The Age of Miracles—A Story of Franklin Pierce—Simon Suggs Billy
Sunday—Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr—Certain Constitutional
Shortcomings
I
The years intervening between 1865 and 1919 may be accounted the most
momentous in all the cycles of the ages. The bells that something more
than half a century ago rang forth to welcome peace in America have
been from that day to this jangled out of tune and harsh with the
sounding of war’s alarms in every other part of the world. We flatter
ourselves with the thought that our tragedy lies behind us. Whether
this be true or not, the tragedy of Europe is at hand and ahead. The
miracles of modern invention, surpassing those of old, have made for
strife, not for peace. Civilization has gone backward, not forward.
Rulers, intoxicated by the lust of power and conquest, have lost their
reason, and nations, following after, like cattle led to slaughter,
seem as the bereft of Heaven “that knew not God.”
We read the story of our yesterdays as it unfolds itself in the current
chronicle; the ascent to the bank-house, the descent to the mad-house,
and, over the glittering paraphernalia that follows to the tomb, we
reflect upon the money-zealot’s progress; the dizzy height, the
dazzling array, the craze for more and more and more; then the
temptation and fall, millions gone, honor gone, reason gone—the
innocent and the gentle, with the guilty, dragged through the mire of
the prison, and the court—and we draw back aghast. Yet, if we speak of
these things we are called pessimists.
I have always counted myself an optimist. I know that I do not lie
awake nights musing on the ingratitude either of my stars or my
countrymen. I pity the man who does. Looking backward, I have sincere
compassion for Webster and for Clay! What boots it to them, now that
they lie beneath the mold, and that the drums and tramplings of nearly
seventy years of the world’s strifes and follies and sordid ambitions
and mean repinings, and longings, and laughter, and tears, have passed
over their graves, what boots it to them, now, that they failed to get
all they wanted? There is indeed snug lying in the churchyard; but the
flowers smell as sweet and the birds sing as merry, and the stars look
down as loving upon the God-hallowed mounds of the lowly and the poor,
as upon the man-bedecked monuments of the Kings of men. All of us, the
least with the greatest, let us hope and believe shall attain immortal
life at last. What was there for Webster, what was there for Clay to
quibble about? I read with a kind of wonder, and a sickening sense of
the littleness of great things, those passages in the story of their
lives where it is told how they stormed and swore, when tidings reached
them that they had been balked of their desires.
Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with
its lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty
done; so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its
noble opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have
emulated the satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that
an enemy was inveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up
and said: “You should not talk so about the President, I assure you
that he is not at all the man you describe him to be. On the contrary,
he is a man of the rarest gifts and virtues. He has long been regarded
as the greatest orator in New England, and the greatest lawyer in New
England, and surely no one of his predecessors ever sent such state
papers to Congress.”
“How are you going to prove it,” angrily retorted the first speaker.
“I don’t need to prove it,” coolly replied the second. “He admits it.”
I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on
the whole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I
would not exchange places with any of the men who have been President,
and I have known quite a number of them.