To revisit this earth, some ages after their departure from it, is a
common wish among men. We frequently hear men say that they would give so
many months or years of their lives in exchange for a less number on the
globe one or two or three centuries from now. Merely to see the world
from some remote sphere, like the distant spectator of a play which
passes in dumb show, would not suffice. They would like to be of the
world again, and enter into its feelings, passions, hopes; to feel the
sweep of its current, and so to comprehend what it has become.
I suppose that we all who are thoroughly interested in this world have
this desire. There are some select souls who sit apart in calm endurance,
waiting to be translated out of a world they are almost tired of
patronizing, to whom the whole thing seems, doubtless, like a cheap
performance. They sit on the fence of criticism, and cannot for the life
of them see what the vulgar crowd make such a toil and sweat about. The
prizes are the same dreary, old, fading bay wreaths. As for the soldiers
marching past, their uniforms are torn, their hats are shocking, their
shoes are dusty, they do not appear (to a man sitting on the fence) to
march with any kind of spirit, their flags are old and tattered, the
drums they beat are barbarous; and, besides, it is not probable that they
are going anywhere; they will merely come round again, the same people,
like the marching chorus in the “Beggar's Opera.” Such critics, of
course, would not care to see the vulgar show over again; it is enough
for them to put on record their protest against it in the weekly
“Judgment Days” which they edit, and by-and-by withdraw out of their
private boxes, with pity for a world in the creation of which they were
not consulted.
The desire to revisit this earth is, I think, based upon a belief,
well-nigh universal, that the world is to make some progress, and that it
will be more interesting in the future than it is now. I believe that the
human mind, whenever it is developed enough to comprehend its own action,
rests, and has always rested, in this expectation. I do not know any
period of time in which the civilized mind has not had expectation of
something better for the race in the future. This expectation is
sometimes stronger than it is at others; and, again, there are always
those who say that the Golden Age is behind them. It is always behind or
before us; the poor present alone has no friends; the present, in the
minds of many, is only the car that is carrying us away from an age of
virtue and of happiness, or that is perhaps bearing us on to a time of
ease and comfort and security.
Perhaps it is worth while, in view of certain recent discussions, and
especially of some free criticisms of this country, to consider whether
there is any intention of progress in this world, and whether that
intention is discoverable in the age in which we live.
If it is an old question, it is not a settled one; the practical
disbelief in any such progress is widely entertained. Not long ago Mr.
James Anthony Froude published an essay on Progress, in which he examined
some of the evidences upon which we rely to prove that we live in an “era
of progress.” It is a melancholy essay, for its tone is that of profound
skepticism as to certain influences and means of progress upon which we
in this country most rely. With the illustrative arguments of Mr.
Froude's essay I do not purpose specially to meddle; I recall it to the
attention of the reader as a representative type of skepticism regarding
progress which is somewhat common among intellectual men, and is not
confined to England. It is not exactly an acceptance of Rousseau's notion
that civilization is a mistake, and that it would be better for us all to
return to a state of nature--though in John Ruskin's case it nearly
amounts to this; but it is a hostility in its last analysis to what we
understand by the education of the people, and to the government of the
people by themselves. If Mr. Froude's essay is anything but an exhibition
of the scholarly weapons of criticism, it is the expression of a profound
disbelief in the intellectual education of the masses of the people. Mr.
Ruskin goes further. He makes his open proclamation against any
emancipation from hand-toil. Steam is the devil himself let loose from
the pit, and all labor-saving machinery is his own invention. Mr. Ruskin
is the bull that stands upon the track and threatens with annihilation
the on-coming locomotive; and I think that any spectator who sees his
menacing attitude and hears his roaring cannot but have fears for the
locomotive.
There are two sorts of infidelity concerning humanity, and I do not know
which is the more withering in its effects. One is that which regards
this world as only a waste and a desert, across the sands of which we are
merely fugitives, fleeing from the wrath to come. The other is that doubt
of any divine intention in development, in history, which we call
progress from age to age.
In the eyes of this latter infidelity history is not a procession or a
progression, but only a series of disconnected pictures, each little era
rounded with its own growth, fruitage, and decay, a series of incidents
or experiments, without even the string of a far-reaching purpose to
connect them. There is no intention of progress in it all. The race is
barbarous, and then it changes to civilized; in the one case the strong
rob the weak by brute force; in the other the crafty rob the unwary by
finesse. The latter is a more agreeable state of things; but it comes to
about the same. The robber used to knock us down and take away our
sheepskins; he now administers chloroform and relieves us of our watches.
It is a gentlemanly proceeding, and scientific, and we call it
civilization. Meantime human nature remains the same, and the whole thing
is a weary round that has no advance in it.
If this is true the succession of men and of races is no better than a
vegetable succession; and Mr. Froude is quite right in doubting if
education of the brain will do the English agricultural laborer any good;
and Mr. Ruskin ought to be aided in his crusade against machinery, which
turns the world upside down. The best that can be done with a man is the
best that can be done with a plant-set him out in some favorable
locality, or leave him where he happened to strike root, and there let
him grow and mature in measure and quiet--especially quiet--as he may in
God's sun and rain. If he happens to be a cabbage, in Heaven's name don't
try to make a rose of him, and do not disturb the vegetable maturing of
his head by grafting ideas upon his stock.
The most serious difficulty in the way of those who maintain that there
is an intention of progress in this world from century to century, from
age to age--a discernible growth, a universal development--is the fact
that all nations do not make progress at the same time or in the same
ratio; that nations reach a certain development, and then fall away and
even retrograde; that while one may be advancing into high civilization,
another is lapsing into deeper barbarism, and that nations appear to have
a limit of growth. If there were a law of progress, an intention of it in
all the world, ought not all peoples and tribes to advance pari passu, or
at least ought there not to be discernible a general movement, historical
and contemporary? There is no such general movement which can be
computed, the law of which can be discovered--therefore it does not
exist. In a kind of despair, we are apt to run over in our minds empires
and pre-eminent civilizations that have existed, and then to doubt
whether life in this world is intended to be anything more than a series
of experiments. There is the German nation of our day, the most
aggressive in various fields of intellectual activity, a Hercules of
scholarship, the most thoroughly trained and powerful--though its
civilization marches to the noise of the hateful and barbarous drum. In
what points is it better than the Greek nation of the age of its
superlative artists, philosophers, poets--the age of the most joyous,
elastic human souls in the most perfect human bodies?
Again, it is perhaps a fanciful notion that the Atlantis of Plato was the
northern part of the South American continent, projecting out towards
Africa, and that the Antilles are the peaks and headlands of its sunken
bulk. But there are evidences enough that the shores of the Gulf of
Mexico and the Caribbean Sea were within historic periods the seat of a
very considerable civilization--the seat of cities, of commerce, of
trade, of palaces and pleasure--gardens--faint images, perhaps, of the
luxurious civilization of Baia! and Pozzuoli and Capri in the most
profligate period of the Roman empire. It is not more difficult to
believe that there was a great material development here than to believe
it of the African shore of the Mediterranean. Not to multiply instances
that will occur to all, we see as many retrograde as advance movements,
and we see, also, that while one spot of the earth at one time seems to
be the chosen theatre of progress, other portions of the globe are
absolutely dead and without the least leaven of advancing life, and we
cannot understand how this can be if there is any such thing as an
all-pervading and animating intention or law of progress. And then we are
reminded that the individual human mind long ago attained its height of
power and capacity. It is enough to recall the names of Moses, Buddha,
Confucius, Socrates, Paul, Homer, David.
No doubt it has seemed to other periods and other nations, as it now does
to the present civilized races, that they were the chosen times and
peoples of an extraordinary and limitless development. It must have
seemed so to the Jews who overran Palestine and set their shining cities
on all the hills of heathendom. It must have seemed so to the Babylonish
conquerors who swept over Palestine in turn, on their way to greater
conquests in Egypt. It must have seemed so to Greece when the Acropolis
was to the outlying world what the imperial calla is to the marsh in
which it lifts its superb flower. It must have seemed so to Rome when its
solid roads of stone ran to all parts of a tributary world--the highways
of the legions, her ministers, and of the wealth that poured into her
treasury. It must have seemed so to followers of Mahomet, when the
crescent knew no pause in its march up the Arabian peninsula to the
Bosporus, to India, along the Mediterranean shores to Spain, where in the
eighth century it flowered into a culture, a learning, a refinement in
art and manners, to which the Christian world of that day was a stranger.
It must have seemed so in the awakening of the sixteenth century, when
Europe, Spain leading, began that great movement of discovery and
aggrandizement which has, in the end, been profitable only to a portion
of the adventurers. And what shall we say of a nation as old, if not
older than any of these we have mentioned, slowly building up meantime a
civilization and perfecting a system of government and a social economy
which should outlast them all, and remain to our day almost the sole
monument of permanence and stability in a shifting world?
How many times has the face of Europe been changed--and parts of Africa,
and Asia Minor too, for that matter--by conquests and crusades, and the
rise and fall of civilizations as well as dynasties? while China has
endured, almost undisturbed, under a system of law, administration,
morality, as old as the Pyramids probably--existed a coherent nation,
highly developed in certain essentials, meeting and mastering, so far as
we can see, the great problem of an over-populated territory, living in a
good degree of peace and social order, of respect for age and law, and
making a continuous history, the mere record of which is printed in a
thousand bulky volumes. Yet we speak of the Chinese empire as an instance
of arrested growth, for which there is no salvation, except it shall
catch the spirit of progress abroad in the world. What is this progress,
and where does it come from?
Think for a moment of this significant situation. For thousands of years,
empires, systems of society, systems of civilization--Egyptian, Jewish,
Greek, Roman, Moslem, Feudal--have flourished and fallen, grown to a
certain height and passed away; great organized fabrics have gone down,
and, if there has been any progress, it has been as often defeated as
renewed. And here is an empire, apart from this scene of alternate
success and disaster, which has existed in a certain continuity and
stability, and yet, now that it is uncovered and stands face to face with
the rest of the world, it finds that it has little to teach us, and
almost everything to learn from us. The old empire sends its students to
learn of us, the newest child of civilization; and through us they learn
all the great past, its literature, law, science, out of which we sprang.
It appears, then, that progress has, after all, been with the shifting
world, that has been all this time going to pieces, rather than with the
world that has been permanent and unshaken.
When we speak of progress we may mean two things. We may mean a lifting
of the races as a whole by reason of more power over the material world,
by reason of what we call the conquest of nature and a practical use of
its forces; or we may mean a higher development of the individual man, so
that he shall be better and happier. If from age to age it is
discoverable that the earth is better adapted to man as a dwelling-place,
and he is on the whole fitted to get more out of it for his own growth,
is not that progress, and is it not evidence of an intention of progress?
Now, it is sometimes said that Providence, in the economy of this world,
cares nothing for the individual, but works out its ideas and purposes
through the races, and in certain periods, slowly bringing in, by great
agencies and by processes destructive to individuals and to millions of
helpless human beings, truths and principles; so laying stepping-stones
onward to a great consummation. I do not care to dwell upon this thought,
but let us see if we can find any evidence in history of the presence in
this world of an intention of progress.
It is common to say that, if the world makes progress at all, it is by
its great men, and when anything important for the race is to be done, a
great man is raised up to do it. Yet another way to look at it is, that
the doing of something at the appointed time makes the man who does it
great, or at least celebrated. The man often appears to be only a favored
instrument of communication. As we glance back we recognize the truth
that, at this and that period, the time had come for certain discoveries.
Intelligence seemed pressing in from the invisible. Many minds were on
the alert to apprehend it. We believe, for instance, that if Gutenberg
had not invented movable types, somebody else would have given them to
the world about that time. Ideas, at certain times, throng for admission
into the world; and we are all familiar with the fact that the same
important idea (never before revealed in all the ages) occurs to separate
and widely distinct minds at about the same time. The invention of the
electric telegraph seemed to burst upon the world simultaneously from
many quarters--not perfect, perhaps, but the time for the idea had
come--and happy was it for the man who entertained it. We have agreed to
call Columbus the discoverer of America, but I suppose there is no doubt
that America had been visited by European, and probably Asiatic, people
ages before Columbus; that four or five centuries before him people from
northern Europe had settlements here; he was fortunate, however, in
“discovering” it in the fullness of time, when the world, in its
progress, was ready for it. If the Greeks had had gunpowder,
electro-magnetism, the printing press, history would need to be
rewritten. Why the inquisitive Greek mind did not find out these things
is a mystery upon any other theory than the one we are considering.
And it is as mysterious that China, having gunpowder and the art of
printing, is not today like Germany.
There seems to me to be a progress, or an intention of progress, in the
world, independent of individual men. Things get on by all sorts of
instruments, and sometimes by very poor ones. There are times when new
thoughts or applications of known principles seem to throng from the
invisible for expression through human media, and there is hardly ever an
important invention set free in the world that men do not appear to be
ready cordially to receive it. Often we should be justified in saying
that there was a widespread expectation of it. Almost all the great
inventions and the ingenious application of principles have many
claimants for the honor of priority.
On any other theory than this, that there is present in the world an
intention of progress which outlasts individuals, and even races, I
cannot account for the fact that, while civilizations decay and pass
away, and human systems go to pieces, ideas remain and accumulate. We,
the latest age, are the inheritors of all the foregoing ages. I do not
believe that anything of importance has been lost to the world. The
Jewish civilization was torn up root and branch, but whatever was
valuable in the Jewish polity is ours now. We may say the same of the
civilizations of Athens and of Rome; though the entire organization of
the ancient world, to use Mr. Froude's figure, collapsed into a heap of
incoherent sand, the ideas remained, and Greek art and Roman law are part
of the world's solid possessions.
Even those who question the value to the individual of what we call
progress, admit, I suppose, the increase of knowledge in the world from
age to age, and not only its increase, but its diffusion. The intelligent
schoolboy today knows more than the ancient sages knew--more about the
visible heavens, more of the secrets of the earth, more of the human
body. The rudiments of his education, the common experiences of his
everyday life, were, at the best, the guesses and speculations of a
remote age. There is certainly an accumulation of facts, ideas,
knowledge. Whether this makes men better, wiser, happier, is indeed
disputed.
In order to maintain the notion of a general and intended progress, it is
not necessary to show that no preceding age has excelled ours in some
special, development. Phidias has had no rival in sculpture, we may
admit. It is possible that glass was once made as flexible as leather,
and that copper could be hardened like steel. But I do not take much
stock in the “lost arts,” the wondering theme of the lyceums. The
knowledge of the natural world, and of materials, was never, I believe,
so extensive and exact as it is today. It is possible that there are
tricks of chemistry, ingenious processes, secrets of color, of which we
are ignorant; but I do not believe there was ever an ancient alchemist
who could not be taught something in a modern laboratory. The vast
engineering works of the ancient Egyptians, the remains of their temples
and pyramids, excite our wonder; but I have no doubt that President
Grant, if he becomes the tyrant they say he is becoming, and commands the
labor of forty millions of slaves--a large proportion of them office
--holders--could build a Karnak, or erect a string of pyramids across New
Jersey.
Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer
in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world
calls this progress--he calls it only change. I suppose he means by this
two things: that these great movements of our modern life are not any
evidence of a permanent advance, and that our whole structure may tumble
into a heap of incoherent sand, as systems of society have done before;
and, again, that it is questionable if, in what we call a stride in
civilization, the individual citizen is becoming any purer or more just,
or if his intelligence is directed towards learning and doing what is
right, or only to the means of more extended pleasures.
It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the first of these points--the
permanence of our advance, if it is an advance. But we may be encouraged
by one thing that distinguishes this period--say from the middle of the
eighteenth century--from any that has preceded it. I mean the
introduction of machinery, applied to the multiplication of man's power
in a hundred directions--to manufacturing, to locomotion, to the
diffusion of thought and of knowledge. I need not dwell upon this
familiar topic. Since this period began there has been, so far as I know,
no retrograde movement anywhere, but, besides the material, an
intellectual and spiritual kindling the world over, for which history has
no sort of parallel. Truth is always the same, and will make its way, but
this subject might be illustrated by a study of the relation of
Christianity and of the brotherhood of men to machinery. The theme would
demand an essay by itself. I leave it with the one remark, that this
great change now being wrought in the world by the multiplicity of
machinery is not more a material than it is an intellectual one, and that
we have no instance in history of a catastrophe widespread enough and
adequate to sweep away its results. That is to say, none of the
catastrophes, not even the corruptions, which brought to ruin the ancient
civilizations, would work anything like the same disaster in an age which
has the use of machinery that this age has.
For instance: Gibbon selects the period between the accession of Trajan
and the death of Marcus Aurelius as the time in which the human race
enjoyed more general happiness than they had ever known before, or had
since known. Yet, says Mr. Froude, in the midst of this prosperity the
heart of the empire was dying out of it; luxury and selfishness were
eating away the principle that held society together, and the ancient
world was on the point of collapsing into a heap of incoherent sand. Now,
it is impossible to conceive that the catastrophe which did happen to
that civilization could have happened if the world had then possessed the
steam-engine, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph. The Roman
power might have gone down, and the face of the world been recast; but
such universal chaos and such a relapse for the individual people would
seem impossible.
If we turn from these general considerations to the evidences that this
is an “era of progress” in the condition of individual men, we are met by
more specific denials. Granted, it is said, all your facilities for
travel and communication, for cheap and easy manufacture, for the
distribution of cheap literature and news, your cheap education, better
homes, and all the comforts and luxuries of your machine civilization, is
the average man, the agriculturist, the machinist, the laborer any better
for it all? Are there more purity, more honest, fair dealing, genuine
work, fear and honor of God? Are the proceeds of labor more evenly
distributed? These, it is said, are the criteria of progress; all else is
misleading.
Now, it is true that the ultimate end of any system of government or
civilization should be the improvement of the individual man. And yet
this truth, as Mr. Froude puts it, is only a half-truth, so that this
single test of any system may not do for a given time and a limited area.
Other and wider considerations come in. Disturbances, which for a while
unsettle society and do not bring good results to individuals, may,
nevertheless, be necessary, and may be a sign of progress. Take the
favorite illustration of Mr. Froude and Mr. Ruskin--the condition of the
agricultural laborer of England. If I understand them, the civilization
of the last century has not helped his position as a man. If I understand
them, he was a better man, in a better condition of earthly happiness,
and with a better chance of heaven, fifty years ago than now, before the
“era of progress” found him out. (It ought to be noticed here, that the
report of the Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the English
agricultural laborer does not sustain Mr. Froude's assumptions. On the
contrary, the report shows that his condition is in almost all respects
vastly better than it was fifty years ago.) Mr. Ruskin would remove the
steam-engine and all its devilish works from his vicinity; he would
abolish factories, speedy travel by rail, new-fangled instruments of
agriculture, our patent education, and remit him to his ancient
condition--tied for life to a bit of ground, which should supply all his
simple wants; his wife should weave the clothes for the family; his
children should learn nothing but the catechism and to speak the truth;
he should take his religion without question from the hearty, fox-hunting
parson, and live and die undisturbed by ideas. Now, it seems to me that
if Mr. Ruskin could realize in some isolated nation this idea of a
pastoral, simple existence, under a paternal government, he would have in
time an ignorant, stupid, brutal community in a great deal worse case
than the agricultural laborers of England are at present. Three-fourths
of the crime in the kingdom of Bavaria is committed in the Ultramontane
region of the Tyrol, where the conditions of popular education are about
those that Mr. Ruskin seems to regret as swept away by the present
movement in England--a stagnant state of things, in which any wind of
heaven would be a blessing, even if it were a tornado. Education of the
modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders him unfit for labor, and gives
us a half-educated idler in place of a conscientious workman. The disuse
of the apprentice system is not made good by the present system of
education, because no one learns a trade well, and the consequence is
poor work, and a sham civilization generally. There is some truth in
these complaints. But the way out is not backward, but forward. The fault
is not with education, though it may be with the kind of education. The
education must go forward; the man must not be half but wholly educated.
It is only half-knowledge like half-training in a trade that is
dangerous.
But what I wish to say is, that notwithstanding certain unfavorable
things in the condition of the English laborer and mechanic, his chance
is better in the main than it was fifty years ago. The world is a better
world for him. He has the opportunity to be more of a man. His world is
wider, and it is all open to him to go where he will. Mr. Ruskin may not
so easily find his ideal, contented peasant, but the man himself begins
to apprehend that this is a world of ideas as well as of food and
clothes, and I think, if he were consulted, he would have no desire to
return to the condition of his ancestors. In fact, the most hopeful
symptom in the condition of the English peasant is his discontent. For,
as skepticism is in one sense the handmaid of truth, discontent is the
mother of progress. The man is comparatively of little use in the world
who is contented.
There is another thought pertinent here. It is this: that no man, however
humble, can live a full life if he lives to himself alone. He is more of
a man, he lives in a higher plane of thought and of enjoyment, the more
his communications are extended with his fellows and the wider his
sympathies are. I count it a great thing for the English peasant, a solid
addition to his life, that he is every day being put into more intimate
relations with every other man on the globe.
I know it is said that these are only vague and sentimental notions of
progress--notions of a “salvation by machinery.” Let us pass to something
that may be less vague, even if it be more sentimental. For a hundred
years we have reckoned it progress, that the people were taking part in
government. We have had a good deal of faith in the proposition put forth
at Philadelphia a century ago, that men are, in effect, equal in
political rights. Out of this simple proposition springs logically the
extension of suffrage, and a universal education, in order that this
important function of a government by the people may be exercised
intelligently.
Now we are told by the most accomplished English essayists that this is a
mistake, that it is change, but no progress. Indeed, there are
philosophers in America who think so. At least I infer so from the fact
that Mr. Froude fathers one of his definitions of our condition upon an
American. When a block of printer's type is by accident broken up and
disintegrated, it falls into what is called “pi.” The “pi,” a mere chaos,
is afterwards sorted and distributed, preparatory to being built up into
fresh combinations. “A distinguished American friend,” says Mr. Froude,
“describes Democracy as making pi.” It is so witty a sarcasm that I
almost think Mr. Froude manufactured it himself. Well, we have been
making this “pi” for a hundred years; it seems to be a national dish in
considerable favor with the rest of the world--even such ancient nations
as China and Japan want a piece of it.
Now, of course, no form of human government is perfect, or anything like
it, but I should be willing to submit the question to an English traveler
even, whether, on the whole, the people of the United States do not have
as fair a chance in life and feel as little the oppression of government
as any other in the world; whether anywhere the burdens are more lifted
off men's shoulders.
This infidelity to popular government and unbelief in any good results to
come from it are not, unfortunately, confined to the English essayists. I
am not sure but the notion is growing in what is called the intellectual
class, that it is a mistake to intrust the government to the ignorant
many, and that it can only be lodged safely in the hands of the wise few.
We hear the corruptions of the times attributed to universal suffrage.
Yet these corruptions certainly are not peculiar to the United States: It
is also said here, as it is in England, that our diffused and somewhat
superficial education is merely unfitting the mass of men, who must be
laborers, for any useful occupation.
This argument, reduced to plain terms, is simply this: that the mass of
mankind are unfit to decide properly their own political and social
condition; and that for the mass of mankind any but a very limited mental
development is to be deprecated. It would be enough to say of this, that
class government and popular ignorance have been tried for so many ages,
and always with disaster and failure in the end, that I should think
philanthropical historians would be tired of recommending them. But there
is more to be said.
I feel that as a resident on earth, part owner of it for a time,
unavoidably a member of society, I have a right to a voice in determining
what my condition and what my chance in life shall be. I may be ignorant,
I should be a very poor ruler of other people, but I am better capable of
deciding some things that touch me nearly than another is. By what logic
can I say that I should have a part in the conduct of this world and that
my neighbor should not? Who is to decide what degree of intelligence
shall fit a man for a share in the government? How are we to select the
few capable men that are to rule all the rest? As a matter of fact, men
have been rulers who had neither the average intelligence nor virtue of
the people they governed. And, as a matter of historical experience, a
class in power has always sought its own benefit rather than that of the
whole people. Lunacy, extraordinary stupidity, and crime aside, a man is
the best guardian of his own liberty and rights.
The English critics, who say we have taken the government from the
capable few and given it to the people, speak of universal suffrage as a
quack panacea of this “era of progress.” But it is not the manufactured
panacea of any theorist or philosopher whatever. It is the natural result
of a diffused knowledge of human rights and of increasing intelligence.
It is nothing against it that Napoleon III. used a mockery of it to
govern France. It is not a device of the closet, but a method of
government, which has naturally suggested itself to men as they have
grown into a feeling of self-reliance and a consciousness that they have
some right in the decision of their own destiny in the world. It is true
that suffrage peculiarly fits a people virtuous and intelligent. But
there has not yet been invented any government in which a people would
thrive who were ignorant and vicious.
Our foreign critics seem to regard our “American system,” by the way, as
a sort of invention or patent right, upon which we are experimenting;
forgetting that it is as legitimate a growth out of our circumstances as
the English system is out of its antecedents. Our system is not the
product of theorists or closet philosophers; but it was ordained in
substance and inevitable from the day the first “town meeting” assembled
in New England, and it was not in the power of Hamilton or any one else
to make it otherwise.
So you must have education, now you have the ballot, say the critics of
this era of progress; and this is another of your cheap inventions. Not
that we undervalue book knowledge. Oh, no! but it really seems to us that
a good trade, with the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments back of it,
would be the best thing for most of you. You must work for a living
anyway; and why, now, should you unsettle your minds?
This is such an astounding view of human life and destiny that I do not
know what to say to it. Did it occur to Mr. Froude to ask the man whether
he would be contented with a good trade and the Ten Commandments? Perhaps
the man would like eleven commandments? And, if he gets hold of the
eleventh, he may want to know something more about his fellow-men, a
little geography maybe, and some of Mr. Froude's history, and thus he may
be led off into literature, and the Lord knows where.
The inference is that education--book fashion--will unfit the man for
useful work. Mr. Froude here again stops at a half-truth. As a general
thing, intelligence is useful in any position a man occupies. But it is
true that there is a superficial and misdirected sort of education, so
called, which makes the man who receives it despise labor; and it is also
true that in the present educational revival there has been a neglect of
training in the direction of skilled labor, and we all suffer more or
less from cheap and dishonest work. But the way out of this, again, is
forward, and not backward. It is a good sign, and not a stigma upon this
era of progress, that people desire education. But this education must be
of the whole man; he must be taught to work as well as to read, and he
is, indeed, poorly educated if he is not fitted to do his work in the
world. We certainly shall not have better workmen by having ignorant
workmen. I need not say that the real education is that which will best
fit a man for performing well his duties in life. If Mr. Froude, instead
of his plaint over the scarcity of good mechanics, and of the Ten
Commandments in England, had recommended the establishment of industrial
schools, he would have spoken more to the purpose.
I should say that the fashionable skepticism of today, here and in
England, is in regard to universal suffrage and the capacity of the
people to govern themselves. The whole system is the sharp invention of
Thomas Jefferson and others, by which crafty demagogues can rule. Instead
of being, as we have patriotically supposed, a real progress in human
development, it is only a fetich, which is becoming rapidly a failure.
Now, there is a great deal of truth in the assertion that, whatever the
form of government, the ablest men, or the strongest, or the most cunning
in the nation, will rule. And yet it is true that in a popular
government, like this, the humblest citizen, if he is wronged or
oppressed, has in his hands a readier instrument of redress than he has
ever had in any form of government. And it must not be forgotten that the
ballot in the hands of all is perhaps the only safeguard against the
tyranny of wealth in the hands of the few. It is true that bad men can
band together and be destructive; but so they can in any government.
Revolution by ballot is much safer than revolution by violence; and,
granting that human nature is selfish, when the whole people are the
government selfishness is on the side of the government. Can you mention
any class in this country whose interest it is to overturn the
government? And, then, as to the wisdom of the popular decisions by the
ballot in this country. Look carefully at all the Presidential elections
from Washington's down, and say, in the light of history, if the popular
decision has not, every time, been the best for the country. It may not
have seemed so to some of us at the time, but I think it is true, and a
very significant fact.
Of course, in this affirmation of belief that one hundred years of
popular government in this country is a real progress for humanity, and
not merely a change from the rule of the fit to the rule of the cunning,
we cannot forget that men are pretty much everywhere the same, and that
we have abundant reason for national humility. We are pretty well aware
that ours is not an ideal state of society, and should be so, even if the
English who pass by did not revile us, wagging their heads. We might
differ with them about the causes of our disorders. Doubtless, extended
suffrage has produced certain results. It seems, strangely enough, to
have escaped the observation of our English friends that to suffrage was
due the late horse disease. No one can discover any other cause for it.
But there is a cause for the various phenomena of this period of shoddy,
of inflated speculation, of disturbance of all values, social, moral,
political, and material, quite sufficient in the light of history to
account for them. It is not suffrage; it is an irredeemable paper
currency. It has borne its usual fruit with us, and neither foreign nor
home critics can shift the responsibility of it upon our system of
government. Yes, it is true, we have contrived to fill the world with our
scandals of late. I might refer to a loose commercial and political
morality; to betrayals of popular trust in politics; to corruptions in
legislatures and in corporations; to an abuse of power in the public
press, which has hardly yet got itself adjusted to its sudden accession
of enormous influence. We complain of its injustice to individuals
sometimes. We might imagine that something like this would occur.
A newspaper one day says: “We are exceedingly pained to hear that the
Hon. Mr. Blank, who is running for Congress in the First District, has
permitted his aged grandmother to go to the town poorhouse. What renders
this conduct inexplicable is the fact that Mr. Blank is a man of large
fortune.”
The next day the newspaper says: “The Hon. Mr. Blank has not seen fit to
deny the damaging accusation in regard to the treatment of his
grandmother.”
The next day the newspaper says: “Mr. Blank is still silent. He is
probably aware that he cannot afford to rest under this grave charge.”
The next day the newspaper asks: “Where's Blank? Has he fled?”
At last, goaded by these remarks, and most unfortunately for himself, Mr.
Blank writes to the newspaper and most indignantly denies the charge; he
never sent his grandmother to the poorhouse.
Thereupon the newspaper says: “Of course a rich man who would put his own
grandmother in the poorhouse would deny it. Our informant was a gentleman
of character. Mr. Blank rests the matter on his unsupported word. It is a
question of veracity.”
Or, perhaps, Mr. Blank, more unfortunately for himself, begins by making
an affidavit, wherein he swears that he never sent his grandmother to the
poorhouse, and that, in point of fact, he has not any grandmother
whatever.
The newspaper then, in language that is now classical, “goes for” Mr.
Blank. It says: “Mr. Blank resorts to the common device of the rogue
--the affidavit. If he had been conscious of rectitude, would he not have
relied upon his simple denial?”
Now, if an extreme case like this could occur, it would be bad enough.
But, in our free society, the remedy would be at hand. The constituents
of Mr. Blank would elect him in triumph. The newspaper would lose public
confidence and support and learn to use its position more justly. What I
mean to indicate by such an extreme instance as this is, that in our very
license of individual freedom there is finally a correcting power.
We might pursue this general subject of progress by a comparison of the
society of this country now with that of fifty years ago. I have no doubt
that in every essential this is better than that, in manners, in
morality, in charity and toleration, in education and religion. I know
the standard of morality is higher. I know the churches are purer. Not
fifty years ago, in a New England town, a distinguished doctor of
divinity, the pastor of a leading church, was part owner in a distillery.
He was a great light in his denomination, but he was an extravagant
liver, and, being unable to pay his debts, he was arrested and put into
jail, with the liberty of the “limits.” In order not to interrupt his
ministerial work, the jail limits were made to include his house and his
church, so that he could still go in and out before his people. I do not
think that could occur anywhere in the United States today.
I will close these fragmentary suggestions by saying that I, for one,
should like to see this country a century from now. Those who live then
will doubtless say of this period that it was crude, and rather
disorderly, and fermenting with a great many new projects; but I have
great faith that they will also say that the present extending notion,
that the best government is for the people, by the people, was in the
line of sound progress. I should expect to find faith in humanity greater
and not less than it is now, and I should not expect to find that Mr.
Froude's mournful expectation had been realized, and that the belief in a
life beyond the grave had been withdrawn.