sentence has come down to us. The voice through which the rising spirit of
a young nation sounded out its dream of life is hushed. The great
spokesman, of an age unto an age, is dead.
And yet, of those lost words is not our whole America one immortal record
and reporter? Do ye not read them, deep cut, defying the tooth of time, on
all the marble of our greatness? How they blaze on the pillars of our
Union! How is their deep sense unfolded and interpreted by every passing
hour! How do they come to life, and grow audible, as it were, in the
brightening rays of the light he foresaw, as the fabled invisible heart
gave out its music to the morning!
Yes, in one sense, they are perished. No parchment manuscript, no embalming
printed page, no certain traditions of living or dead, have kept them. Yet,
from out and from off all things around us,--our laughing harvests, our
songs of labor, our commerce on all the seas, our secure homes, our
school-houses and churches, our happy people, our radiant and stainless
flag,--how they come pealing, pealing, Independence now, and Independence
forever!
R. Choate.
XXII.
TRIBUTE TO WEBSTER.
They say he was ambitious! Yes, as Ames said of Hamilton, "there is no
doubt that he desired glory; and that, feeling his own force, he longed to
deck his brow with the wreath of immortality." But I believe he would have
yielded his arm, his frame to be burned, before he would have sought to
grasp the highest prize of earth by any means, by any organization, by any
tactics, by any speech, which in the least degree endangered the harmony of
the system.
They say, too, he loved New England! He did love New Hampshire--that old
granite world--the crystal hills, gray and cloud-topped; the river, whose
murmur lulled his cradle; the old hearthstone; the grave of father and
mother. He loved Massachusetts, which adopted and honored him--that
sounding sea-shore, that charmed elm-tree seat, that reclaimed farm, that
choice herd, that smell of earth, that dear library, those dearer friends;
but the "sphere of his duties was his true country." Dearly he loved you,
for he was grateful for the open arms with which you welcomed the stranger
and sent him onwards and upwards.
But when the crisis came, and the winds were let lose, and that sea of
March "wrought and was tempestuous," then you saw that he knew even you
only as you were, American citizens; then you saw him rise to the true
nature and stature of American citizenship; then you read on his brow only
what he thought of the whole Republic; then you saw him fold the robes of
his habitual patriotism around him, and counsel for all--for all. So,
then, he served you--"to be pleased with his service was your affair, not
his."
And now what would he do, what would he be if he were here to-day? I do not
presume to know. But what a loss we have in him! I have read that in some
hard battle, when the tide was running against him, and his ranks were
breaking, some one in the agony of a, need of generalship exclaimed, "Oh
for an hour of Dundee!" So say I, Oh for an hour of Webster now! Oh for one
more roll of that thunder inimitable! One more peal of that clarion! One
more grave and bold counsel of moderation! One more throb of American
feeling! One more Farewell Address! And then might he ascend unhindered to
the bosom of his Father and his God.
R. Choate.
XXIII.
THE FRUITS OF SKILFUL LABOR AND CULTIVATED INTELLECT.
Perhaps as striking an illustration on a large scale as could be desired,
of the connection between the best directed and most skilful labor and the
most cultivated and most powerful intellect, is afforded by the case of
England. British industry as a whole, is among the most splendid and
extraordinary things in the history of man. When you consider how small a
work-bench it has to occupy altogether, a little stormy island bathed in
almost perpetual fogs, without silk, or cotton, or vineyards, or sunshine,
and then look at that agriculture, so scientific and so rewarded, that vast
net-work of internal intercommunication, the docks, merchant-ships,
men-of-war, the trade encompassing the globe, the flag on which the sun
never sets,--when you look, above all, at that vast body of useful and
manly art, not directed, like the industry of France,--the industry of
vanity,--to making pier-glasses and air-balloons and gobelin tapestry and
mirrors, to arranging processions and chiselling silver and twisting gold
into filigrees, but to clothing the people, to the manufacture of woolen,
cotton, and linen cloth, of railroads and chain-cables and canals and
anchors and achromatic telescopes, and chronometers to keep the time at
sea,--when you think of the vast aggregate mass of their manufacturing and
mechanical production, which no statistics can ex-press, and to find a
market for which she is planting colonies under every constellation, and by
intimidation, by diplomacy, is knocking at the door of every market-house
upon the earth,--it is really difficult to restrain our admiration of such
a display of energy, labor, and genius, winning bloodless and innocent
triumphs everywhere, giving to the age we live in the name of the age of
the industry of the people. Now, the striking and the instructive fact is,
that exactly in that island workshop, by this very race of artisans, of
coal-heavers and woollen manufacturers of machinists and blacksmiths and
ship-carpenters, there has been produced and embodied forever, in words
that will outlast the mountains as well as the pyramids, a literature
which, take it for all in all, is the richest, most profound, most
instructive, combining more spirituality with more common sense, springing
from more capacious souls, conveying in better wisdom, more conformable to
the truth in man, in nature, and in human life, than the literature of any
nation that ever existed. That same race, side by side with the
unparalleled growth of its industry produces Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, and
Newton, all four at the summit of human thought,--and then, just below
these unapproachable fixed lights, a whole firmament of glories, lesser
than they, as all created intelligence must be, yet in whose superior rays
the age of Augustus, of Leo X., of Louis XIV., all but the age of Pericles,
the culture of Greece, pale and fade. And yet the literature of England is
not the only, scarcely the most splendid, fruit or form of the mental power
and the energetic character of England. That same race, along with their
indus try, along with their literature, has built up a jurisprudence which
is for substance our law to-day,--has constructed the largest mercantile
and war navy, and the largest commercial empire with its pillars encircling
the globe, that men ever saw,--has gained greater victories on sea and land
than any power in the world,--has erected the smallest spot to the most
imperial ascendency recorded in history. The administrative triumphs of her
intellect are as conspicuous as her imaginative and her speculative
triumphs.
Such is mental power. Mark its union with labor and with all greatness;
deduce the law; learn the lesson; see how you, too, may grow great. Such an
industry as that of England demanded such an intellect as that of England.
Sic vobis etian itur ad astra! That way to you, also, glory lies!
R. Choate.
XXIV.
THE EMPIRE OF MIND.
Knowledge is power as well as fame. Think of that subtle, all-embracing,
plastic, mysterious, irresistible thing called public opinion, the god of
this lower world, and consider what a State, or a cluster of States, of
marked and acknowledged literary and intellectual lead might do to color
and shape that opinion to their will. Consider how winged are words; how
electrical, light-like the speed of thought; how awful human sympathy.
Consider how soon a wise, a beautiful thought uttered here,--a sentiment of
liberty perhaps, or word of succor to the oppressed, of exhortations to
duty, to patriotism, to glory, the refutation of a sophism, the unfolding
of a truth for which the nation may be better,--how soon a word fitly or
wisely spoken here is read on the Upper Mississippi and beneath the
orange-groves of Florida, all through the unequalled valley; how vast an
audience it gains, into how many bosoms it has access, on how much good
soil the seed may rest and spring to life, how easily and fast the fine
spirit of truth and beauty goes all abroad upon the face of the world.
There is an influence which I would rather see Massachusetts exert on her
sisters of this Union, than see her furnish a President every twelve years
or command a majority on any division in Congress; and that is such an
influence as Athens exerted on the taste and opinion first of Greece, then
of Rome, then of the universal modern world; such as she will exert while
the race of man exists. This, of all the kinds of empire, was most grateful
and innocent and glorious and immortal. This was won by no bargain, by no
fraud, by no war of the Peloponnesus, by the shedding of no human blood. It
would rest on admiration of the beautiful, the good, the true, in art, in
poetry, in thought; and it would last while the emotions, its object, were
left in a human soul. It would turn the eye of America hitherwards with
love, gratitude and tears, such as those with which we turn to the walk of
Socrates beneath the plane-tree, now sere, the summer hour of Cicero, the
prison into which philosophy descended to console the spirit of Boethius,--
that room through whose opened window came into the ear of Scott, as he
died, the murmur of the gentle Tweed,--love, gratitude, and tears, such as
we all yield to those whose immortal wisdom, whose divine verse, whose
eloquence of heaven, whose scenes of many-colored life, have held up the
show of things to the insatiate desires of the mind, have taught us how to
live and how to die! Herein were power, herein were influence, herein were
security. Even in the madness of civil war it might survive for refuge and
defence!
R. Choate.
XXV.
THE CITY OF OUR LIBERTY.
But now that our service of commemoration is ended, let us go hence and
meditate on all that it has taught us. You see how long the holy and
beautiful city of our liberty and our power has been in building, and by
how many hands, and at what cost. You see the towering and steadfast height
to which it has gone up, and how its turrets and spires gleam in the rising
and setting sun. You stand among the graces of some--your townsmen, your
fathers by blood, whose names you bear, whose portraits hang up in your
homes, of whose memory you are justly proud--who helped in their day to
sink those walls deep in their beds, where neither frost nor earthquake
might heave them,--to raise aloft those great arches of stone,--to send up
those turrets and spires into the sky. It was theirs to build; remember it
is yours, under Providence, to keep the city,--to keep it from the sword
of the invader,--to keep it from licentiousness and crime and irreligion,
and all that would make it unsafe or unfit to live in,--to keep it from the
fires of faction, of civil strife, of party spirit, that might burn up in a
day the slow work of a thousand years of glory. Happy, if we shall so
perform our duty that they who centuries hence shall dwell among our graces
may be able to remember, on some such day as this, in one common service of
grateful commemoration, their fathers of the first and the second age of
America,--those who through martyrdom and tempest and battle sought
liberty, and made her their own,--and those whom neither ease nor luxury,
nor the fear of man, nor the worship of man, could prevail on to barter her
away!
R. Choate.
XXVI.
SPECIMEN OF THE ELOQUENCE OF JAMES OTIS.
England may as well dam up the wafers of the Nile with bulrushes as to
fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than
where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself
among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. Arbitrary principles, like
those against which we now contend, have cost one king of England his life,
another his crown; and they may yet cost a third his most flourishing
colonies.
We are two millions--one fifth fighting men. We are bold and vigorous, and
we call no man master. To the nation, from whom we are proud to derive our
origin, we ever were, and we ever will be, ready to yield unforced
assistance; but it must not, and it never can be extorted.
Some have sneeringly asked, "Are the Americans too poor to pay a few pounds
on stamped paper?" No! America, thanks to God and herself is rich. But the
right to take ten pounds, implies the right to take a thousand; and what
must be the wealth that avarice, aided by power, cannot exhaust? True, the
spectre is now small; but the shadow he casts before him is huge enough to
darken all this fair land. Others, in sentimental style, talk of the
immense debt of gratitude which we owe to England. And what is the amount
of this debt? Why, truly, it is the same that the young lion owes to the
dam, which has brought it forth on the solitude of the mountain, or left it
amid the winds and storms of the desert.
We plunged into the wave with the great charter of freedom in our teeth,
because the fagot and the torch were behind us. We have waked this New
World from its savage lethargy; forests have been prostrated in our path;
towns and cities have grown up suddenly as the flowers of the tropics, and
the fires in our autumnal woods are scarcely more rapid than the increase
of our wealth and population. And do we owe all this to the kind succor of
the mother-country? No! We owe it to the tyranny that drove us from her, to
the pelting storms which invigorated our helpless infancy.
But perhaps others will say, "We ask no money from your gratitude--we only
demand that you should pay your own expenses." And who, I pray, is to judge
of their necessity? Why, the king--(and with all due reverence to his
sacred majesty, he understands the real wants of his distant subjects as
little as he does the language of the Choctaws.) Who is to judge concerning
the frequency of these demands? The ministry. Who is to judge whether the
money is properly expended? The cabinet behind the throne. In every
instance, those who take are to judge for those who pay. If this system is
suffered to go into operation, we shall have reason to esteem it a great
privilege, that rain and dew do not depend upon parliament; otherwise they
would soon be taxed and dried.
But, thanks to God, there is freedom enough left upon earth to resist such
monstrous injustice. The flame of liberty is extinguished in Greece and
Rome, but the light of its glowing embers is still bright and strong on the
shores of America. Actuated by its sacred influence, we will resist unto
death. But we will not countenance anarchy and misrule. The wrongs that a
desperate community have heaped upon their enemies, shall be amply and
speedily repaired. Still, it may be well for some proud men to remember
that a fire is lighted in these colonies which one breath of their king may
kindle into such fury that the blood of all England cannot extinguish it.
Mrs. M. L. Child.
XXVII.
WEBSTER IN THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
The Dartmouth College case forms an important era in Mr, Webster's life His
argument in that case stands out among his other arguments, as his speech
in reply to Mr. Hayne, among his other speeches. No better argument has
been spoken in the English tongue in the memory of any living man, nor is
the child that is born to-day likely to live to hear a better. Its learning
is ample but not ostentatious; its logic irresistible; its eloquence
vigorous and lofty. Judge Story often spoke with great animation of the
effect he then produced upon the court "For the first hour," said he, "we
listened to him with perfect astonishment; for the second hour, with
perfect delight; and for the third hour with perfect conviction." It is not
too much to say that he entered the court on that day a comparatively
unknown name, and left it with no rival but Pinkney. All the words he spoke
on that occasion have not been recorded. When he had exhausted the
resources of learning and logic, his mind passed naturally and simply into
a strain of feeling not common to the place. Old recollections and early
associations came over him, and the vision of his youth rose up.
The genius of the institution where he was nurtured seemed standing by his
side in weeds of mourning, with a countenance of sorrow. With suffused
eyes, and faltering voice, he broke into an unpremeditated strain of
emotion, so strong and so deep, that all who heard him were borne along
with it. Heart answered to heart as he spoke, and, when he ceased, the
silence and tears of the impassive bench, as well as of the excited
audience were a tribute to the truth and power of the feeling by which he
had been inspired.
G. S. Hillard.
XXVIII.
THE AMBITION OF WEBSTER.
Mr. Webster was an ambitious man. He desired the highest office in the gift
of the people. But on this subject, as on all others, there was no
concealment in his nature. And ambition is not a weakness unless it be
disproportional to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to
be at once weak and unhappy. With him it was a noble passion, because it
rested upon noble powers. He was a man cast in a heroic mould. His
thoughts, his wishes, his passions, his aspirations, were all on a grander
scale than those of other men. Unexercised capacity is always a source of
rusting discontent. The height to which men may rise is in proportion to
the upward force of their genius, and they will never be calm till they
have attained their predestined elevation. Lord Bacon says, "as in nature
things move violently to their place and calmly in their place, so virtue
in ambition is violent, in authority, settled and calm." Mr. Webster had a
giant's brain and a giant's heart, and he wanted a giant's work. He found
repose in those strong conflicts and great duties which crush the weak and
madden the sensitive. He thought that, if he were elevated to the highest
place, he should so administer the government as to make the country
honored abroad, and great and happy at home. He thought, too, that he could
do something to make us more truly one people. This, above everything else,
was his ambition. And we, who knew him better than others, felt that it was
a prophetic ambition, and we honored and trusted him accordingly.
G. S. Hillard.
XXIX.
THE DANGER OF EXCLUSIVE DEVOTION TO BUSINESS.
This is a world of inflexible compensations. Nothing is ever given away,
but everything is bought and paid for. If, by exclusive and absolute
surrender of ourselves to material pursuits, we materialize the mind, we
lose that class of satisfactions of which the mind is the region and the
source. A young man in business, for instance, begins to feel the
exhilarating glow of success, and deliberately determines to abandon
himself to its delirious whirl. He says to himself, I will think of nothing
but business till I shall have made so much money, and then I will begin a
new life. I will gather round me books and pictures and friends. I will
have knowledge, taste, and cultivation,--the perfume of scholarship, and
winning speech, and graceful manners. I will see foreign countries, and
converse with accomplished men. I will drink deep of the fountains of
classic lore. Philosophy shall guide me, history shall instruct, and poetry
shall charm me. Science shall open to me her world of wonders. I shall
remember my present life of drudgery as one recalls a troubled dream when
the morning has dawned.
He keeps his self-registered vow. He bends his thoughts downward and nails
them to the dust. Every power, every affection, every taste, except those
which his particular occupa tion calls into play, is left to starve. Over
the gates of his mind he writes in letters which he who runs may read, "No
admittance except on business." In time he reaches the goal of his hopes;
but now insulted Nature begins to claim her revenge. That which was once
unnatural is now natural to him. The enforced constraint has become a rigid
deformity. The spring of his mind is broken. He can no longer lift his mind
from the ground. Books and knowledge and wise discourse, and the amenities
of it, and the cordial of friendship, are like words in a strange tongue.
To the hard, smooth surface of his soul, nothing genial, graceful, or
winning will cling; he cannot even purge his voice of its fawning tone, or
pluck from his face the mean, money-getting mask which the child does not
look at without ceasing to smile. Amid the graces and ornaments of wealths,
he is like a blind man in a picture-gallery. That which he has done he must
continue to do. He must accumulate riches which he cannot enjoy and
contemplate the dreary prospect of growing old without anything to make age
venerable or attractive; for age without wisdom and without knowledge is
the winter's cold without the winter's fire
G. S. Hillard.
XXX.
SPEECH OF PATRICK HENRY, IN THE CONVENTION OF DELEGATES OF VIRGINIA, MARCH,
1775.
Mr. President, It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope.
We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song
of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise
men, engaged in the great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed
to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears,
hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For
my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the
whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of
experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And
judging by the past, I wish to know, what there has been in the conduct of
the British ministry, for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with
which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House. Is it
that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received?
Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not
yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss! Ask yourselves how this gracious
reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations, which
cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a
work of love and reconciliation! Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be
reconciled, that force must be called in to win back our love! Let us not
deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and
subjugation,--the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask gentlemen,
sir, what means this martial array if its purpose be not to force us to
submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it? Has
Great Britain any enemy in this quarter of the world, to call for all this
accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant
for us; they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and
rivet upon us those chains which the British ministers have been so long
forging.
And what have we to oppose to them?--Shall we try argument? Sir, we have
been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer on
the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light, of which
if is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and
humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already
exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer. Sir,
we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now
coming on. We have petitioned,--we have remonstrated,--we have
supplicated,--we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have
implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical bands of the ministry
and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have
produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been
disregarded; and we have been spurned from the foot of the throne.