Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes; Charles William Eliot; Nicholas Murray Butler
Selected by Amelia Gora (2018) from the Gutenberg website
The following were posted at the Gutenberg website:
Robert
Louis Stevenson in his fable, "The Four Reformers," :
"Four reformers met under a bramble-bush. They were all agreed the world
must be changed. 'We must abolish property,' said one.
"'We must abolish marriage,' said the second.
"'We must abolish God,' said the third.
"'I wish we could abolish work,' said the fourth.
"'Do not let us get beyond practical politics,' said the first. 'The
first thing is to reduce men to a common level.'
"'The first thing,' said the second, 'is to give freedom to the sexes.'
"'The first thing,' said the third, 'is to find out how to do it.'
"'The first step,' said the first, 'is to abolish the Bible.'
"'The first thing,' said the second, 'is to abolish the laws.'
'"The first thing,' said the third, 'is to abolish mankind.'"
BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
THIS is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman
populace. It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have
something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have
something to eat, and the papers to read.
Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our
carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to
Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new
dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with.
If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its
respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a
caraway-umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed
nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one,
if only the Lieutenant’s jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a
pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the
newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.
How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions,
as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his
fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would
have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely
repulsive.
All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have
experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later
betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among
us. We cannot forget Corvisart’s observation of the frequency with which
diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible
emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec
tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director,
where all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled
in the most painful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after
their entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years’ attendance, all
the inmates died out two or three times, and were replaced by new ones.
He does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered
to those depressing moral influences to which they were subjected.
So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous
system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants. Take
the first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad
disaster to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of
two gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden
feeling at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the
stomach, changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the
knees. The lady had a "grande révolution," as French patients
say,—went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day. Perhaps the
reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in
more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from no more
serious cause. An old gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on
hearing of Napoleon’s return from Elba. One of our early friends, who
recently died of the same complaint, was thought to have had his attack
mainly in consequence of the excitements of the time.
We all know what the war fever is in our young men,—what a devouring
passion it becomes in those whom it assails. Patriotism is the fire of
it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of
adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of
participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal
distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we
often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most
ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different
form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a
drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families. Some
of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain
in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that
is prevailing.
The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men
cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They
stroll up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places.
We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of
his work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as
interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before
the red light of the terrible present. Meeting the same author not long
afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time
that we had closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth
century any more than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was
in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.
Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had
fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic
dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new,
until he felt as if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same
thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the
fever is over? Another person always goes through the side streets on
his way for the noon extra,—he is so afraid somebody will meet him
and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board,
and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.
When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in
our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go
tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries
that make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes
round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as
deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty
years. This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the
twelfth of April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex
post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful
impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading
backwards from the leaf of life open before us through all those which
we have already turned.
Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not
wholly blessed, either: for what is more painful than the awaking from
peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong,—we
cannot at first think what,—and then groping our way about through the
twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like
some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us
on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?
The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the
feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is,
after all, only a dream,—if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and
shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed
grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact
always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the
dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their especial use.
Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well,—at least, he suspects
himself of indisposition. Nothing serious,—let us just rub our
fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs
his hands, and all will be right. He rubs them with that peculiar
twisting movement of his, and pauses for the effect. No! all is not
quite right yet. Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought
to be. Let us settle that where it should be, and then we shall
certainly be in good trim again. So he pulls his head about as an old
lady adjusts her cap, and passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten
washing herself.—Poor fellow! It is not a fancy, but a fact, that he
has to deal with. If he could read the letters at the head of the sheet,
he would see they were Fly-Paper.—So with us, when, in our waking
misery, we try to think we dream! Perhaps very young persons may not
understand this; as we grow older, our waking and dreaming life run more
and more into each other.
Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of
old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be
had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must
go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner
nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand
on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine
right of its telegraphic dispatches.
War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of
Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers the
Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,
which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that
time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from
the neighboring heights at all hours,—in token of which see the tower
of Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means ’76.
As for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about that"; and
everybody knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much,
except in its political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us
who are not in the last quarter of their century. We are learning many
strange matters from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new
conditions of existence which make war as it is with us very different
from war as it has been.
The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron
nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and
from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single
living body. The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it
were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was
the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th
of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts
with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?
This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous
action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless
courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight
of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know
for a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden
with truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always
for the last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of
our armies. Tonight the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under
their own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the
tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned
like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times;
now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And
this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another
singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We
may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a
week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would
have been in a whole season before our national nervous system was
organized.
"As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
Thou only teachest all that man can be!"
We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of
long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler’s beautiful
prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.
Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind, we
have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,—especially when one
of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build and
keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would give us
a new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some meaning in
our poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we can
be and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us
all back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long time more or
less kept out of sight by the spirit of commerce, the love of art,
science, or literature, or other qualities not belonging to all of us as
men and women.
It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social
distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the
preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out
that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility.
All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery.
The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like
a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crécy
and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his
straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or
leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs
as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.
Even our poor "Brahmins,"—whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the
same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed
antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the "bloated
aristocracy," whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized,
shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for
learning,—even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, subvirates of
an organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their
courage is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their
slender figures.
A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our
windows. A few days afterwards a field-piece was dragged to the water’s
edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who
looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall,"
he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface. A strange
physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our
present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the
surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared
over Charleston harbor.
Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable
grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with
the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and
unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of
fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed
by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.
It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable
not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary
times had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern
people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the
French,—Goldsmith’s old soldier, it may be remembered, called one
Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,
again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider
the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,—forgetting
that Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon
gold, and Nathanael Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor
of forging iron.
These persons have learned better now. The bravery of our free
working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not drowned.
The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change
their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer
the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build
towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute
matter into every shape civilization can ask for.
Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in
new shapes,—that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a
man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our
bones and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave
Winthrop, marching with the city élégants, seems to have been a little
startled to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the
Eighth Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or
ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is
distributed over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to
think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up
turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us
that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New
Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.
Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen
chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief. When the
masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his heart
that God takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist"
Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young
fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the
Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the
Homoiousians translated from the battle-field to the abodes of
everlasting woe? War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches
also what he must not be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in the
presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls
to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts: to do his duty,
and trust his Maker. Let our brave dead come back from the fields where
they have fallen for law and liberty, and if you will follow them to
their graves, you will find out what the Broad Church means; the narrow
church is sparing of its exclusive formulæ over the coffins wrapped in
the flag which the fallen heroes had defended! Very little comparatively
do we hear at such times of the dogmas on which men differ; very much
of the faith and trust in which all sincere Christians can agree. It is
a noble lesson, and nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can
teach it so that it shall be heard over all the angry cries of
theological disputants.
Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and to
get at their principles of judgment. Perhaps most of us will agree that
our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the experience of
the last six months. We had the notable predictions attributed to the
Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly refused to fulfill themselves.
We were infested at one time with a set of ominous-looking seers, who
shook their heads and muttered obscurely about some mighty preparations
that were making to substitute the rule of the minority for that of the
majority. Organizations were darkly hinted at; some thought our armories
would be seized; and there are not wanting ancient women in the
neighboring University town who consider that the country was saved by
the intrepid band of students who stood guard, night after night, over
the G. R. cannon and the pile of balls in the Cambridge Arsenal.
As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are those
which the sages remember after the event prophesied of has come to
pass, and remind us that they have made long ago. Those who are rash
enough to predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they hope,
or what they fear, or some conclusion from an abstraction of their own,
or some guess founded on private information not half so good as what
everybody gets who reads the papers,—never by any possibility a word
that we can depend on, simply because there are cobwebs of contingency
between every to-day and to-morrow that no field-glass can penetrate
when fifty of them lie woven one over another. Prophesy as much as you
like, but always hedge. Say that you think the rebels are weaker than
is commonly supposed, but, on the other hand, that they may prove to be
even stronger than is anticipated. Say what you like,—only don’t be too
peremptory and dogmatic; we know that wiser men than you have been
notoriously deceived in their predictions in this very matter.
"Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis."
Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as a
prophet, not to put a stop before or after the nunquam.
There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that already
referred to, which strike us very forcibly in their relation to the
great events passing around us. We spoke of the long period seeming to
have elapsed since this war began. The buds were then swelling which
held the leaves that are still green. It seems as old as Time himself.
We cannot fail to observe how the mind brings together the scenes of
to-day and those of the old Revolution. We shut up eighty years into
each other like the joints of a pocket-telescope. When the young men
from Middlesex dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to bring
Lexington and the other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always
been the mint in which the world’s history has been coined, and now
every day or week or month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that
the first impression bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth
now, the new face hardly seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields
are alike in their main features. The young fellows who fell in our
earlier struggle seemed like old men to us until within these few
months; now we remember they were like these fiery youth we are cheering
as they go to the fight; it seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside
was crimsoned but yesterday, and the cannon-ball imbedded in the
church-tower would feel warm, if we laid our hand upon it.
Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from
earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled, are
but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon
the field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right
against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour may go, a
movement onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to
serve its mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare change less
than we think. Our bullets and cannon-balls have lengthened into bolts
like those which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with
weapons, such as are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a
newly invented head-gear as old as the days of the Pyramids.
Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and,
we trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our
narrowness, our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and
shame. Better, because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by
the time, and our people are rising to the standard the time calls for.
For this is the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you
ready, if need be, to sacrifice all that you have and hope for in this
world, that the generations to follow you may inherit a whole country
whose natural conditions shall be peace, and not a broken province which
must live under the perpetual threat, if not in the constant presence,
of war and all that war brings with it? If we are all ready for this
sacrifice, battles may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object
must be won.
Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals. We are
not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view of the
momentous issues before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give up
all, but we have already been called upon to part with much that is dear
to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it is called for. The
time may come when even the cheap public print shall be a burden our
means cannot support, and we can only listen in the square that was once
the market-place to the voices of those who proclaim defeat or victory.
Then there will be only our daily food left. When we have nothing to
read and nothing to eat, it will be a favorable moment to offer a
compromise. At present we have all that nature absolutely demands,—we
can live on bread and the newspaper.
Reference:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40196/40196-h/40196-h.htm
"These five contributions to civilization—peace-keeping, religious toleration, the development of manhood suffrage, the welcoming of newcomers, and the diffusion of well-being"
FIVE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION
CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT
LOOKING back over forty centuries of history, we observe that many
nations have made characteristic contributions to the progress of
civilization, the beneficent effects of which have been permanent,
although the races that made them may have lost their national form and
organization, or their relative standing among the nations of the earth.
Thus, the Hebrew race, during many centuries, made supreme contributions
to religious thought; and the Greek, during the brief climax of the
race, to speculative philosophy, architecture, sculpture, and the drama.
The Roman people developed military colonization, aqueducts, roads and
bridges, and a great body of public law, large parts of which still
survive; and the Italians of the middle ages and the Renaissance
developed ecclesiastical organization and the fine arts, as tributary to
the splendor of the church and to municipal luxury. England, for several
centuries, has contributed to the institutional development of
representative government and public justice; the Dutch, in the
sixteenth century, made a superb struggle for free thought and free
government; France, in the eighteenth century, taught the doctrine of
individual freedom and the theory of human rights; and Germany, at two
periods within the nineteenth century, fifty years apart, proved the
vital force of the sentiment of nationality. I ask you to consider with
me what characteristic and durable contributions the American people
have been making to the progress of civilization.
The first and principal contribution to which I shall ask your attention
is the advance made in the United States, not in theory only, but in
practice, toward the abandonment of war as the means of settling
disputes between nations, the substitution of discussion and
arbitration, and the avoidance of armaments. If the intermittent Indian
fighting and the brief contest with the Barbary corsairs be disregarded,
the United States have had only four years and a quarter of
international war in the one hundred and seven years since the adoption
of the Constitution. Within the same period the United States have been
a party to forty-seven arbitrations—being more than half of all that
have taken place in the modern world. The questions settled by these
arbitrations have been just such as have commonly caused wars, namely,
questions of boundary, fisheries, damage caused by war or civil
disturbances, and injuries to commerce. Some of them were of great
magnitude, the four made under the treaty of Washington (May 8, 1871)
being the most important that have ever taken place. Confident in their
strength, and relying on their ability to adjust international
differences, the United States have habitually maintained, by voluntary
enlistment for short terms, a standing army and a fleet which, in
proportion to the population, are insignificant.
The beneficent effects of this American contribution to civilization are
of two sorts: in the first place, the direct evils of war and of
preparations for war have been diminished; and secondly, the influence
of the war spirit on the perennial conflict between the rights of the
single personal unit and the powers of the multitude that constitute
organized society—or, in other words, between individual freedom and
collective authority—has been reduced to the lowest terms. War has
been, and still is, the school of collectivism, the warrant of tyranny.
Century after century, tribes, clans, and nations have sacrificed the
liberty of the individual to the fundamental necessity of being strong
for combined defense or attack in war. Individual freedom is crushed in
war, for the nature of war is inevitably despotic. It says to the
private person: "Obey without a question, even unto death; die in this
ditch, without knowing why; walk into that deadly thicket; mount this
embankment, behind which are men who will try to kill you, lest you
should kill them; make part of an immense machine for blind destruction,
cruelty, rapine, and killing." At this moment every young man in
Continental Europe learns the lesson of absolute military obedience, and
feels himself subject to this crushing power of militant society,
against which no rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness avail anything. This pernicious influence, inherent
in the social organization of all Continental Europe during many
centuries, the American people have for generations escaped, and they
show other nations how to escape it. I ask your attention to the
favorable conditions under which this contribution of the United States
to civilization has been made.
There has been a deal of fighting on the American continent during the
past three centuries; but it has not been of the sort which most
imperils liberty. The first European colonists who occupied portions of
the coast of North America encountered in the Indians men of the Stone
Age, who ultimately had to be resisted and quelled by force. The Indian
races were at a stage of development thousands of years behind that of
the Europeans. They could not be assimilated; for the most part they
could not be taught or even reasoned with; with a few exceptions they
had to be driven away by prolonged fighting, or subdued by force so
that they would live peaceably with the whites. This warfare, however,
always had in it for the whites a large element of self-defense—the
homes and families of the settlers were to be defended against a
stealthy and pitiless foe. Constant exposure to the attacks of savages
was only one of the formidable dangers and difficulties which for a
hundred years the early settlers had to meet, and which developed in
them courage, hardiness, and persistence. The French and English wars on
the North American continent, always more or less mixed with Indian
warfare, were characterized by race hatred and religious animosity—two
of the commonest causes of war in all ages; but they did not tend to
fasten upon the English colonists any objectionable public authority, or
to contract the limits of individual liberty. They furnished a school of
martial qualities at small cost to liberty. In the War of Independence
there was a distinct hope and purpose to enlarge individual liberty. It
made possible a confederation of the colonies, and, ultimately, the
adoption of the Constitution of the United States. It gave to the
thirteen colonies a lesson in collectivism, but it was a needed lesson
on the necessity of combining their forces to resist an oppressive
external authority. The war of 1812 is properly called the Second War of
Independence, for it was truly a fight for liberty and for the rights of
neutrals, in resistance to the impressment of seamen and other
oppressions growing out of European conflicts. The civil war of 1861-65
was waged, on the side of the North, primarily, to prevent the
dismemberment of the country, and, secondarily and incidentally, to
destroy the institution of slavery. On the Northern side it therefore
called forth a generous element of popular ardor in defense of free
institutions; and though it temporarily caused centralization of great
powers in the government, it did as much to promote individual freedom
as it did to strengthen public authority.
In all this series of fightings the main motives were self-defense,
resistance to oppression, the enlargement of liberty, and the
conservation of national acquisitions. The war with Mexico, it is true,
was of a wholly different type. That was a war of conquest, and of
conquest chiefly in the interest of African slavery. It was also an
unjust attack made by a powerful people on a feeble one; but it lasted
less than two years, and the number of men engaged in it was at no time
large. Moreover, by the treaty which ended the war, the conquering
nation agreed to pay the conquered eighteen million dollars in partial
compensation for some of the territory wrested from it, instead of
demanding a huge war-indemnity, as the European way is. Its results
contradicted the anticipations both of those who advocated and of those
who opposed it. It was one of the wrongs which prepared the way for the
great rebellion; but its direct evils were of moderate extent, and it
had no effect on the perennial conflict between individual liberty and
public power.
In the meantime, partly as the results of Indian fighting and the
Mexican war, but chiefly through purchases and arbitrations, the
American people had acquired a territory so extensive, so defended by
oceans, gulfs, and great lakes, and so intersected by those great
natural highways, navigable rivers, that it would obviously be
impossible for any enemy to overrun or subdue it. The civilized nations
of Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa have always been liable to
hostile incursions from without. Over and over again barbarous hordes
have overthrown established civilizations; and at this moment there is
not a nation of Europe which does not feel obliged to maintain monstrous
armaments for defense against its neighbors. The American people have
long been exempt from such terrors, and are now absolutely free from
this necessity of keeping in readiness to meet heavy assaults. The
absence of a great standing army and of a large fleet has been a main
characteristic of the United States, in contrast with the other
civilized nations; this has been a great inducement to immigration, and
a prime cause of the country’s rapid increase in wealth. The United
States have no formidable neighbor, except Great Britain in Canada. In
April, 1817, by a convention made between Great Britain and the United
States, without much public discussion or observation, these two
powerful nations agreed that each should keep on the Great Lakes only a
few police vessels of insignificant size and armament. This agreement
was made but four years after Perry’s naval victory on Lake Erie, and
only three years after the burning of Washington by a British force. It
was one of the first acts of Monroe’s first administration, and it would
be difficult to find in all history a more judicious or effectual
agreement between two powerful neighbors. For eighty years this
beneficent convention has helped to keep the peace. The European way
would have been to build competitive fleets, dock-yards, and fortresses,
all of which would have helped to bring on war during the periods of
mutual exasperation which have occurred since 1817. Monroe’s second
administration was signalized, six years later, by the declaration that
the United States would consider any attempt on the part of the Holy
Alliance to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as
dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States. This
announcement was designed to prevent the introduction on the American
continent of the horrible European system—with its balance of power,
its alliances offensive and defensive in opposing groups, and its
perpetual armaments on an enormous scale. That a declaration expressly
intended to promote peace and prevent armaments should now be perverted
into an argument for arming and for a belligerent public policy is an
extraordinary perversion of the true American doctrine.
The ordinary causes of war between nation and nation have been lacking
in America for the last century and a quarter. How many wars in the
world’s history have been due to contending dynasties; how many of the
most cruel and protracted wars have been due to religious strife; how
many to race hatred! No one of these causes of war has been efficacious
in America since the French were overcome in Canada by the English in
1759. Looking forward into the future, we find it impossible to imagine
circumstances under which any of these common causes of war can take
effect on the North American continent. Therefore, the ordinary motives
for maintaining armaments in time of peace, and concentrating the powers
of government in such a way as to interfere with individual liberty,
have not been in play in the United States as among the nations of
Europe, and are not likely to be.
Such have been the favorable conditions under which America has made its
best contribution to the progress of our race.
There are some people of a perverted sentimentality who occasionally
lament the absence in our country of the ordinary inducements to war, on
the ground that war develops certain noble qualities in some of the
combatants, and gives opportunity for the practice of heroic virtues,
such as courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. It is further said that
prolonged peace makes nations effeminate, luxurious, and materialistic,
and substitutes for the high ideals of the patriot soldier the low
ideals of the farmer, manufacturer, tradesman, and pleasure-seeker. This
view seems to me to err in two opposite ways. In the first place, it
forgets that war, in spite of the fact that it develops some splendid
virtues, is the most horrible occupation that human beings can possibly
engage in. It is cruel, treacherous, and murderous. Defensive warfare,
particularly on the part of a weak nation against powerful invaders or
oppressors, excites a generous sympathy; but for every heroic defense
there must be an attack by a preponderating force, and war, being the
conflict of the two, must be judged by its moral effects not on one
party, but on both parties. Moreover, the weaker party may have the
worse cause. The immediate ill effects of war are bad enough, but its
after effects are generally worse, because indefinitely prolonged and
indefinitely wasting and damaging. At this moment, thirty-one years
after the end of our civil war, there are two great evils afflicting our
country which took their rise in that war, namely, (1) the belief of a
large proportion of our people in money without intrinsic value, or
worth less than its face, and made current solely by act of Congress,
and (2) the payment of immense annual sums in pensions. It is the
paper-money delusion born of the civil war which generated and supports
the silver-money delusion of to-day. As a consequence of the war, the
nation has paid $2,000,000,000 in pensions within thirty-three years. So
far as pensions are paid to disabled persons, they are a just and
inevitable, but unproductive expenditure; so far as they are paid to
persons who are not disabled,—men or women,—they are in the main not
only unproductive but demoralizing; so far as they promote the marriage
of young women to old men, as a pecuniary speculation, they create a
grave social evil. It is impossible to compute or even imagine the
losses and injuries already inflicted by the fiat-money delusion; and we
know that some of the worst evils of the pension system will go on for a
hundred years to come, unless the laws about widows’ pensions are
changed for the better. It is a significant fact that of the existing
pensioners of the war of 1812 only twenty-one are surviving soldiers or
sailors, while 3826 are widows.[7]
War gratifies, or used to gratify, the combative instinct of mankind,
but it gratifies also the love of plunder, destruction, cruel
discipline, and arbitrary power. It is doubtful whether fighting with
modern appliances will continue to gratify the savage instinct of
combat; for it is not likely that in the future two opposing lines of
men can ever meet, or any line or column reach an enemy’s intrenchments.
The machine-gun can only be compared to the scythe, which cuts off every
blade of grass within its sweep. It has made cavalry charges impossible,
just as the modern ironclad has made impossible the manœuvers of one
of Nelson’s fleets. On land, the only mode of approach of one line to
another must hereafter be by concealment, crawling, or surprise. Naval
actions will henceforth be conflicts between opposing machines, guided,
to be sure, by men; but it will be the best machine that wins, and not
necessarily the most enduring men. War will become a contest between
treasuries or war-chests; for now that 10,000 men can fire away a
million dollars’ worth of ammunition in an hour, no poor nation can long
resist a rich one, unless there be some extraordinary difference between
the two in mental and moral strength.
The view that war is desirable omits also the consideration that modern
social and industrial life affords ample opportunities for the
courageous and loyal discharge of duty, apart from the barbarities of
warfare. There are many serviceable occupations in civil life which call
for all the courage and fidelity of the best soldier, and for more than
his independent responsibility, because not pursued in masses or under
the immediate command of superiors. Such occupations are those of the
locomotive engineer, the electric lineman, the railroad brakeman, the
city fireman, and the policeman. The occupation of the locomotive
engineer requires constantly a high degree of skill, alertness,
fidelity, and resolution, and at any moment may call for heroic
self-forgetfulness. The occupation of a lineman requires all the courage
and endurance of a soldier, whose lurking foe is mysterious and
invisible. In the two years, 1893 and 1894, there were 34,000 trainmen
killed and wounded on the railroads of the United States, and 25,000
other railroad employés besides. I need not enlarge on the dangers of
the fireman’s occupation, or on the disciplined gallantry with which its
risks are habitually incurred. The policeman in large cities needs every
virtue of the best soldier, for in the discharge of many of his most
important duties he is alone. Even the feminine occupation of the
trained nurse illustrates every heroic quality which can possibly be
exhibited in war; for she, simply in the way of duty, without the
stimulus of excitement or companionship, runs risks from which many a
soldier in hot blood would shrink. No one need be anxious about the lack
of opportunities in civilized life for the display of heroic qualities.
New industries demand new forms of fidelity and self-sacrificing
devotion. Every generation develops some new kind of hero. Did it ever
occur to you that the "scab" is a creditable type of nineteenth century
hero? In defense of his rights as an individual, he deliberately incurs
the reprobation of many of his fellows, and runs the immediate risk of
bodily injury, or even of death. He also risks his livelihood for the
future, and thereby the well-being of his family. He steadily asserts in
action his right to work on such conditions as he sees fit to make, and,
in so doing, he exhibits remarkable courage, and renders a great service
to his fellow-men. He is generally a quiet, unpretending, silent person,
who values his personal freedom more than the society and approbation
of his mates. Often he is impelled to work by family affection, but this
fact does not diminish his heroism. There are file-closers behind the
line of battle of the bravest regiment. Another modern personage who
needs heroic endurance, and often exhibits it, is the public servant who
steadily does his duty against the outcry of a party press bent on
perverting his every word and act. Through the telegram, cheap postage,
and the daily newspaper, the forces of hasty public opinion can now be
concentrated and expressed with a rapidity and intensity unknown to
preceding generations. In consequence, the independent thinker or actor,
or the public servant, when his thoughts or acts run counter to
prevailing popular or party opinions, encounters sudden and intense
obloquy, which, to many temperaments, is very formidable. That habit of
submitting to the opinion of the majority which democracy fosters
renders the storm of detraction and calumny all the more difficult to
endure—makes it, indeed, so intolerable to many citizens, that they
will conceal or modify their opinions rather than endure it. Yet the
very breath of life for a democracy is free discussion, and the taking
account, of all opinions honestly held and reasonably expressed. The
unreality of the vilification of public men in the modern press is often
revealed by the sudden change when an eminent public servant retires or
dies. A man for whom no words of derision or condemnation were strong
enough yesterday is recognized to-morrow as an honorable and serviceable
person, and a credit to his country. Nevertheless, this habit of
partizan ridicule and denunciation in the daily reading-matter of
millions of people calls for a new kind of courage and toughness in
public men, and calls for it, not in brief moments of excitement only,
but steadily, year in and year out. Clearly, there is no need of
bringing on wars in order to breed heroes. Civilized life affords
plenty of opportunities for heroes, and for a better kind than war or
any other savagery has ever produced. Moreover, none but lunatics would
set a city on fire in order to give opportunities for heroism to
firemen, or introduce the cholera or yellow fever to give physicians and
nurses opportunity for practicing disinterested devotion, or condemn
thousands of people to extreme poverty in order that some well-to-do
persons might practice a beautiful charity. It is equally crazy to
advocate war on the ground that it is a school for heroes.
Another misleading argument for war needs brief notice. It is said that
war is a school of national development—that a nation, when conducting
a great war, puts forth prodigious exertions to raise money, supply
munitions, enlist troops, and keep them in the field, and often gets a
clearer conception and a better control of its own material and moral
forces while making these unusual exertions. The nation which means to
live in peace necessarily foregoes, it is said, these valuable
opportunities of abnormal activity. Naturally, such a nation’s abnormal
activities devoted to destruction would be diminished; but its normal
and abnormal activities devoted to construction and improvement ought to
increase.
One great reason for the rapid development of the United States since
the adoption of the Constitution is the comparative exemption of the
whole people from war, dread of war, and preparations for war. The
energies of the people have been directed into other channels. The
progress of applied science during the present century, and the new
ideals concerning the well-being of human multitudes, have opened great
fields for the useful application of national energy. This immense
territory of ours, stretching from ocean to ocean, and for the most part
but imperfectly developed and sparsely settled, affords a broad field
for the beneficent application of the richest national forces during an
indefinite period. There is no department of national activity in which
we could not advantageously put forth much more force than we now
expend; and there are great fields which we have never cultivated at
all. As examples, I may mention the post-office, national sanitation,
public works, and education. Although great improvements have been made
during the past fifty years in the collection and delivery of mail
matter, much still remains to be done both in city and country, and
particularly in the country. In the mail facilities secured to our
people, we are far behind several European governments, whereas we ought
to be far in advance of every European government except Switzerland,
since the rapid interchange of ideas, and the promotion of family,
friendly, and commercial intercourse, are of more importance to a
democracy than to any other form of political society. Our national
government takes very little pains about the sanitation of the country,
or its deliverance from injurious insects and parasites; yet these are
matters of gravest interest, with which only the general government can
deal, because action by separate States or cities is necessarily
ineffectual. To fight pestilences needs quite as much energy, skill, and
courage as to carry on war; indeed, the foes are more insidious and
awful, and the means of resistance less obvious. On the average and the
large scale, the professions which heal and prevent disease, and
mitigate suffering, call for much more ability, constancy, and devotion
than the professions which inflict wounds and death and all sorts of
human misery. Our government has never touched the important subject of
national roads, by which I mean not railroads, but common highways; yet
here is a great subject for beneficent action through government, in
which we need only go for our lessons to little republican Switzerland.
Inundations and droughts are great enemies of the human race, against
which government ought to create defenses, because private enterprise
cannot cope with such wide-spreading evils. Popular education is another
great field in which public activity should be indefinitely enlarged,
not so much through the action of the Federal government,—though even
there a much more effective supervision should be provided than now
exists,—but through the action of States, cities, and towns. We have
hardly begun to apprehend the fundamental necessity and infinite value
of public education, or to appreciate the immense advantages to be
derived from additional expenditure for it. What prodigious
possibilities of improvement are suggested by the single statement that
the average annual expenditure for the schooling of a child in the
United States is only about eighteen dollars! Here is a cause which
requires from hundreds of thousands of men and women keen intelligence,
hearty devotion to duty, and a steady uplifting and advancement of all
its standards and ideals. The system of public instruction should embody
for coming generations all the virtues of the mediæval church. It should
stand for the brotherhood and unity of all classes and conditions; it
should exalt the joys of the intellectual life above all material
delights; and it should produce the best constituted and most wisely
directed intellectual and moral host that the world has seen. In view of
such unutilized opportunities as these for the beneficent application of
great public forces, does it not seem monstrous that war should be
advocated on the ground that it gives occasion for rallying and using
the national energies?
The second eminent contribution which the United States have made to
civilization is their thorough acceptance, in theory and practice, of
the widest religious toleration. As a means of suppressing individual
liberty, the collective authority of the Church, when elaborately
organized in a hierarchy directed by one head and absolutely devoted in
every rank to its service, comes next in proved efficiency to that
concentration of powers in government which enables it to carry on war
effectively. The Western Christian Church, organized under the Bishop of
Rome, acquired, during the middle ages, a centralized authority which
quite overrode both the temporal ruler and the rising spirit of
nationality. For a time Christian Church and Christian States acted
together, just as in Egypt, during many earlier centuries, the great
powers of civil and religious rule had been united. The Crusades marked
the climax of the power of the Church. Thereafter, Church and State were
often in conflict; and during this prolonged conflict the seeds of
liberty were planted, took root, and made some sturdy growth. We can see
now, as we look back on the history of Europe, how fortunate it was that
the colonization of North America by Europeans was deferred until after
the period of the Reformation, and especially until after the
Elizabethan period in England, the Luther period in Germany, and the
splendid struggle of the Dutch for liberty in Holland. The founders of
New England and New York were men who had imbibed the principles of
resistance both to arbitrary civil power and to universal ecclesiastical
authority. Hence it came about that within the territory now covered by
the United States no single ecclesiastical organization ever obtained a
wide and oppressive control, and that in different parts of this great
region churches very unlike in doctrine and organization were almost
simultaneously established. It has been an inevitable consequence of
this condition of things that the Church, as a whole, in the United
States has not been an effective opponent of any form of human rights.
For generations it has been divided into numerous sects and
denominations, no one of which has been able to claim more than a tenth
of the population as its adherents; and the practices of these numerous
denominations have been profoundly modified by political theories and
practices, and by social customs natural to new communities formed under
the prevailing conditions of free intercourse and rapid growth. The
constitutional prohibition of religious tests as qualifications for
office gave the United States the leadership among the nations in
dissociating theological opinions and political rights. No one
denomination or ecclesiastical organization in the United States has
held great properties, or has had the means of conducting its ritual
with costly pomp or its charitable works with imposing liberality. No
splendid architectural exhibitions of Church power have interested or
overawed the population. On the contrary, there has prevailed in general
a great simplicity in public worship, until very recent years. Some
splendors have been lately developed by religious bodies in the great
cities; but these splendors and luxuries have been almost simultaneously
exhibited by religious bodies of very different, not to say opposite,
kinds. Thus, in New York city, the Jews, the Greek Church, the
Catholics, and the Episcopalians have all erected, or undertaken to
erect, magnificent edifices. But these recent demonstrations of wealth
and zeal are so distributed among differing religious organizations that
they cannot be imagined to indicate a coming centralization of
ecclesiastical influence adverse to individual liberty.
In the United States, the great principle of religious toleration is
better understood and more firmly established than in any other nation
of the earth. It is not only embodied in legislation, but also
completely recognized in the habits and customs of good society.
Elsewhere it may be a long road from legal to social recognition of
religious liberty, as the example of England shows. This recognition
alone would mean, to any competent student of history, that the United
States had made an unexampled contribution to the reconciliation of just
governmental power with just freedom for the individual, inasmuch as the
partial establishment of religious toleration has been the main work of
civilization during the past four centuries. In view of this
characteristic and infinitely beneficent contribution to human happiness
and progress, how pitiable seem the temporary outbursts of bigotry and
fanaticism which have occasionally marred the fair record of our country
in regard to religious toleration! If anyone imagines that this American
contribution to civilization is no longer important,—that the victory
for toleration has been already won,—let him recall the fact that the
last years of the nineteenth century have witnessed two horrible
religious persecutions, one by a Christian nation, the other by a
Moslem—one, of the Jews by Russia, and the other, of the Armenians by
Turkey.
The third characteristic contribution which the United States have made
to civilization has been the safe development of a manhood suffrage
nearly universal. The experience of the United States has brought out
several principles with regard to the suffrage which have not been
clearly apprehended by some eminent political philosophers. In the first
place, American experience has demonstrated the advantages of a gradual
approach to universal suffrage, over a sudden leap. Universal suffrage
is not the first and only means of attaining democratic government;
rather, it is the ultimate goal of successful democracy. It is not a
specific for the cure of all political ills; on the contrary, it may
itself easily be the source of great political evils. The people of the
United States feel its dangers to-day. When constituencies are large, it
aggravates the well-known difficulties of party government; so that many
of the ills which threaten democratic communities at this moment,
whether in Europe or America, proceed from the breakdown of party
government rather than from failures of universal suffrage. The methods
of party government were elaborated where suffrage was limited and
constituencies were small. Manhood suffrage has not worked perfectly
well in the United States, or in any other nation where it has been
adopted, and it is not likely very soon to work perfectly anywhere. It
is like freedom of the will for the individual—the only atmosphere in
which virtue can grow, but an atmosphere in which sin can also grow.
Like freedom of the will, it needs to be surrounded with checks and
safeguards, particularly in the childhood of the nation; but, like
freedom of the will, it is the supreme good, the goal of perfected
democracy. Secondly, like freedom of the will, universal suffrage has an
educational effect, which has been mentioned by many writers, but has
seldom been clearly apprehended or adequately described. This
educational effect is produced in two ways: In the first place, the
combination of individual freedom with social mobility, which a wide
suffrage tends to produce, permits the capable to rise through all
grades of society, even within a single generation; and this freedom to
rise is intensely stimulating to personal ambition. Thus every capable
American, from youth to age, is bent on bettering himself and his
condition. Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between the
mental condition of an average American belonging to the laborious
classes, but conscious that he can rise to the top of the social scale,
and that of a European mechanic, peasant, or tradesman, who knows that
he cannot rise out of his class, and is content with his hereditary
classification. The state of mind of the American prompts to constant
struggle for self-improvement and the acquisition of all sorts of
property and power. In the second place, it is a direct effect of a
broad suffrage that the voters become periodically interested in the
discussion of grave public problems, which carry their minds away from
the routine of their daily labor and household experience out into
larger fields. The instrumentalities of this prolonged education have
been multiplied and improved enormously within the last fifty years. In
no field of human endeavor have the fruits of the introduction of steam
and electrical power been more striking than in the methods of reaching
multitudes of people with instructive narratives, expositions, and
arguments. The multiplication of newspapers, magazines, and books is
only one of the immense developments in the means of reaching the
people. The advocates of any public cause now have it in their power to
provide hundreds of newspapers with the same copy, or the same plates,
for simultaneous issue. The mails provide the means of circulating
millions of leaflets and pamphlets. The interest in the minds of the
people which prompts to the reading of these multiplied communications
comes from the frequently recurring elections. The more difficult the
intellectual problem presented in any given election, the more educative
the effect of the discussion. Many modern industrial and financial
problems are extremely difficult, even for highly-educated men. As
subjects of earnest thought and discussion on the farm, and in the
work-shop, factory, rolling-mill, and mine, they supply a mental
training for millions of adults, the like of which has never before been
seen in the world.
In these discussions, it is not only the receptive masses that are
benefited; the classes that supply the appeals to the masses are also
benefited in a high degree. There is no better mental exercise for the
most highly trained man than the effort to expound a difficult subject
in so clear a way that the untrained man can understand it. In a
republic in which the final appeal is to manhood suffrage, the educated
minority of the people is constantly stimulated to exertion, by the
instinct of self-preservation as well as by love of country. They see
dangers in proposals made to universal suffrage, and they must exert
themselves to ward off those dangers. The position of the educated and
well-to-do classes is a thoroughly wholesome one in this respect: they
cannot depend for the preservation of their advantages on land-owning,
hereditary privilege, or any legislation not equally applicable to the
poorest and humblest citizen. They must maintain their superiority by
being superior. They cannot live in a too safe corner.
I touch here on a misconception which underlies much of the criticism of
universal suffrage. It is commonly said that the rule of the majority
must be the rule of the most ignorant and incapable, the multitude being
necessarily uninstructed as to taxation, public finance, and foreign
relations, and untrained to active thought on such difficult subjects.
Now, universal suffrage is merely a convention as to where the last
appeal shall lie for the decision of public questions; and it is the
rule of the majority only in this sense. The educated classes are
undoubtedly a minority; but it is not safe to assume that they
monopolize the good sense of the community. On the contrary, it is very
clear that native good judgment and good feeling are not proportional to
education, and that among a multitude of men who have only an elementary
education, a large proportion will possess both good judgment and good
feeling. Indeed, persons who can neither read nor write may possess a
large share of both, as is constantly seen in regions where the
opportunities for education in childhood have been scanty or
inaccessible. It is not to be supposed that the cultivated classes,
under a régime of universal suffrage, are not going to try to make their
cultivation felt in the discussion and disposal of public questions.
Any result under universal suffrage is a complex effect of the
discussion of the public question in hand by the educated classes in the
presence of the comparatively uneducated, when a majority of both
classes taken together is ultimately to settle the question. In
practice, both classes divide on almost every issue. But, in any case,
if the educated classes cannot hold their own with the uneducated, by
means of their superior physical, mental, and moral qualities, they are
obviously unfit to lead society. With education should come better
powers of argument and persuasion, a stricter sense of honor, and a
greater general effectiveness. With these advantages, the educated
classes must undoubtedly appeal to the less educated, and try to convert
them to their way of thinking; but this is a process which is good for
both sets of people. Indeed, it is the best possible process for the
training of freemen, educated or uneducated, rich or poor.
It is often assumed that the educated classes become impotent in a
democracy, because the representatives of those classes are not
exclusively chosen to public office. This argument is a very fallacious
one. It assumes that the public offices are the places of greatest
influence; whereas, in the United States, at least, that is
conspicuously not the case. In a democracy, it is important to
discriminate influence from authority. Rulers and magistrates may or may
not be persons of influence; but many persons of influence never become
rulers, magistrates, or representatives in parliaments or legislatures.
The complex industries of a modern state, and its innumerable
corporation services, offer great fields for administrative talent which
were entirely unknown to preceding generations; and these new activities
attract many ambitious and capable men more strongly than the public
service. These men are not on that account lost to their country or to
society. The present generation has wholly escaped from the conditions
of earlier centuries, when able men who were not great land-owners had
but three outlets for their ambition—the army, the church, or the
national civil service. The national service, whether in an empire, a
limited monarchy, or a republic, is now only one of many fields which
offer to able and patriotic men an honorable and successful career.
Indeed, legislation and public administration necessarily have a very
second-hand quality; and more and more legislators and administrators
become dependent on the researches of scholars, men of science, and
historians, and follow in the footsteps of inventors, economists, and
political philosophers. Political leaders are very seldom leaders of
thought; they are generally trying to induce masses of men to act on
principles thought out long before. Their skill is in the selection of
practicable approximations to the ideal; their arts are arts of
exposition and persuasion; their honor comes from fidelity under trying
circumstances to familiar principles of public duty. The real leaders of
American thought in this century have been preachers, teachers, jurists,
seers, and poets. While it is of the highest importance, under any form
of government, that the public servants should be men of intelligence,
education, and honor, it is no objection to any given form, that under
it large numbers of educated and honorable citizens have no connection
with the public service.
Well-to-do Europeans, when reasoning about the working of democracy,
often assume that under any government the property-holders are
synonymous with the intelligent and educated class. That is not the case
in the American democracy. Anyone who has been connected with a large
American university can testify that democratic institutions produce
plenty of rich people who are not educated and plenty of educated
people who are not rich, just as mediæval society produced illiterate
nobles and cultivated monks.
Persons who object to manhood suffrage as the last resort for the
settlement of public questions are bound to show where, in all the
world, a juster or more practicable regulation or convention has been
arrived at. The objectors ought at least to indicate where the ultimate
decision should, in their judgment, rest—as, for example, with the
land-owners, or the property-holders, or the graduates of secondary
schools, or the professional classes. He would be a bold political
philosopher who, in these days, should propose that the ultimate
tribunal should be constituted in any of these ways. All the experience
of the civilized world fails to indicate a safe personage, a safe class,
or a safe minority, with which to deposit this power of ultimate
decision. On the contrary, the experience of civilization indicates that
no select person or class can be trusted with that power, no matter what
the principle of selection. The convention that the majority of males
shall decide public questions has obviously great recommendations. It is
apparently fairer than the rule of any minority, and it is sure to be
supported by an adequate physical force. Moreover, its decisions are
likely to enforce themselves. Even in matters of doubtful
prognostication, the fact that a majority of the males do the
prophesying tends to the fulfillment of the prophecy. At any rate, the
adoption or partial adoption of universal male suffrage by several
civilized nations is coincident with unexampled ameliorations in the
condition of the least fortunate and most numerous classes of the
population. To this general amelioration many causes have doubtless
contributed; but it is reasonable to suppose that the acquisition of the
power which comes with votes has had something to do with it.
Timid or conservative people often stand aghast at the possible
directions of democratic desire, or at some of the predicted results of
democratic rule; but meantime the actual experience of the American
democracy proves: 1, that property has never been safer under any form
of government; 2, that no people have ever welcomed so ardently new
machinery, and new inventions generally; 3, that religious toleration
was never carried so far, and never so universally accepted; 4, that
nowhere have the power and disposition to read been so general; 5, that
nowhere has governmental power been more adequate, or more freely
exercised, to levy and collect taxes, to raise armies and to disband
them, to maintain public order, and to pay off great public
debts—national, State, and town; 6, that nowhere have property and
well-being been so widely diffused; and 7, that no form of government
ever inspired greater affection and loyalty, or prompted to greater
personal sacrifices in supreme moments. In view of these solid facts,
speculations as to what universal suffrage would have done in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or may do in the twentieth, seem
futile indeed. The most civilized nations of the world have all either
adopted this final appeal to manhood suffrage, or they are approaching
that adoption by rapid stages. The United States, having no customs or
traditions of an opposite sort to overcome, have led the nations in this
direction, and have had the honor of devising, as a result of practical
experience, the best safeguards for universal suffrage, safeguards
which, in the main, are intended to prevent hasty public action, or
action based on sudden discontents or temporary spasms of public
feeling. These checks are intended to give time for discussion and
deliberation, or, in other words, to secure the enlightenment of the
voters before the vote. If, under new conditions, existing safeguards
prove insufficient, the only wise course is to devise new safeguards.
The United States have made to civilization a fourth contribution of a
very hopeful sort, to which public attention needs to be directed, lest
temporary evils connected therewith should prevent the continuation of
this beneficent action. The United States have furnished a demonstration
that people belonging to a great variety of races or nations are, under
favorable circumstances, fit for political freedom. It is the fashion to
attribute to the enormous immigration of the last fifty years some of
the failures of the American political system, and particularly the
American failure in municipal government, and the introduction in a few
States of the rule of the irresponsible party foremen known as "bosses."
Impatient of these evils, and hastily accepting this improbable
explanation of them, some people wish to depart from the American policy
of welcoming immigrants. In two respects the absorption of large numbers
of immigrants from many nations into the American commonwealth has been
of great service to mankind. In the first place, it has demonstrated
that people who at home have been subject to every sort of aristocratic
or despotic or military oppression become within less than a generation
serviceable citizens of a republic; and, in the second place, the United
States have thus educated to freedom many millions of men. Furthermore,
the comparatively high degree of happiness and prosperity enjoyed by the
people of the United States has been brought home to multitudes in
Europe by friends and relatives who have emigrated to this country, and
has commended free institutions to them in the best possible way. This
is a legitimate propaganda vastly more effective than any annexation or
conquest of unwilling people, or of people unprepared for liberty.
It is a great mistake to suppose that the process of assimilating
foreigners began in this century. The eighteenth century provided the
colonies with a great mixture of peoples, although the English race
predominated then, as now. When the Revolution broke out, there were
already English, Irish, Scotch, Dutch, Germans, French, Portuguese, and
Swedes in the colonies. The French were, to be sure, in small
proportion, and were almost exclusively Huguenot refugees, but they were
a valuable element in the population. The Germans were well diffused,
having established themselves in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and
Georgia. The Scotch were scattered through all the colonies.
Pennsylvania, especially, was inhabited by an extraordinary mixture of
nationalities and religions. Since steam-navigation on the Atlantic and
railroad transportation on the North American continent became cheap and
easy, the tide of immigration has greatly increased; but it is very
doubtful if the amount of assimilation going on in the nineteenth
century has been any larger, in proportion to the population and wealth
of the country, than it was in the eighteenth. The main difference in
the assimilation going on in the two centuries is this, that in the
eighteenth century the newcomers were almost all Protestants, while in
the nineteenth century a considerable proportion have been Catholics.
One result, however, of the importation of large numbers of Catholics
into the United States has been a profound modification of the Roman
Catholic Church in regard to the manners and customs of both the clergy
and the laity, the scope of the authority of the priest, and the
attitude of the Catholic Church toward public education. This American
modification of the Roman Church has reacted strongly on the Church in
Europe.
Another great contribution to civilization made by the United States is
the diffusion of material well-being among the population. No country in
the world approaches the United States in this respect. It is seen in
that diffused elementary education which implants for life a habit of
reading, and in the habitual optimism which characterizes the common
people. It is seen in the housing of the people and of their domestic
animals, in the comparative costliness of their food, clothing, and
household furniture, in their implements, vehicles, and means of
transportation, and in the substitution, on a prodigious scale, of the
work of machinery for the work of men’s hands. This last item in
American well-being is quite as striking in agriculture, mining, and
fishing, as it is in manufactures. The social effects of the manufacture
of power, and of the discovery of means of putting that power just where
it is wanted, have been more striking in the United States than anywhere
else. Manufactured and distributed power needs intelligence to direct
it: the bicycle is a blind horse, and must be steered at every instant;
somebody must show a steam-drill where to strike and how deep to go. So
far as men and women can substitute for the direct expenditure of
muscular strength the more intelligent effort of designing, tending, and
guiding machines, they win promotion in the scale of being, and make
their lives more interesting as well as more productive. It is in the
invention of machinery for producing and distributing power, and at once
economizing and elevating human labor, that American ingenuity has been
most conspicuously manifested. The high price of labor in a
sparsely-settled country has had something to do with this striking
result; but the genius of the people and of their government has had
much more to do with it. As proof of the general proposition, it
suffices merely to mention the telegraph and telephone, the
sewing-machine, the cotton-gin, the mower, reaper, and
threshing-machine, the dish-washing machine, the river steamboat, the
sleeping-car, the boot and shoe machinery, and the watch machinery. The
ultimate effects of these and kindred inventions are quite as much
intellectual as physical, and they are developing and increasing with a
portentous rapidity which sometimes suggests a doubt whether the bodily
forces of men and women are adequate to resist the new mental strains
brought upon them. However this may prove to be in the future, the clear
result in the present is an unexampled diffusion of well-being in the
United States.
These five contributions to civilization—peace-keeping, religious
toleration, the development of manhood suffrage, the welcoming of
newcomers, and the diffusion of well-being—I hold to have been
eminently characteristic of our country, and so important that, in spite
of the qualifications and deductions which every candid citizen would
admit with regard to every one of them, they will ever be held in the
grateful remembrance of mankind. They are reasonable grounds for a
steady, glowing patriotism. They have had much to do, both as causes and
as effects, with the material prosperity of the United States; but they
are all five essentially moral contributions, being triumphs of reason,
enterprise, courage, faith, and justice, over passion, selfishness,
inertness, timidity, and distrust. Beneath each one of these
developments there lies a strong ethical sentiment, a strenuous moral
and social purpose. It is for such work that multitudinous democracies
are fit.
In regard to all five of these contributions, the characteristic policy
of our country has been from time to time threatened with reversal—is
even now so threatened. It is for true patriots to insist on the
maintenance of these historic purposes and policies of the people of the
United States. Our country’s future perils, whether already visible or
still unimagined, are to be met with courage and constancy founded
firmly on these popular achievements in the past.
THE REVOLT OF THE UNFIT
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
THERE are wars and rumors of wars in a portion of the territory occupied
by the doctrine of organic evolution. All is not working smoothly and
well and according to formula. It begins to appear that those men of
science who, having derived the doctrine of organic evolution in its
modern form from observations on earthworms, on climbing-plants, and on
brightly colored birds, and who then straightway applied it blithely to
man and his affairs, have made enemies of no small part of the human
race.
It was all well enough to treat some earthworms, some climbing-plants,
and some brightly colored birds as fit, and others as unfit, to survive;
but when this distinction is extended over human beings and their
economic, social, and political affairs, there is a general pricking-up
of ears. The consciously fit look down on the resulting discussions with
complacent scorn. The consciously unfit rage and roar loudly; while the
unconsciously unfit bestir themselves mightily to overturn the whole
theory upon which the distinction between fitness and unfitness rests.
If any law of nature makes so absurd a distinction as that, then the
offending and obnoxious law must be repealed, and that quickly.
The trouble appears to arise primarily from the fact that man does not
like what may be termed his evolutionary poor relations. He is willing
enough to read about earthworms and climbing-plants and brightly colored
birds, but he does not want nature to be making leaps from any of these
to him.
The earthworm, which, not being adapted to its surroundings, soon dies
unhonored and unsung, passes peacefully out of life without either a
coroner’s inquest, an indictment for earthworm slaughter, a legislative
proposal for the future protection of earthworms, or even a new society
for the reform of the social and economic state of the earthworms that
are left. Even the quasi-intelligent climbing-plant and the brightly
colored bird, humanly vain, find an equally inconspicuous fate awaiting
them. This is the way nature operates when unimpeded or unchallenged by
the powerful manifestations of human revolt or human revenge. Of course
if man understood the place assigned to him in nature by the doctrine of
organic evolution as well as the earthworm, the climbing-plant, and the
brightly colored bird understand theirs, he, too, like them, would
submit to nature’s processes and decrees without a protest. As a matter
of logic, no doubt he ought to; but after all these centuries, it is
still a far cry from logic to life.
In fact, man, unless he is consciously and admittedly fit, revolts
against the implication of the doctrine of evolution, and objects both
to being considered unfit to survive and succeed, and to being forced to
accept the only fate which nature offers to those who are unfit for
survival and success. Indeed, he manifests with amazing pertinacity what
Schopenhauer used to call "the will to live," and considerations and
arguments based on adaptability to environment have no weight with him.
So much the worse for environment, he cries; and straightway sets out to
prove it.
On the other hand, those humans who are classed by the doctrine of
evolution as fit, exhibit a most disconcerting satisfaction with things
as they are. The fit make no conscious struggle for existence. They do
not have to. Being fit, they survive ipso facto. Thus does the
doctrine of evolution, like a playful kitten, merrily pursue its tail
with rapturous delight. The fit survive; those survive who are fit.
Nothing could be more simple.
Those who are not adapted to the conditions that surround them, however,
rebel against the fate of the earthworm and the climbing-plant and the
brightly colored bird, and engage in a conscious struggle for existence
and for success in that existence despite their inappropriate
environment. Statutes can be repealed or amended; why not laws of nature
as well? Those human beings who are unfit have, it must be admitted, one
great, though perhaps temporary, advantage over the laws of nature; for
the laws of nature have not yet been granted suffrage, and the organized
unfit can always lead a large majority to the polls. So soon as
knowledge of this fact becomes common property, the laws of nature will
have a bad quarter of an hour in more countries than one.
The revolt of the unfit primarily takes the form of attempts to lessen
and to limit competition, which is instinctively felt, and with reason,
to be part of the struggle for existence and for success. The
inequalities which nature makes, and without which the process of
evolution could not go on, the unfit propose to smooth away and to wipe
out by that magic fiat of collective human will called legislation. The
great struggle between the gods of Olympus and the Titans, which the
ancient sculptors so loved to picture, was child’s play compared with
the struggle between the laws of nature and the laws of man which the
civilized world is apparently soon to be invited to witness. This
struggle will bear a little examination, and it may be that the laws of
nature, as the doctrine of evolution conceives and states them, will not
have everything their own way.
Professor Huxley, whose orthodoxy as an evolutionist will hardly be
questioned, made a suggestion of this kind in his Romanes lecture as
long ago as 1893. He called attention then to the fact that there is a
fallacy in the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants
have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for
existence and the consequent survival of the fittest, therefore, men as
social and ethical beings must depend upon the same process to help them
to perfection. As Professor Huxley suggests, this fallacy doubtless has
its origin in the ambiguity of the phrase "survival of the fittest." One
jumps to the conclusion that fittest means best; whereas, of course, it
has in it no moral element whatever. The doctrine of evolution uses the
term fitness in a hard and stern sense. Nothing more is meant by it than
a measure of adaptation to surrounding conditions. Into this conception
of fitness there enters no element of beauty, no element of morality, no
element of progress toward an ideal. Fitness is a cold fact
ascertainable with almost mathematical certainty.
We now begin to catch sight of the real significance of this struggle
between the laws of nature and the laws of man. From one point of view
the struggle is hopeless from the start; from another it is full of
promise. If it be true that man really proposes to halt the laws of
nature by his legislation, then the struggle is hopeless. It is only a
question of time when the laws of nature will have their way. If, on the
other hand, the struggle between the laws of nature and the laws of man
is in reality a mock struggle, and the supposed combat merely an
exhibition of evolutionary boxing, then we may find a clew to what is
really going on.
It might be worth while, for example, to follow up the suggestion that
in looking back over the whole series of products of organic evolution,
the real successes and permanences of life are to be found among those
species that have been able to institute something like what we call a
social system. Wherever an individual insists upon treating himself as
an end in himself, and all other individuals as his actual or potential
competitors or enemies, then the fate of the earthworm, the
climbing-plant, and the brightly colored bird is sure to be his; for he
has brought himself under the jurisdiction of one of nature’s laws, and
sooner or later he must succumb to that law of nature, and in the
struggle for existence his place will be marked out for him by it with
unerring precision. If, however, he has developed so far as to have
risen to the lofty height of human sympathy, and thereby has learned to
transcend his individuality and to make himself a member of a larger
whole, he may then save himself from the extinction which follows
inevitably upon proved unfitness in the individual struggle for
existence.
So soon as the individual has something to give, there will be those who
have something to give to him, and he elevates himself above this
relentless law with its inexorable punishments for the unfit. At that
point, when individuals begin to give each to the other, then their
mutual co-operation and interdependence build human society, and
participation in that society changes the whole character of the human
struggle. Nevertheless, large numbers of human beings carry with them
into social and political relations the traditions and instincts of the
old individualistic struggle for existence, with the laws of organic
evolution pointing grimly to their several destinies. These are not able
to realize that moral elements, and what we call progress toward an end
or ideal, are not found under the operation of the law of natural
selection, but have to be discovered elsewhere and added to it. Beauty,
morality, progress have other lurking-places than in the struggle for
existence, and they have for their sponsors other laws than that of
natural selection. You will read the pages of Darwin and of Herbert
Spencer in vain for any indication of how the Parthenon was produced,
how the Sistine Madonna, how the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, how the
Divine Comedy, or Hamlet or Faust. There are many mysteries left
in the world, thank God, and these are some of them.
The escape of genius from the cloud-covered mountain-tops of the unknown
into human society has not yet been accounted for. Even Rousseau made a
mistake. When he was writing the Contrat social it is recorded that
his attention was favorably attracted by the island of Corsica. He,
being engaged in the process of finding out how to repeal the laws of
man by the laws of nature, spoke of Corsica as the one country in Europe
that seemed to him capable of legislation. This led him to add: "I have
a presentiment that some day this little island will astonish Europe."
It was not long before Corsica did astonish Europe, but not by any
capacity for legislation. As some clever person has said, it let loose
Napoleon. We know nothing more of the origin and advent of genius than
that.
Perhaps we should comprehend these things better were it not for the
persistence of the superstition that human beings habitually think.
There is no more persistent superstition than this. Linnæus helped it on
to an undeserved permanence when he devised the name Homo sapiens for
the highest species of the order primates. That was the quintessence of
complimentary nomenclature. Of course human beings as such do not think.
A real thinker is one of the rarest things in nature. He comes only at
long intervals in human history, and when he does come, he is often
astonishingly unwelcome. Indeed, he is sometimes speedily sent the way
of the unfit and unprotesting earthworm. Emerson understood this, as he
understood so many other of the deep things of life. For he wrote:
"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
all things are at risk."
The plain fact is that man is not ruled by thinking. When man thinks he
thinks, he usually merely feels; and his instincts and feelings are
powerful precisely in proportion as they are irrational. Reason reveals
the other side, and a knowledge of the other side is fatal to the
driving power of a prejudice. Prejudices have their important uses, but
it is well to try not to mix them up with principles.
The underlying principle in the widespread and ominous revolt of the
unfit is that moral considerations must outweigh the mere blind struggle
for existence in human affairs.
It is to this fact that we must hold fast if we would understand the
world of to-day, and still more the world of to-morrow. The purpose of
the revolt of the unfit is to substitute interdependence on a higher
plane for the struggle for existence on a lower one. Who dares attempt
to picture what will happen if this revolt shall not succeed?
These are problems full of fascination. In one form or another they will
persist as long as humanity itself. There is only one way of getting rid
of them, and that is so charmingly and wittily pointed out by Robert
Louis Stevenson in his fable, "The Four Reformers," that I wish to quote
it:
"Four reformers met under a bramble-bush. They were all agreed the world
must be changed. 'We must abolish property,' said one.
"'We must abolish marriage,' said the second.
"'We must abolish God,' said the third.
"'I wish we could abolish work,' said the fourth.
"'Do not let us get beyond practical politics,' said the first. 'The
first thing is to reduce men to a common level.'
"'The first thing,' said the second, 'is to give freedom to the sexes.'
"'The first thing,' said the third, 'is to find out how to do it.'
"'The first step,' said the first, 'is to abolish the Bible.'
"'The first thing,' said the second, 'is to abolish the laws.'
'"The first thing,' said the third, 'is to abolish mankind.'"
[From Why Should We Change Our Form of Government, by Nicholas
Murray Butler. Copyright, 1912, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
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