions, and the very faculties of mind by which we form them are transitory products of an unstable equilibrium in a process that began in nebulous star-drift and will never pause till the sun is cold and silent as the moon? Well, absolutely we cannot. But again, for practical purposes, we may and must. A singular air of unreality is given to much current popular philosophy and science by the habit of starting every topic with the amoeba and winding up with Utopia. We don t know much about either, but constant allusion to them generates an elusive sense of familiarity. This is what Mr. Chesterton calls "remot- ism," the tendency to think first of those things which lie far- THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 491 thest away from the centre of human experience. George Eliot long ago satirized it as the improved method of explaining every thing by a reference to the tribes least like ourselves. And Mr. John Morley, trying to account for what he calls "the passing eclipse of interest in wisdom of the world," says, "The literary passion for primitive times and the raw material of man has thrust polished man, the manufactured article, into a secondary place." There are otherwise rational men who will reply to a pertinent historical or literary precedent that the past is obso lete and we must solve the problems of the day with the experi ence of the hour. But if you tell them that the female of an unpronounceable crustacean devours the male, or that the devel opment of the human embryo recapitulates the evolution of the vertebrate from the tidal ascidian, they will accept these inter esting truths, if the truths they be, as serious contributions to the understanding of twentieth-century marriage or education. As Superintendent Harris used to put it, we study the embryology of the frog, but not that of our civilization. The word evolution, outside of biological science, has become the shibboleth of con fused or evasive thinking. The relish of writers who are not biologists for the polysyllabic neologisms of the new metaphysi cal biology resembles the gusto of a half -educated colored gentle man for the tremendous pomposity of sesquipedalian verbiage. The value for biological science of orthoplasy, orthogenesis, ontogeny, phylogeny, and the principle of projected efficiency I will not presume to discuss. But for the morals, the psychol ogy, and the institutions of man as he is, they are about as significant as their mediaeval analogues, the inquiry how many angels can poise simultaneously on a needle s point, or the ques tion whether a chimaera, bombinating in a vacuum, can eat second intentions. In spite of the space they still occupy in pretentious treatises, they are solemn humbugs, and it shows a lack of intellectual seriousness to take them seriously at all. We live, it may be, in a process of evolution, but for all practical ends of the higher human life it is the historic evolution of Western European civilization, and not the cosmogonic evolu tion of the universe. "Evolution," says John Fiske, "is correct ing our perspective. Events only three thousand years old seem recent." Do they really? I doubt it. But if they do it is because 492 PAUL SHOREY the abuse of the language of science has so confused our common sense that we habitually put our eye to the big end of the tele scope. Nobody really believes that all our social and educational arrangements are contingent upon the fortunes of the planetesi- mal hypothesis or the ups and downs of the theory of the conti nuity of the germ plasm. But everybody who writes a big book on sociology pretends to believe it. But, it will be said, the new philosophy of history proclaims the diversity of man from age to age, and the great error of the eighteenth century was its deficiency in historic imagination. It measured all things by itself. As Shelley said of Wordsworth, "It had as much imagination As a pint pot, it never could Fancy another situation From which to dart its contemplation Than that whereon it stood." That is what we have all been taught and have all been repeating for the past hundred years. But are we not in danger of confound ing psychological comprehension and imaginative dramatic sym pathy with deliberate acceptance and reasoned approval? Must we not discriminate between the imaginative historical reali zation of conditions unlike our own, and the extenuation of ab solute wrong, the compromise with absolute error? The word (absolute) does not beg the question. We mean what is wrong and false by the standards and ideals that progressively tend to get themselves established in the best minds from Homer to Tennyson, from Thales to Darwin, and to which witness is borne even in the darkest times by an enlightened minority. This tendency is a fact, and it constitutes that unity of the human spirit which we deny and repudiate at our peril. The existence in any age or country of one right-thinking representa tive of reason and truth justifies us from this point of view in passing absolute judgment of condemnation on those who sin against the light. If superstition is a folly and a curse, the miracle monger, Apollonius of Tyana, cannot plead the spirit of his age, for it was the age of Plutarch s noble essay on superstition. The charlatan and faith healer, Alexander of Abonoteichos, is not justified by the practice of his contemporaries, for he was the contemporary of the philosophic physician Galen and the clear- THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 493 eyed Lucian. It is of no avail to cite long lists of saintly and learned men who approved of burning witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For, to say nothing of skeptical humanists and philosophic liberals, the arguments of John Wier and Cornelius Agrippa turn the burden of proof and the pre sumption against the intelligence, the good faith, or the courage of any educated man who countenanced that abomination. We might accept the plea that the time-spirit justified Calvin in burning Servetus, if we did not remember in the same century Zwinglius and the genial tolerance of Henry the Fourth, and Montaigne s observation that it is setting a very high value on our conjectures to cook a man alive for them. The sentimental rhetoric of Victor Hugo s poem cannot save the inquisitor Torquemada. The plea that he loved the heretics and burned them for their good will not serve. Sophocles, Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, Boethius, Roger Bacon, St. Francis, Giordano Bruno, Montaigne, Milton, and Locke would have judged him precisely as we do. Why should we unsettle that practical moral certainty by the affectation of a pseudo-scientific, dramatically impartial, relative, and psychological estimate? So is our judgment of the literature of the past. Beyond and above the would-be scientific literary criticism of evolution is the estimate of the great book by its abiding value for the human spirit. Homeric theories come and go. I have myself assisted at the obsequies of not a few. And the theory of Homeric unity, which seems to be getting the upper hand in 1910, is rapidly approximating to that which my scholarly colleagues thought it mere sentimentalism in me to maintain in 1892. Homeric theo ries come and go. But Homer abides, and it is beginning to appear that the old-fashioned boys whose enthusiasm was nour ished on the somewhat artificial dignity of Pope s Homer were quite as near even to the scientific truth as are the generation that were taught to regard the poet as a lively barbarian, chant ing his rude, unpremeditated lays to wild tribesmen about the camp-fire. In Spencer s "Tables of Sociology," Homer is merely the witness to curious survivals of barbaric rites and institutions. To Matthew Arnold, he is the clearest-souled of men, and the chief prop of the mind, the "Iliad" is the "most important poet ical monument existing," and its finest lines are the touchstone 49 4 PAUL SHOREY of the "grand style in simplicity." There is place for both points of view, but the place of the one is the conjectural science of a decade, and that of the other the eternal soul of humanism. Systems of philosophy have their day and pass, but the Socratic dialogues remain, and Plato, as Emerson says, makes havoc with our originalities. Time fails to explain to you how exquisitely funny are the hasty modern interpreters who apolo gize for his logic, the German specialists who discover his fal lacies and self-contradictions, the commencement orators of science who proclaim his "passing." Cicero lived before the days of modern science, and had his personal weaknesses, but in the forum of human reason his intel ligence needs less allowance and apology than Gladstone s. And the eighteenth-century statesmen, who quoted him freely and re garded him as a man and a brother, understood him better than the disciples of Mommsen have. How shall we know the true Dante? By immersing ourselves in parochial Italian politics and scholastic philosophy and dwell ing solely on the things that divide him from us, or by learning to distil from this detail the universal quality of soul that makes of him the mind in whose spiritual communion Kant and Glad stone and Longfellow and Lowell and Tennyson find most af finity and most solace? The critical scholar must study Shakespeare as an Elizabethan, with the vocabulary, the information, and the prejudices of his fellow Elizabethans. The science of comparative literature may classify him as the poet of feudalism and contrast him with Homer, poet of the tribe, JEschylus, poet of the city state, Dante, poet of Catholicism, Goethe, poet of modern culture, Walt Whitman, poet of the coming democracy. But the true Shake speare soars to heights above these distinctions, where Walt Whitman and the lesser Elizabethans are invisible, and where he holds converse with his peers across the centuries. The real Shakespeare is not the Elizabethan playwright who throws sops to the Cerberus of the pit, but the poetic mirror of universal humanity, the magician whose golden phrase "sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible home," the supreme word-compeller who stamps the seal and superscription of his THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 495 imagination upon truths equally valid for the Homeric tribe and the democracy of the future. Thus, as I have already hinted, the naive reader who inter prets every book as if it were written now and here and addressed to him will often err less than the philosopher of relativity who persists in making condescending allowance for the spirit of the age. The deficiencies which we detect in the great thinkers of the past are apt to prove those of our own imperfect perception and misplaced emphasis. As Morley says of Emerson, all great minds perceive all things; the only difference is in the order in which they shall choose to place them. They see in its relation to the whole the particular aspect of life which the glamour of their art and the potency of their genius throws into excessive relief for us. And our more intimate study of them is a progressive redis covery in them of the forestalling and explaining away of our over hasty censures. I do not mean by this to vindicate a papal infallibility for great writers, but merely to affirm that the ap preciation of their excellency is a more fruitful study than the criticism of their defects, or the attempt to account for them by vigorous and rigorous systems. Our idea might be further illustrated by the great books of the second order, those that fall short of the highest imaginative inspiration, but which are yet world books by virtue of wealth of content, justice of observation, subtlety of wit, sagacity of judg ment, sanity in the criticism of life. Foremost in this class are the great reservoir books, books that collect from the past and distribute to the future enormous stores of observation and sage reflection. Plutarch, Quintilian, Seneca, Lucretius, Boethius, Montaigne, Bacon, Burton, and last, but for us Americans not least, Emerson s Essays. To these we may add the great wits and satirists, Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Moliere, Rabelais, La Bruyere, Swift, Pope. When we have stripped from them all scurrility, all declamation, all merely local hits and topical songs, we find that they all employ the same trenchant reason, the same wholesome laughter, to lash the same follies, expose the same pettinesses, and shame us by contrast into recognition of the same ideal of a larger and truer humanity. A like lesson is taught by the books of characters and aphorisms, the books of the wisdom of life, and the maxims of good sense, 496 PAUL SHOREY of which Mill said that there is a nearly equal supply in all ages, while Schopenhauer puts the same thought less good-naturedly in the remark that in every age wise men have said the same things and fools have done the same things, namely the contrary. But most of all is the lesson of the unity of reason brought home to us by increasing experience of the fair proportion of sanity and intelligence that we can count upon meeting in the better books of the darkest ages and in the most obsolete branches of literature. Genius sometimes fails, but the torch of reason is never extinguished. The Epigonoi of Alexandria and Rome did not attain the artistic heights of the ages of Pericles and Augustus, but on nearer acquaintance many of them prove to be scholars and gentlemen uncommonly like those of our own day. The really good mystics, a Philo Judaeus, a Plotinus, when we allow for their peculiar rhetoric and the trick of allegory, turn out to be very sensible fellows. It is only the weaklings that take to table-rappings, divine healing, thought-transference, Mrs. Piper, and Madame Eusapia Palladino. The dark ages are illu mined not only by Gothic architecture and Provengal lyric, and fitful flashes of genius and saintliness, but by Boethius, through whom King Alfred, Dante, and Chaucer are still in touch with Plato, by the learning and the good sense of the Venerable Bede, the speculative insight of John Scotus Erigena, the scientific divinations of Roger Bacon, the humanism of John of Salisbury, the liberalism of William of Ockham. We do not now need to read the Latin-writing scholars of the Renaissance. But those who do dip into them are amazed at the stores, not merely of erudition, but of intelligence, right feeling, sound psychology, and anticipations of modern thought found in such men as Politian, Erasmus, Vives, Bruno, and Gassendi. It is the fashion to laugh at the ponderous tomes of the seventeenth century. But in a recent perusal of old Burton I have been struck not so much with the learning of the man as with the good sense and keen discrimination of one whom Taine, misled perhaps by his fantastic table of contents, represents as merely an absurd pedant. This is not the only experience of the kind that every extension of our reading brings us. A large pro portion of the good if secondary writers of the past are much more rational than minor critics and compilers of modern text- THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 497 books represent them to be. Their errors and oddities are always exaggerated by the writers of the next ensuing age, who feel too deeply the differences in the fashion of their expression to appre ciate their agreement in the fundamentals of reason. Even the representatives of the pseudo-classicism, which the romantic revolt has made a byword with us, make a very different appear ance in their own person from that which they present in the pages of so fair a summarizer as Mr. Saintsbury. Even La Harpe in France and Rymer in England have something to say for themselves. One may despise the character and depreciate the influence of Rousseau. But the first impression on actually read ing his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of his "Social Con tract" is one of amazed indignation at the discovery that Rousseau himself anticipates most of the qualifications and objections of the critics who represent him as a rhetorician of genius, incapable of consecutive thought. In short, as Mill I believe said, there are two classes of mind, recognized in the vocabulary of no party, but marking a more important distinc tion than any party line, the superior and inferior, the strong and the weak. It is perhaps expecting too much to ask that we teachers, commentators, and textbook writers should admit that the majority of us do not belong to the superior class. Space failing for further illustration of the applications of our idea, I may touch in closing on its practical helpfulness for edu cation and culture and its value as a sentiment, a feeling. It emancipates and liberates us, as we have seen, from the formulas and catchwords of contemporary vogue, which we are in no dan ger of forgetting, because we are rarely allowed to hear anything else. We shall still retain sufficient faith in progress, science, evolution, relativity, the historic method, and other conquests of the nineteenth or twentieth century mind. But we shall view them in relation to a larger whole and apply them with a saving common sense and sense of humor which mere science does not always give. Democracy, too, is a conquest of progress that we are in no danger of losing. But we shall henceforth interpret it as equality of opportunity, not equalization of values. We shall not take it to mean that one book is as good as another, or that books written to flatter the multitude and gratify the natural taste for bathos of the unregenerate man are necessarily "more 498 PAUL SHOREY highly evolved" than the products of feudalism or the ancient city state. The spirit of humanism knows nothing of these classi fications of the " science of literature." There is one great society alone on earth, the noble living and the noble dead. That society is and always will be an aristocracy. But the door of oppor tunity that gives access to it opens easily to the keys of a sound culture, and is closed only to the ignorance and prejudice that fixes our hypnotized vision on the passing phantasmagoria. A certain type of educator is given to denouncing the tyranny of the classics. There is no intellectual tyranny comparable to that exercised over the imagination by the present, the up-to-date, with its incessant panorama of self-representation, its myriad- voiced iteration of itself from the newspapers, the dime maga zines, the platforms that mould or enforce the opinions of ninety million men. The new psychologists have coined a question- begging epithet into a pseudo-scientific term, "misoneism," or hatred of novelty, to stigmatize the hesitation of culture to accept every popgun of hypothesis as the crack of doom. What Greek compound will do justice to that hatred of the old, that distaste for everything not mentioned in yesterday s newspaper, which seals their minds, and the minds of the generation which they are educating, to so much of the inherited beauty and wis dom of the world? The present, like the poor, we shall always have with us. The effect of educating the undergraduate solely on the literature and the ideas of the day will be to clothe the graduate for life in that most hopelessly obsolete of all garbs, the fashion of yesterday. Those books only will never grow obsolete and out of date whose fashion, like the unwritten law to which Antigone appealed, is not of to-day nor yesterday, but of all time. They only can diffuse through the college life that gracious and serene atmosphere of beauty and right reason in which the young soul can attain its fullest stature. The literature of the hour and the place may titillate and entertain, but only the timeless literature of the world can elevate, refine, and console. "Even to him whose heart fresh sorrow wrings There comes a solace when the minstrel sings. He sings the heroes of the olden time, And gods that walk Olympian heights sublime. And brings swift oubliance of every woe; Such spells the gifts of heavenly song bestow." THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 499 The Homeric rhapsode no longer chants the fall of Ilion; the white robes of the Muses that taught Hesiod gleam no more in the moonlight where Helicon breaks down in cliff to the sea; Sappho s divine tortoise shell is vocal no longer; no more the rolling anapaestic curls like vapor over Athenian shrines in the great theatre of Dionysus; the Pan s pipe of the Theocritean shepherd has ceased to vie in sweetness with the rustling of the pines by the fountain and the lowing of the distant kine; the nightingales of Bion have fallen mute, and the water springs that spake are quenched and dead; the heard melodies have passed away. But those who can listen to the lordly music flow ing from the illimitable years, those whose souls a culture which it is now the fashion to call old-fashioned has keyed to receive the far, faint vibrations of the past, for them those soft pipes play on, not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. And I trust that you will not think me fantastic if I add that this feeling of communion with the past, this sentiment of the unity of the world s best literature, is an emotional refuge from the desolating sense of vastness and confusion which results from the immensity and the dispersion of our intellectual interests. We are all familiar with that nameless horror of the infinite which overcomes us at the thought of endless space and time. "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces appals me," says Pascal. And even the austere Herbert Spencer writes in his last book, "Of late years the consciousness that without origin or cause infinite void space has existed from all eternity and will exist when man has passed away fills me with a feeling from which I shrink." The highest imaginative expression of this sentiment is Tennyson s poem "Vastness," with its refrain, "Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the deeps of a meaningless Past." From that waste welter of endless space and time, the dome of a library shuts us in to the warm little world of literature, charged with human thought and feeling. This is the true Mid-garth of Norse mythology, the merry middle earth, strongly fenced against Ut-garth, the icy barrier of the world, the home of the gigantic abstractions of physical science, only one remove from 500 PAUL SHOREY Niflheim and the gulfs of chaos. The desolate seons of geologic time shrink to the thirty post-Homeric centuries, and the myri ads of lonely suns and the waste vacancies of inter-stellar space become only the dim background for those luminous points, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, Weimar, London. But again within this human world another vastitude con fronts us from which we can find refuge only in some simplifying selection of the best. A huge collection of antiquities, a many- corridored art gallery, the millions of volumes gathered beneath the great dome of the British Museum, are hardly less oppressive to the soul than the myriads of rolling suns that burn and brand his nothingness into man. Infinite is the detail of modern erudi tion. Unless we find a way to master it, it will master us and crush our spirit. If literature and history are a Heraclitean flux of facts, if one event is as significant as another, one book, one idea, the equivalent of another as objects of abstract science, we may for a time bravely tread the mill of scholastic routine, but in the end the soul will succumb to an immense lassitude and bafflement. But if, to wrest the old Platonic phrases once more to our purpose, the flux is not all, if the good, the true, and the beautiful are something real and ascertainable, if these eternal ideals reembody themselves from age to age essentially the same in the imaginative visions of supreme genius and in the persistent sanity and rationality of the world s best books, then our reading and study are redeemed, both from the obsessions of the hour, and the tyranny of quantitative measures and mechanical methods. The boundless ocean of books is before us, and the courageous reader will make many a bold voyage of discovery to rarely visited shores. But more and more as the years go by will he concentrate his attention on the books that preserve from age to age the precious distillation of the human spirit in its finest flower. They are not so many but that he may in time hope to seek them out and in some sort to know them. They are com paratively few, but "That few is all the world which with a few Doth ever live and move and work and strive." THE END RE Tl 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewals only: Tel. No. 642-3405 Renewals may be made 4 days prior to date due. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. ftfll_ fueena or wiNltR Quarter subject to recall FEB 2 2 73 t 2 1* REC D IB MAR 1 7 73 -* PM # 3 I APR 4 1982 KfctP MAR 1982 A i - , , . I TT9B3 -; ;> iBC-Clfc JIW8 *82 i SEP U 1^ OCT1 92002 l JUL312002 u< ~~ ) I JUN ^ o Z003 SEP 1 9 2002 j LD21A-40m-3, 72 CQll73SlO)476-A-32 General Library University of California Berkeley LD9-30m-4, 65(F3o. U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY V * *