this difference: in other nations the things of a man are put before the
man himself; so a materialism which exalts the accidents of the
man--rank, wealth, birth, and the like--above the man, is not
inconsistent with the general idea of England or Austria. In America it
is a contradiction. Besides, in most civilized countries, there is a
class of men living on inherited wealth, who devote their lives to
politics, art, science, letters, and so are above the mere material
elegance which surrounds them. That class has often inflicted a deep
wound on society, which festers long and leads to serious trouble in the
system, but at the same time it redeems a nation from the reproach of
mere material vulgarity; it has been the source of refinement, and has
warmed into life much of the wisdom and beauty which have thence spread
over all the world. In America there is no such class. Young men
inheriting wealth very rarely turn to any thing noble; they either
convert their talents into gold, or their gold into furniture, wines,
and confectionary. A young man of wealth does not know what to do with
himself or it; a rich young woman seems to have no resource but
marriage! Yet it must be confessed, that at least in one part of the
United States wealth flows freely for the support of public institutions
of education.
Here it is difficult for a man of science to live by his thought. Was
Bowditch one of the first mathematicians of his age? He must be at the
head of an annuity office. If Socrates should set up as a dealer in
money, and outwit the brokers as formerly the Sophists, and shave notes
as skilfully as of old, we should think him a great man. But if he
adopted his old plan, what should we say of him?
Manliness is postponed and wealth preferred. "What a fine house is
this," one often says; "what furniture; what feasting. But the master of
the house!--why every stone out of the wall laughs at him. He spent all
of himself in getting this pretty show together, and now it is empty,
and mocks its owner. He is the emblematic coffin at the Egyptian feast."
"Oh, man!" says the looker-on, "why not furnish thyself with a mind, and
conscience, a heart and a soul, before getting all this brass and
mahogany together; this beef and these wines?" The poor wight would
answer,--"Why, Sir, there were none such in the market!"--The young man
does not say, "I will first of all things be a man, and so being will
have this thing and the other," putting the agreeable after the
essential. But he says, "First of all, by hook or by crook, I will have
money, the manhood may take care of itself." He has it,--for tough and
hard as the old world is, it is somewhat fluid before a strong man who
resolutely grapples with difficulty and will swim through, it can be
made to serve his turn. He has money, but the man has evaporated in the
process; when you look he is not there. True, other nations have done
the same thing, and we only repeat their experiment. The old devil of
conformity says to our American Adam and Eve, "Do this and you shall be
as gods," a promise as likely to hold good as the devil's did in the
beginning. A man was meant for something more than a tassel to a large
estate, and a woman to be more than a rich housekeeper.
With this offensive materialism we copy the vices of feudal aristocracy
abroad, making our vulgarity still more ridiculous. We are ambitious or
proud of wealth, which is but labor stored up, and at the same time are
ashamed of labor which is wealth in process. With all our talk about
democracy, labor is thought less honorable in Boston than in Berlin and
Leipsic. Thriving men are afraid their children will be shoemakers, or
ply some such honorable and useful craft. Yet little pains are taken to
elevate the condition or improve the manners and morals of those who do
all the manual work of society. The strong man takes care that his
children and himself escape that condition. We do not believe that all
stations are alike honorable if honorably filled; we have little desire
to equalize the burdens of life, so that there shall be no degraded
class; none cursed with work, none with idleness. It is popular to endow
a college; vulgar to take an interest in common schools. Liberty is a
fact, equality a word, and fraternity, we do not think of yet.
In this struggle for material wealth and the social rank which is based
thereon, it is amusing to see the shifting of the scenes; the social
aspirations of one and the contempt with which another rebuts the
aspirant. An old man can remember when the most exclusive of men, and
the most golden, had scarce a penny in their purse, and grumbled at not
finding a place where they would. Now the successful man is ashamed of
the steps he rose by. The gentleman who came to Boston half a century
ago, with all his worldly goods tied up in a cotton handkerchief, and
that not of so large a pattern as are made now-a-days, is ashamed to
recollect that his father was a currier, or a blacksmith, or a skipper
at Barnstable or Beverly; ashamed, also, of his forty or fifty country
cousins, remarkable for nothing but their large hands and their
excellent memory. Nay, he is ashamed of his own humble beginnings, and
sneers at men starting as he once started. The generation of English
"Snobs" came in with the Conqueror, and migrated to America at an early
day, where they continue to thrive marvellously--the chief "conservative
party" in the land.
Through this contempt for labor, a certain affectation runs through a
good deal of American society, and makes our aristocracy vulgar and
contemptible. What if Burns had been ashamed of his plough, and Franklin
had lost his recollection of the candle-moulds and the composing stick?
Mr. Chubbs, who got rich to-day, imitates Mr. Swipes, who got rich
yesterday, buys the same furniture, gives similar entertainments, and
counts himself "as good a man as Swipes, any day." Nay, he goes a little
beyond him, puts his servants in livery, with the "Chubbs arms" on the
button; but the new-found family arms are not descriptive of the
character of the Chubbses, or of their origin and history--only of their
vanity. Then Mr. Swipes looks down on poor Chubbs, and curls his lip
with scorn; calls him a "parvenu," "an upstart," "a plebeian;" speaks of
him as one of "that sort of people," "one of your ordinary men;"
"thrifty and well off in the world, but a little vulgar." At the same
time Mr. Swipes looks up to Mr. Bung, who got rich the day before
yesterday, as a gentleman of old family and quite distinguished, and
receives from that quarter the same treatment he bestows on his
left-hand neighbor. The real gentleman is the same all the world over.
Such are by no means lacking here, while the pretended gentlemen swarm
in America. Chaucer said a good word long ago:
"--This is not mine intendement
To clepen no wight in no age
Only gentle for his lineage;
But whoso that is virtuous,
And in his port not outrageous:
When such one thou see'st thee beforn,
Though he be not gentle born,
Thou mayest well see this in soth,
That he is gentle, because he doth
As 'longeth to a gentleman;
Of them none other deem I can;
For certainly withouten drede,
A churl is deemed by his deed,
Of high or low, as ye may see,
Or of what kindred that he be."
It is no wonder vulgar men, who travel here and eat our dinners, laugh
at this form of vulgarity. Wiser men see its cause, and prophesy its
speedy decay. Every nation has its aristocracy, or controlling class: in
some lands it is permanent, an aristocracy of blood; men that are
descended from distinguished warriors, from the pirates and freebooters
of a rude age. The nobility of England are proud of their fathers'
deeds, and emblazon the symbols thereof in their family arms, emblems of
barbarism. Ours is an aristocracy of wealth, not got by plunder, but by
toil, thrift, enterprise; of course it is a movable aristocracy: the
first families of the last century are now forgot, and their successors
will give place to new names. Now earning is nobler than robbing, and
work is before war; but we are ashamed of both, and seek to conceal the
noble source of our wealth. An aristocracy of gold is far preferable to
the old and immovable nobility of blood, but it has also its peculiar
vices: it has the effrontery of an upstart, despises its own ladder, is
heartless and lacks noble principle, vulgar and cursing. This lust of
wealth, however, does us a service, and gives the whole nation a
stimulus which it needs, and, low as the motive is, drives us to
continual advancement. It is a great merit for a nation to secure the
largest amount of useful and comfortable and beautiful things which can
be honestly earned, and used with profit to the body and soul of man.
Only when wealth becomes an idol, and material abundance is made the
end, not the means, does the love of it become an evil. No nation was
ever too rich, or overthrifty, though many a nation has lost its soul by
living wholly for the senses.
Now and then we see noble men living apart from this vulgarity and
scramble; some rich, some poor, but both content to live for noble aims,
to pinch and spare for virtue, religion, for truth and right. Such men
never fail from any age or land, but everywhere they are the exceptional
men. Still they serve to keep alive the sacred fire in the hearts of
young men, rising amid the common mob as oaks surpass the brambles or
the fern.
* * * * *
In these secondary qualities of the people which mark the special signs
of the times, there are many contradictions, quality contending with
quality; all by no means balanced into harmonious relations. Here are
great faults not less than great virtues. Can the national faults be
corrected? Most certainly; they are but accidental, coming from our
circumstances, our history, our position as a people--heterogeneous,
new, and placed on a new and untamed continent. They come not from the
nation's soul; they do not belong to our fundamental idea, but are
hostile to it. One day our impatience of authority, our philosophical
tendency, will lead us to a right method, that to fixed principles, and
then we shall have a continuity of national action. Considering the
pains taken by the fathers of the better portion of America to promote
religion here, remembering how dear is Christianity to the heart of all,
conservative and radical--though men often name as Christian what is
not--and seeing how truth and right are sure to win at last,--it becomes
pretty plain that we shall arrive at true principles, laws of the
universe, ideas of God; then we shall be in unison also with it and Him.
When that great defect--lack of first principles--is corrected, our
intensity of life, with the hope and confidence it inspires, will do a
great work for us. We have already secured an abundance of material
comforts hitherto unknown; no land was ever so full of corn and cattle,
clothing, comfortable houses, and all things needed for the flesh. The
desire of those things, even the excessive desire thereof, performs an
important part in the divine economy of the human race; nowhere is its
good effect more conspicuous than in America, where in two generations
the wild Irishman becomes a decent citizen, orderly, temperate, and
intelligent. This done or even a-doing, as it is now, we shall go forth
to realize our great national idea, and accomplish the great work of
organizing into institutions the unalienable rights of man. The great
obstacle in the way of that is African slavery--the great exception in
the nation's history; the national sin. When that is removed, as soon it
must be, lesser but kindred evils will easily be done away; the truth
which the land-reformers, which the associationists, the free-traders,
and others, have seen, dimly or clearly, can readily be carried out. But
while this monster vice continues, there is little hope of any great and
permanent national reform. The positive things which we chiefly need for
this work, are first, education, next, education, and then education, a
vigorous development of the mind, conscience, affections, religious
power of the whole nation. The method and the means for that I shall not
now discuss.
The organization of human rights, the performance of human duties, is an
unlimited work. If there shall ever be a time when it is all done, then
the race will have finished its course. Shall the American nation go on
in this work, or pause, turn off, fall, and perish? To me it seems
almost treason to doubt that a glorious future awaits us. Young as we
are, and wicked, we have yet done something which the world will not let
perish. One day we shall attend more emphatically to the rights of the
hand, and organize labor and skill; then to the rights of the head,
looking after education, science, literature, and art; and again to the
rights of the heart, building up the State with its laws, society with
its families, the church with its goodness and piety. One day we shall
see that it is a shame, and a loss, and a wrong, to have a criminal, or
an ignorant man, or a pauper, or an idler, in the land; that the jail,
and the gallows, and the almshouse are a reproach which need not be. Out
of new sentiments and ideas, not seen as yet, new forms of society will
come, free from the antagonism of races, classes, men--representing the
American idea in its length, breadth, depth, and height, its beauty and
its truth, and then the old civilization of our time shall seem
barbarous and even savage. There will be an American art commensurate
with our idea and akin to this great continent; not an imitation, but a
fresh, new growth. An American literature also must come with democratic
freedom, democratic thought, democratic power--for we are not always to
be pensioners of other lands, doing nothing but import and quote; a
literature with all of German philosophic depth, with English solid
sense, with French vivacity and wit, Italian fire of sentiment and soul,
with all of Grecian elegance of form, and more than Hebrew piety and
faith in God. We must not look for the maiden's ringlets on the baby's
brow; we are yet but a girl; the nameless grace of maturity, and
womanhood's majestic charm, are still to come. At length we must have a
system of education, which shall uplift the humblest, rudest, worst born
child in all the land; which shall bring forth and bring up noble men.
An American State is a thing that must also be; a State of free men who
give over brawling, resting on industry, justice, love, not on war,
cunning, and violence,--a State where liberty, equality, and fraternity
are deeds as well as words. In its time the American Church must also
appear, with liberty, holiness, and love for its watchwords, cultivating
reason, conscience, affection, faith, and leading the world's way in
justice, peace, and love. The Roman Church has been all men know what
and how; the American Church, with freedom for the mind, freedom for the
heart, freedom for the soul, is yet to be, sundering no chord of the
human harp, but tuning all to harmony. This also must come; but hitherto
no one has risen with genius fit to plan its holy walls, conceive its
columns, project its towers, or lay its corner-stone. Is it too much to
hope all this? Look at the arena before us--look at our past history.
Hark! there is the sound of many million men, the trampling of their
freeborn feet, the murmuring of their voice; a nation born of this land
that God reserved so long a virgin earth, in a high day married to the
human race,--rising, and swelling, and rolling on, strong and certain as
the Atlantic tide; they come numerous as ocean waves when east winds
blow, their destination commensurate with the continent, with ideas vast
as the Mississippi, strong as the Alleghanies, and awful as Niagara;
they come murmuring little of the past, but, moving in the brightness of
their great idea, and casting its light far on to other lands and
distant days--come to the world's great work, to organize the rights of
man.
VI.
A DISCOURSE OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. DELIVERED AT
THE MELODEON, IN BOSTON, MARCH 5, 1848.
Within a few days one of the most distinguished statesmen of the age has
passed away; a man who has long been before the public, familiarly known
in the new world and the old. He was one of the prominent monuments of
the age. It becomes us to look at his life, works, and public character,
with an impartial eye; to try him by the Christian standard. Let me
extenuate nothing, add nothing, and set down nought from any partial
love or partial hate. His individuality has been so marked in a long
life, his good and evil so sharply defined, that one can scarcely fail
to delineate its most important features.
God has made some men great and others little. The use of great men is
to serve the little men; to take care of the human race, and act as
practical interpreters of justice and truth. This is not the Hebrew
rule, nor the heathen, nor the common rule, only the Christian. The
great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him. Perhaps
greatness is always the same thing in kind, differing only in mode and
in form, as well as degree. The great man has more of human nature than
other men, organized in him. So far as that goes, therefore, he is more
me than I am myself. We feel that superiority in all our intercourse
with great men, whether kings, philosophers, poets, or saints. In kind
we are the same; different in degree.
In nature we find individuals, not orders and genera; but for our own
convenience in understanding and recollecting, we do a little violence
to nature, and put the individuals into classes. In this way we
understand better both the whole and each of its parts. Human nature
furnishes us with individual great men; for convenience we put them into
several classes, corresponding to their several modes or forms of
greatness. It is well to look at these classes before we examine any one
great man; this will render it easier to see where he belongs and what
he is worth. Actual service is the test of actual greatness; he who
renders, of himself, the greatest actual service to mankind, is actually
the greatest man. There may be other tests for determining the potential
greatness of men, or the essential; this is the Christian rule for
determining the actual greatness. Let us arrange these men in the
natural order of their work.
First of all, there are great men who discover general truths, great
ideas, universal laws, or invent methods of thought and action. In this
class the vastness of a man's genius may be measured, and his relative
rank ascertained by the transcendency of his ideas, by the newness of
his truth, by its practical value, and the difficulty of attaining it in
his time, and under his peculiar circumstances. In literature it is such
men who originate thoughts, and put them into original forms; they are
the great men of letters. In philosophy we meet with such; and they are
the great men of science. Thus Socrates discovered the philosophical
method of minute analysis that distinguished his school, and led to the
rapid advance of knowledge in the various and even conflicting
academies, which held this method in common, but applied it in various
ways, well or ill, and to various departments of human inquiry; thus
Newton discovered the law of gravitation, universal in nature, and by
the discovery did immense service to mankind. In politics we find
similar, or analogous men, who discover yet other laws of God, which
bear the same relation to men in society that gravitation bears to the
orbs in heaven, or to the dust and stones in the street; men that
discover the first truths of politics, and teach the true method of
human society. Such are the great men in politics.
We find corresponding men in religion; men who discover an idea so
central that all sectarianism of parties or of nations seems little in
its light; who discover and teach the universal law which unifies the
race, binding man to man, and men to God; who discover the true method
of religion conducting to natural worship without limitation, to free
piety, free goodness, free thought. To my mind such are the greatest of
great men, when measured by the transcendency of their doctrine and the
service they render to all. By the influence of their idea, letters,
philosophy, and politics become nobler and more beautiful, both in their
forms and their substance.
Such is the class of discoverers; men who get truth at first hand, truth
pertaining either especially to literature, philosophy, politics,
religion, or at the same time to each and all of them.
* * * * *
The next class consists of such as organize these ideas, methods,
truths, and laws; they concretize the abstract, particularize the
general; they apply philosophy to practical purposes, organizing the
discoveries of science into a railroad, a mill, a steam-ship, and by
their work an idea becomes fact. They organize love into families,
justice into a state, piety into a church. Wealth is power, knowledge is
power, religion power; they organize all these powers, wealth,
knowledge, religion, into common life, making divinity humanity, and
that society.
This organizing genius is a very great one, and appears in various
forms. One man spreads his thought out on the soil, whitening the land
with bread-corn; another applies his mind to the rivers of New England,
making them spin and weave for the human race; this man will organize
his thought into a machine with one idea, joining together fire and
water, iron and wood, animating them into a new creature, ready to do
man's bidding; while that with audacious hand steals the lightning of
heaven, organizes his plastic thought within that pliant fire, and sends
it of his errands to fetch and carry tidings between the ends of the
earth.
Another form of this mode of greatness is seen in politics, in
organizing men. The man spreads his thought out on mankind, puts men
into true relations with one another and with God; he organizes
strength, wisdom, justice, love, piety; balances the conflicting forces
of a nation, so that each man has his natural liberty as complete as if
the only man, yet, living in society, gathers advantages from all the
rest. The highest degree of this organizing power is the genius for
legislation, which can enact justice and eternal right into treaties and
statutes, codifying the divine thought into human laws, making absolute
religion common life and daily custom, and balancing the centripetal
power of the mass, with the centrifugal power of the individual, into a
well-proportioned state, as God has balanced these two conflicting
forces into the rhythmic ellipses above our heads. It need not be
disguised, that politics are the highest business for men of this class,
nor that a great statesman or legislator is the greatest example of
constructive skill. It requires some ability to manage the brute forces
of Nature, or to combine profitably nine-and-thirty clerks in a shop;
how much more to arrange twenty millions of intelligent, free men, not
for a special purpose, but for all the ends of universal life!
Such is the second class of great men; the organizers, men of
constructive heads, who form the institutions of the world, the little
and the great.
* * * * *
The next class consists of men who administer the institutions after
they are founded. To do this effectually and even eminently, it requires
no genius for original organization of truths freshly discovered, none
for the discovery of truths, outright. It requires only a perception of
those truths, and an acquaintance with the institutions wherein they
have become incarnate; a knowledge of details, of formulas, and
practical methods, united with a strong will and a practised
understanding,--what is called a turn for affairs, tact, or address; a
knowledge of routine and an acquaintance with men. The success of such
men will depend on these qualities; they "know the ropes" and the
soundings, the signs of the times; can take advantage of the winds and
the tides.