work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that
cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that
this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom--and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not
perish from the earth." [Footnote: _Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech_.]
{255}
THE RESULT
{256}
{257}
X
THE RESULT
In these days, therefore, immediately following the Great War it is
well to keep in our own minds and try to put into the minds of others
the great elemental truths of life; and to try at the same time to
keep out of our and their minds in so far as possible the unessential
and changing superficialities which never last long and which never
move forward the civilization of the human race.
This very simple biographical sketch is not an attempt to settle the
problems of the hour. Such an attempt might excite the amusement and
interest of students of that mental disease known as
paranoia--students who are far too busy at the moment as it is without
this addition to the unusually large supply of patients--but it could
not add anything either to the pleasure or entertainment of any one
else. That the simple biographical sketch can even approach the latter
{258} accomplishment may be held to be a matter for reasonable doubt.
Nor, furthermore, is the sketch an attempt at the soap box or other
variety of philosophy which one individual attempts to thrust down the
mental throats of his fellow beings. There exists a hazy suspicion
that the fellow beings are quite competent to decide what they will
swallow mentally and what they will, vulgarly speaking, expectorate
forthwith.
The simple biographical sketch is a frank attempt to express, as at
least one person sees it, the character, the accomplishments and the
service rendered by one man to his country throughout a life which
seems to have been singularly sturdy, honest, normal and consistent,
and which, therefore, is an example to his countrymen that may in
these somewhat hectic times well be considered and perhaps even
emulated.
At the risk, however, of entering the paranoiac's clinic it would seem
almost necessary if not even desirable to apply the record discussed
to the situation which confronts us in these days, since biography has
no special significance unless it {259} brings to others some more or
less effective stimulus to better and greater endeavor on their own
part.
If, therefore, the life and record of a man like Leonard Wood is to be
of value to others it must to some extent at least be considered in
relation to the events of his day and time. These events have been
sufficiently startling in the light of all previous history to make it
perhaps permissible to glance over them.
Roughly speaking, since Wood was born transportation has become so
perfected that, in the light of our navy's recent accomplishments with
the seaplane, it is now possible for a human being to go from New York
to London in the same period of time that it took then to go from New
York to New London. It is fair to assume then that the distance of New
York from London so far as human travel goes is or will shortly be the
same as the distance of New York from New London when Wood was born.
Roughly speaking since Wood was born intercourse between persons by
means of conversation has become so perfected that it is now possible
for {260} two people, one in New York and the other in San Francisco,
to converse over the telephone--wireless or otherwise--as easily as
could two persons when Wood was born talk from one room to another
through an open doorway. So that for practical purposes the three or
four thousand mile breadth of this continent is reduced to what then
was a matter of ten feet.
One might continue indefinitely, but these two examples are
sufficient. If San Francisco is no further away than the next room and
if London can be reached as quickly as New London, and if myriads of
other physical changes of this sort have occurred in sixty years, then
it is fair to assume that there has been an equal amount of resulting
psychological change. These changes in the relation of man to his
surroundings and the consequent changes in his relations to himself
and his fellow beings have probably done more to rearrange the world
on a different basis than all the developments of the half-dozen
centuries that preceded the nineteenth.
The elimination of distance, the making of human relation as easy for
continents as for {261} adjoining communities lessens the size of the
world and standardizes the rules that govern life. All intellectual,
political, commercial and military procedures have changed therefore
in the last half century to a greater extent than in hundreds of years
prior thereto. One race in the fifth or sixth grade of civilization
begins to discover what the other race in the first grade is doing.
One commercial country of a lower order finds what it is losing
because of another country of a higher order of commercialism. The
laborers of Barcelona discover what the laborers of New York are
receiving in compensation for the same work. The people of Russia
discover the different political conditions existing amongst
themselves and the people of England and France. The government of the
German Empire sees what a united nation backed by the biggest army on
earth might do in Europe. The men of Austria who have no vote learn
what the men of the United States procure from universal suffrage.
With the belief on every human being's part that the other fellow is
better off than he, with the education which goes on through the
medium {262} of emigration and immigration, with the immense number of
detail short cuts, with the prodigious increase in reading and the
resulting acquirement of the ideas of others, with the myriad of other
matters patent to any one who thinks--with all this and because of it
the methods and procedure of daily life have changed entirely
throughout most of the civilized world since a man who is now nearly
sixty was born.
At the same time the family remains the same; the marriage law is
unchanged; the right of private property is what it was in the days of
ancient Rome. The Constitution of the United States is what it was a
hundred and thirty years ago. Justice is the same as it was in the
time of Alexander. The Golden Rule has not been altered since the time
of Christ. Love, hate, fear and courage stand as they were originally
some time prior to the stone age.
To revert, then, to the simile of the construction of the house, it
seems true that while the plaster and the wall paper--the decorations
of its interior and exterior--change from time to nevertheless on the
whole, as a rule, in the main {263} the passage of the great ages has
not materially changed the supports of the structure--and never will.
In the matter of interior and exterior decoration periods come and go
during which those who build houses decorate according to schools of
art. It is the only belief that any sane and hopeful human being can
have that these schools of decoration for the old house of
civilization in the main steadily improve. If it is not so, then we
have nothing to live for, nothing to which we may look forward. Also,
however, there are fashions and fads running along by the side of
these great schools which are suggestive, amusing or ludicrous, as the
case may be. The cubists and the followers of the old masters paint at
the same time. One, however, dies shortly and the other lives
on--often to be sure affected in some slight way by the grotesque but
honest fad, but never giving way to it.
In the month of November, 1918, greater changes of this nature took
place in the political world than in all the years which preceded that
month since the beginning of the Christian era. {264} In that month
some scores of crowned heads stepped down from their thrones and made
haste to reach shelter as do the rats in a kitchen when the cook turns
on the electric light. At that time something like three hundred
millions of people gave up their particular forms of government and to
a certain extent have been living on since without any substitute.
Some of these crowned heads have sat on their thrones from five to ten
centuries. Some of the governments have lived as long.
It looks like a general tumble of the house of civilization. And yet
most of these millions of people go on getting up in the morning,
going to bed at night and, impossible as it may seem, conducting
commercial enterprises. The kings have gone; the governments have
gone; yet the people remain and their daily life goes on--not as usual
--but in the main the same.
At such a time amidst such stupendous changes it is natural that an
infinite number of plans for reconstruction come forward. All the
century-old panaceas crop up. All the moss-grown plans for a perfect
world are thrust forward in a new {265} dress and naturally gain
credence. And with the increased ease of intercommunication of
individuals and ideas the opportunity not only for many more but for
widely divergent theories to make themselves heard is immeasurably
increased. Thus it becomes possible for a Lenine and a Trotzky to
leave their tenement flats in the slums of New York and proceed to the
palaces of the Czar to show the hundred and twenty millions of
Russians what can be done--and, what is far more to the point, get a
hearing. Thus it becomes possible for the International Workers of the
World in Russia, France, England and America to get together in
conference in Switzerland or elsewhere and discuss how best to destroy
not only governments, but private property, law, order, the family and
all the beams of the great house at one time. Thus it becomes possible
for a host of less radical but none the less pernicious plans for the
good or evil of the world to fly about amongst unstable but
well-meaning minds.
Our country, so remote in miles from the scenes of these upheavals, is
by the development of {266} modern times so near that it is to a
certain extent affected by them.
In a population of one hundred millions in the United States there are
probably one hundred million different views entertained upon each of
the questions of this disturbed period. But a fair classification of
them could be safely made into radicals, moderates and
conservatives--Bolsheviki and theorists, slow-moving and hard-thinking
citizens and stiff-necked reactionaries--all honest and earnest in the
mean. If the Bolsheviki and theorists outnumber the others we shall
have a situation in the United States similar to that in Russia,
Austria and Germany. If the stiff-necked reactionaries outnumber the
others, we shall smother the flame for a time only to have it burst
forth shortly in an infinitely more terrible explosion. If the
slow-moving, hard-thinking citizens outnumber the others, we shall
maintain the main structure of our house so laboriously built
throughout the ages while we change to some extent the nature of the
wall paper and the plaster to adapt it to modern conditions.
Some of us want to achieve the first, some the {267} second and some
the third status; and it would be safe to say that up to the present
in this country the people of the great middle class--the not rich,
the not poor, the steady business man, the ordinary mother of a
family--are in the majority and are trying to adapt themselves to the
new conditions even if only in a slow and somewhat halting manner.
It will help them and therefore help the country to maintain
themselves and itself on an even keel until the storm subsides if they
can have some concrete standard to work by. And as standards in this
sense usually become established by example, by what each of us thinks
the man he looks up to is doing, thinking and planning, it seems fair
to say that the example of a few leading men of the strong sanity
which characterizes General Wood is having now or will have in the
future a great influence for good.
When we are all complaining at the changing conditions, when we see
apparently permanent organizations like the government of
thousand-year-old empires crumbling in a month, when we hear the new-old
theories for a new form of {268} existence, we are somewhat dazed,
somewhat influenced by the outward signs and somewhat skeptical about
our own small but to ourselves important outlook. At such a moment the
voice of one who says in substance: "Do not let superficial changes
--no matter how important they seem--make us forget the law of man and
nature; do not forget that the fittest survives; do not imagine that
wars are over because the most terrible one in history is just
finished; do not hesitate to prepare for your own duties and those of
your country; do not forget that organization and cooperation produce
peace, safety, prosperity and happiness"--when a voice in our land
announces this and its owner proves by his whole life the truth of his
statements, then it pays to listen and inwardly digest.
In spite of all we are being told to the contrary, there need be no
alarm for the future if the country contains enough of such leaders to
make themselves heard above the babel of new cries and beliefs,
notwithstanding the attractive pictures some of these theorists
present. For that reason leaders must always exist where progress is
to be {269} made and the great majority must stand behind them to back
them up.
The effective spear cannot do its work without its steel point, nor
yet without its long handle to force the point home.
This biographical sketch treats of one of these spear points and as
such represents to a greater or less degree all great sane leaders,
though it speaks of but one.
Leonard Wood's personality is one of mental sanity and physical
health. It is non-reactionary and non-visionary. It is military only
in the sense that the army happens to have been his business in life.
His business might have been that of the law, of banking, or leather,
without in the least changing in it. He once said of this:
"The officers of the Army and Navy are the professional servants of
the government in matters pertaining to the military establishment.
They are like engineers, doctors, lawyers, or any other class of
professional men whose services people employ because they are expert
in their line of work. They do not initiate wars. Nine-tenths of all
wars have their origin directly or indirectly in {270} issues arising
out of trade. The people make war; the government declares it; and the
officers of the army and navy are charged with the responsibility of
terminating it with such means and implements as the people may give
them."
His voice raised in behalf of preparedness refers therefore to the
military, because as a Major-General in the United States Army he is
not empowered to speak of other walks in life. Yet his own wide
experience in Cuba and the Philippines in administration, very little
of which was military, is a witness of his belief in preparedness in
an life.
He founded schools where there were none to prepare citizens for the
new Cuban republic. He reorganized and built up customs laws and
regulations where there were only attempts at such in order to prepare
revenue to build roads and finish public works to make a busy and
healthy nation. He reestablished sane marriage laws in order to
prepare a solid community resting upon the basis of the clearly
defined family. In the Philippines he instituted local government to
prepare the islands for self-government.
{271}
None of these acts, nor many others of like nature, had anything to do
with the military. They were all based on the law that a sound and
successful community, whether that community be a village, town or
nation, rests in the final analysis on personal, individual
responsibility which in the group makes a responsible government, that
personal responsibility comes only from preparation, from execution as
a result of preparation and from efficiency which is its synonym.
We study for this or that profession. We cannot practice law unless we
prepare and take a degree. We cannot enter the medical profession
unless we study and take a degree. Wood's great thesis is that we
cannot become sound citizens and, therefore, in the group a sound
nation, unless we study and prepare to be such.
It sounds so simple that one wonders why it is written. And yet for
the last two years under the guise of war necessity this country has
been moving in quite another direction. Instead of personal
responsibility we have been substituting more and more government
responsibility. Instead of individual effort we have been advancing
governmental {272} effort. Instead of natural competition we have been
substituting government regulation. Instead of advancing patriotism,
nationalism, Americanism, we have been letting all these give way to
internationalism. We have not been preparing ourselves as individuals
to assume individual responsibly, but in fact we have been giving up
that responsibility to government.
It is through the sense of the people quickened by such men as Wood
that we shall come back to sounder methods--not to where we were
before. That can never be. If it were so, the world would not be
moving forward. But we shall come back to the basic principle that
individual initiative, energy and the rewards that accrue therefrom
are and always must be the basis for collective initiative, energy and
the rewards thereof; that no collective organization such as a
government can remain virile and effective unless its component
parts--the individuals--remain virile and effective.
The appeal which Wood's life makes to us is toward this responsibility
of the individual _for_ his own work, his own affairs, his own family,
and {273} to his own country, and that has been found throughout
history to be the groundwork, the foundation upon which civilization
rests. Translated into current phrase this means that we must follow
such men as he, keep eternally at work to improve ourselves
individually, to make a good and honest living, to hand on the torch
of patriotism, of sanity and of ever-increasing knowledge by
furnishing to the world the new generations that shall carry on, and
to weld and stabilize the whole structure by building up Americanism
within our borders. In the vocabulary of General Wood this is
translated again into the words: "Prepare! Prepare! Prepare!"
Such has been the career of the New Englander from Cape Cod who has
worked in his own land, in the tropics, in many spheres, at many
problems until at the age of fifty-eight in sound mind and body he
stands firmly still in the prime of life ready for many years yet to
come of service and work for himself, his family and his fellow
countrymen.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Career of Leonard Wood, by Joseph Hamblen Sears