Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history
with our own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling
contrasts of ancient and modern religion and government. I have
wandered not a little over Europe at irregular intervals for more than
fifty years. Always a devotee to American institutions, I have been
strengthened in my beliefs by what I have encountered.
The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch to belittle things
American. The commercial spirit in the United States, which affects to
be nationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its god,
French money, English money, anything that calls itself money, is
wealth to it. It has no time to waste on theories or to think of
generics. “Put money in thy purse” has become its motto. Money
constitutes the reason of its being. The organic law of the land is
Greek to it, as are those laws of God which obstruct it. It is too busy
with its greed and gain to think, or to feel, on any abstract subject.
That which does not appeal to it in the concrete is of no interest at
all.
Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, all things yielded to
the theologian’s misconception of the spiritual life so in these days
of the Billionaires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what
they call the progress of the universe and the leading of the times.
Under their rule we have had extraordinary movement just as under the
lords of the Palatinate and the Escurial—the medieval union of the
devils of bigotry and power—Europe, which was but another name for
Spain, had extraordinary movement. We know where it ended with Spain.
Whither is it leading us? Are we traveling the same road?
Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once strolling along through
the crypt of the Church of the Escurial near Madrid, I could not
repress the idea of a personal and physical resemblance between the
effigies in marble and bronze looking down upon me whichever way I
turned, to some of our contemporary public men and seeming to say: “My
love to the President when you see him next,” and “Don’t forget to
remember me kindly, please, to the chairmen of both your national
committees!”