It is a rule that holds in economy as well as in hydraulics that you must
have a source higher than your tap. The mills, the shops, the theatre and
the caucus, the college and the church, have all found out this secret.
The sailors sail by chronometers that do not lose two or three seconds
in a year, ever since Newton explained to Parliament that the way to
improve navigation was to get good watches, and to offer public premiums
for a better time-keeper than any then in use. The manufacturers rely on
turbines of hydraulic perfection; the carpet-mill, on mordants and dyes
which exhaust the skill of the chemist; the calico print, on designers
of genius who draw the wages of artists, not of artisans. Wedgwood,
the eminent potter, bravely took the sculptor Flaxman to counsel, who
said, “Send to Italy, search the museums for the forms of old Etruscan
vases, urns, water-pots, domestic and sacrificial vessels of all kinds.”
They built great works and called their manufacturing village Etruria.
Flaxman, with his Greek taste, selected and combined the loveliest
forms, which were executed in English clay; sent boxes of these as
gifts to every court of Europe, and formed the taste of the world. It
was a renaissance of the breakfast-table and china-closet. The brave
manufacturers made their fortune. The jewellers imitated the revived
models in silver and gold.
The theatre avails itself of the best talent of poet, of painter, and of
amateur of taste, to make the _ensemble_ of dramatic effect. The marine
insurance office has its mathematical counsellor to settle averages; the
life-assurance, its table of annuities. The wine-merchant has his analyst
and taster, the more exquisite the better. He has also, I fear, his debts
to the chemist as well as to the vineyard.
Our modern wealth stands on a few staples, and the interest nations took
in our war was exasperated by the importance of the cotton trade. And
what is cotton? One plant out of some two hundred thousand known to the
botanist, vastly the larger part of which are reckoned weeds. What is a
weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered,—every one of
the two hundred thousand probably yet to be of utility in the arts. As
Bacchus of the vine, Ceres of the wheat, as Arkwright and Whitney were
the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to
every plant. There is not a property in Nature but a mind is born to
seek and find it. For it is not the plants or the animals, innumerable
as they are, nor the whole magazine of material nature that can give
the sum of power, but the infinite applicability of these things in the
hands of thinking man, every new application being equivalent to a new
material.[228]
Our sleepy civilization, ever since Roger Bacon and Monk Schwartz
invented gunpowder, has built its whole art of war, all fortification by
land and sea, all drill and military education, on that one compound,—all
is an extension of a gun-barrel,—and is very scornful about bows and
arrows, and reckons Greeks and Romans and Middle Ages little better than
Indians and bow-and-arrow times. As if the earth, water, gases, lightning
and caloric had not a million energies, the discovery of any one of
which could change the art of war again, and put an end to war by the
exterminating forces man can apply.
Now, if this is true in all the useful and in the fine arts, that the
direction must be drawn from a superior source or there will be no good
work, does it hold less in our social and civil life?
In our popular politics you may note that each aspirant who rises above
the crowd, however at first making his obedient apprenticeship in party
tactics, if he have sagacity, soon learns that it is by no means by
obeying the vulgar weathercock of his party, the resentments, the fears
and whims of it, that real power is gained, but that he must often face
and resist the party, and abide by his resistance, and put them in
fear; that the only title to their permanent respect, and to a larger
following, is to see for himself what is the real public interest, and
to stand for that;—that is a principle, and all the cheering and hissing
of the crowd must by and by accommodate itself to it. Our times easily
afford you very good examples.
The law of water and all fluids is true of wit. Prince Metternich said,
“Revolutions begin in the best heads and run steadily down to the
populace.” It is a very old observation; not truer because Metternich
said it, and not less true.
There have been revolutions which were not in the interest of feudalism
and barbarism, but in that of society. And these are distinguished not
by the numbers of the combatants nor the numbers of the slain, but by
the motive. No interest now attaches to the wars of York and Lancaster,
to the wars of German, French and Spanish emperors, which were only
dynastic wars, but to those in which a principle was involved. These are
read with passionate interest and never lose their pathos by time. When
the cannon is aimed by ideas, when men with religious convictions are
behind it, when men die for what they live for, and the mainspring that
works daily urges them to hazard all, then the cannon articulates its
explosions with the voice of a man, then the rifle seconds the cannon and
the fowling-piece the rifle, and the women make the cartridges, and all
shoot at one mark; then gods join in the combat; then poets are born, and
the better code of laws at last records the victory.
Now the culmination of these triumphs of humanity—and which did virtually
include the extinction of slavery—is the planting of America.
At every moment some one country more than any other represents the
sentiment and the future of mankind. None will doubt that America
occupies this place in the opinion of nations, as is proved by the fact
of the vast immigration into this country from all the nations of Western
and Central Europe. And when the adventurers have planted themselves and
looked about, they send back all the money they can spare to bring their
friends.
Meantime they find this country just passing through a great crisis in
its history, as necessary as lactation or dentition or puberty to the
human individual. We are in these days settling for ourselves and our
descendants questions which, as they shall be determined in one way or
the other, will make the peace and prosperity or the calamity of the next
ages. The questions of Education, of Society, of Labor, the direction of
talent, of character, the nature and habits of the American, may well
occupy us, and more the question of Religion.
The new conditions of mankind in America are really favorable to
progress, the removal of absurd restrictions and antique inequalities.
The mind is always better the more it is used, and here it is kept
in practice. The humblest is daily challenged to give his opinion on
practical questions, and while civil and social freedom exists, nonsense
even has a favorable effect. Cant is good to provoke common sense....
The trance-mediums, the rebel paradoxes, exasperate the common sense. The
wilder the paradox, the more sure is Punch to put it in the pillory.
The lodging the power in the people, as in republican forms, has the
effect of holding things closer to common sense; for a court or an
aristocracy, which must always be a small minority, can more easily run
into follies than a republic, which has too many observers—each with a
vote in his hand—to allow its head to be turned by any kind of nonsense:
since hunger, thirst, cold, the cries of children and debt are always
holding the masses hard to the essential duties.
One hundred years ago the American people attempted to carry out the bill
of political rights to an almost ideal perfection. They have made great
strides in that direction since. They are now proceeding, instructed by
their success and by their many failures, to carry out, not the bill of
rights, but the bill of human duties.
And look what revolution that attempt involves. Hitherto government has
been that of the single person or of the aristocracy. In this country the
attempt to resist these elements, it is asserted, must throw us into the
government not quite of mobs, but in practice of an inferior class of
professional politicians, who by means of newspapers and caucuses really
thrust their unworthy minority into the place of the old aristocracy on
the one side, and of the good, industrious, well-taught but unambitious
population on the other, win the posts of power and give their direction
to affairs. Hence liberal congresses and legislatures ordain, to the
surprise of the people, equivocal, interested and vicious measures.
The men themselves are suspected and charged with lobbying and being
lobbied. No measure is attempted for itself, but the opinion of the
people is courted in the first place, and the measures are perfunctorily
carried through as secondary. We do not choose our own candidate, no, nor
any other man’s first choice,—but only the available candidate, whom,
perhaps, no man loves. We do not speak what we think, but grope after
the practicable and available. Instead of character, there is a studious
exclusion of character. The people are feared and flattered. They are
not reprimanded. The country is governed in bar-rooms, and in the mind
of bar-rooms. The low can best win the low, and each aspirant for power
vies with his rival which can stoop lowest, and depart widest from
himself.
The partisan on moral, even on religious questions, will choose a proven
rogue who can answer the tests, over an honest, affectionate, noble
gentleman; the partisan ceasing to be a man that he may be a sectarian.
The spirit of our political economy is low and degrading. The precious
metals are not so precious as they are esteemed. Man exists for his own
sake, and not to add a laborer to the state. The spirit of our political
action, for the most part, considers nothing less than the sacredness of
man. Party sacrifices man to the measure.[229]
We have seen the great party of property and education in the country
drivelling and huckstering away, for views of party fear or advantage,
every principle of humanity and the dearest hopes of mankind; the
trustees of power only energetic when mischief could be done, imbecile as
corpses when evil was to be prevented.
Our great men succumb so far to the forms of the day as to peril their
integrity for the sake of adding to the weight of their personal
character the authority of office, or making a real government titular.
Our politics are full of adventurers, who having by education and social
innocence a good repute in the state, break away from the law of honesty
and think they can afford to join the devil’s party. ’Tis odious, these
offenders in high life. You rally to the support of old charities and the
cause of literature, and there, to be sure, are these brazen faces. In
this innocence you are puzzled how to meet them; must shake hands with
them, under protest.[230] We feel toward them as the minister about the
Cape Cod farm,—in the old time when the minister was still invited, in
the spring, to make a prayer for the blessing of a piece of land,—the
good pastor being brought to the spot, stopped short: “No, this land does
not want a prayer, this land wants manure.”
“’Tis virtue which they want, and wanting it,
Honor no garment to their backs can fit.”[231]
Parties keep the old names, but exhibit a surprising fugacity in creeping
out of one snake-skin into another of equal ignominy and lubricity, and
the grasshopper on the turret of Faneuil Hall gives a proper hint of the
men below.
Everything yields. The very glaciers are viscous, or relegate into
conformity, and the stiffest patriots falter and compromise; so that
_will_ cannot be depended on to save us.
How rare are acts of will! We are all living according to custom; we do
as other people do, and shrink from an act of our own. Every such act
makes a man famous, and we can all count the few cases—half a dozen in
our time—when a public man ventured to act as he thought without waiting
for orders or for public opinion. John Quincy Adams was a man of an
audacious independence that always kept the public curiosity alive in
regard to what he might do. None could predict his word, and a whole
congress could not gainsay it when it was spoken. General Jackson was a
man of will, and his phrase on one memorable occasion, “I will take the
responsibility,” is a proverb ever since.[232]
The American marches with a careless swagger to the height of power,
very heedless of his own liberty or of other people’s, in his reckless
confidence that he can have all he wants, risking all the prized charters
of the human race, bought with battles and revolutions and religion,
gambling them all away for a paltry selfish gain.
He sits secure in the possession of his vast domain, rich beyond all
experience in resources, sees its inevitable force unlocking itself in
elemental order day by day, year by year; looks from his coal-fields, his
wheat-bearing prairie, his gold-mines, to his two oceans on either side,
and feels the security that there can be no famine in a country reaching
through so many latitudes, no want that cannot be supplied, no danger
from any excess of importation of art or learning into a country of such
native strength, such immense digestive power.
In proportion to the personal ability of each man, he feels the
invitation and career which the country opens to him. He is easily fed
with wheat and game, with Ohio wine, but his brain is also pampered by
finer draughts, by political power and by the power in the railroad
board, in the mills, or the banks. This elevates his spirits, and
gives, of course, an easy self-reliance that makes him self-willed and
unscrupulous.
I think this levity is a reaction on the people from the extraordinary
advantages and invitations of their condition. When we are most disturbed
by their rash and immoral voting, it is not malignity, but recklessness.
They are careless of politics, because they do not entertain the
possibility of being seriously caught in meshes of legislation. They
feel strong and irresistible. They believe that what they have enacted
they can repeal if they do not like it. But one may run a risk once
too often. They stay away from the polls, saying that one vote can do
no good! Or they take another step, and say ‘One vote can do no harm!’
and vote for something which they do not approve, because their party
or set votes for it. Of course this puts them in the power of any party
having a steady interest to promote which does not conflict manifestly
with the pecuniary interest of the voters. But if they should come to be
interested in themselves and in their career, they would no more stay
away from the election than from their own counting-room or the house of
their friend.
The people are right-minded enough on ethical questions, but they
must pay their debts, and must have the means of living well, and not
pinching. So it is useless to rely on them to go to a meeting, or to
give a vote, if any check from this must-have-the-money side arises.
If a customer looks grave at their newspaper, or damns their member of
Congress, they take another newspaper, and vote for another man. They
must have money, for a certain style of living fast becomes necessary;
they must take wine at the hotel, first, for the look of it, and second,
for the purpose of sending the bottle to two or three gentlemen at the
table; and presently because they have got the taste, and do not feel
that they have dined without it.
The record of the election now and then alarms people by the all but
unanimous choice of a rogue and a brawler. But how was it done? What
lawless mob burst into the polls and threw in these hundreds of ballots
in defiance of the magistrates? This was done by the very men you
know,—the mildest, most sensible, best-natured people. The only account
of this is, that they have been scared or warped into some association in
their mind of the candidate with the interest of their trade or of their
property.
Whilst each cabal urges its candidate, and at last brings, with cheers
and street demonstrations, men whose names are a knell to all hope of
progress, the good and wise are hidden in their active retirements, and
are quite out of question.
“These we must join to wake, for these are of the strain
That justice dare defend, and will the age maintain.”[233]
Yet we know, all over this country, men of integrity, capable of action
and of affairs, with the deepest sympathy in all that concerns the
public, mortified by the national disgrace, and quite capable of any
sacrifice except of their honor.
Faults in the working appear in our system, as in all, but they suggest
their own remedies. After every practical mistake out of which any
disaster grows, the people wake and correct it with energy. And any
disturbances in politics, in civil or foreign wars, sober them, and
instantly show more virtue and conviction in the popular vote. In each
new threat of faction the ballot has been, beyond expectation, right and
decisive.
It is ever an inspiration, God only knows whence; a sudden, undated
perception of eternal right coming into and correcting things that were
wrong; a perception that passes through thousands as readily as through
one.
The gracious lesson taught by science to this country is that the history
of Nature from first to last is incessant advance from less to more, from
rude to finer organization, the globe of matter thus conspiring with
the principle of undying hope in man. Nature works in immense time, and
spends individuals and races prodigally to prepare new individuals and
races. The lower kinds are one after one extinguished; the higher forms
come in.[234] The history of civilization, or the refining of certain
races to wonderful power of performance, is analogous; but the best
civilization yet is only valuable as a ground of hope.
Ours is the country of poor men. Here is practical democracy; here is
the human race poured out over the continent to do itself justice; all
mankind in its shirt-sleeves; not grimacing like poor rich men in cities,
pretending to be rich, but unmistakably taking off its coat to hard work,
when labor is sure to pay.[235] This through all the country. For really,
though you see wealth in the capitals, it is only a sprinkling of rich
men in the cities and at sparse points; the bulk of the population is
poor. In Maine, nearly every man is a lumberer. In Massachusetts, every
twelfth man is a shoemaker, and the rest, millers, farmers, sailors,
fishermen.
Well, the result is, instead of the doleful experience of the European
economist, who tells us, “In almost all countries the condition of the
great body of the people is poor and miserable,” here that same great
body has arrived at a sloven plenty,—ham and corn-cakes, tight roof and
coals enough have been attained; an unbuttoned comfort, not clean, not
thoughtful, far from polished, without dignity in his repose; the man
awkward and restless if he have not something to do, but honest and kind
for the most part, understanding his own rights and stiff to maintain
them, and disposed to give his children a better education than he
received.
The steady improvement of the public schools in the cities and the
country enables the farmer or laborer to secure a precious primary
education. It is rare to find a born American who cannot read and write.
The facility with which clubs are formed by young men for discussion of
social, political and intellectual topics secures the notoriety of the
questions.
Our institutions, of which the town is the unit, are all educational, for
responsibility educates fast. The town-meeting is, after the high-school,
a higher school.[236] The legislature, to which every good farmer goes
once on trial, is a superior academy.
The result appears in the power of invention, the freedom of thinking,
in the readiness for reforms, eagerness for novelty, even for all the
follies of false science; in the antipathy to secret societies, in the
predominance of the democratic party in the politics of the Union, and in
the voice of the public even when irregular and vicious,—the voice of
mobs, the voice of lynch law,—because it is thought to be, on the whole,
the verdict, though badly spoken, of the greatest number.
All this forwardness and self-reliance, cover self-government; proceed
on the belief that as the people have made a government they can make
another; that their union and law are not in their memory, but in their
blood and condition. If they unmake a law, they can easily make a new
one. In Mr. Webster’s imagination the American Union was a huge Prince
Rupert’s drop, which will snap into atoms if so much as the smallest end
be shivered off. Now the fact is quite different from this. The people
are loyal, law-abiding. They prefer order, and have no taste for misrule
and uproar.
America was opened after the feudal mischief was spent, and so the people
made a good start. We began well. No inquisition here, no kings, no
nobles, no dominant church. Here heresy has lost its terrors. We have
eight or ten religions in every large town, and the most that comes of it
is a degree or two on the thermometer of fashion; a pew in a particular
church gives an easier entrance to the subscription ball.
We began with freedom, and are defended from shocks now for a century
by the facility with which through popular assemblies every necessary
measure of reform can instantly be carried. A congress is a standing
insurrection, and escapes the violence of accumulated grievance. As the
globe keeps its identity by perpetual change, so our civil system, by
perpetual appeal to the people and acceptance of its reforms.
The government is acquainted with the opinions of all classes, knows the
leading men in the middle class, knows the leaders of the humblest class.
The President comes near enough to these; if he does not, the caucus
does, the primary ward and town-meeting, and what is important does reach
him.
The men, the women, all over this land shrill their exclamations of
impatience and indignation at what is short-coming or is unbecoming in
the government,—at the want of humanity, of morality,—ever on broad
grounds of general justice, and not on the class-feeling which narrows
the perception of English, French, German people at home.
In this fact, that we are a nation of individuals, that we have a highly
intellectual organization, that we can see and feel moral distinctions,
and that on such an organization sooner or later the moral laws must
tell, to such ears must speak,—in this is our hope. For if the prosperity
of this country has been merely the obedience of man to the guiding of
Nature,—of great rivers and prairies,—yet is there fate above fate, if we
choose to spread this language; or if there is fate in corn and cotton,
so is there fate in thought,—this, namely, that the largest thought and
the widest love are born to victory, and must prevail.
The revolution is the work of no man, but the eternal effervescence of
Nature. It never did not work. And we say that revolutions beat all the
insurgents, be they never so determined and politic; that the great
interests of mankind, being at every moment through ages in favor of
justice and the largest liberty, will always, from time to time, gain on
the adversary and at last win the day. Never country had such a fortune,
as men call fortune, as this, in its geography, its history, and in its
majestic possibilities.
We have much to learn, much to correct,—a great deal of lying vanity.
The spread eagle must fold his foolish wings and be less of a peacock;
must keep his wings to carry the thunderbolt when he is commanded. We
must realize our rhetoric and our rituals. Our national flag is not
affecting, as it should be, because it does not represent the population
of the United States, but some Baltimore or Chicago or Cincinnati or
Philadelphia caucus; not union or justice, but selfishness and cunning.
If we never put on the liberty-cap until we were freemen by love and
self-denial, the liberty-cap would mean something. I wish to see America
not like the old powers of the earth, grasping, exclusive and narrow,
but a benefactor such as no country ever was, hospitable to all nations,
legislating for all nationalities. Nations were made to help each other
as much as families were; and all advancement is by ideas, and not by
brute force or mechanic force.
In this country, with our practical understanding, there is, at present,
a great sensualism, a headlong devotion to trade and to the conquest of
the continent,—to each man as large a share of the same as he can carve
for himself,—an extravagant confidence in our talent and activity, which
becomes, whilst successful, a scornful materialism,—but with the fault,
of course, that it has no depth, no reserved force whereon to fall back
when a reverse comes.
That repose which is the ornament and ripeness of man is not American.
That repose which indicates a faith in the laws of the universe,—a faith
that they will fulfil themselves, and are not to be impeded, transgressed
or accelerated. Our people are too slight and vain. They are easily
elated and easily depressed. See how fast they extend the fleeting
fabric of their trade,—not at all considering the remote reaction and
bankruptcy, but with the same abandonment to the moment and the facts of
the hour as the Esquimau who sells his bed in the morning. Our people act
on the moment, and from external impulse. They all lean on some other,
and this superstitiously, and not from insight of his merit. They follow
a fact; they follow success, and not skill. Therefore, as soon as the
success stops and the admirable man blunders, they quit him; already they
remember that they long ago suspected his judgment, and they transfer
the repute of judgment to the next prosperous person who has not yet
blundered. Of course this levity makes them as easily despond. It seems
as if history gave no account of any society in which despondency came so
readily to heart as we see it and feel it in ours. Young men at thirty
and even earlier lose all spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their
first enterprise throw up the game.
The source of mischief is the extreme difficulty with which men are
roused from the torpor of every day. Blessed is all that agitates the
mass, breaks up this torpor, and begins motion. _Corpora non agunt
nisi soluta_; the chemical rule is true in mind. Contrast, change,
interruption, are necessary to new activity and new combinations.
If a temperate wise man should look over our American society, I think
the first danger that would excite his alarm would be the European
influences on this country. We buy much of Europe that does not make us
better men; and mainly the expensiveness which is ruining that country.
We import trifles, dancers, singers, laces, books of patterns, modes,
gloves and cologne, manuals of Gothic architecture, steam-made ornaments.
America is provincial. It is an immense Halifax. See the secondariness
and aping of foreign and English life, that runs through this country, in
building, in dress, in eating, in books. Every village, every city, has
its architecture, its costume, its hotel, its private house, its church,
from England.
Our politics threaten her. Her manners threaten us. Life is grown and
growing so costly that it threatens to kill us. A man is coming, here
as there, to value himself on what he can buy. Worst of all, his expense
is not his own, but a far-off copy of Osborne House or the Elysée. The
tendency of this is to make all men alike; to extinguish individualism
and choke up all the channels of inspiration from God in man. We lose our
invention and descend into imitation. A man no longer conducts his own
life. It is manufactured for him. The tailor makes your dress; the baker
your bread; the upholsterer, from an imported book of patterns, your
furniture; the Bishop of London your faith.
In the planters of this country, in the seventeenth century, the
conditions of the country, combined with the impatience of arbitrary
power which they brought from England, forced them to a wonderful
personal independence and to a certain heroic planting and trading. Later
this strength appeared in the solitudes of the West, where a man is made
a hero by the varied emergencies of his lonely farm, and neighborhoods
must combine against the Indians, or the horse-thieves, or the river
rowdies, by organizing themselves into committees of vigilance. Thus
the land and sea educate the people, and bring out presence of mind,
self-reliance, and hundred-handed activity. These are the people for
an emergency. They are not to be surprised, and can find a way out of
any peril. This rough and ready force becomes them, and makes them
fit citizens and civilizers. But if we found them clinging to English
traditions, which are graceful enough at home, as the English Church, and
entailed estates, and distrust of popular election, we should feel this
reactionary, and absurdly out of place.
Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here
let there be what the earth waits for,—exalted manhood. What this
country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its
materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve
man, and not man corn.
They who find America insipid—they for whom London and Paris have spoiled
their own homes—can be spared to return to those cities. I not only see a
career at home for more genius than we have, but for more than there is
in the world.
The class of which I speak make themselves merry without duties. They sit
in decorated club-houses in the cities, and burn tobacco and play whist;
in the country they sit idle in stores and bar-rooms, and burn tobacco,
and gossip and sleep. They complain of the flatness of American life;
“America has no illusions, no romance.” They have no perception of its
destiny. They are not Americans.
The felon is the logical extreme of the epicure and coxcomb. Selfish
luxury is the end of both, though in one it is decorated with
refinements, and in the other brutal. But my point now is, that this
spirit is not American.
Our young men lack idealism. A man for success must not be pure idealist,
then he will practically fail; but he must have ideas, must obey ideas,
or he might as well be the horse he rides on. A man does not want to be
sun-dazzled, sun-blind; but every man must have glimmer enough to keep
him from knocking his head against the walls. And it is in the interest
of civilization and good society and friendship, that I dread to hear
of well-born, gifted and amiable men, that they have this indifference,
disposing them to this despair.
Of no use are the men who study to do exactly as was done before, who
can never understand that to-day is a new day. There never was such
a combination as this of ours, and the rules to meet it are not set
down in any history. We want men of original perception and original
action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality,—namely, to
considerations of benefit to the human race,—can act in the interest of
civilization; men of elastic, men of moral mind, who can live in the
moment and take a step forward. Columbus was no backward-creeping crab,
nor was Martin Luther, nor John Adams, nor Patrick Henry, nor Thomas
Jefferson; and the Genius or Destiny of America is no log or sluggard,
but a man incessantly advancing, as the shadow on the dial’s face, or the
heavenly body by whose light it is marked.
The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of
grace, of accomplishment, of social power,—the gentleman. What hinders
that he be born here? The new times need a new man, the complemental man,
whom plainly this country must furnish. Freer swing his arms; farther
pierce his eyes; more forward and forthright his whole build and rig than
the Englishman’s, who, we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone.
’Tis certain that our civilization is yet incomplete, it has not
ended nor given sign of ending in a hero. ’Tis a wild democracy; the
riot of mediocrities and dishonesties and fudges. Ours is the age of
the omnibus, of the third person plural, of Tammany Hall. Is it that
Nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it if it is to be
multiplied into millions? The beautiful is never plentiful. Then Illinois
and Indiana, with their spawning loins, must needs be ordinary.
It is not a question whether we shall be a multitude of people. No, that
has been conspicuously decided already; but whether we shall be the new
nation, the guide and lawgiver of all nations, as having clearly chosen
and firmly held the simplest and best rule of political society.
Now, if the spirit which years ago armed this country against rebellion,
and put forth such gigantic energy in the charity of the Sanitary
Commission, could be waked to the conserving and creating duty of making
the laws just and humane, it were to enroll a great constituency of
religious, self-respecting, brave, tender, faithful obeyers of duty,
lovers of men, filled with loyalty to each other, and with the simple
and sublime purpose of carrying out in private and in public action the
desire and need of mankind.
Here is the post where the patriot should plant himself; here the altar
where virtuous young men, those to whom friendship is the dearest
covenant, should bind each other to loyalty; where genius should kindle
its fires and bring forgotten truth to the eyes of men.
It is not possible to extricate yourself from the questions in which your
age is involved. Let the good citizen perform the duties put on him here
and now. It is not by heads reverted to the dying Demosthenes, or to
Luther, or to Wallace, or to George Fox, or to George Washington, that
you can combat the dangers and dragons that beset the United States at
this time. I believe this cannot be accomplished by dunces or idlers,
but requires docility, sympathy, and religious receiving from higher
principles; for liberty, like religion, is a short and hasty fruit,
and like all power subsists only by new rallyings on the source of
inspiration.
Power can be generous. The very grandeur of the means which offer
themselves to us should suggest grandeur in the direction of our
expenditure. If our mechanic arts are unsurpassed in usefulness, if we
have taught the river to make shoes and nails and carpets, and the bolt
of heaven to write our letters like a Gillot pen, let these wonders work
for honest humanity, for the poor, for justice, genius and the public
good.[237] Let us realize that this country, the last found, is the great
charity of God to the human race.
America should affirm and establish that in no instance shall the guns
go in advance of the present right. We shall not make _coups d’état_
and afterwards explain and pay, but shall proceed like William Penn, or
whatever other Christian or humane person who treats with the Indian or
the foreigner, on principles of honest trade and mutual advantage. We
can see that the Constitution and the law in America must be written
on ethical principles, so that the entire power of the spiritual world
shall hold the citizen loyal, and repel the enemy as by force of nature.
It should be mankind’s bill of rights, or Royal Proclamation of the
Intellect ascending the throne, announcing its good pleasure that now,
once for all, the world shall be governed by common sense and law of
morals.
The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis
of all legislation. ’Tis not free institutions, ’tis not a democracy
that is the end,—no, but only the means. Morality is the object of
government. We want a state of things in which crime will not pay; a
state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible
with the liberty of every other man.
Humanity asks that government shall not be ashamed to be tender and
paternal, but that democratic institutions shall be more thoughtful for
the interests of women, for the training of children, and for the welfare
of sick and unable persons, and serious care of criminals, than was ever
any the best government of the Old World.
The genius of the country has marked out our true policy,—opportunity.
Opportunity of civil rights, of education, of personal power, and not
less of wealth; doors wide open. If I could have it,—free trade with all
the world without toll or custom-houses, invitation as we now make to
every nation, to every race and skin, white men, red men, yellow men,
black men; hospitality of fair field and equal laws to all.[238] Let them
compete, and success to the strongest, the wisest and the best. The land
is wide enough, the soil has bread for all.
I hope America will come to have its pride in being a nation of servants,
and not of the served. How can men have any other ambition where the
reason has not suffered a disastrous eclipse? Whilst every man can say I
serve,—to the whole extent of my being I apply my faculty to the service
of mankind in my especial place,—he therein sees and shows a reason for
his being in the world, and is not a moth or incumbrance in it.
The distinction and end of a soundly constituted man is his labor. Use
is inscribed on all his faculties. Use is the end to which he exists. As
the tree exists for its fruit, so a man for his work. A fruitless plant,
an idle animal, does not stand in the universe. They are all toiling,
however secretly or slowly, in the province assigned them, and to a use
in the economy of the world; the higher and more complex organizations to
higher and more catholic service. And man seems to play, by his instincts
and activity, a certain part that even tells on the general face of
the planet, drains swamps, leads rivers into dry countries for their
irrigation, perforates forests and stony mountain chains with roads,
hinders the inroads of the sea on the continent, as if dressing the globe
for happier races.
On the whole, I know that the cosmic results will be the same, whatever
the daily events may be. Happily we are under better guidance than
of statesmen. Pennsylvania coal-mines and New York shipping and free
labor, though not idealists, gravitate in the ideal direction. Nothing
less large than justice can keep them in good temper. Justice satisfies
everybody, and justice alone. No monopoly must be foisted in, no weak
party or nationality sacrificed, no coward compromise conceded to a
strong partner. Every one of these is the seed of vice, war and national
disorganization. It is our part to carry out to the last the ends of
liberty and justice. We shall stand, then, for vast interests; north
and south, east and west will be present to our minds, and our vote
will be as if they voted, and we shall know that our vote secures the
foundations of the state, good will, liberty and security of traffic and
of production, and mutual increase of good will in the great interests.
Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course of
events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little wherry is
taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows the way, and
has the force to draw men and states and planets to their good.
Such and so potent is this high method by which the Divine Providence
sends the chiefest benefits under the mask of calamities, that I do not
think we shall by any perverse ingenuity prevent the blessing.
In seeing this guidance of events, in seeing this felicity without
example that has rested on the Union thus far, I find new confidence for
the future.
I could heartily wish that our will and endeavor were more active parties
to the work. But I see in all directions the light breaking. Trade and
government will not alone be the favored aims of mankind, but every
useful, every elegant art, every exercise of the imagination, the height
of reason, the noblest affection, the purest religion will find their
home in our institutions, and write our laws for the benefit of men.[239]