would not deserve the efforts spent on it. Better government than any
king or congress or democracy has yet given could be had in simpler and
cheaper ways. The automatic scheme of competitive examinations would
give us better rulers at half the present cost. Even an ordinary
intelligence office, or "statesman's employment bureau," would serve us
better than conventions and elections. But a people which could be
ruled in that way, content to be governed well by forces outside
itself, would not be worth the saving. But this is not the point at
issue. Government too good, as well as too bad, may have a baneful
influence on men. Its character is a secondary matter. The purpose of
self-government is to intensify individual responsibility; to promote
abortive attempts at wisdom, through which true wisdom may come at
last. Democracy is nature-study on a grand scale. The republic is a
huge laboratory of civics, a laboratory in which strange experiments
are performed; but by which, as in other laboratories, wisdom may arise
from experience, and having arisen, may work itself out into virtue.
"The oldest and best-endowed university in the world," Dr. Parkhurst
tells us, "is Life itself. Problems tumble easily apart in the field
that refuse to give up their secret in the study, or even in the
closet. Reality is what educates us, and reality never comes so close
to us, with all its powers of discipline, as when we encounter it in
action. In books we find Truth in black and white; but in the rush of
events we see Truth at work. It is only when Truth is busy and we are
ourselves mixed up in its activities that we learn to know of how much
we are capable, or even the power by which these capabilities can be
made over into effect."
Mr. Wilbur F. Jackman has well said: "Children always start with
imitation, and very few people ever get beyond it. The true moral act,
however, is one performed in accordance with a known law that is just
as natural as the law which determines which way a stone shall fall.
The individual becomes moral in the highest sense when he chooses to
obey this law by acting in accordance with it." Conventionality is not
morality, and may co-exist with vice as well as with virtue. Obedience
has little permanence unless it be intelligent obedience.
It is, of course, true that wrong information may lead sometimes to
right action, as falsehood may secure obedience to a natural law which
would otherwise have been violated. But in the long run men and
nations pay dearly for every illusion they cherish. For every sick man
healed at Denver or Lourdes, ten well men may be made sick. Faith cure
and patent medicines feed on the same victim. For every Schlatter who
is worshiped as a saint, some equally harmless lunatic will be stoned
as a witch. This scientific age is beset by the non-science which its
altruism has made safe. The development of the common sense of the
people has given security to a vast horde of follies, which would be
destroyed in the unchecked competition of life. It is the soundness of
our age which has made what we call its decadence possible. It is the
undercurrent of science which has given security to human life, a
security which obtains for fools as well as for sages.
For protection against all these follies which so soon fall into vices,
or decay into insanity, we must look to the schools. A sound
recognition of cause and effect in human affairs is our best safeguard.
The old common sense of the "un-high-schooled man," aided by
instruments of precision, and directed by logic, must be carried over
into the schools. Clear thinking and clean acting, we believe, are
results of the study of nature. When men have made themselves wise, in
the wisdom which may be completed in action, they have never failed to
make themselves good. When men have become wise with the lore of
others, the learning which ends in self, and does not spend itself in
action, they have been neither virtuous nor happy. "Much learning is a
weariness of the flesh." Thought without action ends in intense
fatigue of soul, the disgust with all the "sorry scheme of things
entire," which is the mark of the unwholesome and insane philosophy of
Pessimism. This philosophy finds its condemnation in the fact that it
has never yet been translated into pure and helpful life.
With our children, the study of words and abstractions alone may, in
its degree, produce the same results. Nature-studies have long been
valued as a "means of grace," because they arouse the enthusiasm, the
love of work which belongs to open-eyed youth. The child _blasé_ with
moral precepts and irregular conjugations turns with delight to the
unrolling of ferns and the song of birds. There is a moral training in
clearness and tangibility. An occult impulse to vice is hidden in all
vagueness and in all teachings meant to be heard but not to be
understood. Nature is never obscure, never occult, never esoteric.
She must be questioned in earnest, else she will not reply. But to
every serious question she returns a serious answer. "Simple, natural,
and true" should make the impression of simplicity and truth. Truth
and virtue are but opposite sides of the same shield. As leaves pass
over into flowers, and flowers into fruit, so are wisdom, virtue, and
happiness inseparably related.
[1] Read before the National Educational Association at Buffalo, New
York, 1896.
THE HIGHER SACRIFICE.[1]
Each man that lives is, in part, a slave, because he is a living being.
This belongs to the definition of life itself. Each creature must bend
its back to the lash of its environment. We imagine life without
conditions--life free from the pressure of insensate things outside us
or within. But such life is the dream of the philosopher. We have
never known it. The records of the life we know are full of
concessions to such pressure.
The vegetative part of life, that part which finds its expression in
physical growth, and sustenance, and death, must always be slavery.
The old primal hunger of the protoplasm rules over it all. Each of the
myriad cells of which man is made must be fed and cared for. The
perennial hunger of these cells he must stifle. This hunger began when
life began. It will cease only when life ceases. It will last till
the water of the sea is drained, the great lights are put out, and the
useless earth is hung up empty in the archives of the universe.
This old hunger the individual man must each day meet and satisfy. He
must do this for himself; else, in the long run, it will not be done.
If others help feed him, he must feed others in return. This return is
not charity nor sacrifice; it is simply exchange of work. It is the
division of labor in servitude. Directly or indirectly, each must pay
his debt of life. There are a few, as the world goes, who in luxury or
pauperism have this debt paid for them by others. But there are not
many of these fugitive slaves. The number will never be great; for the
lineage of idleness is never long nor strong.
When this debt is paid, the slave becomes the man. Nature counts as
men only those who are free. Freedom springs from within. No outside
power can give it. Board and lodging on the earth once paid, a man's
resources are his own. These he can give or hold. By the fullness of
these is he measured. All acquisitions of man, Emerson tells us, "are
victories of the good brain and brave heart; the world belongs to the
energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in vain to make a paradise but
for good men."
In the ancient lore of the Jews, so Rabbi Voorsanger tells us, it is
written, "Serve the Lord, not as slaves hoping for reward, but as gods
who will take no reward." The meaning of the old saying is this: _Only
the gods can serve_.
Those who have nothing have nothing to give. He who serves as a slave
serves himself only. That he hopes for a reward shows that to himself
his service is really given. To serve the Lord, according to another
old saying, is to help one's fellow-men. The Eternal asks not of
mortals that they assist Him with His earth. The tough old world has
been His for centuries of centuries before it came to be ours, and we
can neither make it nor mar it. We were not consulted when its
foundations were laid in the deep. The waves and the storms, the
sunshine and the song of birds need not our aid. They will take care
of themselves. Life is the only material that is plastic in our hand.
Only man can be helped by man.
When they hung John Brown in Virginia, many said, you remember, that in
resisting the Government he had thrown away his life, and would gain
nothing for it. He could not, as Thoreau said at the time, get a vote
of thanks or a pair of boots for his life. He could not get
four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year around. But he
was not asking for a vote of thanks. It was not for the
four-and-sixpence a day that he stood between brute force and its
victims. It was to show men the nature of slavery. It was to help his
fellow-citizens to read the story of their institutions in the light of
history. "You can get more," Thoreau went on to say, "in your market
[at Concord] for a quart of milk than you can for a quart of blood; but
yours is not the market heroes carry their blood to." The blood of
heroes is not sold by the quart. The great, strong, noble, and pure of
this world, those who have made our race worthy to be called men, have
not been paid by the day or by the quart; not by riches, nor fame, nor
power, nor anything that man can give. Out of the fullness of their
lives have they served the Lord. Out of the wealth of their resources
have they helped their fellow-men.
The great man cannot be a self-seeker. The greatness of a Napoléon or
an Alexander is the greatness of gluttony. It is slavery on a grand
scale. What men have done for their own glory or aggrandizement has
left no permanent impress. "I have carried out nothing," says the
warrior, Sigurd Slembe. "I have not sown the least grain nor laid one
stone upon another to witness that I have lived." Napoléon could have
said as much, if, like Sigurd, he had stood "upon his own grave and
heard the great bell ring." The tragedy of the Isle of St. Helena lay
not in the failure of effort, but in the futility of the aim to which
effort was directed. There was no tragedy of the Isle of Patmos.
What such men have torn down remains torn down. All this would soon
have fallen of itself; for that which has life in it cannot be
destroyed by force. But what such men have built has fallen when their
hands have ceased to hold it up. The names history cherishes are those
of men of another type. Only "a man too simply great to scheme for his
proper self" is great enough to become a pillar of the ages.
It is part of the duty of higher education to build up ideals of noble
freedom. It is not for help in the vegetative work of life that you go
to college. You are just as good a slave without it. You can earn
your board and lodging without the formality of culture. The training
of the college will make your power for action greater, no doubt; but
it will also magnify your needs. The debt of life a scholar has to pay
is greater than that paid by the clown. And the higher sacrifice the
scholar may be called upon to make grows with the increased fullness of
his life. Greater needs go with greater power, and both mean greater
opportunity for sacrifice.
In the days you have been with us you should have formed some ideals.
You should have bound these ideals together with the chain of
"well-spent yesterdays," the higher heredity which comes not from your
ancestors, but which each man must build up for himself. You should
have done something in the direction of the life of higher sacrifice,
the life that from the fullness of its resources can have something to
give.
Such sacrifice is not waste, but service; not spending, but
accomplishing. Many men, and more women, spend their lives for others
when others would have been better served if they had saved themselves.
Mere giving is not service. "Charity that is irrational and impulsive
giving, is a waste, whether of money or of life." "Charity creates
half the misery she relieves; she cannot relieve half the misery she
creates."
The men you meet as you leave these halls will not understand your
ideals. They will not know that your life is not bound up in the
present, but has something to ask or to give for the future. Till they
understand you they will not yield you their sympathies. They may jeer
at you because the whip they respond to leaves no mark upon you. They
will try to buy you, because the Devil has always bid high for the
lives of young men with ideals. A man in his market stands always
above par. Slaves are his stock in trade. If a man of power can be
had for base purposes, he can be sure of an immediate reward. You can
sell your blood for its weight in milk, or for its weight in
gold--whatever you choose,--if you are willing to put it up for sale.
You can sell your will for the kingdoms of the earth; and you will see,
or seem to see, many of your associates making just such bargains. But
in this be not deceived. No young man worthy of anything else ever
sold himself to the Devil. These are dummy sales. The Devil puts his
own up at auction in hope of catching others. If you fall into his
hands, you had not far to fall. You were already ripe for his clutches.
When a man steps forth from the college, he is tested once for all. It
takes but a year or two to prove his mettle. In the college high
ideals prevail, and the intellectual life is taken as a matter of
course. In the world outside it appears otherwise, though the
conditions of success are in fact just the same. It is not true,
though it seems so, that the common life is a game of "grasping and
griping, with a whine for mercy at the end of it." It is your own
fault if you find it so. It is not true that the whole of man is
occupied, with the effort "to live just asking but to live, to live
just begging but to be." The world of thought and the world of action
are one in nature. In both truth and love are strength, and folly and
selfishness are weakness. There is no confusion of right and wrong in
the mind of the Fates. It is only in our poor bewildered slave
intellects that evil passes for power. All about us in the press of
life are real men, "whose fame is not bought nor sold at the stroke of
a politician's pen." Such are the men in whose guidance the currents
of history flow.
The lesson of values in life it should be yours to teach, because it
should be yours to know and to act. Men are better than they seem, and
the hidden virtues of life appear when men have learned how to
translate them into action. Men grasp and hoard material things
because in their poverty of soul they know of nothing else to do. It
is lack of training and lack of imagination, rather than total
depravity, which gives our social life its sordid aspect. When a plant
has learned the secret of flowers and fruit, it no longer goes on
adding meaningless leaf on leaf. And as "flowers are only colored
leaves, fruits only ripe ones," so are the virtues only perfected and
ripened forms of those impulses which show themselves as vices.
It is your relation to the overflow of power that determines the manner
of man you are. Slave or god, it is for you to choose. Slave or god,
it is for you to will. It is for such choice that will is developed.
Say what we may about the limitations of the life of man, they are
largely self-limitations. Hemmed in is human life by the force of the
Fates; but the will of man is one of the Fates, and can take its place
by the side of the rest of them. The man who can will is a factor in
the universe. Only the man who can will can serve the Lord at all, and
by the same token, hoping for no reward.
Likewise is love a factor in the universe. Power is not strength of
body or mind alone. One who is poor in all else, may be rich in
sympathy and responsiveness. "They also serve who only stand and wait."
In a recent number of The Dial, Mr. W. P. Reeves tells us the tale,
half-humorous, half-allegorical, of the decadence of a scholar.
According to this story, one Thomson was a college graduate, full of
high notions of the significance of life and the duties and privileges
of the scholar. With these ideals he went to Germany, that he might
strengthen them and use them for the benefit of his fellow-men. He
spent some years in Germany, filling his mind with all that German
philosophy could give. Then he came home, to turn his philosophy into
action. To do this, he sought a college professorship.
This he found it was not easy to secure. Nobody cared for him or his
message. The authority of "wise and sober Germany" was not recognized
in the institutions of America, and he found that college
professorships were no longer "plums to be picked" by whomsoever should
ask for them. The reverence the German professor commands is unknown
in America. In Germany, the authority of wise men is supreme. Their
words, when they speak, are heard with reverence and attention. In
America, wisdom is not wisdom till the common man has examined it and
pronounced it to be such. The conclusions of the scholar are revised
by the daily newspaper. The readers of these papers care little for
messages from Utopia.
No college opened its doors to Thomson, and he saw with dismay that the
life before him was one of discomfort and insignificance, his ideals
having no exchangeable value in luxuries or comforts. Meanwhile,
Thomson's early associates seemed to get on somehow. The world wanted
their cheap achievements, though it did not care for him.
Among these associates was one Wilcox, who became a politician, and,
though small in abilities and poor in virtues, his influence among men
seemed to be unbounded. The young woman who had felt an interest in
Thomson's development, and to whom he had read his rejected verses and
his uncalled-for philosophy, had joined herself to the Philistines, and
yielded to their influence. She had become Wilcox's wife. His friends
regarded Thomson's failure as a joke. He must not take himself too
seriously, they said. A man should be in touch with his times. "Even
Philistia," one said, "has its aesthetic ritual and pageantry." A wise
man will not despise this ritual, because Philistinism, after all, is
the life of the world.
But Thomson held out. "I pledged my word in Germany," he said, "to
teach nothing that I did not believe to be true. I must live up to
this pledge." And so he sought for positions, and he failed to find
them. Finally, he had a message from a friend that a professorship in
a certain institution was vacant. This message said, "Cultivate
Wilcox." So, in despair, Thomson began to cultivate Wilcox. He began
to feel that Wilcox was a type of the world, a bad world, for which he
was not responsible. The world's servant he must be, if he received
its wages. When he secured the coveted appointment, through the
political pull of Wilcox and the mild kindness of Mrs. Wilcox, he was
ready to teach whatever was wanted of him, whether it was truth in
Germany or not. He found that he could change his notions of truth.
The Wilcox idea was that everything in America is all right just as it
is. To this he found it easy to respond. His salary helped him to do
so. And at last, the record says, he became "_laudator temporis
acti_," one who praises the times that are past. As such, he took but
little part in the times that are to be.
So runs the allegory. How shall it be with you? There are many
Thomsons among our scholars. There may be some such among you. When
you pass from the world of thought you will find yourself in the world
of action. The conditions are not changed, but they seem to be
changed. How shall you respond to the seeming difference? Shall you
give up the truth of high thinking for the appearance of speedy
success? If you do this, it will not be because you are worldly-wise,
but because you do not know the world. In your ignorance of men you
may sell yourself cheaply.
One must know life before he can know truth. He who will be a leader
of men must first have the power to lead himself. The world is selfish
and unsympathetic. But it is also sagacious. It rejects as worthless
him who suffers decadence when he comes in contact with its vulgar
cleverness. The natural man can look the world in the face. The true
man will teach truth wherever he is,--not because he has pledged
himself in Germany not to teach anything else, but because in teaching
truth he is teaching himself. His life thus becomes genuine, and,
sooner or later, the world will respond to genuineness in action. The
world knows the value of genuineness, and it yields to that force
wherever it is felt. "The world is all gates," says Emerson, "all
opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."
Thus, in the decadence of Thomson, it was not the times or the world or
America that was at fault; it was Thomson himself. He had in him no
life of his own. His character, like his microscope, "was made in
Germany," and bore not his mark, but the stamp of the German factory.
Truth was not made in Germany; and to know or to teach truth there must
be a life behind it. The decadence of Thomson was the appearance of
the real Thomson from under the axioms and formulae his teachers had
given him.
Men do not fail because they are human. They are not human enough.
Failure comes from lack of life. Only the man who has formed opinions
of his own can have the courage of his convictions. Learning alone
does not make a man strong. Strength in life will show itself in
helpfulness, will show itself in sympathy, in sacrifice. "Great men,"
says Emerson, "feel that they are so by renouncing their selfishness
and falling back on what is humane. They beat with the pulse and
breathe with the lungs of nations."
It is not enough to know truth; one must know men. It is not enough to
know men; one must be a man. Only he who can live truth can know it.
Only he who can live truth can teach it. "He could talk men over,"
says Carlyle of Mirabeau, "he could talk men over because he could act
men over. At bottom that was it."
And at bottom this is the source of all power and service. Not what a
man knows, or what he can say; but what is he? what can he can do? Not
what he can do for his board and lodging, as the slave who is "hired
for life"; but what can he do out of the fullness of his resources, the
fullness of his helpfulness, the fullness of himself? The work the
world will not let die was never paid for--not in fame, not in money,
not in power.
The decadence of literature, of which much is said to-day, is not due
to the decadence of man. It is not the effect of the nerve strain of
over-wrought generations born too late in the dusk of the ages. Its
nature is this--that uncritical and untrained men have come into a
heritage they have not earned. They will pay money to have their
feeble fancy tickled. The decadence of literature is the struggle of
mountebanks to catch the public eye. There is money in the literature
of decay, and those who work for money have "verily their reward." But
these performances are not the work of men. They have no relation to
literature, or art, or human life. These are not in decadence because
imitations are sold on street-corners or tossed into our laps on
railway trains. As well say that gold is in its decadence because
brass can be burnished to look like it; or that the sun is in his
dotage because we have filled our gardens with Chinese lanterns.
"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew."
Literature has never been paid for. It has never asked the gold nor
the plaudits of the multitude. Job, and Hamlet, and Faust, and Lear,
were never written to fill the pages of a Sunday newspaper. John
Milton and John Bunyan were not publishers' hacks; nor were John
Hampden, John Bright, or Samuel Adams under pay as walking-delegates of
reform.