After one of the early defeats in the War of the Rebellion, the commander
of a Massachusetts regiment wrote home to his father: "I wish people would
not write us so many letters of condolence. Our defeat seemed to trouble
them much more than it troubles us. Did people suppose there were to be no
ups and downs? We expect to lose plenty of battles, but we have enlisted
for the war."
It is just so with every successful reform. While enemies and half-friends
are proclaiming its defeats, those who advocate it are rejoicing that they
have at last got an army into the field to be defeated. Unless this war is
to be an exception to all others, even the fact of having joined battle is
a great deal. It is the first step. Defeat first; a good many defeats, if
you please: victory by and by.
William Wilberforce, writing to a friend in the year 1817, said, "I
continue faithful to the measure of Parliamentary reform brought forward by
Mr. Pitt. I am firmly persuaded that at present a prodigious majority of
the people of this country are adverse to the measure. In my view, so far
from being an objection to the discussion, this is rather a
recommendation." In 1832 the reform bill was passed.
In the first Parliamentary debate on the slave trade, Colonel Tarleton, who
boasted to have killed more men than any one in England, pointing to
Wilberforce and others, said, "The inspiration began on that side of the
house;" then turning round, "The revolution has reached to this also, and
reached to the height of fanaticism and frenzy." The first vote in the
House of Commons, in 1790, after arguments in the affirmative by
Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke, stood, ayes, 88; noes, 163: majority
against the measure, 75. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished, and in 1834
slavery in the British colonies followed; and even on the very night when
the latter bill passed, the abolitionists were taunted by Gladstone, the
great Demerara slaveholder, with having toiled for forty years and done
nothing. The Roman Catholic relief bill, establishing freedom of thought in
England, had the same experience. It passed in 1829 by a majority of a
hundred and three in the House of Lords, which had nine months before
refused by a majority of forty-five to take up the question at all.
The English corn laws went down a quarter of a century ago, after a similar
career of failures. In 1840 there were hundreds of thousands in England who
thought that to attack the corn laws was to attack the very foundations of
society. Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, said in Parliament, that "he
had heard of many mad things in his life, but, before God, the idea of
repealing the corn laws was the very maddest thing of which he had ever
heard." Lord John Russell counselled the House to refuse to hear evidence
on the operation of the corn laws. Six years after, in 1846, they were
abolished forever.
How Wendell Phillips, in the anti-slavery meetings, used to lash
pro-slavery men with such formidable facts as these,--and to quote how Clay
and Calhoun and Webster and Everett had pledged themselves that slavery
should never be discussed, or had proposed that those who discussed it
should be imprisoned,--while, in spite of them all, the great reform was
moving on, and the abolitionists were forcing politicians and people to
talk, like Sterne's starling, nothing but slavery!
We who were trained in the light of these great agitations have learned
their lesson. We expect to march through a series of defeats to victory.
The first thing is, as in the anti-slavery movement, so to arouse the
public mind as to make this the central question. Given this prominence,
and it is enough for this year or for many years to come. Wellington said
that there was no such tragedy as a victory, except a defeat. On the other
hand, the next best thing to a victory is a defeat, for it shows that the
armies are in the field. Without the unsuccessful attempt of to-day, no
success to-morrow.
When Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble came to this country, she was amazed to find
Americans celebrating the battle of Bunker Hill, which she had always heard
claimed as a victory for King George. Such it was doubtless called; but
what we celebrated was the fact that the Americans there threw up
breastworks, stood their ground, fired away their ammunition,--and were
defeated. Thus the reformer, too, looking at his failures, often sees in
them such a step forward, that they are the Bunker Hill of a new
revolution. Give us plenty of such defeats, and we can afford to wait a
score of years for the victories. They will come.