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 \ COLLECTION 
 
edition 6c ICtiacc 
 
 The Edition de Luxe is printed from type and will 
 be limited to Five Hundred Copies, of which this is 
 
 No. 
 
 GEBBIE and COMPANY. 
 
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 Presidt ?it. 
 
 Secretary. 
 
UNIFORM EDITION 
 
 AMERICAN IDEALS 
 
 AND 
 
 Other Essays, Social and Political 
 
 By 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Volume II. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 GEBBIE AND COMPANY 
 
 1903 
 
EI GCO 
 
 Cop j % 
 
 THE LIBRARY OF 
 CONGRESS, 
 
 T wo Copies Received 
 
 1 1903 
 
 Copyright Entry 
 
 1 CUSS O- XX* No 
 
 S$ f X6 
 
 COPY A. 
 
 Copyright, i8g7 
 Copyright, 1903 
 
 by 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 This edition of "American Ideals" is issued under special 
 arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons, 
 
 1 . 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 The Vice-Presidency and the Campaign of 1896 .... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 How not to Help our Poorer Brother 29 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Monroe Doctrine 45 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Washington's Forgotten Maxim 66 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 National Life and Character 92 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 "Social Evolution" 128 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 The Law of Civilization and Decay 157 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 1 Reform through Social Work 186 
 
 1 Reprinted through the courtesy of the S. S. McClure Co. 
 
 Ill 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 William McKinley . . . Frontispiece 
 
 Etched by W. H. W. Bicknell 
 
 James Monroe 46 
 
 A Modern Battleship 77 
 
 Battle of New Orleans . . . .119 
 H. L. V. Parkhurst 
 
AMERICAN IDEALS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE VICE-PRESIDENCY AND THE CAMPAIGN 
 
 OF 1896 ' 
 
 THE Vice-President is an officer unique in his 
 character and functions, or to speak more 
 properly, in his want of functions while he 
 remains Vice-President, and in his possibility of 
 at any time ceasing to be a functionless official 
 and becoming the head of the whole nation. 
 There is no corresponding position in any consti- 
 tutional government. Perhaps the nearest ana- 
 logue is the heir apparent in a monarchy. Neither 
 the French President nor the British Prime Minis- 
 ter has a substitute, ready at any moment to take 
 his place, but exercising scarcely any authority 
 until his place is taken. The history of such an 
 office is interesting, and the personality of the in- 
 cumbent for the time being may at any moment 
 become of vast importance. 
 
 The founders of our Government— the men who 
 
 1 Review of Reviews, September, 1896. 
 
 VOL. II. 
 
2 American Ideals 
 
 did far more than draw up the Declaration of In- 
 dependence, for they put forth the National Con- 
 stitution — in many respects builded very wisely of 
 set purpose. In some cases they built wiser than 
 they knew. In yet other instances they failed 
 entirely to achieve objects for which they had en- 
 deavored to provide by a most elaborate and 
 ingenious governmental arrangement. They dis- 
 trusted what would now be called pure De- 
 mocracy, and they dreaded what we would now 
 call party government. 
 
 Their distrust of Democracy induced them to 
 construct the electoral college for the choice of 
 a President, the original idea being that the people 
 should elect their best and wisest men, who in turn 
 should, untrammelled by outside pressure, elect a 
 President. As a matter of fact the functions of 
 the electorate have now by time and custom be- 
 come of little more importance than those of so 
 many letter-carriers. They deliver the electoral 
 votes of their states just as a letter-carrier delivers 
 his mail. But in the presidential contest this year 
 it may be we shall see a partial return to the ideals 
 of the men of 1789 ; for some of the electors on the 
 Bryan-Sewall- Watson ticket may exercise a choice 
 between the vice-presidential candidates. 
 
 The distrust felt by the founders of the consti- 
 tution for party government took shape in the 
 scheme to provide that the majority party should 
 
The Vice-Presidency 3 
 
 have the foremost place, and the minority party 
 the second place, in the national executive. The 
 man who received the greatest number of electoral 
 votes was made President, and the man who re- 
 ceived the second greatest number was made 
 Vice-President, on a theory somewhat akin to that 
 by which certain reformers hope to revolutionize 
 our system of voting at the present day. In the 
 early days under the present constitution this sys- 
 tem resulted in the choice of Adams for President 
 and of his anti-type Jefferson as Vice-President, 
 the combination being about as incongruous as if 
 we should now see McKinley President and either 
 Bryan or Watson Vice-President. Even in theory 
 such an arrangement is very bad, because under 
 it the Vice-President might readily be, and as a 
 matter of fact was, a man utterly opposed to all 
 the principles to which the President was devoted, 
 so that the arrangement provided in the event of 
 the death of the President, not for a succession, 
 but for a revolution. The system was very soon 
 dropped, and each party nominated its own can- 
 didates for both positions. But it was many 
 years before all the members of the electoral col- 
 lege of one party felt obliged to cast the same votes 
 for both President and Vice-President, and conse- 
 quently there was a good deal of scrambling and 
 shifting in taking the vote. When, however, the 
 parties had crystallized into Democratic and 
 
4 American Ideals 
 
 Whig, a score of years after the disappearance of 
 the Federalists, the system of party voting also 
 crystallized. Each party then as a rule nom- 
 inated one man for President and one for Vice- 
 President, these being voted for throughout the 
 nation. This system in turn speedily produced 
 strange results, some of which remain to this day. 
 There are and must be in every party factions. 
 The victorious faction may crush out and destroy 
 the others, or it may try to propitiate at least its 
 most formidable rival. In consequence, the cus- 
 tom grew of offering the vice-presidency as a con- 
 solation prize, to be given in many cases to the 
 very men who were most bitterly opposed to the 
 nomination of the successful candidate for Presi- 
 dent. Sometimes this consolation prize was 
 awarded for geographical reasons, sometimes to 
 bring into the party men who, on points of princi- 
 ple, might split away because of the principles of 
 the presidential candidate himself, and at other 
 times it was awarded for merely factional reasons 
 to some faction which did not differ in the least 
 from the dominant faction in matters of principle, 
 but had very decided views on the question of 
 offices. 
 
 The presidency being all important, and the 
 vice-presidency of comparatively little note, the 
 entire strength of the contending factions is spent 
 in the conflict over the first, and very often a man 
 
The Vice-Presidency 5 
 
 who is most anxious to take the first place will not 
 take the second, preferring some other political 
 position. It has thus frequently happened that 
 the two candidates have been totally dissimilar in 
 character and even in party principle, though 
 both running on the same ticket. Very odd re- 
 sults have followed in more than one instance. 
 
 A striking illustration of the evils sometimes 
 springing from this system is afforded by what be- 
 fell the Whigs after the election and death of the 
 elder Harrison. Translated into the terms of the 
 politics of continental Europe of to-day, Harri- 
 son's adherents represented a union between the 
 right and the extreme left against the centre. 
 That is, the regular Whigs who formed the bulk 
 of his supporters were supplemented by a small 
 body of extremists who in their political principles 
 were even more alien to the Whigs than were the 
 bulk of the regular Democrats, but who them- 
 selves hated these regular Democrats with the 
 peculiar ferocity so often felt by the extremist 
 for the man who goes far, but not quite far 
 enough. In consequence, the President repre- 
 sented Whig principles, the Vice-President repre- 
 sented a rather extreme form of the very principles 
 to which the Whigs were most opposed. The re- 
 sult was that when Harrison died the presidency 
 fell into the hands of a man who had but a corpo- 
 ral's guard of supporters in the nation, and who 
 
6 American Ideals 
 
 proceeded, to oppose all the measures of the im- 
 mense majority of those who elected him. 
 
 A somewhat similar instance was afforded in the 
 case of Lincoln and Johnson. Johnson was put 
 on the ticket largely for geographical reasons, and 
 on the death of Lincoln he tried to reverse the 
 policy of the party which had put him in office. 
 An instance of an entirely different kind is afforded 
 by Garfield and Arthur. The differences between 
 these two party leaders were mainly merely fac- 
 tional. Each stood squarely on the platform of 
 the party, and all the principles advocated by one 
 were advocated by the other; yet the death of 
 Garfield meant a complete overturn in the per- 
 sonnel of the upper Republican officials, because 
 Arthur had been nominated expressly to placate 
 the group of party leaders who most objected to 
 the nomination of Garfield. Arthur made a very 
 good President, but the bitterness caused by his 
 succession to power nearly tore the party in 
 twain. It will be noted that most of these evils 
 arose from the fact that the Vice-President, under 
 ordinary circumstances possesses so little real 
 power. He presides over the Senate and he has 
 in Washington a position of marked social im- 
 portance, but his political weight as Vice-President 
 is almost nil. There is always a chance that he 
 may become President. As this is only a chance 
 it seems quite impossible to persuade politicians 
 
The Vice-Presidency 7 
 
 to give it proper weight. This certainly does not 
 seem right. The Vice-President should, so far as 
 possible, represent the same views and principles 
 which have secured the nomination and election 
 of the President, and he should be a man standing 
 well in the councils of the party, trusted by his 
 fellow party leaders, and able in the event of any 
 accident to his chief to take up the work of the 
 latter just where it was left. The Republican 
 party has this year nominated such a man in the 
 person of Mr. Hobart. But nominations of this 
 kind have by no means always been the rule of 
 recent years. No change of parties, for instance, 
 could well produce a greater revolution in policy 
 than would have been produced at almost any 
 time during the last three years if Mr. Cleveland 
 had died and Mr. Stevenson had succeeded 
 him. 
 
 One sure way to secure this desired result would 
 undoubtedly be to increase the power of the Vice- 
 President. He should always be a man who would 
 be consulted by the President on every great party 
 question. It would be very well if he were given 
 a seat in the Cabinet. It might be well, if, in ad- 
 dition to his vote in the Senate in the event of a 
 tie, he should be given a vote, on ordinary occa- 
 sions, and perchance on occasions a voice in the 
 debates. A man of the character of Mr. Hobart 
 is sure to make his weight felt in an administration, 
 
8 American Ideals 
 
 but the power of thus exercising influence should 
 be made official rather than personal. 
 
 The present contest offers a striking illustration 
 of the way in which the Vice-President ought and 
 ought not to be nominated, and to study this it is 
 necessary to study not only the way in which the 
 different candidates were nominated, but at least 
 in outline the characters of the candidates them- 
 selves. 
 
 For the first time in many years, indeed for the 
 first time since parties have fairly crystallized 
 along their present lines, there are three parties 
 running, two of which support the same presiden- 
 tial candidate but different candidates for the vice- 
 presidency. Each one of these parties has carried 
 several states during the last three or four years. 
 Each party has a right to count upon a number of 
 electoral votes as its own. Closely though the 
 Democratic and Populistic parties have now ap- 
 proximated in their principles as enunciated in the 
 platforms of Chicago and St. Louis, they yet do 
 differ on certain points, and neither would have 
 any chance of beating the Republicans without the 
 help of the other. The result has been a coalition, 
 yet each party to the coalition has retained enough 
 of its jealous individuality to make it refuse to ac- 
 cept the candidate of the other for the second 
 position on the ticket. 
 
 The Republican party stands on a normal and 
 
The Vice-Presidency 9 
 
 healthy party footing. It has enunciated a defi- 
 nite set of principles entirely in accord with its past 
 actions. It has nominated on this platform a 
 President and Vice-President, both of whom are 
 thorough-going believers in all the party princi- 
 ples set forth in the platform upon which they 
 stand. Mr. McKinley believes in sound finance, 
 — that is, in a currency based upon gold and as 
 good as gold. So does Mr. Hobart. Mr. McKin- 
 ley believes in a protective tariff. So does Mr. 
 Hobart. Mr. McKinley believes in the only 
 method of preserving orderly liberty, — that is, 
 in seeing that the laws are enforced at what- 
 ever cost. So does Mr. Hobart. In short, Mr. 
 Hobart stands for precisely the same principles 
 that are represented by Mr. McKinley. He is a 
 man of weight in the community, who has had 
 wide experience both in business and in poli- 
 tics. He is taking an active part in the campaign, 
 and he will be a power if elected to the vice- 
 presidency. All the elements which have rallied 
 behind Mr. McKinley are just as heartily behind 
 Mr. Hobart. The two represent the same forces, 
 and they stand for a party with a coherent organ- 
 ization and a definite purpose, to the carrying out 
 of which they are equally pledged. 
 
 It will be a matter of much importance to the 
 nation that the next Vice-President should stand 
 for some settled policy. It is an unhealthy thing 
 
io American Ideals 
 
 to have the Vice-President and President repre- 
 sented by principles so far apart that the succes- 
 sion of one to the place of the other means a 
 change as radical as any possible party overturn. 
 The straining and dislocation of our governmental 
 institutions were very great when Tyler succeeded 
 Harrison and Johnson succeeded Lincoln. In 
 each case the majority of the party that had won 
 the victory felt that it had been treated with 
 scandalous treachery, for Tyler grew to be as re- 
 pulsive to the Whigs as Polk himself, and the Re- 
 publicans could scarcely have hated Seymour 
 more than they hated Johnson. The Vice-Presi- 
 dent has a three-fold relation. First to the ad- 
 ministration; next as presiding officer in the 
 Senate, where he should be a man of dignity and 
 force ; and third in his social position, for socially 
 he ranks second to the President alone. Mr. 
 Morton was in every way an admirable Vice- 
 President under General Harrison, and had he suc- 
 ceeded to the presidential chair there would have 
 been no break in the great policies which were 
 being pushed forward by the administration. But 
 during Mr. Cleveland's two incumbencies Messrs. 
 Hendricks and Stevenson have represented, not 
 merely hostile factions, but principles and interests 
 from which he was sundered by a gulf quite as 
 great as that which divided him from his normal 
 party foes. Mr. Sewall would make a colorless 
 
The Vice-Presidency n 
 
 Vice-President, and were he at any time to suc- 
 ceed Mr. Bryan in the White House would travel 
 Mr. Bryan's path only with extreme reluctance and 
 under duress. Mr. Watson would be a more start- 
 ling, more attractive, and more dangerous figure, 
 for if he got the chance he would lash the nation 
 with a whip of scorpions, while Mr. Bryan would 
 be content with the torture of ordinary thongs. 
 
 Finally, Mr. Hobart would typify as strongly as 
 Mr. McKinley himself what was best in the Re- 
 publican party and in the nation, and would stand 
 as one of the known champions of his party on the 
 very questions at issue in the present election. He 
 is a man whose advice would be sought by all who 
 are prominent in the administration. In short, 
 he would be the kind of man whom the electors are 
 certain to choose as Vice-President if they exercise 
 their choice rationally. 
 
 The men who left the Republican party because 
 of the nomination of McKinley would have left it 
 just as quickly if Hobart had been nominated. 
 They do not believe in sound finance, and though 
 many of the bolters object to anarchy and favor 
 protection, they feel that in this crisis their per- 
 sonal desires must be repressed and that they 
 are conscientiously bound to support the depre- 
 ciated dollar even at the cost of incidentally sup- 
 porting the principles of a low tariff and the 
 doctrine that a mob should be allowed to do what 
 
12 American Ideals 
 
 it likes with immunity. There are many advocates 
 of clipped or depreciated money who are rather 
 sorry to see the demand for such currency coupled 
 with a demand for more lawlessness and an aban- 
 donment by the government of the police functions 
 which are the essential attributes of civilization; 
 but they have overcome their reluctance, feeling 
 that on the whole it is more important that the 
 money of the nation should be unsound than that 
 its laws should be obeyed. People who feel this 
 way are just as much opposed to Mr. Hobart as to 
 Mr. McKinley. They object to the platform upon 
 which the two men stand, and they object as much 
 to the character of one man as to the character of 
 the other. They are repelled by McKinley's alle- 
 giance to the cause of sound money, and find 
 nothing to propitiate them in Hobart's uncom- 
 promisingly honest attitude on the same question. 
 There is no reason whatever why any voter who 
 would wish to vote against the one should favor 
 the other, or vice versa. 
 
 When we cross the political line all this is 
 changed. On the leading issue of the campaign 
 the entire triangle of candidates are a unit. Mr. 
 Bryan, the nominee for the presidency, and Messrs. 
 Sewall and Watson, the nominees for the vice- 
 presidency, are almost equally devoted adherents 
 of the light-weight dollar and of a currency which 
 shall not force a man to repay what he has bor- 
 
The Vice-Presidency 13 
 
 rowed, and shall punish the wrong-headed laborer, 
 who expects to be paid his wages in money worth 
 something, as heavily as* the business man or 
 farmer who is so immoral as to wish to pay his 
 debts. All three are believers in that old-world 
 school of finance which appears under such pro- 
 tean changes of policy, always desiring the increase 
 of the circulating medium, but differing as to the 
 means, which in one age takes the form of putting 
 base metal in with the good, or of clipping the 
 good, and in another assumes the guise of fiat 
 money, or the free coinage of silver. On this. cur- 
 rency question they are substantially alike, agree- 
 ing (as one of their adherents picturesquely put it, 
 in arguing in favor of that form of abundant cur- 
 rency which has as its highest exponent the money 
 of the late Confederacy) that "the money which 
 was good enough for the soldiers of Washington is 
 good enough for us." As a matter of fact the 
 soldiers of Washington were not at all grateful for 
 the money which the loud-mouthed predecessors 
 of Mr. Bryan and his kind then thought "good 
 enough" for them. The money with which the 
 veterans of Washington were paid was worth two 
 cents on the dollar, and as yet neither Mr. Bryan, 
 Mr. Sewall, nor Mr. Watson has advocated a two- 
 cent copper dollar. Still, they are striving toward 
 this ideal, and in their advocacy of the fifty-cent 
 dollar they are one. 
 
H American Ideals 
 
 But beyond this they begin to differ. Mr. 
 vSewall distinctly sags behind the leader of the 
 spike team, Mr. Bryan, and still more distinctly 
 behind his rival, or running mate, or whatever 
 one may choose to call him, the Hon. Thomas 
 Watson. There is far more regard for the essential 
 fitness of things in a ticket which contains Mr. 
 Bryan and Mr. Watson than one which contains 
 Mr. Bryan and Mr. Sewall. Mr. Watson is a man 
 of Mr. Bryan's type, only a little more so. But 
 Mr. Sewall is of a different type, and possesses 
 many attributes which must make association 
 with him exceedingly painful, not merely to Mr. 
 Watson, but to Mr. Bryan himself. He is a well- 
 to-do man. Indeed in many communities he 
 would be called a rich man. He is a banker, a 
 railroad man, a ship-builder, and has been suc- 
 cessful in business. Now if Mr. Bryan and Mr. 
 Watson really stand for any principle it is hostility 
 to this kind of success. Thrift, industry, and 
 business energy are qualities which are quite 
 incompatible with true Populistic feeling. Pay- 
 ment of debts, like the suppression of riots, is ab- 
 horrent to the Populistic mind. Such conduct 
 strikes the Populist as immoral. Mr. Bryan 
 made his appearance in Congress with two col- 
 leagues elected on the same ticket, one of whom 
 stated to the present writer that no honest man 
 ever earned $5000 a year; that whoever got that 
 
The Vice-Presidency 15 
 
 amount stole it. Mr. Sewall has earned many- 
 times $5000 a year. He is a prosperous capitalist. 
 Populism never prospers save where men are un- 
 prosperous, and your true Populist is especially 
 intolerant of business success. If a man is a 
 successful business man he at once calls him a 
 plutocrat. 
 
 He makes only one exception. A miner or 
 speculator in mines may be many times a million- 
 aire and yet remain in good standing in the Popu- 
 list party. The Populist has ineradicably fixed in 
 his mind the belief that silver is a cheap metal, and 
 that silver money is, while not fiat money, still a 
 long step toward it. Silver is connected in his 
 mind with scaling down debts, the partial repudia- 
 tion of obligations, and other measures aimed at 
 those odious moneyed tyrants who lend money to 
 persons who insist upon borrowing, or who have 
 put their ill-gotten gains in savings banks and 
 kindred wicked institutions for the encouragement 
 of the vice of thrift. These pleasurable associa- 
 tions quite outweigh, with the Populist, the fact 
 that the silver man himself is rich. He is even for 
 the moment blind to the further fact that these 
 pro-silver men, like Senator Stewart, Governor 
 Altgeld, and their compeers, strenuously insist 
 that the obligations to themselves shall be liqui- 
 dated in gold ; indeed this particular idiosyncrasy 
 of the silver leaders is not much frowned upon by 
 
1 6 American Ideals 
 
 the bulk of the Populists, because is has at least 
 the merit of savoring strongly of "doing" one's 
 creditors. Not even the fact that rich silver- 
 mine -owners may have earned their money hon- 
 estly can outweigh the other fact that they 
 champion a species of currency which will make 
 most thrifty and honest men poorer, in the minds 
 of the truly logical Populist. 
 
 But Mr. Sewall has no fictitious advantage in the 
 way of owing his wealth to silver. He has made 
 his money precisely as the most loathed reprobate 
 of Wall Street — or of New York, which the average 
 Populist regards as synonymous with Wall Street 
 — has made his. The average Populist does not 
 draw fine distinctions. There are in New York 
 as in other large cities, scoundrels of great wealth 
 who have made their money by means skilfully 
 calculated to come just outside the line of crimi- 
 nality. There are other men who have made their 
 money exactly as the successful miner or farmer 
 makes his, — that is, by the exercise of shrewdness, 
 business daring, energy, and thrift. But the 
 Populist draws no line of division between these 
 two classes. They have made money, and that is 
 enough. One may have built railroads and the 
 other have wrecked them, but they are both rail- 
 road men in his eyes, and that is all. One may 
 have swindled his creditors, and the other built 
 up a bank which has been of incalculable benefit 
 
The Vice-Presidency 17 
 
 to all who have had dealings with it, but to the 
 Populist they are both gold-bugs, and as such 
 noxious. Mr. Sewall is the type of man the con- 
 templation of which usually throws a Populist 
 orator into spasms. But it happens that he be- 
 lieves in free silver, just as other very respectable 
 men believe in spirit rapping, or the faith-cure, or 
 Buddhism, or pilgrimages to Lourdes, or the foot 
 of a graveyard rabbit. There are very able men 
 and very lovely women who believe in each or all 
 of these, and there are a much larger number who 
 believe in free silver. Had they lived in the days 
 of Sparta they would have believed in free iron, 
 iron coin being at that time the cheapest circulat- 
 ing medium, the adoption of which would give the 
 greatest expansion of the currency. But they 
 have been dragged on by the slow procession of the 
 centuries, and now they only believe in free silver. 
 It is a belief which is compatible with all the 
 domestic virtues, and even occasionally with very 
 good capacities as a public servant. Mr. Sewall 
 doubtless stands as one of these men. He can 
 hardly be happy, planted firmly as he is, on the 
 Chicago platform. In the minds of most thrifty, 
 hard-working men, who are given to thinking at 
 all about public questions, the free-silver plank is 
 very far from being the most rotten of the many 
 rotten planks put together with such perverted 
 skill by the Chicago architects. A platform which 
 
 VOL. II.— 2. 
 
1 8 American Ideals 
 
 declares in favor of free and unlimited rioting and 
 which has the same strenuous objection to the 
 exercise of the police power by the general govern- 
 ment that is felt in the circles presided over by 
 Herr Most, Eugene V. Debs, and all the people 
 whose pictures appear in the detective bureaus of 
 our great cities, cannot appeal to persons who have 
 gone beyond the unpolished-stone period of civili- 
 zation. 
 
 The men who object to what they style "gov- 
 ernment by injunction" are, as regards the essen- 
 tial principles of government, in hearty sympathy 
 with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in 
 caves, fought one another with stone-headed axes, 
 and ate the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. 
 They are interesting as representing a geological 
 survival, but they are dangerous whenever there is 
 the least chance of their making the principles of 
 this ages-buried past living factors in our present 
 life. They are not in sympathy with men of good 
 minds and sound civic morality. It is not a nice 
 thing to wish to pay one's debts in coins worth 
 fifty cents on the dollar, but it is a much less nice 
 thing to wish to plunge one's country into anarchy 
 by providing that the law shall only protect the 
 lawless and frown scornfully on the law-abiding. 
 There is a good deal of mushy sentiment in the 
 world, and there are always a certain number of 
 people whose minds are weak and whose emotions 
 
The Vice-Presidency 19 
 
 are strong and who effervesce with sympathy to- 
 ward any man who does wrong, and with indigna- 
 tion against any man who chastises the criminal 
 for having done wrong. These emotionalists, 
 moreover, are always reinforced by that large body 
 of men who themselves wish to do wrong, and who 
 are hot sentimental at all, but, on the contrary, 
 very practical. It is rarely that these two classes 
 control a great political party, but at Chicago this 
 became an accomplished fact. 
 
 Furthermore, the Chicago convention attacked 
 the Supreme Court. Again this represents a 
 species of atavism, — that is, of recurrence to the 
 ways of thought of remote barbarian ancestors. 
 Savages do not like an independent and upright 
 judiciary. They want the judge to decide their 
 way, and if he does not, they want to behead him. 
 The Populists experience much the same emotions 
 when they realize that the judiciary stands be- 
 tween them and plunder. 
 
 Now on all these points Mr. Sewall can hardly 
 feel complete sympathy with his temporary allies. 
 He is very anxious that the Populists shall vote for 
 him for Vice-President, and of course he feels a 
 kindly emotion toward those who do intend to 
 vote for him. He would doubtless pardon much 
 heresy of political belief in any member of the 
 electoral college who feels that Sewall is his friend, 
 not Watson, — Codlin, not Short. He has, of 
 
20 American Ideals 
 
 course, a vein of the erratic in his character, or 
 otherwise he would not be in such company at 
 all, and would have no quality that would recom- 
 mend him to them. But on the whole his sym- 
 pathies must lie with the man who saves money 
 rather than with the man who proposes to take 
 away the money when it has been saved, and with 
 the policeman who arrests a violent criminal 
 rather than with the criminal. Such sympathy 
 puts him at a disadvantage in the Populist camp. 
 He is loud in his professions of belief in the re- 
 markable series of principles for which he is sup- 
 posed to stand, but his protestations ring rather 
 hollow. The average supporter of Bryan doubt- 
 less intends to support Sewall, for he thinks him an 
 unimportant tail to the Bryan kite. But, though 
 unimportant, he regards him with a slight feeling 
 of irritation, as being at the best a rather ludicrous 
 contrast to the rest of the kite. He contributes no 
 element of strength to the Bryan ticket, for other 
 men who work hard and wish to enjoy the fruits of 
 their toil simply regard him as a renegade, and the 
 average Populist, or Populistic Democrat, does not 
 like him, and accepts him simply because he fears 
 not doing so may jeopardize Bryan's chances. He 
 is in the uncomfortable position always held by the 
 respectable theorist who gets caught in revolu- 
 tionary movement and has to wedge nervously up 
 into the front rank with the gentlemen who are not 
 
The Vice- Presidency 21 
 
 troubled by any of his scruples, and who really 
 do think that it is all very fine and glorious. In 
 fact Mr. Sewall is much the least picturesque and 
 the least appropriate figure on the platform or 
 platforms upon which Mr. Bryan is standing. 
 
 Mr. Watson, whose enemies now call him a 
 Georgia cracker, is in reality a far more suitable 
 companion for Mr. Bryan in such a contest. It 
 must be said, however, that if virtue always re- 
 ceived its reward Mr. Watson and not Mr. Bryan 
 would stand at the head of the ticket. In the 
 language of mathematicians Mr. Watson merely 
 represents Mr. Bryan raised several powers. The 
 same is true of the Populist as compared to the 
 Democratic platform. Mr. Bryan may affect to 
 believe that free silver does represent the ultimate 
 goal, and that his friends do not intend to go 
 further in the direction of fiat money. Mr. Wat- 
 son's friends, the middle-of-the-road Populists, are 
 much more fearless and much more logical. They 
 are willing to accept silver as a temporary make- 
 shift, but they want a currency based on corn and 
 cotton next, and ultimately a currency based on 
 the desires of the people who issue it. The states- 
 manlike utterance of that great financier, Mr. 
 Bryan's chief rival for the nomination and at 
 present his foremost supporter, Mr. Bland, to the 
 effect that he would " wipe out the national debt as 
 with a sponge," meets with their cordial approval 
 
22 American Ideals 
 
 as far as it goes, but they object to the qualification 
 before the word "debt." In wiping out debts 
 they do not wish to halt merely at the national 
 debt. The Populists indorsed Bryan as the best 
 they could get ; but they hated Sewall so that they 
 took the extraordinary step of nominating the Vice- 
 President before the President so as to make sure 
 of a really acceptable man in the person of Watson. 
 With Mr. Bryan, denunciation of the gold-bug 
 and the banker is largely a mere form of intellec- 
 tual entertainment ; but with Mr. Watson it repre- 
 sents an almost ferocious conviction. Some one 
 has said that Mr. Watson, like Mr. Tillman, is an 
 embodied retribution on the South for having 
 failed to educate the cracker, the poor white who 
 gives him his strength. It would ill beseem any 
 dweller in cities of the North, especially any 
 dweller in the city of Tammany, to reproach the 
 South with having failed to educate anybody. 
 But Mr. Watson is certainly an awkward man for 
 a community to develop. He is infinitely more 
 in earnest than is Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson's fol- 
 lowers belong to that school of southern Populists 
 who honestly believe that the respectable and 
 commonplace people who own banks, railroads, 
 dry-goods stores, factories, and the like, are per- 
 sons with many of the mental and social attributes 
 that unpleasantly distinguished Heliogabalus, 
 Nero, Caligula, and other worthies of later Rome. 
 
The Vice-Presidency 23 
 
 Not only do they believe this, but they say it with 
 appalling frankness. They are very sincere, as a 
 rule, or at least the rank and file are. They are 
 also very suspicious. They distrust anything they 
 cannot understand ; and as they understand but 
 little this opens a very wide field for distrust. 
 They are apt to be emotionally religious. If not, 
 they are then at least atheists of an archaic type. 
 Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider 
 quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man 
 should change his clothes in the evening, that he 
 should dine at any other hour than noon, impress 
 these good people as being symptoms of depravity 
 instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and 
 cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe fre- 
 quently, cause them the deepest suspicion. A 
 well-to-do man they regard with jealous distrust, 
 and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves, at 
 least they hope to make matters uncomfortable for 
 those that are. They possess many strong, rugged 
 virtues, but they are quite impossible politically, 
 because they always confound the essentials and 
 the non-essentials, and though they often make 
 war on vice, they rather prefer making war on 
 prosperity and refinement. 
 
 Mr. Watson was in a sense born out of place 
 when he was born in Georgia, for in Georgia the 
 regular Democracy, while it has accepted the prin- 
 ciples of the Populists, has made war on their 
 
24 American Ideals 
 
 personnel, and in every way strives to press them 
 down. Far better for Mr. Watson would it have 
 been could he have been born in the adjacent State 
 of South Carolina, where the Populists swallowed 
 the Democrats with a gulp. Senator Tillman, the 
 great Populist or Democratic orator from South 
 Carolina, possesses an untrammelled tongue any 
 middle-of-the-road man would envy: and more- 
 over Mr. Tillman's brother has been frequently 
 elected to Congress upon the issue that he never 
 wore either an overcoat or an undershirt, an issue 
 which any Populist statesman finds readily com- 
 prehensible, and which he would recognize at first 
 glance as being strong before the people. It needs 
 a certain amount of mental subtlety to appreciate 
 that it is for one's interest to support a man be- 
 cause he is honest and has broad views about 
 coast defences and the Navy, and other similar sub- 
 jects ; but it does not need any mind at all to have 
 one's prejudices stirred in favor of a statesman 
 whose claim to the title rests upon his indifference 
 to the requirements of civilized dress. 
 
 Altogether Mr. Watson, with his sincerity, his 
 frankness, his extreme suspiciousness, his distrust 
 of anything he cannot understand, and the feeling 
 he encourages against all the elegancies and decen- 
 cies of civilized life, is an interesting personage. He 
 represents the real thing, while Bryan after all is 
 more or less a sham and a compromise. Mr. Wat- 
 
The Vice-Presidency 25 
 
 son would, at a blow, destroy all banks and bank- 
 ers, with a cheerful, albeit vague, belief that there- 
 by he was in some abstruse way benefiting the 
 people at large. And he would do this with the 
 simple sincerity and faith of an African savage 
 who tries to benefit his tribe by a sufficiency of 
 human sacrifices. But Mr. Bryan would be beset 
 by ugly doubts when he came to put into effect all 
 the mischievous beliefs of his followers, and Mr. 
 Sewall would doubtless be frankly miserable if it 
 ever became necessary for him to take a lead in 
 such matters. Mr. Watson really ought to be the 
 first man on the ticket, with Mr. Bryan second; 
 for he is much the superior in boldness, in thorough- 
 going acceptance of his principles according to 
 their logical conclusions, and in sincerity of faith. 
 It is impossible not to regret that the Democrats 
 and Populists should not have put forward in the 
 first place the man who genuinely represents their 
 ideas. 
 
 However, it is even doubtful whether Mr. Wat- 
 son will receive the support to which he is entitled 
 as a vice-presidential candidate. In the South the 
 Populists have been so crushed under the heel of 
 the Democrats, and have bitten that heel with 
 such eager venom, that they dislike entering into a 
 coalition with them ; but in the South the Demo- 
 crats will generally control the election machinery. 
 In the far West, and generally in those States 
 
26 American Ideals 
 
 where the Populist wing of the new alliance is as- 
 cendant, the Populists have no especial hatred of 
 the Democrats. They know that their principles 
 are substantially identical, and they think it best 
 to support the man who seems to represent the 
 majority faction among the various factions that 
 stand behind Bryan. 
 
 As a consequence of this curious condition of 
 affairs there are several interesting possibilities 
 open. The electoral college consists of the men 
 elected at the pools in the various States to record 
 the decrees of the majorities in those States, and 
 it has grown to be an axiom of politics that they 
 must merely register the will of the men who 
 elected them. But it does seem possible that in 
 the present election some of the electors may re- 
 turn to the old principles of a century ago and 
 exercise at least a limited discretion in casting 
 their votes. In a State like Nebraska, for instance, 
 it looks as though it would be possible that the 
 electoral ticket on the anti-Republican side would 
 be composed of four Bryan and Watson men and 
 four Bryan and Sewall men. Now, in the event of 
 Bryan having more votes than McKinley — that is, 
 in the event of the country showing strong Bed- 
 lamite tendencies next November — it might be 
 that a split between Sewall and Watson would give 
 a plurality to Hobart, and in such event it is 
 hardly conceivable that some of the electors would 
 
The Vice-Presidency 27 
 
 not exercise their discretion by changing their 
 votes. If they did not, we might then again see 
 a return to the early and profoundly interesting 
 practice of our fathers and witness a President 
 chosen by one party and a Vice-President by the 
 other. 
 
 I wish it to be distinctly understood, however, 
 that these are merely interesting speculations as 
 to what might occur in a hopelessly improbable 
 contingency. I am a good American, with a pro- 
 found belief in my countrymen, and I have no idea 
 that they will deliberately lower themselves to a 
 level beneath that of a South American republic, 
 by voting for the farrago of sinister nonsense 
 which the Populistic-Democratic politicians at 
 Chicago chose to set up as embodying the princi- 
 ples of their party, and for the amiable and windy 
 demagogue who stands upon that platform. Many 
 entirely honest and intelligent men have been mis- 
 led by the silver talk, and have for the moment 
 joined the ranks of the ignorant, the vicious, and 
 the wrong-headed. These men of character and 
 capacity are blinded by their own misfortunes, or 
 their own needs, or else they have never fairly 
 looked into the matter for themselves, being, like 
 most men, whether in "gold" or "silver" com- 
 munities, content to follow the opinion of those 
 they are accustomed to trust. After full and fair 
 inquiry these men, I am sure, whether they live in 
 
28 American Ideals 
 
 Maine, in Tennessee, or in Oregon, will come out 
 on the side of honest money. The shiftless and 
 vicious and the honest but hopelessly ignorant and 
 puzzle-headed voters cannot be reached ; but the 
 average farmer, the average business man, the 
 average workman — in short, the average Ameri- 
 can — will always stand up for honesty and decency 
 when he can once satisfy himself as to the side on 
 which they are to be found. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 HOW NOT TO HELP OUR POORER BROTHER 1 
 
 AFTER the publication of my article in the 
 September Review of Reviews on the vice- 
 presidential candidates, I received the 
 following very manly and very courteous letter 
 from the Honorable Thomas Watson, then the 
 candidate with Mr. Bryan on the Populist ticket 
 for Vice-President. I publish it with his permis- 
 sion: 
 
 "Hon. Theodore Roosevelt: 
 
 "It pains me to be misunderstood by those whose 
 good opinion I respect, and upon reading your 
 trenchant article in the September number of the 
 Review of Reviews the impulse was strong to write 
 to you. 
 
 ' 'When you take your stand for honester govern- 
 ment and for juster laws in New York, as you have 
 so courageously done, your motives must be the 
 same as mine — for you do not need the money 
 your office gives you. I can understand, instinc- 
 tively, what you feel — what your motives are. 
 You merely obey a law of your nature which puts 
 
 1 Review of Reviews, January, 1897. 
 29 
 
30 American Ideals 
 
 you into mortal combat with what you think is 
 wrong. You fight because your own sense of self- 
 respect and self -loyalty compels you to fight. Is 
 not this so? 
 
 "If in Georgia and throughout the South we have 
 conditions as intolerable as those that surround 
 you in New York, can you not realize why I make 
 war upon them? 
 
 "Tammany itself has grown great because mis- 
 taken leaders of the Southern Democracy catered 
 to its Kellys and Crokers and feared to defy them. 
 "The first 'roast' I ever got from the Demo- 
 cratic press of this State followed a speech I had 
 made denouncing Tammany and denouncing the 
 craven leaders who obeyed Tammany. 
 
 "It is astonishing how one honest man may hon- 
 estly misjudge another. 
 
 "My creed does not lead me to dislike the men 
 who run a bank, a factory, a railroad, or a foundry. 
 I do not hate a man for owning a bond and having 
 a bank account, or having cash loaned at interest. 
 " Upon the other hand, I think each should make 
 all the profit in business he fairly can ; but I do be- 
 lieve that the banks should not exercise the sov- 
 ereign power of issuing money, and I do believe 
 that all special privileges granted and all exemp- 
 tion from taxation work infinite harm. I do 
 believe that the wealth of the Republic is practi- 
 cally free from federal taxation, and that the bur- 
 
Our Poorer Brother 31 
 
 dens of government fall upon the shoulders of 
 those least able to bear them. 
 
 "If you could spend an evening with me among 
 my books and amid my family, I feel quite sure 
 you would not again class me with those who make 
 war upon the ' decencies and elegancies of civilized 
 life.' And if you could attend one of my great 
 political meetings in Georgia, and see the good 
 men and good women who believe in Populism, you 
 would not continue to class them with those who 
 vote for candidates upon the 'no undershirt' 
 platform. 
 
 "In other words, if you understood me and mine 
 your judgment of us would be different. 
 
 "The 'cracker' of the South is simply the man 
 who did not buy slaves to do his work. He did it 
 all himself — like a man. Some of our best gen- 
 erals in war and magistrates in peace have come 
 from the 'cracker' class. As a matter of fact, 
 however, my own people, from my father back to 
 Revolutionary times, were slave owners and land 
 owners. In the first meeting held in Georgia to 
 express sympathy with the Boston patriots my 
 great-great-grandfather bore a prominent part, 
 and in the first State legislature ever convened in 
 Georgia one of my ancestors was the representative 
 of his county. 
 
 "My grandfather was wealthy, and so was my 
 father. My boyhood was spent in the idleness of 
 
32 American Ideals 
 
 a rich man's son. It was not till I was in my 
 teens that misfortune overtook us, sent us home- 
 less into the world, and deprived me of the 
 thorough collegiate training my father intended 
 for me. 
 
 "At sixteen years of age I thus had to commence 
 life moneyless, and the weary years I spent among 
 the poor, the kindness I received in their homes, 
 and the acquaintance I made with the hardship of 
 their lives, gave me that profound sympathy for 
 them which I yet retain — though I am no longer 
 poor myself. 
 
 "Pardon the liberty I take in intruding this letter 
 upon you. I have followed your work in New 
 York with admiring sympathy, and have fre- 
 quently written of it in my paper. While hun- 
 dreds of miles separate us, and our tasks and 
 methods have been widely different, I must still 
 believe that we have much in common, and that 
 the ruling force which actuates us both is to 
 challenge wrong and to fight the battles of good 
 government. 
 
 "Very respectfully yours, 
 
 "(Signed) Thos. E. Watson. 
 
 "Thompson, Ga., August 30, 1896." 
 
 I intended to draw a very sharp line between 
 Mr. Watson and many of those associated with 
 him in the same movement; and certain of the 
 
Our Poorer Brother 33 
 
 sentences which he quotes as if they were meant 
 to apply to him were, on the contrary, meant to 
 apply generally to the agitators who proclaimed 
 both him and Mr. Bryan as their champions, and 
 especially to many of the men who were running 
 on the Populist ticket in different States. To 
 Mr. Watson's own sincerity and courage I thought 
 I had paid full tribute, and if I failed in any way 
 I wish to make good that failure. I was in Wash- 
 ington when Mr. Watson was in Congress, and I 
 know how highly he was esteemed personally by 
 his colleagues, even by those differing very widely 
 from him in matters of principle. The staunchest 
 friends of order and decent government fully and 
 cordially recognized Mr. Watson's honesty and 
 good faith — men, for instance, like Senator Lodge, 
 of Massachusetts, and Representative Bellamy 
 Storer, of Ohio. Moreover, I sympathize as little 
 as Mr. Watson with denunciation of the " cracker," 
 and I may mention that one of my forefathers was 
 the first Revolutionary Governor of Georgia at the 
 time that Mr. Watson's ancestor sat in the first 
 Revolutionary legislature of the State. Mr. Wat- 
 son himself embodies not a few of the very attri- 
 butes the lack of which we feel so keenly in many 
 of our public men. He is brave, he is earnest, he 
 is honest, he is disinterested. For many of the 
 wrongs which he wishes to remedy, I, too, believe 
 that a remedy can be found, and for this purpose I 
 
 VOL. II.— 3. 
 
34 American Ideals 
 
 would gladly strike hands with him . All this makes 
 it a matter of the keenest regret that he should 
 advocate certain remedies that we deem even 
 worse than the wrongs complained of, and should 
 strive in darkling ways to correct other wrongs, or 
 rather inequalities and sufferings, which exist, not 
 because of the shortcomings of society, but be- 
 cause of the existence of human nature itself. 
 
 There are plenty of ugly things about wealth and 
 its possessors in the present age, and I suppose 
 there have been in all ages. There are many rich 
 people who so utterly lack patriotism, or show 
 such sordid and selfish traits of character, or lead 
 such mean and vacuous lives, that all right-minded 
 men must look upon them with angry contempt ; 
 but, on the whole, the thrifty are apt to be better 
 citizens than the thriftless ; and the worst capital- 
 ist cannot harm laboring men as they are harmed 
 by demagogues. As the people of a State grow 
 more and more intelligent the State itself may be 
 able to play a larger and larger part in the life of 
 the community, while at the same time individual 
 effort may be given freer and less restricted move- 
 ment along certain lines ; but it is utterly unsafe 
 to give the State more than the minimum of 
 power just so long as it contains masses of men 
 who can be moved by the pleas and denunciations 
 of the average Socialist leader of to-day. There 
 may be better schemes of taxation than those at 
 
Our Poorer Brother 35 
 
 present employed; it may be wise to devise in- 
 heritance taxes, and to impose regulations on the 
 kinds of business which can be carried on only 
 under the especial protection of the State; and 
 where there is a real abuse by wealth it needs to be, 
 and in this country generally has been, promptly 
 done away with ; but the first lesson to teach the 
 poor man is that, as a whole, the wealth in the 
 community is distinctly beneficial to him ; that he 
 is better off in the long run because other men are 
 well off ; and that the surest way to destroy what 
 measure of prosperity he may have is to paralyze 
 industry and the well-being of those men who 
 have achieved success. 
 
 I am not an empiricist ; I would no more deny 
 that sometimes human affairs can be much bet- 
 tered by legislation than I would affirm that they 
 can always be so bettered. I would no more 
 make a fetish of unrestricted individualism than 
 I would admit the power of the State offhand and 
 radically to reconstruct society. It may become 
 necessary to interfere even more than we have 
 done with the right of private contract, and to 
 shackle cunning as we have shackled force. All 
 I insist upon is that we must be sure of our ground 
 before trying to get any legislation at all, and that 
 we must not expect too much from this legislation, 
 nor refuse to better ourselves a little because we 
 cannot accomplish everything at a jump. Above 
 
36 American Ideals 
 
 all, it is criminal to excite anger and discontent 
 without proposing a remedy, or only proposing a 
 false remedy. The worst foe of the poor man is 
 the labor leader, whether philanthropist or poli- 
 tician, who tries to teach him that he is a victim 
 of conspiracy and injustice, when in reality he is 
 merely working out his fate with blood and sweat 
 as the immense majority of men who are worthy 
 of the name always have done and always will 
 have to do. 
 
 The difference between what can and what can- 
 not be done by law is well exemplified by our ex- 
 perience with the negro problem, an experience of 
 which Mr. Watson must have ample practical 
 knowledge. The negroes were formerly held in 
 slavery. This was a wrong which legislation could 
 remedy, and which could not be remedied except 
 by legislation. Accordingly they were set free by 
 law. This having been done, many of their friends 
 believed that in some way, by additional legisla- 
 tion, we could at once put them on an intellectual, 
 social, and business equality with the whites. The 
 effort has failed completely. In large sections of 
 the country the negroes are not treated as they 
 should be treated, and politically, in particular, the 
 frauds upon them have been so gross and shameful 
 as to awaken not merely indignation but bitter 
 wrath ; yet the best friends of the negro admit that 
 his hope lies, not in legislation, but in the constant 
 
Our Poorer Brother 37 
 
 working of those often unseen forces of the na- 
 tional life which are greater than all legislation. 
 
 It is but rarely that great advances in general 
 social well-being can be made by the adoption of 
 some far-reaching scheme, legislative or otherwise ; 
 normally they come only by gradual growth, and 
 by incessant effort to do first one thing, then an- 
 other, and then another. Quack remedies of the 
 universal cure-all type are generally as noxious to 
 the body politic as to the body corporal. 
 
 Often the head-in-the-air social reformers, be- 
 cause people of sane and wholesome minds will not 
 favor their wild schemes, themselves decline to 
 favor schemes for practical reform. For the last 
 two years there has been an honest effort in New 
 York to give the city good government, and to 
 work intelligently for better social conditions, 
 especially in the poorest quarters. We have 
 cleaned the streets ; we have broken the power of 
 the ward boss and the saloon-keeper to work in- 
 justice; we have destroyed the most hideous of 
 the tenement houses in which poor people are 
 huddled like swine in a sty ; we have made parks 
 and playgrounds for the children in the crowded 
 quarters; in every possible way we have striven 
 to make life easier and healthier, and to give man 
 and woman a chance to do their best work; while 
 at the same time we have warred steadily against 
 the pauper-producing, maudlin philanthropy of 
 
38 American Ideals 
 
 the free-soup kitchen and tramp lodging-house 
 kind. In all this we have had practically no help 
 from either the parlor socialists or the scarcely 
 more noxious beer-room socialists who are always 
 howling about the selfishness of the rich and their 
 unwillingness to do anything for those who are 
 less well off. 
 
 There are certain labor unions, certain bodies of 
 organized labor — notably those admirable organi- 
 zations which include the railway conductors, the 
 locomotive engineers, and the firemen — which to 
 my mind embody almost the best hope that there 
 is for healthy national growth in the future ; but 
 bitter experience has taught men who work for 
 reform in New York that the average labor leader, 
 the average demagogue who shouts for a depre- 
 ciated currency, or for the overthrow of the rich, 
 will not do anything to help those who honestly 
 strive to make better our civic conditions. There 
 are immense numbers of workingmen to whom we 
 can appeal with perfect confidence ; but too often 
 we find that a large proportion of the men who 
 style themselves leaders of organized labor are in- 
 fluenced only by sullen, short-sighted hatred of 
 what they do not understand, and are deaf to all 
 appeals, whether to their national or to their civic 
 patriotism. 
 
 What I most grudge in all this is the fact that 
 sincere and zealous men of high character and 
 
Our Poorer Brother 39 
 
 honest purpose, men like Mr. Watson, men and 
 women such as those he describes as attending his 
 Populist meetings, or such as are to be found in all 
 strata of our society, from the employer to the 
 hardest-worked day-laborer, go astray in their 
 methods, and are thereby prevented from doing 
 the full work for good they ought to. When a 
 man goes on the wrong road himself he can do 
 very little to guide others aright, even though 
 these others are also on the wrong road. There 
 are many wrongs to be righted ; there are many 
 measures of relief to be pushed; and it is a pity 
 that when we are fighting what is bad and 
 championing what is good, the men who ought 
 to be our most effective allies should deprive 
 themselves of usefulness by the wrong-headedness 
 of their position. Rich men and pool men both 
 do wrong on occasions, and whenever a specific 
 instance of this can be pointed out all citizens alike 
 should join in punishing the wrong-doer. Hon- 
 esty and right-mindedness should be the tests ; not 
 wealth or poverty. 
 
 In our municipal administration here in New 
 York we have acted with an equal hand toward 
 wrong-doers of high and low degree. The Board 
 of Health condemns the tenement-house property 
 of the rich landowner, whether this landowner be 
 priest or layman, banker or railroad president, 
 lawyer or manager of a real estate business ; and 
 
40 American Ideals 
 
 it pays no heed to the intercession of any politi- 
 cian, whether this politician be Catholic or Protes- 
 tant, Jew or Gentile. At the same time the police 
 department promptly suppresses, not only the 
 criminal, but the rioter. In other words, we do 
 strict justice. We feel we are defrauded of help 
 to which we are entitled when men who ought to 
 assist in any work to better the condition of the 
 people decline to aid us because their brains are 
 turned by dreams only worthy of a European 
 revolutionist. 
 
 Many workingmen look with distrust upon laws 
 which really would help them ; laws for the intelli- 
 gent restriction of immigration, for instance. I 
 have no sympathy with mere dislike of immigrants ; 
 there are classes and even nationalities of them 
 which stand at least on an equality with the citi- 
 zens of native birth, as the last election showed. 
 But in the interest of our workingmen we must 
 in the end keep out laborers who are ignorant, 
 vicious, and with low standards of life and com- 
 fort, just as we have shut out the Chinese. 
 
 Often labor leaders and the like denounce the 
 present conditions of society, and especially of our 
 political life, for shortcomings which they them- 
 selves have been instrumental in causing. In our 
 cities the misgovernment is due, not to the mis- 
 deeds of the rich, but to the low standard of 
 honesty and morality among citizens generally; 
 
Our Poorer Brother 4 1 
 
 and nothing helps the corrupt politician more than 
 substituting either wealth or poverty for honesty 
 as the standard by which to try a candidate. A 
 few months ago a socialistic reformer in New York 
 was denouncing the corruption caused by rich men 
 because a certain judge was suspected of giving in- 
 formation in advance as to a decision in a case in- 
 volving the interests of a great corporation. Now 
 this judge had been elected some years previously 
 mainly because he was supposed to be a repre- 
 sentative of the "poor man"; and the socialistic 
 reformer himself, a year ago, was opposing the 
 election of Mr. Beaman as judge because he was 
 one of the firm of Evarts & Choate, who were 
 friends of various millionaires and were counsel 
 for various corporations. But if Mr. Beaman had 
 been elected judge no human being, rich or poor, 
 would have dared so much as hint at his doing 
 anything improper. 
 
 Something can be done by good laws ; more can 
 be done by honest administration of the laws ; but 
 most of all can be done by frowning resolutely 
 upon the preachers of vague discontent ; and by 
 upholding the true doctrine of self-reliance, self- 
 help, and self-mastery. This doctrine sets forth 
 many things. Among them is the fact that 
 though a man can occasionally be helped when he 
 stumbles, yet that it is useless to try to carry him 
 when he will not or cannot walk ; and worse than 
 
42 American Ideals 
 
 useless to try to bring down the work and reward 
 of the thrifty and intelligent to the level of the 
 capacity of the weak, the shiftless, and the idle. 
 It further shows that the maudlin philanthropist 
 and the maudlin sentimentalist are almost as nox- 
 ious as the demagogue, and that it is even more 
 necessary to temper mercy with justice than jus- 
 tice with mercy. 
 
 The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to 
 rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings. 
 If an American is to amount to anything he must 
 rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he 
 must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting 
 idle to envy the luck of others; he must face life 
 with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and 
 accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place 
 on his fellow-men a responsibility which is not 
 theirs. 
 
 Let me say in conclusion that I do not write 
 in the least from the standpoint of those whose 
 association is purely with what are called the 
 wealthy classes. The men with whom I have 
 worked and associated most closely during the 
 last couple of years here in New York, with whom 
 I have shared what is at least an earnest desire to 
 better social and civic conditions (neither blinking 
 what is evil nor being misled by the apostles of a 
 false remedy), and with whose opinions as to what 
 is right and practical my own in the 'main agree, 
 
Our Poorer Brother 43 
 
 j 
 
 are not capitalists, save as all men who by toil 
 earn, and with prudence save, money are capital- 
 ists. They include reporters on the daily papers, 
 editors of magazines as well as of newspapers, 
 principals in the public schools, young lawyers, 
 young architects, young doctors, young men of 
 business who are struggling to rise in their pro- 
 fession by dint of faithful work, but who give 
 some of their time to doing what they can for the 
 city, and a number of priests and clergymen ; but 
 as it happens the list does not include any man of 
 great wealth, or any of those men whose names are 
 in the public mind identified with great business 
 corporations. Most of them have at one time or 
 another in their lives faced poverty and know 
 what it is ; none of them are more than well-to-do. 
 They include Catholics and Protestants, Jews, and 
 men who would be regarded as heterodox by pro- 
 fessors of most recognized creeds; some of them 
 were born on this side, others are of foreign birth ; 
 but they are all Americans, heart and soul, who 
 fight out for themselves the battles of their own 
 lives, meeting sometimes defeat and sometimes 
 victory. They neither forget that man does owe 
 a duty to his fellows, and should strive to do what 
 he can to increase the well-being of the com- 
 munity; nor yet do they forget that in the long 
 run the only way to help people is to make them 
 help themselves. They are prepared to try any 
 
44 American Ideals 
 
 properly guarded legislative remedy for ills which 
 they believe can be remedied ; but they perceive 
 clearly that it is both foolish and wicked to teach 
 the average man who is not well off that some 
 wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he 
 should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own 
 industry, honesty, and intelligence. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MONROE DOCTRINE 1 
 
 THE Monroe Doctrine should not be consid- 
 ered from any purely academic standpoint, 
 but as a broad, general principle of living 
 policy. It is to be justified not by precedent 
 merely, but by the needs of the nation and the 
 true interests of Western civilization. It, of course, 
 adds strength to our position at this moment to 
 show that the action of the national authorities is 
 warranted by the actions of their predecessors on 
 like occasions in time past, and that the line of 
 policy we are now pursuing is that which has been 
 pursued by all our statesmen of note since the 
 Republic grew sufficiently powerful to make what 
 it said of weight in foreign affairs. But even if in 
 time past we had been as blind to the national 
 honor and welfare as are the men who at the pres- 
 ent day champion the anti- American side of the 
 Venezuelan question, it would now be necessary 
 for statesmen who were both far-sighted and pa- 
 triotic to enunciate the principles for which the 
 Monroe Doctrine stands. In other words, if the 
 
 1 The Bachelor of Arts, March, 1896. 
 45 
 
46 American Ideals 
 
 Monroe Doctrine did not already exist it would be 
 necessary forthwith to create it. 
 
 Let us first of all clear the question at issue by 
 brushing away one or two false objections. Lord 
 Salisbury at first put in emphatic words his refusal 
 in any way to recognize the Monroe Doctrine as 
 part of the law of nations or as binding upon Great 
 Britain. Most British statesmen and publicists 
 followed his lead ; but recently a goodly number 
 have shown an inclination to acquiesce in the views 
 of Lord Salisbury's colleague, Mr. Chamberlain, 
 who announces, with bland indifference to the 
 expressed opinion of his nominal chief, that Eng- 
 land does recognize the existence of the Monroe 
 Doctrine and never thought of ignoring it. Lord 
 Salisbury himself has recently shown symptoms of 
 changing ground and taking this position; while 
 Mr. Balfour has gone still farther in the right direc- 
 tion, and the Liberal leaders farther yet. It is not 
 very important to us how far Lord Salisbury and 
 Mr. Chamberlain may diverge in their views, al- 
 though of course, in the interests of the English- 
 speaking peoples and of peace between England 
 and the United States, we trust that Mr. Chamber- 
 lain's position will be sustained by Great Britain. 
 But the attitude of our own people is important, 
 and it would be amusing, were it not unpleasant, 
 to see that many Americans, whose Americanism 
 is of the timid and flabby type, have been inclined 
 
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The Monroe Doctrine 47 
 
 eagerly to agree with Lord Salisbury. A very able 
 member of the New York bar remarked the other 
 day that he had not yet met the lawyer who agreed 
 with Secretary Olney as to the legal interpretation 
 of the Monroe Doctrine. This remark was chiefly 
 interesting as showing the lawyer's own limita- 
 tions. It would not have been made if he had 
 met the justices of the Supreme Court, for in- 
 stance; but even on the unfounded supposition 
 that his remark was well grounded, it would have 
 had little more significance than if he had said that 
 he had not met a dentist who agreed with Mr. 
 Olney. The Monroe Doctrine is not a question of 
 law at all. It is a question of policy. It is a 
 question to be considered not only by statesmen, 
 but by all good citizens. Lawyers, as lawyers, 
 have absolutely nothing whatever to say about it. 
 To argue that it cannot be recognized as a principle 
 of international law is a mere waste of breath. No- 
 body cares whether it is or is not so recognized, any 
 more than any one cares whether the Declaration 
 of Independence and Washington's farewell ad- 
 dress are so recognized. 
 
 The Monroe Doctrine may be briefly defined as 
 forbidding European encroachment on American 
 soil. It is not desirable to define it so rigidly as to 
 prevent our taking into account the varying de- 
 gress of national interest in varying cases. The 
 United States has not the slightest wish to 
 
4-8 American Ideals 
 
 establish a universal protectorate over other Amer- 
 ican States, or to become responsible for their mis- 
 deeds. If one of them becomes involved in an 
 ordinary quarrel with a European power, such 
 quarrel must be settled between them by any one 
 of the usual methods. But no European State is 
 to be allowed to aggrandize itself on American soil 
 at the expense of any American State. Further- 
 more, no transfer of an American colony from one 
 European State to another is to be permitted, if, in 
 the judgment of the United States, such transfer 
 would be hostile to its own interests. 
 
 John Quincy Adams, who, during the presidency 
 of Monroe, first clearly enunciated the doctrine 
 which bears his chief's name, asserted it as against 
 both Spain and Russia. In the clearest and most 
 emphatic terms he stated that the United States 
 could not acquiesce in the acquisition of new 
 territory within the limits of any independent 
 American State, whether in the Northern or South- 
 ern Hemisphere, by any European power. He 
 took this position against Russia when Russia 
 threatened to take possession of what is now Ore- 
 gon. He took this position as against Spain when, 
 backed by other powers of Continental Europe, 
 she threatened to reconquer certain of the Spanish- 
 American States. 
 
 This is precisely and exactly the position the 
 United States has now taken in reference to Eng- 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 49 
 
 land and Venezuela. It is idle to contend that 
 there is any serious difference in the application 
 of the doctrine to the two sets of questions. An 
 American may, of course, announce his opposition 
 to the Monroe Doctrine, although by so doing he 
 forfeits all title to far-seeing and patriotic devo- 
 tion to the interests of his country. But he can- 
 not argue that the Monroe Doctrine does not apply 
 to the present case, unless he argues that the Mon- 
 roe Doctrine has no existence whatever. In fact, 
 such arguments are, on their face, so absurd that 
 they need no refutation, and can be relegated 
 where they belong — to the realm of the hairsplit- 
 ting schoolmen. They have no concern either for 
 practical politicians or for historians with true 
 historic insight. 
 
 We have asserted the principles which underlie 
 the Monroe Doctrine, not only against Russia and 
 Spain, but also against France, on at least two 
 different occasions. The last and most important 
 was when the French conquered Mexico and made 
 it into an empire. It is not necessary to recall to 
 any one the action of our Government in the 
 matter as soon as the Civil War came to an end. 
 Suffice it to say that, under threat of our inter- 
 position, the French promptly abandoned Maxi- 
 milian, and the latter's empire fell. Long before 
 this, however, and a score of years before the 
 Doctrine was christened by the name Monroe, even 
 
 VOL. II. — 4. 
 
5° American Ideals 
 
 the timid statesmen of the Jeffersonian era em- 
 bodied its principles in their protest against the 
 acquisition of Louisiana by France, from Spain. 
 Spain at that time held all of what is now the Great 
 West. France wished to acquire it. Our states- 
 men at once announced that they would regard as 
 hostile to America the transfer of the territory in 
 question from a weak to a strong European power. 
 Under the American pressure the matter was 
 finally settled by the sale of the territory in ques- 
 tion to the United States. The principle which 
 our statesmen then announced was in kind pre- 
 cisely the same as that upon which we should now 
 act if Germany sought to acquire Cuba from Spain, 
 or St. Thomas from the Danes. In either of these 
 events it is hardly conceivable that the United 
 States would hesitate to interfere, if necessary, by 
 force of arms ; and in so doing the national author- 
 ities would undoubtedly be supported by the 
 immense majority of the American people, and, 
 indeed, by all save the men of abnormal timidity 
 or abnormal political short-sightedness. 
 
 Historically, therefore, the position of our rep- 
 resentatives in the Venezuelan question is com- 
 pletely justified. It cannot be attacked on aca- 
 demic grounds. The propriety of their position is 
 even more easily defensible. 
 
 Primarily, our action is based on national self- 
 interest. In other words, it is patriotic. A cer- 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 5 1 
 
 tain limited number of persons are fond of decry- 
 ing patriotism as a selfish virtue, and strive with 
 all their feeble might to inculcate in its place a 
 kind of milk-and-water cosmopolitanism. These 
 good people are never men of robust character 
 or of imposing personality, and the plea itself is 
 not worth considering. Some reformers may urge 
 that in the ages distant future patriotism, like 
 the habit of monogamous marriage, will become a 
 needless and obsolete virtue ; but just at present 
 the man who loves other countries as much as he 
 does his own is quite as noxious a member of 
 society as the man who loves other women as much 
 as he loves his wife. Love of country is an ele- 
 mental virtue, like love of home, or like honesty or 
 courage. No country will accomplish very much 
 for the world at large unless it elevates itself. The 
 useful member of a community is the man who 
 first and foremost attends to his own rights and 
 his own duties, and who therefore becomes better 
 fitted to do his share in the common duties of all. 
 The useful member of the brotherhood of nations 
 is that nation which is most thoroughly saturated 
 with the national idea, and which realizes most 
 fully its rights as a nation and its duties to its own 
 citizens. This is in no way incompatible with a 
 scrupulous regard for the rights of other nations, 
 or a desire to remedy the wrongs of suffering 
 peoples. 
 
52 American Ideals 
 
 The United States ought not to permit any great 
 military powers, which have no foothold on this 
 continent, to establish such foothold; nor should 
 they permit any aggrandizement of those who al- 
 ready have possessions on the continent. We do 
 not wish to bring ourselves to a position where we 
 shall have to emulate the European system of 
 enormous armies. Every true patriot, every man 
 of statesman-like habit, should look forward to the 
 day when not a single European power will hold a 
 foot of American soil. At present it is not neces- 
 sary to take the position that no European power 
 shall hold American territory ; but it certainly will 
 become necessary, if the timid and selfish "peace 
 at any price" men have their way, and if the 
 United States fails to check at the outset European 
 aggrandizement on this continent. 
 
 Primarily, therefore, it is to the interest of the 
 citizens of the United States to prevent the further 
 colonial growth of European powers in the West- 
 ern Hemisphere. But this is also to the interest of 
 all the people of the Western Hemisphere. At 
 best, the inhabitants of a colony are in a cramped 
 and unnatural state. At the worst, the establish- 
 ment of a colony prevents any healthy popular 
 growth. Some time in the dim future it may be 
 that all the English-speaking peoples will be able 
 to unite in some kind of confederacy. However 
 desirable this would be, it is, under existing con- 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 53 
 
 ditions, only a dream. At present the only hope 
 for a colony that wishes to attain full moral and 
 mental growth is to become an independent State, 
 or part of an independent State. No English 
 colony now stands on a footing of genuine equality 
 with the parent State. As long as the Canadian 
 remains a colonist, he remains in a position which 
 is distinctly inferior to that of his cousins, both in 
 England and in the United States. The English- 
 man at bottom looks down on the Canadian, as he 
 does on any one who admits his inferiority, and 
 quite properly, too. The American, on the other 
 hand, with equal propriety, regards the Canadian 
 with the good-natured condescension always felt 
 by the freeman for the man who is not free. A 
 funny instance of the English attitude toward 
 Canada was shown after Lord Dunraven's inglori- 
 ous fiasco last September, when the Canadian 
 yachtsman, Rose, challenged for the American 
 cup. The English journals repudiated him on the 
 express ground that a Canadian was not an Eng- 
 lishman and not entitled to the privileges of an 
 Englishman. In their comments, many of them 
 showed a dislike for Americans which almost rose 
 to hatred. The feeling they displayed for the 
 Canadians was not one of dislike. It was one of 
 contempt. 
 
 Under the best of circumstances, therefore, a 
 colony is in a false position. But if the colony is 
 
54 American Ideals 
 
 in a region where the colonizing race has to do its 
 work by means of other inferior races the condi- 
 tion is much worse. From the standpoint of the 
 race little or nothing has been gained by the Eng- 
 lish conquest and colonization of Jamaica. Ja- 
 maica has merely been turned into a negro island, 
 with a future, seemingly, much like that of San 
 Domingo. British Guiana, however well admin- 
 istered, is nothing but a colony where a few 
 hundred or few thousand white men hold superior 
 positions, while the bulk of the population is com- 
 posed of Indians, Negroes, and Asiatics. Looked 
 at through the vista of the centuries, such a colony 
 contains less promise of true growth than does a 
 State like Venezuela or Ecuador. The history of 
 most of the South American republics has been 
 both mean and bloody; but there is at least a 
 chance that they may develop, after infinite tribu- 
 lations and suffering, into a civilization quite as 
 high and stable as that of such a European power 
 as Portugal. But there is no such chance for any 
 tropical American colony owned by a Northern 
 European race. It is distinctly in the interest of 
 civilization that the present States in the two 
 Americas should develop along their own lines, and 
 however desirable it is that many of them should 
 receive European immigration, it is highly unde- 
 sirable that any of them should be under European 
 control. 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 55 
 
 So much for the general principles, and the 
 justification, historically and morally, of the Mon- 
 roe Doctrine. Now take the specific case at issue. 
 Great Britain has a boundary dispute with Vene- 
 zuela. She claims as her own a territory which 
 Venezuela asserts to be hers, a territory which in 
 point of size very nearly equals the Kingdom of 
 Italy. Our government, of course, cannot, if it 
 wishes to remain true to the traditions of the Mon- 
 roe Doctrine, submit to the acquisition by England 
 of such an enormous tract of territory, and it must 
 therefore find out whether the English claims are 
 or are not well founded. It would, of course, be 
 preposterous to lay down the rule that no Euro- 
 pean power should seize American territory which 
 was not its own, and yet to permit the power itself 
 to decide the question of the ownership of such 
 territory. Great Britain refused to settle the 
 question either by amicable agreement with Vene- 
 zuela or by arbitration. All that remained for the 
 United States was to do what it actually did ; that 
 is, to try and find the facts out for itself, by its own 
 commission. If the facts show England to be in 
 the right, well and good. If they show England 
 to be in the wrong, we most certainly ought not to 
 permit her to profit, at Venezuela's expense, by her 
 own wrong-doing. 
 
 We are doing exactly what England would very 
 properly do in a like case. Recently, when the 
 
5 6 American Ideals 
 
 German Emperor started to interfere in the Trans- 
 vaal, England promptly declared her own "Mon- 
 roe Doctrine" for South Africa. We do not 
 propose to see English filibusters try at the expense 
 of Venezuela the same policy which recently came 
 to such an ignominious end in the Transvaal, in a 
 piece of weak, would-be buccaneering, which, it is 
 perhaps not unfair to say, was fittingly commemo- 
 rated in the verse of the new poet-laureate. 
 
 It would be difficult to overestimate the good 
 done in this country by the vigorous course already 
 taken by the national executive and legislature in 
 this matter. The lesson taught Lord Salisbury is 
 one which will not soon be forgotten by English 
 statesmen. His position is false, and is recognized 
 as false by the best English statesmen and publi- 
 cists. If he does not consent to arrange the mat- 
 ter with Venezuela, it will have to be arranged 
 in some way by arbitration. In either case, the 
 United States gains its point. The only possible 
 danger of war comes from the action of the selfish 
 and timid men on this side of the water, who 
 clamorously strive to misrepresent American, and 
 to mislead English, public opinion. If they suc- 
 ceed in persuading Lord Salisbury that the Ameri- 
 can people will back down if he presses them, they 
 will do the greatest damage possible to both coun- 
 tries, for they will render war, at some time in the 
 future, almost inevitable. 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 57 
 
 Such a war we would deplore; but it must be 
 distinctly understood that we would deplore it 
 very much more for England's sake than for our 
 own ; for whatever might be the initial fortunes of 
 the struggle, or the temporary damage and loss 
 to the United States, the mere fact that Canada 
 would inevitably be rent from England in the end 
 would make the outcome an English disaster. 
 
 We do not in any way seek to become the 
 sponsor of the South American States. England 
 has the same right to protect her own subjects, or 
 even in exceptional cases to interfere to stop out- 
 rages in South America, that we have to interfere 
 in Armenia — and it is to be regretted that our 
 representatives do not see their way clear to inter- 
 fere for Armenia. But England should not acquire 
 territory at the expense of Venezuela any more 
 than we should acquire it at the expense of Turkey. 
 
 The mention of Armenia brings up a peculiarly 
 hypocritical plea which has been advanced against 
 us in this controversy. It has been solemnly al- 
 leged that our action in Venezuela has hampered 
 England in the East and has prevented her inter- 
 fering on behalf of Armenia. We do not wish to 
 indulge in recriminations, but when such a plea 
 is advanced, the truth, however unpleasant, must 
 be told. The great crime of this century against 
 civilization has been the upholding of the Turk by 
 certain Christian powers. To England's attitude 
 
58 American Ideals 
 
 in the Crimean War, and after the Russo-Turkish 
 War of 1877, the present Armenian horror is pri- 
 marily due. Moreover, for six months before the 
 Venezuelan question arose England had looked on 
 motionless while the Turks perpetrated on then- 
 wretched subjects wrongs that would blast the 
 memory of Attila. 
 
 We do not wish to be misunderstood. We have 
 no feeling against England. On the contrary, we 
 regard her as being well in advance of the great 
 powers of Continental Europe, and we have more 
 sympathy with her. In general, her success tells 
 for the success of civilization, and we wish her 
 well. But where her interests enlist her against 
 the progress of civilization and in favor of the op- 
 pression of other nationalities who are struggling 
 upward, our sympathies are immediately forfeited. 
 
 It is a matter of serious concern to every college 
 man, and, indeed, to every man who believes in the 
 good effects of a liberal education, to see the false 
 views which seem to obtain among so many of the 
 leaders of educated thought, not only upon the 
 Monroe Doctrine, but upon every question which 
 involves the existence of a feeling of robust Ameri- 
 canism. Every educated man who puts himself 
 out of touch with the current of American thought, 
 and who on conspicuous occasions assumes an atti- 
 tude hostile to the interest of America, is doing 
 what he can to weaken the influence of educated 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 59 
 
 men in American life. The crude, ill-conditioned 
 jealousy of education, which is so often and so 
 lamentably shown by large bodies of our people, 
 is immensely stimulated by the action of those 
 prominent educated men in whom education seems 
 to have destroyed the strong, virile virtues, and 
 especially the spirit of Americanism. 
 
 No nation can achieve real greatness if its people 
 are not both essentially moral and essentially 
 manly ; both sets of qualities are necessary. It is 
 an admirable thing to possess refinement and 
 cultivation, but the price is too dear if they must 
 be paid for at the cost of the rugged fighting 
 qualities which make a man able to do a man's 
 work in the world, and which make his heart beat 
 with that kind of love of country which is shown 
 not only in readiness to try to make her civic life 
 better, but also to stand up manfully for her when 
 her honor and influence are at stake in a dispute 
 with a foreign power. A heavy responsibility rests 
 on the educated man. It is a double discredit to 
 him to go wrong, whether his shortcomings take 
 the form of shirking his every-day civic duties, or 
 of abandonment of the nation's rights in a foreign 
 quarrel. He must no more be misled by the 
 sneers of those who always write "patriotism" 
 between inverted commas than by the coarser, but 
 equally dangerous, ridicule of the politicians who 
 jeer at "reform." It is as unmanly to be taunted 
 
60 American Ideals 
 
 by one set of critics into cowardice as it is to be 
 taunted by the other set into dishonesty. 
 
 There are many upright and honorable men 
 who take the wrong side, that is, the anti- American 
 side, of the Monroe Doctrine because they are too 
 short-sighted or too unimaginative to realize the 
 hurt to the nation that would be caused by the 
 adoption of their views. There are other men 
 who take the wrong view simply because they have 
 not thought much of the matter, or are in un- 
 fortunate surroundings, by which they have been 
 influenced to their own moral hurt. There are yet 
 other men in whom the mainspring of the oppo- 
 sition to that branch of American policy known as 
 the Monroe Doctrine is sheer timidity. This is 
 sometimes the ordinary timidity of wealth. Some- 
 times, however, it is peculiarly developed among 
 educated men whose education has tended to 
 make them over-cultivated and over-sensitive to 
 foreign opinion. They are generally men who 
 undervalue the great fighting qualities, without 
 which no nation can ever rise to the first rank. 
 
 The timidity of wealth is proverbial, and it was 
 well illustrated by the attitude taken by too many 
 people of means at the time of the Venezuela 
 trouble. Many of them, including bankers, mer- 
 chants, and railway magnates, criticised the action 
 of the President and the Senate, on the ground 
 that it had caused business disturbance. Such a 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 61 
 
 position is essentially ignoble. When a question 
 of national honor or of national right or wrong is 
 at stake, no question of financial interest should 
 be considered for a moment. Those wealthy men 
 who wish the abandonment of the Monroe Doc- 
 trine because its assertion may damage their busi- 
 ness bring discredit to themselves, and, so far as 
 they are able, discredit to the nation of which they 
 are a part. 
 
 It is an evil thing for any man of education to 
 forget that education should intensify patriotism, 
 and that patriotism must not only be shown by 
 striving to do good to the country from within, 
 but by readiness to uphold its interests and honor, 
 at any cost, when menaced from without. Edu- 
 cated men owe to the community the serious per- 
 formance of this duty. We need not concern our- 
 selves with the emigre educated man, the Ameri- 
 can who deliberately takes up his permanent abode 
 abroad, whether in London or Paris ; he is usually 
 a man of weak character, unfitted to do good work 
 either abroad or at home, who does what he can 
 for his country by relieving it of his presence. 
 But the case is otherwise with the American who 
 stays at home, and tries to teach the youth of his 
 country to disbelieve in the country's rights, as 
 against other countries, and to regard it as the sign 
 of an enlightened spirit to decry the assertion of 
 those rights by force of arms. This man may be 
 
62 American Ideals 
 
 inefficient for good ; but he is capable at times of 
 doing harm, because he tends to make other peo- 
 ple inefficient likewise. In our municipal politics 
 there has long been evident a tendency to gather 
 in one group the people who have no scruples, but 
 who are very efficient, and in another group the 
 amiable people who are not efficient at all. This 
 is but one manifestation of the general and very 
 unwholesome tendency among certain educated 
 people to lose the power of doing efficient work as 
 they acquire refinement. Of course in the long 
 run a really good education will give not only re- 
 finement, but also an increase of power and of 
 capacity for efficient work. But the man who 
 forgets that a real education must include the 
 cultivation of the fighting virtues is sure to mani- 
 fest this tendency to inefficiency. It is exhibited 
 on a national scale by the educated men who take 
 the anti-American side of international questions./ 
 There are exceptions to the rule ; but as a rule the 
 healthy man, resolute to do the rough work of the 
 world, and capable of feeling his veins tingle with 
 pride over the great deeds of the men of his own 
 nation, will naturally take the American side of 
 such a question as the Monroe Doctrine. Simi- 
 larly, the anasmic man of refinement and cultiva- 
 tion, whose intellect has been educated at the 
 expense of his character, and who shrinks from 
 all these struggles through which alone the world 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 63 
 
 moves on to greatness, is inclined to consider any 
 expression of the Monroe Doctrine as truculent 
 and ill advised. 
 
 Of course many strong men who are good citi- 
 zens on ordinary occasions take the latter view 
 simply because they have been misled. The 
 colonial habit of thought dies hard. It is to be 
 wished that those who are cursed with it would, in 
 endeavoring to emulate the ways of the Old World, 
 endeavor to emulate one characteristic which 
 has been shared by every Old- World nation, and 
 which is possessed to a marked degree by England. 
 Every decent Englishman is devoted to his coun- 
 try, first, last, and all the time. An Englishman 
 may or may not dislike America, but he is in- 
 variably for England and against America when 
 any question arises between them ; and I heartily 
 respect him for so being. Let our own people of 
 the partially colonial type copy this peculiarity 
 and it will be much to their credit. 
 
 The finest speech that for many years has been 
 delivered by a college man to other college men 
 was that made last spring by Judge Holmes, him- 
 self a gallant soldier of the Civil War, in that hall 
 which Harvard has erected to commemorate those 
 of her sons who perished when the North strove 
 with the South. It should be graven on the heart 
 of every college man, for it has in it that lift of the 
 soul toward things heroic that makes the eyes bum 
 
64 American Ideals 
 
 and the veins thrill. It must be read in its en- 
 tirety, for no quotation could do justice to its fine 
 scorn of the mere money-maker, its lofty fealty to 
 a noble ideal, and, above all, its splendid love of 
 country and splendid praise of the valor of those 
 who strive on stricken fields that the honor of 
 their nation may be upheld. 
 
 It is strange, indeed, that in a country where 
 words like those of Judge Holmes can be spoken, 
 there should exist men who actually oppose the 
 building of a navy by the United States, nay, even 
 more, actually oppose so much as the strengthen- 
 ing of the coast defences, on the ground that they 
 prefer to have this country too feeble to resent any 
 insult, in order that it may owe its safety to the 
 contemptuous forbearance which it is hoped this 
 feebleness will inspire in foreign powers. No 
 Tammany alderman, no venal legislator, no dema- 
 gogue or corrupt politician, ever strove more 
 effectively than these men are striving to degrade 
 the nation and to make one ashamed of the name 
 of America. When we remember that among 
 them there are college graduates, it is a relief to 
 remember that the leaders on the side of manliness 
 and of love of country are also college graduates. 
 Every believer in scholarship and in a liberal edu- 
 cation, every believer in the robust qualities of 
 heart, mind, and body without which cultivation 
 and refinement are of no avail, must rejoice to 
 
The Monroe Doctrine 65 
 
 think that, in the present crisis, college men have 
 been prominent among the leaders whose far- 
 sighted statesmanship and resolute love of country- 
 have made those of us who are really Americans 
 proud of the nation. Secretary Olney is a gradu- 
 ate of Brown ; Senator Lodge, who took the lead 
 in the Senate on this matter, is a graduate of 
 Harvard ; and no less than three members of the 
 Boundary Commission are graduates of Yale. 
 
 VOL. II.— 5. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 Washington's forgotten maxim 1 
 
 A CENTURY has passed since Washington 
 wrote " To be prepared for war is the most 
 effectual means to promote peace." We 
 pay to this maxim the lip loyalty we so often pay 
 to Washington's words; but it has never sunk 
 deep into our hearts. Indeed of late years many 
 persons have refused it even the poor tribute of lip 
 loyalty, and prate about the iniquity of war as if 
 somehow that was a justification for refusing to 
 take the steps which can alone in the long run pre- 
 vent war or avert the dreadful disasters it brings 
 in its train. The truth of the maxim is so obvious 
 to every man of really far-sighted patriotism that 
 its mere statement seems trite and useless, and it 
 is not over-creditable to either our intelligence or 
 our love of country that there should be, as there 
 is, need to dwell upon and amplify such a truism. 
 In this country there is not the slightest danger 
 of an over-development of warlike spirit, and 
 there never has been any such danger. In all our 
 history there has never been a time when pre- 
 
 1 Address, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, before the 
 Naval War College, June, 1897. 
 
 66 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 67 
 
 paredness for war was any menace to peace. On 
 the contrary, again and again we have owed peace 
 to the fact that we were prepared for war ; and in 
 the only contest which we have had with a Euro- 
 pean power since the Revolution, the War of 181 2, 
 the struggle and all its attendant disasters were 
 due solely to the fact that we were not prepared to 
 face, and were not ready instantly to resent, an 
 attack upon our honor and interest; while the 
 glorious triumphs at sea which redeemed that 
 war were due to the few preparations which we 
 had actually made. We are a great peaceful 
 nation ; a nation of merchants and manufacturers, 
 of farmers and mechanics ; a nation of working- 
 men, who labor incessantly with head or hand. It 
 is idle to talk of such a nation ever being led into 
 a course of wanton aggression or conflict with 
 military powers by the possession of a sufficient 
 navy. 
 
 The danger is of precisely the opposite charac- 
 ter. If we forget that in the last resort we can 
 only secure peace by being ready and willing to 
 fight for it, we may some day have bitter cause to 
 realize that a rich nation which is slothful, timid, 
 or unwieldy is an easy prey for any people which 
 still retains those most valuable of all qualities, the 
 soldierly virtues. We but keep to the traditions 
 of Washington, to the traditions of all the great 
 Americans who struggled for the real greatness of 
 
68 American Ideals 
 
 America, when we strive to build up those fighting 
 qualities for the lack of which in a nation, as in an 
 individual, no refinement, no culture, no wealth, 
 no material prosperity, can atone. 
 
 Preparation for war is the surest guaranty for 
 peace. Arbitration is an excellent thing, but ulti- 
 mately those who wish to see this country at peace 
 with foreign nations will be wise if they place re- 
 liance upon a first-class fleet of first-class battle- 
 ships rather than on any arbitration treaty which 
 the wit of man can devise. Nelson said that the 
 British fleet was the best negotiator in Europe, 
 and there was much truth in the saying. More- 
 over, while we are sincere and earnest in our advo- 
 cacy of peace, we must not forget that an ignoble 
 peace is worse than any war. We should engrave 
 in our legislative halls those splendid lines of 
 Lowell: 
 
 "Come, Peace! not like a mourner bowed 
 For honor lost and dear ones wasted, 
 But proud, to meet a people proud, 
 
 With eyes that tell of triumph tasted!" 
 
 Peace is a goddess only when she comes with 
 sword girt on thigh. The Ship of State can 
 be steered safely only when it is always possible 
 to bring her against any foe with "her leashed 
 thunders gathering for the leap." A really great 
 people, proud and high-spirited, would face all the 
 disasters of war rather than purchase that base 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 69 
 
 prosperity which is bought at the price of national 
 honor. All the great masterful races have been 
 fighting races, and the minute that a race loses the 
 hard fighting virtues, then, no matter what else it 
 may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce 
 and finance, in science or art, it has lost its proud 
 right to stand as the equal of the best. Cowardice 
 in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable 
 sin, and a wilful failure to prepare for danger may 
 in its effects be as bad as cowardice. The timid 
 man who cannot fight, and the selfish, short- 
 sighted, or foolish man who will not take the steps 
 that will enable him to fight, stand on almost the 
 same plane. 
 
 It is not only true that a peace may be so ignoble 
 and degrading as to be worse than any war ; it is 
 also true that it may be fraught with more blood- 
 shed than most wars. Of this there has been 
 melancholy proof during the past two years. 
 Thanks largely to the very unhealthy influence of 
 the men whose business it is to speculate in the 
 money market, and who approach every subject 
 from the financial standpoint, purely; and thanks 
 quite as much to the cold-blooded brutality and 
 calculating timidity of many European rulers and 
 statesmen, the peace of Europe has been preserved 
 while the Turk has been allowed to butcher the 
 Armenians with hideous and unmentionable bar- 
 barity, and has actually been helped to keep Crete 
 
70 American Ideals 
 
 in slavery. War has been averted at the cost of 
 more bloodshed and infinitely more suffering and 
 degradation to wretched women and children than 
 have occurred in any European struggle since the 
 days of Waterloo. No war of recent years, no 
 matter how wanton, has been so productive of 
 horrible misery as the peace which the powers have 
 maintained during the continuance of the Arme- 
 nian butcheries. The men who would preach this 
 peace, and indeed the men who have preached uni- 
 versal peace in terms that have prepared the way 
 for such peace as this, have inflicted a wrong on 
 humanity greater than could be inflicted by the 
 most reckless and war-loving despot. Better a 
 thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to 
 fight than to err on the side of tame submission to 
 injury or cold-blooded indifference to the misery 
 of the oppressed. 
 
 Popular sentiment is just when it selects as 
 popular heroes the men who have led in the strug- 
 gle against malice domestic or foreign levy. No 
 triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme 
 triumphs of war. The courage of the soldier, the 
 courage of the statesman who has to meet storms 
 which can be quelled only by soldierly qualities — 
 this stands higher than any quality called out 
 merely in time of peace. It is by no means neces- 
 sary that we should have war to develop soldierly 
 attributes and soldierly qualities ; but if the peace 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 7 1 
 
 we enjoy is of such a kind that it causes their loss, 
 then it is far too dearly purchased, no matter what 
 may be its attendant benefits. It may be that 
 some time in the dim future of the race the need 
 for war will vanish ; but that time is yet ages dis- 
 tant. As yet no nation can hold its place in the 
 world, or can do any work really worth doing, un- 
 less it stands ready to guard its rights with an 
 armed hand. That orderly liberty which is both 
 the foundation and the capstone of our civilization 
 can be gained and kept only by men who are will- 
 ing to fight for an ideal ; who hold high the love of 
 honor, love of faith, love of flag, and love of 
 country. It is true that no nation can be really 
 great unless it is great in peace; in industry, in- 
 tegrity, honesty. Skilled intelligence in civic af- 
 fairs and industrial enterprises alike ; the special 
 ability of the artist, the man of letters, the man of 
 science, and the man of business ; the rigid deter- 
 mination to wrong no man, and to stand up for 
 righteousness— all these are necessary in a great 
 nation. But it is also necessary that the nation 
 should have physical no less than moral courage ; 
 the capacity to do and dare and die at need, and 
 that grim and steadfast resolution which alone 
 will carry a great people through a great peril. 
 The occasion may come at any instant when 
 
 "'T is man's perdition to be safe 
 When for the truth he ought to die." 
 
7 2 American Ideals 
 
 All great nations have shown these qualities. 
 The Dutch held but a little corner of Europe. 
 Their industry, thrift, and enterprise in the pur- 
 suits of peace and their cultivation of the arts 
 helped to render them great; but these qualities 
 would have been barren had they not been backed 
 by those sterner qualities which rendered them 
 able to wrest their freedom from the cruel strength 
 of Spain, and to guard it against the banded might 
 of England and of France. The merchants and 
 the artists of Holland did much for her ; but even 
 more was done by the famished burghers who 
 fought to the death on the walls of Harlem and 
 Leyden, and the great admirals who led their fleets 
 to victory on the broad and narrow seas. 
 
 England's history is rich in splendid names 
 and splendid deeds. Her literature is even greater 
 than that of Greece. In commerce she has stood 
 in the modern world as more than ever Carthage 
 was when civilization clustered in a fringe around 
 the Mediterranean. But she has risen far higher 
 than ever Greece or Carthage rose, because she 
 possesses also the great, masterful qualities which 
 were possessed by the Romans who overthrew 
 them both. England has been fertile in soldiers 
 and administrators ; in men who triumphed by sea 
 and by land; in adventurers and explorers who 
 won for her the world's waste spaces; and it is 
 because of this that the English-speaking race 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 73 
 
 now shares with the Slav the fate of the coming 
 years. 
 
 We of the United States have passed most of our 
 few years of national life in peace. We honor the 
 architects of our wonderful material prosperity; 
 we appreciate the necessity of thrift, energy, and 
 business enterprise, and we know that even these 
 are of no avail without the civic and social virtues. 
 But we feel, after all, that the men who have dared 
 greatly in war, or the work which is akin to war, 
 are those who deserve best of the country. The 
 men of Bunker Hill and Trenton, Saratoga and 
 Yorktown, the men of New Orleans and Mobile 
 Bay, Gettysburg and Appomattox are those to 
 whom we owe most. None of our heroes of peace 
 save a few great constructive statesmen can rank 
 with our heroes of war. The Americans who 
 stand highest on the list of the world's worthies are 
 Washington, who fought to found the country 
 which he afterward governed, and Lincoln, who 
 saved it through the blood of the best and bravest 
 in the land; Washington, the soldier and states- 
 man, the man of cool head, dauntless heart, and 
 iron will, the greatest of good men and the best of 
 great men ; and Lincoln, sad, patient, kindly Lin- 
 coln, who for four years toiled and suffered for the 
 people, and when his work was done laid down his 
 life that the flag which had been rent in sunder 
 might once more be made whole and without a seam. 
 
74 American Ideals 
 
 It is on men such as these, and not on the advo- 
 cates of peace at any price, or upon those so short- 
 sighted that they refuse to take into account the 
 possibility of war, that we must rely in every crisis 
 which deeply touches the true greatness and true 
 honor of the Republic. The United States has 
 never once in the course of its history suffered 
 harm, because of preparation for war or because of 
 entering into war. But we have suffered incalcul- 
 able harm, again and again, from a foolish failure 
 to prepare for war or from reluctance to fight when 
 to fight was proper. The men who to-day protest 
 against a navy, and protest also against every 
 movement to carry out the traditional policy of 
 the country in foreign affairs, and to uphold the 
 honor of the flag, are themselves but following in 
 the course of those who protested against the ac- 
 quisition of the great West, and who failed to make 
 proper preparations for the War of 181 2, or refused 
 to support it after they had been made. They 
 are own brothers to the men whose short-sighted- 
 ness and supine indifference prevented any reor- 
 ganization of the personnel of the Navy during the 
 middle of the century, so that we entered upon the 
 Civil War with captains seventy years old. They 
 are close kin to the men who, when the Southern 
 States seceded, wished to let the Union be disrupted 
 in peace rather than restored through the grim 
 agony of armed conflict. 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 75 
 
 I do not believe that any considerable number 
 of our citizens are stamped with this timid lack 
 of patriotism. There are some doctrinaires whose 
 eyes are so firmly fixed on the golden vision of uni- 
 versal peace that they cannot see the grim facts of 
 real life until they stumble over them, to their own 
 hurt, and, what is much worse, to the possible un- 
 doing of their fellows. There are some educated 
 men in whom education merely serves to soften 
 the fibre and to eliminate the higher, sterner 
 qualities which tell for national greatness; and 
 these men prate about love for mankind, or for 
 another country, as being in some hidden way a 
 substitute for love of their own country. What is 
 of more weight, there are not a few men of means 
 who have made the till their fatherland, and who 
 are always ready to balance a temporary interrup- 
 tion of money-making, or a temporary financial 
 and commerical disaster, against the self-sacrifice 
 necessary in upholding the honor of the nation and 
 the glory of the flag. 
 
 But after all these people, though often noisy, 
 form but a small minority of the whole. They 
 would be swept like chaff before the gust of popu- 
 lar fury which would surely come if ever the nation 
 really saw and felt a danger or an insult. The real 
 trouble is that in such a case this gust of popular 
 fury would come too late. Unreadiness for war is 
 merely rendered more disastrous by readiness to 
 
76 American Ideals 
 
 bluster ; to talk defiance and advocate a vigorous 
 policy in words, while refusing to back up these 
 words by deeds, is cause for humiliation. It has 
 always been true, and in this age it is more than 
 ever true, that it is too late to prepare for war 
 when the time for peace has passed. The short- 
 sightedness of many people, the good-humored in- 
 difference to facts of others, the sheer ignorance of 
 a vast number, and the selfish reluctance to insure 
 against future danger by present sacrifice among 
 yet others — these are the chief obstacles to build- 
 ing up a proper navy and carrying out a proper 
 foreign policy. 
 
 The men who opposed the War of 181 2, and pre- 
 ferred to have the nation humiliated by unre- 
 sented insult from a foreign power rather than see 
 her suffer the losses of an honorable conflict, occu- 
 pied a position little short of contemptible ; but it 
 was not much worse than that of the men who 
 brought on the war and yet deliberately refused 
 to make the preparations necessary to carry it to a 
 successful conclusion. The visionary schemes for 
 defending the country by gunboats, instead of by 
 a fleet of seagoing battle-ships; the refusal to in- 
 crease the Navy to a proper size ; the determina- 
 tion to place reliance upon militia instead of upon 
 regularly trained troops ; and the disasters which 
 followed upon each and every one of these deter- 
 minations should be studied in every schoolbook 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 77 
 
 in the land so as to enforce in the minds of all our 
 citizens the truth of Washington's adage, that in 
 time of peace it is necessary to prepare for war. 
 
 All this applied in 181 2 ; but it applies with ten- 
 fold greater force now. Then, as now, it was the 
 Navy upon which the country had to depend in the 
 event of war with a foreign power; and then, as 
 now, one of the chief tasks of a wise and far-seeing 
 statesmanship should have been the upbuilding of 
 a formidable fighting navy. In 18 12 untold evils 
 followed the failure to provide such a fighting 
 navy; for the splendid feats of our few cruisers 
 merely showed what could have been done if we 
 had had a great fleet of battle-ships. But ships, 
 guns, and men were much more easily provided 
 in time of emergency at the beginning of this cen- 
 tury than at the end. It takes months to build 
 guns and ships now, where it then took days, or at 
 the most, weeks; and it takes far longer now to 
 train men to the management of the vast and 
 complicated engines with which war is waged. 
 Therefore preparation is much more difficult, and 
 requires a much longer time ; and yet wars are so 
 much quicker, they last so comparatively short a 
 period, and can be begun so instantaneously that 
 there is very much less time than formerly in 
 which to make preparations. 
 
 No battle-ship can be built inside of two years 
 under no matter what stress of circumstances, for 
 
7 8 American Ideals 
 
 we have not in this country the plant to enable 
 us to work faster. Cruisers would take almost 
 as long. Even torpedo boats, the smallest of all, 
 could not be put in first-class form under ninety 
 days. Guns available for use against a hostile in- 
 vader would require two or three months ; and in 
 the case of the larger guns, the only ones really 
 available for the actual shock of battle, could not 
 be made under eight months. Rifles and military 
 munitions of every kind would require a corre- 
 sponding length of time for preparation ; in most 
 cases we should have to build, not merely the 
 weapons we need, but the plant with which to 
 make them in any large quantity. Even if the 
 enemy did not interfere with our efforts, which 
 they undoubtedly would, it would, therefore, take 
 from three to six months after the outbreak of a 
 war, for which we were unprepared, before we 
 could in the slightest degree remedy our unreadi- 
 ness. During this six months it would be impossi- 
 ble to overestimate the damage that could be done 
 by a resolute and powerful antagonist. Even at 
 the end of that time we would only be beginning to 
 prepare to parry his attack, for it would be two 
 years before we could attempt to return it. Since 
 the change in military conditions in modern times 
 there has never been an instance in which a war 
 between any two nations has lasted more than 
 about two years. In most recent wars the opera- 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 79 
 
 tions of the first ninety days have decided the re- 
 sult of the conflict. All that followed has been a 
 mere vain effort to strive against the stars in their 
 courses by doing at the twelfth hour what it was 
 useless to do after the eleventh. 
 
 We must therefore make up our minds once for 
 all to the fact that it is too late to make ready for 
 war when the fight has once begun. The prepara- 
 tion must come before that. In the case of the 
 Civil War none of these conditions applied. In 
 1 86 1 we had a good fleet, and the Southern Con- 
 federacy had not a ship. We were able to block- 
 ade the Southern ports at once, and we could 
 improvise engines of war more than sufficient to 
 put against those of an enemy who also had to 
 improvise them, and who labored under even 
 more serious disadvantages. The Monitor was got 
 ready in the nick of time to meet the Merrimac, 
 because the Confederates had to plan and build 
 the latter while we were planning and building the 
 former ; but if ever we have to go to war with a 
 modern military power we shall find its Merrimacs 
 already built, and it will then be altogether too 
 late to try to build Monitors to meet them. 
 
 If this point needs any emphasis surely the 
 history of the War of 1812 applies to it. For 
 twelve years before that war broke out even the 
 blindest could see that we were almost certain to 
 be drawn into hostilities with one or the other of 
 
8o American Ideals 
 
 the pair of combatants whose battle royal ended 
 at Waterloo. Yet we made not the slightest 
 preparation for war. The authorities at Washing- 
 ton contented themselves with trying to build a 
 flotilla of gunboats which could defend our own 
 harbors without making it necessary to take 
 the offensive ourselves. We already possessed a 
 dozen first-class cruisers, but not a battle-ship of 
 any kind. With almost incredible folly the very 
 Congress that declared war voted down the bill to 
 increase the Navy by twenty battle-ships ; though 
 it was probably too late then, anyhow, for even 
 under the simpler conditions of that day such a 
 fleet could not have been built and put into first- 
 class order in less than a couple of years. Bitterly 
 did the nation pay for its want of foresight and 
 forethought. Our cruisers won a number of strik- 
 ing victories, heartening and giving hope to the 
 nation in the face of disaster; but they were 
 powerless to do material harm to the gigantic 
 naval strength of Great Britain. Efforts were 
 made to increase our little Navy, but in the face 
 of a hostile enemy already possessing command of 
 the seas this was impossible. Two or three small 
 cruisers were built ; but practically almost all the 
 fighting on the ocean was done by the handful of 
 frigates and sloops which we possessed when the 
 war broke out. Not a battle-ship was able to put 
 to sea until after peace was restored. Meanwhile 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim Si 
 
 our coast was blockaded from one end to the other 
 and was harried at will by the hostile squadrons. 
 Our capital city was burned, and the ceaseless 
 pressure of the blockade produced such suffering 
 and irritation as nearly to bring about a civil war 
 among ourselves. If in the first decade of the 
 present century the American people and their 
 rulers had possessed the wisdom to provide an 
 efficient fleet of powerful battle-ships there would 
 probably have been no War of 1812 ; and even if 
 war had come, the immense loss to, and destruc- 
 tion of, trade and commerce by the blockade 
 would have been prevented. Merely from the 
 monetary standpoint the saving would have been 
 incalculable; and yet this would have been the 
 smallest part of the gain. 
 
 It can therefore be taken for granted that there 
 must be adequate preparation for conflict, if con- 
 flict is not to mean disaster. Furthermore, this 
 preparation must take the shape of an efficient 
 fighting navy. We have no foe able to conquer 
 or overrun our territory. Our small army should 
 always be kept in first-class condition, and every 
 attention should be paid to the National Guard; 
 but neither on the north nor the south have we 
 neighbors capable of menacing us with invasion or 
 long resisting a serious effort on our part to invade 
 them. The enemies we may have to face will 
 come from over the sea; they may come from 
 
 VOL. II.— 6. 
 
82 American Ideals 
 
 Europe, or they may come from Asia. Events 
 move fast in the West; but this generation has 
 been forced to see that they move even faster in 
 the oldest East. Our interests are as great in the 
 Pacific as in the Atlantic, in the Hawaiian Islands 
 as in the West Indies. Merely for the protection 
 of our own shores we need a great navy ; and what 
 is more, we need it to protect our interests in the 
 islands from which it is possible to command our 
 shores and to protect our commerce on the high 
 seas. 
 
 In building this navy, we must remember two 
 things: First, that our ships and guns should be 
 the very best of their kind ; and second, that no 
 matter how good they are, they will be useless un- 
 less the man in the conning tower and the man be- 
 hind the guns are also the best of their kind. It is 
 mere folly to send men to perish because they have 
 arms with which they cannot win. With poor 
 ships, were an Admiral Nelson and Farragut rolled 
 in one ; he might be beaten by any first-class fleet ; 
 and he surely would be beaten if his opponents 
 were in any degree his equals in skill and courage ; 
 but without this skill and courage no perfection of 
 material can avail, and with them very grave 
 shortcomings in equipment may be overcome. 
 The men who command our ships must have as 
 perfect weapons ready to their hands as can be 
 found in the civilized world, and they must be 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 83 
 
 trained to the highest point in using them. They 
 must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tac- 
 tics, skill in strategy, for ignorant courage cannot 
 avail ; but without courage neither will skill avail. 
 They must have in them the dogged ability to bear 
 punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the 
 daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks 
 and incur responsibility which have been possessed 
 by the great captains of all ages, and without 
 which no man can ever hope to stand in the front 
 rank of fighting men. 
 
 Tame submission to foreign aggression of any 
 kind is a mean and unworthy thing ; but it is even 
 meaner and more unworthy to bluster first, and 
 then either submit or else refuse to make those 
 preparations which can alone obviate the necessity 
 for submission. I believe with all my heart in the 
 Monroe Doctrine, and, I believe also that the great 
 mass of the American people are loyal to it ; but it 
 is worse than idle to announce our adherence to 
 this doctrine and yet to decline to take measures 
 to show that ours is not mere lip loyalty. We had 
 far better submit- to interference by foreign pow- 
 ers with the affairs of this continent than to an- 
 nounce that we will not tolerate such interference 
 and yet refuse to make ready the means by which 
 alone we can prevent it. In public as in private 
 life, a bold front tends to insure peace and not 
 strife. If we possess a formidable navy, small is 
 
84 American Ideals 
 
 the chance indeed that we shall ever be dragged 
 into a war to uphold the Monroe Doctrine. If we 
 do not possess such a navy, war may be forced 
 on us at any time. 
 
 It is certain, then, that we need a first-class 
 navy. It is equally certain that this should not 
 be merely a navy for defence. Our chief harbors 
 should, of course, be fortified and put in condition 
 to resist the attack of an enemy's fleet ; and one of 
 our prime needs is an ample force of torpedo boats 
 to use primarily for coast defence. But in war 
 the mere defensive never pays, and can never re- 
 sult in anything but disaster. It is not enough 
 to parry a blow. The surest way to prevent its 
 repetition is to return it. No master of the prize 
 ring ever fought his way to supremacy by mere 
 dexterity in avoiding punishment. He had to 
 win by inflicting punishment. If the enemy is 
 given the choice of time and place to attack, 
 sooner or later he will do irreparable damage, and 
 if he is at any point beaten back, why, after all, it 
 is merely a repulse, and there are no means of 
 following it up and making it a rout. We can- 
 not rely upon coast protection alone. Forts and 
 heavy land guns and torpedo boats are indis- 
 pensable, and the last, on occasion, may be used 
 for offensive purposes also. But in the present 
 state of naval and military knowledge we must 
 rely mainly, as all great nations always have relied, 
 
* Washington's Forgotten Maxim 85 
 
 on the battle-ship, the fighting ship of the line. 
 Gunboats and light cruisers serve an excellent pur- 
 pose, and we could not do without them. In 
 time of peace they are the police of the seas ; in 
 time of war they would do some harrying of com- 
 merce, and a great deal of scouting and skirmish- 
 ing ; but our main reliance must be on the great 
 armored battle-ships with their heavy guns and 
 shot-proof vitals. In the last resort we most trust 
 to the ships whose business it is to fight and not to 
 run, and who can themselves go to sea and strike 
 at the enemy when they choose, instead of waiting 
 to peacefully receive his blow when and where he 
 deems it best to deliver it. If in the event of war 
 our fleet of battle-ships can destroy the hostile 
 fleet, then our coasts are safe from the menace of 
 serious attack ; even a fight that ruined our fleet 
 would probably so shatter the hostile fleet as to do 
 away with all chance of invasion ; but if we have 
 no fleet wherewith to meet the enemy on the high 
 seas, or to anticipate his stroke by our own, then 
 every city within reach of the tides must spend 
 men and money in preparation for an attack that 
 may not come, but which would cause crushing 
 and irredeemable disaster if it did come. 
 
 Still more is it necessary to have a fleet of great 
 battle-ships if we intend to live up to the Monroe 
 Doctrine, and to insist upon its observance in the 
 two Americas and the islands on either side of 
 
86 American Ideals 
 
 them. If a foreign power, whether in Europe or 
 Asia, should determine to assert its position in 
 those lands wherein we feel that our influence 
 should be supreme, there is but one way in which 
 we can effectively interfere. Diplomacy is utterly 
 useless where there is no force behind it; the dip- 
 lomat is the servant, not the master, of the soldier. 
 The prosperity of peace, commercial and material 
 prosperity, gives no weight whatever when the 
 clash of arms comes. Even great naked strength 
 is useless if there is no immediate means through 
 which that strength can manifest itself. If we 
 mean to protect the people of the lands who look 
 to us for protection from tyranny and aggression ; 
 if we mean to uphold our interests in the teeth of 
 the formidable Old World powers, we can only do 
 it by being ready at any time, if the provocation 
 is sufficient, to meet them on the seas, where the 
 battle for supremacy must be fought. Unless we 
 are prepared so to meet them, let us abandon all 
 talk of devotion to the Monroe Doctrine or to the 
 honor of the American name. 
 
 This nation cannot stand still if it is to retain its 
 self-respect, and to keep undimmed the honorable 
 traditions inherited from the men who with the 
 sword founded it and by the sword preserved it. 
 We ask that the work of upbuilding the Navy, and 
 of putting the United States where it should be 
 put among maritime powers, go forward without a 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 87 
 
 break. We ask this not in the interest of war, but 
 in the interest of peace. No nation should ever 
 wage war wantonly, but no nation should ever 
 avoid it at the cost of the loss of national honor. A 
 nation should never fight unless forced to ; but it 
 should always be ready to fight. The mere fact 
 that it is ready will generally spare it the necessity 
 of fighting. If this country now had a fleet of 
 twenty battle-ships their existence would make it 
 all the more likely that we should not have war. 
 It is very important that we should, as a race, keep 
 the virile fighting qualities and should be ready to 
 use them at need ; but it is not at all important to 
 use them unless there is need. One of the surest 
 ways to attain these qualities is to keep our Navy 
 in first-class trim. There never is, and never has 
 been, on our part, a desire to use a weapon because 
 of its being well- tempered. There is not the least 
 danger that the possession of a good navy will 
 render this country overbearing toward its neigh- 
 bors. The direct contrary is the truth. 
 
 An unmanly desire to avoid a quarrel is often 
 the surest way to precipitate one ; and utter un- 
 readiness to fight is even surer. If at the time of 
 our trouble with Chili, six years ago, we had not 
 already possessed the nucleus of the new Navy we 
 should almost certainly have been forced into 
 fighting, and even as it was trouble was only 
 averted because of the resolute stand then taken 
 
88 American Ideals 
 
 by the President and by the officers of the Navy 
 who were on the spot. If at that time the Chilians 
 had been able to get ready the battle -ship which 
 was building for them, a war would almost cer- 
 tainly have followed, for we had no battle-ship to 
 put against it. 
 
 If in the future we have war, it will almost 
 certainly come because of some action, or lack of 
 action, on our part in the way of refusing to accept 
 responsibilities at the proper time, or failing to 
 prepare for war when war does not threaten. An 
 ignoble peace is even worse than an unsuccessful 
 war ; but an unsuccessful war would leave behind 
 it a legacy of bitter memories which would hurt 
 our national development for a generation to 
 come. It is true that no nation could actually 
 conquer us, owing to our isolated position ; but we 
 would be seriously harmed, even materially, by 
 disasters that stopped far short of conquest ; and 
 in these matters, which are far more important 
 than things material, we could readily be damaged 
 beyond repair. No material loss can begin to 
 compensate for the loss of national self-respect. 
 The damage to our commerical interests by the 
 destruction of one of our coast cities would be as 
 nothing compared to the humiliation which would 
 be felt by every American worthy of the name if 
 we had to submit to such an injury without amply 
 avenging it. It has been finely said that "a 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 89 
 
 gentleman is one who is willing to lay down his life 
 for little things"; that is for those things which 
 seem little to the man who cares only whether 
 shares rise or fall in value, and to the timid doc- 
 trinaire who preaches timid peace from his clois- 
 tered study. 
 
 Much of that which is best and highest in na- 
 tional character is made up of glorious memories 
 and traditions. The fight well fought, the life 
 honorably lived, the death bravely met — those 
 count for more in building a high and fine type 
 of temper in a nation than any possible success in 
 the stock market, than any possible prosperity in 
 commerce or manufactures. A rich banker may 
 be a valuable and useful citizen, but not a thou- 
 sand rich bankers can leave to the country such a 
 heritage as Farragut left, when, lashed in the rig- 
 ging of the Hartford, he forged past the forts and 
 over the unseen death below, to try his wooden 
 stem against the ironclad hull of the great Con- 
 federate ram. The people of some given section 
 of our country may be better off because a shrewd 
 and wealthy man has built up therein a great 
 manufacturing business, or has extended a line of 
 railroad past its doors; but the whole nation is 
 better, the whole nation is braver, because Cushing 
 pushed his little torpedo boat through the darkness 
 to sink beside the sinking Albemarle. 
 
 Every feat of heroism makes us forever indebted 
 
90 American Ideals 
 
 to the man who performed it. All daring and 
 courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, all de- 
 votion to the ideal of honor and the glory of the 
 flag, make for a finer and nobler type of manhood. 
 It is not only those who do and dare and endure 
 that are benefited; but also the countless thou- 
 sands who are not themselves called upon to face 
 the peril, to show the strength, or to win the re- 
 ward. All of us lift our heads higher because those 
 of our countrymen whose trade it is to meet danger 
 have met it well and bravely. All of us are poorer 
 for every base or ignoble deed done by an Ameri- 
 can, for every instance of selfishness or weakness or 
 folly on the part of the people as a whole. We are 
 all worse off when any of us fails at any point in his 
 duty toward the State in time of peace, or his duty 
 toward the State in time of war. If ever we had 
 to meet defeat at the hands of a foreign foe, or had 
 to submit tamely to wrong or insult, every man 
 among us worthy of the name of American, would 
 feel dishonored and debased. On the other hand, 
 the memory of every triumph won by Americans, 
 by just so much helps to make each American 
 nobler and better. Every man among us is more 
 fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of 
 citizenship because of the perils over which, in 
 the past, the nation has triumphed ; because of the 
 blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the 
 anguish, through which, in the days that have 
 
Washington's Forgotten Maxim 91 
 
 gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph. There 
 are higher things in this life than the soft and easy 
 enjoyment of material comfort. It is through 
 strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation 
 must win greatness. We ask for a great navy, 
 partly because we think that the possession of such 
 a navy is the surest guaranty of peace, and partly 
 because we feel that no national life is worth hav- 
 ing if the nation is not willing, when the need shall 
 arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitra- 
 ment of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, 
 and its tears like water, rather than submit to the 
 loss of honor and renown. 
 
 In closing, let me repeat that we ask for a great 
 navy, we ask for an armament fit for the nation's 
 needs, not primarily to fight, but to avert fighting. 
 Preparedness deters the foe, and maintains right 
 by the show of ready might without the use of 
 violence. Peace, like freedom, is not a gift that 
 tarries long in the hands of cowards, or of those too 
 feeble or too short-sighted to deserve it ; and we 
 ask to be given the means to insure that honorable 
 peace which alone is worth having. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER x 
 
 IN National Life and Character; a Forecast, Mr. 
 Charles H. Pearson, late fellow of Oriel College, 
 Oxford, and sometime Minister of Education 
 in Victoria, has produced one of the most notable 
 books of the end of the century. Mr. Pearson is 
 not always quite so careful as he might be about 
 his facts ; many of the conclusions he draws from 
 them seem somewhat strained ; and with much of 
 his forecast most of us would radically disagree. 
 Nevertheless, no one can read this book without 
 feeling his thinking powers greatly stimulated; 
 without being forced to ponder problems of which 
 he was previously wholly ignorant, or which he but 
 half understood ; and without realizing that he is 
 dealing with the work of a man of lofty thought 
 and of deep and philosophic insight into the world- 
 forces of the present. 
 
 Mr. Pearson belongs to the melancholy or pessi- 
 mist school, which has become so prominent in 
 England during the last two or three decades, and 
 which has been represented there for half a cen- 
 tury. In fact, the note of despondency seems to 
 
 1 The Sewanee Review, August, 1894. 
 92 
 
National Life and Character 93 
 
 be the dominant note among Englishmen of high 
 cultivation at the present time. It is as marked 
 among their statesmen and publicists as among 
 their men of letters, Mr. Balfour being particularly- 
 happy in his capacity to express in good English, 
 and with much genuine elevation of thought, a 
 profound disbelief in nineteenth century progress, 
 and an equally profound distrust of the future to- 
 ward which we are all travelling. 
 
 For much of this pessimism and for many of 
 the prophecies which it evokes, there is no excuse 
 whatsoever. There may possibly be good foun- 
 dation for the pessimism as to the future shown 
 by men like Mr. Pearson ; but hitherto the writers 
 of the stamp of the late "Cassandra" Greg, who 
 have been pessimistic about the present, have 
 merely betrayed their own weakness or their 
 own incapacity to judge contemporary persons 
 and events. The weakling, the man who cannot 
 struggle with his fellow-men and with the condi- 
 tions that surround him, is very apt to think these 
 men and these conditions bad ; and if he has the 
 gift of writing, he puts these thoughts down at 
 some length on paper. Very strong men, more- 
 over, if of morose and dyspeptic temper, are apt 
 to rail at the present, and to praise the past simply 
 because they do not live in it. To any man who 
 will consider the subject from a scientific point of 
 view, with a desire to get at the truth, it is needless 
 
94 American Ideals 
 
 to insist on the fact that at no period of the 
 world's history has there been so much happiness 
 so generally diffused among mankind as now. 
 
 At no period of the world's history has life been 
 so full of interest and of possibilities of excitement 
 and enjoyment as for us who live in the latter half 
 of the nineteenth century. This is not only true 
 as far as the working classes are concerned, but it 
 is especially true as regards the men of means, and 
 above all of those men of means who also possess 
 brains and ambition. Never before in the world's 
 history have there been such opportunities thrown 
 open to men, in the way of building new common- 
 wealths, exploring new countries, conquering king- 
 doms, and trying to adopt the governmental policy 
 of old nations to new and strange conditions. The 
 half -century which is now closing, has held out to 
 the people who have dwelt therein, some of the 
 great prizes of history. Abraham Lincoln and 
 Prince Bismarck have taken their places among 
 the world's worthies. Mighty masters of war have 
 arisen in America, in Germany, in Russia ; Lee and 
 Grant, Jackson and Farragut, Moltke, Skobeleff, 
 and the Red Prince. The work of the chiefs of 
 mechanical and electrical invention has never been 
 equalled before, save perhaps by what was done in 
 the first half of this same century. Never before 
 have there been so many opportunities for com- 
 monwealth builders ; new States have been pitched 
 
National Life and Character 95 
 
 on the banks of the Saskatchewan , the Columbia, 
 the Missouri, and the Colorado, on the seacoast of 
 Australia, and in the interior of Central Africa. 
 Vast regions have been won by the sword. Bur- 
 mah and Turkestan, Egypt and Matabeleland, 
 have rewarded the prowess of English and Russian 
 conquerors, exactly as, when the glory of Rome 
 was at its height, remote Mediterranean provinces 
 furnished triumphs to the great military leaders of 
 the Eternal City. English administrators govern 
 subject empires larger than those conquered by 
 Alexander. In letters no name has been produced 
 that will stand with the first half-dozen of all lit- 
 erature, but there have been very many borne by 
 men whose effect upon the literatures of their own 
 countries has been profound, and whose works will 
 last as long as the works of any men written in the 
 same tongues. In science even more has been 
 done; Darwin has fairly revolutionized thought; 
 and many others will stand but a step below him. 
 All this means only that the opportunities have 
 been exceptionally great for the men of exception- 
 ally great powers ; but they have also been great 
 for the men of ordinary powers. The workingman 
 is, on the whole, better fed, better clothed, better 
 housed, and provided with greater opportunities 
 for pleasure and for mental and spiritual improve- 
 ment than ever before. The man with ability 
 enough to become a lawmaker has the fearful joy 
 
96 American Ideals 
 
 of grappling with problems as important as any 
 the administrators and legislators of the past had 
 to face. The ordinary man of adventurous tastes 
 and a desire to get all out of life that can be gotten, 
 is beyond measure better off than were his fore- 
 fathers of one, two, or three centuries back. He 
 can travel round the world ; he can dwell in any 
 country he wishes ; he can explore strange regions ; 
 he can spend years by himself in the wilderness, 
 hunting great game ; he can take part in a cam- 
 paign here and there. Whithersoever his tastes 
 lead him, he finds that he has far greater capacity 
 conferred upon him by the conditions of nine- 
 teenth-century civilization to do something of note 
 than ever a man of his kind had before. If he is 
 observant, he notes all around him the play of 
 vaster forces than have ever before been exerted, 
 working, half blindly, half under control, to bring 
 about immeasurable results. He sees going on 
 before his eyes a great transfer of population and 
 civilization, which is making America north of the 
 Rio Grande, and Australia, English-speaking con- 
 tinents; which has filled Central and South 
 America with States of uncertain possibilities; 
 which is creating for the first time a huge Aryan 
 nation across the entire north of Asia, and which 
 is working changes in Africa infinitely surpassing 
 in importance all those that have ever taken place 
 there since the days when the Bantu peoples first 
 
National Life and Character 97 
 
 built their beehive huts on the banks of the Congo 
 and the Zambezi. Our century has teemed with 
 life and interest. 
 
 Yet this is the very century at which Carlyle 
 railed; and it is strange to think that he could 
 speak of the men at that very moment engaged in 
 doing such deeds, as belonging to a worn-out age. 
 His vision was clear to see the importance and the 
 true bearing of England's civil war of the seven- 
 teenth century, and yet he remained mole-blind to 
 the vaster and more important civil war waged be- 
 fore his very eyes in nineteenth-century America. 
 The heroism of Naseby and Worcester and Minden 
 hid from him the heroism of Balaklava and Inker- 
 man, of Lucknow and Delhi. He could appreciate 
 at their worth the campaigns of the Seven Years' 
 War, and yet could hardly understand those waged 
 between the armies of the Potomac and of North- 
 ern Virginia. He was fairly inspired by the fury 
 and agony and terror of the struggle at Kunners- 
 dorf ; and yet could not appreciate the immensely 
 greater importance of the death-wrestle that reeled 
 round Gettysburg. His eyes were so dazzled by 
 the great dramas of the past that he could not see 
 the even greater drama of the present. It is but 
 the bare truth to say that never have the rewards 
 been greater, never has there been more chance for 
 doing work of great and lasting value, than this 
 last half of the nineteenth century has offered alike 
 
 VOL. II. — 7. 
 
98 American Ideals 
 
 to statesman and soldier, to explorer and common- 
 wealth-builder, to the captain of industry, to the 
 man of letters, and to the man of science. Never 
 has life been more interesting to each to take part 
 in. Never has there been a greater output of good 
 work done both by the few and by the many. • 
 
 Nevertheless, signs do not fail that we are on the 
 eve of great changes, and that in the next century 
 we shall see the conditions of our lives, national 
 and individual, modified after a sweeping and 
 radical fashion. Many of the forces that make for 
 national greatness and for individual happiness in 
 the nineteenth century, will be absent entirely, or 
 will act with greatly diminished strength, in the 
 twentieth. Many of the forces that now make for 
 evil will by that time have gained greatly in vol- 
 ume and power. It is foolish to look at the future 
 with blind and careless optimism ; quite as foolish 
 as to gaze at it only through the dun-colored mists 
 that surround the preachers of pessimism. It is 
 always best to look facts squarely in the face, 
 without blinking them, and to remember that, as 
 has been well said, in the long run even the most 
 uncomfortable truth is a safer companion than the 
 pleasantest falsehood. 
 
 Whether the future holds good or evil for us does 
 not, it is true, alter our duty in the present. We 
 must stand up valiantly in the fight for righteous- 
 ness and wisdom as we see them, and must let the 
 
National Life and Character 99 
 
 event turn out as it may. Nevertheless, even 
 though there is little use in pondering over the 
 future, most men of intelligence do ponder over it 
 at times, and if we think of it at all, it is well to 
 think clearly. 
 
 Mr. Pearson writes a forecast of what he believes 
 probably will, or at least very possibly may, hap- 
 pen in the development of national life and charac- 
 ter during the era upon which we are now entering. 
 He is a man who has had exceptional advantages 
 for his work; he has studied deeply and travelled 
 widely ; he has been a diligent reader of books and 
 a keen observer of men. To a careful training in 
 one of the oldest of the world's universities he has 
 added long experience as an executive officer in 
 one of the world's youngest commonwealths. He 
 writes with power and charm. His book is inter- 
 esting in manner, and is still more interesting in 
 matter, for he has thought deeply and faithfully 
 over subjects of immense importance to the future 
 of all the human race. He possesses a mind of 
 marked originality. Moreover, he always faith- 
 fully tries to see facts as they actually are. He is, 
 it seems to me, unduly pessimistic ; but he is not 
 pessimistic of set purpose, nor does he adopt pes- 
 simism as a cult. He tries hard, and often suc- 
 cessfully, to make himself see and to make himself 
 state forces that are working for good. We may 
 or may not differ from him, but it behooves us, if 
 
ioo American Ideals 
 
 we do, to state our positions guardedly ; for we are 
 dealing with a man who has displayed much re- 
 search in getting at his facts and much honesty in 
 arriving at his rather melancholy conclusions. 
 
 The introduction to Mr. Pearson's book is as 
 readable as the chapters that follow, and may best 
 be considered in connection with the first of these 
 chapters, which is entitled "The Unchangeable 
 Limits of the Higher Races." I am almost 
 tempted to call this the most interesting of the 
 six chapters of the book, and yet one can hardly 
 do so when absorbed in reading any one of the 
 other five. Mr. Pearson sees what ought to be 
 evident to every one, but apparently is not, that 
 what he calls the " higher races," that is, the races 
 that for the last twenty-five hundred years (but, it 
 must be remembered, only during the last twenty- 
 five hundred years) have led the world, can prosper 
 only under conditions of soil and climate analogous 
 to those obtaining in their old European homes. 
 Speaking roughly, this means that they can 
 prosper only in the temperate zones, north and 
 south. 
 
 Four hundred years ago the temperate zones 
 were very thinly peopled indeed, while the tropical 
 and sub-tropical regions were already densely 
 populated. The great feature in the world's his- 
 tory for the last four centuries has been the peo- 
 pling of these vast, scantily inhabited regions by 
 
National Life and Character 101 
 
 men of the European stocks; notably by men 
 speaking English, but also by men speaking Rus- 
 sian and Spanish. During the same centuries 
 these European peoples have for the first time 
 acquired an enormous ascendancy over all other 
 races. Once before, during the days of the Greco- 
 Macedonian and Roman supremacy, European 
 peoples possessed a somewhat similar supremacy ; 
 but it was not nearly as great, for at that period 
 America and Australia were unknown, Africa 
 south of the Sahara was absolutely unaffected by 
 either Roman or Greek, and all but an insignificant 
 portion of Asia was not only without the pale of 
 European influence, but held within itself im- 
 mense powers of menace to Europe, and contained 
 old and peculiar civilizations, still flourishing in 
 their prime. All this has now been changed. 
 Great English-speaking nations have sprung up in 
 America north of the Rio Grande, and are springing 
 up in Australia. The Russians, by a movement 
 which has not yet fired the popular imagina- 
 tion, but which all thinking men recognize as of 
 incalculable importance, are building a vast State 
 in northern Asia, stretching from the Yellow Sea 
 to the Ural Mountains. Tropical America is par- 
 celled out among States partly of European blood, 
 and mainly European in thought, speech, and re- 
 ligion ; while tropical Asia and Africa have been 
 divided among European powers, and are held in 
 
io2 American Ideals 
 
 more or less complete subjection by their military 
 and civil agents. It is no wonder that men who 
 are content to look at things superficially, and who 
 think that the tendencies that have triumphed 
 during the last two centuries are as immutable in 
 their workings as great natural laws, should speak 
 as if it were a mere question of time when the 
 civilized peoples should overrun and occupy the 
 entire world, exactly as they now do Europe and 
 North America. 
 
 Mr. Pearson points out with great clearness the 
 groundlessness of this belief. He deserves especial 
 praise for discriminating between the importance 
 of ethnic, and of merely political, conquests. The 
 conquest by one country of another populous 
 country always attracts great attention at the 
 time, and has wide momentary effects; but it is 
 of insignificant importance when compared with 
 the kind of armed settlement which causes new 
 nations of an old stock to spring up in new coun- 
 tries. The campaigns carried on by the lieutenants 
 of Justinian against Goth and Vandal, Bulgar- 
 ian and Persian, seemed in the eyes of civilized 
 Europe at that time of incalculably greater mo- 
 ment than the squalid warfare being waged in 
 England between the descendants of Low Dutch 
 sea-thieves and the aboriginal British. Yet, in 
 reality, it was of hardly any consequence in history 
 whether Belisarius did or did not succeed in over- 
 
National Life and Character 103 
 
 throwing the Ostrogoth merely to make room for 
 the Lombard, or whether the Vandal did or did not 
 succumb to the Roman instead of succumbing to 
 the Saracen a couple of centuries later; while it 
 was of the most vital consequence to the whole 
 future of the world that the English should sup- 
 plant the Welsh as masters of Britain. 
 
 Again, in our own day, the histories written of 
 Great Britain during the last century teem with 
 her dealings with India, while Australia plays a 
 very insignificant part indeed ; yet, from the 
 standpoint of the ages, the peopling of the great 
 island-continent with men of the English stock is 
 a thousand-fold more important than the holding 
 Hindoostan for a few centuries. 
 
 Mr. Pearson understands and brings out clearly 
 that in the long run a conquest must fail when it 
 means merely the erection of an insignificant gov- 
 erning caste. He shows clearly that the men of 
 our stock do not prosper in tropical countries. In 
 the New World they leave a thin strain of their 
 blood among and impose their laws, language, and 
 forms of government on the aboriginal races, 
 which then develop on new and dimly drawn lines. 
 In the Old World they fail to do even this. In 
 Asia they may leave a few tens of thousands or 
 possibly hundreds of thousands of Eurasians to 
 form an additional caste in a caste-ridden com- 
 munity. In tropical Africa they may leave here 
 
104 American Ideals 
 
 and there a mulatto tribe like the Griquas. But it 
 certainly has not yet been proved that the Euro- 
 pean can live and propagate permanently in the 
 hot regions of India and Africa, and Mr. Pearson is 
 right in anticipating for the whites who have con- 
 quered these tropical and sub-tropical regions of 
 the Old World, the same fate which befell the 
 Greek kingdoms in Bactria and the Chersonese. 
 The Greek rulers of Bactria were ultimately ab- 
 sorbed and vanished, as probably the English rul- 
 ers of India will some day in the future — for the 
 good of mankind, we sincerely hope and believe 
 the very remote future — themselves be absorbed 
 and vanish. In Africa south of the Zambezi (and 
 possibly here and there on high plateaus north of 
 it,) there may remain white States, although even 
 these States will surely contain a large colored 
 population, always threatening to swamp the 
 whites ; but in tropical Africa generally, it does not 
 seem possible that any white State can ever be 
 built up. Doubtless for many centuries European 
 adventurers and Arab raiders will rule over huge 
 territories in the country south of the Soudan and 
 north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and the whole 
 structure, not only social, but physical, of the 
 negro and the negroid peoples will be profoundly 
 changed by their influence and by the influence 
 of the half-caste descendants of these European 
 and Asiatic soldiers of fortune and industry. But 
 
National Life and Character 105 
 
 it is hardly possible to conceive that the peoples 
 of Africa, however ultimately changed, will be any- 
 thing but negroid in type of body and mind. It is 
 probable that the change will be in the direction of 
 turning them into tribes like those of the Soudan, 
 with a similar religion and morality. It is almost 
 impossible that they will not in the end succeed in 
 throwing off the yoke of the European outsiders, 
 though this end may be, and we hope will be, 
 many centuries distant. In America, most of the 
 West Indies are becoming negro islands. The 
 Spaniard, however, because of the ease with which 
 he drops to a lower ethnic level, exerts a much 
 more permanent influence than the Englishman 
 upon tropic aboriginal races; and the tropical 
 lands which the Spaniards and Portuguese once 
 held, now contain, and always will contain, races 
 which, though different from the Aryan of the 
 temperate zone, yet bridge the gulf between him 
 and the black, red, and yellow peoples who have 
 dwelt from time immemorial on both sides of the 
 equator. 
 
 Taking all this into consideration, therefore, it is 
 most likely that a portion of Mr. Pearson's fore- 
 cast, as regards the people of the tropic zones, will 
 be justified by events. It is impossible for the 
 dominant races of the temperate zones ever bodily 
 to displace the peoples of the tropics. It is highly 
 probable that these people will cast off the yoke 
 
106 American Ideals 
 
 of their European conquerors sooner or later, and 
 will become independent nations once more; 
 though it is also possible that the modern condi- 
 tions of easy travel may permit the permanent rule 
 in the tropics of a vigorous northern race, renewed 
 by a complete change every generation. 
 
 Mr. Pearson's further proposition is that these 
 black, red, and yellow nations, when thus freed, 
 will threaten the dominance of the higher peo- 
 ples, possibly by military, certainly by industrial, 
 rivalry, and that the mere knowledge of the 
 equality of these stocks will cow and dispirit the 
 higher races. 
 
 This part of his argument is open to very seri- 
 ous objections. In the first place, Mr. Pearson 
 entirely fails to take into account the difference 
 in character among the nationalities produced in 
 the tropics as the result of European conquest. 
 In Asia, doubtless, the old races now submerged 
 by European predominance will reappear, pro- 
 foundly changed in themselves, and in their rela- 
 tions to one another, but as un-European as ever, 
 and not appreciably affected by any intermixture 
 of European blood. In Africa, the native States 
 will probably range somewhere between the Portu- 
 guese half-caste and quarter-caste communities 
 now existing on certain of the tropic coasts, and 
 pastoral or agricultural communities, with a Mo- 
 hammedan religious cult and Asiatic type of gov- 
 
National Life and Character 107 
 
 ernment, produced by the infusion of a conquering 
 Semitic or hamitic caste on a conquered negro peo- 
 ple. There may be. a dominant caste of European 
 blood in some of these States, but that is all. In 
 tropical America, the change has already taken 
 place. The States that there exist will not ma- 
 terially alter their form. It is possible that here 
 and there populations of Chinese, pure or half- 
 caste, or even coolies, may spring up ; but, taken 
 as a whole, these States will be in the future what 
 they are now, that is, they will be by blood partly 
 white, but chiefly Indian or negro, with their lan- 
 guage, law, religion, literature, and governmental 
 system approaching those of Europe and North 
 America. 
 
 Suppose that what Mr. Pearson foresees comes 
 to pass, and that the black and yellow races of 
 the world attain the same independence already 
 achieved by the mongrel reddish race. Mr. Pear- 
 son thinks that this will expose us to two dangers. 
 The first is that of actual physical distress caused 
 by the competition of the teeming myriads of the 
 tropics, or perhaps by their invasion of the tem- 
 perate zones. Mr. Pearson himself does not feel 
 any very great anxiety about this invasion assum- 
 ing a military type, and I think that even the fear 
 he does express is unwarranted by the facts. He 
 is immensely impressed by the teeming population 
 of China. He thinks that the Chinese will some 
 
108 American Ideals 
 
 day constitute the dominant portion of the popu- 
 lation, both politically and numerically, in the 
 East Indias, New Guinea, and farther India. In 
 this he is probably quite right ; but such a change 
 would merely mean the destruction or submersion 
 of Malay, Dyak, and Papuan, and would be of 
 hardly any real consequence to the white man. 
 He further thinks that the Chinese may jeopardize 
 Russia in Asia. Here I am inclined to think he is 
 wrong. As far as it is possible to judge in the 
 absence of statistics, the Chinaman at present is 
 not increasing relatively as fast as the Slav and 
 the Anglo-Saxon. Half a century or so more will 
 put both of them within measurable distance 
 of equality with him, even in point of numbers. 
 The movement of population in China is toward 
 the south, not the north ; the menace is real for the 
 English and French protectorates in the south ; in 
 the north the difficulty hitherto has been to keep 
 Russian settlers from crossing the Chinese frontier. 
 When the great Trans-Siberian railroad is built, 
 and when a few millions more of Russian settlers 
 stretch from the Volga to the valley of the Amoor, 
 the danger of a military advance by the Chinese 
 against Asiatic Russia will be entirely over, even 
 granting that it now exists. The Chinaman never 
 has been, and probably never will be, such a 
 fighter as Turk or Tartar, and he would have to 
 possess an absolutely overwhelming superiority of 
 
National Life and Character 109 
 
 numbers to give him a chance in a war of aggres- 
 sion against a powerful military race. As yet, he 
 has made no advance whatever towards develop- 
 ing an army capable of offensive work against 
 European foes. In China there are no roads ; the 
 military profession is looked down on; Chinese 
 troops would be formidable only under a European 
 leader, and a European leader would be employed 
 only from dire necessity; that is to repel, not to 
 undertake, an invasion. Moreover, China is merely 
 an aggregate of provinces with a central knot at 
 Pekin ; and Pekin could be taken at any time by a 
 small trained army. China will not menace Si- 
 beria until after undergoing some stupendous and 
 undreamed-of internal revolution. It is scarcely 
 within the bounds of possibility to conceive of the 
 Chinaman expelling the European settler from 
 lands in which that settler represents the bulk of 
 a fairly thick population, not merely a small in- 
 trusive caste. It is, of course, always possible 
 that in the far-distant future (though there is no 
 sign of it now) China may travel on the path of 
 Japan, may change her policy, may develop fleets 
 and armies; but if she does do this, there is no 
 reason why this fact should stunt and dwarf the 
 people of the higher races . In E lizabeth ' s day the 
 Turkish fleets and armies stood towards those of 
 European powers in a far higher position than 
 those of China, or of the tropics generally, can 
 
no American Ideals 
 
 ever hope to stand in relation to the peoples of the 
 temperate zones ; and yet this did not hinder the 
 Elizabethan age from being one of great note both 
 in the field of thought and in the field of action. 
 
 The anticipation of what might happen if India 
 became solidified seems even more ill-founded. 
 Here Mr. Pearson's position is that the very con- 
 tinuance of European rule, doing away with war 
 and famine, produces an increase of population 
 and a solidity of the country, which will enable the 
 people to overthrow that European rule. He as- 
 sumes that the solidified and populous country 
 will continue to remain such after the overthrow 
 of the Europeans, and will be capable of deeds of 
 aggression ; but, of course, such an assumption is 
 contrary to all probabilities. Once the European 
 rule was removed, famine and internecine war 
 would again become chronic, and India would sink 
 back to her former place. Moreover, the long con- 
 tinuance of British rule undoubtedly weakens the 
 warlike fibre of the natives, and makes the usurer 
 rather than the soldier the dominant type. 
 
 The danger to which Mr. Pearson alludes, that 
 even the negro peoples may in time become vast 
 military powers, constituting a menace to Europe, 
 really seems to belong to a period so remote that 
 every condition will have changed to a degree 
 rendering it impossible for us to make any estimate 
 in reference thereto. By that time the descendant 
 
National Life and Character m 
 
 of the negro may be as intellectual as the Athen- 
 ian. Even prophecy must not look too many 
 thousand years ahead. It is perfectly possible 
 that European settlements in Africa will be 
 swamped some time by the rising of natives who 
 outnumber them a hundred or a thousand to one, 
 but it is not possible that the negroes will form a 
 military menace to the people of the north, at least 
 for a space of time longer than that which now 
 separates us from the men of the River Drift. The 
 negroid peoples, the so-called " hamitic," and bas- 
 tard Semitic, races of eastern middle Africa are for- 
 midable fighters ; but their strength is not fit for 
 any such herculean tasks. 
 
 There is more reason to fear the industrial com- 
 petition of these races ; but even this will be less 
 formidable as the power of the State increases and 
 especially as the democratic idea obtains more and 
 more currency. The Russians are not democratic 
 at all, but the State is very powerful with them ; 
 and therefore they keep the Chinese out of their 
 Siberian provinces, which are being rapidly filled 
 up with a population mainly Slav, the remainder 
 of which is being Slavicized. From the United 
 States and Australia the Chinaman is kept out be- 
 cause the democracy, with much clearness of 
 vision, has seen that his presence is ruinous to the 
 white race. 
 
 Nineteenth century democracy needs no more 
 
ii2 American Ideals 
 
 complete vindication for its existence than the fact 
 that it has kept for the white race the best portions 
 of the new worlds' surface, temperate America and 
 Australia. Had these regions been under aristo- 
 cratic governments, Chinese immigration would 
 have been encouraged precisely as the slave trade 
 is encouraged of necessity by any slave-holding 
 oligarchy, and the result would in a few genera- 
 tions have been even more fatal to the white race ; 
 but the democracy, with the clear instinct of race 
 selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the 
 dangerous alien. The presence of the negro in 
 our Southern States is a legacy from the time 
 when we were ruled by a trans-oceanic aristocracy. 
 The whole civilization of the future owes a debt of 
 gratitude greater than can be expressed in words 
 to that democratic policy which has kept the 
 temperate zones of the new and the newest worlds 
 a heritage for the white people. 
 
 As for the industrial competition, the Chinaman 
 and the Hindoo may drive certain kinds of white 
 traders from the tropics ; but more than this they 
 cannot do. They can never change the status of 
 the white laborer in his own home, for the latter 
 can always protect himself, and as soon as he is 
 seriously menaced, always will protect himself, by 
 protective tariffs and stringent immigration laws. 
 
 Mr. Pearson fears that when once the tropic 
 races are independent, the white peoples will be 
 
National Life and Character 113 
 
 humiliated and will lose heart ; but this does not 
 seem inevitable, and indeed seems very improb- 
 able. If the Englishman should lose his control 
 over South Africa and India, it might indeed be a 
 serious blow to the Englishman of Britain ; though 
 it may be well to remember that the generation of 
 Englishmen which grew up immediately after Eng- 
 land had lost America accomplished feats in arms, 
 letters, and science such as, on the whole, no other 
 English generation ever accomplished. Even 
 granting that Britain were to suffer as Mr. Pear- 
 son thinks she would, the enormous majority of 
 the English-speaking peoples, those whose homes 
 are in America and Australia, would be absolutely 
 unaffected; and Continental Europe would be 
 little more affected than it was when the Portu- 
 guese and Dutch successively saw their African 
 and Indian empires diminish. France has not 
 been affected by the expulsion of the French from 
 Hay ti ; nor have the freed negroes of Hayti been 
 capable of the smallest aggressive movement. No 
 American or Australian cares in the least that the 
 tan-colored peoples of Brazil and Ecuador now live 
 under governments of their own instead of being 
 ruled by viceroys from Portugal and Spain ; and it 
 is difficult to see why they should be materially 
 affected b)' a similar change happening in regard 
 to the people along the Ganges or the upper Nile. 
 Even if China does become a military power on the 
 
 VOL. II. — 8. 
 
ii4 American Ideals 
 
 European model, this fact will hardly affect the 
 American and Australian at the end of the twen- 
 tieth century more than Japan's effort to get ad- 
 mitted to the circle of civilized nations has affected 
 us at the end of the nineteenth. 
 
 Finally, it must be borne in mind that if any one 
 of the tropical races ever does reach a pitch of in- 
 dustrial and military prosperity which makes it a 
 menace to European and American countries, it 
 will almost necessarily mean that this nation has 
 itself become civilized in the process ; and we shall 
 then simply be dealing with another civilized na- 
 tion of non-aryan blood, precisely as we now deal 
 with Magyar, Fin, and Basque, without any 
 thought of their being ethnically distinct from 
 Croat, Rouman, or Wend. 
 
 In Mr. Pearson's second chapter he deals with 
 the stationary order of society, and strives to' show 
 that while we are all tending toward it, some 
 nations, notably France, have practically come to 
 it. He adds that when this stationary state is 
 reached, it will produce general discouragement, 
 and will probably affect the intellectual energy of 
 the people concerned. He further points out that 
 our races now tend to change from faith in private 
 enterprises to faith in State organizations, and 
 that this is likely to diminish the vigorous origin- 
 ality of any race. He even holds that we already 
 see the beginning of a decadence, in the decline of 
 
National Life and Character 115 
 
 speculative thought, and still more in the way of 
 mechanical inventions. It is perfectly true that 
 the laissez-faire doctrine of the old school of politi- 
 cal economists is receiving, less and less favor ; but 
 after all, if we look at events historically, we see 
 that every race, as it has grown to civilized great- 
 ness, has used the power of the State more and 
 more. A great State cannot rely on mere unre- 
 stricted individualism, any more than it can afford 
 to crush out all individualism. Within limits, the 
 mercilessness of private commercial warfare must 
 be curbed as we have curbed the individual's right 
 of private war proper. It was not until the power 
 of the State had become great in England, and 
 until the lawless individualism of feudal times 
 had vanished, that the English people began that 
 career of greatness which has put them on a level 
 with the Greeks in point of intellectual achieve- 
 ment, and with the Romans in point of that ma- 
 terial success which is measured by extension 
 through settlement, by conquest, by triumphant 
 warcraft and statecraft. As for Mr. Pearson's be- 
 lief that we now see a decline in speculative 
 thought and in mechanical invention, all that can 
 be said is that the facts do not bear him out. 
 
 There is one side to this stationary-state theory 
 which Mr. Pearson scarcely seems to touch. He 
 points out with emphasis the fact, which most 
 people are prone to deny, that the higher orders 
 
n6 American Ideals 
 
 of every society tend to die out; that there is 
 a tendency, on the whole, for both lower classes 
 and lower civilizations to increase faster than the 
 higher. Taken in the rough, his position on this 
 point is undoubtedly correct. Progressive so- 
 cieties, and the most progressive portions of so- 
 ciety, fail to increase as fast as the others, and 
 often positively decrease. The great commanders, 
 great statesmen, great poets, great men of science 
 of any period, taken together, do not average as 
 many children who reach years of maturity as 
 a similar number of mechanics, workmen, and 
 farmers, taken at random. Nevertheless, society 
 progresses, the improvement being due mainly to 
 the transmission of acquired characters, a process 
 which in every civilized State operates so strongly 
 as to counterbalance the operation of that baleful 
 law of natural selection which tells against the sur- 
 vival of some of the most desirable classes. Mr. 
 Balfour, by the way, whose forecast for the race is 
 in some respects not unlike Mr. Pearson's, seems 
 inclined to adopt the view that acquired charac- 
 teristics cannot be inherited; a position which, 
 even though supported by a few eminent names, is 
 hardly worthy of serious refutation. 
 
 The point I wish to dwell upon here, however, is 
 that it is precisely in those castes which have 
 reached the stationary state, or which are posi- 
 tively diminishing in numbers, that the highest 
 
National Life and Character 117 
 
 culture and best training, the keenest enjoyment 
 of life, and the greatest power of doing good to the 
 community are to be found at present. Unques- 
 tionably no community that is actually diminish- 
 ing in numbers is in a healthy condition ; and as 
 the world is now, with huge waste places still to fill 
 up, and with much of the competition between the 
 races reducing itself to the warfare of the cradle, 
 no race has any chance to win a great place unless 
 it consists of good breeders as well as of good fight- 
 ers. But it may well be that these conditions will 
 change in the future, when the other changes to 
 which Mr. Pearson looks forward with such melan- 
 choly are themselves brought about. A nation 
 sufficiently populous to be able to hold its own 
 against aggression from without, a nation which, 
 while developing the virtues of refinement, culture, 
 and learning, has yet not lost those of courage, 
 bold initiative, and military hardihood, might well 
 play a great part in the world, even though it had 
 come to that stationary state already reached by 
 the dominant castes of thinkers and doers in most 
 of the dominant races. 
 
 In Mr. Pearson's third chapter he dwells on 
 some of the dangers of political development, and 
 in especial upon the increase of the town at the 
 expense of the country, and upon the growth of 
 g^eat standing armies. Excessive urban develop- 
 ment undoubtedly does constitute a real and great 
 
n8 American Ideals 
 
 danger. All that can be said about it is that it is 
 quite impossible to prophesy how long this growth 
 will continue. Moreover, some of the evils, as 
 far as they really exist, will cure themselves. If 
 townspeople do, generation by generation, tend to 
 become stunted and weak, then they will die out, 
 and the problem they cause will not be permanent ; 
 while, on the other hand, if the cities can be made 
 healthy, both physically and morally, the objec- 
 tions to them must largely disappear. As for 
 standing armies, Mr. Pearson here seems to have 
 too much thought of Europe only. In America and 
 Australia there is no danger of the upgrowing of 
 great standing armies ; and, as he well shows, the 
 fact that every citizen must undergo military 
 training is by no means altogether a curse to the 
 nations of Continental Europe. 
 
 There is one point, by the way, although a small 
 point, where it may be worth while to correct Mr. 
 Pearson's statement of a fact. In dwelling on 
 what is undoubtedly the truth, that raw militia are 
 utterly incompetent to make head against trained 
 regular forces, he finds it necessary to explain 
 away the defeat at New Orleans. In doing this, 
 he repeats the story as it has been told by British 
 historians from Sir Archibald Alison to Goldwin 
 Smith. I hasten to say that the misstatement is 
 entirely natural on Mr. Pearson's part; he was 
 simply copying, without sufficiently careful in- 
 
National Life and Character 119 
 
 vestigation, the legend adopted by one side to 
 take the sting out of defeat. The way he puts it 
 is that six thousand British under Pakenham, 
 without artillery, were hurled against strong works 
 defended by twice their numbers, and were beaten, 
 as they would have been beaten had the works 
 been defended by almost any troops in the world. 
 In the first place, Pakenham did not have six 
 thousand men ; he had almost ten thousand. In 
 the second place, the Americans, instead of being 
 twice as numerous as the British, were but little 
 more than half as numerous. In the third place, 
 so far from being without artillery, the British 
 were much superior to the Americans in this re- 
 spect. Finally, they assailed a position very 
 much less strong than that held by Soult when 
 Wellington beat him at Toulouse with the same 
 troops which were defeated by Jackson at New 
 Orleans. The simple truth is that Jackson was 
 a very good general, and that he had under him 
 troops whom he had trained in successive cam- 
 paigns against Indians and Spaniards, and that 
 on the three occasions when he brought Paken- 
 ham to battle— that is, the night attack, the 
 great artillery duel, and the open assault — 
 the English soldiers, though they fought with 
 the utmost gallantry, were fairly and decisively 
 beaten. 
 
 This one badly chosen premise does not, how- 
 
120 American Ideals 
 
 ever, upset Mr. Pearson's conclusions. Plenty 
 of instances can be taken from our War of 1812 
 to show how unable militia are to face trained 
 regulars; and an equally striking example was 
 that afforded at Castlebar, in Ireland, in 1798, 
 when a few hundred French regulars attacked 
 with the bayonet and drove in headlong flight 
 from a very strong position, defended by a 
 powerful artillery, five times their number of 
 English, Scotch, and Irish militia. 
 
 In Mr. Pearson's fourth chapter he deals, from 
 a very noble standpoint, with some advantages 
 of national feeling. With this chapter and with 
 his praise of patriotism, and particularly of that 
 patriotism which attaches itself to the whole 
 country, and not to any section of it, we can 
 only express our hearty agreement. 
 
 In his fifth chapter, on "The Decline of the 
 Family," he sets forth, or seems to set forth, 
 certain propositions with which I must as 
 heartily disagree. He seems to lament the 
 change which is making the irresponsible despot 
 as much of an anomaly in the family as in the 
 State. He seems to think that this will weaken 
 the family. It may do so, in some instances, 
 exactly as the abolition of a despotism may pro- 
 duce anarchy ; but the movement is essentially 
 as good in one case as in the other. To all who 
 have known really happy family lives, that is to 
 
National Life and Character 121 
 
 all who have known or have witnessed the great- 
 est happiness which there can be on this earth, 
 it is hardly necessary to say that the highest 
 ideal of the family is attainable only where the 
 father and mother stand to each other as lovers 
 and friends, with equal rights. In these homes 
 the children are bound to father and mother by 
 ties of love, respect, and obedience, which are 
 simply strengthened by the fact that they are 
 treated as reasonable beings with rights of their 
 own, and that the rule of the household is 
 changed to suit the changing years, as childhood 
 passes into manhood and womanhood. In such 
 a home the family is not weakened; it is 
 strengthened. This is no unattainable ideal. 
 Every one knows hundreds of homes where it is 
 more or less perfectly realized, and it is an ideal 
 incomparably higher than the ideal of the bene- 
 ficent autocrat which it has so largely sup- 
 planted. 
 
 The final chapter of Mr. Pearson's book is 
 entitled "The Decay of Character." He be- 
 lieves that our world is becoming a world with 
 less adventure and energy, less brightness and 
 hope. He believes that all the great books have 
 been written, all the great discoveries made, all 
 the great deeds done. He thinks that the 
 adoption of State socialism in some form will 
 crush out individual merit and the higher kinds 
 
122 American Ideals 
 
 of individual happiness. Of course, as to this, 
 all that can be said is that men differ as to what 
 will be the effect of the forces whose working he 
 portrays, and that most of us who live in the 
 American democracy do not agree with him. 
 It is to the last degree improbable that State 
 socialism will ever be adopted in its extreme 
 form, save in a few places. It exists, of course, 
 to a certain extent wherever a police force and 
 a fire department exist; and the sphere of the 
 State's action may be vastly increased without in 
 any way diminishing the happiness of either the 
 many or the few. It is even conceivable that a 
 combination of legislative enactments and natural 
 forces may greatly reduce the inequalities of 
 wealth without in any way diminishing the real 
 power of enjoyment or power for good work of 
 what are now the favored classes. In our own 
 country the best work has always been produced 
 by men who lived in castes or social circles where 
 the standard of essential comfort was high ; that 
 is, where men were well clothed, well fed, well 
 housed, and had plenty of books and the oppor- 
 tunity of using them, but where there was small 
 room for extravagant luxury. We think that 
 Mr. Pearson's fundamental error here is his belief 
 that the raising of the mass necessarily means the 
 lowering of the standard of life for the fortunate 
 few. Those of us who now live in communities 
 
National Life and Character 123 
 
 where the native American element is largest and 
 where there is least inequality of conditions, know 
 well that there is no reason whatever in the nature 
 of things why, in the future, communities should 
 not spring up where there shall be no great ex- 
 tremes of poverty and wealth, and where, never- 
 theless, the power of civilization and the chances 
 for happiness and for doing good work shall be 
 greater than ever before. 
 
 As to what Mr. Pearson says about the work 
 of the world which is best worth doing being now 
 done, the facts do not bear him out. He thinks 
 that the great poems have all been written, that 
 the days of the drama and the epic are past. Yet 
 one of the greatest plays that has ever been pro- 
 duced, always excepting the plays of Shakes- 
 peare, was produced in this century; and if the 
 world had to wait nearly two thousand years 
 after the vanishing of the Athenian dramatists 
 before Shakespeare appeared, and two hundred 
 years more before Goethe wrote his one great 
 play, we can well afford to suspend judgment 
 for a few hundred years at least, before asserting 
 that no country and no language will again pro- 
 duce another great drama. So it is with the 
 epic. We are too near Milton, who came three 
 thousand years after Homer, to assert that the 
 centuries to come will never more see an epic. 
 One race may grow feeble and decrepit and be 
 
124 American Ideals 
 
 unable to do any more work; but another may- 
 take its place. After a time the Greek and Latin 
 writers found that they had no more to say ; and 
 a critic belonging to either nationality might have 
 shaken his head and said that all the great themes 
 had been used up and all the great ideas ex- 
 pressed; nevertheless, Dante, Cervantes, Mo- 
 liere, Schiller, Chaucer, and Scott, then all lay in 
 the future. 
 
 Again, Mr. Pearson speaks of statecraft at the 
 present day as offering fewer prizes, and prizes of 
 less worth than formerly, and as giving no chance 
 for the development of men like Augustus Caesar, 
 Richelieu, or Chatham. It is difficult to perceive 
 how these men can be considered to belong to a 
 different class from Bismarck, who is yet alive; 
 nor do we see why any English-speaking people 
 should regard a statesman like Chatham, or far 
 greater than Chatham, as an impossibility now- 
 adays or in the future. We Americans at least 
 will with difficulty be persuaded that there has 
 ever been a time when a nobler prize of achieve- 
 ment, suffering, and success was offered to any 
 statesman than was offered both to Washington 
 and to Lincoln. So, when Mr. Pearson speaks 
 of the warfare of civilized countries offering less 
 chance to the individual than the warfare of 
 savage and barbarous times, and of its being far 
 less possible now than in old days for a man to 
 
National Life and Character 125 
 
 make his personal influence felt in warfare, we 
 can only express our disagreement. No world- 
 conqueror can arise save in or next to highly 
 civilized States. There never has been a barbarian 
 Alexander or Cassar, Hannibal or Napoleon. Sit- 
 ting Bull and Rain-in-the-Face compare but ill 
 with Von Moltke ; and no Norse king of all the 
 heroic viking age even so much as began to ex- 
 ercise the influence upon the warfare of his gen- 
 eration that Frederick the Great exercised on his. 
 
 It is not true that character of necessity de- 
 cays with the growth of civilization. It may, of 
 course, be true in some cases. Civilization may 
 tend to develop upon the lines of Byzantine, Hin- 
 doo, and Inca; and there are sections of Europe 
 and sections of the United States where we now 
 tend to pay heed exclusively to the peaceful vir- 
 tues and to develop only a race of merchants, 
 lawyers, and professors, who will lack the virile 
 qualities that have made our race great and 
 splendid. This development may come, but it 
 need not come necessarily, and, on the whole, the 
 probabilities are against its coming at all. 
 
 Mr. Pearson is essentially a man of strength and 
 courage. Looking into the future, the future seems 
 to him gray and unattractive; but he does not 
 preach any unmanly gospel of despair. He thinks 
 that in time to come, though life will be freer 
 than in the past from dangers and vicissitudes, 
 
126 American Ideals 
 
 yet it will contain fewer of the strong pleasures 
 and of the opportunities for doing great deeds 
 that are so dear to mighty souls. Nevertheless, 
 he advises us all to front it bravely whether our 
 hope be great or little ; and he ends his book with 
 these fine sentences: " Even so, there will still re- 
 main to us ourselves. Simply to do our work in 
 life, and to abide the issue, if we stand erect be- 
 fore the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers 
 faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training 
 for our souls than the faith in progress." 
 
 We do not agree with him that there will be 
 only this eternal calm to face ; we do not agree 
 with him that the future holds for us a time when 
 we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor 
 from the future but that we may not deteriorate. 
 We do not agree with him that there is a day ap- 
 proaching when the lower races will predominate 
 in the world and the higher races will have lost 
 their noblest elements. But after all, it matters 
 little what view we take of the future if, in our 
 practice, we but do as he preaches, and face reso- 
 lutely whatever fate may have in store. We, our- 
 selves, are not certain that progress is assured; 
 we only assert that it may be assured if we but 
 live wise, brave, and upright lives. We do not 
 know whether the future has in store for us calm 
 or unrest. We cannot know beyond perad ven- 
 ture whether we can prevent the higher races 
 
National Life and Character 127 
 
 from losing their nobler traits and from being 
 overwhelmed by the lower races. On the whole, 
 we think that the greatest victories are yet to be 
 won, the greatest deeds yet to be done, and that 
 there are yet in store for our peoples and for the 
 causes that we uphold grander triumphs than 
 have ever yet been scored. But be this as it may, 
 we gladly agree that the one plain duty of every 
 man is to face the future as he faces the pre- 
 sent, regardless of what it may have in store for 
 him, and, turning toward the light as he sees the 
 light, to play his part manfully, as a man among 
 men. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 "social evolution" 1 
 
 MR. KIDD'S Social Evolution is a suggestive, 
 but a very crude book ; for the writer is 
 burdened by a certain mixture of dog- 
 matism and superficiality, which makes him con- 
 tent to accept half truths and insist that they are 
 whole truths. Nevertheless, though the book ap- 
 peals chiefly to minds of the kind which are 
 uncharitably described as "half-baked," Mr. Kidd 
 does suggest certain lines of thought which are 
 worth following — though rarely to his conclu- 
 sions. 
 
 He deserves credit for appreciating what he calls 
 "the outlook." He sketches graphically, and 
 with power, the problems which now loom up for 
 settlement before all of us who dwell in Western 
 lands; and he portrays the varying attitudes of 
 interest, alarm, and hope with which the thinkers 
 and workers of the day regard these problems. 
 He points out that the problems which now face 
 us are by no means parallel to those that were 
 solved by our forefathers one, two, or three cen- 
 turies ago. The great political revolutions seem 
 
 1 North American Review, July, 1895. 
 128 
 
" Social Evolution " 129 
 
 to be about complete and the time of the great 
 social revolutions has arrived. We are all peer- 
 ing eagerly into the future to try to forecast the 
 action of the great dumb forces set in operation by 
 the stupendous industrial revolution which has 
 taken place during the present century. We do 
 not know what to make of the vast displacements 
 of population, the expansion of the towns, the un- 
 rest and discontent of the masses, and the un- 
 easiness of those who are devoted to the present 
 order of things. 
 
 Mr. Kidd sees these problems, but he gropes 
 blindly when he tries to forecast their solution. 
 He sees that the progress of mankind in past ages 
 can only have been made under and in accordance 
 with certain biological laws, and that these laws 
 continue to work in human society at the present 
 day. He realizes the all-importance of the laws 
 which govern the reproduction of mankind from 
 generation to generation, precisely as they govern 
 the reproduction of the lower animals, and which, 
 therefore, largely govern his progress. But he 
 makes a cardinal mistake in treating of this kind 
 of progress. He states with the utmost positive- 
 ness that, left to himself, man has not the slightest 
 innate tendency to make any onward progress 
 whatever, and that if the conditions of life allowed 
 each man to follow his own inclinations the aver- 
 age of one generation would always tend to sink 
 
 VOL. II.— 9. 
 
130 American Ideals 
 
 below the average of the preceding. This is one 
 of the sweeping generalizations of which Mr. Kidd 
 is fond, and which mar so much of his work. He 
 evidently finds great difficulty in stating a general 
 law with the proper reservations and with the 
 proper moderation of phrase; and so he enun- 
 ciates as truths statements which contain a truth, 
 but which also contain a falsehood. What he 
 here says is undoubtedly true of the world, taken 
 as a whole. It is in all probability entirely false 
 of the highest sections of society. At any rate, 
 there are numerous instances where the law he 
 states does not work; and of course a single in- 
 stance oversets a sweeping declaration of such a 
 kind. 
 
 There can be but little quarrel with what Mr. 
 Kidd says as to the record of the world being a 
 record of ceaseless progress on the one hand, and 
 ceaseless stress and competition on the other; 
 although even here his statement is too broad, 
 and his terms are used carelessly. When he 
 speaks of progress being ceaseless, he evidently 
 means by progress simply change, so that as he 
 uses the word it must be understood to mean 
 progress backward as well as forward. As a 
 matter of fact, in many forms of life and for long 
 ages, there is absolutely no progress whatever 
 and no change, the forms remaining practically 
 stationary. 
 
" Social Evolution " 131 
 
 Mr. Kidd further points out that the first neces- 
 sity for every successful form engaged in this 
 struggle is the capacity for reproduction beyond 
 the limits for which the conditions of life com- 
 fortably provide, so that competition and selec- 
 tion must not only always accompany progress, 
 but must prevail in every form of life which is 
 not actually retrograding. As already said, he 
 accepts without reservation the proposition that 
 if all the individuals of every generation in any 
 species were allowed to propagate their kind 
 equally, the average of each generation would 
 tend to fall below the preceding. 
 
 From this position he draws as a corollary, that 
 the wider the limits of selection, the keener the 
 rivalry and the more rigid the selection, just so 
 much greater will be the progress; while for any 
 progress at all there must be some rivalry in selec- 
 tion, so that every progressive form must lead a 
 life of continual strain and stress as it travels its 
 upward path. This again is true in a measure, 
 but it is not true as broadly as Mr. Kidd has 
 stated it. The rivalry of natural selection is but 
 one of the features in progress. Other things 
 being equal, the species where this rivalry is 
 keenest will make most progress ; but then " other 
 things" never are equal. In actual life those 
 species make most progress which are farthest re- 
 moved from the point where the limits of selec- 
 
132 American Ideals 
 
 tion are very wide, the selection itself very rigid, 
 and the rivalry very keen. Of course the selec- 
 tion is most rigid where the fecundity of the ani- 
 mal is greatest ; but it is precisely the forms which 
 have most fecundity that have made least prog- 
 ress. Some time in the remote past the guinea 
 pig and the dog had a common ancestor. The 
 fecundity of the guinea pig is much greater than 
 that of the dog. Of a given number of guinea 
 pigs born, a much smaller proportion are able to 
 survive in the keen rivalry, so that the limits of 
 selection are wider, and the selection itself more 
 rigid ; nevertheless the progress made by the pro- 
 genitors of the dog since eocene days has been 
 much more marked and rapid than the progress 
 made by the progenitors of the guinea pig in the 
 same time. 
 
 Moreover, in speaking of the rise that has come 
 through the stress of competition in our modern 
 societies, and of the keenness of this stress in the 
 societies that have gone fastest, Mr. Kidd over- 
 looks certain very curious features in human so- 
 ciety. In the first place he speaks as though the 
 stress under which nations make progress was 
 primarily the stress produced by multiplication 
 beyond the limits of subsistence. This, of course, 
 would mean that in progressive societies the num- 
 ber of births and the number of deaths would both 
 be at a maximum, for it is where the births and 
 
" Social Evolution " 133 
 
 deaths are largest that the struggle for life is 
 keenest. If, as Mr. Kidd's hypothesis assumes, 
 progress was most marked where the struggle for 
 life was keenest, the European peoples standing 
 highest in the scale would be the South Italians, 
 the Polish Jews, and the people who live in the 
 congested districts of Ireland. As a matter of 
 fact, however, these are precisely the peoples who 
 have made least progress when compared with 
 the dominant strains among, for instance, the 
 English or Germans. So far is Mr. Kidd's propo- 
 sition from being true that, when studied in the 
 light of the facts, it is difficult to refrain from 
 calling it the reverse of the truth. The race 
 existing under conditions which make the com- 
 petition for bare existence keenest, never pro- 
 gresses as fast as the race which exists under less 
 stringent conditions. There must undoubtedly 
 be a certain amount of competition, a certain 
 amount of stress and strain, but it is equally un- 
 doubted that if this competition becomes too 
 severe the race goes down and not up; and it is 
 further true that the race existing under the 
 severest stress as regards this competition often 
 fails to go ahead as fast even in population as does 
 the race where the competition is less severe. No 
 matter how large the number of births may be, a 
 race cannot increase if the number of deaths also 
 grows at an accelerating rate. 
 
134 American Ideals 
 
 To increase greatly a race must be prolific, and 
 there is no curse so great as the curse of barren- 
 ness, whether for a nation or an individual. 
 When a people gets to the position even now 
 occupied by the mass of the French and by sec- 
 tions of the New Englanders, where the death rate 
 surpasses the birth rate, then that race is not only 
 fated to extinction but it deserves extinction. 
 When the capacity and desire for fatherhood and 
 motherhood is lost the race goes down, and 
 should go down ; and we need to have the plainest 
 kind of plain speaking addressed to those in- 
 dividuals who fear to bring children into the 
 world. But while this is all true, it remains 
 equally true that immoderate increase in no way 
 furthers the development of a race, and does not 
 always help its increase even in numbers. The 
 English-speaking peoples during the past two 
 centuries and a half have increased faster than 
 any others, yet there have been many other peo- 
 ples whose birth rate during the same period has 
 stood higher. 
 
 Yet, again, Mr. Kidd, in speaking of the stress 
 of the conditions of progress in our modern so- 
 cieties fails to see that most of the stress to which 
 he refers does not have anything to do with in- 
 creased difficulty in obtaining a living, or with 
 the propagation of the race. The great prizes 
 are battled for among the men who wage no war 
 
" Social Evolution " 135 
 
 whatever for mere subsistence, while the fight for 
 mere subsistence is keenest among precisely the 
 classes which contribute very little indeed to the 
 progress of the race. The generals and admirals, 
 the poets, philosophers, historians and musicians, 
 the statesmen and judges, the law-makers and 
 law-givers, the men of arts and of letters, the great 
 captains of war and of industry — all these come 
 from the classes where the struggle for the bare 
 means of subsistence is least severe, and where 
 the rate of increase is relatively smaller than in 
 the classes below. In civilized societies the ri- 
 valry of natural selection works against progress. 
 Progress is made in spite of it, for progress results 
 not from the crowding out of the lower classes by 
 the upper, but on the contrary from the steady 
 rise of the lower classes to the level of the upper, 
 as the latter tend to vanish, or at most barely 
 hold their own. In progressive societies it is 
 often the least fit who survive ; but, on the other 
 hand, they and their children often tend to grow 
 more fit. 
 
 The mere statement of these facts is sufficient 
 to show not only how incorrect are many of Mr. 
 Kidd's premises and conclusions, but also how 
 unwarranted are some of the fears which he 
 expresses for the future. It is plain that the 
 societies and sections of societies where the indi- 
 vidual's happiness is on the whole highest, and 
 
136 American Ideals 
 
 where progress is most real and valuable, are pre- 
 cisely those where the grinding competition and 
 the struggle for mere existence is least severe. 
 Undoubtedly in every progressive society there 
 must be a certain sacrifice of individuals, so that 
 there must be a certain proportion of failures in 
 every generation; but the actual facts of life 
 prove beyond shadow of doubt that the extent of 
 this sacrifice has nothing to do with the rapidity 
 or worth of the progress. The nations that make 
 most progress may do so at the expense of ten or 
 fifteen individuals out of a hundred, whereas the 
 nations that make least progress, or even go back- 
 wards, may sacrifice almost every man out of the 
 hundred. 
 
 This last statement is in itself partly an answer 
 to the position taken by Mr. Kidd, that there is 
 for the individual no "rational sanction" for the 
 conditions of progress. In a progressive com- 
 munity, where the conditions provide for the 
 happiness of four fifths or nine tenths of the 
 people, there is undoubtedly a rational sanction 
 for progress both for the community at large and 
 for the great bulk of its members; and if these 
 members are on the whole vigorous and intel- 
 ligent, the attitude of the smaller fraction who 
 have failed will be a matter of little consequence. 
 In such a community the conflict between the 
 interests of the individual and the organism of 
 
" Social Evolution " 137 
 
 which he is a part, upon which Mr. Kidd lays so 
 much emphasis, is at a minimum. The stress is 
 severest, the misery and suffering greatest, among 
 precisely the communities which have made least 
 progress — among the Bushmen, Australian black 
 fellows, and root-digger Indians, for instance. 
 
 Moreover, Mr. Kidd does not define what he 
 means by "rational sanction." Indeed, one of 
 his great troubles throughout is his failure to make 
 proper definitions, and the extreme looseness 
 with which he often uses the definitions he does 
 make. Apparently by "rational" he means 
 merely selfish, and proceeds upon the assumption 
 that "reason" must always dictate to every man 
 to do that which will give him the greatest amount 
 of individual gratification at the moment, no mat- 
 ter what the cost may be to others or to the com- 
 munity at large. This is not so. Side by side 
 with the selfish development in life there has been 
 almost from the beginning a certain amount of 
 unselfish development too; and in the evolution 
 of humanity the unselfish side has, on the whole, 
 tended steadily to increase at the expense of the 
 selfish, notably in the progressive communities 
 about whose future development Mr. Kidd is so 
 ill a tease. A more supreme instance of unselfish- 
 ness than is afforded by motherhood cannot be 
 imagined ; and when Mr. Kidd implies, as he does 
 very clearly, that there is no rational sanction for 
 
138 American Ideals 
 
 the unselfishness of motherhood, for the unselfish- 
 ness of duty, or loyalty, he merely misuses the 
 word rational. When a creature has reached a 
 certain stage of development it will cause the 
 female more pain to see her offspring starve than 
 to work for it, and she then has a very rational 
 reason for so working. When humanity has 
 reached a certain stage it will cause the individual 
 more pain, a greater sense of degradation and 
 shame and misery, to steal, to murder, or to lie, 
 than to work hard and suffer discomfort. When 
 man has reached this stage he has a very rational 
 sanction for being truthful and honest. It might 
 also parenthetically be stated that when he has 
 reached this stage he has a tendency to relieve 
 the sufferings of others, and he has for this course 
 the excellent rational sanction that it makes him 
 more uncomfortable to see misery unrelieved than 
 it does to deny himself a little in order to relieve it. 
 However, we can cordially agree with Mr. 
 Kidd's proposition that many of the social plans 
 advanced by would-be reformers in the interest 
 of oppressed individuals are entirely destructive 
 of all growth and of all progress in society. Cer- 
 tain cults, not only Christian, but also Buddhistic 
 and Brahminic, tend to develop an altruism which 
 is as "supra-natural" as Mr. Kidd seemingly de- 
 sires religion to be ; for it really is without founda- 
 tion in reason, and therefore to be condemned. 
 
" Social Evolution " 139 
 
 Mr. Kidd repeats again and again that the 
 scientific development of the nineteenth century 
 confronts us with the fact that the interests of the 
 social organism and of the individual are, and 
 must remain, antagonistic, and the latter pre- 
 dominant, and that there can never be found any 
 sanction in individual reason for individual good 
 conduct in societies where the conditions of prog- 
 ress prevail. From what has been said above it 
 is evident that this statement is entirely without 
 basis, and therefore that the whole scheme of 
 mystic and highly irrational philosophy which he 
 founds upon it at once falls to the ground. There 
 is no such necessary antagonism as that which 
 he alleges. On the contrary, in the most truly 
 progressive societies, even now, for the great mass 
 of the individuals composing them the interests 
 of the social organism and of the individual are 
 largely identical instead of antagonistic ; and even 
 where this is not true, there is a sanction of indi- 
 vidual reason, if we use the word reason properly, 
 for conduct on the part of the individual which is 
 subordinate to the welfare of the general society. 
 
 We can measure the truth of his statements by 
 applying them, not to great societies in the ab- 
 stract, but to small social organisms in the con- 
 crete. Take, for instance, the life of a regiment 
 or the organization of a police department or fire 
 department. The first duty of a regiment is to 
 
HO American Ideals 
 
 fight, and fighting means the death and disabling 
 of a large proportion of the men in the regiment. 
 The case against the identity of interests between 
 the individual and the organism, as put by Mr. 
 Kidd, would be far stronger in a regiment than in 
 any ordinary civilized society of the day. Yet as 
 a matter of fact we know that in the great multi- 
 tude of regiments there is much more subordina- 
 tion of the individual to the organism than is the 
 case in any civilized state taken as a whole. 
 Moreover, this subordination is greatest in pre- 
 cisely those regiments where the average indi- 
 vidual is best off, because it is greatest in those 
 regiments where the individual feels that high, 
 stern pride in his own endurance and suffering, 
 and in the great name of the organism of which 
 he forms a part, that in itself yields one of the 
 loftiest of all human pleasures. If Mr. Kidd 
 means anything when he says that there is no 
 rational sanction for progress, he must also mean 
 that there is no rational sanction for a soldier not 
 flinching from the enemy when he can do so un- 
 observed, for a sentinel not leaving his post, for 
 an officer not deserting to the enemy. Yet when 
 he says this he utters what is a mere jugglery on 
 words. In the process of evolution men and 
 societies have often reached such a stage that the 
 best type of soldier or citizen feels infinitely more 
 shame and misery from neglect of duty, from 
 
" Social Evolution " 141 
 
 cowardice or dishonesty, from selfish abandon- 
 ment of the interests of the organism of which 
 he is part, than can be offset by the gratification 
 of any of his desires. This, be it also observed, 
 often takes place, entirely independent of any 
 religious considerations. The habit of useful 
 self-sacrifice may be developed by civilization in 
 a great society as well as by military training in a 
 regiment. The habit of useless self-sacrifice may 
 also, unfortunately, be developed ; and those who 
 practice it are but one degree less noxious than 
 the individuals who sacrifice good people to bad. 
 The religious element in our development is 
 that on which Mr. Kidd most strongly dwells, 
 entitling it "the central feature of human his- 
 tory." A very startling feature of his treatment 
 is that in religious matters he seemingly sets no 
 value on the difference between truth and false- 
 hood, for he groups all religions together. In a 
 would-be teacher of ethics such an attitude war- 
 rants severe rebuke; for it is essentially dis- 
 honest and immoral. Throughout his book he 
 treats all religious beliefs from the same stand- 
 point, as if they were all substantially similar and 
 substantially of the same value ; whereas it is, of 
 course, a mere truism to say that most of them 
 are mutually destructive. Not only has he no 
 idea of differentiating the true from the false, but 
 he seems not to understand that the truth of a 
 
i4 2 American Ideals 
 
 particular belief is of any moment. Thus he 
 says, in speaking of the future survival of re- 
 ligious beliefs in general, that the most notable 
 result of the scientific revolution begun by Dar- 
 win must be "to establish them on a foundation 
 as broad, deep, and lasting as any the theologians 
 ever dreamed of." If this sentence means any- 
 thing it means that all these religious beliefs will 
 be established on the same foundation. It hardly 
 seems necessary to point out that this cannot be 
 the fact. If the God of the Christians be in very 
 truth the one God, and if the belief in Him be 
 established, as Christians believe it will, then the 
 foundation for the religious belief in Mumbo 
 Jumbo can be neither broad, deep, nor lasting. 
 In the same way the beliefs in Mohammed and 
 Buddha are mutually exclusive, and the various 
 forms of ancestor worship and fetichism cannot 
 all be established on a permanent basis, as they 
 would be according to Mr. Kidd's theory. 
 
 Again, when Mr. Kidd rebukes science for its 
 failure to approach religion in a scientific spirit he 
 shows that he fails to grasp the full bearing of the 
 subject which he is considering. This failure 
 comes in part from the very large, not to say 
 loose, way in which he uses the words "science" 
 and "religion." There are many sciences and 
 many religions, and there are many different 
 kinds of men who profess the one or advocate the 
 
11 Social Evolution " 143 
 
 other. Where the intolerant professors of a 
 given religious belief endeavor by any form of 
 persecution to prevent scientific men of any kind 
 from seeking to find out and establish the truth, 
 then it is quite idle to blame these scientific men 
 for attacking with heat and acerbity the religious 
 belief which prompts such persecution. The ex- 
 igencies of a life and death struggle unfit a man 
 for the coldness of a mere scientific inquiry. 
 Even the most enthusiastic naturalist, if attacked 
 by a man-eating shark, would be much more in- 
 terested in evading or repelling the attack than 
 in determining the precise specific relations of the 
 shark. A less important but amusing feature of 
 his argument is that he speaks as if he himself had 
 made an entirely new discovery when he learned 
 of the important part played in man's history by 
 his religious beliefs. But Mr. Kidd surely cannot 
 mean this. He must be aware that all the great 
 historians have given their full importance to 
 such religious movements as the birth and growth 
 of Christianity, the Reformation, the growth of 
 Islamism, and the like. Mr. Kidd is quite right 
 in insisting upon the importance of the part 
 played by religious beliefs, but he has fallen into a 
 vast error if he fails to understand that the great 
 majority of the historical and sociological writers 
 have given proper weight to this importance. 
 Mr. Kidd's greatest failing is his tendency to 
 
144 American Ideals 
 
 use words in false senses. He uses "reason" in 
 the false sense "selfish." He then, in a spirit 
 of mental tautology, assumes that reason must 
 be necessarily purely selfish and brutal. He as- 
 sumes that the man who risks his life to save a 
 friend, the woman who watches over a sick child, 
 and the soldier who dies at his post, are unreason- 
 able, and that the more their reason is developed 
 the less likely they will be to act in these ways. 
 The mere statement of the assertion in such a 
 form is sufficient to show its nonsense to any one 
 who will take the pains to think whether the 
 people who ordinarily perform such feats of self- 
 sacrifice and self-denial are people of brutish 
 minds or of fair intelligence. 
 
 If none of the ethical qualities are developed at 
 the same time with a man's reason, then he may 
 become a peculiarly noxious kind of wild beast; 
 but this is not in the least a necessity of the de- 
 velopment of his reason. It would be just as 
 wise to say that it was a necessity of the develop- 
 ment of his bodily strength. Undoubtedly the 
 man with reason who is selfish and unscrupulous 
 will, because of his added power, behave even 
 worse than the man without reason who is 
 selfish and unscrupulous; but the same is true 
 of the man with vast bodily strength. He has 
 power to do greater harm to himself and to others ; 
 but, because of this, to speak of bodily strength 
 
" Social Evolution " 145 
 
 or of reason as in itself "profoundly anti-social 
 and anti-evolutionary" is foolishness. Mr. Kidd, 
 as so often, is misled by a confusion of names for 
 which he is himself responsible. The growth of 
 rationalism, unaccompanied by any growth in 
 ethics or morality, works badly. The society in 
 which such a growth takes place will die out, and 
 ought to die out. But this does not imply that 
 other communities quite as intelligent may not 
 also be deeply moral and be able to take firm root 
 in the world. 
 
 Mr. Kidd's definitions of "supra-natural" and 
 "ultra-rational" sanctions, the definitions upon 
 which he insists so strongly and at such length, 
 would apply quite as well to every crazy super- 
 stition of the most brutal savage as to the teach- 
 ings of the New Testament. The trouble with 
 his argument is that, when he insists upon the 
 importance of this ultra-rational sanction, defin- 
 ing it as loosely as he does, he insists upon too 
 much. He apparently denies that men can come 
 to a certain state at which it will be rational for 
 them to do right even to their own hurt. It is 
 perfectly possible to build up a civilization which, 
 by its surroundings and by its inheritances, work- 
 ing through long ages, shall make the bulk of the 
 men and women develop such characteristics of 
 unselfishness, as well as of wisdom, that it will be 
 the rational thing for them as individuals to act 
 
 VOL. II.— IO. 
 
146 American Ideals 
 
 in accordance with the highest dictates of honor 
 and courage and morality. If the intellectual 
 development of such a civilized community goes 
 on at an equal pace with the ethical, it will per- 
 sistently war against the individuals in whom the 
 spirit of selfishness, which apparently Mr. Kidd 
 considers the only rational spirit, shows itself 
 strongly. It will weed out these individuals 
 and forbid them propagating, and therefore will 
 steadily tend to produce a society in which the 
 rational sanction for progress shall be identical 
 in the individual and the State. This ideal has 
 never yet been reached, but long steps have been 
 taken towards reaching it; and in most progres- 
 sive civilizations it is reached to the extent that 
 the sanction for progress is the same not only for 
 the State but for each one of the bulk of the in- 
 dividuals composing it. When this ceases to be 
 the case progress itself will generally cease and the 
 community ultimately disappear. 
 
 Mr. Kidd, having treated of religion in a pre- 
 liminary way, and with much mystic vagueness, 
 then attempts to describe the functions of re- 
 ligious belief in the evolution of society. He has 
 already given definitions of religion quoted from 
 different authors, and he now proceeds to give his 
 own definition. But first he again insists upon 
 his favorite theory, that there can be no rational 
 basis for individual good conduct in society, using 
 
" Social Evolution " 147 
 
 the word rational according to his usual habit, as 
 a synonym of selfish ; and then asserts that there 
 can be no such thing as a rational religion. Ap- 
 parently all that Mr. Kidd demands on this point 
 is that it shall be what he calls ultra-rational, a 
 word which he prefers to irrational. In other 
 words, he casts aside as irrelevant all discussion 
 as to a creed's truth. 
 
 Mr. Kidd then defines religion as being "a form 
 of belief providing an ultra-rational sanction for 
 that large class of conduct in the individual where 
 his interests and the interests of the social organ- 
 ism are antagonistic, and by which the former are 
 rendered subordinate to the latter in the general 
 interest of the evolution which the race is under- 
 going," and says that we have here the principle 
 at the base of all religions. Of course this is 
 simply not true. All those religions which busy 
 themselves exclusively with the future life, and 
 which even Mr. Kidd could hardly deny to be re- 
 ligious, do not have this principle at their base at 
 all. They have nothing to do with the general 
 interests of the evolution which the race is under- 
 going on this earth. They have to do only with 
 the soul of the individual in the future life. They 
 are not concerned with this world; they are con- 
 cerned with the world to come. All religions, 
 and all forms of religions, in which the principle 
 of asceticism receives any marked development 
 
148 American Ideals 
 
 are positively antagonistic to the development of 
 the social organism. They are against its inter- 
 ests. They do not tend in the least to subordinate 
 the interests of the individual to the interests of 
 the organism " in the general interest of the evolu- 
 tion which the race is undergoing." A religion 
 like that of the Shakers means the almost imme- 
 diate extinction of the organism in which it de- 
 velops. Such a religion distinctly subordinates 
 the interests of the organism to the interests of 
 the individual. The same is equally true of many 
 of the more ascetic developments of Christianity 
 and Islam. There is strong probability that 
 there was a Celtic population in Iceland before 
 the arrival of the Norsemen, but these Celts be- 
 longed to the Culdee sect of Christians. They 
 were anchorites, and professed a creed which com- 
 pletely subordinated the development of the race 
 on this earth to the well-being of the individual in 
 the next. In consequence they died out and left 
 no successors. There are creeds, such as most of 
 the present day creeds of Christianity, both Pro- 
 testant and Catholic, which do very noble work 
 for the race because they teach its individuals to 
 subordinate their own interests to the interests of 
 mankind ; but it is idle to say this of every form 
 of religious belief. 
 
 It is equally idle to pretend that this principle, 
 which Mr. Kidd says lies at the base of all re- 
 
" Social Evolution " 149 
 
 ligions, does not also lie at the base of many forms 
 of ethical belief which could hardly be called 
 religious. His definition of religion could just 
 as appropriately be used to define some forms of 
 altruism or humanitarianism, while it does not 
 define religion at all, if we use the word religion 
 in the way in which it generally is used. If Mr. 
 Kidd should write a book about horses, and should 
 describe a horse as a striped equine animal found 
 wild in South Africa, his definition would apply 
 to certain members of the horse family, but would 
 not apply to that animal which we ordinarily 
 mean when we talk of a horse ; and, moreover, it 
 would still be sufficiently loose to include two or 
 three entirely distinct species. This is precisely 
 the trouble with Mr. Kidd's definition of religion. 
 It does not define religion at all as the word is 
 ordinarily used, and while it does apply to certain 
 religious beliefs, it also applies quite as well to 
 certain non-religious beliefs. We must, therefore, 
 recollect that throughout Mr. Kidd's argument on 
 behalf of the part that religion plays he does not 
 mean what is generally understood by religion, but 
 the special form or forms which he here defines. 
 
 Undoubtedly, in the race for life, that group of 
 beings will tend ultimately to survive in which 
 the general feeling of the members, whether due 
 to humanitarianism, to altruism, or to some form 
 of religious belief proper, is such that the average 
 
i5° American Ideals 
 
 individual has an unselfish — what Mr. Kidd would 
 call an ultra-rational — tendency to work for the 
 ultimate benefit of the community as a whole. 
 Mr. Kidd's argument is so loose that it may 
 be construed as meaning that, in the evolution 
 of society, irrational superstitions grow up from 
 time to time, affect large bodies of the human 
 race in their course of development, and then die 
 away; and that this succession of evanescent re- 
 ligious beliefs will continue for a very long time 
 to come, perhaps as long as the human race exists. 
 He may further mean that, except for this belief, 
 in a long succession of lies, humanity could not 
 go forward. His words, I repeat, are sufficiently 
 involved to make it possible that he means this, 
 but, if so, his book can hardly be taken as a satis- 
 factory defence of religion. 
 
 If there is justification for any given religion, 
 and justification for the acceptance of super- 
 natural authority as regards this religion, then 
 there can be no justification for the acceptance 
 of all religions, good and bad alike. There can, 
 at the outside, be a justification for but one or 
 two. Mr. Kidd's grouping of all religions to- 
 gether is offensive to every earnest believer. 
 Moreover, in his anxiety to insist only on the ir- 
 rational side of religion, he naturally tends to 
 exalt precisely those forms of superstition which 
 are most repugnant to reasoning beings with 
 
"Social Evolution " 151 
 
 moral instincts, and which are most heartily con- 
 demned by believers in the loftiest religions. He 
 apparently condemns Lecky for what Lecky says 
 of that species of unpleasant and noxious anchor- 
 ite best typified by St. Simeon Stylites and the 
 other pillar hermits. He corrects Lecky for his 
 estimate of this ideal of the fourth century, and 
 says that instead of being condemned it should 
 be praised, as affording striking evidence and ex- 
 ample of the vigor of the immature social forces 
 at work. This is not true. The type of anchorite 
 of which Mr. Lecky speaks with such just con- 
 demnation flourished most rankly in Christian 
 Africa and Asia Minor, the very countries where 
 Christianity was so speedily overthrown by Islam. 
 It was not an example of the vigor of the imma- 
 ture social forces at work ; on the contrary, it was 
 a proof that those social forces were rotten and 
 had lost their vigor. Where an anchorite of the 
 type Lecky describes, and Mr. Kidd impliedly 
 commends, was accepted as the true type of the 
 church, and set the tone for religious thought, the 
 church was corrupt, and was unable to make any 
 effective defence against the scarcely baser form 
 of superstition which received its development in 
 Islamism. As a matter of fact, asceticism of this 
 kind had very little in common with the really 
 vigorous and growing part of European Chris- 
 tianity, even at that time. Such asceticism is far 
 
15 2 American Ideals 
 
 more closely related to the practices of some 
 loathsome Mohammedan dervish than to any 
 creed which has properly developed from the 
 pure and lofty teachings of the Four Gospels. 
 St. Simeon Stylites is more nearly kin to a Hin- 
 doo fakir than to Phillips Brooks or Archbishop 
 Ireland. 
 
 Mr. Kidd deserves praise for insisting as he does 
 upon the great importance of the development of 
 humanitarian feelings and of the ethical element 
 in humanity during the past few centuries, when 
 compared with the mere material development. 
 He is, of course, entirely right in laying the ut- 
 most stress upon the enormous part taken by 
 Christianity in the growth of Western civilization. 
 He would do well to remember, however, that 
 there are other elements than that of merely cere- 
 monial Christianity at work, and that such cere- 
 monial Christianity in other races produces quite 
 different results, as he will see at a glance, if he 
 will recall that Abyssinia and Hayti are Christian 
 countries. 
 
 In short, whatever Mr. Kidd says in reference 
 to religion must be understood as being strictly 
 limited by his own improper terminology. If we 
 should accept the words religion and religious be- 
 lief in their ordinary meaning, and should then 
 accept as true what he states, we should appar- 
 ently have to conclude that progress depended 
 
" Social Evolution " 153 
 
 largely upon the fervor of the religious spirit, 
 without regard to whether the religion itself was 
 false or true. If such were the fact, progress 
 would be most rapid in a country like Morocco, 
 where the religious spirit is very strong indeed, 
 far stronger than in any enlightened Christian 
 country, but where, in reality, the religious de- 
 velopment has largely crushed out the ethical 
 and moral development, so that the country has 
 gone steadily backward. A little philosophic 
 study would convince Mr. Kidd that while the 
 ethical and moral development of a nation may, 
 in the case of certain religions, be based on those 
 religions and develop with them and on the lines 
 laid down by them, yet that in other countries 
 where they develop at all they have to develop 
 right in the teeth of the dominant religious be- 
 liefs, while in yet others they may develop entirely 
 independent of them. If he doubts this, let him 
 examine the condition of the Soudan under the 
 Mahdi, where what he calls the ultra-rational and 
 supra-natural sanctions were accepted without 
 question, and governed the lives of the people 
 to the exclusion alike of reason and morality. He 
 will hardly assert that the Soudan is more pro- 
 gressive than say Scotland or Minnesota, where 
 there is less of the spirit which he calls religious 
 and which old-fashioned folk would call super- 
 stitious. 
 
154 American Ideals 
 
 Mr. Kidd's position in reference to the central 
 feature of his argument is radically false ; but he 
 handles some of his other themes very well. He 
 shows clearly in his excellent chapter on modern 
 socialism that a state of retrogression must ensue 
 if all incentives to strife and competition are 
 withdrawn. He does not show quite as clearly as 
 he should that over-competition and too severe 
 stress make the race deteriorate instead of im- 
 proving; but he does show that there must be 
 some competition, that there must be some strife. 
 He makes it clear also that the true function of 
 the State, as it interferes in social life, should be 
 to make the chances of competition more even, 
 not to abolish them. We wish the best men ; and 
 though we pity the man that falls or lags behind 
 in the race, we do not on that account crown him 
 with the victor's wreath. We insist that the 
 race shall be run on fairer terms than before be- 
 cause we remove all handicaps. We thus tend 
 to make it more than ever a test of the real merits 
 of the victor, and this means that the victor must 
 strive heart and soul for success. Mr. Kidd's 
 attitude in describing socialism is excellent. He 
 sympathizes with the wrongs which the socialistic 
 reformer seeks to redress, but he insists that these 
 wrongs must not be redressed, as the socialists 
 would have them, at the cost of the welfare of 
 mankind. 
 
" Social Evolution " 155 
 
 Mr. Kidd also sees that the movement for po- 
 litical equality has nearly come to an end, for its 
 purpose has been nearly achieved. To it must 
 now succeed a movement to bring all people into 
 the rivalry of life on equal conditions of social 
 opportunity. This is a very important point, 
 and he deserves the utmost credit for bringing it 
 out. It is the great central feature in the de- 
 velopment of our time, and Mr. Kidd has seen it 
 so clearly and presented it so forcibly that we 
 cannot but regret that he should be so befogged 
 in other portions of his argument. 
 
 Mr. Kidd has our cordial sympathy when he 
 lays stress on the fact that our evolution cannot 
 be called primarily intellectual. Of course there 
 must be an intellectual evolution, too, and Mr. 
 Kidd perhaps fails in not making this sufficiently 
 plain. A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a 
 very high plane ; the negro, for instance, has been 
 kept down as much by lack of intellectual develop- 
 ment as by anything else; but the prime factor 
 in the preservation of a race is its power to attain a 
 high degree of social efficiency. Love of order, 
 ability to fight well and breed well, capacity to 
 subordinate the interests of the individual to the 
 interests of the community, these and similar 
 rather humdrum qualities go to make up the 
 sum of social efficiency. The race that has 
 them is sure to overturn the race whose members 
 
156 American Ideals 
 
 have brilliant intellects, but who are cold and 
 selfish and timid, who do not breed well or fight 
 well, and who are not capable of disinterested 
 love of the community. In other words, character 
 is far more important than intellect to the race 
 as to the individual. We need intellect, and there 
 is no reason why we should not have it together 
 with character ; but if we must choose between 
 the two we choose character without a moment's 
 hesitation. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE LAW OF CIVILIZATION AND DECAY 1 
 
 FEW more melancholy books have been 
 written than Mr. Brooks Adams's Law 
 of Civilization and Decay. It is a marvel 
 of compressed statement. In a volume of less 
 than four hundred pages Mr. Adams singles out 
 some of the vital factors in the growth and evolu- 
 tion of civilized life during the last two thousand 
 years; and so brilliant is his discussion of these 
 factors as to give, though but a glimpse, yet one 
 of the most vivid glimpses ever given, of some of 
 the most important features in the world-life of 
 Christendom. Of some of the features only; for 
 a fundamentally defective point in Mr. Adams's 
 brilliant book is his failure to present certain 
 phases of the life of the nations, — phases which 
 are just as important as those which he discusses 
 with such vigorous ability. Furthermore, he disre- 
 gards not a few facts which would throw light on 
 others, the weight of which he fully recognizes. 
 Both these shortcomings are very natural in a 
 writer who possesses an entirely original point of 
 view, who is the first man to see clearly certain 
 
 1 The Forum, January, 1897. 
 157 
 
158 American Ideals 
 
 things that to his predecessors have been nebulous, 
 and who writes with a fervent intensity of con- 
 viction, even in his bitterest cynicism, such as we 
 are apt to associate rather with the prophet and 
 reformer than with a historian to whom prophet 
 and reformer alike appeal no more than do their 
 antitypes. It is a rare thing for a historian to 
 make a distinct contribution to the philosophy of 
 history ; and this Mr. Adams has done. Naturally 
 enough, he, like other men who break new ground, 
 tends here and there to draw a devious furrow. 
 
 The book is replete with vivid writing, and with 
 sentences and paragraphs which stand out in the 
 memory as marvels in the art of presenting the 
 vital features of a subject with a few master- 
 strokes. The story of the Crusades, the outline of 
 the English conquest of India, and the short tale 
 of the rise of the house of Rothschild, are master- 
 pieces. Nowhere else is it possible to find in the 
 same compass any description of the Crusades so 
 profound in its appreciation of the motives behind 
 them, so startling in the vigor with which the 
 chief actors, and the chief events, are portrayed. 
 Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that it is in 
 the description of the Crusades that Mr. Adams is 
 at his best. He is dealing with a giant movement 
 of humanity ; and he grasps not only the colossal 
 outward manifestations, but also the spirit itself, 
 and, above all, the strange and sinister changes 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 159 
 
 which that spirit underwent. His mere descrip- 
 tion of the Baronies set up by the Crusaders in 
 the conquered Holy Land, with their loose feudal 
 government, brings them before the reader's eyes 
 as few volumes specially devoted to the subject 
 could. It is difficult to write of a fortress and 
 make a pen-picture which will always stay in the 
 mind ; yet this is what Mr. Adams has done in deal- 
 ing with the grim religious castles, terrible in size 
 and power, which were built by the Knights of 
 the Temple and the Hospital as bulwarks against 
 Saracen might. He is not only a scholar of 
 much research, but a student of art, who is so 
 much more than a mere student as to be thrilled 
 and possessed by what he studies. He shows, 
 with a beauty and vigor of style not unbecoming 
 his subject, how profoundly the art of Europe 
 was affected by the Crusades. It is not every one 
 who can write with equal interest of sacred archi- 
 tecture and military engineering, who can appre- 
 ciate alike the marvels of Gothic cathedrals and 
 the frowning strength of feudal fortresses, and 
 who furthermore can trace their inter-relation. 
 
 The story of the taking of Constantinople by 
 the Crusaders who followed the lead of the blind 
 Doge Dandolo is told with an almost brutal ruth- 
 lessness quite befitting the deed itself. Nowhere 
 else in the book is Mr. Adams happier in his in- 
 sistence upon the conflict between what he calls 
 
160 American Ideals 
 
 the economic and the imaginative spirits. The 
 incident sets well with his favorite theory of the 
 inevitable triumph of the economic over the im- 
 aginative man, as societies grow centralized, and 
 the no less inevitable fossilization and ruin of 
 the body politic which this very triumph itself 
 ultimately entails. The history of the English 
 conquest of India is only less vividly told. Inci- 
 dentally, it may be mentioned that one of Mr. 
 Adams's many merits is his contemptuous re- 
 fusal to be misled by modern criticism of Macaulay. 
 He sees Macaulay' s greatness as a historian, and 
 his essential truthfulness on many of the very 
 points where he has been most sharply criticised. 
 Mr. Adams's book, however, is far more than a 
 mere succession of brilliant episodes. He fully 
 sees that the value of facts lies in their relation to 
 one another; and from the facts as he sees them 
 he deduces certain laws with more than a Thu- 
 cydidean indifference as to his own individual 
 approval or disapproval of the development. 
 The life of nations, like any other form of life, is 
 but one manifestation of energy ; and Mr. Adams's 
 decidedly gloomy philosophy of life may be gath- 
 ered from the fact that he places fear and greed as 
 the two forms of energy which stand conspicu- 
 ously predominant ; fear in the earlier, and greed 
 in the later, stages of evolution from barbarism to 
 civilization. Civilization itself he regards merely 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 161 
 
 as the history of the movement from a condition 
 of physical distribution to one of physical con- 
 centration. During the earlier stages of this 
 movement the imaginative man — the man who 
 stands in fear of a priesthood — is, in his opinion, 
 the representative type, while with him, and 
 almost equally typical, stand the soldier and the 
 artist. As consolidation advances, the economic 
 man — the man of industry, trade, and capital — 
 tends to supplant the emotional and artistic 
 types of manhood, and finally himself develops 
 along two lines, — -"the usurer in his most formid- 
 able aspect, and the peasant whose nervous 
 system is best adapted to thrive on scanty nutri- 
 ment." These two very unattractive types are, 
 in his belief, the inevitable final products of all 
 civilization, as civilization has hitherto developed ; 
 and when they have once been produced there 
 follows either a stationary period, during which 
 the whole body politic gradually ossifies and 
 atrophies, or else a period of utter disintegration. 
 This is not a pleasant theory; it is in many 
 respects an entirely false theory ; but neverthe- 
 less there is in it a very ugly element of truth. 
 One does not have to accept either all Mr. Adams's 
 theories or all his facts in order to recognize more 
 than one disagreeable resemblance between the 
 world as it is to-day, and the Roman world un- 
 der the Empire, or the Greek world under the 
 
 VOL. II. — II, 
 
1 62 American Ideals 
 
 successors of Alexander. Where he errs is his fail- 
 ure to appreciate the fundamental differences which 
 utterly destroy any real parallelism between the 
 two sets of cases. Indeed, his zeal in champion- 
 ing his theories leads him at times into positions 
 which are seen at a glance to be untenable. 
 
 Probably Mr. Adams's account of the English 
 Reformation, and of Henry VIII. and his instru- 
 ments, is far nearer the truth than Froude's. But 
 his view of the evils upon which the reformers as 
 a whole waged war, and of the spirit which lay 
 behind the real leaders and spurred them on, is 
 certainly less accurate than the view given by 
 Froude in his Erasmus and Council of Trent. It 
 can be partly corrected by the study of a much 
 less readable book — Mr. Henry C. Lea's work on 
 The Inquisition. Yet Mr. Adams's description of 
 the English Reformation is very powerful, and 
 has in it a vein of bitter truth; though on the 
 whole it is perhaps not so well done as his account 
 of the suppression of the Templars in France. If 
 he can be said to have any heroes, the Templars 
 must certainly be numbered among them. 
 
 He is at his best in describing the imaginative 
 man, and especially the imaginative man whose 
 energy manifests itself in the profession of arms. 
 His description of the tremendous change which 
 passed over Europe during the centuries which 
 saw, what is commonly called, the decay of faith, 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 163 
 
 is especially noteworthy. In no other history are 
 there to be found two sentences which portray 
 more vividly the reasons for the triumph of the 
 great Pope Hildebrand over the Emperor Henry 
 than these: 
 
 " To Henry's soldiers the world was a vast space 
 peopled by those fantastic beings which are still 
 seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed 
 the monk of Rome, and his army, melting from 
 the Emperor under a nameless horror, left him 
 helpless." 
 
 His account of the contrast between the rela- 
 tions of Philip Augustus and of Philip the Fair 
 with the Church is dramatic in its intensity. To 
 Mr. Adams, Philip the Fair, even more than 
 Henry VIII., is the incarnation of the economic 
 spirit in its conflict with the Church; and he 
 makes him an even more repulsive, though per- 
 haps an abler, man than Henry. In this he is 
 probably quite right. His account of the hound- 
 ing down of Boniface, and the cruel destruction of 
 the Templars, is as stirring as it is truthful; but 
 he certainly pushes his theory to an altogether 
 impossible extreme when he states that the 
 moneyed class, the bourgeoisie, was already the 
 dominant force in France. The heroes of Frois- 
 sart still lay in the future; and for centuries to 
 come the burgher was to be outweighed by king, 
 
1 64 American Ideals 
 
 priest, and noble. The economic man, the man 
 of trade and money, was, at that time, in no sense 
 dominant. 
 
 That there is grave reason for some of Mr. 
 Adams's melancholy forebodings no serious stu- 
 dent of the times, no sociologist or reformer, and 
 no practical politician who is interested in more 
 than momentary success, will deny. A foolish 
 optimist is only less noxious than an utter pessi- 
 mist ; and the prerequisite for any effort, whether 
 hopeful or hopeless, to better our conditions is an 
 accurate knowledge of what these conditions are. 
 There is no use in blinding ourselves to certain of 
 the tendencies and results of our high-pressure 
 civilization. Some very ominous facts have be- 
 come more and more apparent during the present 
 century, in which the social movement of the 
 white race has gone on with such unexampled 
 and ever-accelerating rapidity. The rich have 
 undoubtedly grown richer; and, while the most 
 careful students are inclined to answer with an 
 emphatic negative the proposition that the poor 
 have grown poorer, it is nevertheless certain that 
 there has been a large absolute, though not rela- 
 tive, increase of poverty, and that the very poor 
 tend to huddle in immense masses in the cities. 
 Even though these masses are, relatively to the 
 rest of the population, smaller than they formerly 
 were, they constitute a standing menace, not 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 165 
 
 merely to our prosperity, but to our existence. 
 The improvement in the means of communication, 
 moreover, has so far immensely increased the 
 tendency of the urban population to grow at the 
 expense of the rural; and philosophers have 
 usually been inclined to regard the ultimate safety 
 of a nation as resting upon its peasantry. The 
 improvement in machinery, the very perfection 
 of scientific processes, cause great, even though 
 temporary, suffering to unskilled laborers. More- 
 over, there is a certain softness of fibre in civilized 
 nations which, if it were to prove progressive, 
 might mean the development of a cultured and 
 refined people quite unable to hold its own in 
 those conflicts through which alone any great 
 race can ultimately march to victory. There is 
 also a tendency to become fixed, and to lose 
 flexibility. Most ominous of all, there has be- 
 come evident, during the last two generations, a 
 very pronounced tendency among the most highly 
 civilized races, and among the most highly civi- 
 lized portions of all races, to lose the power of 
 multiplying, and even to decrease ; so much so as 
 to make the fears of the disciples of Malthus a 
 century ago seem rather absurd to the dweller in 
 France or New England to-day. 
 
 Mr. Adams does not believe that any individual 
 or group of individuals can influence the destiny 
 of a race for good or for evil. All of us admit that 
 
1 66 American Ideals 
 
 it is very hard by individual effort thus to make 
 any alteration in destiny ; but we do not think it 
 impossible; and Mr. Adams will have performed 
 a great service if he succeeds in fixing the eyes of 
 the men who ought to know thoroughly the prob- 
 lems set us to solve, upon the essential features 
 of these problems. I do not think his diagnosis 
 of the disease is in all respects accurate. I be- 
 lieve there is an immense amount of healthy tissue 
 as to the existence of which he is blind ; but there 
 is disease, and it is serious enough to warrant very 
 careful examination. 
 
 However, Mr. Adams is certainly in error in 
 putting the immense importance he does upon 
 the question of the expansion or contraction of 
 the currency. There is no doubt whatever that 
 a nation is profoundly affected by the character 
 of its currency; but there seems to be equally 
 little doubt that the currency is only one, and by 
 no means the most important, among a hundred 
 causes which profoundly affect it. The United 
 States has been on a gold basis and on a silver 
 basis ; it has been on a paper basis and on a basis 
 of what might be called the scraps and odds and 
 ends of the currencies of a dozen other nations; 
 but it has kept on developing along the same lines 
 no matter what its currency has been. If a 
 change of currency were so enacted as to amount 
 to dishonesty, that is, to the repudiation of debts, 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 167 
 
 it would be a very bad thing morally; or, if a 
 change took place in a manner that would tem- 
 porarily reduce the purchasing power of the wage- 
 earner, it would be a very bad thing materially; 
 but the current of the national life would not be 
 wholly diverted or arrested,— it would merely be 
 checked, even by such a radical change. The 
 forces that most profoundly shape the course of 
 a nation's life lie far deeper than the mere use of 
 gold or of silver, the mere question of the apprecia- 
 tion or depreciation of one metal when compared 
 with the other, or when compared with com- 
 modities generally. 
 
 Mr. Adams unconsciously shows this in his first 
 and extremely interesting chapter on the Romans. 
 In one part of this chapter he seems to ascribe the 
 ruin of the Roman Empire to the contraction of 
 the currency, saying, "with contraction came 
 that fall of prices which first ruined, then en- 
 slaved, and finally exterminated the native rural 
 population of Italy." This he attributes to the 
 growth of the economic or capitalistic spirit. As 
 he puts it, "the stronger type exterminated the 
 weaker, the money-lender killed out the husband- 
 man, the soldiers vanished, and the farms on 
 which they once flourished were left desolate." 
 
 But, curiously enough, Mr. Adams himself 
 shows that all this really occurred during the two 
 centuries, or thereabouts, extending from the end 
 
1 68 American Ideals 
 
 of the second Punic war through the reign of the 
 first of the Roman emperors; and this was a 
 period of currency expansion, not of currency 
 contraction. Moreover, it was emphatically a 
 period when the military and not the economic 
 type was supreme. The great Romans of the 
 first and second centuries before Christ were sol- 
 diers, not merchants or usurers, and they could 
 only be said to possess the economic instinct in- 
 cidentally, in so far as it is possessed by every 
 man of the military type who seizes the goods 
 accumulated by the man of the economic type. 
 It was during these centuries, when the military 
 type was supreme, and when prices were rising, 
 that the ruin, the enslavement, and the extermina- 
 tion of the old rural population of Italy began. 
 It was during these centuries that the husband- 
 men left the soil and became the mob of Rome, 
 clamoring for free bread and the games of the 
 amphitheatre. It was toward the close of this 
 period that the Roman army became an army 
 no longer of Roman citizens, but of barbarians 
 trained in the Roman manner ; it was toward the 
 close of this period that celibacy became so crying 
 an evil as to invoke the vain action of the legis- 
 lature, and that the Roman race lost the power of 
 self -perpetuation. What happened in the suc- 
 ceeding centuries — the period of the contraction 
 of the currency and the rise of prices — was 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 169 
 
 merely the completion of the ruin which had 
 already been practically accomplished. 
 
 These facts seem to show clearly that the ques- 
 tion of the currency had really little or nothing to 
 do with the decay of the Roman fibre. This de- 
 cay began under one set of currency conditions, 
 and continued unchanged when these conditions 
 became precisely reversed. An infinitely more 
 important cause, as Mr. Adams himself shows, 
 was the immense damage done to the Italian hus- 
 bandman by the importation of Asiatic and 
 African slaves; which was in all probability the 
 chief of the causes that conspired to ruin him. 
 He was forced into competition with races of 
 lower vitality; races tenacious of life, who pos- 
 sessed a very low standard of living, and who 
 furnished to the great slave-owner his cheap 
 labor. Mr. Adams shows that the husbandman 
 was affected, not only by the importation of vast 
 droves of slaves to compete with him in Italy, but 
 by the competition with low-class labor in Egypt 
 and elsewhere. These very points, if developed 
 with Mr. Adams's skill, would have enabled him 
 to show in a very striking manner the radical con- 
 trast between the present political and social life 
 of civilized states, and the political and social life 
 of Rome during what he calls the capitalistic or 
 closing period. At present, the minute that the 
 democracy becomes convinced that the workman 
 
ijo American Ideals 
 
 and the peasant are suffering from competition 
 with cheap labor, whether this cheap labor take 
 the form of alien immigration, or of the importa- 
 tion of goods manufactured abroad by low-class 
 working men, or of commodities produced by 
 convicts, it at once puts a stop to the competition. 
 We keep out the Chinese, very wisely; we have 
 put an end to the rivalry of convict contract 
 labor with free labor ; we are able to protect our- 
 selves, whenever necessary, by heavy import 
 duties, against the effect of too cheap labor in any 
 foreign country ; and, finally, in the Civil War, we 
 utterly destroyed the system of slavery, which 
 really was threatening the life of the free working 
 man in a way in which it cannot possibly be 
 threatened by any conceivable development of 
 the "capitalistic" spirit. 
 
 Mr. Adams possesses a very intimate knowledge 
 of finance, and there are many of his discussions on 
 this subject into which only an expert would be 
 competent to enter. Nevertheless, on certain 
 financial and economic questions, touching mat- 
 ters open to discussion by the man of merely ordi- 
 nary knowledge, his terminology is decidedly 
 vague. This is especially true when he speaks of 
 ' ' the producer. ' ' Now the producer, as portrayed 
 by the Populist stump orator or writer of political 
 and economic pamphlets, is a being with whom we 
 became quite intimate during the recent cam- 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 171 
 
 paign; but we have found it difficult to under- 
 stand at all definitely who this "producer" ac- 
 tually is. According to one school of Populistic 
 thinkers the farmer is the producer ; but according 
 to another and more radical school this is not so, 
 unless the farmer works with his hands and not his 
 head, this school limiting the application of the 
 term "producer" to the working man who does 
 the immediate manual work of production. On 
 the other hand, those who speak with scientific 
 precision must necessarily class as producers all 
 men whose work results directly or indirectly in 
 production. Under this definition, inventors and 
 men who improve the methods of transportation, 
 like railway presidents, and men who enable other 
 producers to work, such as bankers who loan 
 money wisely, are all themselves to be classed as 
 producers, and often indeed as producers of the 
 most effective kind. 
 
 The great mass of the population consists of 
 producers; and in consequence the majority of 
 the sales by producers are sales to other producers. 
 It requires one set of producers to make a market 
 for any other set of producers ; and in consequence 
 the rise or fall of prices is a good or a bad thing 
 for different bodies of producers according to the 
 different circumstances of each case. Mr. Adams 
 says that the period from the middle of the 
 twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth centuries 
 
172 American Ideals 
 
 was an interval of "almost unparalleled prosper- 
 ity," which he apparently ascribes to the expan- 
 sion of the currency, with which, he says, " went a 
 rise in prices, all producers grew rich, and for more 
 than two generations the strain of competition 
 was so relaxed that the different classes of the 
 population preyed upon each other less savagely 
 than they are wont to do in less happy times." 
 It is not exactly clear how a rise in the prices both 
 of what one producer sells another, and of what 
 he in return buys from that other, can somehow 
 make both of them rich, and relax the strain of 
 competition. Certainly in the present century, 
 competition has been just as severe in times of 
 high prices, and some of the periods of greatest 
 prosperity have coincided with the periods of 
 very low prices. There is reason to believe that 
 low prices are ultimately of great benefit to the 
 wage-earners. A rise in prices generally injures 
 them Moreover, in the century of which Mr. 
 Adams speaks, the real non-producers were the 
 great territorial feudal lords and the kings and 
 clergymen; and these were then supreme. It 
 was the period of the ferocious Albigensian cru- 
 sades. It is true that it ushered in a rather worse 
 period, — that of the struggle between England 
 and France, with its attendant peasant wars and 
 Jacqueries, and huge bands of marauding free- 
 companies. But the alteration for the worse was 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 1 73 
 
 due to a fresh outbreak of "imaginative" spirit; 
 and the first period was full of recurring plagues 
 and famines, besides the ordinary unrest, murder, 
 oppression, pillage, and general corruption. Mr. 
 Adams says that the different classes of the 
 population during that happy time "preyed upon 
 each other less savagely" than at other times. 
 All that need be said in answer is that there is not 
 now a civilized community, under no matter what 
 stress of capitalistic competition, in which the 
 different classes prey upon one another with one- 
 tenth the savagery they then showed, or in which 
 famine and disease, even leaving war out of ac- 
 count, come anywhere near causing so much 
 misery to poor people, and above all to the wage- 
 earners, or working men, the under strata and 
 base of the producing classes. 
 
 From many of the statements in Mr. Adams's 
 very interesting concluding chapter I should 
 equally differ; and yet this chapter is one which 
 is not merely interesting but soul-stirring, and it 
 contains much with which most of us would 
 heartily agree. Through the cold impartiality 
 with which he strives to work merely as a recorder 
 of facts, there break now and then flashes of pent- 
 up wrath and vehement scorn for all that is mean 
 and petty in a purely materialistic, purely capital- 
 istic, civilization. With his scorn of what is ig- 
 noble and base in our development, his impatient 
 
174 American Ideals 
 
 contempt of the deification of the stock-market, 
 the trading-counter, and the factory, all generous 
 souls must agree. When we see prominent men 
 deprecating the assertion of national honor be- 
 cause it ' ' has a bad effect upon business, ' ' or be- 
 cause it "impairs the value of securities"; when 
 we see men seriously accepting Mr. Edward 
 Atkinson's pleasant theory that patriotism is of 
 no consequence when compared with the price of 
 cotton sheeting or the capacity to undersell our 
 competitors in foreign markets, it is no wonder 
 that a man who has in him the stuff of ancestors 
 who helped to found our Government, and helped 
 to bring it safely through the Civil War, should 
 think blackly of the future. But Mr. Adams 
 should remember that there always have been 
 men of this merely huckstering type, or of other 
 types not much higher. It is not a nice thing 
 that Mr. Eliot, the president of one of the great- 
 est educational institutions of the land, should 
 reflect discredit upon the educated men of the 
 country by his attitude on the Venezuela affair, 
 carrying his desertion of American principles so 
 far as to find himself left in the lurch by the very 
 English statesman whose cause he was champion- 
 ing; but Mr. Adams, by turning to the History of 
 the administration of Madison by his brother, 
 Henry Adams, would find that Mr. Eliot had 
 plenty of intellectual ancestors among the "blue 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 1 75 
 
 lights" federalists of that day. Timothy Picker- 
 ing showed the same eager desire to stand by 
 another country to the hurt of his own country's 
 honor, and Timothy Pickering was a United 
 States Senator whose conduct was far more rep- 
 rehensible than that of any private individual 
 could be. We have advanced, not retrograded, 
 since 181 2. 
 
 This applies also to what Mr. Adams says of 
 the fall of the soldier and the rise of the usurer. 
 He quite overstates his case in asserting that in 
 Europe the soldier has lost his importance since 
 187 1, and that the administration of society since 
 then has fallen into the hands of the " economic 
 man," thereby making a change "more radical 
 than any that happened at Rome or even at By- 
 zantium." In the first place, a period of a quarter 
 of a century is altogether too short to admit of 
 such a generalization. In the next place, the 
 facts do not support this particular generaliza- 
 tion. The Germans are quite as military in type 
 as ever they were, and very much more so than 
 they were at any period during the two centuries 
 preceding Bismarck and Moltke. Nor is it true to 
 say that " the ruler of the French people has passed 
 for the first time from the martial to the moneyed 
 type." Louis XV. and Louis Philippe can hardly 
 be held to belong to any recognized martial type ; 
 and the reason of the comparative sinking of the 
 
176 American Ideals 
 
 military man in France is due not in the least to the 
 rise of his economic fellow-countryman, but to the 
 rise of the other military man in Germany. Mr. 
 Adams says that since the capitulation of Paris 
 the soldier has tended to sink more and more, 
 until he merely receives his orders from financiers 
 (which term when used by Mr. Adams includes all 
 business and working men) with his salary, with- 
 out being allowed a voice, even in the questions 
 which involve peace and war. Now this is pre- 
 cisely the position which the soldier has occupied 
 for two centuries among English-speaking races; 
 and it is during these very centuries that the 
 English-speaking race has produced its greatest 
 soldiers. Marlborough and Wellington, Nelson 
 and Farragut, Grant and Lee, exactly fill Mr. 
 Adams's definition of the position into which 
 soldiers have "sunk" ; and the United States has 
 elected as President, as it so frequently has done 
 before, a man who owes his place in politics in 
 large part to his having done gallant service as a 
 soldier, and who is in no sense a representative of 
 the moneyed type. 
 
 Again, Mr. Adams gloomily remarks that "pro- 
 ducers have become the subjects of the possessors 
 of hoarded wealth," and that among capitalists 
 the money-lenders form an aristocracy, while 
 debtors are helpless and the servants of the credit- 
 ors. All this is really quite unworthy of Mr. 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 177 
 
 Adams, or of any one above the intellectual level 
 of Mr. Bryan, Mr. Henry George, or Mr. Bellamy. 
 Any man who has had the slightest practical 
 knowledge of legislation, whether as Congress- 
 man or as State legislator, knows that nowadays 
 laws are passed much more often with a view to 
 benefiting the debtors than the creditors ; always 
 excepting that very large portion of the creditor 
 class which includes the wage-earners. " Pro- 
 ducers " — whoever they may be — are not the 
 subjects of "hoarded wealth," nor of any one nor 
 anything else. Capital is not absolute ; and it is 
 idle to compare the position of the capitalist nowa- 
 days with his position when his workmen were 
 slaves and the law-makers were his creatures. 
 The money-lender, by whom I suppose Mr. Adams 
 means the banker, is not an aristocrat as compared 
 to other capitalists, — at any rate in the United 
 States. The merchant, the manufacturer, the 
 railroad man, stand just as the banker does ; and 
 bankers vary among themselves just as any other 
 business men do. They do not form a "class" at 
 all ; any one who wishes to can go into the business ; 
 men fail and succeed in it just as in other busi- 
 nesses. As for the debtors being powerless, if Mr. 
 Adams knows any persons who have lent money 
 in Kansas or similar States they will speedily en- 
 lighten him on this subject, and will give him 
 an exact idea of the extent to which the debtor 
 
 VOL. II. — 12. 
 
178 American Ideals 
 
 is the servant of the creditor. In those States 
 the creditor— and especially the Eastern money- 
 lender or "gold-bug" — is the man who has lost 
 all his money. Mr. Adams can readily find this 
 out by the simple endeavor to persuade some 
 "money-lender," or other "Wall Street shark" to 
 go into the business of lending money on Far- 
 Western farm property. The money-lender in the 
 most civilized portions of the United States always 
 loses if the debtor is loser, or if the debtor is dis- 
 honest. Of course, there are "sharpers" among 
 bankers, as there are among producers. More- 
 over, the private, as distinguished from the cor- 
 porate, debtor borrows for comparatively short 
 periods, so that he is practically not at all affected 
 by an appreciating currency ; the rise is much too 
 small to count in the case of the individual, 
 though it may count in the long-term bonds of a 
 nation or corporation. The wage of the working 
 man rises, while interest, which is the wage of the 
 capitalist, sinks. 
 
 Mr. Adams's study of the rise of the usurer in 
 India and the ruin of the martial races is very in- 
 teresting; but it has not the slightest bearing 
 upon anything which is now happening in West- 
 ern civilization. The debtor, in America at least, 
 is amply able to take care of his own interests. 
 Our experience shows conclusively that the 
 creditors only prosper when the debtors prosper, 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 1 79 
 
 and the danger lies less in the accumulation of 
 debts than in their repudiation. Among us, the 
 communities which repudiate their debts, which 
 inveigh loudest against their creditors, and which 
 offer the poorest field for the operations of the 
 honest banker (whom they likewise always call 
 "money-lender") are precisely those which are 
 least prosperous and least self-respecting. There 
 are, of course, individuals here and there who are 
 unable to cope with the money-lender, and even 
 sections of the country where this is true; but 
 this only means that a weak or thriftless man can 
 be robbed by a sharp money-lender just as he can 
 be robbed by the sharp producer from whom he 
 buys or to whom he sells. There is, in certain 
 points, a very evident incompatibility of interest 
 between the farmer who wishes to sell his product 
 at a high rate, and the working man who wishes 
 to buy that product at a low rate ; but the success 
 of the capitalist, and especially of the banker, is 
 conditioned upon the prosperity of both working 
 man and farmer. 
 
 When Mr. Adams speaks of the change in the 
 relations of women and men he touches on the 
 vital weakness of our present civilization. If we 
 are, in truth, tending toward a point where the 
 race will cease to be able to perpetuate itself, our 
 civilization is of course a failure. No quality in 
 a race atones for the failure to produce an abun- 
 
180 American Ideals 
 
 dance of healthy children. The problem upon 
 which Mr. Adams here touches is the most serious 
 of all problems, for it lies at the root of, and in- 
 deed itself is, national life. But it is hard to ac- 
 cept seriously Mr. Adams's plea that "martial" 
 men loved their wives more than "economic" 
 men do, and showed their love by buying them. 
 Of course the only reason why a woman was 
 bought in early times was because she was looked 
 upon like any other chattel; she was "loved" 
 more than she is now only as a negro was " loved" 
 more by the negro-trader in i860 than at present. 
 The worship of women during the Middle Ages 
 was, in its practical effects, worship of a very 
 queer kind. The " economic man" of the present 
 day is beyond comparison gentler and more tender 
 and more loving to women than the "emotional 
 man" of the Middle Ages. 
 
 Mr. Adams closes with some really fine para- 
 graphs, of which the general purport is, that the 
 advent of the capitalist and the economic man, 
 and especially the advent of the usurer, mark a 
 condition of consolidation which means the begin- 
 ning of utter decay, so that our society, as a re- 
 sult of this accelerated movement away from 
 emotionalism and towards capitalism, is now in a 
 condition like that of the society of the later 
 Roman Empire. He forgets, however, that there 
 are plenty of modern states which have entirely 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 1S1 
 
 escaped the general accelerated movement of our 
 time. Spain on the one hand, and Russia on the 
 other, though alike in nothing else, are alike in 
 being entirely outside the current of modern 
 capitalistic development. Spain never suffered 
 from capitalists. She exterminated the economic 
 man in the interest of the emotional and martial 
 man. As a result she has sunk to a condition just 
 above that of Morocco — another state, by the 
 way, which still clings to the martial and emo- 
 tional type, and is entirely free from the vices of 
 capitalistic development, and from the presence 
 of the usurer, save as the usurer existed in the 
 days of Isaac of York. Soldiers and artists have 
 sunk lower in Spain than elsewhere, although 
 they have had no competition from the economic 
 man. Russia is in an entirely different position. 
 Russia is eminently emotional, and her capital- 
 ists are of the most archaic type ; but it is difficult 
 to say exactly what Russia has done for art, or in 
 what respect her soldiers are superior to other 
 soldiers ; and certainly the life of the lower classes 
 in Russia is on the average far less happy than the 
 life of the working man and farmer in any English- 
 speaking country. Evidently, as Spain and Rus- 
 sia show, national decay, or non-development may 
 have little to do with economic progress. 
 
 Mr. Adams has shown well that the progress 
 of civilization and centralization has depended 
 
1 82 American Ideals 
 
 largely upon the growing mastery of the attack 
 over the defence; but when he says that the 
 martial type necessarily decays as civilization 
 progresses, he goes beyond what he can prove. 
 The economic man in England, Holland, and the 
 United States has for several centuries proved a 
 much better fighter than the martial emotional- 
 ist of the Spanish countries. It is Spain which is 
 now decaying; not the nations with capitalists. 
 The causes which make Russia formidable are 
 connected with the extent of her territory and her 
 population, for she has certainly failed so far to 
 produce fighting men at all superior to the fight- 
 ing men of the economic civilizations. In a pent- 
 up territory she would rise less rapidly, and fall 
 more rapidly, than they would ; and her freedom 
 from centralization and capitalization would not 
 help her. Spain, which is wholly untouched by 
 modern economic growth, suffers far more than 
 any English-speaking country from maladies like 
 those of Rome in its decadence; and Rome did 
 not decay from the same causes which affect 
 modern America or Europe; while Russia owes 
 her immunity from a few of the evils that affect 
 the rest of us, to causes unconnected with her 
 backwardness in civilization, and moreover has 
 worse evils of her own to contend with. The 
 English-speaking man has, so far, out-built, out- 
 fought, and out-administered the Russian; and 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 183 
 
 he is as far as the poles away from the Roman of 
 the later Empire. 
 
 Moreover, instead of the mercenary or paid 
 police growing in relative strength, as Mr. Adams 
 says, it has everywhere shrunk during the last 
 fifty years, when compared with the mass of 
 armed farmers and wage-earners who make up a 
 modern army. The capitalist can no longer, as in 
 ages past, count upon the soldiers as being of his 
 party; he can only count upon them when they 
 are convinced that in fighting his battle they are 
 fighting their own, although under modern in- 
 dustrial conditions this is generally the case. 
 Again, Mr. Adams is in error in his facts, when he 
 thinks that producers have prospered in the 
 silver-using, as compared with the gold-using 
 countries. The wage-earner and small farmer of 
 the United States, or even of Europe, stand waist- 
 high above their brothers in Mexico and the other 
 communities that use only silver. The pros- 
 perity of the wage-earning class is more important 
 to the state than the prosperity of any other class 
 in the community, for it numbers within its ranks 
 two- thirds of the people of the community. The 
 fact that modern society rests upon the wage- 
 earner, whereas ancient society rested upon the 
 slave, is of such transcendent importance as to 
 forbid any exact comparison between the two, 
 save by way of contrast. 
 
1 84 American Ideals 
 
 While there is in modern times a decrease in 
 emotional religion, there is an immense increase in 
 practical morality. There is a decrease of the 
 martial type found among savages and the people 
 of the Middle Ages, except as it still survives in 
 the slums of great cities; but there remains a 
 martial type infinitely more efficient than any 
 that preceded it. There are great branches of 
 industry which call forth in those that follow 
 them more hardihood, manliness, and courage 
 than any industry of ancient times. The im- 
 mense masses of men connected with the railroads 
 are continually called upon to exercise qualities 
 of mind and body such as in antiquity no trade 
 and no handicraft demanded. There are, it is 
 true, influences at work to shake the vitality, 
 courage, and manliness of the race ; but there are 
 other influences which tell in exactly the opposite 
 direction ; and, whatever may come in the future, 
 hitherto the last set of influences have been 
 strongest. As yet, while men are more gentle 
 and more honest than before, it cannot be said 
 that they are less brave; and they are certainly 
 more efficient as fighters. If our population de- 
 creases ; if we lose the virile, manly qualities, and 
 sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain 
 over national honor, and subordinating everything 
 to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a 
 condition worse than that of the ancient civiliza- 
 
Law of Civilization and Decay 185 
 
 tions in the years of their decay. But at present 
 no comparison could be less apt than that of By- 
 zantium, or Rome in its later years, with a great 
 modern state where the thronging millions who 
 make up the bulk of the population are wage- 
 earners, who themselves decide their own des- 
 tinies ; a state which is able in time of need to put 
 into the field armies, composed exclusively of its 
 own citizens, more numerous than any which the 
 world has ever before seen, and with a record of 
 fighting in the immediate past with which there 
 is nothing in the annals of antiquity to compare. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 REFORM THROUGH SOCIAL WORK — SOME FORCES 
 
 THAT TELL FOR DECENCY IN 
 
 NEW YORK CITY * 
 
 ANY one who has a serious appreciation of 
 the immensely complex problems of our 
 present-day life, and of those kinds of 
 benevolent effort which for lack of a better term 
 we group under the name of philanthropy, must 
 realize the infinite diversity there is in the field of 
 social work. Each man can, of course, do best if 
 he takes up that branch of work to which his 
 tastes and his interests lead him, and the field is 
 of such large size that there is more than ample 
 room for every variety of workman. Of course 
 there are certain attributes which must be pos- 
 sessed in common by all who want to do well. 
 The worker must possess not only resolution, 
 firmness of purpose, broad charity, and great- 
 hearted sympathy, but he must also possess 
 common-sense sanity, and a wholesome aversion 
 alike to the merely sentimental and the merely 
 spectacular. The soup-kitchen style of philan- 
 
 1 Reprinted, by permission, from McC lure's Magazine, 
 Copyright, 1901, S. S. McClure Co. 
 
 186 
 
Reform Through Social Work 187 
 
 l £> 
 
 thropy is worse than useless, for in philanthropy, 
 as everywhere else in life, almost as much harm 
 is done by soft-headedness as by hard-hearted- 
 ness. The highest type of philanthropy is that 
 which springs from the feeling of brotherhood, 
 and which, therefore, rests on the self-respecting, 
 healthy basis of mutual obligation and common 
 effort. The best way to raise any one is to join 
 with him in an effort whereby both you and he 
 are raised by each helping the other. This is 
 what has been done in those factories in Cleveland, 
 Dayton, Pittsburg, and elsewhere, in which the 
 betterment of working life has been aimed at, and 
 partly achieved, through measures beneficial alike 
 to employer and employed. 
 
 Any man who takes an active part in the varied, 
 hurried, and interesting life of New York must be 
 struck, not only by the number of the forces 
 which tell for evil, but by the number of the 
 forces which tell for good. Of course most of 
 these are not, in the narrow sense of the term, 
 philanthropic forces at all ; but many of them are, 
 and among these there is the widest variety. In 
 this paper it is only possible to touch upon a very 
 few of the ways in which philanthropic work is 
 being done in New York City. It is necessary to 
 speak of individuals, because otherwise it would 
 be impossible to emphasize the widely different 
 kinds of work which can thus be done. These 
 
1 88 American Ideals 
 
 individuals are mentioned simply as typifying cer- 
 tain phases, certain methods. There are countless 
 others who could be mentioned ; it merely happens 
 that these particular men have occupied to ad- 
 vantage certain widely different parts of the great 
 field of usefulness. 
 
 Much can be done in downright charitable work, 
 and there are great fragments of our social life in 
 which the work must be in part or in whole chari- 
 table. The charity workers do an amount of good 
 which in some cases is literally inestimable. Yet, 
 on the whole, it becomes ever increasingly evi- 
 dent that the largest opportunity for work along 
 the lines of social and civic betterment lie with 
 the independent classes of the community— the 
 classes which have not yielded to the many kinds 
 of downward pressure always so strong in city 
 life. Sometimes this work may take the form of 
 an organized effort to secure greater equality of 
 opportunity. Sometimes the best way to work 
 is the oldest and simplest ; that is, by trying the 
 effect of character upon character. 
 
 Political and social conditions are often closely 
 interwoven, and always tend to act and react upon 
 one another. It is impossible to have a high 
 standard of political life in a community sunk in 
 sodden misery and ignorance ; and where there is 
 industrial well-being there is at least a chance of 
 its going hand in hand with the moral and intel- 
 
Reform Through Social Work 189 
 
 lectual uplifting, which will secure cleanliness and 
 efficiency in the public service. Politics have 
 been entered by a good many different doors, but 
 in New York City Mr. F. Norton Goddard is prob- 
 ably the only man who ever entered on the career 
 of a district leader by the door of philanthropy. 
 Mr. Goddard, feeling he ought to do something 
 serious in life, chose a quarter on the East Side for 
 his experiment, and he entered upon it without 
 the slightest thought of going into politics, simply 
 taking a room in a tenement house with the idea 
 of testing his own capacities and to find out if he 
 was fit to do what has grown to be known as 
 "settlement work." He speedily became very 
 much interested in the men with whom he was 
 thrown in contact, and also became convinced 
 that he personally could do most by acting, not 
 in connection with others, but for his own hand. 
 After a few weeks he joined a small club which 
 met at first in a single room. From this one room 
 sprang in the course of a couple of years the Civic 
 Club at 243 East Thirty-fourth Street, than which 
 there exists in all New York no healthier centre 
 of energetic social and political effort. Very 
 speedily Mr. Goddard found himself brought into 
 hostile and embarrassing contact with that huge 
 and highly organized system of corruption, tem- 
 pered with what may be called malevolent charity, 
 which we know as Tammany. Every foe of 
 
190 American Ideals 
 
 decency, from, the policy player to the protected 
 proprietor of a law-breaking saloon, had some 
 connection with Tammany, and every move in 
 any direction resulted in contact of some sort 
 with a man or institution under Tammany's con- 
 trol. Mr. Goddard soon realized that organiza- 
 tion must be met by organization; and, being a 
 thoroughly practical man, he started in to or- 
 ganize the decent forces in such fashion as would 
 enable him to check organized indecency. He 
 made up his mind that the Republican party or- 
 ganization offered the best chance for the achieve- 
 ment of his object. As it then was, however, the 
 Republican organization of the district in ques- 
 tion served but little purpose save to deliver dele- 
 gates in conventions, and was under the control 
 of men who, although some degrees above the 
 Tammany leaders, had no conception of running 
 things on the plane which Goddard deemed neces- 
 sary. There were three courses open to him : He 
 could acquiesce helplessly ; he could start an out- 
 side organization, in which case the chances were a 
 thousand to one that it would amount to nothing ; 
 or he could make a determined effort to control 
 for good purposes the existing Republican organi- 
 zation. He chose the latter alternative, and 
 began a serious campaign to secure his object. 
 There was at the time a fight in the Republican 
 organization between two factions, both of which 
 
Reform Through Social Work 19 1 
 
 were headed by professional politicians. Both 
 factions at the outset looked upon Goddard's 
 methods with amused contempt, expecting that 
 he would go the gait which they had seen so many 
 other young men go, where they lacked either 
 persistency or hard common-sense. But Gocl- 
 dard was a practical man. He spent his days and 
 evenings in perfecting his own organization, using 
 the Civic Club as a centre. He already had im- 
 mense influence in the district, thanks to what he 
 had done in the Civic Club, and at this, his first 
 effort, he was able to make an organization which 
 while it could not have availed against the extra- 
 ordinary drill and discipline of Tammany, was 
 able overwhelmingly to beat the far feebler ma- 
 chine of the regular Republican politicians. At 
 the primary he got more votes than both his an- 
 tagonists put together. No man outside of poli- 
 tics can realize the paralyzed astonishment with 
 which the result was viewed by the politicians in 
 every other Assembly district. Here at last was 
 a reformer whose aspirations took exceedingly 
 efficient shape as deeds; who knew what could 
 and what could not be done ; who was never con- 
 tent with less than the possible best, but who 
 never threw away that possible best because it 
 was not the ideal best ; who did not try to reform 
 the universe, but merely his own district; and 
 who understood thoroughly that though speeches 
 
19 2 American Ideals 
 
 and essays are good, downright hard work of the 
 common-sense type is infinitely better. 
 
 It is more difficult to preserve the fruits of a 
 victory than to win the victory. Mr. Goddard 
 did both. A year later, when the old-school pro- 
 fessional politicians attempted to oust him from 
 his party leadership in the district association, he 
 beat them more overwhelmingly than before ; and 
 when the Republican National Convention came 
 around he went still further afield, beat out his 
 opponents in the Congressional district, and sent 
 two delegates to Philadelphia. Nor was his suc- 
 cess confined to the primary. In both the years 
 of his leadership he has enormously increased the 
 Republican vote in his district, doing better rela- 
 tively than any other district leader in the city. 
 He does this by adopting the social methods of 
 Tammany, only using them along clean lines. 
 The Tammany leader keeps his hold by incessant 
 watchfulness over every element, and almost 
 every voter, in his district. Neither his objects 
 nor his methods are good; but he does take a 
 great deal of pains, and he is obliged to do much 
 charitable work, although it is not benevolence 
 of a healthy kind. Mr. Goddard was already, 
 through the Civic Club, doing just this kind of 
 work, on a thoroughly healthy basis. Going into 
 politics had immensely helped with the club, for 
 it had given a great common interest to all of the 
 
Reform Through Social Work 193 
 
 men. Of course Goddard could have done noth- 
 ing if he had not approached his work in a genuine 
 American spirit of entire respect for himself and 
 for those with whom and for whom he labored. 
 Any condescension, any patronizing spirit would 
 have spoiled everything. But the spirit which 
 exacts respect and yields it, which is anxious 
 always to help in a mood of simple brotherhood, 
 and which is glad to accept help in return — this 
 is the spirit which enables men of every degree of 
 wealth and of widely varying social conditions to 
 work together in heartiest good-will, and to the 
 immense benefit of all. It is thus that Mr. God- 
 dard has worked. His house is in the district and 
 he is in close touch with every one. If a man is 
 sick with pneumonia, some member of the Civic 
 Club promptly comes round to consult Goddard 
 as to what hospital he shall be taken to. If an- 
 other man is down on his luck, it is Goddard who 
 helps him along through the hard times. If a boy 
 has been wild and got into trouble and gone to 
 the penitentiary, it is Goddard who is appealed 
 to to see whether anything can be done for him. 
 The demands upon his time and patience are in- 
 numerable. The reward, it is to be supposed, 
 must come from the consciousness of doing well 
 work which is emphatically well worth doing. A 
 very shrewd politician said the other day that if 
 there were twenty such men as Goddard in twenty 
 
 VOL. II. — 13. 
 
194 American Ideals 
 
 such districts as his, New York City would be 
 saved from Tammany, and that in the process 
 the Republican machine would be made heartily 
 responsive to and representative of the best sen- 
 timent of the Republicans of the several districts. 
 The University Settlements do an enormous 
 amount of work. As has been well said, they de- 
 mand on the part of those who work in them in- 
 finitely more than the sacrifice of almsgiving, for 
 they demand a helping hand in that progress 
 which for the comfort of all must be given to all ; 
 they help people to help themselves, not only in 
 work and self-support, but in right thinking and 
 right living. It would be hard to mention any 
 form of civic effort for righteousness which has 
 not received efficient aid from Mr. James B. 
 Reynolds and his fellow-workers in the Univer- 
 sity Settlements. They have stood for the forces 
 of good in politics, in social life, in warring against 
 crime, in increasing the sum of material pleasures. 
 They work hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, 
 with those whom they seek to benefit, and they 
 themselves share in the benefit. They make 
 their house the centre for all robust agencies for 
 social betterment. They have consistently en- 
 deavored to work with, rather than merely for, 
 the community; to co-operate in honorable 
 friendship with all who are struggling upward. 
 Only those who know the appalling conditions of 
 
Reform Through Social Work 195 
 
 *& 
 
 life in the swarming tenements that surround the 
 University Settlement can appreciate what it has 
 done. It has almost inevitably gone into politics 
 now and then, and whenever it has done so has 
 exercised a thoroughly healthy influence. It has 
 offered to the people of the neighborhood educa- 
 tional and social opportunities ranging from a 
 dancing academy and musical classes, to literary 
 clubs, a library, and a children's bank— the clubs 
 being administered on the principle of self -man- 
 agement and self-government. It has diligently 
 undertaken to co-operate with all local organiza- 
 tions such as trades-unions, benefit societies, social 
 clubs, and the like, provided only that their pur- 
 poses were decent. The Settlement has always 
 desired to co-operate with independent forces 
 rather than merely to lead or direct the dependent 
 forces of society. Its work in co-operation with 
 trades-unions has been of special value both in 
 helping them where they have done good work, 
 and in endeavoring to check any tendency to evil 
 in any particular union. It has, for instance, 
 consistently labored to secure the settlement of 
 strikes by consultation or arbitration before the 
 bitterness has become so great as to prevent any 
 chance of a settlement. All this is aside from its 
 work of sociological investigation and its active 
 co-operation with those public officials, who, like 
 the late Colonel Waring, desired such aid. 
 
196 American Ideals 
 
 Healthy political endeavor should, of course, be 
 one form of social work. This truth is not recog- 
 nized as it should be. Perhaps, also, there is 
 some, though a far lesser, failure to recognize that 
 a living church organization should, more than 
 any other, be a potent force in social uplifting. 
 Churches are needed for all sorts and conditions 
 of men under every kind of circumstances; but 
 surely the largest field of usefulness is open to that 
 church in which the spirit of brotherhood is a 
 living and vital force, and not a cold formula ; in 
 which the rich and poor gather together to aid 
 one another in work for a common end. Brother 
 can best help brother, not by almsgiving, but by 
 joining with him in an intelligent and resolute 
 effort for the uplifting of all. It is towards this 
 that St. George's Church, under Dr. W. S. Rains- 
 ford, has steadily worked. The membership of 
 St. George's Church is in a great majority com- 
 posed of working people — and young working 
 people at that. It is a free church with a mem- 
 bership of over four thousand, most of the mem- 
 bers having come in by way of the Sunday-school. 
 Large sums of money are raised, not from a few 
 people, but from the many. An honest effort has 
 been made to study the conditions of life in the 
 neighborhood, and through the church to remedy 
 those which were abnormal. One of the troubles 
 on the East Side is the lack of opportunity for 
 
Reform Through Social Work 197 
 
 young people, boys and girls, to meet save where 
 the surroundings are unfavorable to virtue. In 
 St. George's Church this need is, so far as can be, 
 met by meetings — debating societies, clubs, social 
 entertainments, etc., in the large parish building. 
 Years ago the dances needed to be policed by 
 chosen ladies and gentlemen and clergymen. Now 
 the whole standard of conduct has been so raised 
 that the young people conduct their own enter- 
 tainments as they see fit. There is a large athletic 
 club and industrial school, a boys' battalion and 
 men's club; there are sewing classes, cooking 
 classes, and a gymnasium for working girls. Dr. 
 Rainsford's staff includes both men and women, 
 the former living at the top of the parish house, 
 the latter in the little deaconess-house opposite. 
 Every effort is made to keep in close touch with 
 wage -workers, and this not merely for their bene- 
 fit, but quite as much for the benefit of those who 
 are brought in touch with them. 
 
 The church is, of all places, that in which men 
 should meet on the basis of their common human- 
 ity under conditions of sympathy and mutual 
 self-respect. All must work alike in the church 
 in order to get the full benefit from it ; but it is not 
 the less true that we have a peculiar right to ex- 
 pect systematic effort from men and women of 
 education and leisure. Such people should jus- 
 tify by their work the conditions of society which 
 
198 American Ideals 
 
 have rendered possible their leisure, their educa- 
 tion, and their wealth. Money can never take 
 the place of service, and though here and there it 
 is absolutely necessary to have the paid worker, 
 yet normally he is not an adequate substitute for 
 the volunteer. 
 
 Of course St. George's Church has not solved 
 all the social problems in the immediate neighbor- 
 hood which is the field of its special effort. But 
 it has earnestly tried to solve some at least, and 
 it has achieved a very substantial measure of 
 success towards their solution. Perhaps, after 
 all, the best work done has been in connection 
 with the development of the social side of the 
 church organization. Reasonable opportunities 
 for social intercourse are an immense moral safe- 
 guard, and young people of good character and 
 steady habits should be encouraged to meet under 
 conditions which are pleasant and which also tell 
 for decency. The work of a down-town church in 
 New York City presents difficulties that are unique, 
 but it also presents opportunities that are unique. 
 In the case of St. George's Church it is only fair to 
 say that the difficulties have been overcome, and 
 the opportunities taken advantage of, to the 
 utmost. 
 
 Aside from the various kinds of work outlined 
 above, where the main element is the coming to- 
 gether of people for the purpose of helping one 
 
Reform Through Social Work 199 
 
 another to rise higher, there is, of course, a very- 
 large field for charitable work proper. For such 
 work there must be thorough organization of the 
 kind supplied, for instance, by the State Charities 
 Aid Association. Here, again, the average out- 
 sider would be simply astounded to learn of the 
 amount actually accomplished every year by the 
 association. 
 
 A peculiar and exceedingly desirable form of 
 work, originally purely charitable, although not 
 now as exclusively so, is that of the Legal Aid 
 Society, founded by Arthur von Briesen. It was 
 founded to try to remedy the colossal injustice 
 which was so often encountered by the poorest 
 and most ignorant immigrants ; it has been ex- 
 tended to shield every class, native and foreign. 
 There are always among the poor and needy thou- 
 sands of helpless individuals who are preyed upon 
 by sharpers of different degrees. If very poor, 
 they may have no means whatever of obtaining 
 redress ; and, especially if they are foreigners ig- 
 norant of the language, they may also be abso- 
 lutely ignorant as to what steps should be taken 
 in order to right the wrong that has been done 
 them. The injuries that are done may seem 
 trivial; but they are not trivial to the sufferers, 
 and the aggregate amount of misery caused is 
 enormous. The Legal Aid Society has made it 
 its business to take up these cases and secure 
 
200 American Ideals 
 
 justice. Every conceivable variety of case is at- 
 tended to. The woman who has been deserted 
 or maltreated by her husband, the poor serving- 
 maid who has been swindled out of her wages, 
 the ignorant immigrant who has fallen a victim 
 to some sharper, the man of no knowledge of our 
 language or laws who has been arrested for doing 
 something which he supposed was entirely proper 
 — all these and countless others like them apply 
 for relief, and have it granted in tens of thousands 
 of cases every year. It should be remembered 
 that the good done is not merely to the sufferers 
 themselves, it is also a good done to society, for it 
 leaves in the mind of the newcomer to our shores 
 not the rankling memory of wrong and injustice, 
 but the feeling that, after all, here in the New 
 World, where he has come to seek his fortune, 
 there are disinterested men who endeavor to see 
 that the right prevails. 
 
 Some men can do their best work in an organi- 
 zation. Some, though they occasionally work in 
 an organization, can do best by themselves. Re- 
 cently a man well qualified to pass judgment 
 alluded to Mr. Jacob A. Riis as "the most useful 
 citizen of New York." Those fellow-citizens of 
 Mr. Riis who best know his work will be most apt 
 to agree with this statement. The countless evils 
 which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institu- 
 tions, which stalk abroad in the slums, and have 
 
Reform Through Social Work 201 
 
 their permanent abode in the crowded tenement 
 houses, have met in Mr. Riis the most formidable 
 opponent ever encountered by them in New York 
 City. Many earnest men and earnest women 
 have been stirred to the depths by the want and 
 misery and foul crime which are bred in the 
 crowded blocks of tenement rookeries. These 
 men and women have planned and worked, in- 
 telligently and resolutely, to overcome the evils. 
 But to Mr. Riis was given, in addition to earnest- 
 ness and zeal, the great gift of expression, the 
 great gift of making others see what he saw and 
 feel what he felt. His book, How the Other Half 
 Lives, did really go a long way toward removing 
 the ignorance in which one half of the world of 
 New York dwelt concerning the life of the other 
 half. Moreover, Mr. Riis possessed the further 
 great advantage of having himself passed through 
 not a few of the experiences of which he had to 
 tell. Landing here, a young Danish lad, he had 
 for years gone through the hard struggle that so 
 often attends even the bravest and best when 
 they go out without money to seek their fortunes 
 in a strange and alien land. The horror of the 
 police lodging-houses struck deep in his soul, for 
 he himself had lodged in them. The brutality of 
 some of the police he had himself experienced. 
 He had been mishandled, and had seen the stray 
 dog which was his only friend killed for trying in 
 
202 American Ideals 
 
 dumb friendship to take his part. He had known 
 what it was to sleep on door-steps and go days in 
 succession without food. All these things he re- 
 membered, and his work as a reporter on the New 
 York Sun has enabled him in the exercise of his 
 profession to add to his knowledge. There are 
 certain qualities the reformer must have if he is 
 to be a real reformer and not merely a faddist; 
 for of course every reformer is in continual danger 
 of slipping into the mass of well-meaning people 
 who in their advocacy of the impracticable do 
 more harm than good. He must possess high 
 courage, disinterested desire to do good, and sane, 
 wholesome common-sense. These qualities he 
 must have, and it is furthermore much to his 
 benefit if he also possesses a sound sense of humor. 
 All four traits are possessed by Jacob Riis. No 
 rebuff, no seeming failure, has ever caused him to 
 lose faith. The memory of his own trials never 
 soured him. His keen sense of the sufferings of 
 others never clouded his judgment, never led him 
 into hysterical or sentimental excess, the pit into 
 which not a few men are drawn by the very keen- 
 ness of their sympathies; and which some other 
 men avoid, not because they are wise, but because 
 they are cold-hearted. He ever advocates mercy, 
 but he ever recognizes the need of justice. The 
 mob leader, the bomb-thrower, have no sympathy 
 from him. No man has ever insisted more on the 
 
Reform Through Social Work 203 
 
 danger which comes to the community from the 
 lawbreaker. He sets himself to kill the living 
 evil, and small is his kinship with the dreamers 
 who seek the impossible, the men who talk of re- 
 constituting the entire social order, but who do 
 not work to lighten the burden of mankind by so 
 much as a feather's weight. Every man who 
 strives, be it ever so feebly, to do good according 
 to the light that is in him, can count on the aid of 
 Jacob Riis if the chance comes. Whether the 
 man is a public official, like Colonel Waring, seek- 
 ing to raise some one branch of the city govern- 
 ment ; whether he is interested in a boys' club up 
 in the country, or in a scheme for creating small 
 parks in the city, or in an effort to better the con- 
 ditions of tenement-house life — no matter what 
 his work is, so long as his work is useful, he can 
 count on the aid of the man who perhaps more than 
 any other knows the needs of the varied people 
 who make up the great bulk of New York's popu- 
 lation. 
 
 Half a dozen men have been mentioned, each 
 only as a type of those who in the seething life of 
 the great city do, in their several ways and ac- 
 cording to their strength and varying capacities, 
 strive to do their duty to their neighbor. No 
 hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to the way 
 in which such work must be done ; but most cer- 
 tainly every man, whatever his position, should 
 
204 American Ideals 
 
 strive to do it in some way and to some degree. 
 If he strives earnestly he will benefit himself prob- 
 ably quite as much as he benefits others, and he 
 will inevitably learn a great deal. At first it may 
 be an effort to him to cast off certain rigid con- 
 ventions, but real work of any kind is a great 
 educator, and soon helps any man to single out 
 the important from the unimportant. If such a 
 worker has the right stuff in him he soon grows to 
 accept without effort each man on his worth as a 
 man, and to disregard his means, and what is 
 called his social position; to care little whether 
 he is a Catholic or Protestant, a Jew or a Gentile; 
 to be utterly indifferent whether he was born here 
 or in Ireland, in Germany or in Scandinavia ; pro- 
 vided only that he has in him the spirit of sturdy 
 common-sense and the resolute purpose to strive 
 after the light as it is given him to see the light. 
 
 END OF VOLUME II. 
 

SEP 1 1903 
 
 
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