[Footnote 2: Address delivered by Secretary Lane at the University of
Virginia, Feb. 22, 1912. Reprinted from the University of Virginia _Alumni
Bulletin_, and from _The American Spirit_, by Franklin K. Lane (Copyright,
1918, by the Frederick A. Stokes Co.). By permission of the author and of
the publishers.]
It has not been an easy task for me to decide upon a theme for discussion
to-day. I know that I can tell you little of Washington that would be new,
and the thought has come to me that perhaps you would be interested in what
might be called a western view of American tradition, for I come from the
other side of this continent where all of our traditions are as yet
articles of transcontinental traffic, and you are here in the very heart of
tradition, the sacred seat of our noblest memories.
No doubt you sometimes think that we are reckless of the wisdom of our
forebears; while we at times have been heard to say that you live too
securely in that passion for the past which makes men mellow but unmodern.
When you see the West adopting or urging such measures as presidential
primaries, the election of United States Senators by popular vote, the
initiative, the referendum and the recall as means supplementary to
representative government, you shudder in your dignified way no doubt, at
the audacity and irreverence of your crude countrymen. They must be in your
eyes as far from grace as that American who visited one of the ancient
temples of India. After a long journey through winding corridors of marble,
he was brought to a single flickering light set in a jeweled recess in the
wall. "And what is this?" said the tourist. "That, sir," replied the guide,
"is the sacred fire which was lighted 2,000 years ago and never has been
out." "Never been out? What nonsense! Poof! Well, the blamed thing's out
now." This wild Westerner doubtless typifies those who without heed and in
their hot-headed and fanatical worship of change would destroy the very
light of our civilization. But let me remind you that all fanaticism is not
radical. There is a fanaticism that is conservative, a reverence for things
as they are that is no less destructive. Some years ago I visited a fishing
village in Canada peopled by Scotchmen who had immigrated in the early part
of the nineteenth century. It was a place named Ingonish in Cape Breton, a
rugged spot that looks directly upon the Atlantic at its cruelest point.
One day I fell into talk with a fisherman--a very model of a tawny-haired
viking. He told me that from his fishing and his farming he made some $300
a year. "Why not come over into my country," I said, "where you may make
that in a month?" There came over his face a look of humiliation as he
replied, "No, I could not." "Why not?" I asked. "Because," said he,
brushing his hand across his sea-burnt beard, "because I can neither read
nor write." "And why," said I, "haven't you learned? There are schools
here." "Yes, there are schools, but my father could not read or write, and
I would have felt that I was putting a shame upon the old man if I had
learned to do something he could not do." Splendid, wasn't it! He would not
do what his father could not do. Fine! Fine as the spirit of any man with a
sentiment which holds him back from leading a full, rich life. Yet can you
conceive a nation of such men--idolizing what has been, blind to the great
vision of the future, fettered by the chains of the past, gripped and held
fast in the hand of the dead, a nation of traditionalists, unable to meet
the needs of a new day, serene, no doubt self-sufficient, but coming how
far short of realizing that ideal of those who praise their God for that
they serve his world!
I have given the two extremes; now let us return to our point of departure,
and the first question to be asked is, "What are the traditions of our
people?" This nation is not as it was one hundred and thirty-odd years ago
when we asserted the traditional right of Anglo-Saxons to rebel against
injustice. We have traveled centuries and centuries since then--measured in
events, in achievements, in depth of insight into the secrets of nature, in
breadth of view, in sweep of sympathy, and in the rise of ennobling hope.
Physically we are to-day nearer to China than we were then to Ohio.
Socially, industrially, commercially the wide world is almost a unit. And
these thirteen states have spread across a continent to which have been
gathered the peoples of the earth. We are the "heirs of all the ages." Our
inheritance of tradition is greater than that of any other people, for we
trace back not alone to King John signing the Magna Charta in that little
stone hut by the riverside, but to Brutus standing beside the slain Cæsar,
to Charles Martel with his battle-axe raised against the advancing horde of
an old-world civilization, to Martin Luther declaring his square-jawed
policy of religious liberty, to Columbus in the prow of his boat crying to
his disheartened crew, "Sail on, sail on, and on!" Irishman, Greek, Slav,
and Sicilian--all the nations of the world have poured their hopes and
their history into this great melting pot, and the product will be--in
fact, is--a civilization that is new in the sense that it is the blend of
many, and yet is as old as the Egyptians.
Surely the real tradition of such a people is not any one way of doing a
certain thing; certainly not any set and unalterable plan of procedure in
affairs, nor even any fixed phrase expressive of a general philosophy
unless it comes from the universal heart of this strange new people. Why
are we here? What is our purpose? These questions will give you the
tradition of the American people, our supreme tradition--the one into which
all others fall, and a part of which they are--the right of man to oppose
injustice. There follow from this the right of man to govern himself, the
right of property and to personal liberty, the right to freedom of speech,
the right to make of himself all that nature will permit, the right to be
one of many in creating a national life that will realize those hopes which
singly could not be achieved.
Is there any other tradition so sacred as this--so much a part of
ourselves--this hatred of injustice? It carries in its bosom all the past
that inspires our people. Their spirit of unrest under wrong has lighted
the way for the nations of the world. It is not seen alone in Kansas and in
California, but in England, where a Liberal Ministry has made a beginning
at the restoration of the land to the people; in Germany, where the citizen
is fighting his way up to power; in Portugal, where a university professor
sits in the chair a king so lately occupied; in Russia, emerging from the
Middle Ages, with her groping Douma; in Persia, from which young Shuster
was so recently driven for trying to give to a people a sense of national
self-respect; in India, where an Emperor moves a national capital to pacify
submerged discontent; and even in far Cathay, the mystery land of Marco
Polo, immobile, phlegmatic, individualistic China, men have been waging war
for the philosophy incorporated in the first ten lines of our Declaration
of Independence.
Here is the effect of a tradition that is real, not a mere group of words
or a well-fashioned bit of governmental machinery--real because it is ours;
it has come out of our life; for the only real traditions a people have are
those beliefs that have become a part of them, like the good manners of a
gentleman. They are really our sympathies--sympathies born of experience.
Subjectively they give standpoint; objectively they furnish background--a
rich, deep background like that of some master of light and shade, some
Rembrandt, whose picture is one great glowing mystery of darkness save in a
central spot of radiant light where stands a single figure or group which
holds the eye and enchants the imagination. History may give to us the one
bright face to look upon, but in the deep mystery of the background the
real story is told; for therein, to those who can see, are the groping
multitudes feeling their way blindly toward the light of self-expression.
Now, this is a western view of tradition; it is yours, too; it was yours
first; it was your gift to us. And is it impertinent to ask, when your
sensibilities are shocked at some departure from the conventional in our
western law, that you search the tradition of your own history to know in
what spirit and by what method the gods of the elder days met the wrongs
they wished to right? It may be that we ask too many questions; that we are
unwilling to accept anything as settled; that we are curious, distrustful,
and as relentlessly logical as a child.
For what are we but creatures of the night
Led forth by day,
Who needs must falter, and with stammering steps
Spell out our paths in syllables of pain?
There are no grown-ups in this new world of democracy. We are trying an
experiment such as the world has never seen. Here we are, so many million
people at work making a living as best we can; 90,000,000 people covering
half a continent--rich, respected, feared. Is that all we are? Is that why
we are? To be rich, respected, feared? Or have we some part to play in
working out the problems of this world? Why should one man have so much and
many so little? How may the many secure a larger share in the wealth which
they create without destroying individual initiative or blasting individual
capacity and imagination? It was inevitable that these questions should be
asked when this republic was established. Man has been struggling to have
the right to ask these questions for 4,000 years; and now that he has the
right to ask _any_ questions surely we may not with reason expect him to be
silent. It is no answer to make that men were not asking these questions a
hundred years ago. So great has been our physical endowment that until the
most recent years we have been indifferent as to the share which each
received of the wealth produced. We could then accept cheerfully the
coldest and most logical of economic theories. But now men are wondering as
to the future. There may be much of envy and more of malice in current
thought; but underneath it all there is the feeling that if a nation is to
have a full life it must devise methods by which its citizens shall be
insured against monopoly of opportunity. This is the meaning of many
policies the full philosophy of which is not generally grasped--the
regulation of railroads and other public service corporations, the
conservation of natural resources, the leasing of public lands and
waterpowers, the control of great combinations of wealth. How these
movements will eventually express themselves none can foretell, but in the
process there will be some who will dogmatically contend that "Whatever is,
is right," and others who will march under the red flag of revenge and
exspoliation. And in that day we must look for men to meet the false cry of
both sides--"gentlemen unafraid" who will neither be the money-hired
butlers of the rich nor power-loving panderers to the poor.
Assume the right of self-government and society becomes the scene of an
heroic struggle for the realization of justice. Take from the one strong
man the right to rule and make others serve, the right to take all and hold
all, the power to grant or to withhold, and you have set all men to asking,
"What should I have, and what should my children have?" and with this come
all the perils of innovation and the hazards of revolution.
To meet such a situation the traditionalist who believes that the last word
in politics or in economics was uttered a century ago is as far from the
truth as he who holds that the temporary emotion of the public is the
stone-carved word from Sinai.
A railroad people are not to be controlled by ox-team theories, declaims
the young enthusiast for change. An age that dares to tell of what the
stars are made; that weighs the very suns in its balances; that mocks the
birds in their flight through the air, and the fish in their dart through
the sea; that transforms the falling stream into fire, light, and music;
that embalms upon a piece of plate the tenderest tones of the human voice;
that treats disease with disease; that supplies a new ear with the same
facility that it replaces a blown-out tire; that reaches into the very
grave itself and starts again the silent heart--surely such an age may be
allowed to think for itself somewhat upon questions of politics.
Yet with our searchings and our probings, who knows more of the human heart
to-day than the old Psalmist? And what is the problem of government but one
of human nature? What Burbank has as yet made grapes to grow on thorns or
figs on thistles? The riddle of the universe is no nearer solution than it
was when the Sphinx first looked upon the Nile. The one constant and
inconstant quantity with which man must deal is man. Human nature responds
so far as we can see to the same magnetic pull and push that moved it in
the days of Abraham and of Socrates. The foundation of government is
man--changing, inert, impulsive, limited, sympathetic, selfish man. His
institutions, whether social or political, must come out of his wants and
out of his capacities. The problem of government, therefore, is not always
what should be done but what can be done. We may not follow the supreme
tradition of the race to create a newer, sweeter world unless we give heed
to its complementary tradition that man's experience cautions him to make a
new trail with care. He must curb courage with common-sense. He may lay his
first bricks upon the twentieth story, but not until he has made sure of
the solidity of the frame below. The real tradition of our people permits
the mason to place brick upon brick wherever he finds it most convenient,
safest and most economical; but he must not mistake thin air for structural
steel.
Let me illustrate the thought that I would leave with you by the
description of one of our western railroads. Your train sweeps across the
desert like some bold knight in a joust, and when about to drive recklessly
into a sheer cliff it turns a graceful curve and follows up the wild
meanderings of a stream until it reaches a ridge along which it finds its
flinty way for many miles. At length you come face to face with a great
gulf, a canyon--yawning, resounding and purple in its depths. Before you
lies a path, zigzagging down the canyon's side to the very bottom, and away
beyond another slighter trail climbs up upon the opposite side. Which is
our way? Shall we follow the old trail? The answer comes as the train
shoots out across a bridge and into a tunnel on the opposite side, coming
out again upon the highlands and looking into the Valley of Heart's Desire
where the wistful Rasselas might have lived.
When you or I look upon that stretch of steel we wonder at the daring of
its builders. Great men they were who boldly built that road--great in
imagination, greater in their deeds--for they were men so great that they
did not build upon a line that was without tradition. The route they
followed was made by the buffalo and the elk ten thousand years ago. The
bear and the deer followed it generation after generation, and after them
came the trapper, and then the pioneer. It was already a trail when the
railroad engineer came with transit and chain seeking a path for the great
black stallion of steel.
Up beside the stream and along the ridge the track was laid. But there was
no thought of following the old trail downward into the canyon. Then the
spirit of the new age broke through tradition, the canyon was leaped and
the mountain's heart pierced, that man might have a swifter and safer way
to the Valley of Heart's Desire.