such, nor such her fundamental idea, nor that her destined work. It is
true that much of the national conduct seems exceptional when measured
by that standard, and the nation's course as crooked as the Rio Grande;
it is true that America sometimes seems to spurn liberty, and sells the
freedom of three million men for less than three million annual bales of
cotton; true, she often tramples, knowingly, consciously, tramples on
the most unquestionable and sacred rights. Yet, when one looks through
the whole character and history of America, spite of the exceptions,
nothing comes out with such relief as this love of freedom, this idea of
liberty, this attempt to organize right. There are numerous subordinate
qualities which conflict with the nation's idea and work, coming from
our circumstances, not our soul, as well as many others which help the
nation perform her providential work. They are signs of the times, and
it is important to look carefully among the most prominent of them,
where, indeed, one finds striking contradictions.
* * * * *
The first is an impatience of authority. Every thing must render its
reason, and show cause for its being. We will not be commanded, at least
only by such as we choose to obey. Does some one say, "Thou shalt," or
"Thou shalt not," we ask, "Who are you?" Hence comes a seeming
irreverence. The shovel hat, the symbol of authority, which awed our
fathers, is not respected unless it covers a man, and then it is the man
we honor, and no longer the shovel hat. "I will complain of you to the
government!" said a Prussian nobleman to a Yankee stage-driver, who
uncivilly threw the nobleman's trunk to the top of the coach. "Tell the
government to go to the devil!" was the symbolical reply.
Old precedents will not suffice us, for we want something anterior to
all precedents; we go beyond what is written, asking the cause of the
precedent and the reason of the writing. "Our fathers did so," says
some one. "What of that?" say we. "Our fathers--they were giants, were
they? Not at all, only great boys, and we are not only taller than they,
but mounted on their shoulders to boot, and see twice as far. My dear
wise man, or wiseacre, it is we that are the ancients, and have
forgotten more than all our fathers knew. We will take their wisdom
joyfully, and thank God for it, but not their authority, we know better;
and of their nonsense not a word. It was very well that they lived, and
it is very well that they are dead. Let them keep decently buried, for
respectable dead men never walk."
Tradition does not satisfy us. The American scholar has no folios in his
library. The antiquary unrolls his codex, hid for eighteen hundred years
in the ashes of Herculaneum, deciphers its fossil wisdom, telling us
what great men thought in the bay of Naples, and two thousand years ago.
"What do you tell of that for?" is the answer to his learning. "What has
Pythagoras to do with the price of cotton? You may be a very learned
man; you can read the hieroglyphics of Egypt, I dare say, and know so
much about the Pharaohs, it is a pity you had not lived in their time,
when you might have been good for something; but you are too
old-fashioned for our business, and may return to your dust." An eminent
American, a student of Egyptian history, with a scholarly indignation
declared, "There is not a man who cares to know whether Shoophoo lived
one thousand years before Christ, or three."
The example of other and ancient States does not terrify or instruct us.
If slavery were a curse to Athens, the corruption of Corinth, the
undoing of Rome, and all history shows it was so, we will learn no
lesson from that experience, for we say, "We are not Athenians, men of
Corinth, nor pagan Romans, thank God, but free republicans, Christians
of America. We live in the nineteenth century, and though slavery worked
all that mischief then and there, we know how to make money out of it,
twelve hundred millions of dollars, as Mr. Clay counts the cash."
The example of contemporary nations furnishes us little warning or
guidance. We will set our own precedents, and do not like to be told
that the Prussians or the Dutch have learned some things in the
education of the people before us, which we shall do well to learn after
them. So when a good man tells us of their schools and their colleges,
"patriotic" school-masters exclaim, "It is not true; our schools are the
best in the world! But if it were true, it is unpatriotic to say so; it
aids and comforts the enemy." Jonathan knows little of war; he has heard
his grandfather talk of Lexington and Saratoga; he thinks he should like
to have a little touch of battle on his own account: so when there is
difficulty in setting up the fence betwixt his estate and his neighbors,
he blusters for awhile, talks big, and threatens to strike his father;
but, not having quite the stomach for that experiment, falls to beating
his other neighbor, who happens to be poor, weak, and of a sickly
constitution; and when he beats her at every step,--
"For 'tis no war, as each one knows,
When only one side deals the blows,
And t' other bears 'em,"--
Jonathan thinks he has covered himself "with imperishable honors," and
sets up his general for a great king. Poor Jonathan--he does not know
the misery, the tears, the blood, the shame, the wickedness, and the sin
he has set a-going, and which one day he is to account for with God who
forgets nothing!
Yet while we are so unwilling to accept the good principles, to be
warned by the fate, or guided by the success, of other nations, we
gladly and servilely copy their faults, their follies, their vice and
sin. Like all upstarts, we pique ourselves on our imitation of
aristocratic ways. How many a blusterer in Congress,--for there are two
denominations of blusterers, differing only in degree, your great
blusterer in Congress and your little blusterer in a bar-room,--has
roared away hours long against aristocratic influence, in favor of the
"pure democracy," while he played the oligarch in his native village,
the tyrant over his hired help, and though no man knows who his
grandfather was, spite of the herald's office, conjures up some
trumpery coat of arms! Like a clown, who, by pinching his appetite, has
bought a gaudy cloak for Sabbath wearing, we chuckle inwardly at our
brave apery of foreign absurdities, hoping that strangers will be
astonished at us--which, sure enough, comes to pass. Jonathan is as vain
as he is conceited, and expects that the Fiddlers, and the Trollopes,
and others, who visit us periodically as the swallows, and likewise for
what they can catch, shall only extol, or at least stand aghast at the
brave spectacle we offer, of "the freest and most enlightened nation in
the world;" and if they tell us that we are an ill-mannered set, raw and
clownish, that we pick our teeth with a fork, loll back in our chairs,
and make our countenance hateful with tobacco, and that with all our
excellences we are a nation of "rowdies,"--why, we are offended, and our
feelings are hurt. There was an African chief, long ago, who ruled over
a few miserable cabins, and one day received a French traveller from
Paris, under a tree. With the exception of a pair of shoes, our chief
was as naked as a pestle, but with great complacency he asked the
traveller, "What do they say of me at Paris?"
Such is our dread of authority, that we like not old things; hence we
are always a-changing. Our house must be new, and our book, and even our
church. So we choose a material that soon wears out, though it often
outlasts our patience. The wooden house is an apt emblem of this sign
of the times. But this love of change appears not less in important
matters. We think "Of old things all are over old, of new things none
are new enough." So the age asks of all institutions their right to be:
What right has the government to existence? Who gave the majority a
right to control the minority, to restrict trade, levy taxes, make laws,
and all that? If the nation goes into a committee of the whole and makes
laws, some little man goes into a committee of one and passes his
counter resolves. The State of South Carolina is a nice example of this
self-reliance, and this questioning of all authority. That little brazen
State, which contains only about half so many free white inhabitants as
the single city of New York, but which none the less claims to have
monopolized most of the chivalry of the nation, and its patriotism, as
well as political wisdom--that chivalrous little State says, "If the
nation does not make laws to suit us; if it does not allow us to
imprison all black seamen from the North; if it prevents the extension
of Slavery wherever we wish to carry it--then the State of South
Carolina will nullify, and leave the other nine-and-twenty States to go
to ruin!"
Men ask what right have the churches to the shadow of authority which
clings to them--to make creeds, and to bind and to loose! So it is a
thing which has happened, that when a church excommunicates a young
stripling for heresy, he turns round, fulminates his edict, and
excommunicates the church. Said a sly Jesuit to an American Protestant
at Rome, "But the rites and customs and doctrines of the Catholic church
go back to the second century, the age after the apostles!" "No doubt of
it," said the American, who had also read the Fathers, "they go back to
the times of the apostles themselves; but that proves nothing, for there
were as great fools in the first century as the last. A fool or a folly
is no better because it is an old folly or an old fool. There are fools
enough now, in all conscience. Pray don't go back to prove their
apostolical succession."
There are always some men who are born out of due season, men of past
ages, stragglers of former generations, who ought to have been born
before Dr. Faustus invented printing, but who are unfortunately born
now, or, if born long ago, have been fraudulently and illegally
concealed by their mothers, and are now, for the first time, brought to
light. The age lifts such aged juveniles from the ground, and bids them
live, but they are sadly to seek in this day; they are old-fashioned
boys; their authority is called in question; their traditions and old
wives' fables are laughed at, at any rate disbelieved; they get
profanely elbowed in the crowd--men not knowing their great age and
consequent venerableness; the shovel hat, though apparently born on
their head, is treated with disrespect. The very boys laugh pertly in
their face when they speak, and even old men can scarce forbear a
smile, though it may be a smile of pity. The age affords such men a
place, for it is a catholic age, large-minded, and tolerant,--such a
place as it gives to ancient armor, Indian Bibles, and fossil bones of
the mastodon; it puts them by in some room seldom used, with other old
furniture, and allows them to mumble their anilities by themselves; now
and then takes off its hat; looks in, charitably, to keep the mediaeval
relics in good heart, and pretends to listen, as they discourse of what
comes of nothing and goes to it; but in matters which the age cares
about, commerce, manufactures, politics, which it cares much for, even
in education, which it cares far too little about, it trusts no such
counsellors, nor tolerates, nor ever affects to listen.
Then there is a philosophical tendency, distinctly visible; a groping
after ultimate facts, first principles, and universal ideas. We wish to
know first the fact, next the law of that fact, and then the reason of
the law. A sign of this tendency is noticeable in the titles of books;
we have no longer "treatises" n the eye, the ear, sleep, and so forth,
but in their place we find works professing to treat of the "philosophy"
of vision, of sound, of sleep. Even in the pulpits, men speak about the
"philosophy" of religion; we have philosophical lectures, delivered to
men of little culture, which would have amazed our grandfathers, who
thought a shoemaker should never go beyond his last, even to seek for
the philosophy of shoes. "What a pity," said a grave Scotchman, in the
beginning of this century, "to teach the beautiful science of geometry
to weavers and cobblers." Here nothing is too good or high for any one
tall and good enough to get hold of it. What audiences attend the Lowell
lectures in Boston--two or three thousand men, listening to twelve
lectures on the philosophy of fish! It would not bring a dollar or a
vote, only thought to their minds! Young ladies are well versed in the
philosophy of the affections, and understand the theory of attraction,
while their grandmothers, good easy souls, were satisfied with the
possession of the fact. The circumstance, that philosophical lectures
get delivered by men like Walker, Agassiz, Emerson, and their
coadjutors, men who do not spare abstruseness, get listened to, and even
understood, in town and village, by large crowds of men, of only the
most common culture; this indicates a philosophical tendency, unknown in
any other land or age. Our circle of professed scholars, men of culture
and learning, is a very small one, while our circle of thinking men is
disproportionately large. The best thought of France and Germany finds a
readier welcome here than in our parent land: nay, the newest and the
best thought of England, finds its earliest and warmest welcome in
America. It was a little remarkable, that Bacon and Newton should be
reprinted here, and La Place should have found his translator and
expositor coming out of an insurance office in Salem! Men of no great
pretensions object to an accomplished and eloquent politician: "That is
all very well; he made us cry and laugh, but the discourse was not
philosophical; he never tells us the reason of the thing; he seems not
only not to know it, but not to know that there is a reason for the
thing, and if not, what is the use of this bobbing on the surface?"
Young maidens complain of the minister, that he has no philosophy in his
sermons, nothing but precepts, which they could read in the Bible as
well as he; perhaps in heathen Seneca. He does not feed their souls.
One finds this tendency where it is least expected: there is a
philosophical party in politics, a very small party it may be, but an
actual one. They aim to get at everlasting ideas and universal laws, not
made by man, but by God, and for man, who only finds them; and from them
they aim to deduce all particular enactments, so that each statute in
the code shall represent a fact in the universe; a point of thought in
God; so, indeed, that legislation shall be divine in the same sense that
a true system of astronomy is divine--or the Christian religion--the law
corresponding to a fact. Men of this party, in New England, have more
ideas than precedents, are spontaneous more than logical; have
intuitions, rather than intellectual convictions, arrived at by the
process of reasoning. They think it is not philosophical to take a
young scoundrel and shut him up with a party of old ones, for his
amendment; not philosophical to leave children with no culture,
intellectual, moral, or religious, exposed to the temptations of a high
and corrupt civilization, and then, when they go astray--as such
barbarians needs must, in such temptations--to hang them by the neck for
the example's sake. They doubt if war is a more philosophical mode of
getting justice between two nations, than blows to settle a quarrel
between two men. In either case, they do not see how it follows, that he
who can strike the hardest blow is always in the right. In short, they
think that judicial murder, which is hanging, and national murder, which
is war, are not more philosophical than homicide, which one man commits
on his own private account.
Theological sects are always the last to feel any popular movement. Yet
all of them, from the Episcopalians to the Quakers, have each a
philosophical party, which bids fair to outgrow the party which rests on
precedent and usage, to overshadow and destroy it. The Catholic church
itself, though far astern of all the sects, in regard to the great
movements of the age, shares this spirit, and abroad, if not here, is
wellnigh rent asunder by the potent medicine which this new Daniel of
philosophy has put into its mouth. Everywhere in the American churches
there are signs of a tendency to drop all that rests merely on
tradition and hearsay, to cling only to such facts as bide the test of
critical search, and such doctrines as can be verified in human
consciousness here and to-day. Doctors of divinity destroy the faith
they once preached.
True, there are antagonistic tendencies, for, soon as one pole is
developed, the other appears; objections are made to philosophy, the old
cry is raised--"Infidelity," "Denial," "Free-thinking." It is said that
philosophy will corrupt the young men, will spoil the old ones, and
deceive the very elect. "Authority and tradition," say some, "are all we
need consult; reason must be put down, or she will soon ask terrible
questions." There is good cause for these men warring against reason and
philosophy; it is purely in self-defence. But this counsel and that cry
come from those quarters before mentioned, where the men of past ages
have their place, where the forgotten is re-collected, the obsolete
preserved, and the useless held in esteem. The counsel is not dangerous;
the bird of night, who overstays his hour, is only troublesome to
himself, and was never known to hurt a dovelet or a mouseling after
sun-rise. In the night only is the owl destructive. Some of those who
thus cry out against this tendency, are excellent men in their way, and
highly useful, valuable as conveyancers of opinions. So long as there
are men who take opinions as real estate, "to have and to hold for
themselves and their heirs forever," why should there not be such
conveyancers of opinions, as well as of land? And as it is not the duty
of the latter functionary to ascertain the quality or the value of the
land, but only its metes and bounds, its appurtenances and the title
thereto; to see if the grantor is regularly seized and possessed
thereof, and has good right to convey and devise the same, and to make
sure that the whole conveyance is regularly made out,--so is it with
these conveyancers of opinion; so should it be, and they are valuable
men. It is a good thing to know that we hold under Scotus, and Ramus,
and Albertus Magnus, who were regularly seized of this or that opinion.
It gives an absurdity the dignity of a relic. Sometimes these worthies,
who thus oppose reason and her kin, seem to have a good deal in them,
and, when one examines, he finds more than he looked for. They are like
a nest of boxes from Hingham and Nuremburg, you open one, and behold
another; that, and lo! a third. So you go on, opening and opening, and
finding and finding, till at last you come to the heart of the matter,
and then you find a box that is very little, and entirely empty.
* * * * *
Yet, with all this tendency--and it is now so strong that it cannot be
put down, nor even howled down, much as it may be howled over--there is
a lamentable want of first principles, well known and established; we
have rejected the authority of tradition, but not yet accepted the
authority of truth and justice. We will not be treated as striplings,
and are not old enough to go alone as men. Accordingly, nothing seems
fixed. There is a perpetual see-sawing of opposite principles. Somebody
said ministers ought to be ordained on horseback, because they are to
remain so short a time in one place. It would be as emblematic to
inaugurate American politicians, by swearing them on a weathercock. The
great men of the land have as many turns in their course as the Euripus
or the Missouri. Even the facts given in the spiritual nature of man are
called in question. An eminent Unitarian divine regards the existence of
God as a matter of opinion, thinks it cannot be demonstrated, and
publicly declares that it is "not a certainty." Some American
Protestants no longer take the Bible as the standard of ultimate appeal,
yet venture not to set up in that place reason, conscience, the soul
getting help of God; others, who affect to accept the Scripture as the
last authority, yet, when questioned as to their belief in the
miraculous and divine birth of Jesus of Nazareth, are found unable to
say yes or no, not having made up their minds.
In politics, it is not yet decided whether it is best to leave men to
buy where they can buy cheapest, and sell where they can sell dearest,
or to restrict that matter.
It was a clear case to our fathers, in '76, that all men were "created
equal," each with "Unalienable Rights." That seemed so clear, that
reasoning would not make it appear more reasonable; it was taken for
granted, as a self-evident proposition. The whole nation said so. Now,
it is no strange thing to find it said that negroes are not "created
equal" in unalienable rights with white men. Nay, in the Senate of the
United States, a famous man declares all this talk a dangerous mistake.
The practical decision of the nation looks the same way. So, to make our
theory accord with our practice, we ought to recommit the Declaration to
the hands which drafted that great State-paper, and instruct Mr.
Jefferson to amend the document, and declare that "All men are created
equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, if
born of white mothers; but if not, not."
In this lack of first principles, it is not settled in the popular
consciousness, that there is such a thing as an absolute right, a great
law of God, which we are to keep, come what will come. So the nation is
not upright, but goes stooping. Hence, in private affairs, law takes the
place of conscience, and, in public, might of right. So the bankrupt
pays his shilling in the pound, and gets his discharge, but afterwards,
becoming rich, does not think of paying the other nineteen shillings. He
will tell you the law is his conscience; if that be satisfied, so is
he. But you will yet find him letting money at one or two per cent. a
month, contrary to law; and then he will tell you that paying a debt is
a matter of law, while letting money is only a matter of conscience. So
he rides either indifferently--now the public hack, and now his own
private nag, according as it serves his turn.
So a rich State borrows money and "repudiates" the debt, satisfying its
political conscience, as the bankrupt his commercial conscience, with
the notion that there is no absolute right; that expediency is the only
justice, and that King People can do no wrong. No calm voice of
indignation cries out from the pulpit and the press and the heart of the
people, to shame the repudiators into decent morals; because it is not
settled in the popular mind that there is any absolute right. Then,
because we are strong and the Mexicans weak, because we want their land
for a slave-pasture and they cannot keep us out of it, we think that is
reason enough for waging an infamous war of plunder. Grave men do not
ask about "the natural justice" of such an undertaking, only about its
cost. Have we not seen an American Congress vote a plain lie, with only
sixteen dissenting voices in the whole body; has not the head of the
nation continually repeated that lie; and do not both parties, even at
this day, sustain the vote?
Now and then there rises up an honest man, with a great Christian heart
in his bosom, and sets free a score or two of slaves inherited from his
father; watches over and tends them in their new-found freedom: or
another, who, when legally released from payment of his debts, restores
the uttermost farthing. We talk of this and praise it, as an
extraordinary thing. Indeed it is so; justice is an unusual thing, and
such men deserve the honor they thus win. But such praise shows that
such honesty is a rare honesty. The northern man, born on the
battle-ground of freedom, goes to the South and becomes the most
tyrannical of slave-drivers. The son of the Puritan, bred up in austere
ways, is sent to Congress to stand up for truth and right, but he turns
out a "dough-face," and betrays the duty he went to serve. Yet he does
not lose his place, for every dough-faced representative has a
dough-faced constituency to back him.