of passion: great and terrible evils they wrought. They were as nothing
to the vices of calculation. Passion was the flesh, ambition the devil.
There are vices of democracy, vices of radicalism; very great vices they
are too. You may read of them in Hume and Alison. They are painted black
as night and bloody as battle in tory journals of England, and the more
vulgar tory journals of America. Democracy wrought terrible evils in
Britain in Cromwell's time; in France at her Revolution. But to the
vices, the crimes, the sins of aristocracy, of conservatism,--they are
what the fleeting lust of the youth is to the cool, hard, calculating,
and indomitable ambition of the grown man. Radicalism pillaged Governor
Hutchinson's house, threw some tea into the ocean; conservatism set up
its stamp act, and drove America into revolution. Radicalism helped
Shadrach out of court; conservatism enacted the fugitive slave bill.
Radicalism sets up a republic that is red for six months; conservatism
sets up a red monarchy covered with blood for hundreds of years. Judge
you from which we have the most to fear.
* * * * *
Such are the safeguards of society; such our condition. What shall we
do? Nobody would dare pretend to build a church except on righteousness;
that is, the rock of ages. Can you build a state on any other
foundation--that house upon the sand? What should you think of a
minister of the church who got his deacons together, and made a creed,
and said, "There is no higher law; no law of God. You, laymen, must take
our word for your guidance, and do just as we bid you, and violate the
plainest commands of conscience?" What would be atheism in a minister of
the church,--is that patriotism in a minister of the state? A bad law is
a most powerful instrument to demoralize and debauch the people. If it
is a law of their own making, it is all the worse. There is no real and
manly welfare for a man, without a sense of religious obligation to God;
none in a family, none in a church, none in a state. We want
righteousness in the people, in their establishments, in their officers.
I adjure you to reverence a government that is right, statutes that are
right, officers that are right; but to disobey every thing that is
wrong. I entreat you by your love for your country, by the memory of
your fathers, by your reverence for Jesus Christ, yea, by the deep and
holy love of God which Jesus taught, and you now feel.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] See note on Function of the Jury, above, p. 165.
[35] In these times of political corruption, when a postmaster in a
country village is turned out of office for voting for a representative
to Congress who exposed the wickedness of a prominent member of the
cabinet, it is pleasant to read such letters as those of Washington to
Benjamin Lincoln, March 11, 1789, and to Bushrod Washington, July 27,
1789, in Sparks's Writings of Washington, vol. ix. p. 477, _et seq._,
and x. p. 73, _et seq._
[36] In the Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan gives a case which it is probable
was fictitious only in the names of the parties. Faithful was indicted
before Lord Hategood for a capital offence. Mr. Envy testified. Then the
judge asked him, Hast thou any more to say? Envy replied: "My Lord, I
could say much more, only I would not be tedious to the court. Yet, if
need be, when the other gentlemen have given in their evidence, rather
than any thing should be wanting that will dispatch him, I will enlarge
my testimony against him."
Lord Hategood stated the law--there were three statutes against the
prisoner: 1. The act of King Pharaoh, in 1 Exodus 22; 2. That of King
Nebuchadnezzar in 3 Daniel 6; and 3. That of King Darius in 6 Daniel 7.
The jury took "the law from the ruling of the court," and, having been
carefully packed, to judge from the names, and all just men expelled
from their number, they readily found such a verdict as the government
had previously determined upon.
The same thing, _mutatis mutandis_, has been attempted in America, in
Boston, and we may fear that in some instances it will succeed.
[37] Since the first publication of this sermon we have seen
eight-and-thirty men indicted for treason under the fugitive slave law,
because they resisted the attempt to kidnap one of their number, and
killed one of the kidnappers. This indictment was found at the
instigation of an officer of the government, who adds new infamy to the
name of the great first murderer.
[38] Speech at Capon Springs.
VIII.
THE POSITION AND DUTIES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.--AN ADDRESS DELIVERED
AT WATERVILLE, AUGUST 8, 1849.
Men of a superior culture get it at the cost of the whole community, and
therefore, at first owe for their education. They must pay back an
equivalent, or else remain debtors to mankind, debtors forever; that is,
beggars or thieves, such being the only class that are thus perpetually
in debt and a burden to the race.
It is true that every man, the rudest Prussian boor, as well as Von
Humboldt, is indebted to mankind for his culture, to their past history
and their existing institutions, to their daily toil. Taking the whole
culture into the account, the debt bears about the same ratio to the
receipt in all men. I speak not of genius, the inborn faculty which
costs mankind nothing, only of the education thereof, which the man
obtains. The Irishman who can only handle his spade, wear his garments,
talk his wild brogue, and bid his beads, has four or five hundred
generations of ancestors behind him, and is as long descended, and from
as old a stock, as the accomplished patrician scholar at Oxford and
Berlin. The Irishman depends on them all, and on the present generation
for his culture. But he has obtained his development with no special
outlay and cost of the human race. In getting that rude culture, he has
appropriated nothing to himself which is taken from another man's share.
He has paid as he went along, so he owes nothing in particular for his
education; and mankind has no claim on him as for value received. But
the Oxford graduate has been a long time at school and college; not
earning, but learning; living therefore at the cost of mankind, with an
obligation and an implied promise to pay back when he comes of age and
takes possession of his educated faculties. He therefore has not only
the general debt which he shares with all men, but an obligation quite
special and peculiar for his support while at study.
This rule is general, and applies to the class of educated men with some
apparent exceptions, and a very few real ones. Some men are born of poor
but strong-bodied parents, and endowed with great abilities; they
inherit nothing except their share of the general civilization of
mankind, and the onward impulse which that has given. These men devote
themselves to study; and having behind them an ancestry of
broad-shouldered, hard-handed, stalwart, temperate men, and
deep-bosomed, red-armed and industrious mothers, they are able to do the
work of two or three men at the time. Such men work while they study;
they teach while they learn; they hew their own way through the wood by
superior strength and skill born in their bones, with an axe themselves
have chipped out from the stone, or forged of metal, or paid for with
the result of their first hewings. They are specially indebted to nobody
for their culture. They pay as they go, owing the academic ferryman
nothing for setting them over into the elysium of the scholar.
Only few men ever make this heroic and crucial experiment. None but poor
men's sons essay the trial. Nothing but poverty has whips sharp enough
to sting indolent men, even of genius, to such exertion of the manly
part. But even this proud race often runs into another debt: they run up
long scores with the body, which must one day be paid "with aching head
and squeamish heart-burnings." The credit on account of the hardy
fathers, is not without limit. It is soon exhausted; especially in a
land where the atmosphere, the institutions, and the youth of the people
all excite to premature and excessive prodigality of effort. The body
takes a mortgage on the spendthrift spirit, demands certain regular
periodic payments, and will one day foreclose for breach of condition,
impede the spirit's action in the premises, putting a very disagreeable
keeper there, and finally expel the prodigal mortgagor. So it often
happens, that a man, who in his youth scorned a pecuniary debt to
mankind, and would receive no favor even to buy culture with, has yet,
unconsciously and against his will, contracted debts which trouble him
in manhood, and impede his action all his life; with swollen feet and
blear eyes famous Griesbach pays for the austere heroism of his
penurious and needy youth. The rosy bud of genius, on the poor man's
tree, too often opens into a lean and ghastly flower. Could not Burns
tell us this?
With the rare exceptions just hinted at, any man of a superior culture
owes for it when obtained. Sometimes the debt is obvious: a farmer with
small means and a large family sends the most hopeful of his sons to
college. Look at the cost of the boy's culture. His hands are kept from
work that his mind may be free. He fares on daintier food, wears more
and more costly garments. Other members of the family must feed and
clothe him, earn his tuition-fees, buy his books, pay for his fuel and
room-rent. For this the father rises earlier than of old, yoking the
oxen a great while before day of a winter's morning, and toils till long
after dark of a winter's night, enduring cold and hardship. For this the
mother stints her frugal fare, her humble dress; for this the brothers
must forego sleep and pastime, must toil harder, late and early both;
for this the sisters must seek new modes of profitable work, must wear
their old finery long after it is finery no more. The spare wealth of
the family, stinted to spare it, is spent on this one youth. From the
father to the daughters, all lay their bones to extraordinary work for
him; the whole family is pinched in body that this one youth may go
brave and full. Even the family horse pays his tax to raise the
education fee.
Men see the hopeful scholar, graceful and accomplished, receiving his
academic honors, but they see not the hard-featured father standing
unheeded in the aisle, nor the older sister in an obscure corner of the
gallery, who had toiled in the factory for the favored brother, tending
his vineyard, her own not kept, who had perhaps learned the letters of
Greek to hear him recite the grammar at home. Father and sister know not
a word of the language in which his diploma is writ and delivered. At
what cost of the family tree is this one flower produced? How many
leaves, possible blossoms, yea, possible branches have been absorbed to
create this one flower, which shall perpetuate the kind, after being
beautiful and fragrant in its own season? Yet, while these leaves are
growing for the blossom's sake, and the life of the tree is directed
thither with special and urgent emphasis, the difference between branch
and blossom, leaf and petal, is getting more and more. By and by the two
cannot comprehend each other; the acorn has forgotten the leaf which
reared it, and thinks itself of another kin. Grotius, who speaks a host
of languages, talking with the learned of all countries, and of every
age, has forgot his mother tongue, and speech is at an end with her that
bore him. The son, accomplished with many a science, many an art, ceases
to understand the simple consciousness of his father and mother. They
are proud of him--that he has outgrown them; he ashamed of them when
they visit him amid his scholarly company. To them he is a philosopher;
they only clowns in his eyes. He learns to neglect, perhaps to despise
them, and forgets his obligation and his debt. Yet by their rudeness is
it that he is refined. His science and literary skill are purchased by
their ignorance and uncouthness of manner and of speech. Had the
educational cost been equally divided, all had still continued on a
level; he had known no Latin, but the whole family might have spoken
good English. For all the difference which education has made betwixt
him and his kinsfolk he is a debtor.
In New England you sometimes see extremes of social condition brought
together. The blue-frocked father, well advanced, but hale as an October
morning, jostles into Boston in a milk-cart, his red-cheeked
grand-daughter beside him, also coming for some useful daily work, while
the youngest son, cultured at the cost of that grand-daughter's sire and
by that father's toil, is already a famous man; perhaps also a proud
one, eloquent at the bar, or powerful in the pulpit, or mighty in the
senate. The family was not rich enough to educate all the children after
this costly sort; one becomes famous, the rest are neglected, obscure,
and perhaps ignorant; the cultivated son has little sympathy with them.
So the men that built up the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Milan slept in
mean hutches of mud and straw, dirty, cold, and wet; the finished tower
looks proudly down upon the lowly thatch, all heedless of the cost at
which itself arose.
It is plain that this man owes for his education; it is plain whom he
owes. But all men of a superior culture, though born to wealth, get
their education in the same way, only there is this additional mischief
to complicate the matter: the burden of self-denial is not borne by the
man's own family, but by other fathers and mothers, other brothers and
sisters. They also pay the cost of his culture, bear the burden for no
special end, and have no personal or family joy in the success; they do
not even know the scholar they help to train. They who hewed the
topstone of society are far away when it is hoisted up with shouting.
Most of the youths now-a-days trained at Harvard College are the sons of
rich men, yet they also, not less, are educated at the public charge;
beneficiaries not of the "Hopkins' Fund," but of the whole community.
Society is not yet rich enough to afford so generous a culture to all
who ask, who deserve, or who would pay for it a hundred-fold. The
accomplished man who sits in his well-endowed scholarship at Oxford, or
rejoices to be "Master of Trinity," though he have the estate of the
Westminsters and Sutherlands behind him, is still the beneficiary of the
public, and owes for his schooling.
In the general way among the industrious classes of New England, a boy
earns his living after he is twelve years old. If he gets the superior
education of the scholar solely by the pecuniary aid of his father or
others, when he is twenty-five and enters on his profession, law,
medicine, or divinity, politics, school-keeping, or trade, he has not
earned his Latin grammar; has rendered no appreciable service to
mankind; others have worked that he might study, and taught that he
might learn. He has not paid the first cent towards his own schooling;
he is indebted for it to the whole community. The ox-driver in the
fields, the pavior in the city streets, the laborer on the railroad, the
lumberer in the woods, the girl in the factory, each has a claim on him.
If he despises these persons, or cuts himself off from sympathy with
them; if he refuses to perform his function for them after they have
done their possible to fit him for it; he is not only the perpetual and
ungrateful debtor, but is more guilty than the poor man's son who
forgets the family that sent him to college: for that family consciously
and willingly made the sacrifice, and got some satisfaction for it in
the visible success of their scheme, nay, are sometimes proud of the
pride which scorns them, while with the mass of men thus slighted there
is no return for their sacrifice. They did their part, faithfully did
it; their beneficiary forgets his function.
The democratic party in New England does not much favor the higher
seminaries of education. There has long been a suspicion against them in
the mass of the community, and among the friends of the public education
of the people a serious distrust. This is the philosophy of that
discontent: public money spent on the higher seminaries is so much taken
from the humbler schools, so much taken from the colleges of all for the
college of the few; men educated at such cost have not adequately repaid
the public for the sacrifice made on their account; men of superior
education have not been eminently the friends of mankind, they do not
eminently represent Truth, Justice, Philanthropy, and Piety; they do not
point men to lofty human life, and go thitherward in advance of mankind;
their superior education has narrowed their sympathies, instead of
widening; they use their opportunities against mankind, and not in its
behalf; think, write, legislate, and live not for the interest of
mankind, but only for a class; instead of eminent wisdom, justice,
piety, they have eminent cunning, selfishness, and want of faith. These
charges are matters of allegation; judge you if they be not also matters
of fact.
Now there is a common feeling amongst men that the scholar is their
debtor, and, in virtue of this, that they have a right to various
services from him. No honest man asks the aid of a farmer or a
blacksmith without intending to repay him in money; no assembly of
mechanics would ask another to come two hundred miles and give them a
month's work, or a day's work. Yet they will ask a scholar to do so.
What gratuitous services are demanded of the physician, of the minister,
of the man of science and letters in general! No poor man in Boston but
thinks he has a good claim on any doctor; no culprit in danger of
liberty or life but will ask the services of a lawyer, wholly without
recompense, to plead his cause. The poorest and most neglected class of
men look on every good clergyman as their missionary and minister and
friend; the better educated and more powerful he is, the juster and
greater do they feel their claim on him. A pirate in jail may command
the services of any Christian minister in the land. Most of the high
achievements in science, letters and art, have had no apparent pay. The
pay came beforehand: in general and from God, in the greater ability,
"the vision and the faculty divine," but in particular also and from
men, in the opportunity afforded them by others for the use and culture
thereof. Divinely and humanly they are well paid. Men feel that they
have this right to the services of the scholar, in part because they
dimly know that his superior education is purchased at the general cost.
Hence, too, they are proud of the few able and accomplished men, feeling
that all have a certain property therein, as having contributed their
mite to the accumulation, by their divine nature related to the men of
genius, by their human toil partners in the acquirements of the scholar.
This feeling is not confined to men who intellectually can appreciate
intellectual excellence. The little parish in the mountains, and the
great parish in the city, are alike proud of the able-headed and
accomplished scholar, who ministers to them; though neither the poor
clowns of the village nor the wealthy clowns of the metropolis could
enter into his consciousness and understand his favorite pursuits or
loftiest thought. Both would think it insulting to pay such a man in
full proportion to his work or their receipt. Nobody offers a salary to
the House of Lords: their lordship is their pay, and they must give
back, in the form of justice and sound government, an equivalent for all
they take in high social rank. They must pay for their nobility by being
noble lords.
* * * * *
How shall the scholar pay for his education? He is to give a service for
the service received. Thus the miller and the farmer pay one another,
each paying with service in his own kind. The scholar cannot pay back
bread for bread, and cloth for cloth. He must pay in the scholar's kind,
not the woodman's or the weaver's. He is to represent the higher modes
of human consciousness; his culture and opportunities of position fit
him for that. So he is not merely to go through the routine of his
profession, as minister, doctor, lawyer, merchant, schoolmaster,
politician, or maker of almanacs, and for his own advantage; he is also
to represent truth, justice, beauty, philanthropy, and religion--the
highest facts of human experience; he must be common, but not vulgar,
and, as a star, must dwell apart from the vulgarity of the selfish and
the low. He may win money without doing this, get fame and power, and
thereby seem to pay mankind for their advance to him, while he rides
upon their neck; but as he has not paid back the scholar's cost and in
the scholar's way, he is a debtor still, and owes for his past culture
and present position.
* * * * *
Such is the position of the scholar everywhere, and such his consequent
obligation. But in America there are some circumstances which make the
position and the duty still more important. Beside the natural
aristocracy of genius, talent, and educated skill, in most countries
there is also a conventional and permanent nobility based on royal or
patrician descent and immovable aristocracy. Its members monopolize the
high places of society, and if not strong by nature are so by position.
Those men check the natural power of the class of scholars. The
descendant of some famous chief of old time, takes rank before the
Bacons, the Shakspeares, and the Miltons of new families, born
yesterday, to-day gladdened and gladdening with the joy of their genius,
usurps their place, and for a time "shoves away the worthy bidden guest"
from the honors of the public board. Here there is no such class: a man
born at all is well born; with a great nature, nobly born; the career
opens to all that can run, to all men that wish to try; our aristocracy
is movable, and the scholar has scope and verge enough.
Germany has the largest class of scholars; men of talent, sometimes of
genius, of great working power, exceedingly well furnished for their
work, with a knowledge of the past and the present. On the whole, they
seem to have a greater power of thought than the scholars of any other
land. They live in a country where intellectual worth is rated at its
highest value. As England is the paradise of the patrician and the
millionnaire, so is Germany for the man of thought; Goethe and Schiller,
and the Humboldts took precedence of the mere conventional aristocracy.
The empire of money is for England; that of mind is for Germany. But
there the scholar is positively hindered in his function by the power of
the government, which allows freedom of thought, and by education tends
to promote it, yet not its correlative freedom of speech, and still
less the consequent of that--freedom of act. Revelations of new thought
are indeed looked for, and encouraged in certain forms, but the
corresponding revolution of old things is forbidden. An idea must remain
an idea; the government will not allow it to become a deed, an
institution, an idea organized in men. The children of the mind must be
exposed to die, or, if left alive, their feet are cramped, so that they
cannot go alone; useless, joyless, and unwed, they remain in their
father's house. The government seeks to establish national unity of
action, by the sacrifice of individual variety of action, personal
freedom; every man must be a soldier and a Christian, wearing the livery
of the government on the body and in the soul, and going through the
spiritual exercises of the church, as through the manual exercise of the
camp. In a nation so enlightened, personal freedom cannot be wholly
sacrificed, so thought is left free, but speech restricted by
censorship--speech with the human mouth or the iron lips of the press.
Now, as of old, is there a controversy between the temporal and the
spiritual powers, about the investiture of the children of the soul.