I think I could get every worthy citizen of the Back Bay who at
present feels the deepest distrust of us to applaud with tepid decorum
[laughter] the following two lines of Emerson, provided only that I
merely read them, in the course of a lecture on Emerson, and did not
ask to translate them into action. [Laughter and applause.] The lines
are:
For fishers and choppers and plowmen
Shall constitute a State.
He is describing the birth of Massachusetts, the birth of the United
States, and he describes this country as being foreordained through
the ages to show the kings, the aristocracy, the powers of privilege
in the Old World, that here in the New World we could have a true and
real democracy, a democracy where fishers and choppers and plowmen
constitute a State. [Applause and cheers.]
As I say, friends, I could get decorous applause in any part of the
Back Bay for that sentiment so long as I treated it purely as poetry of
the past and not as politics of the present. [Applause.]
“THE MOB” WHO RULE.
But when I ask that the choppers, the plowmen, the fishers be given
the absolute, the real control over their Government: when I ask that
the farmers, the factory workers, the retail merchants, the young
professional men, the railroad men, all the average citizens, be given
the real control of this Government of theirs, be given the right to
nominate their own candidates, be given the right to supervise the
acts of all their servants――the minute I do that, I am told that I am
appealing to the momentary passion of the mob [laughter and applause],
that fishers and choppers and plowmen are all right in poetry but
when I try to put them into politics they become a mob cursed with
an inability to act except under the impulse of momentary passion.
[Laughter and applause.]
Now, friends, in my life, according to the strength that has been
given me, I have always striven measurably to realize every ideal I
have ever possessed, and I hold with deepest conviction that there is
nothing worse in any man than to profess a high ideal as a mere matter
of intellectual pleasure and in practice to make no effort to realize
that ideal. [Applause.] I hold that it is discreditable to us as a
people, discreditable to you of Massachusetts, if you praise Emerson’s
and Lowell’s lines in the abstract and fail to do your best to endeavor
actually to realize them in the present. [Applause.]