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PAPERS AND ADDRESSES
By J. N. LARNEDDANIEL D. BID WELL
Address at Dedication of the Monument Raised by “D”
Company at General Bid well's Grave, Forest
Lawn, Buffalo, October 19, 1871
BY J. N. EARNED
Seven years ago today the brave, good soldier who lies
at rest yonder and whose name has been written upon this
record of stone, flung his life, into the scales in which the
ransom of the Re-public was then being weighed.
It does not seem so long ago to us, who remember, as
though the interval had been weeks instead of years, that
sad and solemn day when the tom -body of our dead friend
was 'borne back to us for burial. It does not seem so long
ago, but the years slip from us as though they were sand
in our fingers; and, as treacherous as the sands, they sift
and heap themselves so fast upon -every precious or sacred
memory that we leave unshrined, that, before we know, the
dreary waste of the forgotten past is swallowing it up.
That is why this monument has been builded, near the
grave of the good soldier who died seven years ago today;
who died on one of the battlefields of the last and decisive
encounter of civilization with barbaric force, giving the
blood of a noble heart to the great seal, of immortal and
immutable validity, with which the character of freedom
was stamped at last. Even to us who knew him, vivid and
tenderly cherished as our recollection of the man and of
3738
DANIEL D. BIDWELL
his heroic life and of his patriotic death is now—it is not
impossible that the time might come, even to us, when the
image of the one and the record of the other would have
faded to indistinctness in our minds, if now and again, they
were not renewed by the seeing of some impressive memento
like this.
And how far, at the best of it, through the little
remainder of our span of life, would the recollection in
which we shall keep them, go toward the immortality of
remembrance that is due to those who died, las this man died,
in the defending of a great cause1? Unless we have tre-
mendously mistaken all the meaning and consequence of
events, the heritage of freedom and free government which
they redeemed at the price of their lives, is the heritage
of the whole future of the human race—destined to pass
from father to child with augmentation and accumulation,
down to the last generation of mankind. Surely the suc-
ceeding heirs of so great an inheritance, of the precious
capitalization of patriotic blood, will not forgive us if
we fail to preserve and transmit to them the names and the
memory of the men to whom they owe it. Nor could we
forgive ourselves, or respect ourselves, if we fail to keep
their memory green and their names monumentally
inscribed. A pious duty, alike to the dead, to the living,
and to the unborn millions who will come hereafter—a pious
duty with which loving, reverent, and grateful feelings
coincide—impel the building of such memorial shafts. It
would be pitiful to leave it so that there could ever be a
time, while marble will last or granite endure, when our
children’s children, or a child of theirs, could approach this
spot and not be hushed by the silent admonition of an
ever-lifted finger of stone, and told to whisper reverently
the name of one of those who shielded the Republic with
their bodies and took upon themselves the mortal blows
with which treason tried to strike it down.DANIEL D. BIDWELL
39
All about us, in this place, there is more than a score of
such graves—Wilcox, the Wilkesons, the Burts, Bullymore,
Budd, Heacock, Fish, Faxon, Mulligan, Dewey, Ellis,
Blatchford, Clinton, Cottier, Tuttle, Woltge, Hosmer, Fiarn-
ham, Wallace, Herriman, Richardson, Fero, Newell, Justin,
and many more are here: and I trust that the chisel which
has begun its work, in this, will not rest until it has marked
the burial place of every one—the general and the private
soldier alike; for the equality of a common martyrdom
obliterates every gradation of rank in that high peerage
to which they have all been raised.
I have said that he who lies here was a brave, good sol-
dier. He was more than that. The brave heart was as
tender and true and honest as it was brave; full of the
conscience of duty, and, therefore, full of that grandest
patriotism of all, which grows, not so much out of the pride
of country, which the serf of any autocrat may feel, as out
of faith in and hope for the institutions of free govern-
ment upon which this nation of United States is founded.
In his case, as with so many others whose stuff was tried
by the exigency of war, it was the good citizen that made the
good soldier.
When I say these things of him, I am not using emptily
and at random the phrases of eulogy. I am declaring the
testimony of all who best knew Daniel D. Bidwell, both
before and after he entered the perilous path of duty which
led him to his death. We, most of us, knew him well in
those peaceful days when he was with us here. Doubtless
there are some now present who knew him from his boyhood
up; for he was born, cradled, and reared in Buffalo. He
was the son of Benjamin Bidwell, the pioneer shipbuilder of
this port; his birth occurred in the then separate village
of Black Rock, in the year 1816. I do not purpose to fol-
low the details of his life, because I could not trace in them,
if I did, the growth or shaping of the character of the man,
which is all that makes the details of such a life interesting.40
DANIEL D. BIDWELL
At the age when his profession was to be chosen, he
studied law in the office of the late James Barton. For
some reason, however, his pursuit of law at that period
ended with the initiatory study, and he never entered upon
professional practice. I think it must have been more by
circumstances than by preference that he was led for a
time into mercantile life; for it is certain that his nature
was not that of a man of 'business. He was careless of
money and had no taste for the speculation or the thrifty
trade by which it is accumulated. A few years passed
in the employment of a firm in which his father and elder
brother were partners, was followed by his election to the
office of Justice of the Peace, and some years later he was
called to a more important magistracy — that of Police
Justice for the city, which he filled until the outbreak of
the war. It is an office for which few men are fitted, and
his rare adaptation to its trying and difficult duties became
all the more marked. He was a just man by every instinct
of his mental, as well as his moral, nature; keen in the
reading of men; quick and seldom erring in that detective
faculty of a shrewdly honest mind which sifts the truth out
of contradictions; firm, with the firmness that is sinewy
and human — not of flint; stem and austere when occa-
sion needed, but always with a hidden kindness looking
out of the kindly eyes. It seems to me that he was almost
the model of a magistrate for such ai court as the one in
which he sat. My duties as a reporter of news, at that
time, took me almost daily to his court, and it was there
that I learned to feel toward him the affection and respect
which I am trying to express with sincerity today.
From his earliest manhood he had been exceedingly fond
of military exercises, and to that taste we owe the most
important public services of his life — services which must
be measured far back of those that he rendered on the actual
field when war occurred. It is doing no injustice, I amDANIEL D. BIDWELL
41
sure, to others who labored with him in the good work,
which so few people appreciated then, or understood, to
say that, during twenty years prior to the war, no man in
this community did so much as he to cultivate, keep alive,
and make contagious the spirit of those military organiza-
tions without which the National Government in 1861 could
have summoned nothing better than a mob to meet the
first onset of the Southern rebellion. He trained himself
first as a private in the old 65th Regiment of the State
Militia, then as a lieutenant, and afterwards as brigade
inspector. On the death of Captain Burdett, of Company
“D” in the 65th, he was chosen to the captaincy of that
company, which became henceforward the central object of
his thoughts and aspirations. He re-created it, in-formed
it with his own soldierly enthusiasm and ardor, and made
it what no company of citizen soldiery here had ever been
before. Presently he withdrew his company from the 65th
regiment, reorganizing it as an independent corps, with a
view to making it the nucleus of a new regimental organi-
zation. The new regiment soon grew into existence, and
Captain BidwelFs Company “D” became part of what is
now the 74th Regiment of the New York State National
Guard. He was offered the colonelcy of the regiment, but
refused it. The company into which he had drawn the
best young manhood of Buffalo had grown into his life and
become a part of himself. It was his pride, his pet — his
military family, which he loved with father-like affection.
And all the time, I think, he looked with serious forethought
to the possible time of unexpected public need, when this
school of young soldiers whom he was training up might
prove the usefulness of his work. I do not believe that
his expenditure of time and care and interest and money,
upon what sometimes used to be laughed at as “amateur
soldering”—I do not believe that it was all amusement
and play to him; but I do believe that he kept continually42
DANIEL D. BIDWELL
in his mind the recollection that sometime the country
might have need of men who knew something of the disci-
pline and art of action in arms together.
That time came at last and he was ready, and the men
whom he had trained for it were ready. How many out
of that old Company “D” there were who answered the
national summons I cannot state; hut we know that they
outnumbered the few who, by any cause, were held at home.
The pupils and privates in that little school of amateur
soldering became teachers and leaders of the rude troops
that were hastily made up for actual war, and the useful-
ness of the training which had prepared them for such a
service is more than any man can estimate.
His place of duty was early found. During the summer
of 1861 the 49th Regiment of New York Volunteers was
enlisted and organized, with Col. Bidwell in command, and
on the 16th of September, that year, he led it away to the
seat of war. It reached the field during the time when
Gen. McClellan was engaged in reorganizing the Army of
the Potomac, in front of Washington. Its redly written
history for the three fateful years that followed is the sad
and glorious history of that heroic army, part of which it
remained almost to the end. The battles and disasters of
the Peninsular Campaign, from Yorktown to Malvern Hill;
the second defeat at Bull Run; the costly victories at South
Mountain and Antietam; the bloody and terrible failures at
Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville; the deadly but glorious
conflict at Gettysburg, were among the fiery ordeals through
which it passed and by which its thinned ranks became
hardened into a veteran line. At the very outset his men
learned that their colonel was one who cried “Come!” and
showed the way. He never hesitated to expose himself to
more than the dangers of his regiment, in order to exhibit
an inspiring example. His face was as calm, his bearing
as cool, his mind as composed, his voice as steady, when heDANIEL D. BIDWELL
43
rode along the line through a storm of plunging shells or
whistling bullets as it used to be when he led some harm-
less holiday parade. Of course there was confidence be-
tween commander and men in such a case — confidence and
warm affection, too.
There came a time when that perfect discipline of con-
fiding obedience, to which Col. Bidwell had trained his
command, saved a whole army from disaster. It was on one
of the nights of those terrible days in the Wilderness, when
Grant set out to hew his way to the rebel capital. The
enemy had stolen a march into the rear of the Sixth Corps,
which formed the right of the Union line. Our troops
were surprised, confused, and rolled up in appalling dis-
order, until the rout reached the position which was occu-
pied by the veteran 49th, and there it was stayed by the
cool, calm courage of Col. Bidwell. “His was the form,77
says a newspaper correspondent who wrote of the scene,
“his was the form, on that portentous evening, that sat,
among the bullets, upon his horse, in the language of
General Sedgwick, ‘like a man of iron/ coolly directing
the movements which repulsed the enemy, gave us back the
field and saved the whole Army of the Potomac from dis-
aster. 7 7 Had Sedgwick lived, there can be no doubt that
the “man of iron77 would have dated his promotion to the
rank of general from that “portentous evening.77 But his
well-earned “star77 he was to wait a little longer for, and
win it anew.
When Richmond had been reached and invested, the Sixth
Corps was hastily detached, in July, and shipped to Wash-
ington, for the defense of the capital, then threatened by
the demonstrations of Early, who had overwhelmed Hunter
and Sigel, and broken out of the Valley of the Shenandoah.
It arrived just in time to confront the rebel advance at the
outer line of the defenses of the capital. Col. Bidwell was
then commanding the Third Brigade of the Second Division,44
DANIEL D. BIDWELL
and his brigade was selected to drive the enemy back. A
brilliant engagement followed — the well-remembered battle
of Fort Stevens — in which the troops under his command
were alone engaged. It was fought under the eye of Presi-
dent Lincoln, who had ridden out to witness the battle, and
Ool. BidwelFs promotion was determined then and there.
He had broken the rebel line, and their retreat from the
front of Washington followed speedily after. He received
his commission as Brigadier-General a month later at
Charleston.
The Sixth Corps had then joined the forces in the Shenan-
doah; Sheridan had assumed the command of the whole,
and that wonderful campaign in the Valley, which we think
of with a bounding pulse even now, was just being opened.
Its thrilling episodes followed in quick succession. Early
and his swaggering army went whirling through Winchester
and staggering from Fisher’s Hill; Sheridan had pursued
its shattered columns as far as Harrisonburg, had devas-
tated the whole region, to make it incapable of subsisting a
rebel force, and had fallen back to Cedar Cheek to enter
camp and give his exhausted soldiers rest.
And now we approach the tragic, culminating scene, in
which our friend acted his last heroic part, in the stormy
dramas that are played this side of the grave. A few days
had sufficed to bring reinforcements to the beaten rebel
army and measurably reconstruct its broken organization.
Maddened by the humiliation of his defeats, Early had
crept back to the vicinity of the Union camp on Cedar
Creek, and watched for an opportunity to snatch revenge.
The Sixth Corps had been ordered back to the Richmond
front, and Early learned the fact; but the order had been
fpllowed instantly by a countermand, and that he did not
learn. Sheridan had gone to Washington, and Early found
it out; but his spies did not tell him that the journey had
been made at flying speed, and that Sheridan, on his return,DANIEL D. BIDWELL
45
was (already only “twenty miles away/’ sleeping that night
at "Winchester. And so he planned a surprise attack upon
the Union army, for the early morning of the 19th of
October. A thick fog settled in the valley and helped his
design. Silently, in the gray dawn of the morning, the
three divisions which he had massed for the attack, stripped
of every accoutrement except their ammunition and their
arms, stole through the fog and through the shadow of a
wooded hill, across the intervening creek, and dashed, with
terrifying yells, upon the works of the troops at the left of
the Union line. The surprise was complete. There was little
chance for rallying in the foggy darkness, under the deadly
fire which the yelling assailants poured in as they advanced.
The Eighth Corps, which held the left of the line, was sent
flying from its entrenchments, only to encounter another
division of the enemy which had reached its flank by a cir-
cuitous route. Large numbers of prisoners were swept into
the well-drawn net, and the whole left wing of Sheridan’s
army on Cedar Creek was practically cleared from the field
within an hour. The Nineteenth Corps, which occupied the
center of the line, with the Sixth Corps on its right, was now
left exposed to the enemy, who closed hotly in upon its
flank, while Early at the same time pressed it with his re-
maining forces in front, and the (artillery of the enemy,
together with the guns that they had captured, were all
tearing its ranks with shell. It was more than flesh and
blood could bear. The corps wavered. The division on its
left gave way. The flanking columns of the enemy were
steadily making headway toward the retreating trains of
the army on the turnpike toward Middletown. The situa-
tion was ominous of a terrible disaster, and Sheridan was
“twenty miles away.”
, Everything depended now upon the old Sixth Corps,
which had saved so many a field. It was swung from its
position on the right into a line facing the left attack of46
DANIEL D. BIDWELL
the enemy, and took its ground near the summit of a slight
bare ridge, across which the shells from the rebel batteries
came ploughing thickly. Twice the enemy charged its line
and were driven back after a desperate encounter, hand to
hand. There the men were ordered to lie down upon the
slope. General Bidwell sat erect on his horse, a few paces
behind his prostrate brigade, as cool as though the storm of
fire and death was not playing around him. Col. Selkirk, of
his staff, sat near. A shell had dropped and exploded among
the men, a little distance down the line, and they both were
intently looking to see what fatal work it had done. At that
instant he was struck down. A passing shell had torn his
left shoulder away and hurled him, unconscious, from his
seat. The lightning could not have been swifter or more
noiseless in its stroke. His companions heard nothing but
one groan, and turned to find the general stretched upon
the earth. His riderless horse stood still, as though it had
not felt the emptying of its saddle.
Tender hands raised up the mutilated and insensible
form and bore it back to a hospital in the rear. The dying
soldier revived after a time from his swoon and the surgeons
told him that he had not long to live. He said calmly that
he had expected it was so, and began with composure to
prepare for his parting with earthly things. His grief at
the prospect of death seemed to be not for himself, but for
his wife. Among the first of his thoughts was to ask that
a little colored boy — one of the homeless waifs of the war —
who had been his servant for some time, should be sent to
Buffalo and committed to the care of his family and friends.
The few directions that he had to leave were briefly given,
for he was in mortal agony from the first. But his mind was
steadily clear, except in the short intervals when strong
opiates gave him sleep. And thus he lay, through the slow
hours of nearly half a day, waiting for the gates of the other
life to open.DANIEL D. BIDWELL
47
And while he lingered there, out at the front the tide of
disaster which had home him down was being rolled back
by a powerful hand, in a mighty wave of overwhelming
victory. Sheridan had come, with his electric presence, and
the resistless force of his indomitable will, and had saved
the day. And so, haply, there shone around the bed of the
dying soldier, before he died, the glories of a surpassing
triumph for the cause which he had loved better than his
life.
The last words that he is remembered to have said to the
one who stood by him to the end were: “I have tried to do
my duty.’ ? The thought of duty was his last, I am sure, be-
cause it had been the thought of his life. He did it always,
as men do who try.
I do not know what legend has been inscribed upon these
monumental stones, but I hope that the chisel has written
the simple, touching and true words of his own dying testi-
mony, that
“He Tried to do His Duty.”ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Address at Celebration of Lincoln’s Birthday, St. James
Hall, Buffalo, February 12, 1874
BY J. N. LABNED
The advent in this world of a great human character is
something to be commemorated. God does not give ns such
so often that, when they appear, we may dare to treat them
familiarly, as though they were common and cheap. We
have great men, of a kind, rising every generation amongst
us in no small number; men of largeness, of weight, of
power — of surpassing faculties or surpassing gifts in this
direction and that; men who lightly leap over the barriers
of limitation which hem their fellows in; men of great doing
or great discovery; who bring us revelations in poetry, in
philosophy, in science; who can govern states, mold nations
as with a mighty potter’s hand, command events, lay hold
upon destiny and fate, make history in a masterful way;
men who can play with armies as with knights and pawns in
a game of chess, or who can breathe a spell upon the million-
handed, idle mob of humankind; and, lo! a Titan has risen
to do their will upon the earth — to hew its mountains down,
to fill its valleys up and to spread the dominion of man
with lightning and with fire.
But the great human character that I have in my thought
tonight signifies something more than this. It signifies a
greatness of being beyond the greatness of doing—a great-
4950
ABEAEAM LINCOLN
ness of the man in himself, of himself, to himself, sepa-
rately and apart from all that he may have done. There
have lived a few men—only ia few—in our world, the
luster and illumination of whose personal! selves have
obscured their own deeds; whereas, most times, it happens
the other way, and the splendid deed or the shining gift
illuminates the man behind it. The difference is here:
In one ease the individual man may be blotted out of
historic memory, if only his works are left behind, and
there is no loss; in the other case, to extinguish the
personal man were to rend a great gap in human history
land inflict a great bereavement on the human heart.
These are the true immortals of the race — inhabitants not
of an age, but of the ages. We never think of them as
honored ghosts of any dead and far-off past; they are the
illustrious fellows of every present day. It is for some
men to kindle a light in the world, but it is for these few,
greater than all, to be that light themselves. The atmos-
phere of our lives is all aglow with the radiance of theirs,
and how much of the nobler warmth of our hearts and the
wider vision of our souls we owe to them is more than we
can tell. The fact of their being — of their having been —
is part of the glory of the world and a portion of the joy,
the cheer, the inspiration of human life.
These are the great characters whom I mean, and, few
though they be, I think that I do no wrong even to so
illustrious a peerage as this if I claim in it a place for
Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps we are yet too near those terri-
ble times when the enduring stability of federal republican-
ism in America was brought to the deciding test, and this
momentous experiment of self government among civilized
men hung wavering between failure and success — perhaps,
I say, we are yet too near to estimate fully how much the
weight of the personal character of this one great man had
to do with the result. But we can judge the largeness ofABRAHAM LINCOLN
51
his relation to those tremendous events more clearly and
justly today than we could then, in the feverish hours of
their happening. With passion cooled, with partisan feel-
ings allayed, we can all of us now, however far we have been
held apart in our standpoints, look back upon that tragic
stage, with its lurid lights, and see that the homely figure
of this gaunt, ungraceful man of the West looms larger,
grander and more heroic among its actors the farther we
recede.
The fact about him which time discloses more and more
is this:	That his greatness is measured not so much by
what he was able to do for the cause of freedom as by what
he was able to be to it. It wjas not his part to ride upon the
storm which rolled out of the free North to overwhelm
slavery and treason; it was not his part to forge its thunder-
bolts, nor to hurl them; but it was his sublimer part to stand
like a firm, strong pillar in the midst of the swaying tempest
of that uncertain time for a tottering nation and la shaken
cause to hold themselves fast by. That is what he was to
us; that is what he did for us; and that is the kind of provi-
dence in human affairs which great characters only, of the
grandest mold and make, are given for. How much this
people leaned upon him while they fought their weary
battle out; how much they took strength from his strength,
calmness from his calm, patience from his patience, faith
from his faith, they never knew until he lay dead at their
feet. Ah! what a remembrance we have of that appalling
day when, right in the moment of our consummated tri-
umph, Lincoln was slain, and the pillar on which our very
trust in one another had rested more than we understood
was treacherously overthrown! Then you and I and all of
us fell down and well-nigh grovelled in dispair. It seemed
to us for a time as though the solid earth had sunk away
from our feet and chaos had come again. It took us hours
to believe that all our victory had not come instantly to52
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
naught 'and that all the long battle had not been fought in
vain. It took us days to recover faith in the re-union and
re-habilitation of the republic with Abraham Lincoln gone.
All that he had been to us began to dawn upon our under-
standings then. We, began to see what an incarnation of
democracy he had been; what a soul of sincerity and verity
he had supplied to the cause of popular freedom, which the
wind-blown emptiness and falsehood and hypocrisy of dema-
gogues brings so often to contempt; with what possession
his great character had folded itself about every feeling
that we had which made us patriotic, democratic, republican.
And, ais we who were his countrymen saw, the whole
world saw, too. Oan you remember, looking history through,
another man whose death aggrieved mankind as Lincoln’s
did ? Do you know any other time when such a sob went
out of the human heart ias we heard from every continent
when Lincoln fell? Oh! the people knew him for what he
was, by some instinct that is a mystery in human nature.
The humble, common men and women of every race were
mourners with us at his grave and mingled their tears with
ours. They could not altogether tell, perhaps, for what or
Why they so honored and loved the man; because the homage
which a great soul commands yields itself to influences
which are half of them unconscious and invisible.
I would not undertake to analyze the attributes of char-
acter in Abraham Lincoln which made him what he was.
I could not if I would. Some of them I can partly under-
stand; but I know that there were lights and forces and
spiritualities in the man which no one can apprehend. I
can see what a bottom of strength and stableness and truth-
fulness and sweetness he had in the flare simplicity of his
nature. He kept his nature as it was given him. He was
so very little a world-made man — so very much a God-made
man. He was one of the few in whom the child seems to
have grown into the man — not the man out of the child —ABBASAM LINCOLN
53
and whose primitive simpleness and sincerity seem to have
matured without any accretion at all of the hardening
crusts of worldly affectation and polite hypocrisy. This
gave him the power which truth of any kind possesses
always. It made him strong to himself and strong to his
fellowmen. It preserved a wonderful fiber and elasticity in
all his being. It was this that produced that quaint and
homely humor in him which some people strangely mistook
for clownishness and levity. Levity! Who ever looked
into the sorrowful, sad eyes of Abraham Lincoln, when his
great burden was heavy upon him, and believed that there
was levity in the soul of the man ? His earnestness was of
a deeper kind than those who slandered him that way could
ever understand. It was deeper than any impulse goes —
it was in the depths of his nature.
And how wise he was! We have heard it disparagingly
said thlat Lincoln had no genius; that he was only a common
man with superior common sense. But he was wise with
a wisdom which nothing save genius can ever possess. The
shrewdly calculating brain of Seward, the large, strong
intellect of Chase, the resolute and willful mind of Stanton,
could never attain the like of it. He felt the argument and
meaning of events. He heard the talk of the people among
themselves with an inward ear; he looked into the working
of their hearts with an inward eye. And so it happened
that all he did and (all he said in the great crises of his work
was done and said with ia timeliness and a fitness which no
reckoning sagacity could ever have hit. Read now, in the
light of later events, the little speeches that he made on his
way from Springfield to Washington to assume the presi-
dential office, and see how wise they were! Read his first
inaugural address, and his second one, his messages to Con-
gress, his wonderful speech at Gettysburg, his proclamation
of emancipation and reconstruction, and see whiat compre-
hension of times and circumstances they show! We need to54
ABEAEAM LINCOLN
read back and study the doings of the man over again to
know what Providence he was to us, and how well for this
nation it was that a great, inlighted character like his filled
its chief place at such a time.
We have sometimes said that perhaps it was fortunate
for his fame that Lincoln died when he did. No doubt a
certain consecration of his memory was produced by the
cruelty and martyrdom of his death; but farther than that
I do not credit such a thought. I believe that if he had
continued with us, to be our counsellor and guide in the
hard return from war to peace, we should have come by a
shorter and better way to better conclusions than we have
reached.
But no matter; it is idle to speculate on that. The im-
portant thing to be thought of is, that we thank God, as we
ought to do, for the gift of this man’s greatness while it
was ours, and that we do not let ourselves live vainly in
the light of it. If we mean to be, in fact and truth, the
democracy thiat we pretend to be and are not; if we genu-
inely want, you and I, to stand toward one another as fellow
citizens of a political commonwealth, in the simple relation
of man to man, and give to one another and take from one
another all the amplitude of character and life that men
can give and take, each from each, in a perfect social state,
he has intimated to us how, and signified the kind of repub-
licans we must be. If this nation is to be truly great, it
must be great as Lincoln was, by verity and simpleness, by
honesty and earnestness; its politics become a fair weighing
of true opinions; its diplomacy a straight acting towards
just purposes and necessary ends; its public service a duty
and an honor; its citizenship a precious inheritance or a
priceless gift. I have faith enough and hope enough to
believe that the time of these things is coming yet; and then,
not till then, will the monument of Abraham Lincoln,
exemplar of democracy and type of the republican man,
have been builded complete.THE INFLUENCE OF A PUBLIC
LIBRARY
Remarks at a Meeting Held April 18, 1883, to Promote
the Movement Which Resulted in the Erection
op the Buffalo Public Library Building
BY J. N. LARNED
I feel naturally a very deep interest in the undertaking
which has been brought before this meeting for discussion.
If any large part of the interest I feel in it is due to my
personal connection with one of the institutions most
affected by what is proposed, I am sure it is chiefly because
I have learned through that connection more than I could
otherwise know of the nature and the extent of the influence
that public libraries exert in a community. I can see from
my own experience that it is not easy to comprehend from
any outside point of observation, the measure or the quality
of the educating work which a public library performs.
It is a matter of information that cannot be statistically
exhibited. It is not shown by the enumerating of readers nor
by the computing and classifying of the books they read.
You may leiarn, truly enough, from such statistics, that every
public library is drawn upon to a lamentable extent for
reading that has no object beyond amusement—diversion—
and that, too, very considerably of the most frivolous kind,
contributing more to unwholesome dissipations of mind
than to any good.
5556
THE INFLUENCE OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY
But the story which bare figures can tell on this point
is misleading. They show, for example, that about seventy
out of every hundred volumes taken for reading from our
Young Men’s Library are books of fiction. But that fact
really signifies much less to the disparagement of those
who use the Library than it appears to signify. For, in
the first place, a large part of the fiction read is good
fiction—fiction belonging to the higher pure literature of
half a dozen languages, and which is as nutritive and whole-
some in its due proportion as history or science.
Then, as for the less worthy remainder, the major part
of the large consumption is achieved by a comparatively
small number of insatiable readers. Remember that the
intemperate novel reader will devour five to ten volumes
of that light confection while the studious reader of sub-
stantial literature is going through a single book. So
70 per cent, of fiction in the mere counting of volumes
is very far from representing 70 per cent, of readers who
get nothing but amusement from the library. On the con-
trary, I do not hesitate to say that a most positive majority
of those who use the library use it, upon the whole, to
the great benefit of themselves—are fed by it intellectually
and morally, broadened by it in knowledge and character.
The nature of the educating influence which a great
public collection of books brings to bear upon a community,
when the people have learned the habit of resorting to it
and making active use of its stores, is quite different from
any other. There is no substitute for it. Schools and
colleges put our young people in the way of education and
equip them with the implements for it. They are at the
end of their function when they do that. If we should
depend upon them for the ripening of the culture that our
city as a whole is to have, we should be satisfying ourselves
with a very thin and shallow social development. I do not
mean to imply that -books, in school and out of school, areTHE INFLUENCE OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY
57
the supreme sources of culture, whether intellectual or moral,
but I do say that, from first to last, they are the fertilizers
for it, and that a great collection of books in a public library
is a fountain of irrigation for every kind of fruitful plant-
ing that is done in the community around it.
We have looked but a little way into its influence if
we take account only of the set reading or set study which
it encourages. The greater thing that it does is to pro-
duce among people a habit of following up the topics and
questions in which their interest happens to be stirred,
from time to time, by casual hints iand circumstances. To
make it common and habitual in some large circle of people
to say, on such occasions, “I will go to the Library and
investigate that point/’ or “I will get acquainted with
that author/’ or “I will study the life and work of that
man/’ or “I will look into that book”—according to the
turn the suggestion has taken—to make this habitual and
common, I say, is to set in action more penetrating energies
and more potent agencies of education than can be organ-
ized in any school or college. And it is upon my obser-
vation of the steady growth in this community of that
kind of habitual appeal to its public libraries, that I
found my high estimate of their influence. From day to
day it is becoming more and more the fact that young and
old of all classes are pursuing in them every kind of quest,
through all ranges of literature, and that in nine cases
out of ten they are quests for which no ordinary private
library could furnish the means. A school theme, a news-
paper paragraph, an allusion from the pulpit, a magazine
article, a picture, a quotation, a play, perhaps, supplies the
impulse which will often carry itself long and far into the
intellectual life and growth of our public library students.
It is the existence of the public library and the cultivation
of the popular habit of turning to its stores, which quickens
all such casual impulses and makes them efficient. With-58
THE INFLUENCE OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY
out it, they would come to nothing. And so it is, in some
degree, I think, with respect to all the working agencies
which we count upon for the educating, deviating and
refining of society. Their influence is fed and reinforced
continually from the public libraries. Our schools,
churches, museums, art collections, science clubs, literary
societies, all find their chief ally in the library, which
nurses and nourishes every germ that they throw out.
If we can have the two important libraries of our city
planted side by side, over there, forming already a com-
bined collection of about 70,000 volumes, with the Histor-
ical Society, the Society of Natural Sciences, and the
Academy of Fine Arts grouped around them, what a pharos
will have been set up in the midst of the city, and to what
harborage of -all things most gracious and sweet in the
commerce of social life it will light the way for generations
to come.WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN
Remarks, Following an Address on “ American
i Courage’? by Hon. Sherman Hoar, Before the
Saturn Club, Buffalo, February 22, 1897
BY J. N. DARNED
Mr. Dean, and Gentlemen of the Saturn Club:
I was told that I might he called upon to say something
here tonight by way, perhaps, of introduction to the privi-
leges of the membership with which you have generously
honored me, and for which I repeat my thanks to you. I
had known that I should value those privileges very highly,
but as I realize them this evening they have a new meaning
to me. I should have been a serious loser if I could not
have listened with you to the splendid address we have
heard, and had not taken from it the freshened faith it
inspires in a country which has answered so to calls for
high courage in its sons. I hope I may lose on no occasion
hereafter the privilege you have given me of joining in
your yearly commemoration of the birth of Washington—a
custom most admirable on the part of this Club. The
oftener we are induced as a people to turn our thoughts
back to the greater men of our national past, the better
it will be for these United States.
There was (a time, in my youth, when I entertained a
somewhat tolerant and patronizing opinion of Washington.
I thought I could detect a certain American exaggeration60
WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN
in the general estimate of him, and I tried to hold myself
superior to such patriotic illusions. But since I outgrew
that callowness I have been learning to comprehend the
extraordinary place which Washington holds in history.
It would be really a unique place, if the same country
which gave it to Washington had not already found another
kindred immortal, in Abrfaham Lincoln, to put closely
beside him; and it is quite the unique glory of this country
that, before it had borne its name through one full cen-
tury, it had contributed to the world's pantheon of national
heroes.two figures which all men's eyes can see to be of
a greatness that differs in kind from the greatness of most
of their peers, and to be of a higher kind. What other
people has brought into public life more than one, if even
one man, of the moral mold and stature of Washington
and Lincoln ? There are soldiers in plenty who count more
victories, in greater campaigns, than Washington's. There
are statesmen in plenty whose successes were more splendid
than his. But how many of their names do men everywhere
speak reverently, ias they speak the name of Washington?
England can cite her Alfred, who was the Washington of
the Middle Ages. But what other? Not Cromwell, who
climbed by the ladders of a great opportunity to the top
of power; who used his power grandly, in many ways, for
England, 'but who did not use it disinterestedly, and who
is condemned, both as a statesman land as a man, by the
fact that he found nothing better to do with his uncrowned
kingship in the end than to pass it on to an incompetent
son. What other, then? Not Chatham. Not Wellington.
Nor of all who lie in Westminster is there one.
And when I turn to other races, and look along the ranks
of their patriotic chieftains, from David to Garibaldi, I
find none who have come near to making the impression
of moral greatness on mankind which Washington left and
which time has steadily deepened. Fame had given himWASHINGTON AND LINCOLN
61
a shrine apart, until Lincoln came to share it; and now the
memories of these two heroes of American democracy have
an almost lonely sacredness in the veneration of men. The
transcendence that was common to them is this:	That
they were exalted above their fellows, not so much by
what they did as by what they were; by the incomparable
high soul that was in each—above the small ambitions,
for title, for self-glory, for mastery—above jealousy, above
malice, above all meanness—filled with the princely virtue
of virtues, which is magnanimity. That is the greatness in
which they were alike, and that, in my belief, holds the
inner secret of the power with which Washington at one
crisis and Lincoln at another molded the fortunes of this
republic. The might of bare character, as a static force
in human affairs, was shown at its best in these men; and
there are no other equal examples of it that I can find in
history.
The better I acquaint myself with the circumstances of
American independence and the founding of a federal
union of the States, the more distinctly I seem to see that
there were two essential, indispensable men concerned in
the event. Without Sam. Adams I cannot believe that
the Revolution would have had an effective beginning,
when it did. Without George Washington I cannot believe
that it would have had a successful ending, within the
generation which saw it end. The restless energy of the
one roused and rallied the temper which broke away from
British rule; the sublime constancy of the other bore the
undertaking through, not merely to the sundering of irk-
some bonds, but to the making of a nation, with ability to
stand alone.
It is impossible to study down to the bottom of the facts
of any part of the story of the Revolution without discovery
of the pervading and controlling influence of Washington,
subduing jealousies, sectional and personal, overcoming62
WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN
distrusts, resisting divisions, bringing courage to the falter-
ing and confusion to the base. Lincoln, in his day, had a
mighty national sentiment to bear him up, and to harden
into solidity, under his own trust in it—Washington had
none. He, himself, would seem to have been the sole sub-
stitute for it. He was the one discoverable center, round
which everything that found a center must circumference
itself. He was more than “the soul of the cause”; the very
body of the cause took most of its substance from him.
It was his firmness that stiffened its gristle into bone. His
courage was the tonic for its fainting, again and again.
What he gave to it was more than what he did. It was
not his deeds so much as his qualities that triumphed in it.
And that, in any view, exemplifies a greatness which sur-
passes the greatness of Caesar and Napoleon.
So it was, too, with Abraham Lincoln; though he bore
the divine mark of genius, which Washington did not,
his heart, his understanding, his tongue, were touched with
the sacred fire that burns for so few of the sons of men.
Above all in his age, he was endowed with the wisdom that
is jealously kept for the chosen of the gods. He was the
greatest among us by intellectual right not less than by
moral right, and what he did in the crisis of the republic
was greater than the doing of any other. But what he
was, counted for more, after all. The “Father Abraham,”
the “Honest Old Abe,” of the people, was a factor of more
final potency than measures in Cabinet and Congress, land
more than armies in the field. His surpassing greatness,
like that of Washington, was in the quality of the man, as
distinguishable from his powers.
There was no likeness between them, except in that.
The massive dignity of character in the Virginian contrasts
strangely with the simple homeliness of the man of the
West; but there was a kindred magnanimity of spirit
behind the difference.WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN
63
As I said in beginning, it is the singular glory of the
American people that, young as they are in the family of
nations, they have put not one, but two such characters into
the highest places in history.PATRIOTISM
Address given before the Liberal Club of Buffalo,
March 15, 1900
BY J. N. EARNED
I wish to speak of patriotism, because it is a subject
that can never be taken into our thoughts without doing
us good, and because it is one which most of us have
at heart, I think, much more than we have it in mind. The
mere feeling that can be called “love of country’’ is a very
common one. It warms our hearts when we look at the flag;
it tingles in our veins when we listen to <a national air;
it exults in us when our country is honored; it rages in us
when our country is wronged. Nature has taken care that
no feeling shall be more easily moved; for it is one that
she uses powerfully in her social marshaling of the human
race. It is one by which she fuses and molds us together,
and incorporates us in lall the forms of association that
make up a civilized world. The clan would have had no tie,
the tribe no bond—even family life would never have been
known—if their existence had been left to depend on a
cold reckoning of the common advantages they give. As
for nations, they were never created by statesmanship, nor
ever miade enduring by their constitutions; but the inner
secret of their being is always in deeps of feeling that are
instinctive in the social nature of men.
65t>6
PATRIOTISM
As it comes to us by the gift of Nature, the emotion
that can be flashed by the sight of a flag or the sound
of a song is very crude. Like all of its kind, it is just
a wildfire, which we are expected, as rational and moral
beings, to take under thoughtful control, and to make use
of, not for empty ardors of rtaige or vanity, but to put
wrarmth and spirit and conscience into our political conduct
and political thought. Such wildfires of our nature, as I
would call them, iare forces, in fact, that we ought to deal
with as we deal with the forces external to us, in the
physical world; which we master, train, educate, to a ser-
vice that we plan and command. What our steam engines
represent is actually an education—a training to higher
uses—of the fire that burned on the hearth and boiled the
pot of the primitive man. What we see in the telegraph,
the telephone and the electric railway, is an educated Ariel,
who only played pranks in the clouds until his scientific
training began. Outwlardly, that mastery and rational
development of physical forces is one side of the process
of the civilization of mankind. Inwardly, the same process
of discipline and cultivation for the forces in ourselves
must go equally on, if a perfect civilization is to be reached.
It does go on, but it does not go equally on. Among
the warm impulses that move us there are some on which
the culture of the race has worked marvels even greater
than the marvels of electricity and steam. Look, for
example, at those which show themselves in the devotion
of parent to child, of the old to the young, of the passing to
the rising generation! As primary feelings, they move
the savage and the civilized man alike; but the savage
satisfies them when he feeds and clothes his children and
puts weapons into their hands. Set in contrast with that
the vast systems of providence for the young which edu-
cated parental love has created in our day!—the schools,
the methods and apparatus of teaching and training, thePATRIOTISM
67
literature, the diversions, the hygienic science, the protective
law; and then consider how amazing a share of the thought
of the thoughtful part of the world is being given to this
one subject of care for the young; the great institutions
in which it is studied, the numberless meetings that discuss
it, the libraries of books that it fills! There we see the
work of the parental instinct as it is civilized, socialized,
cultivated, raised to high powers of expression and action,
charged with lofty ideals and moral aims—no longer a
mere feeling that prompts, but a conscience that commands
—and we know that God’s purpose in giving it to men is
being fulfilled.
But how has it fared meantime with that larger com-
munal instinct which ties the hearts of men to a country,
to a “fatherland,” and to their fellows in it? Has any
such difference risen there, between the sentiment we
call patriotism in the civilized man and the crude feeling
that Nature kindled for the (beginnings of our social state?
We always find it in those beginnings. The country to be
loved may be only a glen, or a bare hill or two, or a range
of pasture, or a hunting ground, but it is unfailingly
there. It may have meagre inspirations and pitifully poor
rewlards, but it burns with a passionate flame—hot, fierce,
deadly to a foe, and to every stranger and alien, as being
a foe. And what else is it? Nothing. The one idea in
it is the idea of battle; its one incitement is an enemy;
its one end is war. The primitive source, in fact, of all
that we call piatriotism is a naked passion of battle and
war.
Now, what has civilization done with it? What has
Christianity done with it? What refinements have they
wrought in the barbaric passion? What ideals have they
imported into it? Toward what higher aims is it being
turned? I sought an answer to those questions not long
ago from one of the notable men of our time, Count Tolstoi.68
PATRIOTISM
I went to his little hook on “Patriotism and Christianity,”
expecting that it would give me some portraiture of Chris-
tian patriotism, as it is, as it ought to be; but it met me,
on the contrary, with a passionate denial of the possibility
of any such thing. I found it to be a sweeping denuncia-
tion of patriotism, as something wickedly irreconcilable
with the religion of Christ. Now, this seems to be strange
ground for a man like Count Tolstoi to take; but his
book shows very plainly what has carried him there. He
"has brushed aside all abstract and theoretical definitions
of patriotism, and has gone straight to history, and to the
doings of his own day, for practical exhibitions of the
spirit which takes that name, and he thinks that he has
found in it so little that rises above the old barbaric spirit
of war that it means that to him, and nothing else. It
is with that meaning in mind that he calls patriotism “the
cruel tradition of an outlived period, ’ ’ promising no future
“that is not.terrible,” and declares that there is not and
has not been “any conjoint violence of some people against
others which was not (accomplished” in its name.
I think we will all say that the view of Count Tolstoi
is flagrantly wrong, in so far as it finds nothing in
patriotism but the spirit of international antagonism and
war; but can we deny that the two are substantially iden-
tified in the ideas that have most currency in the world?
When war drums are silent the word patriotism is rarely
on our lips or in our ears. A warm appeal to the love
of country is rarely heard except as an (appeal to arms.
If patriotism is not identified with the conflicts of nations,
we are doing what we can to make it seem to be so.
Surely, there is some miscarriage of civilization in this—
some miscarriage of Christianity—some strange perversion
of influences that work generally for the moral advance-
ment of the world. It cannot be that such a primary
impulse of common feeling as that which sentimentallyPATRIOTISM
69
incorporates great 'bodies of men, and moves them by one
passionate affection for the land, the history, the ancestry,
the heroes, the sages, the songs, the laws, the monuments
of the piast and the visions of the future that they inherit
and possess together—it cannot be that this was planted
among the deep instincts of humanity without some nobler
purpose than it has yet fulfilled. So far, it has seemed
to escape even that common culture and expansion of
human sympathies which is tending to make tail men
friendly and kindly toward all. It obstructs and limits the
very comities that seek growth in the civilized world. As
man meeting man, the Frenchman and the German, the
Englishman and the Russian, the American and the Spian-
iard, can come together with a friendliness measured only
by the personal congeniality that each finds in the other;
but if they remember themselves as Germans, Frenchmen,
Englishmen, Russians, Spaniards, Americans, there arises
between them a chilling consciousness of national alienism,
implying possible obligations of patriotic antagonism, and
obstructing the good will among men that grows otherwise
year by year, and that is more land more the desire of
mankind.
It is a fact, then, not to be denied, that the sentiment
of patriotism is laggard in civilization; that it clings to
more of the primitive barbarism of its temper than other
instincts of sentiment have done, and hias not been equally
cultivated, broadened and refined. What can we do to
change the fact? In asking this question I do not mean
to imply that the thought of an endeavor to cultivate
patriotism is new. Of late years thiat has been in our
country a remarkably active thought, and it has given rise
to many movements and measures, some of which cannot
fail to 'bear excellent fruit. But generally in those move-
ments there is wanting, it seems to me, a careful ascertain-
ment and clear perception of what it is that needs to be70
PATRIOTISM
cultivated, in order to produce a fine and noble patriotism
in the land. For the most part, they appear to be aimed
at excitements of national feeling, with little care as to the
kind or quality of feeling invoked; and it is just because
patriotism has always been dealt with as a mere matter of
feeling that it has risen to no higher service among the
civilizing influences of the world. A feeling, in itself, is
naught. Its only worth in the human constitution is as
a carrier of ideals and beliefs—a motive force behind duties,
ambitions and aims. If we set electric waves in motion and
give them no message, or generate steam and put no
burden on it, we tare doing nothing more useless than if
we stimulate feelings that we call patriotic and charge them
with no worthy conception of patriotic objects and ends.
But that is a mistake that can easily be made; and I think
that some examples of it are found in things that have been
done of late years, especially to promote, in this country,
a somewhat passionate cult of the national flag.
We passed a law, for example, in the State of New
York, not many years ago, which requires, I believe, that
every public schoolhouse shall be provided with a flag,
and that the flag shall be raised during every school day.
Now the very thought of placing a flag at each school was
very fine, and I am glad that it was put into law; but the
further thought, of keeping that beautiful emblem always
before the eyes of the children, was not so wisely con-
ceived. I talked once on the subject with a teacher, whose
experience left no doubt on my mind that this part of the
law is a serious mistake. “Long before the law was passed/’
he said, “our school had a flag, and it was my practice to
have it raised on all important anniversaries of national
events; not merely on the legal holidays, but on many
anniversaries, like those of the birth of Franklin, Jefferson,
Adams, Hamilton, Irving, Emerson, Longfellow and others;
like the anniversaries of the fight at Lexington, the sur-PATBI0T1SM
71
render at Yorktown, the ratification of the Federal Consti-
tution by New York, the inauguration of Washington, the
attack on Fort Sumter, the Emancipation Proclamation,
the assassination of Lincoln, and on other days which mark
occurrences that have had some notable effect on our
national life. When the children, coming to school on such
days, caught sight of the flag, they began at once to ask
what it meant. They arrived with a keen interest and
curiosity in their minds. Then I talked with them for a
few moments about the anniversary topic of the day. In
that way the flag wfas connected with our national history in
their thoughts. It acquired a real meaning to them—ful-
filled its real purpose, as an emblem of the Eepublic—and
the sight of it awakened feelings of love and pride in their
hearts that were not empty, but were understandingly filled.
That effect, ’ ’ continued the teacher, and he spoke with
much feeling, “is now lost. The children have unseeing
eyes for the flag, and indifferent minds, because it is always
before them. It has been made such a commonplace object
that attention to it and interest in it are possible no more.
I try to talk to them of the anniversary topics, as I used
to do, but the effect is very different, since they listen
without the expectant curiosity which the sight of the
hoisted flag had always stirred up. And the flag itself
is robbed of the association that it had with such episodes
of history, in their thought and in their memories, which
is a serious loss. ”
The schoolmaster whose experience I have repeated, sub-
stantially as he gave it to me, was clearly right, and our
law is clearly wrong. It is by such thoughtful methods
as his that we can endear the national flag to our children,
as an ensign, a symbol, a reminder, of all the claims their
country can make on their duty, their love and their faith,
and we cheapen it in their thought when we make it too
common in their sight.72
PATRIOTISM
This mistake appears to me to be a typical one, repre-
sentative of many others that we have made, and are mak-
ing, in onr well-meant but not well-considered endeavors
to cultivate a patriotic sentiment, especially in the young.
We work too much on mere surfaces of feeling. We try to
excite by mere names and objects what ought to be kindled
by inspiring ideas, and the tendency is to produce a pagan
idol-worship of country, rather than an exalted religion of
patriotism, such as would lift this democratic republic into
a purer and serener air.
If we wish to work intelligently in this matter, from
an understanding of the kind of cultivation and educa-
tion that the patriotic instinct requires, we must look a
little into the nature of the feelings through which it acts.
I have been speaking somewhat! as though men were
endowed with one particular sensibility, to which their
thought of nation or country appeals; but that is not at
all the fact. There is a whole bundle of feelings, some
or all of which may be stimulated Iby many kinds of appeal,
this with others, ias they happen to come, and the difference
between the barbaric and the civilized state of patriotic
emotion seems to lie partly in the choice that is made
among them, and partly in the quality of the stimulant
applied.
At the bottom of them all is the egotistic feeling which
carries a man’s heart to that which belongs to him, and
that to which he belongs. In all the cruder conditions of
human nature this feeling, which bears an ignoble and
a vulgar taint, works everywhere with great power, and
nowhere more powerfully than in the strengthening of
social and political bonds. Barbaric society needs it as a
coarse cement; civilization should extinguish the need, by
bringing finer agencies into play. In so far as our patriotic
feeling is allowed to attach us with heat and passion to
our country, just because it is our country, so far it is onPATRIOTISM
73
a level with the patriotism of a Turk, grounded on nothing
which his rotting empire does not offer to him. I take
it that the first aim in our endeavor to cultivate a large
and fine love of country in American hearts, should be
to make it consciously such a love as could not possibly be
inspired if this republic were not what it is, and what we
can reasonably hope that it will become.
Of course, the sense that one’s self is in and of the
nation must be, and ought to be, in all our feelings towards
it. It has its right part in those feelings, which is not a
braggart and vulgar part. It instigates pride of country,
without which love of country does not easily exist; and
here we touch matters that we need to treat loftily, and
with all possible care. Pride of country! By all means
let us cultivate it—stimulate it—brim every American
heart with swelling floods of patriotic pride! But pride in
what shall it be? We have many things to choose among.
What shall we choose ? Shall it be our bigness in popula-
tion and territory? Then the Chinaman and the Russian,
to say nothing of the Englishman, can be prouder than
we. Shall it be our wealth? Then a little while ago we
should have been humble; for our country is a parvenue
among the rich nations of the earth. Shall it be our brief
battle history? Then the very Tartars of the Asiatic
steppes can boast us out of court. Will we expose our
national pride to rivalries like these, or will we rest it on
the great distinctions by which, at its birth, this Republic
of the United States of America was made singular and
apart, in kind and character, in motives and aims, from all
other nations that have ever existed in the world? No other
ever entered its career with a (broad (and bold declaration of
the rights of men, to be consecrated by that declaration to
the faithful guardianship of life and liberty and a fair
and free pursuit of happiness for all who come within its
sphere. No other ever bound itself by ia sacred obligation74
PATEIOTISM
to remember that “governments derive their just powers
from the consent of the governed.” That is what exalts
and distinguishes us among the nations, and, since the first
hour of our national life, we have been, with ostentation and
iteration, claiming all that it implies. Year by year we
have been renewing the great Declaration; teaching it in
every school, printing it in every texMbook of American
politics and history, reading it from ten thousand platforms,
until no other confession of political faith was ever so
adopted and bound into a nation’s creed. Write, anywhere,
on any wall, in (any continent of the globe, 4 4 Governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,”
and ask where it came from. There is only one answer that
will be made. It represents the American Republic to men’s
minds as the flag of stars represents it to their eyes.
That is what we had for the high seat of a loftier national
pride than ever bore up the patriotism of any other people.
It put barbaric lusts and ambitions under our feet. It
forbade to us the mean careers of conquest and imperial
rule. It kept us honest and clean-handed, while other
nations were scrambling in Africa and Asia and among the
islands for territorial spoils. That is what we had for
the uplifting of our patriotic pride. If we can not say
that we have it now, we are making a startling discovery
of failure in the patriotic education of the American people.
Some malignant influence must be blinding the eyes of our
generation to the unique glory of this unique common-
wealth; and, instead of proudly keeping ourselves upon
the heights which God and our wise ancestors gave us for
an exemplary career, we are suffering ourselves to be
lowered in ideals and ambitions to a plane with the unfor-
tunate peoples who never had our opportunity to rise.
I will not believe that we have accepted that lower plane,
with deliberate choosing of the vulgar temptations that it
spreads. I will not believe that we have more than erredPATB10TISM
75
and lapsed for a moment, tod that we shall not uplift our-
selves again, with a new consecration of our country to the
mission of high example for which it was set apart in its
youth.
But if that is not to he—if the old ideals are really to
he buried with the moldy rubbish of outworn creeds—let
us, at least, be sure that it is not ciarelessly and thought-
lessly done ! Let us, at least, convince ourselves, by honest
and sober thinking, that the glory of a great subjugated
dominion is better than the glory of a perfected govern-
ment of the people, by the people, for the people, set shining
before the eyes of mankind! If we must have new prin-
ciples and new standards, God forbid that we take them
from German Junkers and British Tories, and do not make
them with conscientious deliberation for ourselves!
We say that pride is a patriotic emotion to be studied
and cultivated, but so, too, is shame—the shame which is
wounded pride. An admiring love of country miay be not
half so true as a grieving love. It is easy to be proud of
one’s country, even when the reasons for pride are small;
it is very hard to be ashamed for one’s country, even when
the reasons loom large; and so there is no training that a
citizen needs more than one which shall make him sensitive
to national misdeeds and mistakes, and courageous in
branding them for what they are. But how little tolera-
tion is given to that kind of proud sensitiveness, by what
conceives itself to be the patriotic public opinion of the
world!
There is no country yet civilized so far that great parties
in it will not be enraged by the least questioning of any
national act of war—by the least resistance of moral sense
or common sense to a needless and wicked drawing of the
sword—and will not confound all criticism of such national
misdeeds with criminal treason to the State. It was such
a party in England, last century, that cheered on King76
PATBIOTISM
George’s war with the American colonies, and howled down
Chatham and Burke. It was not a large party to begin
with, but it gained numbers by working on the passions
that war always stirs up. Said Burke to his Bristol con-
stituents in 1780, “ You remember that in the beginning
of this American war (that era of calamity, disgrace, and
downfall—an era which no feeling mind will mention with-
out a tear for England) you were greatly divided, and a
very strong body, if not the strongest, opposed itself to the
madness which every art and every power were employed
to render popular, in order that the errors of the rulers
might be lost in the general blindness of the nation. This
opposition continued until after our great but most unfor-
tunate victory at Long Island. Then all the mounds and
banks of our constancy were borne down at once, and the
frenzy of the American war broke in upon us like a deluge.
We lost all measure between means and ends, and our
headlong desires became our politics and our morals. All
men who wished for peace, or retained iany sentiments of
moderation were overborne or silenced.”
The experience of Burke is repeated continually in all
countries where any freedom of opinion prevails, and it is
something that demands a conclusive judgment in every
man’s mind. On which side, in such an instance, does the
presumption of patriotism lie? On the side of the thought-
less crowd, which excites itself with war cries, or on that
of the philosophic statesman, who studies the welfare and
the honor of his country in the large light of history, using
scrupulous standards of reason and right? Was Edmund
Burke false to England, or was he patriotic, in the anger,
the grief and the shame with which he looked on King
George’s war as an 44era of calamity and disgrace”? Was
he traitor or patriot in feeling when he deplored, as a
misfortune to his country, the victory that encouraged a
witless and unrighteous war? That ceased long ago to bePATBIOTISM
77
a question in England, and Burke and Chatham have their
undisputed place, high among the truest and wisest of
English patriots; but let Americans thresh out the moral
questions in the case for themselves. I would appoint it to
be one of the special studies in patriotism, that our children
should make. I would have them read and read again the
great speeches of those men on the American war, studying
the circumstances of the time, the state of English feeling,
the replies provoked; and then I would require them to
take the whole subject into their thoughts, and form deci-
sions for themselves on all the problems of right and wrong,
of public and private obligation and duty, that are involved.
In like manner, I would have our young people induced
to make moral studies of other wars; later English wars,
for example, that have been grieved over and resisted by
such men as John Bright; and I would try to bring our
American students of patriotism to a settled judgment, on
principle, between the war parties and the peace parties
in each such case. I would give them for another subject
our own Mexican War. Connected with that I would have
them read the ‘‘Biglow Papers” of James Russell Lowell,
in which he lashed the false pretences of that war; then read
the later 44Biglow Papers,” which‘throb with the emotion of
the War for the Union, and decide whether Lowell was less
a patriot in one instance than in the other.
On the more domestic side of a citizen’s relations to
his country and government, the needs and the oppor-
tunities for a patriotic education of the young are cer-
tainly no less than on that outer side where wars and
violences -are chiefly concerned. It seems to me that a
patriotic jealousy of public honor is the sentiment most
wanting and most capable of being awakened and cultivated
in this region of affairs. What I mean is something very
different from that vaporing, inflammable jealousy that
floats in the air of every country, always ready to be flashed78
PATRIOTISM
into flame by any spark of foreign offense, and always doing
infinite mischief in the world. I would try to dispel the
dangerous part of that sentiment, by convincing our young
people that the deiadly wounds to a nation’s honor are not
inflicted by foreign slights or wrongs, but are dealt to itself
by its own lapses from righteous ways.
I would try to make them see that nothing which a
foreign minister can put into dispatch—nothing that a
German admiral could do in Manila Bay—nothing that an
English captain could have done in the old days of British
arrogance at sefa, could be one-half as insolent to our coun-
try, one-half as wounding to its honor, as black-mailing
political “bosses” and “machines”—as servile legislatures
—as money-made Senators—as scores of political gangs have
become in our cities and States. There was fai time, not
long ago, when gentlemen, individually, carried their sense
of honor, as nations are doing now, on their sleeves, to
be jostled and ruffled by passersby, and hotly defended
with a sword always ready on the hip; but they had no
consciousness of the brutial bruising that their honor suffered
when they fell under the table at their drinking debauches,
and slept like snoring swine. Happily, the civilization of
gentlemen has gone far enough in our day to leave those
fantastic and boorish notions of personal honor behind; and
surely it is time that kindred conceptions of national honor
should be cleared from American minds, if from no others
in the world.
But the corporate jealousy that will protect public honor,
in nation, state and city, can never have its proper wakening
until a keener personal jealousy in our citizenship has been
roused singly in us all. Sometimes it seems to me that if
we could rightly understand and rightly feel what it is to
be an American citizen, we would guard our political
rights from impudent trespass more fiercely than pious
Moslems keep the holy places of their faith from profana-PATRIOTISM
79
tion by an unbeliever’s feet. I can imagine a kind of educa-
tion for the young citizen that would have that effect.
It would paint upon his mind such pictures of the piainful
winning of English liberty and law that he could never
think or speak of his heirship in them, nor exercise their
franchises, nor ever taste the sweetness of the peace they
have brought into his life, without an overwhelming con-
sciousness of the cost which ancestral generations have paid
down for them in his behalf. It would put the ballot of
free suffrage into his hand as something sanctified by the.
blood and tears of a thousand cruel years of English his-
tory ; as something brought to him by a ghostly procession
of martyred patriots, martyred thinkers, martyred saints—
Lollards, Puritans, Covenanters, Roundheads, Noncon-
formists, Chartists; victims of the brutal Tudor and the
treacherous Stuart; victims of the Star Chamber, the High
Commission and the “Bloody Assize”; suffering exiles and
pioneers of the wilderness and the sea; and it would fill
the air with their voices, whispering to his inward ear:
“0 man of a fortunate generation, for whom laws have
become equal and thought has become free, we give you a
happiness that we could not reach for ourselves; and this,
which is its title-deed—this charter of your self-sover-
eignty—what shall it be to you? Shall it be a thing of
small worth, to be looked at with indifferent eyes, soiled
with unclean fingers, its regal prerogatives flung carelessly
to a party and played with in political games? Or shall
it be like a good knight’s sword, sacred as honor, more
precious than life, a trust which no cowardice and no levity
miay betray?”
I can imagine, I say, a kind of patriotic education which
would have that impressive effect, and which would give
to the next generation a political conscience very different
from the conscience that acts in this. It is an educa-
tion that ciajnnot be easily given; but no work is easy80
PATRIOTISM
that bears great fruit. It must attack and overcome,
at the outset, the spirit of party, in which the spirit
of patriotism has always encountered its most inveterate
foe. I do not know why men should take on the habit
of thinking and feeling as partisans more easily than the
habit of thinking and feeling as citizens; but they do.
The passion of partisanship steals on those who do not
resist it; deludes them with a false likeness to the patriotic
state of mind; cheats their judgment; saps their inde-
pendence; misguides their loyalty, and gives to a party
or a faction whiajt belongs to the country by every conceiv-
able claim. We can save our young citizen from that
beguilement, if we will give him from the beginning a
clear understanding of the nature of political parties and
the purpose they ought to serve. He should be taught to
look at them with a critical, cool eye, ias instruments to
work with, agencies to be used, servants to be employed.
He should enter a political party precisely as he steps into
a railway carriage, because it is going his way; because it
is moving along iai line of principles and measures that leads
nearest to the ends which he wishes as a citizen to be carried
towards; and he should feel as ready as any traveler to
alight if it turns from that way. But men, once ticketed
to the train of a party, do often, I believe, make life-long
journeys in it, with no heed to its course or destination,
kept in it by the mere habit of the company, and care-
lessly committing their political fortunes to the conductor
and the engineer. That seems to be the reason why
managers of parties can become masters instead of servants
of large bodies of people, who take orders from them with-
out question, and opinions without thought, like the soldiers
of a Russian tsar. It is a monstrous travesty of democracy,
which could never be played if we were trained royally, as
we ought to be, for our sovereign citizenship; trained to
bear its sovereign honors with the pride of princes—to usePATRIOTISM
81
its sovereign powers with the carefulness of statesmen—to
take up its sacred duties with the consecration of priests.
If we will believe in the possibility of such an education
as that, the belief will give us half its fruits. It will
fill us with the spirit of the patriotism of hope and faith,
yearning and striving towards an ideal of one’s country
as it may be, and adding its passion to the love of one’s
country as it is. That, after all, has been the perennial
source of high patriotic inspiration in the whole history of
the world. Men who have toiled and suffered greatly for
their country in the past have mostly done so with an
expectant love, which found its object in things hoped
for more than in things known. The Italy for which
Mazzini and Garibaldi strove, fought, plotted, suffered
exile and poverty and reproach, during half their lives, was
not that broken, deformed, degraded Italy which they
dragged at liaist from under the Austrian heel, but it was
the redeemed and regenerated Italy of their faithful
dreams.
For us, who are happy in a country so fair and free
as this, the love in possession may easily become too satisfy-
ing, and chill the desiring and aspiring love which ought
to be an equal flame. For a perfect patriotism we need
both. No people can keep the good they have won without
striving for more. In the lives of nations, as in the lives
of men, there is no level place; nor is there any brake that
will hold them at rest on the slopes upon which they are
set. They must climb or they must slip. Both morally
and materially, that is the sternest of facts. To mount
or to fall; to grow or to decay; to grasp more of good,
or to keep less; to have more freedom or less—more honor
or less—more purity or less—are the alternatives of choice.
We choose the nobler destiny, of course, when we remember
to choose, iand are not forgetful of the courage, the labor
and the thought that are needful to make our choice good.82
PATRIOTISM
It is tlie forgetting we have to fear. It is against that
besetting sin of mankind that we need to keep the prayer
of the poet forever in our hearts and on our lips :
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget.THE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION
MOVEMENT
Address at a Meeting of the Associated College Alumni,
at the University Club, May 27, 1905
BY J. N. DARNED
Gentlemen of the University Club:
I can speak on this subject with a personal feeling which
you do not hiave. You know, by happy possession of it,
what the instruction and training, the associations and
influences of a college or university can do for a man; I
know by the want. I have felt the handicap of the want
all my life, and there are no stronger arguments for the
undertaking we have met to consider than such as are
embodied for me, in my own experience.
Personal circumstances, of course, and personal charac-
ter, had mostly to do with my privation; but they were
not alone. It may be that a more resolute spirit in myself
would have carried me to a college and through it; but
something was wanting, I am sure, in the spirit of the
community, as well as in my own. If I had been bred in
New England, every influence around me would have been
pushing me toward Harvard, or Yiale, or Dartmouth, or
Williams, or Amherst, or Bowdoin, or Brown. I should
have been made to feel that I must climb some higher stair-
way in learning than that of the common school. The
8384
THE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT
college would have been a proximate object in my outlook,
with the inviting paths to success or satisfaction in life
traced plainly to its doors and through its halls. But here,
in the Buffalo of my young days, I felt no such pressure
upon me. The college seemed hopelessly remote and inac-
cessible—-placed among the luxuries of life, for a favored
few. And so, as I look back, I cannot take to myself the
whole blame of my surrender to circumstances, and my
acceptance of an elementary preparation for the duties and
labors of life.
Those conditions of half a century ago, which put the
institutions of higher learning so much beyond the common
cognizance and thought of this community, have undergone
a great change. This club testifies to the multiplication of
young men in Buffalo whose studies are carried to the end
of ia collegiate course. And yet it must be said, I think,
that ideas of education, as a serious need in life, which go
beyond the range of teaching in our public schools, and
desires for that larger education which act with any power
upon parents or children, are limited to a class that is
relatively very small. No doubt the class has lamentable
limits everywhere, even in New England; but I fear we
exceed the average in the narrowness of ours. Not because
of an intellectual deficiency in our public, but because the
agents and the processes of the higher education are rep-
resented in little more than theory to our minds. We have
been singularly without the least nearness of (association
with it operatively, in one of its seats. We have not had its
teachers to bring the tone and spirit of their scholarship
into our society, or its students to carry the infectious ambi-
tion of their study into wider circles. Our high schools
have raised educational ideals to their plane, by such
influences, with immense effect; and we can heighten the
uplift by heightening the plane of influence. I doubt if we
can do it in any other way.' TEE UNIVEBSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT
85
Some have thought it a mistake in our country to divide
and scatter the provision of collegiate instruction amongst
numerous institutions that are slenderly endowed, instead
of concentrating it, with all possible equipments, in a
few great university seiats. But thiat view is yielding, I
judge, to one that estimates more highly the local attrac-
tion and the neighborhood influence that a college exercises
even when it is small and comparatively poor.
If the object of our present undertaking was only to
enlarge a well-cultured class in the city, iand to do that
only for the improvement of its members, the purpose
would be important enough, but it could hardly furnish
grounds for a strong public appeal. In fact, as a general
proposition, if the fruits of education were only for the
nurturing of the individual who gathers them, the public
might reasonably leave him to mlake his own struggle for it.
But most democratic communities have been quick to learn
that the public interest in the schools and teaching is equal
to the personal interest, if it is not greater; because success-
ful democracy in government is impossible without them.
It is an undisputed axiom in this country, that our public
schools are the nurseries of good citizenship; and I believe
that its popular acceptance as an axiom rests generally upon
a broad and true conception of what good citizenship means
and is. It contemplates much more than the equipment of
knowledge that ia school can give. Up to a certain point
it implies a full recognition of the plasticity of youth, and
the supreme need of care and skillful workmanship upon it,
to insure the making of useful good men. But, commonly,
that important recognition stops short at the most critical
period in youth. It is attentive to the plasticity of the
boy, and unmindful of the plasticity of the young man. It
assumes that a school which dismisses its students from
pupilage at just the age when he is beginning to have the
feelings and capabilities of a man has done enough for the86
TEE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT
making of the desired good citizen. In reality, this dis-
missal puts all that has been done for the half-formed’
youth to the gravest possible risk. The ripening of youth
into manhood is still before him; which means the whole
conversion of boyish dreams and fancies, boyish thinking,
boyish caprices of impulse and will, into determined ten-
dencies of thought, aspiration and purpose in the man. And
in that, the very crisis of human growth, the maturing
young man is sent forth ordinarily to be exposed to all the
hazards of influence encountered in what we describe as
business life.
Consider for a moment what those hazards are. Con-
sider them with reference to our public interest, as a com-
munity, in the formation of the young man. We want him
to become a good citizen, useful in promoting and helpful
in defending the public weal. "This calls for intelligence,
and he can be very usefully intelligent with no teaching
beyond that of the elementary school. But it calls further-
more for a large liberation and elevation of mind, to
raise it above sordidly selfish aims, above narrowing habits
of thought and opinion, above all dishonesties, all servil-
ities, all meannesses of every kind. Where the needed
moral largeness has been given by nature to a youth, with
a deep fixity in his being, he may be proof against the pres-
sures and strains of that arena of competition that he
(inters when his life-work begins, even when it begins in the
very midst of his youth. On the other hand, if Nature
shrank him to a poor pattern in his mother’s womb, there
may be nothing that could expand him in mind or heart.
But those are exceptions to the natural making of character
in men. As a rule, the youth who goes early into the
world of work and commerce is pliant, more or less, to the
forces that play upon him there. And they are forces
very trying and very dangerous to most of the higher
motives in life.. In many ways they act with enormousTHE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT
87
power for good, publicly and personally; but there is an
unceasing pull in them toward selfishness, toward egoism
in all forms, toward hardness, toward aggressiveness, to-
ward small interests and small thoughts—against public
spirit and public service—against fellow service—against
everything, indeed, that goes to the making of the good
citizen of our desire. The evil strain is so insidious that
even religion—not religion in its purity and perfection,
perhaps, but religion that believes itself to be pure—-can
be cheated into solemn consecrations of it, with blessing
and prayer.
Now, what is there—aside from the moral strength
that may be native in him—what is there that will best
protect a young man from those narrowing and hardening
tendencies in our competitive organization of life ? What
will do most to withhold him from the sordid and selfish
careers that make useless .and mischievous citizens ? What
will do most to keep social and civic and patriotic and altru-
istic feeling alive in him ? Why, assuredly, it is a full-fed
mind, left with no leanness or scantness in its growth.
Assuredly it is an early armoring of the man with fine
tastes, high thoughts, large views—too fine, too high, too
large to be reconcilable with an ignoble course in life.
That, as I conceive it, is what liberal education—liberal
culture—means for our democracy. It holds the vitalizing
leaven of an influence which democracy can spare no more
than it can spare the elementary under-culture of its com-
mon schools.
I have been thinking and speaking of conditions as they
are. What of those that we can see to be coming, and
for which we are bound to provide ? The sinister influences
that we have to contend with are a rising tide. Every-
thing that produces them increases and spreads. In all
fields of labor and all marts the competitive struggle grows
harder and fiercer each year. Wealth, not as a reasonable88
THE UNIVEMSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT
providence for safe, comfortable and useful living, but
in the measure of monstrous hoards, for show and for
power, bulks bigger and more fascinating among the objects
of ambition and pursuit. Disinterested public service is
obstructed and discouraged by machinism in our political
system more and more. We take into our political con-
stituencies more and more of ignorance and political inex-
perience from the old world. Everything considered, it is
an almost appalling educational task that we face.
And nowhere more so than in this city of ours. We
expect for Buffalo a great growth. The grounds of the
expectation are a vastly enlarged canal, a prodigious
development of electric power at our doors, an immense
concentration of steel and iron production by our side, an
always widening command of transportation facilities by
water and rail—and nothing in economic forecast could
seem to be more sure. It puts before us the prospect of a
huge population, in more or less divided masses; a great
army of common laborers, another of skilled workmen,
another of clerical employees, all in the service and under
the command of a powerful body of the capitalist—captains
of industry and trade; and every one of these masses of
people—the capitalists no less than the laborers—will need
all the lift of public spirit that can move them, from all
possible sources of light and leading, if they are to work
effectively together for the common good. In some views
the prospect of a populous and busy great city may be one
to exult in; but in this view it presents a future that we
cannot contemplate without serious anxiety and a pro-
found sense of duties that are loud in their call. If we
enter that future of Buffalo with no attempt to bring
influences to bear on its swelling multitudes from higher
ranges of culture than are touched by our excellent gram-
mar and high schools, we shall pay, or our children must
pay, some heavy penalty for the neglect.THE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT
89
It is needless, then, to say that the appeal in this under-
taking is not to civic pride. What it must waken is the
consciousness of a great public need—of a need as sub-
stantial in its bearing on even the material well-being of
the city as the need of a better union railway station, or
of a better water supply, or of a better city government.
Let no one be left to suppose that we want a College of
Liberal Arts for the name of it, or for the rounding out
of our half-formed University of Buffalo. We want it as
we want churches, libraries, art galleries, museums, clubs
like this, and every social institution and organization that
can influence the character and spirit of the city for good.
We want it as we want everything that can liberate and
liberalize capable minds; that can interest them in values
not measurable by the standard dollar; that can weaken
the increasing money-worship of the time, and lessen the
discords which that worship brings into all spheres of
industrial life. Whatever is helpful to those ends gives
an augmentation of power to the community for all move-
ments of its progress, on every line. It does so by con-
tributing to social harmony, and so helping to aggregate
the energies and capabilities that are individualized in the
social body, restraining them from needless rivalries and
strife. In a word, it contributes to a culture of spirit which
is the ultimate of civilization, and for which all the pon-
derable and purchaseable gifts of civilization are but a
means to an end—which we are prone to forget.THE
PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTORY1
BY J. N. EARNED
The staple of History has always been War. Exhibiting
the most forceful as well as the most brutal activity of men,
it has shaped most of the primary conditions of life for all
communities of the human race. In some way it has deter-
mined the career of most nations, from beginning to end.
Personally, in all ages, men have given themselves sacri-
ficially to war more devotedly than to anything else. Collect-
ively, in their tribes and in their corporate states, nations,
and empires, they have given to nothing else such assiduous
thought and care. For nothing else have they striven so
untiringly to perfect themselves. To no other art have
they ever applied so much of their minds and their means.
To no other purpose have the resources of their knowledge
been so strained, from the first rudiments of primitive
invention down to the latest attainments of the science of
the present hour. Their armies, their fleets, their weapons,
their cmilifery systems, whether barbaric or feudal or
modern, have always exemplified the highest constructive
and organizing attainments of the latest day.
War, then, represents the most continuous, the most
universal, the most impassioned and energetic of the col-
lective undertakings and activities of mankind throughout
the long past. It has exercised them in intellect and feel-
1. Reprinted by permission from The Atlantic Monthly, January, 1908.
9192	THE FEACE-TEACHING OF HIS TOBY
ing, trained the natural forces in them, worked upon their
ambitions, molded national character among them, far more
than any other. Of all subjects in history, therefore, it
calls for the gravest treatment, and, as a rule, it is not so
treated. It supplies to history, as a mere tale of the adven-
tures of man in the world, the more enlivening elements of
the story, the more dramatic situations, the more fascinat-
ing actors ; but, as having a distinct and immense import-
ance in itself, apart from its incidents and apart from the
personalities concerned in it—as being a tremendously dom-
inating influence in history, to be investigated and pro-
foundly considered as such—how often is it brought to our
consciousness by anything we find in a historical work?
The writers and teachers of history lead us into every
other special field of human action and make us attentive
to the particularities of its importance; to the influences
that have worked in it, for and against the welfare and
advancement of mankind; to the causes and consequences
that are traceable into and from it through wide surround-
ings of social condition and event. We are stopped thus
everywhere in the presentations of history, to contemplate
governments, religions, movements of trade, industry, in-
vention, growths of literature and iart. But it is not often
that we are brought to the same consideration of what, in
their nature and their importance, the influences and the
consequences of war have been.
Yet all other influences and consequences have been
secondary and subordinate to those of war. When we
examine the constitutions and institutions of national gov-
ernment, we find more of their provisions and adjustments
directed to anticipated contingencies of war than to any
other object for which nations organize their rule. Four
of the seven articles of our Federal Constitution as it was
framed originally, and eight of the twenty-three sections
into which they are divided, contain something of referenceTHE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTOBY
93
to that contingency. Eleven of the thirty-two clauses which
define the legislative and executive powers of the general
government and those withheld from the states are con-
cerned with the same. Elsewhere in the world, the organ-
ization and preparation of nations for conflict with one
another enter into the construction of their governments in
a measure far greater than this.
“When we look at religions in their historical exhibition,
we find them moving the greatest masses of men to the
greatest animation when their differences have furnished
pretexts for war; and we might be taught that very much
of what goes into history under the name and show of
religion is only the war-passion disguised. But how often
are we led to see it so ?
When we turn to the scrutiny of commerce as an active
agent in the making of history we see a different but even
larger intermixture of its incentives and workings with
those of war. The two coarse passions, the combative and
the acquisitive, which can be the most powerful in human
nature if not mastered by moral and intellectual strains,
have been in alliance from the beginning of the social state,
each using the other for the satisfactions it has craved.
The warriors have always been eager and busy in the service
of the traders, to break openings for their reaping in wider
fields, and the traders have always been ready to give them
that employ.
When we study the sciences and the industrial arts in
their relation to the historical activities of mankind, they
amaze us and grieve us by the alacrity of their devotion
to the purposes of battle. It may be that as much knowl-
edge and invention has gone, first and last, to the easing
and bettering of the conditions of life in the world as has
gone to the production of guns, projectiles, explosives,
mines, torpedoes, fortifications, battleships, armies; but that
is far from sure.94f
THE PEACE-TEACHING OF HI ST 0 MY
As for literature, if we should separate all that it has
drawn from war of incident, inspiration, motive, color,
excited imagination and emotion, would there he a remain-
ing half of equal spirit and power ? I fear not.
It is, then, the hideous fact of the recorded past of man-
kind, that its exhibit of men in battle, or planning and pre-
paring themselves for battle, or glorying in memories of
battle, is the most persistent and conspicuous exhibition that
it has to make. It is the most hideous of historical facts,
but its hideousness is not made impressive to us in history,
as history is too commonly written and taught. It ought
to fill us so with horror and pain that the shows and
trumpetings, the heroic and tragic romance, which garnish
it and disguise the underlying savagery of it, could never
divert our thought from its meaning of shame to the human
race; but it does not.
I think the main cause of this is not far to seek. Each
generation of the past, in leaving its records to posterity,
has left them permeated with its own feelings and judg-
ments—its own estimates and valuings of men and things—
its own admirations—its own ideals. These carry an in-
fluence which has stayed more or less through all the cen-
turies, in the impression which historical reading and study
have made on successive generations of mankind. To this
day it is hard for us to think of what was done in ancient
Judea or Greece or Rome with feelings that are really fit
and natural to the moral and rational state of the modern
mind. Our ethical and logical standards, considered
abstractly, at least, differ widely from those of the pre-
Christian ages; but how easily we can read the Hebrew
chronicles and the Greek and Roman histories, with no more
than half-consciousness of the difference, .and with less than
half-consciousness of the moral infidelity, which this
involves.
. It is only by a determined effort that we can realize how
much of a coloring from primitive ideals of excellence andTHE PEACE TEACHING OF HISTOEY
95
primitive conceptions of right has been carried down the
current of written history, and how much of modern feeling
takes fa tone from it that is untrue to modern knowledge and
belief. Its most mischievous perversion is in the admira-
tions it keeps alive, for actors in history who were naturally
admirable to their own times, but who cannot with reason
be admirable to us. The heroes of an age and a people who
imagined for divinity itself nothing loftier than the attri-
butes of the gods of Olympus ought not to be the heroes of
a generation which looks to Jesus of Nazareth as the per-
fected man; but what homage we pay even yet to the
memory of men in Greek and Roman history who looked
heroic to their contemporaries because they fought with
surpassing valor and strength, whatever the object, what-
ever the motive, whatever the consequences of their fighting
might be!
In the early stages of civilization, when social order is but
beginning to take form, strife is a normal exercise of body,
will, intellect, and energy in men; and it is natural that
they should look to it for the high tests of human superior-
ity. To society in that state war could not look otherwise
than glorious, because it afforded those glorifying tests; and
Poetry was born then, in passionate song-bursts of admira-
tion for the invincible warriors of the tribe. Those birth-
songs of poetry, which glorified war and the heroes of war,
in Homeric Greece, in the Rome of the kings and the early
republic, in the younger ages of all peoples who have sung
any songs of praise, seem to have been powerfully the car-
riers of that glorification, out of times and conditions in
which they expressed a natural feeling into conditions and
times in which the feeling was wholly natural no longer.
From generation to generation poetry has inspired poetry,
arousing the emotion that demands it for utterance, and
each has sent forward its motives and its themes. In that
way the primitive hero-motive of the poets went into history96
THE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTOBY
and has been projected through it, from first to last, with an
influence much greater than we comprehend.
Of course that influence has always found lingering bar-
barisms of temper in large parts of all society to nourish it
well; but it has nourished them even more, and they would
not otherwise have kept the mischievous vitality they have
to this day.
On the rational side of their nature men have always, in
the process of civilization, been taking slowly into their
understanding .and belief a code of morality that would
question every war, to find whether or no it could show on
either side a necessity of defense that gave righteousness to
that side; and that would put every hero of battle on trial,
to learn what it was that he fought for and with what war-
rant he slew his fellow men. Civilization could not be a
process of rational evolution if it did not work toward moral
enlightenments like that. And it has. But feeling is
stronger than reason in the majority of mankind, and
antiquity, even primitive antiquity, has been able to trans-
mit to us a thousand times more of its feelings than of its
beliefs.
If history, in its large sense, embracing the whole litera-
ture of the past, serves as the vehicle of that transmission,
the fault is our own; for it does not proffer to us from
its cargoes what we are choosing to take. In all its show-
ing of the conflicts of nations, races, parties, religions, its
appeal to us intellectually is for abhorrence of one side or
both sides of every war that ever was fought. It never
justifies forgetfulness of the awful crime that is somewhere
in every war, or indifference to the placing of the crime, or
admiration for any performance of ability or bravery in the
committing of the crime. If we permit ourselves to feel
that indifference of admiration for deeds which morally in-
different generations in the past have called heroic, we are
simply servile to traditional habits of feeling, and do a
wicked violence to our own better knowledge of right.THE PEACE-TEACHING OF HIS TOBY
97
And this tends to deprave the moral judgment we exer-
cise on kindred deeds of our own time. If the blood-
drenched figure of Napoleon shines heroical and glorious in
the eyes of more than half of the people of the Christian
world today, it is mainly because they see only his likeness
in kind to Alexander of Macedon, to Julius Caesar, to Char-
lemagne, and feel impelled by what we may call the habit of
the ages to make their estimate of him correspond with the
Greek, the Roman, and the mediaeval estimate of them. Let
us not blame history for bringing thus the barbaric stand-
ards of twenty centuries ago to the weighing and measuring
of this modern prodigy of atavic barbarism. As much as
we allow it to do so, history will keep to each age its own
gauges of human quality, its own rules of conduct, its own
heroes. When they are shifted out of place and bring con-
fusions, perversions, distortions of moral sense into our
view of events and of men in our own day, we do it our-
selves ; and in doing it we are false to the study and teach-
ing of historical truth.
Not many of us go far enough in the following of Chrjst
to feel that no wrong and no blow should be resisted, and
that there can be no righteousness in war. But we cannot
read history with just attention to motives in it and be
doubtful of the wicked criminality of all wars on one or the
other side, and of most wars on both sides. In many con-
flicts each party has persuaded itself that a righteous neces-
sity compelled it to take arms; but the righteous necessity
was never imperative to both; and the strict showing of
history will concede it very seldom, to either. Almost
always, on the defensive as well as on the aggressive side of
a war, there has been enough of wrongful temper, of need-
less provocation, of inward willingness for the sword, to
burden it with a serious share of guilt.
We tried long to hold the fathers of this republic
wholly blameless for the war in which they won its inde-98
THE PEACE TEACHING OF HISTOEY
pendence; but the farther we have been moved out of the
(atmosphere of their time the more impossible it has become
for us not to see that some considerable excuses, at least,
were given to the British government for the angry un-
wisdom of its measures, and that all the belligerent temper
which exploded in a revolutionary war was not engendered
in the cabinet and court of King George.
In like manner, the clarifying, cooling influence of time
is working among us, in the North and in the South, a modi-
fication of our views of the sectional temper that was heated
on each side to its conflagration in the terrible Civil War.
Reason and just feeling compel us, in both sections, to see
a large action of motives and excitements and instigations
on both sides of the whole issue concerning slavery that were
not purely patriotic, nor purely moral, nor purely from any
unselfish conviction of right. I think there was never more
of sincerity and pure motive in any war than in that; but
it is clear to me that even that was an unnecessary war;
because the best mind and the best feeling of the people
never had control, on either side, of the discussion of the
questions that led them into it. Influences more partisan
than patriotic, and more of passion than of principle, were
working for years to push the sections into conflict, and they
did not work on one side alone.
We often say of the Civil War that it was inevitable; and
that is true if we mean what Christ meant when He said,
“It must needs be that offences come.” In His thought
He reckoned the inevitableness of wrong-doing among
men, and was pointing to no necessity which they do not
themselves create; for He added, “ But woe to that man by
whom the offence cometh. ’ ’ Of all offences to God and man,
that of war is assuredly the blackest we know or can con-
ceive; and if ever we find reason to say of any war that “it
must needs be, ’ ’ let us take care to remember that men have
made the need; that the woe and the crime of it are on theirTHE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTORY
99
heads; and that we must not look for the whole guilt on one
side.
History, written with truth and read with candor, carries
this teaching always; and my plea is for graver attention to
it than our tradition-colored habits of mind incline us to
give. Especially in the introduction of the young to his-
torical reading, it seems to me of great importance that we
train them to a justly abhorrent attitude of mind toward
war; to such an attitude of thought and feeling as will check
the easy excitement of interest in armies and commanders
and incidents of battle, awakening a moral and rational
interest instead. If they read a story of war with the feel-
ing that it is the story of somebody’s or some nation’s crime,
they are sure to be moved to a judicial action of mind, and
find their liveliest interest in searching out and apportion-
ing the guilt. By this leading they can be carried into more
or less critical studies of the moral, the political, and the
economic antecedents of a war, scrutinizing the right and
the wrong, the practical wisdom or the unwisdom, the true
or the false reasoning, in public policy, in popular feeling,
in the aims and measures of statesmen, that are discover-
able to them in the doings and disputes that brought it
about.
For example, in our own history, if young students of it,
when they approach the occurrence of the War with Mexico,
in 1846-47, are led to a serious examination of the circum-
stances which preceded it, not casually, as if they were only
pursuing a common routine in the learning of facts, but
with the especial attentiveness of a feeling that the conduct
of their country is to be judged, as to its consistency with
principles of right and plain rules of honor, the investiga-
tion cannot fail to interest them, generally, more than the
mere story of the battles of the war. And it will give them
new moral convictions, and a new conception of patriotism;
for they will begin to see that a true lover of his country100
THE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTORY
must care more for keeping uprightness and honor in the
conduct of its government than for having victories in
battle with other peoples to -boast of, or for having con-
quered populations to rule, and conquered lands to culti-
vate, and conquered ports for extended commerce, and
augmented wealth in conquered mines.
And when such young students discover, as they will,,
that the taint of dishonor, of false pretense, of iniquitous
motive, is in all the procedure by which our government
forced Mexico to engage in war with us; when they read
the words of Benton, and of other honorable leaders of the
party in power, who proclaimed and denounced the flagrant
wickedness of its course, and when they note the emphasis
of the vote in the elections by which a majority of the
people condemned it,—then, if they are reminded of the
value to us of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and
large parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona, with Texas
stretched to the Rio Grande, which were our conquests in
the war, and are asked, ‘ ‘ How could we afford to do without
them today?”—then, I say, they will be brought face to
face with such a question as will probe their moral sense
to its depths, and have, on the moral side of their education,
a tremendous effect.
Can anything that a nation gains by a wantonly wicked,,
aggressive war be thought of by honest citizens as the justi-
fication of its war? Can a nation win covetable territory
by means that would be criminal and shameful to an indi-
vidual if he used them for winning his neighbor’s lands,,
and yet not be criminal, or disgraced, or merit less from its.
citizens of their fealty and love? Can a man uphold his
country in an aggressive war with less wrong-doing than if
the aggression were his own ? If such questions could be
threshed out with earnest thoroughness, again and again, as
they arise naturally in historical study, and in their bearing
upon the facts of particular wars, I am sure that a newTHE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTOEY
101
aspect would 'be given in another generation to the whole
subject of war.
Now that the nations of the world are instituting a great,
august tribunal for hearing and adjudicating disputes
among them that threaten war, we may hope that it will
become a prevailing, natural habit, in the reading and study
of history, to imagine a summoning of the authors of past
wars to submit the grounds of their contentions to such a
court. Apply that imagination, for example, to the abomin-
able wars of the eighteenth century, in which half the world
was desolated and tormented by thieves’ quarrels among the
monarchs and ministers of Europe, in the evil time of their
unrestrained power! Apply it to the War of the Spanish
Succession, or to the War of the Austrian Succession, or to
the Seven Years’ War. Imagine a bench of disinterested
and honorable jurists attempting to give serious hearings
and decisions as to whether Louis the Fourteenth may repu-
diate the solemn engagements that he entered into when he
married the Infanta of Spain and joined her in renouncing
all contingent claims to the Spanish crown; or whether
Frederick the Great and his confederates may attack and
despoil Maria Theresa, whose inheritance of the Austrian
dominions of her father they had pledged themselves to
uphold; or whether Maria Theresa and Catherine of Russia
may revenge themselves on Frederick by organizing a
powerful combination to carve and partition his kingdom!
There is no slightest open question between right and
wrong to be found in the origin of one of those wars. There
is nothing to argue about in the grounds on which they
were fought. They offered, therefore, no case that could
come before a tribunal like that of The Hague. And, what
is more to be considered, no tribunal of that character could
exist under the conditions which produced such wars. From
which it follows, that the conditions producing a Hague
tribunal are conditions that may fairly be expected to ex-102
THE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTORY
tinguish the possibility of wars as openly wicked as those
into which Europe and colonial America were dragged by
Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth of France
and Frederick of Prussia, called the Great. A generation
that is able to contemplate the submission of its national
disputes to a rational adjudication cannot easily he tolerant
of a war that has no rationally debatable cause. We have
gone far in the way of civilization within the past century
and a half if we have come to this; and, realizing the ad-
vance, we realize how much of the actuality of civilization,
lies in the movement toward suppression of war.
Yet war has not only its tolerant apologists, who look
upon it as a necessary evil, but its admiring upholders, who
commend it as an exercise of energies and virtues in man
which his best development requires. In their view he
could not be manly if he did not sometimes fight like a wild
beast. Courage, resolution, independence, love of liberty,
would suffer decay. Rights no longer to he contended for
and defended would be valued no more. Peace, in a word,,
would emasculate the race. Does history sustain such a
view? Not at all. The peoples which have exercised their
self-asserting energies most in war are the peoples in whom
those energies went soonest and most surely to decay.
Among the strong nations of the ancient East, the Assy-
rian pursued the busiest, most constant career of war; and
its end was the most absolute extinction, leaving the least
mark of itself behind. What has value in the ruins of its
buried cities is what it took from the more ancient Baby-
lonia. Among the Greeks, it was the Spartans who illus-
trated the fruits of the culture of war; and how much of
Greek influence in history came from them? The Romans,
were a great people, doing a great work in the world,—for
how long? Till they had exhausted the forces of genius and
character that were native in them by persisting in war;
and the exhaustion had begun before the republic wentTHE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTOEY
103
down and the empire took its place. The Romans had then
organized and given their name to a great incorporation of
the energies of many other peoples,— Latin, Greek, Gallic,
Germanic; but the freshening absorption only retarded and
did not arrest the decay. If war could ever invigorate and
better a people we should surely have seen the effect in the
history of Rome, and, surely, we do not.
Among modern peoples the French have had the most of
whatever culture war can give; and the French have a less
hopeful future than any other important people in Europe
today. On the other hand, the English have been and are,
unquestionably, the people of highest achievement in the
modern world; the people who have done most for the
liberation and general uplift of mankind; and, of all who
inhabit Europe, the English have had the least of whatever
culture war and battle can give. If this seems to be a mis-
statement, bear in mind that the many wars of England
have been naval more than military, involving relatively
few men in actual fight; that she has used soldiers who were
not of English blood, from subject races or subsidized allies,
to a great extent in her wars; that a large British army,
on the scale of the armies of Germany and France, has
rarely been seen on any battlefield; that Englishmen had
never had, since Cromwell’s day, at least, so extensive and
so serious a personal experience of war as that which they
went through in their late conflict with the Boers. It is no
exaggeration, then, to say that the qualities exhibited by the
people of English blood have been developed less by the
culture of battle than those of any other living race, and
that the barbaric doctrine which commends war as an exer-
cise necessary to the moral training of mankind, is refuted
sufficiently by that single fact.
It is far from my thought to question the moral nobility
of the spirit which accepts battle as a stern, imperious,
terrible duty of defense, when home and country, or sacred104	THE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTORY
rights and institutions, are wickedly assailed. Then it is
self-sacrifice, the very sublimation of the human soul. Then
it is purely and truly heroic, and uplifts humanity by in-
spiring example. But courage and fierce energy of the kind
to which battle is attractive,— what good to the world can
come from the cultivation of them? They are forces, to be
sure, that have usefulness in other exercises than that of war.
They are part of the power which drives men in that con-
quest of Nature which we call the material progress of the
world; but are they not the part of that power which is ruth-
less, oppressive, dangerous to society, by the hard, aggressive
selfishness with which it works against the common good ?
But, leaving that question aside, and assuming that the
coarsely militant courage and militant energy, as well as
the courage and the energy that are militant only when
duty makes them so, are good qualities in men, and to be
cultivated for the improvement of the race, we are con-
fronted by the discouraging fact that the very process of
cultivation is destructive of the good effect we seek. "We
exercise the fighting temper in men by war, and kill them
in the exercise, or keep them from marriage, and, in one or
the other way, lessen the breeding of the quality of man
that we are supposed to be endeavoring to increase. Every
great war is a dangerous drain upon the stock of valor and
fortitude in the spirit of the peoples engaged; and the drain
runs near to the dregs when war succeeds war, as it does and
will if war is believed to be a national good. There has
been no lack of assiduity in the cultivation of humanity by
war; and what has the product been ? Look at the training-
grounds of Europe, where the schooling has been busiest
and longest, and see!
History, not well studied, but written or read lightly, for
its incidental romance, can make no other impression than
those I have alluded to at the beginning of my paper. War
puts a deluding emphasis on its own part of the story by itsTHE PEACE-TEACHING OF HISTORY
105 ,
rubrication of the text. The past has tinctured it with states
of feeling and thinking which ought to have faded long ago,
in the light of increasing knowledge and in the warmth of
the increasing neighborliness of mankind, but which stay
and give their color to the influence of historical reading,
if we take.it with no proper filtration through the moral
beliefs of our own day. The songs of the heroes of those
ages when battle was a normal exercise of high qualities in
men can still play upon our imaginative and sympathetic
brains, just as the trumpets, the drums, the fifes, the ban-
ners, the plumes, the splendid pageantry of a marching
army can play on our quivering nerves of bodily sense.
A poet, Richard Le Gallienne, has described the deceit of
the emotion in exquisite verse
War
I abhor,
And yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum and fife! And I forget
Wet eyes of widows, and forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchery without a soul.
The tears fill my astonished eyes,
And my full heart is like to break;
And yet ;t is all embannered lies,
A dream those little drummers make.PREPARE FOR SOCIALISM1
BY J. N. EARNED
Indifference to the modem socialistic movement is fast
becoming an impossible attitude of mind. Friendliness or
hostility to it, in some degree, must come into the feeling
of everybody who gives the slightest heed to the auguries
of our time; for the movement has now gathered a momen-
tum that will carry it surely to some vital and momentous
outcome of change in the economic organization of society.
If this is not to be calamitous, but is to realize in any
measure the good equalities and satisfactions which Social-
ists expect, that happy result can arrive only in communi-
ties which have forethoughtfully safeguarded themselves,
with all the wisdom they possess, against ruinous reckless-
ness or perfidy in the working out of so critical a change.
It is nowhere too soon to take serious thought of what we
need to be doing in such preparation.
Our first thought in that direction must be of the several
forces which enter into the problem we deal with. These,
in the main, are the forces of opinion which act on the pro-
positions of Socialism from different dispositions of mind.
The possible attitudes of thought and feeling on the sub-
ject are six in number, to wit
1. That of the radical disciples of Karl Marx — the or-
ganized “ Social Democrats’’ of many countries — who rep-
1. Reprinted by permission from The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1911.108
PREPARE FOR SOCIALISM
resent most logically the doctrines of modern Socialism, as
formulated by Marx; who regard their undertaking as a
class-revolt (of the wage-workers), land who contemplate the
desired transfer of capital from individual to collective
ownership and management as an achievement of revolu-
tion, which may be violent, if violence is necessary, when
adequate power shall have been secured.
2.	That of others in the same wage-earning class who
have not answered the socialistic call, nor openly assented
to its dogmas, but whose circumstances must incline them
to be wistful listeners to its promises and appeals.
3.	That of people who approve, on principle, the social
rearrangements contended for by Marx and his followers,
regarding them as desirable, because just; but who would
seek to attain them by cautious and gradual processes, and
would give no support to any program of hasty revolution.
4.	That of people who are, or hope to be, gainers per-
sonally from the existing economic system, with its limitless
opportunities of profit to individuals of the capitalized class,
and who see nothing but wicked attack on their personal
rights in the proposed limitation of private capital and its
gains.
5.	That of people who are not thus 'biased against the
socialistic project by a personal interest in present economic
arrangements, but who do not believe that productive in-
dustries and exchanges can be operated with success in the
mode proposed, and who fear failure in the attempt, with
serious wreckage of the social fabric and much demoraliza-
tion of mankind.
6.	That of people who have not yet given enough atten-
tion to the socialistic movement to have a thought or a feel-
ing about it.PREPARE FOR SOCIALISM
109
The first and fourth of these groups are the centers of the
antagonism developed by the social-economic doctrines of
Marx, and the outcome of that antagonism will depend on
the action of forces from these two on the other four. At the
two sources of opposing motive, the mainsprings of energy
are nearly, but not quite, the same. Self-interest may be
as dominant among the Socialist workingmen as among their
capitalistic opponents; and it may be tempered on one side
by solicitude for the general welfare as much as by sympa-
thetic class-feeling on the other; but the self-interest of the
capitalist, whose iample means of living are secure, has a
very different spur from that of the workingman, whose
daily wants are tethered by his daily wage. In the needs,
the desires, the hopes, the fears, the uncertainties of the
socialistic wage-worker, there is an animus which the mere
appetite of capital for its own increment can never excite.
In their intensity, therefore, the opposing influences that
work in this contention are unevenly matched; and there
is still more disparity between them in the compass of their
action. All of the wage-workers of the world are possible
recruits to be won for Socialism, and they outnumber all
other divisions of civilized mankind. They make up the
first and second orders of the classification set forth above,
and the second of these stands plainly in the relation of a
waiting-list to the first. In Continental Europe its constitu-
ents are passing over in always swelling numbers to the
party which claims and expects to secure them all. In
Great Britain -and America the draft into Socialism from
the ranks of labor is slower; but, even as indicated in social-
istic political organization and voting (which must be far
short of a showing of the whole movement), it goes on with
persistent increase.
On the other side of the issue, while the people who have
a personal stake in the capitalistic system form a numerous
body, it does not compare in numbers with the opposing110
PBEPABE FOB SOCIALISM
host. It exercises powers, at present, which are far beyond
measurement by its numbers, but they are powers created
by the economic conditions of today, and dependent on
states of feeling which have no fortitude or staying quality
in them, but which can be broken into cowardly panic by the
most trifling alarm. For resistance to an undertaking of
social revolution, nothing weaker than a capitalistic party
could be made up. Its strength in the pending contest with
Socialism is practically the strength of the alliances it can
form. It may seem to have an assured body of important
allies in the fifth group defined above; but how far is that
assured? The people of the group in question are essen-
tially disinterested and open-minded, and their judgment in
this grave matter is subject to change. Their number ap-
pears to have been greater a few years iago than now. Many
who belonged to it once have gone over into the company of
the third group, persuaded that hopes from the justice of
the socialistic project are more to be considered than fears
of its adventuresomeness, if the venture be carefully made.
How these people will be moved hereafter is most likely to
depend on the direction which the socialistic movement
takes,—whether toward revolutionary rashness, under the
control of the radical Marxians, or along the Fabian lines
projected by the prudent Socialists of our third group. At
all events, there is no certainty of persistent opposition to
Socialism from any large part of this fifth class; and
obviously there is nothing to be counted on, for either side,
from that remainder of thoughtless folk who know nothing,
and care nothing, as yet, about this momentous question of
the day.
All considered, the appearances, as I see them, are dis-
tinctly favorable to the socialistic movement, thus far. It
is a movement which moves continuously, with no reaction-
ary signs. The influences in it are active on the greater
masses of people, and, whether selfish or altruistic, they have
the stronger motive force. It is a movement of such nature,PBEPABE FOB SOCIALISM
111
in fact, as seems likely to break suddenly, some day, into
avalanches and floods.
What then? Suppose the spread of socialistic opinion
to be carried in this country to the point of readiness for
taking control of government, and that we then find await-
ing it the same political conditions that exist today! The
Socialist party, in that case, would simply take the place of
our Republican or our Democratic party, as ‘‘ the party in
power/’ and would exercise its power in the customary
party modes. The keen-scented fortune-hunters and profes-
sional experts of politics would already have swarmed to it
from the old parties; would have wormed themselves into
its counsels and perfected its “ organization/’ with a full
-equipment of the most approved “ machines.” Then the
nationalizing and the municipalizing of productive indus-
tries, and the taking over of capital from private to collec-
tive ownership, would begin. Some Croker or Murphy
would be found to “ boss ” the management of the opera-
tion in New York, some Quay in Pennsylvania, some Gor-
man in Maryland, and so on, throughout the land.
This is no wild fancy as to what must occur, if the pro-
jects of Socialism are to be carried out while political con-
ditions — political habits in the country sand the make and
character of parties — remain as they now are. If the
experiment of Socialism were to be undertaken today, it
would have its trial under that sort of handling, and by no
possibility could it have any other. Nor, indeed, can it ever
have any other, unless the whole theory and practice of
party politics in the United States are recast, with a new
and strong injection into them of conscience and rationality.
In other words, if we are pushed, by the spread of social-
istic opinion, into (attempts at a governmental ownership
and management of productive industries, without a pre-
vious reformation of our political system, we shall inevitably
be carried to a disaster so great that imagination can hardly
picture it to one’s mind. No sane Socialist, however firm112
PBEPABE FOB SOCIALISM
his faith, in the workability of the social-industrial scheme,
can dream of its working otherwise than disastrously in the
hands of party managers, as parties are now organized land
managed with the consent and connivance of the people who
make them up. Nor can he reasonably believe that la Social-
ist party can grow up side by side with the parties of our
present politics, play the game of politics with them, win
the prize of political power from them, and then use that
power as the theory of Socialism requires it to be used,—
without partisan spoliation or personal “ graft. ”
It comes, then, to this: If possibilities of good to society
are in the socialistic scheme, they are obviously and abso-
lutely dependent on the discretion, the honesty, the social
sincerity and good faith with which it is carried into effect.
A reckless and knavish corruption of the undertaking so to
revolutionize the social economy could produce nothing else
than the worst wreckage that civilized society has known.
Hence the question between possibly beneficent and inevi-
tably calamitous results from the undertaking is a question
of chana'cter in the government to which it is trusted.
The present character of government in our country,
throughout its divisions, controlled ,'as it is by self-seeking
professional managers of political piarties, is not to he
thought of as one which could work the socialistic experi-
ment to any other than the destructive result. The condi-
tions that give this character to our political parties, and
through them to the government which they control alter-
nately, will surely give the same character to a socialistic
party, if it grows up under their action, and approaches an
attainment of power while they prevail.
But it is so growing, and seems more than likely to
arrive at power to control some, at least, of our divisions of
government at no far distant day. Therefore, the most
urgent of all reasons for a resolute, radical, and immediate
reformation of parties land the politics they embody is found
in the progress of socialistic belief.EVIL
A DISCUSSION FOR THE TIMES
BY J. N. LARNEDEVIL:
A Discussion for the Times1
BY J. N. DARNED
At an uncertain time, not long ago, in a remote com-
munity, there wlas held a great council of thoughtful men,
who sought a common understanding and agreement as to
what relief from the evils that afflict mankind may, with
reasonableness, be pleaded for to the throne of Heaven. Of
their number, or of circumstances of their meeting, there
is no discoverable journal or report; but, fortunately, some
notes of the debate that occurred have come to light.
It appears from these notes that discussion in the council
was opened by a question from the presiding officer, who
asked: ‘ ‘ Have we any supreme desire in our minds which
claims consideration firstV9	An eager voice answered:
“To have no more death in the world’and other voices
joined the cry. But they were hushed when one, venerable
in years, who wore the flowing robes of the East, stood forth
and spread out his hands, as though silence must come at
his bidding. “Be not in haste, 0 my brother,99 he appealed,
“to deliver yourselves from Death; to live may so easily be
more dreadful than to die. Before we ask for the closing
of the door of esdaJpe from life by the tomb, let us take care
that wie are not accepting a captivity which we cannot
1. From the Hibbert Journal (Eng.), July, 1913.
115116
EVIL
endure. How shall we dare to fling away our hope of a
better world without assurance of some better state of exist-
ence in this ? Oh, beware! The question concerning Death
is not the first that we need to set our minds upon, but the
very last of all. Let it wait, I beseech you.”
Quick assent to this appears to have been given by con-
trolling numbers in the assembly, and an order of pro-
cedure was now adopted which brought first into debate
this question: “Shall God be asked to take away from men
the afflictions of disease and pain that torment their flesh?”'
When two or three had spoken favorably of this, one
arose who said: “We are commissioned, as we believe, to
submit to the Divine Ruler of the universe such desires
concerning the evils that afflict us as ‘find clear approval
in our minds/ after ‘careful thought.’ dan any among us
have given careful thought to human suffering from ills of
the flesh without learning that mostly, if not wholly, they
are of man’s own making? With every increase of our
knowledge we find more and more of our maladies starting
plainly from our own ill-dealing with ourselves. What we
know of this already affords fair reason for believing that
the bodily ills of humanity are wholly of its own creation
and within its own control. What then? Shall we ask
the Lord, not only to restore health and vigor to bodies thlat
we have wrecked by abuse, but to keep them whole, though
we abuse them still? If we herd a million human beings
in some narrow city, multiply its walls and the shadow of
its walls around them, veil the light of the sun with smoke,
poison the air above and the ground beneath with foul secre-
tions, shall we implore Heaven to stifle the fevers for which
we are responsible? If the common carelessness of mankind
leaves some filthy comer of the world to breed the winged
germs of a deadly pestilence until they increase beyond
control and are swept across the face of the earth, shall we
ask for angels to stand in the way tamd turn back the plague ?EVIL
117
Shall we ask God's permission to be brutish, to be dissolute,
to be improvident, to be needlessly ignorant and then to
suffer no harm ? ”
The speaker paused, and a voice from the assemblage
cried: 4 4 Surely it is possible for the omnipotent Author of
our Being to endow us with bodies that will not sicken, or
with minds more competent for Safeguarding them. Why
should we not ask for this?”
44The omnipotence of God,” replied another, “is the
omnipotence of perfect reason and righteousness. Its own
inerrancy must set bounds to it. It cannot conceivably do
anything other than the best. How then can we hope for
any other deliverance from ills of the flesh than we now
have—namely, the way of Death?”
“But Who knows,” rejoined the siame contentious voice,
“who knows that Death is a deliverance, and not an extin-
guishment and an end?”
“In the common manner of knowing, no man knows
was the reply. 4 4 But there are some among us who have
a faith which is firm, and there latre others who have a hope
that is strong; and those who find neither the faith nor the
hope may not have looked for them with an open eye.”
44And if,” said another, 44we have no more than the hope
that life is not ended for us, but only changed, with some
blessed enfranchisement, by the mysterious touch of Death,
that hope is more reasonable than the sceptic attitude
which refuses it. It has more to rest on; for the feeling
of life is solely in this conscious part of us which we call
spirit or mind. We identify life with that, never with the
bodily part of us which lies outside of every feeling in us
that hints of deathlessness. We know that life is alien to
its flesh, which lives while it lives by stress of something
that is not in itself. We have, therefore, an expectation of
decay and death for the body; but why should we carry
over that expectation to the spirit which dwells in the body?118
EVIL
Nothing that we know bids us do so; no instinctive feeling
in us loads that way. It seems to be a needless choosing of
despair instead of hope, if we incline against belief in a
future life of the soul. ’ ’
This was challenged by a questioner who asked: “Can
you, with what you doubtless know of the functions of the
brain, form a rational conception in your mind of conscious
life without the agency of brain to produce it?”
‘ ‘ No,9 9 was the reply; ‘ ‘ nor can I shape a distinct thought
of mind or conscious life as of something that issues from
the ponderable and palpable substance of the brain and is
extinguished by the dissolution of that substance. It is with
me as I judge it to be with all of us. Our thought of this
great mystery is indistinct. It lures us to a region of
thought in which we find nothing for the shaping of defined
concepts, and where we can use no formulas of the logic
we apply in argument to tangible things. We bring then
into action some superlogical power of the mind—intuition,
insight, instinct, we call it—which is not of the essence of
strict reason, but may sometimes be truer in judgment than
reason.’ ’
This point was questioned no further; but a voice from
the more remote seats of the chamber was heard to ask: “If
we may not petition for release from the ills of the flesh,
wh'at hinders us from asking, at least, that when our bodies
are diseased we may be spared the torments of pain ? ’1 This
drew quickly from another distant voice the counter-ques-
tion: “What is pain? It is the outcry, is it not, of our
sentient flesh when harm comes to it, its signal of distress,
its call for help, the physician’s summons and his guide?
Without its warning we should be consumed secretly by
disease, and Death would steal on us unawares. Are we
ready to invoke consequences like these?”
There wlas a moment of silence, until a new turn in the
discussion was started by a speaker who said: ‘4 Thus farEVIL
119
in our inquiry we have touched only one type of the mala-
dies which oppress mankind. There are others, perhaps
more numerous, to he considered. I mean the maladies with
which men are born; the maladies which had a beginning,
it may be, in the sins, or follies, or ignorance of generations
long gone, and which have passed from father to son as a
lasting heritage of the race. Since we suffer from these,
and yet are wholly innocent of their cause, /atnd have no
more power to heal them than we have to save ourselves
from them, it is reasonable, I am sure, to pray that they
be taken from us.”
‘4This,” said the President, “is one of many dark ques-
tions that are obviously awaiting us further on in our debate,,
if we follow the scheme of discussion that has been adopted.
The mystery of our evil inheritances, in body and spirit
alike, can be looked at in a clearer light, no doubt, when
we turn to the moral side of the grave problems we have
undertaken to study. I propose, therefore, that we put
aside land pass by for the moment this whole question rela-
tive to the bodily ills of the human race, and return to it
later, when the larger questions that it touches shall have
been cleared in our minds.”
This proposal was approved, and the council, after some
interval of rest, gave attention to the question which came
next in the scheme of debate; namely,
“Does reason justify us in praying to the Divine Father
for simpler wants and better ways of life among men, to
the end that poverty, with all its suffering, may disappear
from the worldt”
“But this,” said one who arose quickly, “takes us back
to ground which we have just learned we must leave behind
us for a time. For man, not God, is the maker of human
poverty. None are in want by the will of the Creator. The
abundance He has given us surpasses the needs of all. The
fruitfulness of our earth hlas no bounds yet shown. It120
EVIL
yields to us more and yet more, without stint, according to
the labor and the knowledge with which we make claims on
it. Its bounty is priced to us only in toil, and the toil which
pays that price to nature, and no more, is a blessing and a
joy to them who give it.”
“Yes,” said a second speaker, “and along with the
abounding riches of the earth God gives us the faculties to
discover and the powers to command them. They increase
with the growth of our needs, as we rise to higher conditions
of life. We are masters, or may be, of more than all man-
kind can rationally use and enjoy. By God’s appointment
there is no place for poverty in the midst of this plenty,
but it is man who has contrived, as much as lies in his power,
to keep it from the many, for the surfeiting of the few. It
is man who has filled his world with the miseries of want.
“ Two parties of mankind have divided between them the
execrable work. The members of one have wrought through
generations of vice, idleness, scorn of knowledge (and con-
tempt for good, to destroy every useful faculty in them-
selves. These can do no profitable part of the work of the
world, and their portion of the harvests which they neither
sow nor reap is a dole to them from the pity of their fellows.
The other party is composed of those who bring cunning and
greed into their work; who are busier and more skillful in
the garnering than in the tillage; who contrive to be bailiffs
and f actors among their simpler-minded neighbors, and who
gather to themselves the common product according to their
opportunities. The monstrous wealth which such men heap
up lessens the portions of all others, and keeps great num-
bers so near to want that even slight misfortune brings
misery.”
“True,” added a third speaker, “and even the suffering
from poverty which innocent misfortune and calamities of
nature may produce is commonly a fruit of wrong-doing
among men. When its cause does not lie in the improvi-EVIL
121
dence of the sufferers, it is most often discoverable in
.greed. If there remains some small residue of want, among
the feeble and the helpless, for (which men should have no
blame, is there too much of it, do you think, for a wholesome
and needed exercise of the kindly sympathies of mankind!
Would we wish to have the offices of benevolence taken away
from us altogether!”
The President now interposed to remark: ‘‘Enough, I
judge, has been said on this point for the present. It cannot
be doubted that in asking for the removal of want from the
world we should be asking for a moral change in men; and
that is the subject which we have placed last on our pro-
gram for discussion, so that all the problems which seem to
meet in it may be considered together. We must now pro-
ceed to that.”
This final question was phrased thus: “Is it fitting that
we appeal for Divine Grace to purify^ the hearts of men;
to extinguish the movings of evil thought and desire in
everyone; to open their understandings to the light which
will make them always wise unto righteousness, and so to
cleanse the world% of folly a/nd misery and wrong and sinf”
Two men stood forth at once, and there was debate
between them for a time. Questions were asked by the one
who spoke first.
‘‘What we now think of asking,” said this speaker, “is
for a human nature that cannot be otherwise than righteous
in conduct and pure in desire. But what is there in right
conduct that makes it righteous, or in purity of feeling that
makes it pure! Assuredly it is the conscious wish and pur-
pose to be righteous and to be pure. Take that away and
you have taken the living principle of rightness and purity
out of all human action and feeling. Are we ready, you and
I, to be bent to what is good by omnipotence—predestined to
it in every act of our lives, with no will or willingness or
striving toward it in ourselves; no gladness from it; no122
EVIL
merit in it, more than belongs to the good instincts of birds
when they feed their young ? There is <a rectitude like this
in the faithful water-wheel, which turns as the stream pushes
it, and in no other way. That is rectitude for a machine; it
it not righteousness for a moral being. To shape human
nature thus would end wickedness in the world, no doubt,
and it would end goodness too. It would fill the stage of
human life with puppets, sinless and soulless, to act on our
earth a poor travesty of the purity and peace of Heaven. ’ ’
“No,”- cried the opponent, who stood waiting for an
opportunity to speiiaik. ‘4 Our brother is mistaken. It is no
travesty or mimicry, but the reality of Heaven itself that
we would bring to the world if this prayer should prevail.
That which we would ask for mankind is what God must
have given to His angels. We suppose them to be, not sin-
less only, but incapable of sin. If our Lord is gracious to
us, what shall hinder the regenerating of mankind to that
perfection of being? Will any of us fear to be lowered by
a nature which the 'angels bear?”
“We know nothing of the angels,” was the reply. “As
we picture them in imagination—inhabitants of Heaven and
companions of Deity—they (are at a height of being which
our understanding cannot reach. It is conceivable to us
that in that supernal state the harmony of will with wisdom
may become so absolute that freedom and necessity are
reconciled and fused in it, and fare one constraining fact.
If, happily, we dare to hope for a lifting, some time, of the
soul of man to that height, it cannot be in this body of flesh.
The impossibility is plain. If, therefore, we mean to plead
for men that they shall be endowed with the nature of
angels, we must pray for their disembodiment and transla-
tion to the world of spirit; for not otherwise can we give a
ground of reason to the plea.
“Even that, however, would be rash and questionable.
For how do we know that any being less than divine canEVIL
12a
afford to lose the knowledge of evil or to escape the warfare
with it which this life affords? How do we know that
Omnipotence even, can temper a nature lower than its own
to perfect righteousness by any gentler process? How do
we know that the final wisdom in which evil is extinguished
can be attained in any other way than through teaching
and discipline which have their beginning in this hard
school of sorrow and sin?”
The objector was not silenced. “Even yet,” was his
rejoinder, “I am not persuaded that the reasoning of our
brother is wholly true. He grounds it on belief in the
present moral freedom of man; but where is certitude of
that to be found? A man who seems to pick his way as he
will, at every step in life, is really being pushed at every
step, this way or that, by conflicting influences of reason,
passion, halbit, heredity and numberless other constraints,
and it is the stronger among them which prevail -and give
their bent to Ms course. Every act of the man may be
accounted for by the composition of these forces. I see no
function left for that imagined sovereign of the mind which
we call Will.
“It does not suffice for me to be told that a man is master
of his own passions, director of his own faculties, shaper of
his own habits; for I find this to be but partly true. I find
him born with so much mastery already lost or won for him,
that his fate is mostly fixed before his own agency in it
begins. Oh, tell me, my brother, where you find reason
sufficient for your belief in the moral free agency of man ? ’f
“The proof of my free will is, to me, like the proof of my
existence, which I find where Descartes found it,” was the
answer. “ (I tMnk, therefore I am.’ In other words,
thought involves a consciousness of self and of something
which is not self, and can leave the thinker in no possible
doubt of his own existence. I carry this a step further, and
find that I think morally, being conscious of myself in124
EVIL
various states of consciousness which contain the sense of
responsibility, right, wrong, guilt, innocence, obligation,
duty, and the like. Therefore, I am a consciously respons-
ible self, which I could not be without free agency — the
power of self-control. This evidence, which I draw only
from myself for myself, is convincing to me.
“But'I iam led to the same conclusion, and with even a
stronger conviction, by what I may call the logic of the
universe. The evils of the world become explainable if we
assume that humanity carries its destinies in its own keep-
ing, and is working out its own development, with freedom.
Without that assumption the enigma of human existence
seems insolent in its mockery of our understanding, and
drives us to atheistic despair. I should fear, for my own
part, to refuse the belief which has that for its alternative. ’ ’
A third disputant now entered the discussion, saying:
“The surest knowledge that mankind has acquired is in
what we call Science, and nothing in Science is surer than
its ascertainment of the rigid reign of laiw in the universe;
the inflexibility of an established order in it; the unbreak-
able procession from cause to effect throughout its unceasing
successions of change. How could there be that dominance
of law and fixity of order if men were made free to disturb
the order by exemption from the law V7
A quick answer ciame from the champion of free agency.
‘ ‘ Science has taught us much,7 7 he said, ‘4 concerning the law
that is inherent in the physical constitution of the universe,
but little or nothing of the law that rules in the realm of
mind. We have no warrlant for supposing that the same
law has force in both. It seems impossible, indeed, that any
parallelism can exist between mental and chemical or
mechanical processes; between concepts and molecules;
between the association of ideJas and the combination of
material atoms; between exercise of reason and judgment
and the performances of a calculating machine. MindEVIL
125
seems to me the nerve matter of the (brain as we use the
diaphragms and wires and electric batteries of our tele-
phonic systems. In both cases the use of the physical
instruments employed is conditioned and limited by the
physical laws to which the instruments are subject; but
within those limiting conditions there is presumably a free-
dom, on the part of the employing agent, as entire in the
one case as in the other.”
“But give attention for a moment,” interposed another,
“to that thinking—that process of deliberation out of which
the volition comes! The mind gives a hearing, perhaps, to
many conflicting persuasions, some for one course of action,
some for another; some from ethical, some from practical
considerations; some from selfish and some from generous
impulses; and there may be aff ecting the mind varied bodily
influences, such as those of age, health, fatigue, and the
like, which are not argumentative at all, but which have a
powerful effect on the decision to be given. All these fac-
tors of influence, as one who writes on the subject has said,
4 owe their particular existence at any given moment simply
and wholly to the natural course and sequence of events.’
Now, what is to be seen in the working of these influences
which determine the man’s action—what, I say, is to be seen
but an inexorable driving of necessity, from the beginning
of time?”
44Yes,” was the reply, 44that, undoubtedly, is what you
must see when you speak of 4 the influences which determine
the man’s action.’ I will not dispute your statement that
the factors of influence which come into the question 4 owe
their particular existence at1 any given moment to the
natural course and sequence of events. ’ If I could go fur-
ther with you and suppose that these influences were self-
acting, and could by some mystery of agreement, determine
one’s action, then I should believe with you that the decision
is a product of necessity, as the influences behind it are.
But that is to me an impossible supposition.126
EVIL
“If a suggestion of reason, or a plea of conscience, or a
temptation of appetite, or the pressure of habit, could be
thought of as being made up of atom-like elements, each
charged with some measurable and invariable quantity of
influential psychic force, then we might be able to conceive
the possibility of some automatic reckoning of the persuasive
powers they bring severally to bear on the volitional appara-
tus of our minds when we are conscious of their conflict, and
the consequent possibility of automatic determinations of
conduct, in which mind, (as mind, would have no agency
whatsoever—free or not free. Make the attempt, my friends,
to frame such a conception, and see if you do not reject it!
See if you are not driven to conclude that the hearings we
have consciousness of giving in such instances to contending
persuasions must be in their nature judicial; that there
must be a tribunlal of some nature in the mind which gives
such hearings, and adjudicates the pleadings submitted to
it; that this tribunal, however constituted, is what we call
will, and that there is freedom in its decrees. The pleas
before it may come from sources of necessity, but the free-
dom we feel in the judgment between them is a logical fact. ’ ’
“Nevertheless,” said a new adversary, “the question
remains—How can the purposes and plans of God, so far as
they relate to this earth and to man himself, be fulfilled, if
mlam can derange them by free action? If his action can
never be contrary to them, then he is not free.”
“It would not be difficult to believe,” responded another,
“that the powers God has given to His human creatures are
so limited and the human nature so constituted that they
cannot greatly disturb, much less thwart, the Divine pur-
pose. Moreover, I, for one, feel rationally assured that a
free action of the human intelligence and will, under the
influences to which humanity is subjected, is among the
agencies that serve the purposes of God, and for which, in
His plans, allowance is made. In this view, Man is investedEVIL
127
with a mortal responsibility, which I cannot regard as
possible otherwise; Creation can be thought of as having a
moral object, and the Creator as having an eternal interest
and pleasure in His work.
“In my conception of the Creator, His omniscience has
been exercised in a perfect foreplanning of the ends of His
creative work, and His omnipotence in the animating of
forces and processes that will patiently and perfectly work
out His design. Formerly men seemed to be required to
believe that the creation of the universe was an immediate
act, completed in its beginning. ‘God spake and it was
done,’ ias the Psalmist stated it. But now we are accepting
from the revelations of science a different belief, which per-
mits us to think of the Creator as having an eternal interest
in the evolution of His systems of worlds and of life upon
them. We can reasonably think, for example, of the evolu-
tion of successive states of society on the earth, successive
civilizations, successive races and nations, as all being the
result of the working of the forces which execute the Divine
design, without thinking that all the details of what became
human history were already from the beginning and per-
petually present in the Divine Mind, like a composed drama,
with actors pre-appointed and stage directions set forth.
“Without the conception of some such large flexibility in
the evolution of Man and his environment, it must seem to us
that God’s interest and pleasure in His creation ceased with
the planning of it, and that the infinity of His being would
involve an eternity of ennui."
For a short interval there was silence, and then the Presi-
dent spoke, saying: “It is easy for me to believe that the
Divine purposes in creation can be accomplished without
denying to men such a measure of free agency as would
make them responsible, moral beings, and not mere marion-
ettes. If this belief prevails among us, we cannot approve
the prayer proposed to us, asking for an exercise of Divine128
EVIL
omnipotence to cleanse the world of sin and folly and wrong..
It would be a doubtful supplication, even if we look to
nothing but our preparation for another world. For I fear
that we cannot afford to have one difficulty of right-doing
diminished, one consequence of ill-doing shortened or taken
away, one lust extinguished in us, one shadow of ignorance
illuminated, except by ourselves and for one another. 77
On this one arose who had been silent hitherto. “I could
be persuaded,77 he said, “to think and feel as you do, my
brothers, if our warfare was only with the evil powers that
rise against us in our own generation. But when men are
struck down, as I see them daily, by some bolt out of the far
past, I cannot feel in my heart that they have fallen in fair
fight. I find myself more willing to suspect that a dreadful
inequity in the operation of natural law has, in some start-
ling way, escaped the notice of the great Ruler, than to
believe that it bears His sanction and follows from His
command. Therefore, I came to this council under pledge
to appeal for the deliverance of mankind from penalties for
which the past is responsible.77
“Bo you not forget,77 was asked in reply, “that gains of
good as well as gatherings of ill are borne down from gen-
eration to generation on the same carrier-stream of heredity ?
Not taints and infirmities alone are transmitted from father
to son, but every fresh invigoration of sanity in body or
mind that one wins by a temperate, prudent and virtuous
life, is won also for one’s children and children’s children.
Every conquest one makes of an evil passion or appetite is
a conquest that carries help through all coming time to one 7s
descendants.
“We depend on this persisting heredity—so terrible in
one of its aspects, but so benign and so full of great promise
in the other—for human advancement. Shall we venture to
ask that the stream of transmission be stayed? Shall we
dare to renounce for our posterity its whole inheritance fromEVIL
129
the past, 'both good and ill ? Or shall we pray to have that
which is evil sifted out and extinguished, and that which is
good made enduring ? But this could have no lasting effect,
unless freedom of conduct should be taken from man; for
just as he now neglects due exertion to restore purity to
tainted streams of heredity, so might he then neglect the
preservation of a purity which miracle had brought about.9 9
To this another added: “Do not think that our deliver-
ance from these evils of inheritance may be got by crying
to God for miracles that would wreck His universe! Bather
let us look at them with the awe they command—these con-
sequences, evil and good, which are the manifested truth
and honesty of the constitution of the world; inflexible as
the righteousness of God! Let us look at them with that
light in our minds, and so set ourselves more earnestly to
the ranging of our lives and the lives of our fellow-men, in
harmony with the order to which they point. We are the
keepers of our brethren, no less than of ourselves. All
ignorance among them is our shame; all vices among them
are our reproach; their sins are our shortcomings—until we
have wrought to the last of our strength for the teaching
and uplifting of everyone.9 9
A moment of impressive silence followed these grave
words. Then the President arose and said:	“The long
day of our debate is waning. We have wasted none of it, I
think, in useless words. We have looked straightly into the
questions that were put before us, and have seen them in
many lights. Possibly we are now prepared to decide this
final one, just discussed, which asks: ‘Is.it fitting that we
appeal for Divine grace to purify the hearts of men; to
extinguish the movings of evil thought and desire
in everyone; to open their understandings to the light
which will make them always wise unto righteousness, and
so to cleanse the world of folly and misery and wrong
and sin?’ Those who would have this assembly address130
EVIL
such a prayer to our Heavenly Father are asked to rise in
their places.’9
A few arose; but so few from the great multitude that the
general disapproval of the proposition was left in no doubt;
and none questioned the conclusiveness of the decision as to
all matters that had been discussed.
“What, then," said the President, “shall be our response
to the gracious invitation, from Heaven, as we believe, which
has brought us together? Manifestly we iare most of us in
agreement as to what the response must be. In conclusion,
I will ask you to consider these words which I have written:
“We humbly acknowledge, 0 God, that there would not
be disease in this world, or pain that is not beneficent, or
untimely death, or sorrow, or any want that creates distress,
or any wrong-doing or evil of any nature, if the reason and
the moral consciousness and the faculties and forces which
Thou hast given to Thy children of the earth had been used
rightly land faithfully in all things by all. We discern,
moreover, that Man could not become worthy of the spiritual
nature Thou hast given him without the freedom which
makes him responsible for his actions. Wherefore our
minds make no appeal against any apparent imperfection in
the ordering of the world, or for heavenly help in the strug-
gles of human life save that of the strengthening spirit
which has always come to those who strive faithfully to the
utmost of their powers for the best.”
This statement was accepted and adopted by the silent
uprising of almost the whole assembly, and then the Presi-
dent, in a few words, declared its session ended.IN MEMORIAM
An Inscription Written for and Published in The Buffalo
Express, April 17, 1865
BY J. N. LARNED
To the Memory of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
President of the United States of America,
Who Died a Martyr to His Country,
Palling by the Hand of a Traitorous Assassin,
On the Night of the 14th Day of April, 1865,
Which was the Fourth Anniversary of the Beginning
of the Great War of the Rebellion,
Through which he had led the Nation to a
Glorious Triumph,
Just Completed When the Dastardly
Revenge of
Vanquished Treason was Wrought in His
Monstrous Murder.
The great Republic loved him as its father, and revered him as the
preserver of its national life. The oppressed peoples of all lands
looked up to him as the anointed of liberty, and hailed in him the
consecrated leader of her cause. He struck the chains of slavery
from four millions of a despised race, and lifted them to erectness
among their fellow-men.
131132
IN MEMORIAM
By his wisdom, his prudence, his calm temper, his steadfast patience,
his lofty courage and his loftier faith, he saved the Republic from
dissolution; by his simple integrity he illustrated the neglected
principles of its constitution, and restored them to their just ascend-
ency; by all the results of his administration of its government, he
inaugurated a new era in the history of mankind.
The wisdom of his statesmanship was excelled only by its virtuous-
ness. Exercising a power which surpassed that of kings, he bore
himself always as the servant of the people, and never as their master.
Too sincere in the simplicity of his nature to be affected by an
elevation to the proudest among human dignities, he stands in the
ranks of the illustrious of all time as the purest exemplar of Democ-
racy. While goodness is beloved, and great deeds are remembered^
the world will never cease to revere his name and memory.CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE
WRITINGS OF J. N. LARNED
[This bibliography does not include Mr. Larned’s papers published in the library journals, or
his writings for the Buffalo Express.]
Personal Representation:	Suggestions toward a plan for the
nomination and election of Representatives. Buffalo:	Express
Printing Co., 1867. (Pamphlet.)
‘ ‘ Found Drowned”: Melancholy end of Guy H. Salisbury. (Pam-
phlet; reprinted from the Buffalo Express, Sept. 6, 1869.)
Address, at eighth annual opening, Buffalo Pine Arts Academy, Peb.
12, 1870.	(Buffalo Express, Peb. 14, 1870.)
Our Money Problem. (Atlantic Monthly, v. XXV., pp. 615-626,
May, 1870.)
Address, on the erection of a monument to Brig. Gen. Daniel D. Bid-
well, Forest Lawn, Buffalo, Oct. 20, 1871.	(Buffalo Express,
Oct. 21, 1871. Reprinted, Buffalo Historical Society Publications,
v. XIX.)
Report on the State of Trade between the United States and British
Possessions in North America. Prepared for the Secretary of
the Treasury, in compliance with a joint resolution of Congress.
Washington; Government Printing Office, 1871.
Abraham Lincoln. Address at St. James Hall, Buffalo, Peb. 12,
1874.	(Buffalo Express, Feb. 13, 1874. Reprinted, Buffalo His-
torical Society Publications, v. XIX.)
Talks About Labor. N. Y.:	D. Appleton & Co., 1876.
Defective Representation and its Remedies. Ca. 1876. (Pamphlet
privately printed.)
A Nation or Not. The supreme Issue in American Politics. Address
at a Republican campaign meeting, Buffalo, Oct. 15, 1880.
(.Buffalo Express, Oct. 16, 1880.)
The Caucus System:	Its Failure and the Remedy. (Pamphlet:
reprinted from the Buffalo Express, 1881.)
133134
WRITINGS OF J. N. LAMNED
The Influence of a Public Library. Remarks at a meeting held
April 18, 1883, to promote the movement which resulted in the
erection of the Buffalo Library building. (Typewritten copy
preserved by Butcalo Public Library. Printed, Buffalo Historical
Society Publications, v. XIX.)
The Buffalo Library and its building, illustrated with views;
also brief Historical Sketches of the Buffalo Fine Arts
Academy, the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, and the Buicalo
Historical Society. [Buiialo] 1887. 4to., ill. (The sketch of
11 The Buffalo Library ’ 7 was reprinted in the Publications of the
Buffalo Historical Society, v. V., pp. 361-376.)
Letters, Poems and Selected Prose Writings of David Gray:
edited, with a biographical memoir, by J. N. Larned. Buffalo
Courier Co., 1888.	2 v.
History for Ready Reference, from the best historians, biographers
and specialists. The C. A. Nichols Co. 1894-5. 5 v.
Same, revised and enlarged edition, 1901-10.	7 v. (v. VI., Recent
history, 1894-5 to 1901; v. VII., 1901-10.)
The Mission and the Missionaries of the Book. Address at 34th
University Convocation, State of N. Y., June, 1896. (Regents7
Bulletin, Univ. S. N. Y., Sept. 1896.)
City Nominations: A Plea for Primary Elections to supersede the
Caucus. [January, 1897.] (Pamphlet, privately printed.)
Washington and Lincoln. (With 1 (American Courage:	An
address delivered before the Saturn Club, Buffalo, Feb. 22, 1897,
by the Hon. Sherman Hoar.77 Pamphlet. Reprinted, Buffalo
Historical Society Publications, v. XIX.)
A Talk About Books:	Addressed originally to the students of the
Central High School, Buffalo. Buffalo: Peter Paul Book Co.
1897, pp. 36.
England's Economic and Political Crisis. (Atlantic Monthly,
v. LXXXI., pp. 298-311, March 1898.)
Gladstone. (Atlantic Monthly, v. LXXXII., pp. 1-22, July, 1898.
Published without author7s name, as leading article.)
The Flaw in Our Democracy. (Atlantic Monthly, v. LXXXIY.,
pp. 529-535, October, 1899.)
Patriotism :	An address delivered March 15, 1900, before the Liberal
Club of Buffalo. (Pamphlet, privately printed. Also printed in
the year-book of the Liberal Club, Buffalo [1900.] Reprinted,
Buffalo Historical Society Publications, v. XIX.)
A History of England, for the use of schools and academies. Boston
and New York:	Houghton^ Mifflin Co., 1900. Pp. 673, ill.WRITINGS OF J. N. LARKED
135
A Multitude op Counsellors: being a collection of codes, precepts
and rules of life from the wise of all ages; edited, with an intro-
ductory essay on the ancient and modern knowledge of good and
evil. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1901.
The Literature of American History:	A bibliographical guide.
Edited for the American Library Association by J. N. Larned.
Published for the American Library Association by Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1902. 8vo, pp. 588.
A Primer op Eight and Wrong, for young people. Houghton Miff-
lin Co., 1902.
A History op the United States, for secondary schools. Hough-
ton Mifflin Co., 1903.
Public Address delivered May 27, 1905, at a meeting of the Associ-
ated College Alumni at the University Club. ' (Pamphlet No. 2.—
University Extension Movement. Eeprinted, Buffalo Historical
Society Publications, v. XIX.)
Seventy Centuries op the Life op Mankind. The C. A. Nichols
Co., 1905, 2 v. Title changed to ‘ ‘ The Eise and Fall of Nations:
exhibiting seventy centuries of the life of mankind.7 7 1907. 2 v.
Books, Culture and Character. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1906.
The Peace-teaching op History. (Atlantic Monthly, v. Cl., pp.
114-121, January, 1908. Eeprinted, Buffalo Historical Society
Publications, v. XIX.)
A Criticism op Two-party Politics. (Atlantic Monthly, v. CYII.,
pp. 289-300, March, 1911.)
A Study op Greatness in Men. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911.
Prepare for Socialism. (Atlantic Monthly, v. CVII., pp 577-580,
May, 1911. Eeprinted, Buffalo Historical Society Publications,
v. XIX.)
A History op Buffalo. The Progress of the Empire State Co.,
1911, 2 v. (Also constitutes vols. II. and III., of the work
entitled:	“The Progress of the Empire State,77 edited by
Charles A. Conant, N. Y., 1913.)
The Life and Work op William Pryor Letchworth, student and
minister of public benevolence. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912.
The Life and Work op William Pryor Letchworth. Bead at a
meeting of the Buffalo Historical Society, Thursday evening,
April 18, 1912. (Printed, Buffalo Historical Society - Publica-
tions, v. XVII., pp. 3-36.)136
WHITINGS OF J. N. LAENED
Evil:	A Discussion for the Times. ([Hibbert Journal, v. XI.,
pp. 856-870, July, 1913. Reprinted, Buffalo Historical Society
Publications, v. XIX.)
A Practicable Organization of Democracy. (Atlantic Monthly,
v. CXII., pp. 610-616, Nov., 1913.)
Lakned's History of the World, or seventy centuries in the Life
of Mankind—Eive vols., ill. World Syndicate Co., Inc., New York
City. 1915. (A re-issue after Mr. Larned’s death, of the
“Seventy Centuries,?’ with illustrations and an added chapter:
“Prom the death of Queen Victoria to the Present Day.”)