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 
 
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