[Speech of George Cary Eggleston at the first annual banquet of the New
York Southern Society, February 22, 1887. Algernon Sidney Sullivan,
President of the Society, was in the chair. In introducing the speaker
Mr. Sullivan said: "We want to hear a word about 'Southern
Literature,' and we will now call upon Mr. George Cary Eggleston to
respond to that sentiment."]
MR. PRESIDENT:--I have cheered myself so hoarse that I do not
think I can make a speech at all. I will say a word or two if my voice
holds out. It is patriotically hoarse.
If I manage to make a speech it will be the one speech of the evening
which was most carefully prepared. The preparations were all made,
arrangements were completed and it was perfectly understood that I
should not make it. The name set down under this toast is that of Hon.
John Randolph Tucker, and the wild absurdity of asking a writer who does
not make speeches, to take the place of such an orator as John Randolph
Tucker would seem to be like asking a seasick land-lubber to take the
captain's place upon the bridge of the ocean steamer in a storm, and
there is another reason by which I am peculiarly unfit to speak in
response to the toast--"Southern Literature," and that is, that I am
firmly convinced that there is no Southern Literature; that there never
was a Southern Literature; that there never will be a Southern
Literature, and that there never ought to be a Southern Literature. Some
very great and noble work in literature has been produced by men of
Southern lineage and birth and residence. John Marshall, if he had not
been the greatest of American jurists, would have been counted, because
of his "Life of Washington," the greatest of biographers. I might name
an extended list of workers in this field, all of Southern birth. Sims;
my dead friend, John Esten Cooke; his brother, Philip Cooke; Cable, who
is married to New England; the gifted woman who calls herself Charles
Egbert Craddock; and a host of others including that noble woman now
going blind in Lexington, who has done some of the sweetest work in
American poetry, Margaret J. Preston. [Applause.] I might go further and
claim Howells, every drop of whose blood is Virginian. If it were not
getting personal and becoming a family affair, I might mention the fact
that the author of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster," with whom I used to play
on the hills of Ohio River, was of direct Southern descent; that he was
born as I was, exactly on Mason and Dixon's line, and one of us fell
over on one side and the other on the other when the trouble came.
Notwithstanding all this, I hold that there can be no such thing as a
Southern Literature, because literature is never provincial, and to say
of any literature that it is Southern or Western or Northern or Eastern
is to say that it is a provincial utterance and not a literature. The
work to which I have referred is American literature. It is work of
which American literature is proud and will ever be proud, whatever is
worthy in literature or in achievement of any kind in any part of the
country goes ultimately in the common fund of American literature or of
American achievement; and that is the joy I have had in being here
to-night, when I ought to have been at home. The joy I have had to-night
has been that this sentiment of Americanism has seemed to be all around
me, and to run through and through everything that has been said here
to-night--a sentiment which was taken out of my mouth, as it were, by
the President this evening, that our first devotion above all is to what
I call the American idea. It seems to me that we are sometimes
forgetting what idea it is that has made this country great; what it is
that has made of it a nation of free men and educated men--a nation in
which the commonest laborer has the school open to him, as well as the
workshop; in which the commonest laborer can sit down three times every
day to a bountiful table. We sometimes forget the idea on which our
country was founded; the idea which prompted Jefferson, as a young man,
to stand up in the legislature of Virginia and fight through three bills
directly affecting mere questions of law, but determining the future of
this country more largely than any other acts,--even the acts of
Washington himself. Those three bills, one providing for the separation
of Church and State, one for the abolition of primogeniture, and the
third for the abolition of entail. The idea that ran through that time
was the idea of equal individual manhood--of the supremacy of the man to
all else, to the State itself, to Government and Society; that the
individual man was the one thing to be taken care of; that it is the
sole business of the Government to give him rights of manhood, to
protect him in his personal freedom, and then to let him alone.
We have imported of late subtly sophistical advocates of socialism who
would set up in opposition to these American ideas the system of State
paternalism, and assert the doctrine that the State should not let a man
alone to make the best use he can of his abilities and opportunities,
but should guide him and support him and direct him and provide for him
and, in short, make a moral and intellectual cripple of him. That is the
new and un-American idea which has recently been promulgated and which
has found expression in New York in 60,000 votes; it is the idea which
has been seized upon by those persons who have leagued themselves
together to secure to themselves larger profits upon their industry or
investments by taxing the whole people for the benefit of the few,
making the State the pap-giver, taking from the people the taxes that
should be rigidly limited to the needs of the government and turning
them into the pockets of the individual; supporting, helping and making,
as I have said, a cripple of him. That is the idea which has prompted in
large degree disturbances through which we have passed, and to which
reference has been made here to-night. It is the idea that somehow or in
some particular way a man should have some support other than his own
individual exertion, and absolute freedom can provide for him.
It seems to me that one lesson we here to-night should take most to
heart is that lesson taught by the whole history of our country, that
the American idea--the idea of the individuality and manhood of man,
the idea of a government formed simply to protect man, as individuals in
their rights, and leave them free in their action and mode of
thought--is the idea that has made this country great. It is in
pursuance of that that we have become the nation we are; it is by
adherence to that that we have become a model to all other nations, so
much so that in the German election yesterday, with the aid of friendly
foreign despots, with the aid of a threatened war, with all the aids
that imperialism can call to its assistance, Bismarck was able to carry
his point only by a small majority. This is the idea under which we have
founded our nation and grown great, and it is by that idea that we shall
continue great, if we are so to continue. [Applause.]