THE MAN OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
In Chicago, in Lincoln Park, there is a wonderful statue. A big,
slouching form, loose yet powerful; ungraceful, yet splendid because
it seems to be able to bear upon its Atlantean shoulders the burdens
of a mighty people. The big hands, the big feet, the great, stooped
shoulders tell the same story of commonness and strength.
Then you look at the face. You find it difficult to keep your hat upon
your head.
What a countenance! How homely, yet how beautiful; how stern, yet how
gentle; how inflexible, yet how infinitely merciful; how powerful, yet
how tender; how common, yet how sublime!
Search the world through and you will find no greater statue than
this--the statue of Abraham Lincoln, by St. Gaudens. It is Lincoln; but
it is also a great deal more. It is the glorification of the Common
Man--the apotheosis of Democracy.
As you look at that face and that figure you feel the history of the
human race, the long, the bloody, the agonized struggle of the masses
of mankind for freedom and light. You see the whole history of your
own country, founded by common men for the common people, founded upon
freedom and equality and justice.
Here is no vain haughtiness, no arrogance, no supercilious looking
down, no cringing looking upward, nothing that suggests class or rank
or aristocracy. Here is Democracy, the Common Man exalted in the
dignity of his own rights, in the splendor of the recognition of the
equal rights of all others; the Common Man, free and enlightened,
strong and just.
The statue is in the attitude of preparation to speak. What is that
brain formulating for those lips to utter?
The expression of brow and eyes and lips leaves no doubt. It is
some thought of freedom and justice, some one of those many mighty
democratic thoughts which will echo forever in the minds and hearts of
men.
Let us recall three of those thoughts:
“The authors of the Declaration of Independence meant it to be a
stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free
people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”
“That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and
that government of the people, by the people, and for the people
shall not perish from the earth.”
“I say that no man is good enough to govern another man without that
other man’s consent. I say that this is the leading principle, the
sheet-anchor.”
These were the ideas that found this country a few ragged settlements
trembling between a hostile sea and a hostile wilderness and built
it up to its present estate of democratic grandeur. Not tyranny,
not murder disguised as war, not robbery disguised as “benevolent
guidance,” not any of the false and foolish ideas of imperialism
and aristocracy. But ideas of peace, of equal rights for all, of
self-government.
Our era, conscious of the mighty works that can be wrought, conscious
that we are all under sentence of speedy death, eagerly seeks out
the young man, the obscure man. It has need of all powers and all
talents, especially of the talents for creating, organizing, directing.
Instead of it being true that a good man doesn’t have a chance any
more, the reverse is true--inferior men have chances greatly beyond
their powers, and immature men are forced into important commands, and
discredited and ruined, so impatient is the pressure for men to do the
world’s important work. This is the day of the man who wants a chance.
It is also a day in which we hear a great deal about the “unruly
class.” This phrase is employed to designate some vague element in the
masses of the people that is naturally turbulent and ever looking about
for an excuse to “rise” and “burn, slay, kill.”
You may search through history page by page, line by line, and you
will find no trace of the doings of this alleged “unruly class.” The
more you read the more you will be struck by the universal and most
tenacious love of quiet and order in the masses of mankind. You will
see them robbed, oppressed, murdered wholesale upon mere caprice, the
victims of all manner of misery. Your cheeks will burn and your blood
run hot as you read. And you will note with wonder that they endured
with seemingly limitless patience until they were eating grass by the
wayside. Then, once in a while, but only once in a while, they “rose.”
All the machinery of law and order was in the hands of the oppressors,
so they were compelled to resort to violence. But even then they
established new machinery or patched up the old as quickly as possible.
_Every society that has been overturned from, within has been
overturned by misrule; never by the unruly._
No; the real “unruly classes” are these “respectabilities” with the
“pulls,” and these governmental officers who are “pulled”;--they
violate the laws; they purchase or enact or enforce unjust legislation;
they abuse the confidence and the tolerant good nature of the people;
they misuse the machinery of justice.
Turn to your history again. You find that every once in a while the
dominant element has begun to talk about the “unruly class,” to express
fear of “risings,” of mob violence. And in every instance you find
that the real reason for this denunciation and dread was that the
dominant element had begun to be acutely conscious of its own misdeeds.
It feared that its own weapons of injustice would be turned against
itself by outraged justice. It feared that its punishment would be in
proportion to its crimes.
Gladstone said that the Nineteenth century was summed up in the phrase,
“Unhand me!” Its science struck off the shackles of ignorance upon the
intellect--shackles of error, of false reverence, of superstitions
about the causes of the inequalities of men. Thus, the Nineteenth
century made it possible for this to be the Age of the Common Man. Not
to states, not to institutions, not to class-made law, not to castes
and orders and rank belongs the Twentieth century. It belongs to the
Common Man--to you. You with your stout heart and your willing and
capable hands. You with your active, intelligent brain, impatient of
traditional nonsense, however poetically or plausibly englamoured.
You with your enlightened sense of the equal rights of all men. You
with your passionate resolve scientifically to correct the stupid and
cruel inequalities of opportunity, that are as intolerable in an era of
science as a cannibal feast in the temple of the Most High.
What is the watchword of this new day? From lip to lip, from land to
land, from race to race, flies the “password eternal”--Democracy.
How the Nineteenth century did belie all the prophecies of pessimism!
And how the Twentieth century will belie all the prophecies of its
pessimists!
To realize this you must penetrate the dust and noise and clamor
that are the surface of things. You must discard prejudice and
that narrowness which makes you exaggerate the importance of the
things immediately at hand--the things that are mere details of the
great pattern which time is weaving in the loom of history--details
incomprehensible unless you look at the pattern as a whole. Disregard
tradition and egotism; free yourself of the small silliness that leads
you to confuse intelligence with etiquette and clothes, with formal
education which may or may not affect the intellect. Look deep into the
realities and see there the lines of the Common Man--the toiler at the
desk and bench and lever and plow, his mind bent upon his work, his
work the improvement of his own condition and the handing down of the
heritage of life richer and better in every way than he received it.
Through the ages this Common Man has been building like the coral
insect--silently, secretly, steadily, strongly. History has little to
say about him or his work, and that little misleading; the historians
have been unable to get away from courts and battlefields and the
legislation halls where fierce but futile and evanescent class
struggles rage. But the real story of the past of the human race as
an interpreter and prophet of the future is the story of the building
of the coral continent founded broadly and deeply upon freedom and
justice, upon Intelligence and Democracy. And now at last this
continent of enduring civilization begins to emerge not here and there,
not merely above the ebbtides of ignorance and tyranny, but everywhere
and for all time.
Let us read the past aright. Its departed civilizations are not a
gloomy warning, but a bright promise. If limited intelligence in a
small class produced such gleams of glory in the black sky of history,
what a day must be now dawning!
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.