By Edward A. Allen, Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Literature
in the University of Missouri
English-speaking people have always been the freest people, the
greatest lovers of liberty, the world has ever seen. Long before
English history properly begins, the pen of Tacitus reveals to us
our forefathers in their old home-land in North Germany beating back
the Roman legions under Varus, and staying the progress of Rome's
triumphant car whose mighty wheels had crushed Hannibal, Jugurtha,
Vercingetorix, and countless thousands in every land. The Germanic
ancestors of the English nation were the only people who did not
bend the neck to these lords of all the world besides. In the year
9, when the Founder of Christianity was playing about his humble
home at Nazareth, or watching his father at work in his shop, our
forefathers dealt Rome a blow from which she never recovered. As
Freeman, late professor of history at Oxford, said in one of his
lectures: "In the blow by the Teutoburg wood was the germ of the
Declaration of Independence, the germ of the surrender of Yorktown."
Arminius was our first Washington, "_haud_ _dubie_ _liberator_," as
Tacitus calls him,--the savior of his country.
When the time came for expansion, and our forefathers in the fifth
century began the conquest and settlement of the island that was to
become their New England, they pushed out the Celts, the native
inhabitants of the island, just as their descendants, about twelve
hundred years later, were to push out the indigenous people of this
continent, to make way for a higher civilization, a larger
destiny. No Englishman ever saw an armed Roman in England, and
though traces of the Roman conquest may be seen everywhere in that
country to-day, it is sometimes forgotten that it was the Britain of
the Celts, not the England of the English, which was held for so
many centuries as a province of Rome.
The same love of freedom that resisted the Roman invasion in the
first home of the English was no less strong in their second home,
when Alfred with his brave yeomen withstood the invading Danes at
Ashdown and Edington, and saved England from becoming a Danish
province. It is true that the Normans, by one decisive battle,
placed a French king on the throne of England, but the English
spirit of freedom was never subdued; it rose superior to the
conquerors of Hastings, and in the end English speech and English
freedom gained the mastery.
The sacred flame of freedom has burned in the hearts of the
Anglo-Saxon race through all the centuries of our history, and this
spirit of freedom is reflected in our language and in our
oratory. There never have been wanting English orators when English
liberty seemed to be imperiled; indeed, it may be said that the
highest oratory has always been coincident with the deepest
aspirations of freedom.
It is said of Pitt,--the younger, I believe,--that he was fired to
oratory by reading the speeches in Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' These
speeches--especially those of Satan, the most human of the
characters in this noble epic,--when analyzed and traced to their
source, are neither Hebrew nor Greek, but English to the core. They
are imbued with the English spirit, with the spirit of Cromwell,
with the spirit that beat down oppression at Marston Moor, and
ushered in a freer England at Naseby. In the earlier Milton of a
thousand years before, whether the work of Caedmon or of some other
English muse, the same spirit is reflected in Anglo-Saxon
words. Milton's Satan is more polished, better educated, thanks to
Oxford and Cambridge, but the spirit is essentially one with that of
the ruder poet; and this spirit, I maintain, is English.
The dry annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are occasionally lighted
up with a gleam of true eloquence, as in the description of the
battle of Brunanburh, which breaks forth into a pean of
victory. Under the year 991, there is mention of a battle at Maldon,
between the English and the Danes, in which great heroism must have
been displayed, for it inspired at the time one of the most
patriotic outbursts of song to be found in the whole range of
English literature. During an enforced truce, because of a swollen
stream that separated the two armies, a messenger is sent from the
Danes to Byrhtnoth, leader of the English forces, with a proposition
to purchase peace with English gold. Byrhtnoth, angry and resolute,
gave him this answer:--
"Hearest thou, pirate, what this folk sayeth? They will give you
spears for tribute, weapons that will avail you nought in
battle. Messenger of the vikings, get thee back. Take to thy people
a sterner message, that here stands a fearless earl, who with his
band wilt defend this land, the home of Aethelred, my prince, folk
and fold. Too base it seems to me that ye go without battle to your
ships with our money, now that ye have come thus far into our
country. Ye shall not so easily obtain treasure. Spear and sword,
grim battle-play, shall decide between us ere we pay tribute."
Though the battle was lost and Byrhtnoth slain, the spirit of the
man is an English inheritance. It is the same spirit that refused
ship-money to Charles I., and tea-money to George III.
The encroachments of tyranny and the stealthier step of royal
prerogative have shrunk before this spirit which through the
centuries has inspired the noblest oratory of England and
America. It not only inspired the great orators of the mother
country, it served at the same time as a bond of sympathy with the
American colonies in their struggle for freedom. Burke, throughout
his great speech on Conciliation, never lost sight of this idea:--
"This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies
probably than in any other people of the earth. The people of the
colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, sir, is a nation
which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The
colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was
most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment
they parted from your bands. They are therefore not only devoted to
liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and our English
principles. ... The temper and character which prevail in our
colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot,
I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade
them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood
of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you
tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would
betray you. ... In order to prove that Americans have no right to
their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims
which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that
the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the
value of freedom itself; and we never gain a paltry advantage over
them in debate without attacking some of those principles, or deriding
some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.
. . . As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority
of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple
consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of
England worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you. The
more ardently they love liberty the more perfect will be their
obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere--it is a weed that grows in
every soil. They can have it from Spain; they may have it from
Prussia. But until you become lost to all feeling of your true
interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but
you."
So, too, in the speeches of Chatham, the great Commoner, whose
eloquence has never been surpassed, an intense spirit of liberty,
the animating principle of his life, shines out above all things
else. Though opposed to the independence of the colonies, he could
not restrain his admiration for the spirit they manifested:--
"The Americans contending for their rights against arbitrary
exactions I love and admire. It is the struggle of free and virtuous
patriots. ... My Lords, you cannot conquer America. You may swell
every expense and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and
accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and
barter with every pitiful little German prince that sells and sends
his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are
forever vain and impotent If I were an American as I am an
Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I would
never lay down my arms--never--never--never!"
Wherever the principle of Anglo-Saxon freedom and the rights of man
have been at stake, the all-animating voice of the orator has kept
alive the sacred flame. In the witenagemote of the earlier tongs, in
the parliament of the later kings, in the Massachusetts town-meeting
and in the Virginia House of Burgesses, in the legislature of every
State, and in the Congress of the United States, wherever in
Anglo-Saxon countries the torch of liberty seemed to burn low, the
breath of the orator has fanned it into flame. It fired the
eloquence of Sheridan pleading against Warren Hastings for the
down-trodden natives of India in words that have not lost their
magnetic charm:--
"My Lords, do you, the judges of this land and the expounders of its
rightful laws, do you approve of this mockery and call that the
character of Justice which takes the form of right to execute wrong?
No. my Lords, justice is not this halt and miserable object; it is
not the ineffective bauble of an Indian pagoda; it is not the
portentous phantom of despair; it is not like any fabled monster,
formed in the eclipse of reason and found in some unhallowed grove
of superstitious darkness and political dismay. No, my Lords! In the
happy reverse of all this I turn from the disgusting caricature to
the real image. Justice I have now before me, august and pure, the
abstract ideal of all that would be perfect in the spirits and
aspirings of men--where the mind rises; where the heart expands;
where the countenance is ever placid and benign; where the favorite
attitude is to stoop to the unfortunate, to hear their cry, and help
them; to rescue and relieve, to succor and save; majestic from its
mercy, venerable from its utility, uplifted without pride, firm
without obduracy, beneficent in each preference, lovely though in
her frown."
This same spirit fired the enthusiasm of Samuel Adams and James Otis
to such a pitch of eloquence that "every man who heard them went
away ready to take up arms." It inspired Patrick Henry to hurl his
defiant alternative of "liberty or death" in the face of unyielding
despotism. It inspired that great-hearted patriot and orator, Henry
Clay, in the first quarter of this century, to plead, single-handed
and alone, in the Congress of the United States, session after
session before the final victory was won, for the recognition of the
provinces of South America in their struggle for independence.
"I may be accused of an imprudent utterance of my feelings on this
occasion. I care not: when the independence, the happiness, the
liberty of a whole people is at stake, and that people our
neighbors, our brethren, occupying a portion of the same continent,
imitating our example, and participating in the same sympathies with
ourselves. I will boldly avow my feelings and my wishes in their
behalf, even at the hazard of such an imputation. I maintain that an
oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and
break their fetters. This was the great principle of the English
revolution. It was the great principle of our own. Spanish-America
has been doomed for centuries to the practical effects of an odious
tyranny. If we were justified, she is more than justified. I am no
propagandist. I would not seek to force upon other nations our
principles and our liberty, if they do not want them. But if an
abused and oppressed people will their freedom; if they seek to
establish it; if, in truth, they have established it, we have a
right, as a sovereign power, to notice the fact, and to act as
circumstances and our interest require. I will say in the language
of the venerated father of my country, 'born in a land of liberty,
my anxious recollections, my sympathetic feelings, and my best
wishes, are irresistibly excited, whensoever, in any country, I see
an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.'"
This same spirit loosed the tongue of Wendell Phillips to plead the
cause of the enslaved African in words that burned into the hearts
of his countrymen. It emboldened George William Curtis to assert the
right to break the shackles of party politics and follow the
dictates of conscience:--
"I know,--no man better,--how hard it is for earnest men to
separate their country from their party, or their religion from
their sect. But, nevertheless, the welfare of the country is dearer
than the mere victory of party, as truth is more precious than the
interest of any sect. You will hear this patriotism scorned as an
impracticable theory, as the dream of a cloister, as the whim of a
fool. But such was the folly of the Spartan Leonidas, staying with
his three hundred the Persian horde, and teaching Greece the
self-reliance that saved her. Such was the folly of the Swiss Arnold
von Winkelried, gathering into his own breast the points of Austrian
spears, making his dead body the bridge of victory for his
countrymen. Such was the folly of the American Nathan Hale, gladly
risking the seeming disgrace of his name, and grieving that be had
but one life to give for his country. Such are the beacon-lights of
a pure patriotism that burn forever in men's memories and answer
each other through the illuminated ages."
So long as there are wrongs to be redressed, so long as the strong
oppress the weak, so long as injustice sits in high places, the
voice of the orator will be needed to plead for the rights of
man. He may not, at this stage of the republic, be called upon to
sound a battle cry to arms, but there are bloodless victories to be
won as essential to the stability of a great nation and the
uplifting of its millions of people as the victories of the
battlefield.
When the greatest of modern political philosophers, the author of
the Declaration of Independence, urged that, if men were left free
to declare the truth the effect of its great positive forces would
overcome the negative forces of error, he seems to have hit the
central fact of civilization. Without freedom of thought and
absolute freedom to speak out the truth as one sees it, there can be
no advancement, no high civilization. To the orator who has heard
the call of humanity, what nobler aspiration than to enlarge and
extend the freedom we have inherited from our Anglo-Saxon
forefathers, and to defend the hope of the world?