commander of a Massachusetts regiment wrote home to his father: “I wish
people would not write us so many letters of condolence. Our defeat
seemed to trouble them much more than it troubles us. Did people suppose
there were to be no ups and downs? We expect to lose plenty of battles,
but we have enlisted for the war.”
It is just so with every successful reform. While enemies and
half-friends are proclaiming its defeats, those who advocate it are
rejoicing that they have at last got an army into the field to be
defeated. Unless this war is to be an exception to all others, even the
fact of having joined battle is a great deal. It is the first step.
Defeat first; a good many defeats, if you please: victory by and by.
William Wilberforce, writing to a friend in the year 1817, said, “I
continue faithful to the measure of Parliamentary reform brought forward
by Mr. Pitt. I am firmly persuaded that at present a prodigious majority
of the people of this country are adverse to the measure. In my view, so
far from being an objection to the discussion, this is rather a
recommendation.” In 1832 the reform-bill was passed.
In the first Parliamentary debate on the slave-trade, Col. Tarleton, who
boasted to have killed more men than any one in England, pointing to
Wilberforce and others, said, “The inspiration began on that side of the
house;” then turning round, “The revolution has reached to this also,
and reached to the height of fanaticism and frenzy.” The first vote in
the House of Commons, in 1790, after arguments in the affirmative by
Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke, stood, ayes, 88; noes, 163: majority
against the measure, 75. In 1807 the slave-trade was abolished, and in
1834 slavery in the British colonies followed; and even on the very
night when the latter bill passed, the abolitionists were taunted by
Gladstone, the great Demerara slaveholder, with having toiled for forty
years and done nothing. The Roman Catholic relief-bill, establishing
freedom of thought in England, had the same experience. It passed in
1829 by a majority of a hundred and three in the House of Lords, which
had nine months before refused by a majority of forty-five to take up
the question at all.
The English corn-laws went down a quarter of a century ago, after a
similar career of failures. In 1840, there were hundreds of thousands in
England who thought that to attack the corn-laws was to attack the very
foundations of society. Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, said in
Parliament, that “he had heard of many mad things in his life, but,
before God, the idea of repealing the corn-laws was the very maddest
thing of which he had ever heard.” Lord John Russell counselled the
House to refuse to hear evidence on the operation of the corn-laws. Six
years after, in 1846, they were abolished forever.
How Wendell Phillips, in the anti-slavery meetings, used to lash
pro-slavery men with such formidable facts as these,—and to quote how
Clay and Calhoun and Webster and Everett had pledged themselves that
slavery should never be discussed, or had proposed that those who
discussed it should be imprisoned,—while, in spite of them all, the
great reform was moving on, and the abolitionists were forcing
politicians and people to talk, like Sterne’s starling, nothing but
slavery!
We who were trained in the light of these great agitations have learned
their lesson. We expect to march through a series of defeats to victory.
The first thing is, as in the anti-slavery movement, so to arouse the
public mind as to make this the central question. Given this prominence,
and it is enough for this year or for many years to come. Wellington
said that there was no such tragedy as a victory, except a defeat. On
the other hand, the next best thing to a victory is a defeat, for it
shows that the armies are in the field. Without the unsuccessful attempt
of to-day, no success to-morrow.
When Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble came to this country, she was amazed to
find Americans celebrating the battle of Bunker Hill, which she had
always heard claimed as a victory for King George. Such it was doubtless
called; but what we celebrated was the fact that the Americans there
threw up breastworks, stood their ground, fired away their
ammunition,—and were defeated. And thus the reformer, looking at his
failures, often sees in them such a step forward, that they are the
Bunker Hill of a new revolution. Give us plenty of such defeats, and we
can afford to wait a score of years for the victories. They will come.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
4. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.