It is such a modest report that we must prepare our minds in order
to appreciate it. The simple-minded cynic must be instructed in
regard to the extreme difficulty and complexity of the work that has
been undertaken. It is nothing less than the transformation of a
carnivorous, not to say cannibalistic, species into an orderly society
in which each member shall joyously and effectively work for the
welfare of all. The first thing, of course, is to catch your cannibals.
This of itself is no easy task, and has taken many centuries. It
has involved a vast amount of wood-chopping and road-making, and
draining of swamps and exploring of caves and dens. It is a task that
is still far from accomplished. Savagery is a condition which cannot
be abolished till there is a conquest of the earth itself. When the
cannibals have been caught and tamed there comes the problem of keeping
them alive. They must eat _something_--a point which many of the
missionaries of civilization have not sufficiently considered. Ethical
progress is delayed by all sorts of economic complications. When the
natural man is confronted with the necessity of getting a living,
robbery is the first method which suggests itself to him. When this is
prohibited he turns upon his moral adviser with, “What more feasible
way do you propose?” The moral adviser has then to turn from the plain
path of pure ethics, and cudgel his poor wits trying to “invent a
little something ingenious” to keep his pupil from starving. The clever
railer at human kind who has always had a bank account to fall back
upon has no idea how much time and thought have been taken up in such
contrivances.
Then it should be remembered that the missionaries of civilization have
not themselves been above reproach. The “multitudes of the heavenly
hosts” might be heard for a moment singing of good will among men, but
they did not remain to do the work. The men of good will who were to
work out the plan were very human indeed. Milton, in the Hymn “On the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” warns us of the long interval between
the Christmas prophecy and its historical fulfillment.
For, if such holy song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back and fetch the age of gold;
And speckled vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould;
* * * * *
Yea, Truth and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering:
And Heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.
But all the imagery of the gala day of peace fades away before the
immediate reality.
But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so.
This veto of “wisest Fate” is not absolute. It only calls a halt upon
our imagination until the rest of our nature catches up with it.
Mankind is not to have peace till it has suffered for it and worked for
it. The workmen must do their work over and over again till they have
learned the right way.
That the “Christian nations” are not hypocrites, but novices who have
been making some progress toward the Christian ideal, becomes evident
when we look back over their history. They are not the descendants of
the simple shepherds of the plains of Bethlehem. Far from it! When they
first began to “profess and call themselves Christians,” they were not
thinking of the beatitudes. They had not got that far.
Turn to the Heimskringla and read how King Olaf converted the pagan
bonders.
“So King Olaf went into the God-house and a certain few of his men
with him, and a certain few of the bonders. But when the king came
whereas the gods were, there sat Thor the most honored of all the gods,
adorned with gold and silver. Then King Olaf hove up the gold-wrought
rod that he had in his hand and smote Thor that he fell down from the
stall; and therewith ran forth all the king’s men and tumbled down all
the gods from their stalls. But whiles the king was in the God-house
was Iron-Skeggi slain without, even at the very door, and that deed
did the king’s men. So when the king was come back to his folk he bade
the bonders take one of two things, either all be christened, or else
abide the brunt of battle with him. But after the death of Skeggi
there was no leader among the folk of the bonders to raise up a banner
against King Olaf. So the choice was taken of them to go to the king
and obey his bidding. Then King Olaf christened all folk that were
there and took hostages of the bonders that they would hold to their
christening. Thereafter King Olaf caused men of his wend over all parts
of Thrandheim; and now spoke no man against the faith of Christ. And so
were all folk christened in the country-side.”
That is the way the nations of the north were first christianized.
What is the difference between Thor and the Christ? the simple-hearted
people would ask. “The difference,” said King Olaf, “is very
fundamental, and it requires little theological training to see it. It
is this: the Christ is stronger. If you don’t believe it, I’ll”--but
they did believe it.
It is evident that there were some points in Christianity that King
Olaf did not appreciate. To cultivate these fruits of the spirit
required men of a different temper. Their work is not all done yet. It
is progressing.
* * * * *
There is one complication in the work of peacemaking which has not been
sufficiently considered. It is the recurrence of Youth. I have listened
to the arguments against war at a great Peace Congress. The reasoning
was strong, the statement of facts conclusive. War was shown to be
cruel and foolish, and incredibly expensive. The audience, consisting
of right-minded and very intelligent people, was convinced of the
justice of the cause of Peace. Why, then, does not the cause triumph?
In such cases I am in the habit of looking about with the intent
to fix the responsibility where it belongs, on those who were not
at the meeting. Mature life was well represented, but there was a
suspicious absence of young men in the twenties. Ah! I said, there is
the difficulty. We can’t be sure of lasting peace until we make it more
interesting to these young absentees. They’ll all be peace men by and
by, but meanwhile there is no knowing what trouble they may get us into.
John Fiske traced the influence which the prolongation of infancy
has had on the progress of civilization. I am inclined to think that
equally great results would flow from any discovery by which the period
of middle age could be prolonged beyond its present term. War would be
abolished without any more ado. A uniformly middle-aged community would
be immune from any attack of militant fever.
It happens, however, that every once in a while the hot passions of
youth carry all before them. The account of what happened at the
beginning of the civil wars in Israel is typical. King Rehoboam called
a meeting of the elder statesmen of his kingdom. They outlined a policy
that was eminently conciliatory. But we are told, “He forsook the
counsel of the old men which they had given him, and consulted with the
young men that were grown up with him and which stood by him.”
That’s the difficulty! The hardest thing about a good policy is to get
it accepted by the people who have the power. What avails the wisdom
of the old men when all the young men are “spoiling for a fight?”
Something more is needed than statesman-like plans for strengthening
the framework of civilization. You may have a fireproof structure,
but you are not safe so long as it is crammed with highly inflammable
material.
There is a periodicity in the passion for war. It marks the coming
into power of a new generation. A quarter of a century from now
“the good gray poet” Rudyard Kipling may be singing sweet lyrics of
peace. All things come in time. The Kipling we know simply utters the
sentiments of “the young men brought up with him.” What he has been
to his contemporaries Tennyson was to the generation before. Kipling
never wrote a more scornful arraignment of peace or a more passionate
glorification of war than Tennyson’s “Maud.”
We are listening to the invective of a youth whose aspirations have
been crushed and ideals shattered by a civilization that seems to him
to be soulless. He has seen something which to him is infinitely more
cruel than the battle between contending hosts
Why do they prate of the blessings of peace? we have made them a
curse,
Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own;
And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse
Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone?
We are made to see the inglorious peace in which men seek only their
own ease.
Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,
When the poor are hovell’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine,
When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie.
From the evils of a soulless commercialism, and from the inanities of
fashion, what is the way of escape? From the evils of peace he turns to
the heroism of war.
I wish I could hear again
The chivalrous battle song.
* * * * *
Ah God, for a man with heart, head, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by,
One still strong man in a blatant land.
At last, breaking in upon the deadly stupidity and selfishness of the
common life, is the noise of battle:--
it lightened my despair
When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right,
That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease,
The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height,
Nor Britain’s one sole God be the millionaire.
* * * * *
Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!
That was an appeal to Young England, the England that was too young to
remember the Napoleonic wars and was thirsting for an experience of its
own.
We may see in such an outburst of the militant spirit only the
recrudescence of savagery. It is better to treat it seriously, for it
is something which each generation must reckon with. Tennyson sums up
the matter from the standpoint of ardent youth:--
Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind.
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.
It is easy enough to dismiss all this as mere vaporing. But it is a
protest which must be heeded, for it expresses a real experience. There
are things worse than war. A sordid slothfulness is worse. A cowardly
acquiescence in injustice is worse. It is a real revelation when to the
heart of youth comes a sudden sense of the meaning of life. It is not
a treasure to be preserved with miserly carefulness. It is to be nobly
hazarded. It _is_ better to fight for the good than to rail, however
eloquently, against the ill. To feel for one’s native land, to unite in
generous comradeship with one’s kind, to endure hardness for a noble
cause,--these things are of the essence of manhood.
In times of national peril such awakening has come. Many a man has then
for the first time discovered that he has a soul. He has cried out,
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Now just here we peace men may see our most inspiring bit of unfinished
business. War has been idealized; it is left to us to idealize peace.
It cannot be done till we bring out all its heroic possibilities. If
it means dull stagnation, selfish ease, the prosperity that can be
measured in dollars and cents, there is sure to come a revulsion
against it. The gospel of the full dinner-pail and the plethoric
pocket-book does not satisfy. If the choice is between commercialism
and militarism we need not wonder if many an idealist chooses the
latter as the less perilous course. It seems less threatening toward
the things for which he cares.
The call is for a new chivalry. Our duty is not only to keep the peace,
but to make a peace that is worth keeping. This is no easy task. It
means the humanizing of all our activities. Everywhere a human ideal
must be placed above every other kind of success. Religion must be
lifted above ecclesiasticism; and business honor above the vulgar
standards of commercialism. The machinery of civilization must be
made subservient to man. More careers must be opened for men of the
soldierly spirit whose ambition is for service. The new generation must
be shown what opportunities the world’s business and politics offer to
great-hearted gentlemen who are willing to risk something for a cause.
The kind of peace which the world needs cannot be had for the asking.
It comes high,--but it is worth the price.
THE LAND OF THE LARGE AND CHARITABLE AIR
[Illustration]
Are you not constrayned (my fellow Academicks) to subscribe to this
my opinion that the knowledge of no nation is so necessary as the
searching out of a man’s own Country and the manners thereof and the
right understanding of that Commonweale whereof each one of us is a
part and member. The Lamiæ that are a certaine kind of monsters are
laughed at in the Poeticall Fables in that they were so blinde at home
that they could not see their own affaires, could foresee nothing;
but when they were once gone from home they were accounted the most
sharpe-sighted and curious searchers of all others.... [Are not they]
very ridiculous when as by taking long voyages unto farre remote
people, after they have curiously sought out all matters amongst them
are ignorant of the principall things at home and know not what is
contayned within the precincts of their country, and are reckoned
altogether strangers on their native soile?--CORYAT’S _Crudities_.
The remark that Boston is not so much a place as a state of mind is one
of the highest compliments ever paid to that city. Places are common
enough, the maps are dotted with them, but a state of mind is a mark
of distinction. The Bostonian enjoys his state of mind none the less
because he is aware that outsiders are not always able to enter into it.
Only those places which have become symbolic of mental or moral traits
are remembered. Sodom and Gomorrah were once towns of some commercial
importance. We think of them, however, not as trade centres, but as
sins. Babylon, according to a doctrine of spiritual correspondences
long since established, is another name for proud and cruel
worldliness. It is likely so to remain, in spite of the discovery of
clay tablets which show that many of its people were estimable citizens
who practiced domestic economy and collected their debts by due process
of law. All we have to say is that those who acted in this commonplace
way were not typical,--in fact, they were quite un-Babylonian. In
like manner, Zion represents no longer a hill whose altitude may be
prosaically estimated according to the metric system. It is a highly
exalted frame of pious joy.
It is strange that, with all the ingenuity that has been shown in
inventing new text-books for the use of schools, no one has compiled a
Psychological Geography. The materials are ample. It only needs some
one with a scientific imagination, or, rather, with a capacity for
writing imaginative science, to make it a success. Eliminating those
communities whose states of mind are so mixed as to be unclassifiable,
the way would be clear for a very pretty series of generalizations.
There would be maps with isothermal lines uniting places of equal
degrees of warmth of temperament or frigidity of manner. Weather charts
would show the direction of the various winds of doctrine and the
storm centres, religious and political. The theory of moral cyclones
and anti-cyclones would be adequately explained. There would be maps
in colors indicating the communities situated on the plateaus of
conscious ethical and intellectual superiority. These often rise into
the arid, or at least semi-arid, belt. In sharp contrast with these
are the luxuriant bottom lands, where less favored peoples dwell in
happy ignorance of their low estate. The “principal products” would be
graphically illustrated. One section, being without natural resources,
is given over to the manufacture of novelties, while another is rich
in fossils. The distribution of fads may be shown to advantage. Some
localities are almost barren, while others are naturally faddy.
When he comes to the Points of the Compass the most matter-of-fact
psychological geographer will forget the cold mannerisms of his science
and become poetical. North, South, East, West, these are vast symbols
of psychic forces. He would not think of putting at the head of the
chapter the picture, from the old Geography, of the disconsolate urchin
with his face to the north and his arms extended in rigid but reluctant
testimony to the fact that “East is East and West is West.” What does
this featureless boy know of those tremendous forces whose age-long
contests have made the history of the world? What does he know of the
hardiness and the prowess that make the true North? If he were forcibly
turned around, his face would be as expressionless as ever. Such a
mannikin never felt a sudden longing for “a beaker full of the warm
South.”
Art must be called to the aid of science. Each point of the compass has
an expression of its own. One should be able by looking at the face of
the man in the picture to know the direction. There is no mistaking
the qualities which grow only where there is a northerly exposure. The
Orient and the Occident are not to be confounded.
Were some affluent citizen to endow a chair of psycho-geographical
science in one of our leading universities, especial attention should
be paid to the teaching of Systematic Americanism. It is a branch
now much neglected. The professor should take pains to instruct his
“fellow Academicks” in the manners and customs of their own country,
so that they should no longer be reckoned strangers on their native
soil. They should be taught to avoid entangling analogies drawn
from the experience of other lands, and to look directly at the
subject-matter. When they see something going wrong, they should not
jump at the conclusion that it is a repetition of the classic tragedy
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,--for it may be something
quite different. When there is a popular movement on the prairies,
they should not begin to talk of the French Revolution and of the
excesses of the proletariat. Before they talk in European fashion of
the “classes and the masses,” they should make certain that we have
such things, and if we have, that there is a sure way of telling which
is which. The Old-World generalizations about the upper and lower and
middle classes should be well shaken before using.
Those who elect the course in Americanism should be taught to
overcome the nervous fright to which bookish people are subject at
the appearance of any man in public life who shows signs of unusual
virility. It is a weakness of those who are more familiar with
the careers of Cæsar and Napoleon than with the temper of their
fellow-citizens. In the early seventies there were academic minds
thoroughly convinced that they were watching the Republic in its death
struggle with Cæsarism. Curiously enough, they fixed upon plain Ulysses
Grant to act the part of Cæsar. It would have been hard to find one
less fitted for the rôle. When we look back and contrast what really
happened with what the well-read spectators thought was happening, we
are reminded of the remark of the British matron to her husband as they
left the theatre where they had been seeing the play of “Antony and
Cleopatra,” “How unlike the home life of our dear Queen!”
The great thing, as President Roosevelt has often reminded us, is
to “think nationally.” This is no small achievement. A nation is a
psycho-geographical fact which it requires a very great effort of the
imagination to conceive. The same word represents a land and the
people who inhabit it. The physical features of the landscape have
their spiritual counterparts. It may be that the landscape impresses
itself on the imagination of the race, or, as may be maintained with
equal plausibility, the imagination of a gifted race may interpret the
landscape and impress itself upon it forever. In either case there is
a recognizable harmony between the two elements. In reading the great
literature of Israel we never forget that the nation was desert-born.
“He found him in a desert place, he led him about, he instructed him.”
In psalm and prophecy we are conscious of barren mountain ranges, of
rocks in a weary land, of narrow valleys which laugh for very joy over
the incongruity between themselves and the surrounding desolations.
There is the passion of the desert, born of solitude and the stars. In
the prophet of righteousness there is the same urgent note that Bayard
Taylor catches in his “Bedouin Song:”--
From the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
The impatient human cry is followed by the refrain natural to those
whose lives are surrounded by the eternal calm of the desert,--
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.
When we think of the Greeks we think at the same time of
the sprinkled isles
Lily on lily that o’erlace the sea,
And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps “Greece.”
England and her Englishmen are forever inseparable. “This happy breed
of men” belong to “this little world, this precious stone set in a
silver sea, this blessed plot, this England.” That Great Britain is an
island is more than a fact of physical geography. It is the outward and
visible sign of an insularity of sentiment which gives its peculiar
quality to British patriotism. There is something snug and homelike
about it, as of a family that enjoys “the tumultuous privacy of storm.”
We become conscious of Spain and her Spaniards as we read Longfellow’s
lines:--
A something sombre and severe
O’er the enchanted landscape reigned,
As if King Philip listened near
And Torquemada, the austere,
His ghostly sway maintained.
When we come to the United States of America there is a peculiar
difficulty in thinking and feeling nationally, because the imagination
does not at once find the physical facts to serve as symbols. It is not
easy to conceive the land as a whole. When we sing “My Country, ’tis
of thee,” the country that is visualized is very small. The author of
the hymn was a New England clergyman, and naturally enough described
New England and called it America. It is a land of rocks and rills
and woods, and the hills are templed, in Puritan fashion, by white
meeting-houses; for the early New Englander, like erring Israel of
old, loved to worship on “the high places.” Over it all is one great
tradition: it is the “land of the Pilgrims’ pride.”
The farmer in North Dakota loves his country, too; but the idea that
it is a land of rocks and rills and templed hills seems to him rather
farfetched. His heart does not thrill with rapture when he thinks of
these things. He can plow all day in the Red River valley without
striking a stone, and he is glad to have it so.
The Texan cultivates an exuberant Americanism, but he does not think of
his country as the “land of the Pilgrims’ pride.” Texas is not proud
of the Pilgrims, and perhaps the Pilgrims would not have appreciated
Texas.