In this country we are inclined to believe that the epoch that followed
the Revolution was one of the utmost purity and simplicity. But it was
one of the "fathers" who said to a friend upon the adjournment of the
first Congress, "Do you suppose such a set of rascals will ever assemble
again?" In his diary John Adams appeals to the calmer mind and juster
judgment of the coming age--meaning that in which we live, and from
which we look wistfully back to old John Adams's cocked hat and
knee-breeches as the symbols of a nobler time.
Then there is Fisher Ames, one of the famous orators and conspicuous
leaders of the beginning of the century, who, studying his country at
the time to which we recur as the age of high purpose and lofty men,
bewails the sordidness, selfishness, and degradation around him. "Of
course," he says, seventy years ago, "the single passion that engrosses
us, the only avenue to consideration and importance in our society, is
the accumulation of property: our inclinations cling to gold, and are
bedded in it as deeply as that precious ore in the mine.... As
experience evinces that popularity--in other words, consideration and
power--is to be procured by the meanest of mankind, the meanest in
spirit and understanding, and in the worst of ways, it is obvious that
at present the incitement to genius is next to nothing."
We might suppose that we were listening to a contemporary cynic; and
whoever reads the history of the politics of that time will find that
"the better days of the republic" were very like the days in which we
deplore their disappearance. When Mr. Ames died, Mr. John Quincy Adams
wrote a review of his works, in which, with the equanimity and
moderation of the golden age, he remarks, "It is a melancholy
contemplation of human nature to see a mind so highly cultivated and so
richly gifted as that of Mr. Ames soured and exasperated into the very
ravings of a bedlamite." He then proceeds to speak of those who, without
believing Mr. Ames's "absurd and inconsistent political creed," are
selfishly eager for its propagation, being "choice spirits, amounting to
at most six hundred" (their name was the Essex Junto!), and who hold
that "the porcelain must rule over the earthenware, the blind and sordid
multitude must put themselves, bound hand and foot, into the custody of
the lynx-eyed, seraphic souls of the six hundred, and then all together
must go and _squat_ for protection under the hundred hands of the
British Briareus."
To this gentle strain Mr. John Lowell replied in a similar vein,
beginning by speaking of the malignity of Mr. Adams's sarcasm, and of
his following Mr. Ames to the grave with crocodile tears, informing him
that he had no need to assail Mr. Ames's friends with all the venom of
an infuriated partisan, because he had already obtained his reward for
"ratting" from the Federalists, and this act of gratitude to his
benefactors was unnecessary. Mr. Lowell ends his reply by saying that
in the course of a short political life Mr. Adams had received more than
seventy thousand dollars from the public, and that while no man pitied
Mr. Ames, "Mr. Adams is an object of sincere commiseration with many a
man of high and honorable feelings, while it is to be doubted whether he
is the object of envy to any man on earth."
These are glimpses of the golden age, of that "better day" of the
republic with which our own is so often and so injuriously contrasted.
Indeed, there is no finer cordial for despondency than a glance at the
paradise that hovers behind our retreating steps. The mountain traveller
turns and sees a lovely vision floating in the sky.
"How faintly flushed, how phantom-fair,
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there--
A thousand shadowy-pencil'd valleys,
And snowy dells in a golden air."
Good lack! he cries, are those the crags and precipices along which I
slid and stumbled in terror of my life? The hanging gardens of the
past, the halcyon epoch of our history, the lost paradise of our
fathers, are all crags and precipices along which the race and our
country have stumbled and slid. If any man is disposed to think that he
has fallen upon evil times, let him open his history. It is a marvellous
tonic.
Does he think republics ungrateful? Look at Mr. Motley's vivid portrait
of John of Barneveld. When he was seventy-two years old he writes from
his prison to his wife and family: "I receive at this moment the very
heavy and sorrowful tidings that I, an old man, for all my services done
well and faithfully to the fatherland for so many years ... must prepare
myself to die to-morrow." Does he think irreligion undermining society?
Look into Smiles's "Huguenots in France after the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes." For attending Huguenot meetings men were captured by
soldiers and sentenced to the galleys, mostly for life. They were
chained by the neck with murderers and other criminals, and were
quartered in Paris in the dungeon of the Chateau de la Tournelle. Thick
iron collars were attached by iron chains to the beams. The collar was
closed around the prisoner's neck, and riveted with blows of a hammer
upon an anvil. Twenty men in pairs were chained to each beam. They could
not sleep lying; they could not sleep sitting or standing up straight,
for the beam was too high for the one and too low for the other. This
was done in the name of religion. The age of Louis the Fourteenth is
called one of the great epochs of the world. It was an age in which the
king's mistress persuaded him to slaughter and banish hundreds of
thousands of his subjects because of their religious faith, and the
great preachers of his church applauded, and the Holy Father approved,
and even Madame de Sévigné, whose letters some young ladies at Newport
and Saratoga are diligently reading, and sighing for the good old witty
times in which she lived, wrote of the most innocent and most devoted
men: "Hanging is quite a refreshment to me. They have just taken
twenty-four or thirty of these men, and are going to throw them off."
The golden age is not yesterday or to-morrow, but to-day. It is the age
in which we live, not that in which somebody else lived. The trouble,
vexation, corruption, weakness, selfishness, meanness, which dismay us
and tempt us to despair are the old lions that have always beset the
path. No man is born out of time; and what man living to-day, who is not
pinched with poverty or disease, would have lived a thousand years ago?
If our politics seem mean and our men small, how does Alfred's time
seem, or the glory of Athens, or the court of Louis the Fourteenth, or
Luther's Germany? What did Jefferson think of Hamilton, or the _Aurora_
say of Washington?