It is believed that every just-minded and right-feeling American will
experience a glow of gratification in the assurance that after ages
of indifference, neglect, and even contumelious disparagement, Adam
is at last to have a monument. The proposal to erect a “suitable
memorial” to the good forefather is singularly touching; in a tranquil,
business-like way it gets a tolerably firm footing in the sympathies
and sentiments of the human heart, quietly occupying the citadel of
the affections before the unready conservatisms of habit, prejudice,
and unreason can recover from their surprise to repel it. It will be
difficult for even the most impenitent obstructionist to utter himself
cogently in opposition; the promoters of the filial scheme will have
the argument as much their own way as have the promoters of temperance,
chastity, truth, and honor. The comparison is ominous, but not entirely
discouraging, inasmuch as the builders of monuments are less dependent
on “right reason and the will of God” than the builders of character.
Stones are not laid in logic; even the men of the plains of Shinar,
desperately wrong-headed as in the light of Revelation we now perceive
them to have been, and ghastly incapable of adding an inch to their
moral stature, succeeded in piling up a fairish testimonial to their
own worth, and would no doubt have achieved the top course had it not
happened that suddenly each appeared to be of a different mind, so
that in the multitude of counselors there was little wisdom. Dr. Noah
Webster being dead—heaven rest him!—and the reporters of the press
being easily propitiated with libations of news, there is not likely to
be any tampering with the American tongue that will not be a distinct
advantage to it; so we may reasonably expect the stones of the Adamite
monument to be appropriately inscribed. Many reasons occur why this
ought to be so. Of Adam, even more than of Washington it may justly be
said that he was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts
of his countrymen.” In truth, he was first in everything and all round.
To the patriot the plan of erecting to him a fitting memorial will
especially commend itself: it is an American, and therefore a
superior, plan. Contrast its glossy originality with the threadbare
second-handedness of the project to import Cleopatra’s other needle!
The religious mind will not fail to discover in the proposal a kind of
special providence for the arrest and eventual overthrow of Infidelity,
against whose dark disciples it will lift a finger of permanent
admonition. Can even the most flippant scoffer look up at the reverend
pile and doubt the Mosaic account of creation? If the architect have
only the sagacity to omit the date of erection, and the subscribers
the self-denial to forego the glory of displaying their names on it,
will not posterity naturally come to think that he whose virtues it
commemorates “reposes beneath”? True, the wily scientist, alarmed
for his theory, or touched with a sentiment of filial piety as _he_
understands it, may countercheck by building a similar monument to the
recent Ourang-Outang, the remote Ascidian, or the ultimate Bathybius.
He may even have the prudent audacity to put up a stone to the memory
of that unthinkable, and therefore irrefutable, Missing Link—as the
groping pagan of antiquity with his single gleam of spiritual light
erected an altar “To the Unknown God.” If the hardy Evolutionist
do anything of this kind it will be a clear infringement of the
_leges non scriptæ_ of copyright. Justice, religion, and reason alike
will dictate the upsetting of his profane memorial with as little
compunction as the wave felt for Caliban’s designs in the sea-sand.
That the Adam monument project is seriously entertained there can be no
intelligent doubt: in the list of its founders is publicly mentioned a
name which, for better or for worse, is inseparably linked with that of
the Great Progenitor—the name of Mark Twain, whose sobs at the paternal
tomb have reverberated through the world with an authenticating energy
that makes the erection of the monument a matter of comparatively
trifling importance, after all.
1878.