THE FUTURE IN
AMERICA

AN ADDRESS BY
JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D.
BEFORE
THE WASHINGTON ASSOCIATION
OF NEW JERSEY
With Greeting bv* WILLARD W. CUTLER, Vice-President,
and Proceedings in the Celebration
AT WASHINGTON'S HEADQUARTERS
IN MORRISTOWN, N. J.
ON FEBRUARY 22, 1923

4_

ADDRESSES
Before the Members of the
Washington Association of New Jerseu
At Headquarters, Morristown, N. J.
FEBRUARY 22, 1923

In the absence of the President the meeting was called to
order by Willard W. Cutler, Vice-President of the Association.
After the singing of the National Anthem, "America,"
Mr. Cutler said:
MEMBERS OF THE WASHINGTON ASSOCIATION AND
GUESTS:
There was a young professor who was invited to make a
speech before a woman's club; he was an authority on the
subject which had been assigned him, but he was not in the
habit of making a speech before an audience composed
entirely of women. He felt it was his duty to compliment his
audience and so he began his address something as follows.
"I have traveled over this country and through other lands;
I have met many people; but I want to say to this audience
that in all my travels I have never seen in any place that I
have visited so many beautiful, intelligent and refined women
as I have met in your city, — the present company, of course,
excepted." I bid you, in behalf of the Association and its President,
a hearty welcome. Your President is in the sunny South, but
he has not forgotten you, for I received a letter from him only

a day or two ago in which he asked me to remember him to
the members of this Association when gathered here today.
Your Trustees welcome you, and give you a warm welcome,
although a few days ago there was some doubt about the
warmth of that welcome, if we were to gauge it by the
temperature which might be in this room.
Fortunately, we have managed so far to get enough coal
to keep the main building comfortable, so that visitors might
at all times come and see the various relics as well as the other
things that are on exhibition.
But, even if it was a cold room in which we had to meet,
still you know that your welcome would have been cordial and
hearty, for this is your meeting, and the Trustees simply
carry out your wishes in making the arrangements.
You know, it is said that history repeats itself, and I
haven't any doubt that when George Washington, in the winter
of 1779 and 1780, occupied the Ford dwelling as his head
quarters, they lacked coal. They had an open fireplace. You
go up there today, in the kitchen, and you will see the same
old fireplace that Washington had when he was staying there
during that winter.
It is said that an open fireplace with a roaring fire, burn
ing logs, is very comfortable, but most of the heat goes up the
chimney with the smoke, and when a person is seated before
it, his face is scorched and baked, while the cold chills play
hide and seek up and down his back. So Washington did not
have the greatest amount of comfort when he was here in
Morristown, and his soldiers were a great deal worse off than
he, because out on the Wick farm and the surrounding country
they had only log huts with crude stone fireplaces to protect
them from the cold blasts of winter, and oftentimes, when
they arose in the morning, they would have to shake from
their clothes the snow which had sifted through the cracks
between the logs during the night, and then had to go to the
brook and break the ice to get water.
They had no easy time, and they were doing all that for
love of country. They never heard of Doctor Coue, and could
not get rid of their discomfort by saying, "Day by day,, in
4

every way, we are growing warmer and warmer."
We are here to celebrate the birthday of General Wash
ington, and we give thanks every year and at all times, that
God raised up a man of his ability to be the Father of this
great nation of ours, and we give thanks, too, because the
members of the Washington Association in the past and those
of today emulate his example with their love of liberty and
their love of right; and we here today must realize that it
depends upon us what we hand down to future generations.
We cannot shirk our responsibility if we expect the gov
ernment to live in the future.
It depends upon us to do our part here today while we
are the active men of the country.
You know, it is very easy to give advice, but it is not
always taken in the way it is intended. There was a colored
boy who had been arrested three times for stealing chickens.
When he was brought up before the police magistrate for the
third time, the magistrate hardly knew what to do with him;
it would not do to send this small boy to jail; still, he was
continually stealing chickens, and the magistrate turned to
the boy's father and said, "Sam, why don't you show him how
to act so he won't come here any more?" Sam looked at the
Judge and said: "I sure done that, Mr. Judge; I sure done
that ; but he don't take my advice, and every time he takes the
chickens, he gets ketched."
Now, I am sure you have had a good time in the other
room, but the best part is still to follow. We have with us
today a gentleman known to some of you personally, to others
by reputation, and it gives me great pleasure to introduce to
you as the speaker of the afternoon, Rev. Joseph Fort Newton,
who will speak on "The Future in America." (Applause.)

ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D.
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen : Lord Charnwood recently
said that the story of America, if told with insight and
imagination, is one of y the great epics of the world. It is
indeed true. There is no romance in fairyland more thrilling
than the story of the discovery, the conquest and the develop
ment of this continent. For America is not a new England;
it is not a new Europe; it is a new world where, please God,
great ideals which for centuries have struggled for expression
are to be worked out and organized in human society. Never
since time began has there been such a flowing together of
peoples, such a blending of bloods, as in the history of
America. For our Republic is a fraternal symposium, and
while it is true that one race gave form and impress toi its
ideals and institutions, none the less peoples of many races
have had part in its making. The Pilgrims and the Puritans
in New England, the sturdy old Dutch in New Amsterdam,
the blessed Quakers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the
men of the Old Dominion, and the Carolinas, — this thin,
wavering line along our Atlantic seacoast laid the foundations
of our national history. Others came later, each race bring
ing something unique, particular and precious, making a con
tribution to the commonwealth. The Irish brought their wit
and humor and charm. The German people, following suc
cessive revolutions in the Fatherland, came to add their thrift,
their efficiency, their music. Still later, other peoples gave a
touch all their own to this vast symphony which we call the
history of America. From that early, wavering line they
began their grand march westward over mountain and prairie
and desert, as their fathers had crossed the sea, subduing
wild nature and wilder human nature, until today, if by some
art, poised in the air, we could see the whole American scene,
its cities shining in the sunlight, its parklike farms, its rivers

ADDRESS OP JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D. 7
like threads of silver, its railways like great shuttles in a
loom ; if we could see the whole picture, what a vision it would
be of the last great hope of the human race.
Surely, he is a poor patriot, and no poet at all, who can
think of America and recall in his heart a rosary of its
history, and not feel in that history the touch of the hand of
God. Again and again, in dark hours, unaccountably things
have turned for the best, and a crisis has become an hour of
creative advance. The daring stroke of Washington at
Trenton, when the hopes of his compatriots were at a low
ebb, was not an accident. The death of Jackson in the Valley
of the Rappahannock, the arrival at the critical moment of the
Monitor in the waters of Hampton Roads, were not accidents.
It was written in the will of God that America should not only
be free, but one and indivisible forever. By the same token,
in every hour of mortal need in our history, there has arisen,
nearly always from some unexpected quarter, a man to match
that hour and master it.
After all, Carlyle was right when he said that history is
best told as a series of biographies, for it is in great char
acters, in great personalities, that the innumerable forces that
make history find incarnation and embodiment. And as we
look back for a moment over our national annals, there are
three figures that stand out supremely great, each in his own
distinction and power, unique and memorable, as perhaps the
most perfect and lasting incarnations of the mighty and
tender genius of America. It is in the memory of the first
of those figures that we are assembled. The War of the
Revolution was the birth hour of our nation, as the Civil War
was its wild and stormy time of adolescence, following which
there was, so to speak, a new awareness of our manhood, a
discovery of our power, our influence, obligation and oppor
tunity. For the moment, then, I am thinking of American history
in three periods, each period finding expression in a supremely
great, fascinating personality. Let us think of the first two
together, Washington and Lincoln. They had so much in
common. Both were sons of the out-of-doors, born in the

8 ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D.
days of the pioneers, one in the front yard and the other in
the back yard of our country. Two very tall men; Washing
ton a little more symmetrically fashioned; Lincoln, slender,
awkward, homely. Washington early lost the chief factor
in his life, his father. Lincoln, while yet a child, lost the
sweetest shaping influence of his career, his mother. They
were not men highly educated, if we measure education by
the schools, but men whom God had educated in the great
university of life; men of practical cast of mind, wise with the
wisdom of the country-side, familiar with the homely
realities of life. Lincoln, it is true, is nearer to us with that
appealing, divine pathos that was in his heart. Washington,
a little farther away, where the features of his face are a
little less distinct, and made even more indistinct, unfortun
ately, by paintings which iron every human wrinkle out of
his face, and remove the flush of human passion and the
warmth of human heart beats. Still, we think of them to
gether on the distant slope of fame, and if America had pro
duced nothing else but these two towering, outstanding
personalities, its history would not have been in vain. These
two we have given to the world, worthy to stand alongside
the mighty spirits of the ancient world. (Applause).
After the Civil War, with its blood and fire and tears, in
which my fathers fought your fathers, drdwing their swords
and throwing their scabbards away, and settling the issue that
had been left unsettled by the fathers of the Republic; after
that terrible ordeal when brother fought brother, when lines
of blue and gray had swept to and fro for four terrible years ;
there followed a period of incredible development, growth,
expansion, with the revelation of a national vitality and a
national unity that we had not known hitherto. For before
the Civil War, we were little more than a loose federation of
states. The Constitution was a kind of voluntary compact
from which, it was held, any state might withdraw at will,
and the question of secession would come up, first in one part
of the country, and then in another; but in the Gethsemane
of our history, in its hour of sacrifice and crucifixion, the
Republic was welded together and there emerged that spir-

ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D. 9
itual entity that we call a nation; that awareness of unity and
identity and origin of purpose and destiny which has never
been shaken since and will never be shaken again. And it
was well along in that period that there appeared suddenly
a most picturesque, daring, unpredictable and fascinating
personality, Theodore Roosevelt. (Applause). He was the
incarnation of a new America, in his personal history uniting
the old and the new, andv he became a mighty preacher of
righteousness, a great voice in behalf of the old moral idealism
that is the grandest tradition in American history. And what
a personality! John Morley said he was a blend of Saint
Vitus and the ten commandments. (Laughter). What in
credible vitality, what amazing vivacity, what astonishing
versatility! There is a line in one of the books of H. G. Wells
describing Roosevelt, just one line, — "the friendly, peering
snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes." It
is nothing short of perfect; just one stroke, a twist of the
wrist, and the picture lives. He said of himself that he was
"a mediocre intellect highly energized." While we do not
agree with that estimate of his intellect, no one will doubt the
energy, or the lovableness, of the man. And yet, with all the
effervescence of his temperament, when he was called upon to
act, he worked with a swift sagacity and a fine finish in his
stroke. One of the master workmen of our history, who
became a legend while yet he lived amongst us, it was well
that death came when he was asleep; otherwise, there would
have been a fight. These three men, Washington, Lincoln and
Roosevelt, tell the story of our history.
What of the future in America? In the time of rancor
and reaction following, inevitably, the World War, when the
whole foundation of civilization seemed to be cracked if not
shattered, in an hour of disillusionment, often of cynicism, we
have had time to think, to wonder and pray; and there has
been in our hearts, often when we were unwilling to admit it
to ourselves, something akin to a sense of dismay with regard
to the future of civilization. It is significant that two of the
best friends that America has ever had, two of its most intel
ligent and sympathetic friends, shared with us this wonder

10 ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D.
about the future in America. The first was James Bryce, —
Lord Bryce as they call him on the other side, among other
titles — the greatest ambassador that the Old World has ever
sent to the New World, a man whose death was a bereavement
to civilization. Bryce helped America to understand itself.
He was an interpreter of America to America. No one can
forget the last stately pages of his monumental book, "The
American Commonwealth," as he looks forward; nor can you
forget the preface to his later book entitled "Modern Demo
cracies," when he surveys the whole democratic society the
world over. While refusing to yield to the pessimism of
experience, still he has a question mark in his heart as to the
future of the democratic idea. What will America be like,
he asks, when the industrialization that we are familiar with
here in the east has been extended over the whole country?
When there are not one hundred millions of people, but five or
six or eight hundred millions of people under our flag, will our
institutions, as we now know them, be equal to the strain, the
stupendous strain of such populations, of the problems in
evitably growing out of an increasingly intricate human
organization? He asks, quoting the old Greek maxim, "If
water chokes, what can you drink to stop the choking?" If
democracy fails, what then?
The other friend is H. G. Wells, great journalist, more a
scientist than a humanist, a man whose singular genius can
whisk things out of the air, and articulate what men and
women are thinking even before they have formulated their
own thoughts; a man with a great love for America. Several
years ago he came for the first time to visit us and left a
record of his impressions and observations in a very radiant
book entitled, "The Future in America." No sooner had he
landed on our shores than he felt the power of America, the
power of youth, the enthusiasm of youth, and he said, "These
people can do anything." He went to and fro in the human
laboratory, the social marvel, the incredible scramble of
humanity that we call New York; he went into old New
England and saw the places where the Puritans used to live
filling up with other races from the south of Europe. Unlike

ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D. 11
many Britishers, he took his life in his hands and went as far
west as Chicago, out among the natives, then down to the
great black belts of the south, into old Virginia; and the
farther he went, the more the wonder grew in his heart. Can
America assimilate all these innumerable elements and digest
them and realize its dream? When he was here last, he went
to Ellis Island, stood and watched the inpouring tide, not then
so high as it had been in former years, and he had the same
wonder in his heart as to whether America, if it continues to
admit all these multitudes, can remain the America that
Washington knew. America will change them, but will not
they imperceptibly change America, and make it something
other and something different from what it was intended to
be? So these two gracious and wise and intelligent friends of
America have had this same question in their hearts about
what the future in America is to be.
Let us quite informally, as man to man, think for a
moment of the future of our Republic; and if we do I think
we shall agree that the thing that has made America great
in the past will make it still greater in the future. The unique
thing which sets America apart from all other human experi
ments, is a spirit, a genius, a point of view, almost a gospel,
which we feel and love and cherish in our hearts, and which
has found expression in our government.
Sometime ago the very able editor of the "London
Spectator" wrote an article about America in which he asked,
"What is the secret of the Ajnerican greatness? What is
America?" The secret is not in its geography. Although it
is a country of fabulous resources, the secret is not altogether
in the insight and enterprise of its people, because other people
have a like enterprise. "The thing that has made America
great," he said, "is its form of government, which unites in
dividual initiative with a sense of communal responsibility
and obedience to law." Our form of government, which grew
up out of our experience as a people, has been modified and
altered and developed according to our experience, not by
theorists or wild doctrinarians, but by practical men. This
form of government we refuse to change at the behest of

12 ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D.D.
Karl Marx, or any other wild dreamer of the Old World.
(Applause). Three things we must guard against if the future of
America is to be worthy of its past and realize the visions of
our poets and seers. First, we must heal ourselves and our
children of racial rancor. Here in the east, in these vast
encampments like Boston and New York, we feel that rancor
as an undertone of our life every day, everywhere. We are
never away from it. It is the most terrible thing upon the
earth today — racial rancor. It has in it the seeds of unn.im-
able wars; it has in it the seeds which, if they come to flower,
will destroy the fair humanities that have been developed in
the past. America must know nothing of the Saxon race,
nothing of the Teutonic race, nothing of the Slavic race; it
must know only the human race. (Applause). It is the very
genius of America that a man shall be estimated and valued,
not by his antecedents, but by his own worth as a man.
One of the great achievements of our fathers was that
they destroyed the old caste system which makes a three-story
society such as you see in England. Of the three great words
that rang through the world, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,
America selected Equality as its keynote. Now, this is a
matter, this racial rancor, that is very! close to all of us all
the time — rancor against the yellow man in the west; against
the black man in the south; against myriad races that pour
in upon us in the east. It is a thing slithered with blood.
The story of it fills you with horror when you think of what
it has done in the past, and America, pray God, is to reverse
that awful cycle that wheeled through the past. It has to do
something different. We do not want to repeat on a gigantic
scale the blunders of the Old World. We want to do some
thing better, something nobler.
Once over the tea cups I discussed this matter with Mr.
Lloyd George, the Prime Minister. I had gone to preach in
his little Welsh Baptist Church up off Oxford Street in
London, of whcih he is a deacon, and a good deacon too, and
it was according to the fitness of things that the visiting
minister should go to tea with the deacon. So I found myself

ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D. 1.1
in a very simple and democratic and charming home at No.
10 Downing Street, where I was given such a cordial welcome
by the wife of the Prime Minister. And while the tea was
being brought in, I fell to expressing regret that America had
nothing corresponding to the sacred tea time in England, at
four o'clock in the afternoon, when everything is adjourned,
and people indulge in the chit-chat which adds so much to the
charm of life. The Prime Minister said nothing, but smoked
his cigarette,. listening to my harangue. There was a sparkle
in his big blue eye, and when he got a chance, he said, "But
remember, we offered you tea once, and you wouldn't take it."
(Applause). Then, over the tea cups, we fell to talking about
the future in America. I was astonished at his knowledge
of America. I was delighted with his admiration and love of
America, his enthusiasm for it. But he expressed a wonder
how we could assimilate so many different races, and he
wanted to know what the future American would look like.
He had been watching our soldiers march through London,
fine, upstanding fellows, the cleanest army that ever marched
on earth. (Applause). He had studied the typical cast of
face in the American army, and then he asked, "What kind of
a face will be typical of America in the years to come when
you have assimilated all these different races? What will an
American look like?" Really, I had never thought of the
matter in all my life ; but that is a valid question.
Gentlemen, there is room enough in America for every
thing except hatred. (Applause). Only love can American
ize men and women. Americanism is not a formula; it is a
friendship. And the peoples whom we admit through the
gates of America must not be foreigners; they must be
friends. Our ungracious indifference herds them into quarters
and colonies. It will be a separating influence, making us
clannish, making them clannish, and we can never have the
greater America in that way. Here, on a continent unencum
bered by old institutions, God has brought world-end peoples
together, of every race, of every color, to show that humanity
is one, that it can live together in freedom, in equality, in
fraternity, in mutual respect and good will. (Applause).

14 ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D.
Jerusalem was the city of faith; Athens the city of
philosophy; Rome the city of law; London the city of liberty;
New York is the city of fraternity. (Applause). By the
same token, by the very genius of our history, and wise fore
sight of our fathers, as we must rid ourselves of racial rancor.
So we must haye no religious bigotry in America. That, too,
is a terrible thing, the history of which has blotted the human
story with blood and tears and tragedy. The founding of our
Republic under President Washington was the opening of a
new era in this most difficult and delicate of all matters. The
first four centuries of our era was a fight between religion and
the empire, the Roman empire. Then the Christian Church
was made the state religion of the empire. That was the
second period, which continued for many centuries, uniting
church and state, which had both its advantages and its dis
advantages. But with the founding of America there came
another era separating church and state, but giving free play
and toleration to all elevating and benign religions. (Ap
plause). Gentlemen, we do not want anybody to Ulsterize the
United States, (applause) and repeat in the streets of our
cities the tragedies that have terrified the streets of the goodly
cities of Belfast and Dublin. Toleration is not enough. We
want sympathy, insight, understanding, brotherhood. Here
is a matter, too, that is everywhere with us; we feel it as a
friction in our national life. There are two sayings of William
Penn that are often in my heart. The first is this: "A man
who is furious about religion is irreligiously religious," which,
bemg interpreted, means that people who fight about their
religion have not enough to fight about. The other saying,
so beloved of Lincoln, was "that all just men, all devout men,
all righteous men, are everywhere of one religion, and when
death hath taken off their masks, they will know each other."
Why wait for death to take off the masks? It was the whole
purpose of America, its spirit and its genius of fraternity,
that these masks should be removed. For that reason, our
religion should be a part of our patriotism, and our patriotism
should be a religion. Once I heard James Bryce say that

ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D. D. 15
patriotism in America is a religion. It ought to be a religion.
It ought to have the depth, the warmth, the color, the rich
ness of religion, which will make our life sacramental, and
make the obligations of citizenship as sacred as the hour of
prayer. Have you thought that only about half of our citizens
who are qualified to vote ever vote on any issue at all? It is
incredible, Mr. Chairman. How can we have "government of
the people, by the people and for the people" if they are too
indifferent to perform the fundamental duties of citizenship?
The third thing that will make the future in America
worthy of its past, bringing in a new era in the long troubled
and tragic story of mankind, is the cultivation of a spiritual
quality in our national life. We have had one panacea after
another in the last hundred years, each leaving us disillusioned
and dismayed. Liberty was a word of magic. Men thought
that at last they had found the key that would open the gates
into Paradise. Make men free; that is all that is needed; but
freedom often became license, often enough it ran wild and
forgot obligation. Then came another word of magic,
democracy. Let the state be the people; then all is secure.
But none of us have the same feeling towards democracy as a
talisman that we used to have. Democracy alone, democracy
without moral idealism, without the spiritual quality, will be
a plague and a terror in the earth.
Today the magic word is science. Science is the high
priest of humanity in our generation, having an august and
terrifying authority. According to my friend Wells, with
whom I have had so many gorgeous quarrels about theology,
if we can just organize our modern life upon the basis of
science, then all will be well in the future. That is his recom
mendation for the future in America, that we must learn to
reconcile the law of things and the law of men, not to treat
men as if they were things, and not to treat things as if they
were men. But we are not so sure about salvation by science.
Science puts a measureless power in our hands, but it does not
create the high motive that will use that power for beneficent
things. Always, in the end, we must come back to the spir-

16 ADDRESS OF JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D.D.
itual quality. Let me read these words from a wise philoso
pher who edits a journal called "Life," whose business it is to
shoot folly on the fly ; these words :
"What is the spiritual quality? It is not piety in the
common sense of it; it is not necessarily religiousness; but
though it may be consistent with any kind of religion I do not
understand how it can be consistent with none. It is con
sistent with money getting and with indifference to money;
with ambition and with modesty ; with great powers and lesser
ones but hardly with stupidity, for it is itself a quality of
intelligence. Let us call it a grasp of certain great truths,
the knowledge of which is revealed to some babes and denied
to some learned ; which comes more by conduct than by study,
and more, perhaps, by breeding and the grace of God than
either. Lincoln had it. Emerson had it. McKinley had it,
and the shrewd Hanna recognized it. Able men lacking or
losing this quality cease to be able to inspire and fail of
leadership." It is this spiritual quality, a fine clear flame of spiritual
insight that can discriminate among the values of life, that
can adjudicate between differences of taste, this thing that
you feel in Washington, that still trembles in the words of
Lincoln which march up and down in our hearts, in the moral
enthusiasm of Roosevelt ; this quality, and this alone, can give
fineness and distinction, creative power and prophecy to the
future in America that will make- it greater than the past.
Oh, America is young as the lives of nations go. Its
faults are the faults of youth, but it has the power of youth.
May its golden age be long in coming, for the golden age is
always the sunset; but if we keep alive in our hearts the moral
idealism of the past and cherish and make prevail the spiritual
quality in our national life, then the future of America will be
worth the past of all the race. I thank you. (Applause).

'185