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FOUR 
 AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
FOUR 
 AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES W. ELIOT 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 1906 
 
LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 Two Copies Received 
 
 NOV 22 1906 
 
 Copyright Entry 
 CLASS <X XXc, No. 
 
 / 6 a ^ 4- 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 
 Copyright, 1906 
 American Unitarian Association 
 
Note 
 
 The four essays in this volume were 
 written for celebrations or commemora- 
 tions in which several persons took part. 
 Each of them is, therefore, only a partial 
 presentation of the life and character of 
 its subject. The delineation in every case 
 is not comprehensive and proportionate, 
 but rather portrays the man in some of 
 his aspects and qualities. 
 
Contents 
 
 I. Franklin 
 
 An address delivered before the meeting 
 of the American Philosophical Society to 
 commemorate the two hundredth anniversary 
 of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, Philadel- 
 phia, AprU 20, 1906. 
 
 II. Washington 31 
 
 An address given before the Union League 
 Club of Chicago at the exercises in commem- 
 oration of the birth of Washington, February 
 23, 1903. 
 
 III. Channing 57 
 
 An address made at the unveiling of the 
 Channing statue on the occasion of the one 
 hundredth anniversary of the birth of William 
 Ellery Channing, Boston, June 1, 1903. 
 
 IV. Emerson .73 
 
 An address delivered on the commemo- 
 ration of the centenary of the birth of Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, Boston, May 24, 1903. 
 
FRANKLIN 
 
Four American Leaders 
 
 FRANKLIN 
 
 The facts about Franklin as a printer 
 are simple and plain, but impressive. 
 His father, respecting the boy's strong 
 disinclination to become a tallow-chandler, 
 selected the printer's trade for him, after 
 giving him opportunities to see members 
 of several different trades at their work, 
 and considering the boy's own tastes and 
 aptitudes. It was at twelve years of age 
 that Franklin signed indentures as an ap- 
 prentice to his older brother James, who 
 was already an established printer. By 
 the time he was seventeen years old he 
 had mastered the trade in all its branches 
 so completely that he could venture, with 
 hardly any money in his pocket, first into 
 
4 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 New York and then into Philadelphia 
 without a friend or acquaintance in either 
 place, and yet succeed promptly in earn- 
 ing his living. He knew all departments 
 of the business. He was a pressman as 
 well as a compositor. He understood 
 both newspaper and book work. There 
 were at that time no such sharp subdi- 
 visions of labor and no such elaborate 
 machinery as exist in the trade to-day ; 
 and Franklin could do with his own eyes 
 and hands, long before he was of age, 
 everything which the printer's art was 
 then equal to. When the faithless Gov- 
 ernor Keith caused Franklin to land in 
 London without any resources whatever 
 except his skill at his trade, the youth was 
 fully capable of supporting himself in the 
 great city as a printer. Franklin had 
 been induced by the governor to go to 
 England, where he was to buy a complete 
 
FRANKLIN 5 
 
 outfit for a good printing office to be set 
 up in Philadelphia. He had already pre- 
 sented the governor with an inventory of 
 the materials needed in a small printing 
 office, and was competent to make a criti- 
 cal selection of all these materials ; yet 
 when he arrived in London on this errand 
 he was only eighteen years old. Thrown 
 completely on his own resources in the 
 great city, he immediately got work at a 
 famous printing house in Bartholomew 
 Close, but soon moved to a still larger 
 printing house, in which he remained dur- 
 ing the rest of his stay in London. Here 
 he worked as a pressman at first, but was 
 soon transferred to the composing room, 
 evidently excelling his comrades in both 
 branches of the art. The customary 
 drink money was demanded of him, first 
 by the pressmen with whom he was asso- 
 ciated, and afterwards by the compositors. 
 
6 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 Franklin undertook to resist the second 
 
 demand ; and it is interesting to learn that 
 
 after a resistance of three weeks he was 
 
 forced to yield to the demands of the men 
 
 by just such measures as are now used 
 
 against any scab in a unionized printing 
 
 office. He says in his autobiography : 
 
 " I had so many little pieces of private 
 
 mischief done me by mixing my sorts, 
 
 transposing my pages, breaking my matter, 
 
 and so forth, if 1 were ever so little out of 
 
 the room . . . that, notwithstanding the 
 
 master's protection, I found myself obliged 
 
 to comply and pay the money, convinced 
 
 of the folly of being on ill terms with 
 
 those one is to live with continually." 
 
 He was stronger than any of his mates, 
 
 kept his head clearer because he did not 
 
 fuddle it with beer, and availed himself of 
 
 the liberty which then existed of working 
 
 as fast and as much as he chose. On this 
 
FRANKLIN 7 
 
 point he says : " My constant attendance 
 (I never making a St. Monday) recom- 
 mended me to the master ; and my 
 uncommon quickness at composing occa- 
 sioned my being put upon all work of 
 dispatch, which was generally better paid. 
 So I went on now very agreeably." 
 
 On his return to Philadelphia Franklin 
 obtained for a few months another occu- 
 pation than that of printer ; but this 
 employment failing through the death of 
 his employer, FrankUn returned to print- 
 ing, becoming the manager of a small 
 printing office, in which he was the only 
 skilled workman and was expected to 
 teach several green hands. At that time 
 he was only twenty-one years of age. 
 This printing office often wanted sorts, 
 and there was no type-foundry in America. 
 Franklin succeeded in contriving a mould, 
 struck the matrices in lead, and thus sup- 
 
8 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 plied the deficiencies of the office. The 
 autobiography says : "I also engraved 
 several things on occasion ; I made the 
 ink ; I was warehouse man and every- 
 thing, and in short quite a factotum." 
 Nevertheless, he was dismissed before long 
 by his incompetent employer, who, how- 
 ever, was glad to re-engage him a few 
 days later on obtaining a job to print 
 some paper money for New Jersey. 
 Thereupon Franklin contrived a copper- 
 plate press for this job — the first that 
 had been seen in the country — and cut 
 the ornaments for the bills. Meantime 
 Franklin, with one of the apprentices, 
 had ordered a press and types from Lon- 
 don, that they two might set up an inde- 
 pendent office. Shortly after the New 
 Jersey job was finished, these materials 
 arrived in Philadelphia, and Franklin 
 immediately opened his own printing 
 
FRANKLIN 9 
 
 office. His partner " was, however, no 
 compositor, a poor pressman, and seldom 
 sober." The office prospered, and in July, 
 1730, when Franklin was twenty-four 
 years old, the partnership was dissolved, 
 and Franklin was at the head of a well- 
 established and profitable printing busi- 
 ness. This business was the foundation 
 of Franklin's fortune ; and better founda- 
 tion no man could desire. His industry 
 was extraordinary. Contrary to the cur- 
 rent opinion. Dr. Baird of St. Andrews 
 testified that the new printing office would 
 succeed, " for the industry of that Frank- 
 lin," he said, " is superior to anything I 
 ever saw of the kind ; I see him still at 
 work when I go home from the club, and 
 he is at work again before the neighbors 
 are out of bed." No trade rules or 
 customs limited or levied toll on his 
 productiveness. He speedily became by 
 
10 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 far the most successful printer in all the 
 colonies, and in twenty years was able 
 to retire from active business with a 
 competency. 
 
 One would, however, get a wrong im- 
 pression of Franklin's career as a printer, 
 if he failed to observe that from his boy- 
 hood Franklin constantly used his connec- 
 tion with a printing office to facilitate his 
 remarkable work as an author, editor, 
 and publisher. Even while he was an 
 apprentice to his brother James he suc- 
 ceeded in getting issued from his brother's 
 press ballads and newspaper articles of 
 which he was the anonymous author. 
 When he had a press of his own he used 
 it for publishing a newspaper, an almanac, 
 and numerous essays composed or com- 
 piled by himself His genius as a writer 
 supported his skill and industry as a 
 printer 
 
FRANKLIN 11 
 
 The second part of the double subject 
 assigned to me is Franklin as philosopher. 
 The philosophy he taught and illustrated 
 related to four perennial subjects of human 
 interest — education, natural science, poli- 
 tics, and morals. I propose to deal in that 
 order with these four topics. 
 
 Franklin s philosophy of education was 
 elaborated as he gi^ew up, and was applied 
 to himself throughout his life. In the 
 first place, he had no regular education of 
 the usual sort. He studied and read with 
 an extraordinary diligence from his earli- 
 est years ; but he studied only the subjects 
 which attracted him, or which he himself 
 believed would be good for him, and 
 throughout life he pursued only those in- 
 quiries for pursuing which he found within 
 himself an adequate motive. The most 
 important element in his training was 
 reading, for which he had a precocious 
 
12 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 desire which was imperative, and proved 
 to be lasting. His opportunities to get 
 books were scanty ; but he seized on all 
 such opportunities, and fortunately he 
 early came upon the " Pilgrim's Progress,'* 
 the Spectator, Plutarch, Xenophon's 
 " Memorabilia," and Locke " On the Hu- 
 man Understanding." Practice of English 
 composition was the next agency in 
 Frankhn's education ; and his method — 
 quite of his own invention — was certainly 
 an admirable one. He would make brief 
 notes of the thoughts contained in a good 
 piece of writing, and lay these notes aside 
 for several days ; then, without looking at 
 the book, he would endeavor to express 
 these thoughts in his own words as fully 
 as they had been expressed in the original 
 paper. Lastly, he would compare his 
 product with the original, thus discover- 
 ing his shortcomings and errors. To im- 
 
FRANKLIN 13 
 
 prove his vocabulary he turned specimens 
 of prose into verse, and later, when he 
 had forgotten the original, turned the 
 verse back again into prose. This exer- 
 cise enlarged his vocabulary and his 
 acquaintance with synonyms and their 
 different shades of meaning, and showed 
 him how he could twist phrases and sen- 
 tences about. His times for such exer- 
 cises and for reading were at night after 
 work, before work in the morning, and on 
 Sundays. This severe training he imposed 
 on himself ; and he was well advanced in 
 it before he was sixteen years of age. 
 His memory and his imagination must 
 both have served him well ; for he not 
 only acquired a style fit for narrative, 
 exposition, or argument, but also learned 
 to use the fable, parable, paraphrase, pro- 
 verb, and dialogue. The third element 
 in his education was writing for pubhca- 
 
14 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 tion ; he began very early, while he was 
 still a young boy, to put all he had learned 
 to use in writing for the press. When he 
 was but nineteen years old he wrote and 
 published in London " A Dissertation 
 on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and 
 Pain." In after years he was not proud 
 of this pamphlet ; but it was, neverthe- 
 less, a remarkable production for a youth 
 of nineteen. So soon as he was able to 
 establish a newspaper in Philadelphia he 
 wrote for it with great spirit, and in a 
 style at once accurate, concise, and attrac- 
 tive, making immediate application of his 
 reading and of the conversation of intelli- 
 gent acquaintances on both sides of the 
 ocean. His fourth principle of education 
 was that it should continue through life, 
 and should make use of the social in- 
 stincts. To that end he thought that 
 friends and acquaintances might fitly band 
 
FRANKLIN 15 
 
 together in a systematic endeavor after 
 mutual improvement. The Junto was 
 created as a school of philosophy, morality, 
 and politics ; and this purpose it actually 
 served for many years. Some of the 
 questions read at every meeting of the 
 Junto, with a pause after each one, would 
 be curiously opportune in such a society 
 at the present day. For example. No. 5, 
 " Have you lately heard how any present 
 rich man, here or elsewhere, got his 
 estate ? " And No. 6, " Do you know of 
 a fellow- citizen . . . who has lately com- 
 mitted an error proper for us to be warned 
 against and avoid ? " When a new mem- 
 ber was initiated he was asked, among 
 other questions, the following : " Do you 
 think any person ought to be harmed in 
 his body, name, or goods, for mere specu- 
 lative opinions or his external way of 
 worship ? " and again, " Do you love truth 
 
16 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 for truth's sake, and will you endeavor 
 impartially to find it, receive it yourself, 
 and communicate it to others ? " The 
 Junto helped to educate Franklin, and he 
 helped greatly to train all its members. 
 
 The nature of Franklin's own education 
 accounts for many of his opinions on the 
 general subject. Thus, he believed, con- 
 trary to the judgment of his time, that 
 Latin and Greek were not essential sub- 
 jects in a liberal education, and that 
 mathematics, in which he never excelled, 
 did not deserve the place it held. He 
 believed that any one who had acquired a 
 command of good English could learn 
 any other modern language that he really 
 needed when he needed it ; and this faith 
 he illustrated in his own person, for he 
 learned French, when he needed it, suffi- 
 ciently well to enable him to exercise 
 great influence for many years at the 
 
FRANKLIN 17 
 
 French court. As the fruit of his educa- 
 tion he exhibited a clear, pungent, persua- 
 sive EngHsh style, both in writing and 
 in conversation — a style which gave him 
 great and lasting influence among men. It 
 is easy to say that such a training as Frank- 
 lin's is suitable only for genius. Be that 
 as it may, Franklin's philosophy of educa- 
 tion certainly tells in favor of liberty for 
 the individual in his choice of studies, and 
 teaches that a desire for good reading and 
 a capacity to write well are two very im- 
 portant fruits of any liberal culture. It 
 was all at the service of his successor 
 Jefferson, the founder of the University 
 of Virginia. 
 
 Franklin's studies in natural philosophy 
 are characterized by remarkable direct- 
 ness, patience, and inventiveness, absolute 
 candor in seeking the truth, and a power- 
 ful scientific imagination. What has 
 
18 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 been usually considered his first discovery 
 was the now familiar fact that northeast 
 storms on the Atlantic coast begin to lee- 
 ward. The Pennsylvania fireplace he 
 invented was an ingenious application to 
 the warming and ventilating of an apart- 
 ment of the laws that regulate the move- 
 ment of hot air. At the age of forty-one 
 he became interested in the subject of 
 electricity, and with the aid of many 
 friends and acquaintances pursued the 
 subject for four years, with no thought 
 about personal credit for inventing either 
 theories or processes, but simply with 
 delight in experimentation and in efforts 
 to explain the phenomena he observed. 
 His kite experiment to prove lightning 
 to be an electrical phenomenon very pos- 
 sibly did not really draw lightning from 
 the cloud ; but it supplied evidence of 
 electrical energy in the atmosphere which 
 
FRANKLIN 19 
 
 went far to prove that lightning was an 
 electrical discharge. The sagacity of 
 Franklin's scientific inquiries is well illus- 
 trated by his notes on colds and their 
 causes. He maintains that influenzas 
 usually classed as colds do not arise, as a 
 rule, from either cold or dampness. He 
 points out that savages and sailors, who 
 are often wet, do not catch cold, and that 
 the disease called a cold is not taken by 
 swimming. He maintains that people 
 who live in the forest, in open barns, or 
 with open windows, do not catch cold, 
 and that the disease called a cold is gener- 
 ally caused by impure air, lack of exercise, 
 or overeating. He comes to the conclu- 
 sion that influenzas and colds are conta- 
 gious — a doctrine which, a century and a 
 half later, was proved, through the advance 
 of bacteriological science, to be sound. 
 The following sentence exhibits remark- 
 
20 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 able insight, considering the state of 
 medical art at that time : "I have long 
 been satisfied from observation, that 
 besides the general colds now termed 
 influenzas (which may possibly spread 
 by contagion, as well as by a particular 
 quality of the air), people often catch cold 
 from one another when shut up together 
 in close rooms and coaches, and when 
 sitting near and conversing so as to 
 breathe in each other's transpiration ; 
 the disorder being in a certain state." In 
 the light of present knowledge what a 
 cautious and exact statement is that ! 
 
 There being no learned society in all 
 America at the time, Franklin's scientific 
 experiments were almost all recorded in 
 letters written to interested friends ; and 
 he was never in any haste to write these 
 letters. He never took a patent on any 
 of his inventions, and made no effort either 
 
FRANKLIN 21 
 
 to get a profit from them, or to establish 
 any sort of intellectual proprietorship in 
 his experiments and speculations. One 
 of his English correspondents, Mr. Col- 
 linson, published in 1751 a number of 
 Franklin's letters to him in a pamphlet 
 called " New Experiments and Observa- 
 tions in Electricity made at Philadelphia 
 in America." This pamphlet was trans- 
 lated into several European languages, and 
 established over the continent — particu- 
 larly in France — Franklin's reputation as 
 a natural philosopher. A great variety 
 of phenomena engaged his attention, such 
 as phosphorescence in sea water, the cause 
 of the saltness of the sea, the form and 
 the temperatures of the Gulf Stream, the 
 effect of oil in stilling waves, and the 
 cause of smoky chimneys. Franklin also 
 reflected and wrote on many topics which 
 are now classified under the head of politi- 
 
22 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 cal economy, — such as paper currency, 
 national wealth, free trade, the slave trade, 
 the effects of luxury and idleness, and the 
 misery and destruction caused by war. 
 Not even his caustic wit could adequately 
 convey in words his contempt and ab- 
 horrence for war as a mode of settling 
 questions arising between nations. He 
 condensed his opinions on that subject 
 into the epigram : " There never was a 
 good war or a bad peace." 
 
 Franklin's political philosophy may all 
 be summed up in seven words — " first 
 freedom, then public happiness and com- 
 fort." The spirit of liberty was born in 
 him. He resented his brother's blows 
 when he was an apprentice, and escaped 
 from them. As a mere boy he refused to 
 attend church on Sundays in accordance 
 with the custom of his family and his 
 town, and devoted his Sundays to reading 
 
FRANKLIN 23 
 
 and study. In practising his trade he 
 claimed and diligently sought complete 
 freedom. In public and private business 
 alike he tried to induce people to take 
 any action desired of them by presenting 
 to them a motive they could understand 
 and feel — a motive which acted on their 
 own wills and excited their hopes. This 
 is the only method possible under a 
 regime of liberty. A perfect illustration 
 of his practice in this respect is found in 
 his successful provision of one hundred 
 and fifty four-horse wagons for Braddock's 
 force, when it was detained on its march 
 from Annapolis to western Pennsylvania 
 by the lack of wagons. The military 
 method would have been to seize horses, 
 wagons, and drivers wherever found. 
 Franklin persuaded Braddock, instead of 
 using force, to allow him (Franklki) to 
 offer a good hire for horses, wagons, and 
 
24 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 drivers, and proper compensation for the 
 equipment in case of loss. By this appeal 
 to the frontier farmers of Pennsylvania he 
 secured in two weeks all the transporta- 
 tion required. To defend public order 
 Franklin was perfectly ready to use pub- 
 lic force, as, for instance, when he raised 
 and commanded a regiment of militia to 
 defend the northwestern frontier from the 
 Indians after Braddock's defeat, and again, 
 when it became necessary to defend Phil- 
 adelphia from a large body of frontiers- 
 men who had lynched a considerable 
 number of friendly Indians, and were 
 bent on revolutionizing the Quaker gov- 
 ernment. But his abhorrence of all war 
 was based on the facts, first, that during 
 war the law must be silent, and, secondly, 
 that military discipline, which is essential 
 for effective fighting, annihilates individ- 
 ual liberty. " Those," he said, " who 
 
FRANKLIN 25 
 
 would give up essential liberty for the 
 sake of a little temporary safety deserve 
 neither liberty nor safety." The founda- 
 tion of his firm resistance on behalf of the 
 colonies to the English Parliament was 
 his impregnable conviction that the love 
 of liberty was the ruling passion of the 
 people of the colonies. In 1766 he said 
 of the American people : " Every act of 
 oppression will sour their tempers, lessen 
 greatly, if not annihilate, the profits of 
 your commerce with them, and hasten 
 their final revolt ; for the seeds of liberty 
 are universally found there, and nothing 
 can eradicate them." Because they loved 
 liberty, they would not be taxed without 
 representation ; they would not have 
 
 soldiers quartered on them, or their gov- 
 ernors made independent of the people in 
 regard to their salaries ; or their ports 
 closed, or their commerce regulated by 
 
26 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 Parliament. It is interesting to observe 
 how Franklin's experiments and specula- 
 tions in natural science often had a favor- 
 able influence on freedom of thought. 
 His studies in economics had a strong 
 tendency in that direction. His views 
 about religious toleration were founded 
 on his intense faith in civil liberty ; and 
 even his demonstration that lightning 
 was an electrical phenomenon brought 
 deliverance for mankind from an ancient 
 terror. It remov^ed from the domain of 
 the supernatural a manifestation of for- 
 midable power that had been supposed to 
 be a weapon of the arbitrary gods ; and 
 since it increased man's power over nature, 
 it increased his freedom. 
 
 This faith in freedom was fully de- 
 veloped in Franklin long before the 
 American Revolution and the French 
 Revolution made the fundamental princi- 
 
FRANKLIN 27 
 
 pies of liberty familiar to civilized man- 
 kind. His views concerning civil liberty 
 were even more remarkable for his time 
 than his views concerning religious lib- 
 erty ; but they were not developed in a 
 passionate nature inspired by an enthusi- 
 astic idealism. He was the very embodi- 
 ment of common sense, moderation, and 
 sober honesty. His standard of human 
 society is perfectly expressed in the 
 description of New England which he 
 wrote in 1772 : " I thought often of the 
 happiness in New England, where every 
 man is a freeholder, has a vote in public 
 affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has 
 plenty of good food and fuel, with whole 
 clothes from head to foot, the manufac- 
 ture perhaps of his own family. Long may 
 they continue in this situation I " Such was 
 Franklin's conception of a free and happy 
 people. Such was his political philosophy. 
 
28 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 The moral philosophy of Franklin con- 
 sisted almost exclusively in the inculcation 
 of certain very practical and unimagina- 
 tive virtues, such as temperance, frugality, 
 industry, moderation, cleanliness, and 
 tranquillity. Sincerity and justice, and 
 resolution — that indispensable fly-wheel 
 of virtuous habit — are found in his table 
 of virtues ; but all his moral precepts seem 
 to be based on observation and experience 
 of life, and to express his convictions con- 
 cerning what is profitable, prudent, and 
 on the whole satisfactory in the life that 
 now is. His philosophy is a guide of life, 
 because it searches out virtues, and so 
 provides the means of expelling vices. It 
 may reasonably determine conduct. It did 
 determine Franklin's conduct to a remark- 
 able degree, and has had a prodigious 
 influence for good on his countrymen and 
 on civilized mankind. Nevertheless, it 
 
FRANKLIN 29 
 
 omits all consideration of the prime motive 
 power, which must impel to right conduct, 
 as fire supplies the power which actuates 
 the engine. That motive power is pure, 
 unselfish love — love to God and love to 
 man. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy heart . . . and thy 
 neighbor as thyself." 
 
 Franklin never seems to have perceived 
 that the supreme tests of civilization are 
 the tender and honorable treatment of 
 women as equals, and the sanctity of 
 home life. There was one primary virtue 
 on his Hst which he did not always prac- 
 tise. His failures in this respect dimin- 
 ished his influence for good among his 
 contemporaries, and must always qualify 
 the admiration with which mankind will 
 regard him as a moral philosopher and an 
 exhorter to a good life. His sagacity, 
 intellectual force, versatility, originahty. 
 
30 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 firmness, fortunate period of service, and 
 longevity combined to make him a great 
 leader of his people. In American public 
 affairs the generation of w^ise leaders next 
 to his own felt for him high admiration 
 and respect ; and the strong republic, 
 whose birth and youthful growth he wit- 
 nessed, will carry down his fame as politi- 
 cal philosopher, patriot, and apostle of 
 liberty through long generations. 
 
WASHINGTON 
 
WASHINGTON 
 
 The virtues of Washington were of 
 two kinds, the splendid and the homely ; 
 I adopt, for my part in this celebration, 
 some consideration of Washington as a 
 man of homely virtues, giving our far- 
 removed generation a homely example. 
 
 The first contrast to which I invite 
 your attention is the contrast between the 
 early age at which Washington began to 
 profit by the discipline of real life and the 
 late age at which our educated young 
 men exchange study under masters, and 
 seclusion in institutions of learning, for 
 personal adventure and responsibility out 
 in the world. Washington was a public 
 surveyor at sixteen years of age. He 
 could not spell well ; but he could make 
 
34 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 a correct survey, keep a good journal, and 
 endure the hardships to which a surveyor 
 in the Virginia wilderness was inevitably 
 exposed. Our expectation of good ser- 
 vice and hard work from boys of sixteen, 
 not to speak of young men of twenty-six, 
 is very low. I have heard it maintained 
 in a learned college faculty that young 
 men who were on the average nineteen 
 years of age, were not fit to begin the 
 study of economics or philosophy, even 
 under the guidance of skilful teachers, and 
 that no young man could nowadays begin 
 the practice of a profession to advantage 
 before he was twenty-six or twenty-seven 
 years old. Now, Washington was at 
 twenty-one the Governor of Virginia's 
 messenger to the French forts beyond the 
 AUeghanies. He was already an accom- 
 plished woodman, an astute negotiator with 
 savages and the French, and the cautious 
 
WASHINGTON 35 
 
 yet daring leader of a company of raw, 
 insubordinate frontiersmen, who were to 
 advance 500 miles into a wilderness with 
 nothing but an Indian trail to follow. 
 In 1755, at twenty- three years of age, 
 twenty years before the Revolutionary War 
 broke out, he was a skilful and experienced 
 fighter, and a colonel in the Virginia ser- 
 vice. What a contrast to our college 
 under-graduates of to-day, who at twenty- 
 two years of age are still getting their 
 bodily vigor through sports and not 
 through real work, and who seldom seem 
 to realize that, just as soon as they have 
 acquired the use of the intellectual tools 
 and stock with which a livelihood is to be 
 earned in business or in the professions, 
 the training of active life is immeasurably 
 better than the training of the schools ! 
 Yet Washington never showed at any 
 age the least spark of genius ; he was only 
 
36 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 " sober, sensible, honest, and brave," as he 
 said of Major-General Lincoln in 1791. 
 
 By inheritance and by marriage Wash- 
 ington became, while he was still young, 
 one of the richest men in the country ; 
 but what a contrast between his sort of 
 riches and our sorts ! He was a planter 
 and sportsman — a country gentleman. 
 All his home days were spent in looking 
 after his farms ; in breeding various kinds 
 of domestic animals ; in fishing for profit ; 
 in attending to the diseases and accidents 
 which befall livestock, including slaves ; 
 in erecting buildings, and repairing them ; 
 in caring for or improving his mills, barns, 
 farm implements, and tools. He always 
 lived very close to nature, and from his 
 boyhood studied the weather, the markets, 
 his crops and woods, and the various qual- 
 ities of his lands. He was an economical 
 husbandman, attending to all the details 
 
WASHINGTON 37 
 
 of the management of his large estates. 
 He was constantly on horseback, often 
 riding fifteen miles on his daily rounds. 
 At sixty-seven years of age he caught 
 the cold which killed him by getting wet 
 on horseback, riding as usual about his 
 farms. 
 
 Compare this sort of life, physical and 
 mental, with the life of the ordinary rich 
 American of to-day, who has made his 
 money in stocks and bonds, or as a banker, 
 broker, or trader, or in the management 
 of great transportation or industrial con- 
 cerns. This modern rich man, in all 
 probability, has nothing whatever to do 
 with nature or with country life. He is 
 soft and tender in body ; lives in the city ; 
 takes no vigorous exercise, and has very 
 little personal contact with the elemental 
 forces of either nature or mankind. He 
 is not like Washington an out-of-door 
 
38 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 man. Washington was a combination of 
 land-owner, magistrate, and soldier, — the 
 best combination for a leader of men 
 which the feudal system produced. Our 
 modern rich man is apt to possess no one 
 of these functions, any one of which, well 
 discharged, has in times past commanded 
 the habitual respect of mankind. It is a 
 grave misfortune for our country, and 
 especially for our rich men, that the mod- 
 ern forms of property, — namely, stocks 
 and bonds, mortgages, and city buildings 
 — do not carry with them any inevitable 
 responsibilities to the state, or involve 
 their owner in personal risks and charges 
 as a leader or commander of the people. 
 The most enviable rich man to-day is the 
 intelligent industrial or commercial ad- 
 venturer or promoter, in the good sense of 
 those terms. He takes risks and assumes 
 burdens on a large scale, and has a chance 
 
WASHINGTON 39 
 
 to develop will, mind, and character, just 
 as Queen Elizabeth's adventurers did all 
 over the then known world. 
 
 Again, Washington, as I have already 
 indicated, was an economical person, care- 
 ful about little expenditures as well as 
 great, averse to borrowing money, and 
 utterly impatient of waste. If a slave 
 were hopelessly ill, he did not call a doc- 
 tor, because it would be a useless expendi- 
 ture. He insisted that the sewing woman, 
 Carolina, who had only made five shirts 
 in a week, not being sick, should make 
 nine. He entered in his account ** thread 
 and needle, one penny," and used said 
 thread and needle himself. All this close- 
 ness and contempt for shiftlessness and 
 prodigality were perfectly consistent with 
 a large and hospitable way of living ; for 
 during many years of his life he kept open 
 house at Mt. Vernon. This frugal and 
 
40 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 prudent man knew exactly what it meant 
 to devote his " Ufe and fortune to the 
 cause we are engaged in, if needful," as 
 he wrote in 1774. This was not an ex- 
 aggerated or emotional phrase. It was 
 moderate, but it meant business. He 
 risked his whole fortune. What he lost 
 through his service in the Revolutionary 
 War is clearly stated in a letter written 
 from Mt. Vernon in 1784: ** I made no 
 money from my estate during the nine 
 years I was absent from it, and brought 
 none home with me. Those who owed 
 me, for the most part, took advantage of 
 the depreciation, and paid me off with six- 
 pence in the pound. Those to whom I 
 was indebted, I have yet to pay, without 
 other means, if they will wait, than selling 
 part of my estate, or distressing those who 
 were too honest to take advantage of the 
 tender laws to quit scores with me." 
 
WASHINGTON 41 
 
 Should we not all be glad if to-day a hun- 
 dred or two multi-millionaires could give 
 such an account as that of their losses in- 
 curred in the public service, even if they 
 had not, like Washington, risked their 
 lives as well? In our times we have 
 come to think that a rich man should not 
 be frugal or economical, but rather waste- 
 ful or extravagant. We have even been 
 asked to believe that a cheap coat makes 
 a cheap man. If there were a fixed rela- 
 tion between a man's character and the 
 price of his clothes, what improvement 
 we should have seen in the national charac- 
 ter since 1893 1 At Harvard University, 
 twelve hundred students take three meals 
 a day in the great dining-room of Memo- 
 rial Hall, and manage the business them- 
 selves through an elected President and 
 Board of Directors. These officers pro- 
 scribe stews, apparently because it is a form 
 
42 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 in which cheap meat may be offered them, 
 neglecting the more important fact that 
 the stew is the most nutritious and digest- 
 ible form in which meats can be eaten. 
 Mr. Edward Atkinson, the economist, 
 invented an oven in which various kinds 
 of foods may be cheaply and well pre- 
 pared with a minimum of attention to the 
 process. The workingmen, among whom 
 he attempted to introduce it, took no 
 interest in it whatever, because it was 
 recommended to them as a cheap way of 
 preparing inexpensive though excellent 
 foods. This modern temper affords a 
 most striking contrast to the practices 
 and sentiments of Washington, senti- 
 ments and practices which underlay his 
 whole public life as well as his private 
 life. 
 
 If he were alive to-day, would he not 
 be bewildered by much of our talk about 
 
WASHINGTON 43 
 
 the rights of men and animals ? Wash- 
 ington's mind dwelt very little on rights 
 and very much on duties. For him, 
 patriotism was a duty ; good citizenship 
 was a duty ; and for the masses of man- 
 kind it was a duty to clear away the 
 forest, till the ground, and plant fruit 
 trees, just as he prescribed to the hoped- 
 for tenants on his Ohio and Kanawha 
 lands. For men and women in general 
 he thought it a duty to increase and mul- 
 tiply, and to make the wilderness glad 
 with rustling crops, lowing herds, and 
 children's voices. When he retired from 
 the Presidency, he expressed the hope 
 that he might " make and sell a little 
 flour annually." For the first soldier and 
 first statesman of his country, surely this 
 was a modest anticipation of continued 
 usefulness. We think more about our 
 rights than our duties. He thought more 
 
44 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 about his duties than his rights. Pos- 
 terity has given him first place because 
 of the way in which he conceived and 
 performed his duties ; it will judge the 
 leaders of the present generation by the 
 same standard, whatever their theories 
 about human rights. 
 
 Having said thus much about contrasts, 
 let me now turn to some interesting re- 
 semblances between Washington's times 
 and our own. We may notice in the first 
 place the permanency of the fighting 
 quality in the English- American stock. 
 Washington was all his life a fighter. 
 The entire American people is to-day a 
 fighting people, prone to resort to force 
 and prompt to take arms, the different 
 sections of the population differing chiefly 
 in regard to the nature and amount of the 
 provocation which will move them to vio- 
 lence and combat. To this day nothing 
 
WASHINGTON 45 
 
 moves the admiration of the people so 
 quickly as composure, ingenuity, and suc- 
 cess in fighting ; so that even in political 
 contests all the terms and similes are 
 drawn from war, and among American 
 sports the most popular have in them a 
 large element of combat. Washington 
 was roused and stimulated by the dangers 
 of the battlefield, and utterly despised 
 cowards, or even men who ran away in 
 battle from a momentary terror which 
 they did not habitually manifest. His 
 early experience taught him, however, 
 that the Indian way of fighting in woods 
 or on broken ground was the most effec- 
 tive way ; and he did not hesitate to adopt 
 and advocate that despised mode of fight- 
 ing, which has now, one hundred and 
 fifty years later, become the only possible 
 mode. The Indian in battle took in- 
 stantly to cover, if he could find it. In 
 
46 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 our Civil War both sides learned to throw 
 up breastworks wherever they expected 
 an engagement to take place ; and the 
 English in South Africa have demonstrated 
 that the only possible way to fight with 
 the present long range quick-firing guns, 
 is the way in which the "treacherous 
 devils," as Washington called the Indians, 
 fought General Braddock, that is, with 
 stratagem, surprise, and ambuscade ; with 
 hiding and crawling behind screens and 
 obstacles ; with the least possible appear- 
 ance in open view, with nothing that can 
 glitter on either arms or clothes, and with 
 no visible distinction between officers and 
 men. War is now a genuinely Indian 
 performance, just as Washington saw one 
 hundred and fifty years ago that it ought 
 to be. 
 
 The silent Washington's antipathy to 
 the press finds an exact parallel in our own 
 
WASHINGTON 47 
 
 day. He called the writers of the press 
 *' infamous scribblers." President Cleve- 
 land called them " ghouls." But it must 
 be confessed that the newspapers of 
 Washington's time surpassed those of the 
 present day in violence of language, and 
 in lack of prophetic insight and just ap- 
 preciation of men and events. When 
 Washington retired from the Presidency 
 the Aurora said, " If ever a Nation 
 was debauched by a man, the Ameri- 
 can Nation has been debauched by 
 Washington." 
 
 Some of the weaknesses or errors of the 
 Congresses of Washington's time have 
 been repeated in our own day, and seem 
 as natural to us as they doubtless seemed 
 to the men of 1776 and 1796. Thus, the 
 Continental Congress incurred all the evils 
 of a depreciated currency with the same 
 blindness which afflicted the Congress of 
 
48 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 the Southern Confederacy and the Union 
 Congress during the Civil War, or the 
 Democrat-PopuHst party of still more 
 recent times. The refusal of the Con- 
 gress of 1777 to carry out the agreement 
 made with the Hessian prisoners at Sara- 
 toga reminds one of the refusal of Con- 
 gress, in spite of the public exhortations 
 of our present Executive, and his cabinet, 
 to carry out the understanding with Cuba 
 in regard to the commercial relations of 
 the island with the United States. In 
 both cases the honor of the country was 
 tarnished. 
 
 The intensity of party spirit in Wash- 
 ington's time closely resembles that of our 
 own day, but was certainly fiercer than it 
 is now, the reason being that the ques- 
 tions at issue were absolutely fundamental. 
 When the question was whether the Con- 
 stitution of the United States was a sure 
 
WASHINGTON 49 
 
 defence for freedom or a trap to ensnare 
 an unsuspecting people, intensity of feel- 
 ing on both sides was well-nigh inevitable. 
 During Washington's two administra- 
 tions a considerable number of the most 
 eminent American publicists feared that 
 dangerous autocratic powers had been 
 conferred on the President by the Con- 
 stitution. Washington held that there 
 was no ground for these fears, and acted 
 as if the supposition was absurd. When 
 the question was whether we should love 
 and adhere to revolutionary France, or 
 rather become partisans of Great Britain 
 — the power from which we had just 
 won independence — it is no wonder that 
 political passions burnt fiercely. On this 
 question Washington stood between the 
 opposing parties, and often commended 
 himself to neither. In spite of the tre- 
 mendous partisan heat of the times, 
 
50 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 Washington, through both his adminis- 
 trations, made appointments to pubUe 
 office from both parties indifferently. 
 He appointed some well-known Tories 
 and many Democrats. He insisted only 
 on fitness as regards character, ability, 
 and experience, and preferred persons, of 
 whatever party, who had already proved 
 their capacity in business or the profes- 
 sions, or in legislative or administrative 
 offices. It is a striking fact that Wash- 
 ington is the only one of the Presidents 
 of the United States who has, as a rule, 
 acted on these principles. His example 
 was not followed by his early successors, 
 or by any of the more recent occupants 
 of the Presidency. His successors, elected 
 by a party, have not seen their way to 
 make appointments without regard to 
 party connections. The Civil Service 
 Reform agitation of the last twenty-five 
 
WASHINGTON 51 
 
 years is nothing but an effort to re- 
 turn, in regard to the humbler national 
 offices, to the practice of President 
 Washington. 
 
 In spite of these resemblances between 
 Washington's time and our own, the pro- 
 found contrasts make the resemblances 
 seem unimportant. In the first years 
 of the Government of the United States 
 there was widespread and genuine appre- 
 hension lest the executive should develop 
 too much power, and lest the centraliza- 
 tion of the Government should become 
 overwhelming. Nothing can be farther 
 from our political thoughts to-day than 
 this dread of the power of the national 
 executive. On the contrary, we are con- 
 stantly finding that it is feeble where we 
 wish it were strong, impotent where we 
 wish it omnipotent. The Senate of the 
 United States has deprived the President 
 
52 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 of much of the power intended for his 
 office, and has then found it, on the whole, 
 convenient and desirable to allow itself to 
 be held up by any one of its members who 
 possesses the bodily strength and the as- 
 surance to talk or read aloud by the week. 
 Other forces have developed within the 
 Republic quite outside of the Government, 
 which seem to us to override and almost 
 defy the closely limited governmental 
 forces. Quite lately we have seen two 
 of these new forces — one a combination 
 of capitalists, the other a combination of 
 laborers — put the President of the Uni- 
 ted States into a position of a mediator be- 
 tween two parties whom he could not con- 
 trol, and with whom he must intercede. 
 This is part of the tremendous nineteenth 
 century democratic revolution, and of the 
 newly acquired facilities for combination 
 and association for the promotion of 
 
WASHINGTON 53 
 
 common interests. We no longer dread 
 abuse of the power of state or church ; 
 we do dread abuse of the powers of 
 compact bodies of men, highly organized 
 and consenting to be despotically ruled, 
 for the advancement of their selfish 
 interests. 
 
 Washington was a stern disciplinarian 
 in war ; if he could not shoot deserters 
 he wanted them " stoutly w^hipped." He 
 thought that army officers should be of a 
 different class from their men, and should 
 never put themselves on an equality with 
 their men ; he went himself to suppress 
 the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and 
 always believed that firm government was 
 essential to freedom. He never could 
 have imagined for a moment the tolera- 
 tion of disorder and violence which is now 
 exhibited everywhere in our country when 
 a serious strike occurs. He was the chief 
 
54 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 actor through the long struggles, military 
 and civil, which attended the birth of this 
 nation, and took the gravest responsi- 
 bilities which could then fall to the lot of 
 soldiers or statesmen ; but he never en- 
 countered, and indeed never imagined, 
 the anxieties and dangers which now 
 beset the Republic of which he was the 
 founder. We face new difficulties. Shall 
 we face them with Washington's courage, 
 wisdom, and success ? 
 
 Finally, I ask your attention to the 
 striking contrast between the wealth of 
 Washington and the poverty of Abraham 
 Lincoln, the only one of the succeeding 
 Presidents who won anything like the 
 place in the popular heart that Wash- 
 ington has always occupied. Washington, 
 while still young, was one of the richest 
 men in the country ; Lincoln, while young, 
 was one of the poorest ; both rendered su- 
 
WASHINGTON 55 
 
 preme service to their country and to 
 freedom ; between these two extremes 
 men of many degrees as regards property 
 holding have occupied the Presidency, the 
 majority of them being men of moderate 
 means. The lesson to be drawn from 
 these facts seems to be that the Republic 
 can be greatly served by rich and poor 
 alike, but has oftenest been served credit- 
 ably by men who were neither rich nor 
 poor. In the midst of the present con- 
 flicts between employers and employed, 
 between the classes that are already well 
 to do and the classes who believe it to be 
 the fault of the existing order that they 
 too are not well to do, and in plain sight 
 of the fact that democratic freedom per- 
 mits the creation and perpetuation of 
 greater differences as regards possessions 
 than the world has ever known before, 
 it is comforting to remember that true 
 
56 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 patriots and wise men are bred in all 
 the social levels of a free commonwealth, 
 and that the Republic may find in any 
 condition of life safe leaders and just 
 rulers. 
 
CHANNING 
 
CHANNING 
 
 We commemorate to-day a great 
 preacher. It is the fashion to say that 
 preaching is a thing of the past, other 
 influences having taken its place. But 
 Boston knows better ; for she had two 
 great preachers in the nineteenth century, 
 and is sure that an immense and enduring 
 force was theirs, and through them, hers. 
 Channing and Brooks ! Men very unhke 
 in body and mind, but preachers of hke 
 tendency and influence from their com- 
 mon love of freedom and faith in mankind. 
 This city has learned by rich experi- 
 ence that preaching becomes the most 
 productive of all human works the mo- 
 ment the adequate preacher appears — 
 
60 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 a noble man with a noble message. Such 
 was Channing. 
 
 His public work was preceded and ac- 
 companied by a great personal achieve- 
 ment. All his life he grew in spirit, 
 becoming always freer, broader, and more 
 sympathetic. In forty years he worked 
 his way out of moderate Calvinism with- 
 out the Trinity into such doctrines as 
 these : — " The idea of God ... is the 
 idea of our own spiritual natures purified 
 and enlarged to infinity." " The sense 
 of duty is the greatest gift of God. The 
 idea of right is the primary and highest 
 revelation of God to the human mind ; 
 and all outward revelations are founded 
 on and addressed to it." There is " but 
 one object of cherished and enduring love 
 in heaven or on earth, and that is moral 
 goodness." " I do and I must reverence 
 human nature. ... I honor it for its 
 
CHANNING 61 
 
 struggles against oppression, for its 
 growth and progress under the weight 
 of so many chains and prejudices, for 
 its achievements in science and art, and 
 still more for its examples of heroic 
 and saintly virtue. These are marks of a 
 divine origin and pledges of a celestial 
 inheritance." ** Perfection is man's proper 
 and natural goal." What an immense 
 distance between these doctrines of Chan- 
 ning's maturity and the Calvinism of his 
 youth ! He was a meditative, reflecting 
 man, who read much, but took selected 
 thoughts of others into the very substance 
 and fibre of his being, and made them his 
 own. The foundation of his professional 
 power and public influence was this great 
 personal achievement, this attuning of his 
 own soul to noblest harmonies. 
 
 Thousands of ministers and spiritually- 
 minded laymen of many denominations 
 
62 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 have travelled since Channing's death the 
 road he laid out, and so have been delivered 
 from the inhuman doctrines of the fall of 
 man, the wrath of God, vicarious atone- 
 ment, everlasting hell for the majority, 
 and the rescue of a predestined few. 
 They should all join in giving heartfelt 
 praise and thanks to Channing, who 
 thought out clearly, and preached with fer- 
 vid reiteration, the doctrines which have 
 delivered them from a painful bondage. 
 
 Another remarkable quality of Chan- 
 ning's teachings is their universality. Men 
 of learning and spirituality in all the 
 civilized nations have welcomed his 
 words, and found in them teachings ot 
 enduring and expansive influence. Many 
 Biblical scholars, in the technical sense, 
 have arrived eighty years later at Chan- 
 ning's conclusions about the essential 
 features of Christianity, although Chan- 
 
CHANNING 63 
 
 ning was no scholar in the modern sense ; 
 while they go far beyond him in treating 
 the Bible as a collection of purely human 
 writings and in rejecting the so-called 
 supernatural quality of the Jewish and 
 Christian Scriptures. Indeed, many Bibli- 
 cal scholars belonging to-day to evan- 
 gelical sects have arrived not only at 
 Channing's position, but also at Emer- 
 son's. 
 
 Just how much Channing's pubhshed 
 works have had to do with this quiet 
 but fateful revolution no man can tell. 
 The most eminent to-day of American 
 Presbyterian divines preached an excel- 
 lent sermon in the Harvard College 
 Chapel one Sunday evening not many 
 years ago, and asked me, as we walked 
 away together, how I liked it. I replied : 
 " Very much ; it was all straight out ot 
 Channing." " That is strange," he said, 
 
64 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 "for I have never read Channing." It 
 is great testimony to the pervasive qual- 
 ity of a prophet's teachings when they 
 become within fifty years a component 
 of the intellectual atmosphere of the 
 new times. At a dinner of Harvard 
 graduates I once complained that, al- 
 though I heard in the College Chapel 
 a great variety of preachers connected 
 with many different denominations, the 
 preaching was, after all, rather monoto- 
 nous, because they all preached Chan- 
 ning. Phillips Brooks spoke after me 
 and said : " The President is right in 
 thinking our present preaching monoto- 
 nous, and the reason he gives for this 
 monotony is correct ; we aU do preach 
 Channing." 
 
 The direct influence of Channing's 
 writings has been vast, for they are read 
 in English in all parts of the world, 
 
CHANNING 65 
 
 and have been translated into many lan- 
 guages. Thirty years ago I spent a long 
 day in showing Don Pedro, the Emperor 
 of Brazil, some of the interesting things 
 in the laboratories and collections of Har- 
 vard University. He was the most as- 
 siduous visitor that I ever conducted 
 through the University buildings, intelli- 
 gently interested in a great variety of 
 objects and ideas. Late in the afternoon 
 he suddenly said, with a fresh eagerness : 
 " Now I will visit the tomb of Channing." 
 We drove to Mount Auburn, and found 
 the monument erected by the Federal 
 Street Church. The Emperor copied 
 with his own hand George Ticknor's in- 
 scriptions on the stone, and made me 
 verify his copies. Then, with his great 
 weight and height, he leaped into the air, 
 and snatched a leaf from the maple which 
 overhung the tomb. " 1 am going to put 
 
 5 
 
66 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 that leaf," he said, " into my best edition 
 of Channing. I have read all his pub- 
 lished works, — some of them many times 
 over. He was a very great man." The 
 Emperor of Brazil was a Roman Catholic. 
 Channing's philanthropy was a legiti- 
 mate outcome of his view of religion. 
 For him practical religion was character- 
 building by the individual human being. 
 But character-building in any large group 
 or mass of human beings means social re- 
 form ; therefore Channing was a preacher 
 and active promoter of social regeneration 
 in this world. He depicted the hideous 
 evils and wrongs of intemperance, slavery, 
 and war. He advocated and supported 
 every well-directed effort to improve pub- 
 lic education, the administration of charity, 
 and the treatment of criminals, and to lift 
 up the laboring classes. He denounced 
 the bitter sectarian and partisan spirit of 
 
CHANNING 67 
 
 his day. He refused entire sympathy to 
 the abohtionists, because of the ferocity 
 and violence of their habitual language 
 and the injustice of their indiscriminate 
 attacks. He distrusted money worship, 
 wealth, and luxury. 
 
 ^ These sentiments and actions grew 
 straight out of his religious conceptions, 
 and were their legitimate fruit. All his 
 social aspirations and hopes were rooted 
 in his fundamental conception of the 
 fatherhood of God, and its corollary the 
 brotherhood of men. It was his lofty idea 
 of the infinite worth of human nature and 
 of the inherent greatness of the human 
 soul, in contrast with the then prevailing 
 doctrines of human vileness and impo- 
 tency, which made him resent with such 
 indignation the wrongs of slavery, intem- 
 perance, and war, and urge with such 
 ardor every effort to deliver men from 
 
68 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 poverty and ignorance, and to make 
 them gentler and juster to one another. 
 
 In no subject which he discussed does 
 the close connection between Channing's 
 theology and his philanthropy appear more 
 distinctly than in education. He says in 
 his remarks on education : . . . " There is 
 nothing on earth so precious as the mind, 
 soul, character of the child. . . . There 
 should be no economy in education. Mon- 
 ey should never be weighed against the 
 soul of a child. It should be poured out 
 like water for the child's intellectual and 
 moral life." It is more than two genera- 
 tions since those sentences were written, 
 and still the average public expenditure 
 on the education of a child in the United 
 States is less than fifteen dollars a year. 
 Eastern Massachusetts is the commu- 
 nity in the whole world which gives most 
 thought, time, and money to education, 
 
CHANNING 69 
 
 public and endowed. Whence came this 
 social wisdom ? From Protestantism, from 
 Congregationalism, from the religious 
 teachings of Channing and his disciples. 
 Listen to this sentence: "Benevolence is 
 short-sighted indeed, and must blame itself 
 for failure, if it do not see in education 
 the chief interest of the human race." 
 
 It is impossible to join in this centen- 
 nial celebration of the advent to Boston 
 of this religious pioneer and philanthropic 
 leader without perceiving that in certain 
 respects the country has recently fallen 
 away from the moral standards he set up. 
 Channing taught that no real good can 
 come through violence, injustice, greed, 
 and the inculcation of hatred and enmities, 
 or of suspicions and contempts. He be- 
 lieved that public well-being can be pro- 
 moted only through public justice, freedom, 
 peace, and good will among men. 
 
70 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 He never could have imagined that 
 there would be an outburst in his dear 
 country, grown rich and strong, of such 
 doctrines as that the might of arms, 
 possessions, or majorities makes right ; 
 that a superior civilization may rightly 
 force itself on an inferior by wholesale 
 killing, hurting, and impoverishing ; that 
 an extension of commerce, or of mission- 
 ary activities, justifies war ; that the ex- 
 ample of imperial Rome is an instructive 
 one for republican America ; and that the 
 right to liberty and the brotherhood of 
 man are obsolete sentimentalities. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of these tempo- 
 rary aberrations of the public mind and 
 heart, it is plain that many of Channing s 
 anticipations and hopes have already been 
 realized, that his influence on three gen- 
 erations of men has been profound and 
 wholly beneficent, and that the world is 
 
CHANNING 71 
 
 going his way, though with slow and 
 halting steps. 
 
 His life brightened to its close. In 
 its last summer but one he wrote : " This 
 morning I plucked a globe of the dande- 
 lion — the seed-vessel — and was struck 
 as never before with the silent, gentle 
 manner in which nature sows her seed. 
 ... I saw, too, how nature sows her seed 
 broadcast. ... So we must send truth 
 abroad, not forcing it on here and there 
 a mind, and watching its progress anx- 
 iously, but trusting that it will light on a 
 kindly soil, and yield its fruit. So nature 
 teaches." 
 
 May those who stand here one hun- 
 dred years hence say, — the twentieth 
 century supplied more of kindly soil for 
 Channing seed than the nineteenth. 
 
EMERSON 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Emerson was not a logician or reasoner, 
 and not a rhetorician, in the common 
 sense. He was a poet, who wrote chiefly 
 in prose, but also in verse. His verse was 
 usually rough, but sometimes finished and 
 melodious ; it was always extraordinarily 
 concise and expressive. During his en- 
 gagement to the lady who became his 
 second wife, he ^Tote thus to her : " I am 
 born a poet, — of a low class without 
 doubt, yet a poet ; that is my nature and 
 vocation. My singing, be sure, is very 
 husky, and is, for the most part, in prose. 
 Still, I am a poet in the sense of a per- 
 ceiver and dear lover of the harmonies 
 that are in the soul and in matter, and 
 
76 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 specially of the correspondences between 
 these and those." 
 
 This husky poet had his living to get. 
 His occupations in life were those of the 
 teacher, minister, lecturer, and author. 
 He was a teacher at various times be- 
 tween 1818 and 1826 ; but he never 
 liked teaching. He was a preacher at 
 intervals from 1826 to 1847, but a settled 
 minister only from 1829 to 1832. His 
 career as a lecturer began in the autumn 
 of 1833 ; and his first book, ** Nature," was 
 published in 1836, when he was thirty- 
 three years old. His lectures for money 
 were given as a rule during the winter 
 and early spring ; and for thirty years the 
 travelling he was obliged to do in search 
 of audiences was often extremely fatiguing, 
 and not wdthout serious hardships and ex- 
 posures. These occupations usually gave 
 him an income sufficient for his simple 
 
EMERSON 77 
 
 wants ; but there were times when outgo 
 exceeded income. The little property 
 his first wife left him ($1200 a year) re- 
 lieved him from serious pecuniary anxiety 
 by 1834 ; although it did not relieve him 
 from earning by his own labor the liveli- 
 hood of his family. 
 
 In 1834 he went to live in Concord, 
 where his grandfather had been the min- 
 ister at the time of the Revolution, and 
 in 1835 he bought the house and grounds 
 there which were his home for the rest 
 of his days. Before settling in Concord, 
 he had spent one winter and spring 
 (1826-27) in the Southern states, and 
 seven months of 1833 in Europe. Both 
 of these absences were necessitated by 
 the state of his health, which was 
 precarious during his young manhood. 
 With these exceptions, he had lived in 
 Boston or its immediate neighborhood, 
 
78 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 until he settled in Concord. His pro- 
 genitors on both sides were chiefly New 
 England ministers. His formal educa- 
 tion was received in the Boston Latin 
 School and Harvard College, and was 
 therefore purely local. How narrow and 
 provincial seems his experience of life I 
 A little city, an isolated society, a country 
 village I Yet through books, and through 
 intercourse with intelligent persons, he 
 was really " set in a large place." The 
 proof of this largeness, and of the keen- 
 ness of his mental and moral vision, is 
 that, in regard to some of the chief con- 
 cerns of mankind, he was a seer and a 
 fore-seer. This prophetic quality of his I 
 hope to demonstrate to-night in three 
 great fields of thought, — education, social 
 organization, and religion. 
 
 Although a prophet and inspirer of re- 
 form, Emerson was not a reformer. He 
 
EMERSON 79 
 
 was but a halting supporter of the reforms 
 of his day ; and the eager experimenters 
 and combatants in actual reforms found 
 him a disappointing sort of sympathizer. 
 His visions were far-reaching, his doctrines 
 often radical, and his exhortations fervid ; 
 but when it came to action, particularly 
 to habitual action, he was surprisingly 
 conservative. With an exquisite candor, 
 and a gentle resolution of rarest quality 
 he broke his strong ties to the Second 
 Church of Boston before he was thirty 
 years old, abandoning the profession for 
 which he had been trained, and which, 
 in many of its aspects, he honored and 
 enjoyed ; yet he attended church on Sun- 
 days all his life with uncommon regu- 
 larity. He refused to conduct public 
 prayer, and had many things to say 
 against it; but when he was an Over- 
 seer of Harvard College, he twice voted 
 
80 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 to maintain the traditional policy of com- 
 pelling all the students to attend morning 
 prayers, in spite of the fact that a large 
 majority of the Faculty urgently advo- 
 cated abandoning that policy. He mani- 
 fested a good deal of theoretical sympathy 
 with the community experiments at Brook 
 Farm and Fruitlands ; but he declined to 
 take part in them himself. He was inti- 
 mate with many of the leading aboli- 
 tionists; but no one has described more 
 vividly their grave intellectual and social 
 defects. He laid down principles which, 
 when applied, would inevitably lead to 
 progress and reform ; but he took little 
 part in the imperfect step-by-step process 
 of actual reforming. He probably would 
 have been an ineffective worker in any 
 field of reform ; and, at any rate, strenu- 
 ous labor on applications of his philosophy 
 would have prevented him from main- 
 
EMERSON 81 
 
 taining the flow of his philosophic and 
 prophetic visions. The work of giving 
 practical effect to his thought was left for 
 other men to do, — indeed for generations 
 of other serviceable men, who, filled with 
 his ideals, will slowly work them out into 
 institutions, customs, and other practical 
 values. 
 
 When we think of Emerson as a 
 prophet, we at once become interested in 
 the dates at which he uttered certain 
 doctrines, or wrote certain pregnant sen- 
 tences; but just here the inquirer meets 
 a serious difficulty. He can sometimes 
 ascertain that a given doctrine or sen_ 
 tence was published at a given date ; but 
 he may be quite unable to ascertain how 
 much earlier the doctrine was really for- 
 mulated, or the sentence written. Emer- 
 son has been dead twenty-one years, and 
 it is thirty years since he wrote anything 
 
82 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 new ; but his whole philosophy of life was 
 developed by the time he was forty years 
 old, and it may be doubted if he wrote 
 anything after 1843, the germinal expres- 
 sion of which may not be found in his 
 journals, sermons, or lectures written be- 
 fore that date. If, therefore, we find in 
 the accepted thought, or established insti- 
 tutions, of to-day recent developments of 
 principles and maxims laid down by 
 Emerson, we may fairly say that his 
 thought outran his times certainly by 
 one, and probably by two generations of 
 men. 
 
 I take up now the prophetic teachings 
 of Emerson with regard to education. In 
 the first place, he saw, with a clearness to 
 which very few people have yet attained, 
 the fundamental necessity of the school as 
 the best civilizing agency, next to steady 
 
EMERSON 83 
 
 labor, and the only sure means of perma- 
 nent and progressive reform. He says 
 outright : " We shall one day learn to 
 supersede politics by education. What 
 we call our root-and-branch reforms, of 
 slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is 
 only medicating the symptoms. We must 
 begin higher up — namely, in education." 
 He taught that if we hope to reform 
 mankind, we must begin not with adults, 
 but with children : we must begin in the 
 school. There are some signs that this 
 doctrine has now at last entered the minds 
 of the so-called practical men. The 
 Cubans are to be raised in the scale of 
 civilization and public happiness ; so both 
 they and we think they must have more 
 and better schools. The Filipinos, too, 
 are to be developed after the American 
 fashion ; so we send them a thousand 
 teachers of English. The Southern states 
 
84 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 are to be rescued from the persistent 
 poison of slavery ; and, after forty years 
 of failure with pohtical methods, we at 
 last accept Emerson's doctrine, and say : 
 We must begin earlier, — at school. The 
 city slums are to be redeemed ; and the 
 scientific charity workers find the best 
 way is to get the children into kinder- 
 gartens and manual training schools. 
 
 Since the Civil War, a whole genera- 
 tion of educational administrators has been 
 steadily at work developing what is called 
 the elective system in the institutions of 
 education which deal with the ages above 
 twelve. It has been a slow, step-by-step 
 process, carried on against much active 
 opposition and more sluggish obstruction. 
 The system is a method of educational 
 organization which recognizes the immense 
 expansion of knowledge during the nine- 
 teenth century, and takes account of the 
 
EMERSON 85 
 
 needs and capacities of the individual child 
 and youth. Now, Emerson laid down in 
 plain terms the fundamental doctrines on 
 which this elective system rests. He 
 taught that the one prudence in life is 
 concentration ; the one evil, dissipation. 
 He said : ** You must elect your work : 
 you shall take what your brain can, and 
 drop all the rest." To this exhortation 
 he added the educational reason for it, — 
 only by concentration can the youth 
 arrive at the stage of doing something 
 with his knowledge, or get beyond the 
 stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capa- 
 city for producing. As Emerson puts it, 
 " Only so can that amount of vital force 
 accumulate which can make the step from 
 knowing to doing." The educational in- 
 stitutions of to-day have not yet fully 
 appreciated this all-important step from 
 knowing to doing. They are only begin- 
 
86 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 ning to perceive that, all along the course 
 of education, the child and the youth 
 should be doing something as well as 
 learning something ; should be stimulated 
 and trained by achievement ; should be 
 constantly encouraged to take the step 
 beyond seeing and memorizing to doing, 
 — the step, as Emerson says, "out of a 
 chalk circle of imbecihty into fruitfulness." 
 Emerson carried this doctrine right on 
 into mature life. He taught that nature 
 arms each man with some faculty, large 
 or small, which enables him to do easily 
 some feat impossible to any other, and 
 thus makes him necessary to society ; and 
 that this faculty should determine the 
 man's career. The advocates of the elec- 
 tive system have insisted that its results 
 were advantageous for society as a whole, 
 as well as for the individual. Emerson 
 put this argument in a nutshell at least 
 
EMERSON 87 
 
 fifty years ago : " Society can never pros- 
 per, but must always be bankrupt, until 
 every man does that which he was created 
 to do." 
 
 Education used to be given almost ex- 
 clusively through books. In recent years 
 there has come in another sort of educa- 
 tion through tools, machines, gardens, 
 drawings, casts, and pictures. Manual 
 training, shop-work, sloyd, and gardening 
 have come into use for the school ages ; 
 the teaching of trades has been admitted 
 to some public school systems ; and, in 
 general, the use of the hands and eyes in 
 productive labor has been recognized as 
 having good educational effects. The 
 education of men by manual labor was a 
 favorite doctrine with Emerson. He had 
 fully developed it as early as 1837, and he 
 frequently recurred to it afterwards. In 
 December of that year, in a course of 
 
88 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 lectures on Human Culture, he devoted 
 one lecture to The Hands. He saw 
 clearly that manual labor might be made 
 to develop not only good mental qualities, 
 but good moral qualities. To-day, it is 
 frequently necessary for practical teachers, 
 who are urging measures of improve- 
 ment, to point this out, and to say, just 
 as Emerson said two generations ago, 
 that any falseness in mechanical work 
 immediately appears ; that a teacher can 
 judge of the moral quality of each boy in 
 the class before him better and sooner 
 from manual work than from book-work. 
 Emerson taught that manual labor is the 
 study of the external world ; that the use 
 of manual labor never grows obsolete, and 
 is inapplicable to no person. He said ex- 
 plicitly that " a man should have a farm 
 or a mechanical craft for his culture " ; that 
 there is not only health, but education in 
 
EMERSON 89 
 
 garden work ; that when a man gets sugar, 
 hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, 
 and letter paper by simply signing his 
 name to a cheque, it is the producers and 
 carriers of these articles that have got the 
 education they yield, he only the com- 
 modity ; and that labor is God's education. 
 This was Emerson's doctrine more than 
 sixty years ago. It is only ten years since 
 the Mechanic Arts High School was 
 opened in Boston. 
 
 We are all of us aware that within the 
 last twenty years there has been a detei™- 
 mined movement of the American people 
 toward the cultivation of art, and toward 
 the public provision of objects which open 
 the sense of beauty and increase public en- 
 joyment. It is curious to see how literally 
 Emerson prophesied the actual direction 
 of these efforts : — 
 
90 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 " On the city's paved street 
 Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet ; 
 Let spouting fountains cool the air. 
 Singing in the sun-baked square ; 
 Let statue, picture, park, and hall. 
 Ballad, flag, and festival 
 The past restore, the day adorn. 
 And make to-morrow a new morn ! " 
 
 We have introduced into our schools, 
 of late years, lessons in drawing, model- 
 ling, and designing, — not sufficiently, but 
 in a promising and hopeful way. Emer- 
 son taught that it is the office of art to 
 educate the perception of beauty ; and he 
 precisely describes one of the most recent 
 of the new tendencies in American educa- 
 tion and social life, when he says : " Beauty 
 must come back to the useful arts, and 
 the distinction between the fine and the 
 useful arts be forgotten." That sentence 
 is the inspiration of one of the most recent 
 of the effi)rts to improve the arts and 
 
EMERSON 91 
 
 crafts, and to restore to society the artistic 
 craftsman. But how slow is the institu- 
 tional realization of this ideal of art edu- 
 cation I We are still struggling in our 
 elementary and secondary schools to get 
 a reasonable amount of instruction in 
 drawing and music, and to transfer from 
 other subjects a fair allotment of time to 
 these invaluable elements of true culture, 
 which speak a universal language. Yet 
 the ultimate object of art in education is 
 to teach men to see nature to be beautiful 
 and at the same time useful, beautiful 
 because alive and reproductive, useful 
 while symmetrical and fair. Take up to- 
 day the last essays on education, the last 
 book on landscape architecture, or the 
 freshest teachings of the principles of de- 
 sign, and you will find them penetrated 
 with Emerson's doctrine of art as teacher 
 of mankind. Emerson insists again and 
 
<' 
 
 92 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 again that true culture must open the 
 sense of beauty ; that " a man is a beggar 
 who only lives to the useful." It will 
 probably require several generations yet 
 to induce the American people to accept 
 his doctrine that all moments and objects 
 can be embellished, and that cheerfulness, 
 serenity, and repose in energy are the " end 
 of culture and success enough." 
 
 It has been clearly perceived of late 
 that a leading object in education is the 
 cultivation of fine manners. On tliis 
 point the teachings of Emerson are fun- 
 damental ; but the American institutions 
 of education are only beginning to appre- 
 ciate their significance. He teaches that 
 genius or love invents fine manners, 
 " which the baron and the baroness copy 
 very fast, and by the advantage of a 
 palace better the instruction. They 
 stereotype the lesson they have learned 
 
EMERSON 93 
 
 into a mode." There is much in that 
 phrase, "by the advantage of a palace." 
 For generations, American institutions of 
 education were content with the humblest 
 sort of shelters, with plain wooden huts 
 and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds 
 about the buildings. They are only lately 
 beginning to acquire fine buildings with 
 pleasing surroundings ; that is, they are 
 just beginning to carry into practice 
 Emerson's wisdom of sixty years ago. 
 The American cities are beginning to 
 build handsome houses for their High 
 Schools. Columbia University builds a 
 noble temple for its Hbrary. The gradu- 
 ates and friends of Harvard like to pro- 
 vide her with a handsome fence round the 
 Yard, with a fair array of shrubs within 
 the fence, with a handsome stadium in- 
 stead of shabby, wooden seats round the 
 football gridiron, and to take steps for 
 
94 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 securing in the future broad connections 
 between the grounds of the University 
 and the Cambridge parks by the river. 
 They are just now carrying into practice 
 Emerson's teaching ; by the advantage of 
 a palace they mean to better Harvard's 
 instruction in manners. They are ac- 
 cepting his doctrine that " manners make 
 the fortune of the ambitious youth ; that 
 for the most part his manners marry him, 
 and, for the most part, he marries man- 
 ners. When we think what keys they 
 are, and to what secrets ; what high les- 
 sons, and inspiring tokens of character 
 they convey, and what divination is re- 
 quired in us for the reading of this fine 
 telegraph, — we see what range the sub- 
 ject has, and what relations to convenience, 
 power, and beauty." 
 
 In Emerson's early days there was 
 nothing in our schools and colleges which 
 
EMERSON 95 
 
 at all corresponded to what we now know 
 too much about under the name of athle- 
 tic sports. The elaborate organization of 
 these sports is a development of the last 
 thirty years in our schools and colleges ; 
 but I find in Emerson the true reason for 
 the athletic cult, given a generation before 
 it existed among us. Your boy "hates 
 the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, 
 fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the 
 boy is right, and you are not fit to direct 
 his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out 
 his gymnastic training. . . . Football, 
 cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climb- 
 ing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art 
 of power, which it is his main business to 
 learn. . . . Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, 
 boat, and horse constitute, among all who 
 use them, secret free-masonries." We 
 shall never find a completer justification 
 of athletic sports than that. 
 
96 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 In his memorable address on The 
 American Scholar, which was given at 
 Cambridge in 1837, Emerson pointed out 
 that the function of the scholar should in- 
 clude creative action, or, as we call it in 
 these days, research, or the search for new 
 truth. He says : " The soul active . . . 
 utters truth, or creates. ... In its essence 
 it is progressive. The book, the college, 
 the school of art, the institution of any 
 kind, stop with some past utterance of 
 genius. . . . They look backward and not 
 forward. But genius looks forward. Man 
 hopes : genius creates. Whatever talents 
 may be, if the man create not, the pure 
 efflux of the Deity is not his ; — cinders 
 and smoke there may be, but not yet 
 flame." And more explicitly still, he 
 says : " CoUeges have their indispensable 
 office, — to teach elements. But they 
 can only highly serve us when they aim 
 
EMERSON 97 
 
 not to drill, but to create." When Emer- 
 son wrote this passage, the spirit of re- 
 search, or discovery, or creation had not 
 yet breathed life into the higher institu- 
 tions of learning in our country ; and 
 to-day they have much to do and to 
 acquire before they will conform to 
 Emerson's ideal. 
 
 There are innumerable details in which 
 Emerson anticipated the educational ex- 
 periences of later generations. I can cite 
 but two of them. He taught that each 
 age must write its own books ; " or rather, 
 each generation for the next succeeding. 
 The books of an older period will not fit 
 this." How true that is in our own day 
 when eighty thousand new books come 
 fi'om the press of the civilized world in a 
 single year ! Witness the incessant re- 
 making or re-casting of the books of the 
 preceding generation ! Emerson himself 
 
98 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 has gone into thousands of books in which 
 his name is never mentioned. Even his- 
 tory has to be re-written every few years, 
 the long-surviving histories being rather 
 monuments of style and method than ac- 
 cepted treasuries of facts. Again, con- 
 trary to the prevailing impression that the 
 press has, in large measure, stripped elo- 
 quence of its former influence, Emerson 
 taught that " if there ever was a country 
 where eloquence was a power, it is the 
 United States." He included under elo- 
 quence the useful speech, all sorts of 
 political persuasion in the great arena of 
 the Republic, and the lessons of science, 
 art, and religion which should be " brought 
 home to the instant practice of thirty 
 millions of people," now become eighty. 
 The colleges and universities have now 
 answered in the affirmative Emerson's 
 question, " Is it not worth the ambition 
 
EMERSON 99 
 
 of every generous youth to train and arm 
 his mind with all the resources of knowl- 
 edge, of method, of grace, and of character 
 to serve such a constituency ? " But then 
 Emerson's definition of eloquence is sim- 
 ple, and foretells the practice of to-day 
 rather than describes the practice of 
 Webster, Everett, Choate, and Winthrop, 
 his contemporaries : " Know your fact ; 
 hug your fact. For the essential thing is 
 heat, and heat comes of sincerity. . . . 
 Eloquence is the power to translate a 
 truth into language perfectly intelligible 
 to the person to whom you speak." 
 
 I turn next to some examples of Emer- 
 son's anticipation of social conditions, 
 visible to him as seer in his own day, and 
 since become plain to the sight of the 
 ordinary millions. When he accumulated 
 in his journals the original materials of his 
 
 I. Of a 
 
100 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 essay on Worship, there were no large 
 cities in the United States in the present 
 sense of that term. The great experiment 
 of democracy was not far advanced, and 
 had not developed many of its sins and 
 dangers ; yet how justly he presented 
 them in the following description : " In 
 our large cities, the population is godless, 
 materialized, — no bond, no fellow-feeling, 
 no enthusiasm. These are not men, but 
 hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites 
 walking. How is it people manage to 
 live on, so aimless as they are ? . . . There 
 is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in 
 wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, 
 galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing- 
 machines, and in public opinion, but not 
 in divine causes." 
 
 In Emerson's day, luxury in the pres- 
 ent sense had hardly been developed in 
 our country ; but he foresaw its coming, 
 
EMERSON 101 
 
 and its insidious destructiveness. " We 
 spend our incomes for paint and paper, 
 for a hundred trifles, I know not what, 
 and not for the things of a man. Our 
 expense is almost all for conformity. It 
 is for cake that we run in debt ; it is not 
 the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, 
 not worship, that costs us so much. Why 
 needs any man be rich ? Why must he 
 have horses, fine garments, handsome 
 apartments, access to public houses and 
 places of amusement ? Only for want of 
 thought. . . . We are first thoughtless, 
 and then find that we are moneyless. 
 We are first sensual and then must be 
 rich." He foresaw the young man's state 
 of mind to-day about marriage — I must 
 have money before I can marry ; and 
 deals with it thus : " Give us wealth and 
 the home shall exist. But that is a very 
 imperfect and inglorious solution of the 
 
102 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 problem, and therefore no solution. Give 
 us wealth I You ask too much. Few have 
 wealth ; but all must have a home. IVIen 
 are not born rich ; in getting wealth the 
 man is generally sacrificed, and often is 
 sacrificed without acquiring wealth at last." 
 We have come to understand by ex- 
 perience that the opinion of masses of 
 men is a formidable power which can be 
 made safe and useful. In earlier days 
 this massed opinion was either despised or 
 dreaded ; and it is dreadful, if either con- 
 fined or misdirected. Emerson compares 
 it to steam. Studied, economized, and 
 directed, steam has become the power by 
 which all great labors are done. Like 
 steam is the opinion of political masses I 
 If crushed by castles, armies, and police, 
 dangerously explosive ; but if furnished 
 with schools and the ballot, developing 
 " the most harmless and energetic form 
 
EMERSON 103 
 
 of a state." His eyes were wide open to 
 some of the evil intellectual effects of 
 democracy. The individual is too apt to 
 wear the time-worn yoke of the multi- 
 tude's opinions. No multiplying of con- 
 temptible units can produce an admirable 
 mass. " If I see nothing to admire in a 
 unit, shall I admire a million units ? " 
 The habit of submitting to majority rule 
 cultivates individual subserviency. He 
 pointed out two generations ago that the 
 action of violent political parties in a 
 democracy might provide for the individ- 
 ual citizen a systematic training in moral 
 cowardice. 
 
 It is interesting, at the stage of indus- 
 trial warfare which the world has now 
 reached, to observe how Emerson, sixty 
 years ago, discerned clearly the absurdity 
 of paying all sorts of service at one rate, 
 now a favorite notion with some labor 
 
104 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 unions. He points out that even when 
 all labor is temporarily paid at one rate, 
 differences in possessions will instantly 
 arise : ** In one hand the dime became an 
 eagle as it fell, and in another hand a cop- 
 per cent. For the whole value of the 
 dime is in knowing what to do with it." 
 Emerson was never deceived by a specious 
 philanthropy, or by claims of equality 
 which find no support in the nature of 
 things. He was a true democrat, but 
 still could say : " I think I see place and 
 duties for a nobleman in every society ; 
 but it is not to drink wine and ride in a 
 fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for 
 the multitude by forethought, by elegant 
 studies, by perseverance, self-devotion, 
 and the remembrance of the humble old 
 friend, — by making his life secretly beau- 
 tiful." How fine a picture of the demo- 
 cratic nobility is that I 
 
EMERSON 105 
 
 In his lecture on Man the Reformer, 
 which was read before the Mechanics' 
 Apprentices' Association in Boston in 
 January, 1841, Emerson described in the 
 clearest manner the approaching strife 
 between laborers and employers, between 
 poor and rich, and pointed out the cause 
 of this strife in the selfishness, unkindness, 
 and mutual distrust which ran through 
 the community. He also described, with 
 perfect precision, the only ultimate remedy, 
 — namely, the sentiment of love. " Love 
 would put a new face on this weary old 
 world in which we dwell as pagans and 
 enemies too long. . . . The virtue of this 
 principle in human society in application 
 to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. 
 But one day all men will be lovers ; and 
 every calamity will be dissolved in the 
 universal sunshine." It is more than sixty 
 years since those words were uttered, and 
 
106 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 in those years society has had large ex- 
 perience of industrial and social strife, of 
 its causes and consequences, and of many 
 attempts to remedy or soften it ; but all 
 this experience only goes to show that 
 there is but one remedy for these ills. It 
 is to be found in kindness, good fellow- 
 ship, and the affections. In Emerson's 
 words, " We must be lovers, and at once 
 the impossible becomes possible." The 
 world will wait long for this remedy, but 
 there is no other. 
 
 Like every real seer and prophet whose 
 testimony is recorded, Emerson had in- 
 tense sympathy with the poor, laborious, 
 dumb masses of mankind, and being a 
 wide reader in history and biography, 
 he early arrived at the conviction that 
 history needed to be written in a new 
 manner. It was long before Green's 
 History of the English People that Em- 
 
EMERSON 107 
 
 erson wrote : " Hence it happens that the 
 whole interest of history Hes in the for- 
 tunes of the poor." In recent years this 
 view of history has come to prevail, and 
 we are given the stories of institutions, 
 industries, commerce, crafts, arts, and 
 beliefs, instead of the stories of dynasties 
 and wars. For Emerson it is always 
 feats of liberty and wit which make 
 epochs of history. Commerce is civil- 
 izing because "the power which the sea 
 requires in the sailor makes a man of him 
 very fast." The invention of a house, 
 safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, 
 gives play to the finer faculties, and in- 
 troduces art, manners, and social de- 
 lights. The discovery of the post office 
 is a fine metre of civilization. The sea- 
 going steamer marks an epoch ; the sub- 
 jection of electricity to take messages and 
 turn wheels marks another. But, after 
 
108 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 all, the vital stages of human progress 
 are marked by steps toward personal, in- 
 dividual freedom. The love of liberty 
 was Emerson's fundamental passion : — 
 
 " For He that ruleth high and wise, 
 Nor pauseth in His plan, 
 Will take the sun out of the skies 
 Ere freedom out of man." 
 
 The new National League of Indepen- 
 dent Workmen of America has very 
 appropriately taken its motto from 
 Emerson : — 
 
 " For what avail the plough or sail 
 Or land or life, if freedom fail ? " 
 
 The sympathetic reader of Emerson 
 comes often upon passages written long 
 ago which are positively startling in their 
 anticipation of sentiments common to- 
 day and apparently awakened by very 
 recent events. One would suppose that 
 the following passage was written yes- 
 
EMERSON 109 
 
 terday. It was written fifty-six years 
 ago. "And so, gentlemen, I feel in re- 
 gard to this aged England, with the pos- 
 sessions, honors, and trophies, and also 
 with the infirmities of a thousand years 
 gathering around her, irretrievably com- 
 mitted as she now is to many old cus- 
 toms which cannot be suddenly changed ; 
 pressed upon by the transitions of trade, 
 and new and all incalculable modes, fab- 
 rics, arts, machines, and competing pop- 
 ulations, — I see her not dispirited, not 
 weak, but well remembering that she has 
 seen dark days before; — indeed with a 
 kind of instinct that she sees a little bet- 
 ter in a cloudy day, and that in storm of 
 battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor 
 and a pulse like a cannon." 
 
 Before the Civil War the Jew had no 
 such place in society as he holds to-day. 
 He was by no means so familiar to Amer- 
 
110 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 icans as he is now. Emerson speaks 
 twice of the Jew in his essay on Fate, in 
 terms precisely similar to those we com- 
 monly hear to-day : ** We see how much 
 will has been expended to extinguish the 
 Jew, in vain. . . . The sufferance which 
 is the badge of the Jew has made him 
 in these days the ruler of the rulers 
 of the earth." Those keen observations 
 were made certainly more than forty 
 years ago, and probably more than fifty. 
 
 Landscape architecture is not yet an 
 established profession among us, in spite 
 of the achievements of Downing, Cleve- 
 land, and Olmsted and their disciples ; 
 yet much has been accomplished within 
 the last twenty-five years to realize the 
 predictions on this subject made by Em- 
 erson in his lecture on The Young Amer- 
 ican. He pointed out in that lecture that 
 the beautiful gardens of Europe are un- 
 
EMERSON 111 
 
 known among us, but might be easily- 
 imitated here, and said that the land- 
 scape art "is the Fine Art which is left 
 for us. . . . The whole force of all arts 
 goes to facilitate the decoration of lands 
 and dwellings. ... 1 look on such im- 
 provement as directly tending to endear 
 the land to the inhabitant." The follow- 
 ing sentence might have been written 
 yesterday, so consistent is it with the 
 thought of to-day : " Whatever events 
 in progress shall go to disgust men with 
 cities, and infuse into them the passion 
 for country life and country pleasures, 
 will render a service to the whole face 
 of this continent, and will further the 
 most poetic of all the occupations of real 
 life, the bringing out by art the native 
 but hidden graces of the landscape." In 
 regard to books, pictures, statues, collec- 
 tions in natural history, and all such re- 
 
112 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 fining objects of nature and art, which 
 heretofore only the opulent could enjoy, 
 Emerson pointed out that in America the 
 public should provide these means of 
 culture and inspiration for every citizen. 
 He thus anticipated the present owner- 
 ship by cities, or by endowed trustees, 
 of parks, gardens, and museums of art 
 or science, as well as of baths and orches- 
 tras. Of music in particular he said : " I 
 think sometimes could I only have music 
 on my own terms ; could I . . . know 
 where I could go whenever I wished the 
 ablution and inundation of musical waves, 
 — that were a bath and a medicine." It 
 has been a long road from that sentence, 
 written probably in the forties, to the 
 Symphony Orchestra in this Hall, and to 
 the new singing classes on the East Side 
 of New York City. 
 
 For those of us who have attended to 
 
EMERSON 113 
 
 the outburst of novels and treatises on 
 humble or squalid life, to the copious 
 discussions on child-study, to the masses 
 of slum literature, and to the numerous 
 writings on home economics, how true 
 to-day seems the following sentence writ- 
 ten in 1837 : " The literature of the poor, 
 the feelings of the child, the philosophy 
 of the street, the meaning of household 
 life are the topics of the time." 
 
 I pass now to the last of the three 
 topics which time permits me to discuss, 
 — Emerson's religion. In no field of 
 thought was Emerson more prophetic, 
 more truly a prophet of coming states 
 of human opinion, than in religion. In 
 the first place, he taught that religion 
 is absolutely natural, — not supernatural, 
 but natural : — 
 
 " Out from the heart of Nature rolled 
 
 The burdens of the Bible old." 
 8 
 
114 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 He believed that revelation is natural and 
 continuous, and that in all ages prophets 
 are born. Those souls out of time pro- 
 claim truth, which may be momentarily 
 received with reverence, but is neverthe- 
 less quickly dragged down into some 
 savage interpretation which by and by 
 a new prophet will purge away. He be- 
 lieved that man is guided by the same 
 power that guides beast and flower. 
 " The selfsame power that brought me 
 here brought you," he says to beautiful 
 Rhodora. For him worship is the atti- 
 tude of those "who see that against all 
 appearances the nature of things works 
 for truth and right forever." He saw 
 good not only in what we call beauty, 
 grace, and light, but in what we call foul 
 and ugly. For him a sky-born music 
 sounds " from all that s fair ; from all 
 that 's foul : " — 
 
EMERSON 115 
 
 " *T is not in the high stars alone, 
 
 Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 
 Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone, 
 
 Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
 But in the mud and scum of things 
 There alway, alway something sings." 
 
 The universe was ever new and fresh in 
 his eyes, not spent, or fallen, or degraded, 
 but eternally tending upward : — 
 
 " No ray is dimmed, no atom worn. 
 My oldest force is good as new. 
 And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 
 
 Gives back the bending heavens in dew," 
 
 When we come to his interpretation of 
 historical Christianity, we find that in his 
 view the life and works of Jesus fell en- 
 tirely within the field of human experi- 
 ence. He sees in the deification of Jesus 
 an evidence of lack of faith in the infini- 
 tude of the individual human soul. He 
 sees in every gleam of human virtue not 
 only the presence of God, but some atom 
 
116 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 of His nature. As a preacher he had no 
 tone of authority. A true non-conformist 
 himself, he had no desire to impose his 
 views on anybody. Rehgious truth, like 
 all other truth, was to his thought an un- 
 rolling picture, not a deposit made once 
 for all in some sacred vessel. When 
 people who were sure they had drained 
 that vessel, and assimilated its contents, 
 attacked him, he was irresponsive or im- 
 passive, and yielded to them no juicy 
 thought ; so they pronounced him dry or 
 empty. Yet all of Emerson's religious 
 teaching led straight to God, — not to 
 a withdrawn creator, or anthropomor- 
 phic judge or king, but to the all-inform- 
 ing, all-sustaining soul of the universe. 
 
 It was a prophetic quality of Emerson's 
 religious teaching that he sought to ob- 
 literate the distinction between secular 
 and sacred. For him all things were 
 
EMERSON 117 
 
 sacred, just as the universe was religious. 
 We see an interesting fruition of Emer- 
 son's sowing in the nature of the means 
 of influence, which organized churches 
 and devout people have, in these later 
 days, been compelled to resort to. Thus 
 the Catholic Church keeps its hold on its 
 natural constituency quite as much by 
 schools, gymnasiums, hospitals, entertain- 
 ments, and social parades as it does by 
 its rites and sacraments. The Protestant 
 Churches maintain in city slums '* settle- 
 ments," which use the secular rather than 
 the so-called sacred methods. The fight 
 against drunkenness, and the sexual vice 
 and crimes of violence which follow in its 
 train, is most successfully maintained by 
 eliminating its physical causes and pro- 
 viding mechanical and social protections. 
 For Emerson inspiration meant not the 
 rare conveyance of supernatural power to 
 
118 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 an individual, but the constant incoming 
 into each man of the "divine soul which 
 also inspires all men." He believed in the 
 worth of the present hour : — 
 
 " Future or Past no richer secret folds, 
 O friendless Present ! than thy bosom holds." 
 
 He believed that the spiritual force of 
 human character imaged the divine: — 
 
 "The sun set, but set not his hope : 
 Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up : 
 Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
 Deeper and older seemed his eye." 
 
 Yet man is not an order of nature, but 
 a stupendous antagonism, because he 
 chooses and acts in his soul. *' So far as 
 a man thinks, he is free." It is interest- 
 ing to-day, after all the long discussion of 
 the doctrine of evolution, to see how 
 the much earlier conceptions of Emer- 
 son match the thoughts of the latest 
 
EMERSON 119 
 
 exponents of the philosophic results of 
 evolution. 
 
 The present generation of scholars and 
 ministers has been passing through an 
 important crisis in regard to the sacred 
 books of Judaism and Christianity. All 
 the features of the contest over " the 
 higher criticism " are foretold by Emer- 
 son in " The American Scholar." " The 
 poet chanting was felt to be a divine man ; 
 henceforth the chant is divine also. The 
 writer was a just and wise spirit ; hence- 
 forward it is settled the book is perfect. 
 Colleges are built on it ; books are written 
 on it. . . . Instantly the book becomes 
 noxious ; the guide is a tyrant." This is 
 exactly what has happened to Protestant- 
 ism, which substituted for infallible Pope 
 and Church an infallible Book ; and this 
 is precisely the evil from which modern 
 scholarship is delivering the world. 
 
120 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 In religion Emerson was only a nine- 
 teenth-century non-conformist instead of 
 a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. 
 It was a fundamental article in his creed 
 that, although conformity is the virtue in 
 most request, "Whoso would be a man 
 must be a non-conformist." In the midst 
 of increasing luxury, and of that easy- 
 going, unbelieving conformity which is 
 itself a form of luxury, Boston, the 
 birthplace of Emerson, may well remem- 
 ber with honor the generations of non- 
 conformists who made her, and created 
 the intellectual and moral climate in 
 which Emerson grew up. Inevitably, to 
 conformists and to persons who still accept 
 doctrines and opinions which he rejected, 
 he seems presumptuous and consequential. 
 In recent days we have even seen the word 
 " insolent " applied to this quietest and 
 most retiring of seers. But have not all 
 
EMERSON 121 
 
 prophets and ethical teachers had some- 
 thing of this aspect to their conservative 
 contemporaries ? We hardly expect the 
 messages of prophets to be welcome ; they 
 imply too much dissatisfaction w^ith the 
 present. 
 
 The essence of Emerson's teaching con- 
 cerning man's nature is compressed into 
 the famous verse : — 
 
 " So nigh is grandeur to our dust. 
 So near is God to man. 
 When Duty whispers low. Thou must. 
 The youth replies, I can." 
 
 The cynic or the fall-of-man theologian 
 replies — Grandeur indeed, say rather 
 squalor and shame. To this ancient pes- 
 simism Emerson makes answer with a 
 hard question — " We grant that human 
 life is mean, but how did we find out that 
 it was mean ? " To this question no 
 straight answer has been found, the com- 
 
122 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 mon answer running in a circle. It is 
 hard indeed to conceive of a measure 
 which will measure depths but not heights ; 
 and besides, every measure implies a 
 standard. 
 
 I have endeavored to set before you 
 some of the practical results of Emerson's 
 visions and intuitions, because, though 
 quite unfit to expound his philosophical 
 views, I am capable of appreciating some 
 of the many instances in which his words 
 have come true in the practical experience 
 of my own generation. My own work has 
 been a contribution to the prosaic, concrete 
 work of building, brick by brick, the new 
 walls of old American institutions of edu- 
 cation. As a young man I found the 
 writings of Emerson unattractive, and not 
 seldom unintelligible. I was concerned 
 with physical science, and with routine 
 
EMERSON 123 
 
 teaching and discipline ; and Emerson's 
 thinking seemed to me speculative and 
 visionary. In regard to religious belief, 
 I was brought up in the old-fashioned 
 Unitarian conservatism of Boston, which 
 was rudely shocked by Emerson's excur- 
 sions beyond its well-fenced precincts. But 
 when I had got at what proved to be my 
 life work for education, I discovered in 
 Emerson's poems and essays all the funda- 
 mental motives and principles of my own 
 hourly struggle against educational routine 
 and tradition, and against the prevailing 
 notions of discipline for the young ; so 
 when I was asked to speak to you to-night 
 about him, although I realized my unfit- 
 ness in many respects for such a function, 
 I could not refuse the opportunity to point 
 out how many of the sober, practical un- 
 dertakings of to-day had been anticipated 
 in all their principles by this solitary, 
 
124 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 shrewd, independent thinker, who, in 
 an inconsecutive and almost ejaculatory 
 way, wrought out many sentences and 
 verses which will travel far down the 
 generations. 
 
 I was also interested in studying in this 
 example the quality of prophets in general. 
 We know a good deal about the intellec- 
 tual ancestors and inspirers of Emerson ; 
 and we are sure that he drank deep at 
 many springs of idealism and poetry. 
 Plato, Confucius, Shakespeare, and Milton 
 were of his teachers ; Oken, Lamarck, and 
 Lyell lent him their scientific theories; 
 and Channing stirred the residuum which 
 came down to him through his forbears 
 from Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. All 
 these materials he transmuted and mould- 
 ed into lessons which have his own indi- 
 vidual quality and bear his stamp. The 
 precise limits of his individuality are inde- 
 
EMERSON 125 
 
 terminable, and inquiry into them would 
 be unprofitable. In all probability the 
 case would prove to be much the same 
 with most of the men that the world 
 has named prophets, if we knew as much 
 of their mental history as we know of 
 Emerson's. With regard to the Semitic 
 prophets and seers, it is reasonable to 
 expect that as Semitic exploration and 
 discovery advance, the world will learn 
 much about the historical and poetical 
 sources of their inspiration. Then the 
 Jewish and Christian peoples may come 
 nearer than they do now to Emerson's 
 conceptions of inspiration and worship, 
 of the naturalness of revelation and re- 
 ligion, and of the infinite capacities of 
 man. Meantime, it is an indisputable 
 fact that Emerson's thought has proved 
 to be consonant with the most progres- 
 sive and fruitful thinking and acting of 
 
126 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 
 
 two generations since his working time. 
 This fact, and the sweetness, fragrance, 
 and loftiness of his spirit, prophesy for 
 him an enduring power in the hearts and 
 lives of spiritually-minded men. 
 
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