I have often been requested by my friends to write a sketch book,
containing, first, my autobiography, with some of the incidents of a
life already numbering eighty years and more; secondly, some of the
addresses and papers made by me as a private citizen or public official;
and, thirdly, some of the impressions, solemn, ludicrous and otherwise,
made upon me in my contact with all the forms of the _genus homo_,
principally on the Pacific Coast, where I have resided since 1852--in
Oregon for seventeen years; in Seattle, Washington, thirty-eight years,
plus the dimming future.
I have finally concluded to undertake the delicate task. If it is ever
completed and printed, I fondly hope its readers, if any, may be
interested, if not instructed, by these extracts from a long experience
of contact and conflict with the world.
I say "conflict," because every true life is a battle for financial
independence, social position and the general approval of one's
fellow-men.
If an autobiography could be completed by an accurate and simple
statement of facts, such as one's birth, education and the prominent and
distinguishing events or acts of one's career, it would be a
comparatively easy task. But, even then, too great modesty might incline
to dim the lustre of the paramount facts, or to narrow their
beneficence; while a dominating egotism might overstate their merits
and extent, and exaggerate their beneficial results. Both of these are
to be avoided. But where is the man so calm, so dispassionate and
discriminating as to avoid the engulfing breakers on either hand? If
there could be an impartial statement of the facts I have suggested,
still they would be but a veil encompassing the real man. The true man
would but dimly appear by implication. Character, that invisible entity,
like the soul, constitutes the true man. Any biography that does not
develop the traits, the qualities, of this invisible entity is of no
value. Character is complex and compound. It consists of those
tendencies, inclinations, bents and impulses which come down through the
line of descent and become an integral part of the man, and are
therefore constitutional. These are enlarged and strengthened, or curbed
and diminished or modified, by education, environment and religious
belief. Education possesses no creative power. It acts only on the
faculties God has given. It draws them out, enlarges and strengthens
them--increases their scope and power--and gives them greater breadth
and deeper penetration. By education I do not mean the knowledge derived
from books alone, for Nature is a great teacher and educator. The
continuous woods, the sunless canyon, the ascending ridges and mountain
peaks, as well as the sunlit and flower-bestrewn dells and valleys--in
fact all of the beautiful and variegated scenes in Nature--possess an
educational force and power very much, in my judgment, underestimated.
Man's emotional nature is enlarged--his taste for the beautiful
quickened--and his love for the grand and sublime broadened and deepened
by frequent intercourse with Nature. Byron felt this when he wrote
"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these, our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal."
I have mentioned environment above. It is not only a restraining and
quasi-licensing, but also an educational force. There are, I fear, in
every community, especially on the Pacific Coast, many young persons,
who, lacking in fixed moral principles and habits of life like the
sensitive and impressionable chameleon, assuming the color of the bark
on the tree which for a time is its home--take on the moral coloring of
the society in which they move, and become for a time, at least, an
embodiment of its moral tone. But let the conditions change--let such
persons migrate and become residents of a society of darker moral hue
and of lower moral tone--and, like the chameleon, they almost
immediately take on the darkened coloring and echo the lower tone. If it
is their nature to command, they become leaders in a career of
associated viciousness or infamously distinguished in the line of
individual criminality. The general result is, however, that having
broken loose from their moral moorings, they drift as hopeless,
purposeless wrecks on the sea of life.
During my residence on the Pacific Coast I have known many sad instances
of this degeneration, and our own beautiful and prosperous city has not
been free from such sad examples. It is a true, if not an inspired
saying that "evil communications corrupt good manners." It is more
emphatically true that evil associations corrupt good morals, which was
probably the meaning intended by the translators.
I have mentioned religious belief as an element in the formation of
character. The doctrine of no religious teacher has ever exercised such
a dominating and controlling force in the formation of character in the
civilized world, as have the doctrines of Christ. Before His advent the
learned world received the philosophy of Aristotle, as a sufficient
basis of moral doctrine and civic virtue. But that philosophy, great as
it was, and impinging as it often did on the domain of absolute truth,
has as a system of moral conduct, given way or been subordinated to the
clear, direct yet simple enunciation of Christ, summed up in that grand
and universally applicable rule of individual and civil conduct: "Do
unto others as you would have others do unto you." A character in which
this doctrine forms the basis will always respond to the demands of
honor and right.
These observations must answer as a preface, or, as Horace Greely once
styled such performances, as "preliminary egotism."