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UNIV
MICH
OF
Fratemolly,
Thomor Dixon Jr.
DIXON'S SERMONS.
DELIVERED IN THE GRAND OPERA HOUSE,
NEW YORK, 1898-1899.
BY
THOMAS DIXON Jr.
.....
A sy
NEW YORK:
F. L. BUSSEY & CO.,
225-227 Eighth Ave.
Libr
Bandhang
10-9-42
46378
Index to Dixon's Sermons,
The Battle Cry of Freedom
The Anglo-Saxon Alliance
The Victory of Manila
The Agony of Waiting
Traitors at Washington
The Mightiest Navy in the World
The Nation's Call the Voice of God
The New Fourth of July
Messages From Santiago
The New Thanksgiving Day
The Philippines-Can We Retreat
Roosevelt, the Heroic Leader
Alger, and Why He Should Resign
McKinley as War President
The Destiny of America
The Bulwarks of the Nation
Kitchener and Dewey
A Letter From Santiago
Roosevelt's Personality
What is Sin
The Larger Church
Does Death End All
A Friendly Warning to the Negro
Ingersollian Wind
Divorce
Col. Ingersoll's Mistakes
Dr. Potter and the Saloon
Resignation
<
1
·
Some Fundamentals
Marriage and Divorce The Ideal of the Family
Travesties of Marriage
}
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THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM.
"The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath sent me to pro-
claim release to the captives, to set at liberty them that are bruised." A
nation has caught these words from the lips of Jesus Christ and gone
forth upon its divine mission. During the past three years of Cuba's
struggle, there has been among us many differences of opinion. Party
divisions have been sharply and bitterly drawn.-To-day, sword in
hand, face to face with the barbarism and tyranny of Spain, we are
one people. There are but two classes of people in America since
April, Twenty-first-Patriots and Traitors. We may differ about
tariff, currency, religion and philosophy, but we all believe that liberty
is the birthright of humanity. We all agree, at last, that starvation,
brutality, oppression and anarchy at our doors shall cease.
With this glorious battle cry our nation shall go forth to war in the
name of liberty, fraternity, humanity, God, without a single selfish
purpose, with everything to lose and nothing to gain save the conscious-
ness of duty noble done. The call to this war has been simply resist-
less.
Conscience called. Louder than the roar of our commerce, with
its myriads of thundering trains and majestic steamers, spoke the still
small voice within the soul calling us to duty, right, honor and truth
however great the sacrifice. When Cuba, lying at our feet, wounded
and bleeding, starving and suffering first stretched out to us her hands
and cried for help, the stars in their courses decreed that we must
hear that cry.
We refused to allow other nations to interfere, and
made ourselves morally responsibile for this Cuban hell. To have re-
fused to hear that cry, would have been to prove false to every
principle of our government, deny duty, right and every obligation of
common humanity.
History called us. We did not achieve our own independence. The
chances are that as against the mother country, single handed and
alone we never could have won. France sent to us her army and
navy and loaned us millions of dollars, which we have never paid.
Lord Cornwallis finally surrendered to the allied armies of the United
States and France. Any man who knows the history of America, and
yet to-day in our wealth and power advocates the infamous and
cowardly doctrine of non-interference is a dastard. The meanest cur
does not forget a kindness. We owe the Latin race a debt that we
2
have never paid. This is our first opportunity to pay it in the coin of
our realm-the liberty of man.
Honor called. Nationality is a divine ordinance. God has ordained
this Republic to a great work in the evolution of human history. The
American who does not believe this, is made of poor stuff. The
battleship "Maine" that lay at her anchor in Havana harbor
had on her big prow the coat-of-arms of this nation, and the flag that
symbolizes its dignity, its majesty and honor floated above it. That battle-
ship was sunk and her sailors and officers murdered in the dead of
night by a foul conspiracy of Spanish villains. Those sailors wore our
uniforms. The deed was no blacker than would have been the
murder of the President of the United States by a Spanish officer.
The President is the commander-in-chief of our navy. Equality is a
fundamental of our Republic. The President is no more entitled to
protection than the common sailor who walks the deck of the warship.
The nation that will not protect its sailors has no right to build ships
or fly a flag. The nation that could allow its brave sailors to be
murdered by butchers and leave their bodies to be eaten by vultures
and sharks, has no future, is already dead or rotten at heart. We
have to make Spain pay the utmost demands of justice for the
Maine, or cease to exist as a Sovereign Nation. Besides the destination
of our ship was providential—God used Spanish means to work their
own death. Selfish men in high places were crying at that time that
we could compromise everything. They told us in honeyed accents
that diplomacy, the art of lying, would settle the Cuban problem.
They told us in fact, that we were nearing a solution already, and that
the suffering and anarchy on that Island did not concern us. But the
explosion of a Spanish mine beneath our ship was God Almighty's
answer to these descendants of Cain. The roar of that explosion was
God's summons to this nation to its solemn duty, lest we should mis-
take the murderers cry-" Am I my brother's keeper?" for the voice
of patriotism.
Humanity, Liberty, Justice and Brotherhood, in united chorus
called us.
No braver, kindlier, gentler people live in America than
the native Cuban. These people have been forced by incredible cor-
ruption and tyranny to fight for their lives. Their inhuman oppressors
despairing of conquering, determined to exterminate the race. They
eclipsed the black infamy of Spain's history in the Dark Ages. They
have actually starved to death three hundred thousand women and
children, besides the hosts shot and cut to pieces. A recent visitor
to a Cuban town said in New York last week, that he saw a Spanish
officer draw his sword, cut off the head of a Cuban child and kick it as a
football across the street. Could America longer witness these orgies
of hell and repeat parrot-like the words of our great fathers "We hold
3
it to be self-evident that all men are born free and equal, and are en-
titled to life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Every instinct
of humanity, justice, liberty and fraternity demanded that we should
interfere and abate this nuisance.
Therefore the decree of a mighty people as the voice of God, has
declared that the Spanish flag shall come down from every inch of
blood-soaked soil on the Western Hemisphere.
Tremendous influences have been used to obscure the issue and
compromise our duty and honor in this crisis. Greed, organized
and personal, has cried peace, peace at any price! Every trick
of the money grubber, every influence of materialism has been
used with desperate earnestness to corrupt the press, the people
and their represntatives in the interest of an infamous peace that
might be purchased at the price of prostituted honor and betrayed
trusts. Every instinct of cowardice has been appealed to in
frantic terms. Men high in position of Church and State have appealed
with all their prestige and power to the lowest and vilest selfishness,
ridiculing honor, duty, liberty and humanity as poetic vagaries. The
bitterest partisanship, that sets party success above country, God and
right, for a time imperiled the cause. To these jangling voices a
group of maudlin sentimentalists and she men added their piping
treble crying with watery eyes for peace-at-any-price. To the honor
of a great people, be it said, our nation has gone steadily about its
business of searching for the truth, and rescuing the weak, in the
midst of all this pusillanimous chatter.
From the beginning of the struggle the cause of Cuba has been re-
sistlesss. There has never been an hour when compromise was
possible or diplomacy could have prevented war. War was inevitable.
War is the clash of two irreconcible moral principles—one is right, the
other is wrong. All talk of what might have been done by negotiations
is mere child's twaddle. The work of Peace Societies is to prevent
war for foolish and unnecessary causes. The Peace Society that at-
tempts to compromise a great moral issue is always organized in hell.
Two great irreconcible principles have been silently and surely mov-
ing through the centuries, and finally came face to face over the dead
bodies of our murdered sailors and officers in Havana harbor. What
a host of murdered dead at last hovered over that fated harbor! With
the pale figures of the ill-fated expedition of 1852 crowded the slain
men of the Virginius, the ghosts of Maceo and Marti and Ruiz, with
the hundreds of thousands of starved women and children, till the pale
faces of the martyred dead seemed a host that melted into the clouds,
and that no man could number! No, the time for talk, diplomacy,
delay, hesitation, was past. The Twenty-first day of April, 1898, was
4
God's judgment day for Spain in Cuba. The fleet sailed. A mighty
nation moved forward to execute the will of God.
I am proud that I am an American citizen.
For the first time in modern history, a great nation has accepted the
Spirit of Jesus Christ as the motive power of life.
The old law of nations recognizes self interest as the supreme
standard of life. The law of Christ is sacrificial and redemptive love.
This nation has taken up its cross in Cuba. It has begun a holy war,
with nothing to gain, and millions of dollars and priceless blood to
lose. It is the sublimest incarntion of Christianity of this century.
The supercilious and incredulous courts of the old world sneer at
our nation. They do no understand us. They can not. The selfish
always sneer at the man who turns from self and lays his life down for
humanity. But the procession of the martyrs and moral heroes grows
mightier with each succeeding year.
Once more in history we are leading the world. Our fathers wrote
their declaration of independence amid the sneers and contempt of the
assembled wise men of the world. The world could not understand it.
But the world had to go to school and grow up to it. We wrote them
a new chapter in the science of Government. We are writing now a
new chapter in international law on the Brotherhood of man. Well,
may the brutal sneer and tyrants tremble. We are not fighting for
hatred of Spain, but for love of humanity, and pity for our enemy's
ignorance. It will be a hard and bitter lesson for Spain to learn. If
she will open her heart and receive it, she has a future-otherwise
death and oblivion await her.
When England began her course of injustice and oppression toward
her Colonies, our fathers led a triumphant rebellion and founded this
Republic. It was a bitter draught for the proud old mother-land,
but she drained it to the last black dregs. It was good for the soul.
She learned in the sorrow that followed divine wisdom. England
changed her colonial policy and thenceforth built squarely on the
principles of liberty, equality and justice. The sun does not set on her
world empire to-day. And its integrity is unassailable because built
on the principle of liberty and justice.
The sailing of that fleet against Spain was the beginning of a new
epoch in world history. It foreshadows the Federated Democracy of
the English Speaking World in the 20th Century. This Federated
Democracy will prepare the soil for the coming co-operative common-
wealth of the 21st century. It was inevitable that Great Britain should
be our friend in this crisis. Great Britain is as truly democratic as the
United States. Royalty is a social, rather than a governmental func-
5
here.
tion of the nation. The people rule in England as truly as they do
We are of the same blood. We speak the language that conquers
the world, the language of Shakespere, Milton, Byron and Tennyson,
the language of the dawning centuries. It was perfectly natural that the
Mother Country should say to the meddling plotters of the old world,
"Hands off.” Glorious old mother-land! Thy young children of the
West will not forget it! An Anglo-American Alliance is a certainty of
the near future. God has endowed the Anglo-Saxon with the supreme
genius for self-government. The growth of Great Britain and the
United States are the political miracles of the past two centuries.
Their alliance would control the destiny of the world in the great
crisis we are rapidly approaching. The work of such a federation
would be to curb tyranny, proclaim liberty, throttle assassins, succor
the oppressed, and carry the blessings of civilization to every land
and every sea.
The sailing of that fleet was the beginning of a new heroic period of
our own national life. From 1865 to 1898 the Almighty Dollar has
reigned supreme in our land. We witness now the end of the fetish-
ism of money and mere money issues. The worship of the golden
calf has ceased to be our national religion. We have broken the image
into fragments, and cast them into cannon whose stern lips shall speak
the new human creed of a mighty people, the creed of humanity,
justice, love, liberty and sacrifice.
We are in fact witnessing the birth pangs of a new giant nation.
The conception of this new nation was accomplished at Appomatox, in
1865, when General Lee surrendered to General Grant. The South
fought for the old Constitution. The South's interpretation of that
Constitution is now acknowledged to be absolutely correct.
But we
had outgrown the Constitution, and we had to write a new one in the
blood of heroes. The South fought for the principles of State Sov-
ereignty, Individualism, Local Government. The North fought for
the greater, newer principles of Nationality, Solidarity, Unity. The
South collided with the sweep of the Nineteenth Century and was
crushed.
The new Constitution proclaimed in the fall of Lee's army at
Appomatox found its first logical act of life in the order for our fleet
to sail against Spain. We have entered our new life. We have be-
come a new force in the history of the world. It is our destiny. To
falter, to hesitate, to retreat, is to prove unworthy of life. We have
become at last, one people, and with resolute step Young America
moves forward to a glorious career. We will have henceforth, be-
cause we must, an Army and Navy equal to the responsibilities of our
wealth, power and position. Within a few years, we will have 50
6
battleships, 100 cruisers and 500 torpedo craft, and our full share of all
the latest improvements in the naval progress of the world.
I am proud of the glorious young Nation. It has begun its new
career with the battle cry of heroic humanity as the ordinance of its
life. Individuals here and there have risen to the heights of dis-
interested heroism. A nation has now achieved this glory. A hun-
dred and thirty years ago a young French nobleman, with wealth and
rank as his birth-right, and a proud career assured in the councils of
his country, listened with throbbing heart to the story of the wrongs,
dreams, and struggles of the American colonies in the far-off wilder-
ness beyond the seas. He turned his back upon his stately home, his
title and his future, buckled on his sword, crossed those seas, and
laying his sword and his life at the feet of Washington, said, "When I
heard of your struggle my heart was enlisted!" We justly honor
Lafayette as one of the purest heroes of history. A nation has to-day
risen to the height of Lafayette. We have said to the Cuban people,
"Our hearts are moved with anguish and righteous wrath at your
sufferings, your wrongs, and your struggles,-let come what will,
your cause shall be our cause, we extend to you our hands, our
treasure, our hearts, and our heart's blood."
It is a glorious thing to be an American Citizen to-day.
GRAND OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK,
SUNDAY, MAY IST, 1898.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
(
THE ANGLO-SAXON ALLIANCE.
The recent utterances of men high in authority on both sides of
the Atlantic, expressing a desire for an alliance of the English speak-
ing world, is one of the most important events of modern times.
Great Britain is the richest and most powerful nation in the Old
World, as the United States is the richest and most powerful in the
New World. These two vast empires bound together by a treaty
would represent 460,000.000 of people and more than one-half the
wealth of the whole world. Their combined navy would rule the
ocean; their men and money establish the peace of the world on the
basis of civil and religious liberty.
Such an outcome of our little war with Spain would be the ful-
filment of the dreams of the great souls of our race for the past hundred
years. It would be the greatest event in the history of the evolution
of government since the Declaration of American Independence.
The present war with Spain can have as between the contestants
but one possible end, the utter defeat and ruin of Spain. Every event
since it began only confirms this inexorable decree of Fate. The
battle of Manila, in which we sunk an entire fleet and silenced three
forts without the loss of a man was but a prophecy of what is to come.
The Spaniards are a brave and undisciplined herd of sixteenth century
barbarians. When the deadly work of the war really begins on land
and open sea, they will stand up and be mowed down like sheep. Wheth-
er we lose one ship, or two, or a dozen, or a hundred, the results will be
the same.
Whether we lose a hundred men or a hundred thousand in
the struggle, the result will be the same-we will kill ten Spaniards
for every American lost; sink every ship in her navy; tear her flag
from every colony she owns; dictate our own terms of peace and
practically eliminate Spain from the world's political arena.
"The Maine wreck's rusting in Havana far away,
The iron tomb of heroes Spaniards buried in the bay,
But a phantom ship is sailing, and it signals every day,
The Maine goes sailing on! "
"That phantom ship led Dewey by Manila's fort and mine,
When Spanish balls were wasted on the ghost in battle line,
While Dewey sunk the Spaniards and their battle ships in brine,
The Maine goes sailing on!"
"That phantom ship is leading and our Navy ploughs the sea,
The Army saw her signal and it rolls the revellé-
The Maine goes sailing on!"
M
8
Behind this tragedy of ignorance and barbarism struggling in
suicidal duel with the modern giants, science, intelligence and liberty,
incarnate in the American Republic loom the misty storm clouds of a
vast world conflict. This is after all but the prelude to these greater
battles yet to come.
We are rapidly approaching a supreme crisis in modern life. It is
nothing less than the readjustment of the political map of the world.
Humbugs now masquerading as Powers will be ground to powder be-
neath the wheels of the juggernaut of remorseless, intelligent manhood
and the sweep of new world powers.
The intensification of life and the bitterness of its struggle indicate
that we are approaching tropics of civilization. The people who have
been ground to death beneath century-old tyrannies have at last begun
to think and to act. The terriffic bread riots of Italy and Spain have
a grim significance beyond the fact of an incident to war with the
bread-producing nation of the world. More than a thousand men and
women were shot to death in Italy in these riots. This is a larger
grand total of deaths than has yet occurred in our war with Spain,
counting the murdered dead of the Maine. Many of the Powers of the
Old World are rapidly approaching the hour when they must stand
before the judgment bar of a new world and give an account of their
right to live. Their downfall will involve the fate of the civilized
world. There is a profound popular conviction in the minds of the
millions who think, that a universal war is almost a certainity within
the next ten years. How can we account for this conviction except
that it is divinely prophetic of God's purposes for the future of man?
The tyrannies of the old world with their systems of op-
pression and childish ceremonialism are entering the twentieth
century armed to the teeth and animated by the most selfish, brutal
and cynical philosophy of life. Materialism is their religion; self-
interest their only acknowledged standard of politics. They profess
profound sympathy with Spain on paper, and behind the tottering
throne of the Queen Regent they are already plotting what they will
do with her Colonies after our Army and Navy have torn them from
her grasp. They are already busy speculating how they can rob us of
these fruits of our victory and enrich themselves. It will be a world
battle, when it comes, between Barbarism and Civilization, Progress
and Traditionalism, Humanity and Brutality, Liberty and Tyranny.
The wars between Japan and China, Greece and Turkey, the United
States and Spain are but the first skirmish lines of this approaching
world tragedy.
When the roar of the guns of that conflict wakes mankind, we
9
will be handling some of these guns. This world is now a whispering
gallery. The unity of man has become the most tragic, the most
terrible, and the most glorious truth revealed in this century. Our
policy of imaginary isolation has received a rude shock in this war
with Spain. The explosion of that mine beneath the Maine woke a
young giant from the deep sleep of youth to the consciousness of a
glorious manhood. The eagle can not go back to his shell. The
man can not become a child again. The policy of isolation has had its
day and its uses, as swaddling clothes serve the child. But this policy
can henceforth belong only to the past. It is already an out-grown
tradition. The guns of Admiral Dewey smashed the barriers of cen-
turies and ushered the United States into the council chambers of the
world's great powers. Diplomatically, the young giant may be yet in
his shirt sleeves, but he will find a seat at that council table or make
His manners may offend the fastidious hyprocracy of Old World
countries, but he has come to stay. When the approaching struggle
for world power becomes a tragic fact, to whom can we look for
friendly alliance? There will be but four other great powers in that
struggle, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, France.
one.
An alliance with Russia in a contest involving the life and death
of nations, policies and races is out of the question. Politically,
Russia is an unthinkable quantity to the American mind. Her gov-
ernment is the contradiction of every principle for which our fathers
fought and for which we live. She maintains with stubborn and
fatal reactionery brutality, the most crushing and absolute tyranny
outside of Turkey, Spain and Hell. No nation to whom the word
liberty has any real meaning can join hands with Russia so long as the
words Czar, Siberia and Exile retain their present meaning.
Austria is a name and Italy is but a glorious memory.
Germany under her present auspices of revived absolutism is an
incongruity for which French hatred and threatened vengeance alone
accounts. It can not possibly survive the settlement of the present
quarrel with France. The government of Germany is one hundred
years behind the growth of the German intelligence in other fields,
and with its tyrannous, absolute monarchy, a free Republic can have
no serious friendship. Commercially, Germany has already declared
war with us and we need look to her for nothing in the struggle of the
next decade for world leadership. The Emperor of Germany desires
apparently to be the dictator of the world's destiny. Dictatorships do
not harmonize with our scheme of politics or life. France ought to be
our ally if history were the index of the future. But the recent trials
of Dreyfus and Zola and the onslaughts of the French press on
America, bought as merchandise by Spanish bondholders have revealed
10
a depth of public corruption that throws a shadow over the immediate
future of France. Evidently, France is ripening for a second revolution,
in which a baptism in her own blood must come to cleanse her
for her future career. The degeneration which Nordau so terribly
portrayed with Paris as its center, seems about to begin its harvest of
madness. Instead of the Lafayette of old, with a heart to pity those
who struggle for liberty, we have reason to suspect that modern
France has sent us the steamship LAFAYETTE, loaded with men, to
man the guns of tyrants for the sake of the gold that hirlings take. It
is a painful contrast with the glory of her past. It simply means that
the work of the guillotine is not yet done in France, and we can hope
for nothing there till a government and press that really represents
her people, shall rule.
In short, it is the ultimate fate, and therefore the present duty of
Great Britain and the United States in some form to accomplish the
alliance of the English speaking world.
Our language is one. We speak the tongue of Blackstone,
Shakespere and the St. James Bible. The English language is now
the mightiest single force at work in the evolution of the human race.
It is the only language that has ever approached the universality of a
world tongue. It is possible now to travel around the world without
serious inconvenience, speaking only the English language.
The use
of the mails is the index of the progress of real civilization. The last
postal congress revealed to the world the startling fact that two-thirds
of the mail matter of the world is now addressed in the English
language. This is the legal tongue to-day of 460,000,000 people,
whose wealth is more than half the total owned by the human race.
At the present rate of relative progress this tongue will practically
complete the conquest of the world in the twenty-first century.
Our literature is one, and that the greatest yet developed by
modern civilization. Show me the books that a man reads and
cherishes and I will tell you the character of the man. We read and
love the same great books. Shakespere, Milton, Byron, Burns, Shelly
and Tennyson are household words in America as they are in Great
Britain. Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndal, Carlisle, are as mighty
forces in the brain of America a sin the Old World. American Litera-
ture is Anglo-Saxon with a merely personal accent. We read more
English books than Englishmen. What is distinctly American in our
literature has curiously enough first found worthy recognition in
Great Britain. The Old World first recognized the true genius of Poe
and Whitman our two distinct contributions to the literature of the
English language.
Our laws are one. When I began the study of law to practice in
I I
American courts, my first book was Blackstone. I devoted two years
to study of English authorities and three weeks only to the reading of
American authors. The common-law of England is the ruling law
to-day in every state of the American union except Louisiana where
a part of the French law survives. The names of the Presidents of
the United States and the present leaders of our politics, are almost
all distinctly British. When Dewey's ships spoke death to their foes.
in Manila bay the blaze of his guns flashed the names of SIR WALTER
RALEIGH and LORD BALTIMORE into the face of the Spaniard, while
the men at those terrible guns spoke the language of Nelson.
Our religion is one. Methodism came from England. The Bap-
tists came from England. The Congregationalists are the Puritans
who brought what was greatest and best from the commonwealth of
Cromwell and gave it as a birthright civil and religious to America.
The Presbyterians came from Scotland. The Episcopalians are pure
English. The Roman Catholic Church drew its real life in America
from Ireland and England, and in spite of all the hosts of adherents
from other countries this British wing of the heirarchy has conquered at
last the whole church in America, and John Ireland and Cardinal
Gibbons are the two most powerful men in this church to-day. We
two stand alone among the great nations of the world the avowed
champions of a free church and the fullest liberty of conscience.
We are of one blood. The Anglo-Saxon race has the peculiar
power of absorbing into a consistent unity all races that flow into its
life. These foreign streams disappear in the second generation and
emerge with scarcely a trace of their national origin. My great-grand-
father on one side of the house was a pure-blooded Prussian. The
blood of Scotland, Ireland and England also flows in my veins; but
from the last drop of blood that ever came from my heart, to the last
drop in my finger-tips, I am all over an Anglo-Saxon. I count myself
• an average American in feelings, character and purposes.
-
Our interests and ideals as nations are one. And this is by far
the most important bond that binds us. Sometimes people who speak
the same tongue, belong to the same church and are born of the same
blood, quarrel the most bitterly and persistently. The quarrels of
Great Britain and the United States have all been on the surface.
They have simply been the quarrels of an over-grown boy at the
tyrannous exactions and manners of a strong-tempered, well-meaning
mother, who sometimes made grevious blunders with her power. The
boy rebelled, left his mother and grew to a majestic manhood, and now
in sober second thought begins to recall in how many ways he is really
like his mother. Their reconcilliation with mutual confessions is sure.
It cannot be on the old basis. The man cannot become a child. But
their re-union will be none the less real and lasting.
I2
Great Britain stands for progress and public enlightenment as the
bulwarks of a nation's power. So does America. She stands for civil
and religious liberty. So do we. The haunted exile, fleeing from the
yawning prisons of the Old World's putrid politics, has only to reach
London or New York to be safe from the strongest mailed hand of
medieval tyranny that still rules. In the early history of man there
were pioneers of humanity who built in the vast deserts of crime,
oppression and cruelty, the ancient Cities of Refuge. The victim of
private, tribal or racial vengeance had but to fall panting within its
walls to be safe for life. Every city built in Great Britain or the
United States is a city of refuge for the oppressed of every kindred,
race and tongue on this earth, and the arm of no political tyrant is
strong enough to reach within and take the exile.
Our commercial ideal is the same. England opens the fields of
Africa: our merchants follow her flag, dig her mines and build her
machinery and share her commerce, while we invite English capital to
America. France conquers a territory and closes the doors in the face
of the world. This has always been the policy of Spain, and Russia
and Germany are her modern imitators in part.
We stand for humanity against tryanny, standing armies that
grind the poor and taxes that make bread riots possible. This is not
much of which to boast. It is only the higher zoological period of
the developement of man, but it is distinctly an advance over the other
nations at present. Great Britain is a democracy. The people govern.
Our language, literature, law, religion, blood, ideal and purpose make
us distinctly one people.
We can not possibly draw apart from one another in the great
world conflict upon which we are sooner or later to enter. This
struggle will sooner or later resolve itself into a contest between the
Anglo-Saxon and Slavonic races for the leadership of the world. The
alliance of the English speaking world would settle in advance the
results of that struggle before a drop of blood had been shed. That
alliance would control 460,000,000 people against 320,000,000 in a
possible European combination. Its navy on its present basis could
sweep the ocean. It would be the mightiest force in the peaceful
evolution of the principles of civilization, humanity and liberty that
could be possibly created by the genius of man. Such an alliance once
formed, Germany would be forced to enter it sooner or later, for
Germany belongs to the Anglo Saxon race. A German woman is
Queen of Great Britain and an Englishman is the Emperor of Germany.
Japan will inevitably enter into this alliance, and the lasting peace of
the world that will prepare the race for the coming co-operative
Christian Commonwealth will be an accomplished fact.
Let us prepare then for our manifest destiny. Let us destroy
{
13
Spain's colonial system and build on its ruins the basis of a vast naval
power which we must create, equal to Great Britain's. Let us cut the
canal that will unite our Eastern and Western coasts, and reorganize
our army and navy for our manhood role in history. Let old fogies
with their mental lumber of traditions and prejudices go to the rear
and men of this century take command. Let the Irishman know that
he will be a greater power in this alliance than he has ever been or
ever will be without it. Let us meet the honest advances of the
mother country with serious thought, remembering that but for Great
Britain's friendship, Spain would have already have beaten us twice,
by a concentrated European fleet movement to prevent the war and by
its mobilization at Manila to rob Dewey of the fruit of his miraculous
victory. Let us remember that unless Great Britain again stands for
the Stars and Stripes against Europe, we will yet be robbed of the
results of our victory over Spain or else be forced to fight the com-
bined armies and navies of Continental Europe.
With such an alliance even expressed in moral terms only, we
would rule the seas, control the commerce of the world, give to man a
universal language, protect the weak, curb the tyrant and command
the peace of the world for the longest period yet known in the history
of the race.
Can ignorance, prejudice, tradition and criminal stupidity defeat
such a glorious end? I do not believe it. God has been standing
amid the shadows of history guiding us to this day.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
GRAND OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK,
SUNDAY MORNING, MAY 15, 1898.
THE VICTORY OF MANILA.
"The stars in their courses fought against Sisera!" cried the
Hebrew prophet of old. "Evil shall slay the wicked and they that
hate the righteous shall be desolate." It is the law of nature. It is
the law of God. It is the law of life. The forces of nature are in
league with the eternal forces of truth and righteousness and to-gether
they are working out the salvation of the race.
The achievement of Dewey at Manila is the miracle of the naval
history of the world. It's like was never seen before. It is too much
to believe that it can ever be repeated. The largest flower on the
earth is, strangly enough, the Bolo flower of the Phillipine Islands.
This enormous blossom is three feet in diameter and weighs twenty
pounds. Garlands of such flowers spanning each of his gallant ships
would feebly express the feelings of Americans toward Dewey and his
men.
What are some of the lessons of that battle?
First, certainly that the most that remains of Spain's once world
empire is a continental and collossal capacity for lying and bluster.
In the face of this crushing defeat that shook the throne of Spain and
filled the kingdom with maddened mobs, the Spaniards claimed a great
victory. This is a fresh revelation of the childishness of Spanish nat-
ional character. It is an index finger that points to the certain end of
a once proud world empire. Four hundred years ago Spain was queen
of the seas and practically ruled the world. But she built that empire
on pride, brutality, barbarism, ignorance and superstition. She
murdered the Jew and lost the art of wealth. She eliminated the
Moor and strangled her arts and sciences. She chained the con-
sciences of her people and produced a race of ignorant children. She
attempted to enslave England and Holland and lost her army and
navy. She coined gold from the heart's blood of enslaved peoples and
debauched the souls of her own officials until they would steal now
the coin from the dead eyes of their own Queen. She has made the
art of lying her bulwark of national defence and destroyed her future.
She sent letters of peace and love to William of Orange with one hand,
and from the other despatched orders to her secret agents for his mur-
der. The same Spain in Cuba sent a flag of truce to the dauntless
Maceo and murdered him beneath its solemn pledge. God's judgment
-
15
day has come for her crimes and the United States is the messenger of
divine vengeance.
When the first Spanish shell screamed its challenge
over the flag ship of Dewey and the boatswain's whistle called our men
to the guns, by a common impulse the awful battle cry rang from three
hundred brave men,
Remember the Maine!" It was not a cry of
human passion. It was the judgment voice of Almighty God.
could stand before it?
((
Who
Dewey taught us too, that the way to do a thing is to do it. The
way to take a port is to go for it and take it. There may be wisdom
in the long delay over Cuba, but the common mind cannot understand
it.
Since Manila, the ordinary man must believe that had we bom-
barded Havana on April 22d, we would have dismantled every gun
in six hours. Now ten guns bristle for every one then. Every day
of hesitation and indecision must be paid for in the blood of heroes.
We have tested our navy and found the American sailor of to-day
what he has always been, as fine a seaman as walks the decks of any
ship that floats. The Spaniards boasted that in the first battle our
men of many nations would fall in a panic and desert their guns.
Manila is the answer. The composite man has shown the pure
blooded Spaniard that what he needs is new blood in his veins. The
movement of our fleet was the remorseless and terrible sweep of the
scientific control of nature against brave but suicidal barbarism.
It was an overwhelming answer to the American snob and
croaker. We have a group of loud-mouthed toadies to foreign ideas
who have wearied our ears with sneers at everything American during
the past decade. To hear them, we had no navy, no commanders, no
guns that would shoot, no ships that would float and no armor that
could stand the first crash of a genuine foreign built shell. Manila
is the answer. Let the toady who has been eating the bread of
democracy and fawning at the feet of titled fools now migrate to
Madrid where his spirit will be appreciated. This is only the first
skirmish. The future will send every warship that flies the Spanish
flag to the bottom of the sea, in spite of the chatter of the few drivil-
ling idiots who edit our HARPER'S WEEKLIES and gravely continue to
warn us that "all war is crime and barbarism. We will continue to
add the names of distinguished "criminals " to the roll of immortality
among whom are Washington, Lafayette, Grant, Farragut and Dewey.
رد
And we will continue to love a warrior above all other heroes in spite
of the moral idiot who cries for peace-at-any-price, and can not dis-
tinguish right from wrong. We love a warrior not because he kills,
but because his business is to die for his country and his fellow-man.
16
We don't rejoice over the uumber of Spaniards killed and wounded at
Manila. The secret of our national exhultation is found in a larger
thought. The shriek of the shells from our ships sang the battle cry
of freedom in one of the foulest slave pens of the Orient. We are
teaching the music of human liberty to ears and hearts that never
heard it before !
That battle makes the founding of a world empire of the common
people a certainty. Washington's farewell address has been overworked
by modern pharisees, hypocrites and traitors. That address was
delivered a century and a quarter ago. It was patriotism then. It is
treason to-day. We were then a hand-full of poverty-stricken colon-
ists in a hostile wilderness, with savage Indians threatening our
frontiers and three hostile nations established on our soil. Steam and
electricity, that have made a new world, were then the dreams of
madmen. The young American of to-day looks forward to a mighty
nation of 300,000,000 of freeman, leading the world to peace, freedom
and justice. Men and nations must go forward or backward. They
cannot stand still. It is the law of nature. We are not dying.
Therefore our mission is forward! When Old Glory is raised over
Manila, no combination of European tyrants on earth with devils in
Hell can ever haul it down.
GRAND OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK,
SUNDAY, MAY 7, 1898.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
gadg
THE AGONY OF WAITING.
The present war with Spain is unique. The end is certain. The
only question involving uncertainty is the one of time and cost in life.
and treasure in accomplishing this end. Spain admits the certainty
of defeat, but in suicidal madness determines to make her defeat all
the more crushing in the desperate hope of inflicting great injury upon
her victorious enemy. Time and swiftness of movement are the
pivots upon which will turn the tragic element of this war. Every
day of absolutely unnecessary delay will be a tragedy.
As a nation we are noted for our high nerve power and celerity of
movement. We rush our eating. We rush our business. We rush
our play. We rush everything. But when we go to war, our hands
are tied by weary days and weeks of waiting because we are unpre-
pared. We see to-day that we have been lulled in the dream of a
fool's paradise during the past decade by the old grannies and excuses
from men and statesmen who have drawn their salaries at Washington
and left the nation without an army or navy or coast defenses adequate
for a fight even with a third-class bankrupt power.
This school of tragic folly in which we are learning wisdom to-day is
a hard and bitter one but its lessons strike home to the heart and life.
We will never have to learn this again in this generation. A new set
of fools will have to be born before another lot of windbags, mug-
wumps and nincompoops can pose as men at washington. Hence-
forth this nation will demand in its representatives men of flesh and
blood and common sense and common patriotism.
The most of the precious time we have wasted before invading
Cuba, has been due to the criminal folly of the National granny policy
of the past twenty years. This can not be helped in this crisis.
Without venturing to criticise the war plans of our experts there
are some delays the ordinary mind can not comprehend and that seem
fraught with terrible possibilities.
We cannot understand the long delay in starting the first ship
with relief for Admiral Dewey. The President and Congress were
swift to appreciate the glory of his achievement-a work that has
wrought in a few days a complete revolution in the established policy
of a hundred years and thrilled the hearts of seventy millions of people
with the consciousness of a glorious world destiny. Yet long days and
weeks dogged out before a single ship sailed for his relief. If Dewey
18
should be caught and crushed by an overwhelming Spanish naval
force before the arrival of reinforcements, his ruin would bring the
managers of this war beneath an avalanche of national fury. Every
officer connected with the war department except the President would
have to resign. Nor can the ordinary mind understand why we have
lost so many precious days and sacrificed so many lives to starvation
in Cuba without attempting to establish a base of supplies at some
point in Cuba.
Nor can the people understand the spirit that nerves politicians at
Washington to haggle and delay the war revenue measures and the
annexation of Hawaii for petty partisan reasons. Every little man at
the Capital had better make an early note of the fact that the people
of this country do not care a copper now for Democracy, Republicanism,
Populism, Free Silver or Gold Standard, but that they want only the
red, white and blue. Any politician who attempts to take advantage
of this crisis to further his pet schemes at the expense of heroic blood
and the cause of our flag, will be ground to powder in the Novem-
ber election—we do not care what the politics of Dewey is. He is an
American spelled with a capital “A," and we want no nonsense in
the prosecution of this war with terrible swiftness to its end.
S
It is therefore the immediate duty of this Government to make
war on Spain by aggressive action, swift and relentless.
or man.
The long continued blockade can have no justification before God
We began this war in the cause of humanity. The bitter
cry of mortal agony that came from the starving Cubans pierced the
souls of our people. If we hold that blockade a day beyond the
absolute necessity of military operations, the Spaniard will have the
right to taunt us with his own cruelty and laugh at the anguish of the
dying straining their eyes for the sight of our flag and our men.
This blockade was an awful necessity to prevent arms and men reach-
ing Cuba to reinforce the enemy, while we were drilling our raw
recruits. But now we are prepared. We must move swiftly forward
to the work God has set to our hands.
The American people believe that fifty thousand of our soldiers
can sweep the Island of Cuba with fire and sword in three weeks. If
Gen. Miles does not believe this can be done, send Fitzhugh Lee. He
believes it can be done.
We must not forget that the principal object of this war is the
freedom of Cuba and the saving of her starving people. Spain must
be driven from her bloodsoaked soil and the red flag of Spanish tyranny
hauled down from the sky of the Western World. We sent Spain an
ultimatum to evacuate Cuba in forty-eight hours-hours are rolling
19
into days and the time seems over-ripe for the execution of that decree.
Our history in this Cuban tragedy has been one long series of delays.
And every one of these delays has added sorrow to sorrow, tragedy
unto tragedy. If Mr. Cleveland had recognized two years ago the belig-
erent rights of Cuba, they would have won their own independence
and Spain would not have dared declare war. Spain did not dream of
war with the United States. They were totally unprepared and
dumbfounded when it came. But evil powers stayed the govern-
ment at Washington. McKinley received the inheritance of delay and
trifling. We have sowed the wind, we must now reap the whirlwind.
Cleveland's delay cost us this war-the war itself will teach us and
has taught us lessons worth all its cost and more. But the swifter we
move, the more terrible our aggression, the quicker the end and the
larger the results, and the smaller the losses in men and money.
Spain's rule is defense-ours aggression, swift and remorseless to
the end.
Why did Gen. Grant conquer the South? Gen. Sherman once
gave the secret of his military genius one day. "I know more of the
technical science of war than Grant," said Sherman. "I know more
of its history and the principles of all its movemnts. But I cannot
conduct a campaign without considering the plans and movements of
my enemy. Grant does not. He makes his own plans, never worries
about the plans of the other side and with dogged persistence quietly
goes on with his own campaign and makes the enemy adapt himself
to them. This was the secret of his success."
This can always be done by a nation when resources are exhaust-
less, fighting one where resources are limited the plain man says:
Let Spain's fleeing squadrons go to Santiago, San Juan, the Canaries,
to Spain or to Hell our objective point is Havana, Cuba! Smash
her forts and walls and haul down the Spanish flag! We are able to
strike Manila, Havana, San Juan and the coast of Spain at the same
moment. Let us do it. A fleet of war ships led by the Oregon, bom-
barding Barcelona or Cadiz-will do more to crush Spain than the
conquest of all her distant colonies. Our resources are as exhaustless
as Nature. We asked for 125,000 men and 800,000 answered.
ask for $200,000,000 and five times the amount is waiting-the
South meets the North on the streets of Baltimore, where brothers
once killed each other and clasp hands over the sorrows of the past,
one in faith, one in loyalty, one in patriotic fire and enthusiasm.
We
Little men in the past who have prevented our building an army
and navy and coast defenses, are now meddling with their senile policy
of reaction and toryism. Let new men come to the front! The crisis
that produced a Dewey on the bridge of a warship demands his
20
counterpart on the bridges at Washington. We should get down on
our knees and thank God that we are being taught the lessons of delay
and humiliation in a struggle with a medieval second-rate bankrupt
nation, and not leaving them in the blood and agony of defeat at the
hands of a first-rate modern power.
The hour has come for us to
strike and strike with the arm of a giant.
We must open Cuba and save our friends and allies.
I know we
must lose some of our brave boys. But God has called us to this
work. Not a sparrow falls to the ground but that He counts the beat
of its wings. Not an American hero shall fall whose work has not
been well done.
Some time ago, when that terrible disaster swept Titusville, Pa.,
where so many lives were lost in the flood of burning oil, a German
lad rushed into the roaring flames again and again to drag fourth each
time smothering victims. Three trips the young hero made success-
fully. The fourth cost him his life. Later in the day they brought
his charred and lifeless body to his old mother. She threw herself
upon the blackened corpse in an agony of grief. And then lifting her
tearstained face, lit by a divine glow, she said: "I thank God that He
gave my boy that glorious work to do. I am willing." So the
spartan christian mother heart of America says to-day to her sons.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
TRAITORS AT WASHINGTON.
"A man's foes shall be they of his own household."
The enemies to our national growth and power are from within, not
without. There come to nations supreme opportunities in which the
national character is put to supreme tests.
I believe in my natlon, I
believe in its future, I believe in its government, I believe, in spite of
all that government's faults, it is the best and the noblest that the
world has yet seen. I believe that it carries within itself the promise
of the highest future.
This war is teaching us, as we could never have been taught, our
strength and our weakness. It has been teaching us some sad lessons,
and in humiliation and sack-cloth and ashes we are learning them.
We have discovered in the present contest with Spain that we had no
national guard-we supposed we had. We have discovered that we
had no army, that we had no coast defenses, that we have no navy
adequate to our needs, our dignity and our duties.
The delays, the shame, the humiliation, will not be in vain. The
people have been swift to learn these sad lessons; but apparently a
large number of Congressmen have not yet learned anything. Their
course of stupid opposition to the policy of the Commander-in-Chief
of the Army and Navy, who declares the annexation of the Hawaiian
Islands to be an immediate military necessity, has been a climax of
criminal stupidity which we hardly deemed a possibility in our politics.
Since April, the Twenty-first, there are but two real classes of
American citizens-Traitors and Patriots. Whatever may have been
the differences of opinion about policies in the past, to-day there is
but one supreme issue before this nation-the carrying of the present
war to a triumphant conclusion and the reaping of the just rewards
of its results. The Commander-in-Chief hae declared that the occu-
pation of the Hawaiian Islands is the key to the Philippine issue, an
absolute necessity to the completion of the heroic work that Dewey
began in Manila Bay, and the proper defense of our Western coast.
-
I believe in our glorious national destiny, I believe in our future.
I see a nation of 300,000,000 people, a navy equal to their wealth,
their numbers, their importance and their duties, an army trained to
execute their will. I see their commerce piercing every port of the
world, opening the trackless wilderness, their genius blazing the way
for the progress of man, as I see their ideals marking the way for
the leadership of the world. I see this certain destiny, in spite of
22
the chatter of fools, the raving of feeble minds, and the sneer of
pharisees.
20
Yet before we can attain our national destiny, there is some im-
portant work to be done at the National Capitol. It is necessary for
the people to cleanse the Nation of a group of small men who have
misrepresented and are misrepresenting their constituents and their
nation. We must kill the cowards, pharisees, fools, rascals and peanut
politicians who inhabit Washington. No coward can inherit the
kingdom of God or any other kingdom. When Moses proposed to
enter the promised land, he sent over a number of spies to survey the
ground. They brought back marvelous reports of the fruits of the
country; but they declared that the cities were mighty and fortified,
that the people were giants. and that they felt themselves to be grass-
hoppers in comparison with those giants. Moses gave up the expedi-
tion. They were grasshoppers. Colonel Ingersoll says that Moses
lacked commonsense and military talent, because he took forty years
to wander in a wilderness, before he marched into the land. that was
his destined objective. The reason Moses went into the wilderness
was very simple. He had to take off the cowards into the woods and
kill them, before he could enter the promised land. He had to kill
the whole generation and raise up a new one. The men that hold the
creed of the coward, who whine for peace at any price, cumber the
ground and hinder the progress of nations. A man who believes that
he is a grasshopper is a grasshopper. We have a group of pharisees
at Washington who have outlived their day and their usefulness.
The advent of this cult dates from the rise of Mr. Cleveland in our
national history. Its birth was incident to the death of the old
Democracy and the temporary corruption of the Republican party.
The Mugwump is a survival, not a vital force. He cumbers the
ground, impedes the progress of a nation, and is an evidence of de-
generacy and moral idiocy. There is nothing to do except to kick
these men out and to kill them politically. The quicker the work
is done the better. They may have had their uses, but their day is
past.
Then we are cumbered with fools. This is far more serious. We
have a group of men who are misled by superior minds, whose ignor-
ance is fathomless. We have a great number of fools at Washington,
because we have millions of fools at home. A bunco steerer can stand
on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street and conduct his business
until old age overtakes him, without serious interruption. His
schemes are exposed a thousand times in public prints, but his con-
stituency is eternal. A thousand new fools are born daily, and so his
work goes on.
There is no medicine for a fool. And yet only twice
23
have our representatives at Washington risen to the level of the intelli-
gence of the people in this generation once, when they voted
$50,000,000 to the President, without condition, to meet a national
crisis; and again when they passed their war resolution against the
tyranny of Spain. With all the sad lessons of delay and of tragic lack
of preparation that this war has revealed, with thirty transports chaf-
ing at their anchors in Tampa Bay, because of a phantom fleet of a
bankrupt nation-yet Congressmen denounce the expansion of the
nation because it would involve the building of a navy. Think of
troops tramping in the heat beneath a tropical sky, for the lack of war
ships to convoy them to their destination! A colossal fool stood on
the floor of the House of Representatives and declared he would not
vote for the annexation of Hawaii, because the nation would be taxed
to build a navy.
And yet he knew that the present war was costing
this nation $1,000,000 a day, and that the money expended was a dead
loss to the 'Treasury.
The truth is, there is a growing contempt in the United States for
the character of Congress. What is the Senate, to-day? A desert of
fossils among whom roam a group of rich loafers. There are a few
young men among them who apparently got there by accident, who
do not know why they are there or what they ought to do. There is
not a man in the present Senate of the United States who has meas-
ured up to the standard of national genius that we have displayed on
every occasion of great crisis in the past. The Senate is a hall of
glorious memories. And what is the House of Representatives? A
hostile critic would say: "A sea of nonentity with but a single bubble
on the surface-the Speaker of the House. Stick a pin in him and
there is nothing left." And yet this criticism is hardly a just one, for
the present House has demonstrated the fact that it stands in closer
touch to the heart and faith of the people than any body that has rep-
resented us within the past twenty years. The nation waits for a
leader, not a parrot; for a man, not a martinet. Men who pose as
statesmen, take the name of the illustrious dead in vain to justify
their incapacity to think. Whatever Thomas Jefferson was, he was
an independent thinker. Progress was his watchword. He was a
prophet, not a parrot. He was a leader, not an echo. Let the men
who take his name in vain remember this. We must kill the rascals
who misrepresent us.
In American political life, to-day, is the shadow of the money-
huckster. In our national lobbies the deadly mark of the corporation
attorney is in evidence on every bill affecting their interests. The
National Congress is honey-combed with attorneys of various corporate
interests. There is but one reason why the Islands of Hawaii have
24
not been annexed long ago. There is but one reason why the flag of
the United States was hauled down from the government building at
Honolulu-the Sugar Trust demanded it. The Sugar Trust has
formed a collossal conspiracy against this nation and its interests, and
in the present crisis its leaders could be arrested and hung for treason.
Every Congressman who allows himself to be deceived by the so-called
political aspects of the Hawaiian question is but allowing himself to be
made the tool of this giant corporation. Any man who has taken the
oath of office as a Congressman, representing the people of the United
States, and who at the same time accepts fees as the attorney of a
corporation, is a scoundrel. I say it deliberately with the full con-
sciousness of the import of the words.
The time has come to kill out the peanut politicians who hinder our
progress. Small men have misrepresented this nation during the past
generation, because the heart and brain of America has turned to com-
mercial pursuits. The men who really incarnate the genius of America
are to be found in our great commercial establishments. These are the
men who not only conceive vast empires in terms of commerce, but these
are the men whose brain plan conventions, dictate national platforms
and policies, and make and unmake our political history in accordance
with their plans of personal advancement and gain. They buy legis-
latures, and create public opinion in the purchase and management of
the press, not in the prostitution of its columns, but in the purchase
outright of the plant and its entire corps of editors. The men who
claim to represent the people are the martinets whom these men of
genius manipulate. A boy was recently drilling a company of smaller
boys in military tactics. Mutiny had evidently begun in the ranks.
The captain suddenly stopped the company and addressed them:
"Some of you say you want to take turns being captain; you can't do
it. I am the only man to be captain of this company; any man who
says I aint can get out. If any of you fellows think you can make
that train of cars do what you want-watch me.” He moved several
rods to the right, where between the cars he could see the conductor.
The soldiers could not see this official. "Now then," he shouted,
"stand still, don't move till I wave my sword. Watch, and you will
see the train mind me. Hold still, wait, not yet." In a moment the
conductor gave the signal. "Now go it," and the captain swung his
sword the section of a barrel stave. Apparently at his command the
obedient train moved off. "Now do you see that," he promptly
cried, "who is the captain of this company?" And they trotted off at
his heels, submissive to his authority.
Such is the farce we see enacted and re-enacted before our eyes at
Washington. A great crisis comes before us, and these martinets
1
25
stand distracted between their masters and the people. There is but
one thing to do with them-kill them. I appeal to young America-
the eagle cannot go back to its shell. The crisis in our history has
come-forward or backward we must go. We have reached the second
creative and heroic period of our national history. The hour has come
for the highest manhood to enter the nations service. The nation
demands a holy crusade of heart and brain in national politics. We
need priests of the people, messengers of the most high God, who
recognize that the state is the organ through which the whole people
search for God. We need a reconsecration of young American brain
and heart, talent and genius, to the disinterested service of the nation.
We must destroy the cowards, Pharisees, fools, rascals and insects,
that infest our national life. Our task is the building of the structure
of a new nation, and it requires a new order of statesmen, Gladstonian
Americans. The glory of democracy is the equality of opportunity
that it gives for the development of the highest mind. We have failed
to produce in our recent national life any great minds in our political
world. America has not a man in this generation who can be com-
pared with William E. Gladstone. There are scores of men in our
history with whom he may be compared.
We enter a new world. Let new men come forth to shape its pol-
icies, bear its burdens, and lay their life down in sacrifice for its cause,
and the cause of humanity which it represents.
1
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
THE MIGHTIEST NAVY IN THE WORLD.
The most thrilling drama of the universe is the progress of man,
and war is a necessary incident in the succeeding climaxes of this drama.
In this drama of progress there are two forces always contending
for the mastery, life and death, progress and stagnation, faith and
infidelity. It is not surprising, therefore, that in our present national
crisis these forces of death assert themselves. The recent meeting of
a few Bostonians in Faneuil Hall has given expression to this degen-
eracy and incapacity for progress in America. The age of decay is a
necessary incident to every human body. These normally hope for
twenty years of childhood and youth, forty years of strength and
development of manhood, and twenty years of ripening age; but the
ideal of the normal man is rarely realized. From inherited sin or
personal fault, we give evidence of decay earlier than the normal
expectation. The muscle begins to waste, the nerve loses its
sensibility and power, the arteries becomes chalky or fatty, the heart
weakened, the circulation feeble. It is the beginning of the age of
decay. The same phenomena occurs in the heart and mind. It is
the evidence of approaching death.
Monasticism is the calling evolved by this disease. Monasticism,
secular and religious, is as old as human disease is old. The Bostonian
contingent protests against national expansion and the new imperial
democracy, because of incapacity to keep up with the ideal of modern
progress. They desire Nirvana, they long for rest and retreat.
There is a great cathedral at Kiev in Russia, that has beneath it
miles of subterranean corridors lined with cells in which are fifteen
hundred ascetics performing their daily misconceptions of life. They
live, eat and sleep in the company of the dead. For a short time each
day, they walk in the beautiful garden of the cathedral, only to
return from this glimpse of paradise to the damp cellars where they
live their death in life. The garden above them breathes the spirit of
beauty and life. The Cathedral itself is a pile of splendid wealth and
art, its plaques of solid gold and silver, its images enshrined in richly
jeweled frames of gold, and before them hang hundreds of tiny lamps
that gleam in the shadows like multi-colored jewels. What a com-
ment upon the mind of man, that fifteen hundred souls should
acknowledge their defeat, incapacity, and retire beneath such a
building and such gardens to living death! This aspect of the human
mind is one with which every student of mental pathology is familiar.
It simply means collapse under disease-the approach of death.
G
27
The men who oppose the expansion of this nation in its new and
glorious destiny are the same men who opposed the revolution which
our fathers led to establish our liberties, the same men who opposed
the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, who opposed the annexation of
Florida in 1819, of Texas in 1845, and California in 1848. What
would this nation have become had it listened to the voices of these
alleged men. The pioneer souls who dared the wilderness and to
whom progress and life were synonyms, built this nation and gave its
glorious inheritance to their children. In one of the pioneer huts
which an early american built in the far West, a single woman once
repelled the attack of hostile Indians. She wrote this message to her
husband who was absent on important business: 'Dear John: The
Indians attacked the house. I shot six of them; the others went
away. Don't trouble to come home, but just send me some more
ammunition. Your loving wife."
((
We are a mighty nation to-day, because God gave us such
mothers. The alleged manhood of Toryism and reaction is merely the
evidence of sporadic degeneracy. It is marvelous, indeed, how small
the influence of such men have been on the growth of such a nation.
In spite of their croaking and opposition, we have moved swiftly and
silently forward from poverty to wealth, from isolation to empire. We
are to-day the richest nation the history of the world records. We
could buy half this world, and after we had paid for a hemisphere
have money enough left to establish a new empire in our undeveloped
West.
Our approaching political conventions, this summer, must decide
issues never before presented to the American people. We enter the
first national election since the birth of the new nation in Manila Bay.
We must go forward or backward. The forces of life or death must
triumph. The most serious need of the nation to-day is, beyond a
doubt, a mighty navy. A great navy cannot be improvised, it cannot
be bought over the counter. It is something that limitless wealth
alone cannot secure. It requires time, brains, foresight. In the present
crisis, we commanded the financial resources of the world; but we could
only buy three little ships, and one of them was so small we could not
get it across the ocean, and the other two were second-class craft.
Hence it is the immediate duty of the United States to begin the
building of the mightiest navy in the world, expending thereon at
least a billion dollars.
It is the only guarantee of peace. All intelligent nations desire
peace, and yet all intelligent nations know that there are unsettled
moral issues, involving the certainty of war, that must eventually
clash-issues of tyranny against liberty, equality against caste, hatred
1
28
against brotherhood. A nation's best defense is the power of remorse-
less aggression. Captain Mahan, our greatest naval authority, has
demonstrated this beyond the possibility of question. A nation that
merely prepares to defend its own coasts is certain to be overwhelm-
ingly defeated. The power of true defense is the power to reach your
enemy and strike him to kill. To do this, we must have a navy that
will circle the earth in its power.
The secret of effective diplomacy is sea power. The articulation
of wind by diplomats is effective only when the nation, back of the
diplomat, has floating lips of steel that can speak its message in no
uncertain language. No nation is respected in the councils of the
world that has not the physical power to enforce its principles and its
views of just interests and rights. We have had at least two wars
that could have been prevented had we been prepared with an efficient
navy. The war of 1812 was entirely unnecessary; but England fought
us because we did not have a navy. We have a national faith called
the Monroe Doctrine which affirms that no foreign monarchy shall
extend its territory in the Western world. This is a dangerous creed
unless we have the power to make it good. We should shut up about
the Monroe Doctrine, or else build a navy to enforce it. But for the
good sense and good will of Lord Salsbury, Mr. Cleveland's famous
Venezuela message would have involved this nation in the one ruinous
and utterly disastrous war of its history. England did not fight us
because we were of the same blood. If that message had referred to
Germany or France or Russia, the answer would have been the
thunder of their guns at Sandy Hook, and our defense would have
been ridiculous. The present war with Spain is costing us $1,000,000 a
day. Its total cost will not be less than $800,000,000. If we had
had a navy adequate to our responsibilities, wealth and power, Spain
would not have dared to fight.
The sea calls us to its dominion. We have the most extensive,
the most beautiful, the most inviting coast-lines of any nation of the
earth. It stretches for thousands of miles along the East and the
West. Its bays, inlets and rivers reach hundreds of miles inland. The
voice of its tides calls daily to that vast empire of humanity of which
the sea is the highway. Three-quarters of the earth's surface is cov-
ered with water. The sea holds the sovereignty of the twentieth
century. The economic and political changes of the world are so
swift that the nation who does not know this will be outstripped by
its rivals and left with the dead past. Ten years ago, Japan was but
a name; and yet in a day Japan sprung from the bosom of the Pacific
Ocean, a giant clad in full armor, and took her place on the battle-
fields of the world. Ten years ago, who would have dreamed that
1
29
Japan would enter a protest against our annexation of the Hawaiian
Islands? And yet the birth of Japan has disturbed the equilibrium of
the world's political and economic history. Our coasts touch the
whole human race—the old world on our Eastern shore, the new old
world on the Pacific. The affairs of the world are our affairs.
Our destiny demands a mighty navy. The new imperial democ-
racy is already an accomplished fact. It is the natural developement
of the one-hundred-and-twenty-three years of our history.
This
empire of the common people is something absolutely new and unique
in the history of the world. All arguments against imperialism fall
to the ground when applied to the new empire of democracy, for this
empire of the people is built for the first time on the foundations of
liberty, equality and fraternity. We conquer no territory and hold it
subject, but we proclaim that all men-Anglo-Saxon, Mongolian,
African, Celt and Slav-all men are born free and equal.
What we
claim for ourselves we give to them and to the humblest child-the
possibilities of becoming the supreme ruler of the great republic.
Such an empire the world never saw before. The fact that other
empires have fallen is but a prophecy that this one will stand, because
its foundations are natural, righteous and eternal. Our growth has
been the resistless movement of life. We rebelled against the mother
country because it was the decree of nature. Mountain and plain and
sea called us to liberty. We possessed ourselves of Louisiana because
it was fate. We could tolerate no foreign nation as a rival on this
continent. To take Louisiana we had to re-write our constitution.
We took Florida from Spain for the same reason—it was our destiny.
We annexed Texas because it was inevitable to the fulfillment of the
ordinance of our life. For the same reason we took California and
Alaska.
And for the same reason would we hold the Philippine Islands and
every inch of soil snatched from the monstrous tyranny of Spain. You
had as well discuss the technicalities of the movement of a volcano as
to attempt the technical analysis of this movement of national life.
Manila was the explosion of a national volcano that had been boiling
and slumbering for a hundred years. Small men, with small minds,
incapable of enduring the sight, must take to cover-the nation moves
forward to its destiny. We must and will hold every inch of soil
redeemed from the curse of Spain's alleged sovereignty.
There are
two alternatives-return them to Spain, or sell them to the earth-
hungry great Powers. If we return them to Spain, we deny the faith
of our fathers, prostitute our national conscience, deny every principle
for which we entered this war, prove traitors to humanity, and
proclaim ourselves the allies of tyranny and oppression. A Spanish
30
commander in the Philippine Islands recently suffered a terrible defeat
at the hands of a division of insurgents. In revenge for this defeat he
marched into the town from whence most of their soldiers came and
in their absence murdered, in cold blood, their women aud children.
The American who can coolly propose to return what we wrest from
Spain disgraces our flag, stamps himself as a dastard and a national
infidel. The truth is, the man who cries out to-day against the new
imperial democracy does so, because he has no faith in American man-
hood or American institutions. It is the duty of the United States to
hold these possessions, because it has a message to deliver to the world
and for the good of the world, itself, lest an attempt to dispose of them
would embroil the Powers in a great war.
G
We must prepare, sooner or later, for European interference.
The governments of the old World are in a condition of aggressive
restlessness. There is only one thing certain about the future—and
that is its uncertainty. The thing that is sure to happen is the
unforeseen. In all the arguments that experts have used in the past
generation for the building of a great navy, not one of them ever
dreamed that we would need it to fight Spain, and this is exactly what
happened. Some three years ago, under the shadows of a dark night,
a tiny open boat grated on the sands of the Island of Cuba. In it
were a group of weary and weather-beaten adventurers. They found
their way into the interior of the island, and under the leadership of
Jose Marti raised the flag of Cuba Libre. That night was big with
the history of the world. Yet who could foresee it? It meant the
thunder of artillery, the tread of armies, the re-adjustment of the map
of the world.
The nations of the old world recognize the fact that a great war
is a certainty within a few years, and that the navy holds the key that
unlocks the future. The naval budgets of the present year in the old
world carry a startling warning to the United States. It shows that
Great Britain has appropriated for this year $107,000,000 for the
building of 108 new war-ships, 14 battle-ships, 18 cruisers, 54 torpedo
boats, beside gun-boats and small craft. Germany has ordered a naval
program, involving the expenditure of $240,000,000. They are
building thus 17 battle-ships, 36 cruisers, besides the small craft.
France has authorized the expenditure of $144,000,000, and is now
building 12 battle-ships and 9 cruisers. Russia has authorized a naval
expenditure of $318,000,000. And Japan is just completing her first
naval program of $200,000,000.
It is the immediate duty of the
iest navy the world has ever seen.
years will cost us $1,000,000,000.
United States to build the might-
A war that lasts three-and-a-half
The $1,000,000,000 spent in war
31
will be so much money lost. At the end of the war we will have
nothing to show for it; but, in addition to the loss, a legacy of
pensions that will mean ultimately another $1,000,000,000. Let us
build a $1,000,000,000 navy, and when we have built it and spent
every dollar appropriated, the nation will still be as rich in money
value as before the expenditure; but the money will be in ships and
guns that will command the highways of the world and plant the flag
of the nation where its interests and rights and its just destiny ordain.
Our field is the world, and the world is at our doors. As a
nation, we have a message to man. The stars and stripes are them-
selves a gospel. Our flag is the sublimest symbol of religion ever
evolved in the history of man. It is the supreme expression of the
consciousness of God of 70,000,000 of people. That flag is charmed.
No nation has ever lifted its hand against it, but has suffered defeat.
No rebellion has ever been led against it, but that its leaders came
back to kiss it, and, in loving acknowledgement of their error, to
swear eternal allegiance for their children's children. God had a
divine purpose when He planted that flag on the soil of America.
The struggles and faiths of our fathers were a divine prophecy of the
growth and glory of man. A British soldier at the siege of Augusta,
who was full of hatred for all rebels, rode out of his way after the
battle to tell an American woman of her son's death. She met him at
her cottage door and he brutally cried to her, "You had a son this
morning, I saw his brains blowed out at Augusta." The mother's
form grew rigid and her lips quivered, but from her soul came the
brave words, "He could not have died in a nobler cause!"
It was
the breathing of the prophetic spirit of God through the soul of a
Spartan mother.
The hour has come for the fulfillment of those prophecies in the
wider destiny of the nation and its greater duties to humanity.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
·
THE NATION'S CALL THE VOICE OF GOD.
The sacred historian tells us that "The Spirit came upon Amasa
and he said, Thine we are David, and on thy side, thou son of Jesse.'
The ancient Hebrew prophet believed in the imminence of God. He
declares that the Spirit moved the soldier to enlist. The call of
David, the leader, was the voice of God. The men who have answered
the call of the President to serve their country have done so under the
inspiration of the Holy Ghost. They have answered and are answer-
ing under the most solemn conviction of duty that ever moves the
human soul—a conviction that involves the issues of life and death.
The country's call is not addressed to men who are failures and misfits
in life. It is given to the picked men of thousands-the strongest
bodies and cleanest minds, to those who love life and are bound to it
by the tenderest and sweetest ties. There can be no conflict between
patriotism and Christianity. Patriotism is the spirit of sacrifice.
Christianity is sacrifice. The man who denies the service of country
in war as anti-christian does not know the meaning of christianity.
When country calls it is a solemn honor to every honest soul. What
talents have I? Every man is under obligations as deep as life and
solemn as death to give in answer to that call the very best of which
his body and soul are capable.
""
Over all races, creeds and sects our Nation looms as the visible
incarnation of the coming Kingdom of God. It is the one organ
through which we all seek justice and right. The Nation's call is the
voice of God.
The Nation is the only possible center of the organization of the
people's faith and energy. We dream of solidarity and social unity.
Here alone we approach the realization of that dream. Our temper-
ments separate us as individuals wider than seas and continents.
Religious sects raise impossible barriers in the mind of childhood and
scars the soul of ripest age. Races are barriers beyond which only a
few great minds pass. The scholar as he walks through his library
and touches lovingly the friendly volumes that give him fellowship
with all ages and climes feels the gulf between his individuality
and the ignoramus who does not or can not read. The Jew feels that
he lives in another world from the Gentile. The Roman Catholic
mind can not fraternize with the Protestant. The gulf between the
Rich and the Poor is deep and dark. And yet when my country
calls and men answer that summons and shoulder to shoulder march
beneath the flag, I grasp the hand of the brawny ignoramus and our
33
spirits are one; there is one flag above us and one God around us
whose message that flag speaks. I count myself a liberal minded man
in religion and study comparative religions with a coldly critical eye, yet
I acknowledge a personal bias against Roman Catholic dogma. But
when an Irish Catholic regiment marches by me bearing aloft the flag,
I take off my hat and cheer. They are my brethern. There is but
one God above us and that flag is his Holy Emblem! The life of the
rich is far removed from my own. I feel I have too little sympathy
for their trials and struggles. But when Miss Helen Gould sent her
generous offering to my country, I said—"She is my sister. I will
always love her for that.”
The Nation becomes thus more and more the only Kingdom of
universal association and fellowship. All truth is divine. All law is
divine. The law of God and the law of man are equally divine. The
statesmen of the old Hebrew regime were called Prophets. The
Nation is the organized virtue of the whole people. Here alone all
can seek for the right. It is here alone that the limits of personality
cease to bind us with conscious fetters and we begin to feel the pain and
the glory of the universal. When we read the history of wrong and
oppression, our hearts burn within us. The soul beats its wings
against the prison bars of one weak body. We cry for universal power
and its resistless effect. The Nation gives us here the only answer to
this cry of the soul for Divine power. We love the heroes who manned
the guns in Manila Bay because they spoke for us. Those black lips
of steel spoke the divine wrath that has been burning in our souls
during the past three years of Cuban agony. The Nation was there.
We were there. The smallest American citizen for once broke the
chains that bind him to earth and rode upon storm of battle in clash
of Empires.
The Nation is thus the organ of the common consciousness of
God, as well as the visible expression of the divine purpose in history.
As the nation grows it absorbs one by one the functions of the Ancient
Church. The ministry to the poor, the care of the sick, the education
of the child, the spread of knowledge, are now the work of the State.
Once they were done by the Church. No Church is to-day competent
to undertake even one of these great functions of Christian civiliza-
tion. The soldier who follows our flag into Cuba, the Phillipines, and
Porta Rico carries more than a musket on his shoulder and cartridges
in his belt. He carries bread for the poor, healing for the sick,
knowledge for the ignorant, and freedom for the oppressed. There
are divine things, and they are packed in every bullet that speeds
death to the foe. Our soldiers are not simply soldiers, they are mission-
aries of the Gospel of healing, of charity, of light, of liberty. And
34
the war that sent them on their mission was conceived of the Holy
Ghost. Once the fires of Suttee blazed over all India, in which the
screaming struggling widow, often a mere child was bound to the
dead body of her husband and with him burned to ashes. Babes were
publicly thrown into the Ganges. Young maidens and men decked
with flowers were butchered in Hindoo temples before idols. The cars
of Juggernaut rolled over the land crushing hundreds of victims
annually.
The crack of the British rifles, and the thunder of British cannon
not only proclaimed Victoria Empress of India, they brought life to
the struggling widow, put out the fires of Suttee, cleansed the Ganges
of the bodies of the babes, washed the stain of human blood from the
temple altars, and smashed the cars of Juggernaut. The war we wage
is a holy war, begun in the name of God and Humanity.
Let the man who hears its call know that he hears the voice of
God. The President of the United States is the highest religions
dignitary in the world. He is the chosen representative of seventy
millions of people in the solemnist religious act of which they are
capable. Politics is religion in action. I believe that God has guided
and does guide our President in a peculiar manner. Not one of them
has ever led the nation to defeat. All our great Presidents have been
men whose minds were sensitive to the touch of the Divine Spirit.
Lincoln's nature was profoundly religious. It is said that prayer was
with him a daily habit. He once said to a friend: "I have been
driven many times to ask Divine direction by the overwhelming con-
viction that I had nowhere else to go." His second inaugural address is
perhaps the most profound religious document produced in America
in that generation. Once again to a friend one day he solemnly and
slowly said, with a dreamy expression in his prophetic eyes, (called by
a sculptor who gave many days to the study of his face) "the strang-
est and saddest eyes through which a mortal ever looked "—“ I should
be foolishly presumptious if I thought I could discharge for one day
the duties which have fallen upon me, without the aid and enlighten-
ment of One who is wiser and stronger than all others.”
Let the modern snivelling hypocrite know that his conventional
piety and his paper creed are no cover for treachery. Shallow moral
natures are incapable of rising to the religious climax called patriotism.
The man who writes such a letter as did Love, the President of the
so-called Peace Society of Philadelphia, needs more than the plea of
Christianity to shield his dastardly nature and excuse his infamous
treachery to the land that gave him birth. If Heaven is the home of
such trash as Love, and Hell be the portion of the man who fights
and dies for his country, then I choose Hell as my portion. I prefer
35
the comradship of the brave in Hell, to contact with such lepers in
Heaven.
The highest type of manhood evolved in the history of the
nineteenth century was a soldier. Charles Gordon, that Englishman
who was immeasurably greater than Gladstone or any of his living
contemporaries. He was a man of the largest moral power over his
fellow man, whether savage or civilized. His purpose was so lofty,
his nature so unselfish, his soul so fearless, his spirit so elevated, his
passion for justice so intense that even the lowest types of men recog-
nized the moral forces that dominated his character and almost
instinctively gave him obedience. His work was as truly missionary
as though he held the Bible instead of the sword in his hand. He
made the name of England honored among the four-hundred-millions
of China who had lost faith in all men. He put down the slave trade
in the Soudan and over the helpless and the downtrodden in the
wildest region of this earth flung the majesty of Anglo-Saxon law.
The secret of his power was his simple faith in God, his quenchless
love of humanity, and his absolute surrender of himself to duty. Born
to fortune, its splendor and power, he became a teacher of homeless
boys when in London. When called to lead the armies of Great
Britain his parting from those boys was very touching. When he
came back from foreign wars and triumphs he gave to his ragged
school children the flags and the medals he had won. When taken
prisoner by the Abyssinians and brought into the presence of their
king, he quickly picked up the chair that had been placed for him at
a lower level and seated himself beside the astonished sovereign. "Do
you know," said the haughty chief, "that I can kill you on the spot
if I like." "I am aware of it, Your Majesty," said General Gordon,
Do so at once-I am ready.”
"What," said the king, "ready to be killed?'' Certainly,"
replied the General, "I am always ready to die. I am prevented
by my faith from killing myself. You would thus relieve me from all
the troubles and all the burdens and trials the future may have in
store for me and usher me at once into a longer and better life.”
The king was so moved by this man's moral courage that he looked
at him with a feeling of profound awe. He not only gave him his
liberty but yielded to all his wishes. Before the collossal figure of
this great soldier how pusillanimous seems the whine of the moral
idiot who declares that struggle for right in war is only savagery.
War is the tragedy that results from the inevitable clash of two irre-
concilable moral principles. The man who stands for the right in
that struggle is the chosen servant of the Most High God.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
((
THE NEW FOURTH OF JULY.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" is not simply an ex-
traneous decree that God has imposed upon man from without; it is
the expression within the soul of man, of his essentially divine nature.
The soul of the noblest man instinctively and resistlessly goes out to
his neighbor who is oppressed, who struggles and who suffers.
A man of delicate nerves and fine sensibilities and feeble health
was once imprisoned in a European dungeon. The penalty inflicted
for the slightest infraction of the rules was incarceration for twenty-
four hours in the darkest prison cell of the establishment, which was
located far below the surface of the earth and from which no sound
could penetrate, and to which no evidence of life could possibly be
brought. This delicate prisoner cherished an instinctive horror of this
punishment. At last, one day, he was accused of an infraction of the
rules and hurled into this cell of total darkness and isolation. He
crouched in the corner, shivering in an agony of fear, a prey to abject
terror. His suffering was something excruciating, something that the
ordinary mind could not possibly understand nor appreciate. The
keeper turned the key in the lock, his footfalls died away, door after
door creaked on its hinges, and the silence of death and the indescrib-
able horrors of darkness clutched his soul with resistless power.
Suddenly, to his surprise, he heard a footfall without the door, and a
voice crying through the crevice. It was the voice of the chaplain.
In his joy he could scarcely believe that it was true. Through the
darkness the chaplain cried, "The moment I found you to be im-
prisioned here I knew what you would suffer, and I came to stand here
by you through the twenty-four hours." And at intervals through
the lonely watch he would cry to the prisoner within and receive his
answer through his sobs of joy.
W
What brought the chaplain into the darkness of this dungeon?
It was because God wrote in the beat of his heart the music of that
glorious command, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." This
is the destiny of man's soul when it attains its majority. We begin
as a child.
As a child we are little more than animal. The child is
centered in self. He thinks only of his own nourishment; but as he
grows, and the soul expands with the expanding body, his interests
begin to extend to the world without him, until at last he rises from
self to the profoundest interests of association with his fellowmen.
Such is the evolution of nations and peoples. We have passed
through our childhood isolation, our childhood selfishness; we have
passed through a vigorous and stormy youth, a youth of struggle and
38
rebellion, a youth of suffering and of anguish,-and we have
awakened to-day to a glorious manhood with the consciousness of a
soul. Our principles are the same, but we have enlarged the sphere
of their application. We have gone outside of self, and have applied
these principles to our neighbors.
The present war has therefore wrought a revolution of more
dramatic importance to the world than our first.
In reality we celebrate to-day the beginning of the new national
manhood. The crisis through which we are passing has been the first
revelation to ourselves of our own actual attainments, our real char-
acter, and position in the world. A man's best friend is his enemy.
Our enemies have taught us the facts. The dream of a fool's Fourth
of July is dispelled. From to-day we face the reality. Let us cease
our childish boasting, our fustian and idle talk. When we began this
war we had no army worth speaking of, we had no navy adequate to
our needs, our wealth, our dignity and our importance. Every man
is a trinity; he is what he is, he is what he thinks he is, and he is
what other people think he is. Success in life depends upon finding
out what we actually are, and squaring life accordingly. We are
getting down to the facts as a nation. As a people our resources are
exhaustless. War has created no panic in the business world, indeed
the volume of our business is greater to-day than when the war began.
Money seeks investment and does not hide. The credit of the nation
is the highest in its history. The President asks for two hundred
million dollars, and eight hundred millions are offered. He might ask
for a billion, and two billion would be offered. The solidarity of our
nation is an accomplished fact of the war. There is no North, and
no South. There are no religious distinctions. The Catholic and the
Protestant, the rich and the poor, the North and the South are clasping
hands over the dead upon our blood-stained battlefields.
We have discovered on this Fourth of July for the first time in
our national life, that in all the governments of continental Europe, we
have not a single honest friend. France, under the leadership of a vile
and venal press, has proven false to her historic professions, and no
epithet is too vile for the Frenchman to use, none too harsh to hurl at
the country for which LaFayette offered his life. The guillotine has
not yet done its work in France. Her boulevards and streets must
yet run with ignoble blood before the nation comes to a realization of
of its professions as the champion of the world's liberty, equality and
fraternity. Germany has displayed toward us the bitterest hostility,
and back of Germany and France, Russia has growled, ready to aid
in any demonstration against us. It is well to know our friends and
39
our enemies. I expect to live to see the day that my country shall
stand at her gates with a majestic navy, and a gleaming army, able to
defy not only continental Europe combined, but the threat of a hostile
world. These revelations have destroyed the basis of our ancient
foreign relations. All our history hitherto, in dealing with foreign
peoples, has been but a preparation for to-day. Henceforth our
ministers to France, Germany, Austria, Russia, England, will go forth
with new instructions. We have entered a new international life.
We have discovered that our supposed traditional foe is our best
friend. Whatever shall come of the present contest, one thing is
eternally certain, the practical friendship of the English-speaking world
is now a moral fact. Nothing can separate us. Great Britain in
extending to us her cordial greeting, backed by her splendid power,
has twined her flag in our own for every Fourth of July that shall be
celebrated in our future. We will not forget our friends in need.
We bave begun to recognize the essential unity of the English-speaking
world. The differences that separated us in the past, were not
fundamental in character. The British nation has recognized the
righteousness of our fathers' contention, and has re-built its empire
accordingly. They are a democracy in reality, as we are in form.
The truth is, we are one people henceforth. Our friendship is eternal.
From this day forth, the people of the United States will demand
recognition in the council-chambers of the world's great powers.
Isolation is childhood history. The nations may sneer at Uncle Sam
as a shirt-sleeved diplomat, but with or without a sneer, they will
make a seat for him. Whether he comes in shirt-sleeves or in dress
coat, he will find a way or make one.
Henceforth the continued expansion of our national territory will
be a recognized vital fact. It has always been a vital fact, but it has
hitherto been refused recognition. It is childish to contend that we
did not set out to conquer foreign territory. Man plans his wars, but
Almighty God fixes results. The war between the States, was begun
without any reference to slavery in the United States. Even
Mr Lincoln protested with vehemence, that nothing was further from
his mind than an attempt to free the slaves. The original abolitionists,
with their center at Boston, were Lincoln's bitterest opponents, and
the harshest critics of the war during its first terrible and bloody year.
But in the providence of God, Abraham Lincoln issued his Proclama-
tion of Emancipation. So we set out to free Cuba, but in the
providence of God, Dewey thundered at the gates of Manila, and the
breath of his cannon tore down the traditions of the past, and revealed
to us the facts of our future national policy. Our history has been
40
one of expansion from the beginning of this Republic down to to-day.
We started the first year of our Independence, a group of struggling
colonies covering eight hundred thousand square miles, with only a
narrow strip of ocean on our eastern shores, the Gulf of Mexico on
our south, in hostile hands, the Pacific Ocean beyond the dream of our
wisest men.
To-day, we are a continental nation. We have grown
from eight hundred thousand square miles to three million, five hun-
dred thousand square miles. The new colonial policy is the same old
policy of expansion except on modern oceanic lines. We snatched
Florida from Spain, and we took Louisiana from France with the
rights of France at least questionable. The territory of Louisiana
extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the mountains of Manitoba. It
included the present States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa,
Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, North
Dakota, South Dakota, and Indian Territory. We annexed Texas,
which was larger than the six New England States. We annexed
California and a vast territory by conquest from Mexico. We purchased
Alaska. In short, there has never been a time from the birth of
this nation down to the present crisis, when expansion has not been
the ordinance of our national life. The man who undertakes to tear
our flag from blood consecrated conquered soil, must first march over
the dead body of every hero that falls fighting for the flag. The hand
that undertakes to haul down that flag will feel the skeleton clutch of
dead armies holding him in check. The blood of heroes has re-baptized
that flag. The nation goes forward, not backward. Shall we hold
the territory that we conquer? Ask the heroic dead! Ask the
wounded! Ask the men who fight our battles! As for annexing
foreign peoples, this has been our way of working since our birth.
We have all nations, all tongues, all kindreds, from the four corners
of the inhabited earth here already. We have shown our capacity to
make of them American citizens.
From this day a new and glorious idea of life and character must
fill the soul of the young manhood of the nation. A year ago our
young men of brain and genius knew no higher dreams than to be-
come a millionaire. Their neighbors did not concern them except as
a field for operation and speculation. The spirit of sacrifice has sup-
planted the spirit of gain. Manhood has risen triumphant over
money. We celebrate the Fourth of July because men were willing
to die in the far-off past that you and I should live. We are here in
this house to-day worshipping God according to the dictates of our
conscience, because the privilege was blood-bought.
The men of to-day are struggling to give the blessings and privi-
4I
leges of our flag to the world, and to make that flag a heritage to our
neighbors. Never before were men who entered battle more deeply
conscious of a divine mission. What a spectacle! A regiment of
rugged soldiers on a field of carnage, joining in singing in religious
ecstacy "The Star Spangled Banner" before the fiery circles of
Spanish troops around Santiago !
Our flag has ceased to be merely national; its cause is the cause
of humanity; its progress marks the footprint of God. The men
who carry it to-day are proclaiming that all men are born free and
equal. To demonstrate this they are dying in a strange land, and for
an alien race. They are proving worthy of the men who went before
them.
In our last war a captain stood before his company and called for
ten volunteers to undertake a most dangerous operation. He said to
them, "Death is almost certain. I want you to understand it. But
the work is of the deepest importance for the safety of this army, and
the glory of our country. Let the ten men who are willing to volunteer
step five paces forward." Instantly the whole company moved
forward five paces, and stood in a perfect line. The captain removed
his cap, his eyes filled with tears, and he said: "Soldiers, I thank
you! I am proud to be the captain of such a company of men.'
The spirit of those volunteers is the spirit of the army of the
United States to-day. The Battle Hymn of the Republic has been
given a new and more glorious meaning. Every stanza and every
line throbs with a divine message that points its prophetic finger to
the future as well as to the past.
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
"I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.
They have builded Him an altar in the evening's dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
",
*
"He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat ;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat ;
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant, my feet
Our God is marching on."
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
MESSAGES FROM SANTIAGO.
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." It is the
law of nature; it is the law of God. Santiago is the site of Spain's
ancient dominion of Cuba. From her gates that empire has departed
forever. The story of the struggle of Cuba through the past century
is the history of oppression, and wrong, and greed, and rebellion, and
tyranny. And through it all America has been, not only a spectator,
but an ardent sympathizer with those who love Liberty.
In 1852 Lopez sailed from New Orleans with his famous
expedition of three hundred men, aided by the gallant Crittenden.
By a decoy letter he was lured within the lines of the Spanish army,
captured and executed. The scene of his death is historic for his
reply to the Spanish commander who ordered him to kneel: "I am an
American citizen. I kneel to God but not to, Man."
In 1873 while the Ten Years' War was in progress, the Virginius,
an American ship, sailed from Hayti for the coast of Cuba, with a
company of daring Americans, who heard the call of Cuba for
Freedom. The papers of the Virginius were regularly issued, and
until her hostile destination had been established, she had full rights
on the sea. She was overtaken by the Spanish warship Tornado, off
the coast of Cuba, and after an exciting chase, she was captured. She
was treated as a pirate. The Spanish crew that boarded her tore the
American flag down from her staff and stamped it on the deck. She
was towed into the harbor of Santiago and her Captain and crew, the
three Cuban generals, De Varona, Cespedes, Jesus Del Sol, and the
American general, Washington Ryan, were condemned by drumhead
court martial, to be shot. The Virginius was commanded by Capt.
Joseph Fry, of Tampa, Florida. On the night before his execution,
Capt. Fry wrote his historic letter to his wife. I quote the opening
sentence of this beautiful love-letter, to show the spirit of the man:
"Santiago de Cuba, Nov. 6th, '73.
'Dear, Dear Dita:-When I left you I had no idea that we should
never meet again in this world, but it seems strange to me that I
should to-night, and on Annie's birthday, 'be calmly seated on a
beautiful moonlight night in a most beautiful bay in Cuba, to
take my last leave of you, my own dear, sweet wife; and with the
thought of your own bitter anguish my only regret at leaving. ***
Your devoted husband, Joseph Fry."
This pathetic and beautiful letter swept the heart of the American
nation with inexpressible anguish, and the desire for an outburst of
43
American patriotism against Spanish tyranny could scarcely be
suppressed. The men were led on the afternoon of November 7th
outside the walls of Santiago. Capt. Fry and fifty-three of his men
were shot to death. Capt. Fry was killed instantly; at the first volley
a bullet passing through his heart. Most of the men, however, were
wounded. It was a favorite pastime of the Spanish soldiery of that
day to torture their victims by slow death, even when they were shot.
After they fell under the first volley the soldiers rushed up and
amused themselves by forcing their guns into the mouths of the men
who were writhing in mortal agony, and shooting them to death.
After they had thus been killed a division of cavalry came upon the
scene and rode their horses over the dead bodies until they were
mangled beyond recognition. This butchery was only stopped by the
sudden appearance in the harbor of the British man-of-war Niobe,
under the command of Sir Lampton Loraine. The commander
ordered the execution to be instantly stopped. He claimed the
authority of the British Empire, and the authority of the United States
of America, and whether he had that authority or not, he exercised it
in no uncertain manner. He informed the Spanish commander that
if another American citizen was shot he would clear his decks and
bombard Santiago. The execution was immediately stopped, and the
lives of the ninety-three remaining members of the crew were saved.
When Sir Lampton Loraine returned to England by way of New York,
he was presented with a silver brick from a western State, on which
was inscribed:-
"Blood is thicker than water.
Santiago de Cuba, November, 1873."
The action of this British commander was a prophesy of the
roar of the British lion in behalf of the stars and stripes in 1898. It
was the first prophesy of the actual accomplishment of the
coming Anglo-Saxon alliance of the world.
General Grant was President of the United States and Hamilton
Fish was Secretary of State, when this outrage occurred. For some in-
scrutable reason, Spain was never held to strict account for this infamy.
By a curious coincidence of Providence the Spanish commander who
was deputized to surrender the Virginius to the United States
authorities afterwards, was named Cervera. To-day Spain is reaping
the results of her rule at Santiago in 1873. She sowed the wind; she is
reaping to-day the whirlwind. She shot down the Cuban patriot generals
like dogs, refusing to treat them as prisoners of war. To-day the
Cuban army under Garcia, circles Santiago with fire and sword; and
the spirits of De Varona, Cespedes, and Del Sol fire the Cuban heart
with quenchless zeal. Captain Joseph Fry was a citizen of Tampa,
44
Florida; He sent his love-letter to his wife to that historic port.
The magnificent fleet of transports and warships bearing the first
army of invasion, sailed from Tampa, Florida. "Whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap." Fry and Ryan were shot down
without mercy, without regard to their claims to American citizen-
ship. The spirits of Fry and Ryan walk the bridge of every warship
before Santiago's doomed harbor. The Spanish seamen tore the stars
and stripes down from the mast-head of the Virginius, and trampled
them upon the deck. Stand on the hills before Santiago to-day and
look out over the waters of the Cuban sea, East and West and to
the farthest South, as far as the eye can reach, stretches our
magnificent fleet, floating that flag before the doomed city.
"What-
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
debt she owed to history. For every American
walls, a dozen of her soldiers have been slain.
her proudest fleet lie stranded on the beach.
floats proudly over the Governor's palace.
Santiago has paid the
sailor shot outside her
The battered hulks of
The flag she trampled
We, too, are reaping our harvest at Santiago. We have had an
opportunity during the past generation to give the weight of our
power again and again in behalf of the Cuban patriots. Commercial
reasons and the dickerings of politicians have paralyzed the nation's
heart and conscience, and stood in the way of its duty. When the
infamous incident of the Virginius occurred, Hamilton Fish was
Secretary of State. It was a strange providence of God that the first
young hero wearing the blue, who fell before Santiago, was Hamilton
Fish, of New York. We must reap what we sow. The mills of the
gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small." While we are
reaping in the sorrow of bereavement, the results of the failures to do
our duty in the past, Spain is reaping only the anguish of defeat and
utter ruin. The movements of this war have been slow, and we have
chafed bitterly at the numberless delays, and yet our army and navy
have after all carried out the program with a remorseless and terrible
surety. From the beginning of the war to its last day, that program
has been carried out without a serious hitch or blunder, on to its final
tragic climax. The fleet sailed from Key West, was ordered to
blockade the ports of Cuba. They were circled with fire and death,
and the first breath of their guns blew Spanish commerce from
southern seas. The eastern fleet was ordered from the coast of China
to strike Spain in her eastern possessions, and in Manila Bay Dewey
delt her a mortal blow. The Atlantic fleet was ordered to crush the
fleet of Cervera. He was driven into the harbor of Santiago, and
reduced to a mass of blackened, curled steel. Every movement of the
((
45
1
army and navy has drawn closer and closer the lines of death about
the tottering Empire of Spain.
What are some of the messages that Santiago sends us to-day?
First: That we have a navy whose personnel is an honor to the
nation, and that worthily maintains the high standard Dewey set for the
world on May 1st. The glorious fact stands forth also in this demonstra-
tion, that our Nation is a unit. God reserved for the once
rebellious South the pain and the glory of the first heroic
sacrifices. Young Bagley fell on the deck of the Winslow, gloriously
dying with a smile on his face. He was the son of a Confederate
Young Hobson's exploit, the most daring in the history of
modern warfare since Cushing, added new luster to our nation's record,
and new glory to the redeemed South, and set a new standard for
American heroism. Our marines have shown in the establishment of
our naval base, the same spirit, the same dash and daring displayed on
the decks of our ships. For six terrible days nine hundred men held
their post against the Spanish host with the loss of only four men.
Our ships have demonstrated the fact that they are the best afloat.
The slanders and jeers of those who have ridiculed their construction
have been put to naught. The battle ship Texas has been the butt of
ridicule of our press for the past five years. In action this ship has
demonstrated that she is one of the finest of our vessels. She bears in
The Vesuvius
has been laughed at as a foolish dream. The first hiss of her tubes,
hurling dynamite into the Spanish forts, has added new terror and
power to naval warfare, and the Yankee genius through these tubes,
speaks its prophesy of a future conquest of the seas.
Such a navy
deserves of the nation the best. We shall make it the mightiest navy
that floats the sea.
her steel ribs the first serious wound of the naval war.
Second: The volunteers have had their baptism of fire and
blood, and proved worthy of the Nation and its cause, the equality,
liberty and fraternity of man. For dauntless courage, for matchless
enthusiasm, there has been nothing to surpass them in the history of
modern war. The charge of Roosevelt's regiment of dismounted cav-
alry-the only training these men had as warriors was on horse-back,
and yet deprived of their horses, on foot, they charged a treacherous
concealed foe with the daring and dash of seasoned veterans, they
charged into the jaws of certain death, beneath stifling skies, and in
the wilds of a tropical jungle.
Our European critics have gravely informed us that the
volunteer army could never meet seasoned Spanish regulars. Our
volunteers have demonstrated the fact that the best seasoning that can
be given a soldier is the seasoning of the soul, the spirit of
46
freedom and human brotherhood, the volunteer sacrifice of one's life
and being to a holy cause. And that sacrifice has only begun. More
of our brave boys will lay down their lives. The flag is more sacred
to-day for the blood they have shed, and their death is a
inspiration to heroic endeavor. For every hero that dies Spain will
pay a heavier penalty.
They are not fighting to-day as the martyr President and his men
struggled in the past generation, in order that a government of the
people, by the people, and for the people, should not perish from the
earth; but they are struggling that a government of the people, by the
people, and for the people, shall conquer this whole earth that its
spirit and its truth shall circle the world with its majesty and power.
The fire of that divine purpose is in their heart, and the flag is the
symbol of that purpose in history. The charge of that regiment has
demonstrated afresh the unity and solidarity of our nation. Young
millionaire and society devotee charged side by side with the penniless
cow-boy from the plains of Texas. They demonstrated anew the
divine fact that "Classes and clothes are but thin disguises that hide
the eternal childhood of the soul." Theodore Roosevelt in that daring
charge was the same young hero who left his magnificent library and his
palatial home in New York, to go into the slums of the city and devote
his life to the cleansing and purification of its government. As he
stood the slander and the jeers of his enemies in New York, he stood
the fire of Spanish bullets in the jungle, and led his men to a
glorious victory. Roosevelt has thus set a new ideal for the young
manhood of this nation. He has demonstrated the fact that there are
higher things than money and social prestige, that are worthy of the
ambition of our noblest young manhood.
Third: The Cubans have proven that they are worthy of our
friendship, and the sacrifices that we are making for them and their
cause. The past three years their enemies in America have persistently
slandered and maligned them. We have been told that they were a
worthless mob of half-breeds and fanatics. We were carefully
informed at the beginning of this war, that their army was a myth,
that there were not two thousand men in all Cuba following the flag
of the Republic. I thank God for the early opportunity the patriots
have had for the refutation of these slanders.
The co-operation they have given our army in every case has been
successful, and the record they have made, one of heroism and
devotion to their cause. Where the fight was thickest, where the
danger was greatest, where the blood flowed freest, and the Hell of
war was blackest, there the Cubans have been found ready to do and to
die. General Garcia has made a juncture with the American forces
47
around Santiago, and has under his immediate command 4,000 armed
patriots. What a comment is this fact upon their terrible struggles of
the past three years. A handful of determined patriots, circled by two
hundred thousand Spanish soldiers, not a ship on the sea they could
call their own, have fought with magnificent heroism for three years,
amid ashes, starvation, blood and death. They have faced the
most cruel treachery, bribery, and assassination, and
and the most
inhuman brutality that the 19th Century records. Their prisoners
captured were shot like dogs, their hospitals were burned, and their
wounded killed; and yet, in spite of this treatment, with a Marti
assassinated, a Maceo murdered under a flag of truce, they have
fought on, and on, and they have defeated Campos, the first general
of modern Spain; they defeated the inhuman devil Weyler, sent to
succeed him; they defeated Blanco, the successor of Weyler; and,
when our army touches Santiago, General Garcia with his 4,000 men
fight off the Spanish troops, and we land our army without the loss of
a single man. The men who fight for Cuban liberty, and the heroic
generals who lead them, are worthy of their cause. They are worthy
of the noblest traditions of the lovers of Freedom in America.
I have the honor of the personal acquaintance of General
Garcia. He is a gentleman and a scholar. In conversation he would
honor any drawing-room in the republic, or any salon of the old world.
No word of hatred or vindictiveness ever escapes his lips. His address
to the Cuban army in the Eastern Division on assuming command,
thus eloquently closes:-
"Army of the Republic, your old general comes to die by your
side, if necessary. Let there be no armistice, no treaty, unless based
on the recognition of our independence-free forever, or battling
forever until free.
"If we die in the struggle, we shall be dead, but our country shall
live, and we will be honored thereby.
"It is necessary to save our men from indignity, to save our women
from outrage and dishonor, to save our children from the gallows,
and to make our country prosperous and great. To arms, veterans!
Indifference is cowardice! Glory is achieved by honored death! Let
there not be rest for us until we pass the threshold of the Palace, where
our enemies forge our irons. Soldiers, to battle!"
The patriotism of that utterance is worthy of Washington and
Lincoln, its eloquence of a Patrick Henry.
Once more I greet the Republic of Cuba! Brave little blood-
robed gem of the Southern seas, thy Freedom is sure as God lives; thy
sons and daughters will yet make thy beautiful mountains and plains.
ring with the Joy of Life and the Glory of Liberty.
THOMAS DIXON JR.
THE NEW THANKSGIVING DAY.
The President of the United States has issued his proclamation,
calling upon the nation to set aside the first day of worship after the
events of Santiago as a day of special thanksgiving and prayer. The
President voices thus the soul of the nation. He speaks under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit. I believe that every President who has
ever guided the destinies of this nation in any crisis, has been led by
the spirit of God. The nation thus becomes to us in reality, the
organ of the common consciousness of God. Over all creed, race,
sect, or nationality, looms this visible and invisible power, a power
that expresses the soul of the whole people, searching for God and
right and truth.
Seated at my table on the Fourth of July, discussing with the
family group the glorious news of our nation's victory, I was talking
of the mystery of God's providence in the marvelous events before
the harbor of Santiago, when my baby boy, looking at me with an
expression of peculiar seriousness, asked, "Papa, is our God the
same God as the Spaniards?"
Who could answer adequately to the mind of a child such a
question? Yet, the question may be answered directly: No, our God
is not the God of the Spaniards. Our God is the creation of the soul
of the American Republic. My God is the creation of my own soul.
Our God is just as good, and loving, and mighty, as high and as
righteous as is our conception of Him. A nation cannot rise beyond
its ideal. A nation cannot worship a God nobler than its ideal. The
God of Spain is the creation of the Spaniard's soul, with all its ignor-
ance, its cruelty, its inhumanity and its tyranny. The God of
America is the creation of the American spirit with its love of liberty,
its faith in equality, fraternity and humanity.
I am not so vain as to claim that God is on our side and the
Spaniard has no God. I rejoice in the faith that we are really pro-
gressing toward the true God,-the God of nature, the God of right-
eousness, and the God whose child is the Son of Man. The true
God is the God whose power sends forth bud and leaf and blossom;
speaks in the throb of the tide, in the thunder peal, the lightning
flash, the earthquake shock, the dewdrop and the beam of light.
Happy is the nation whose God is in harmony with this God.
Happy is the nation that brings its life into harmonious action with
His life and purpose. We praise the God of righteousness, humanity
and nature-the eternal God of the ages to-day, for the evidence that
49
((
as a nation we are so close to His divine purpose. He has given us
this evidence historically. Our fathers were inspired of His spirit to
build as prophets would build, the foundations of this Republic.
They closed their immortal Declaration of Independence with the
prayer, Trusting to the providence of Almighty God." God heard
that prayer. Our early history is the story of the providence of God.
We could not have conquered the mother country alone. In God's
providence the whole world helped us until England stood single-
handed and alone with the world in arms at her throat. When she
deputized Lord Clive, her mightiest general, to command the forces
of the crown, and defeat our fathers, on the day he was to sail, Lord
Clive committed suicide. God walked in the shadows of death that
day, and held the destinies of a mighty nation yet unborn in the
hollow of His hand. God has watched over our growth. England
has fought great wars, lost and won; France has fought great wars,
and lost and won; Austria has fought great wars, and lost and won;
Russia has fought, and lost and won; Spain has fought five great
wars during our history, and lost them all. The United States has
fought five great wars, and never met defeat. Our flag has ever
flown triumphant in the sky. It is an enigma historically in the story
of the human race. It is inexplicable except that God has been
with us.
The Civil War was the supreme test and the supreme judgment—
were we worthy to endure? God put us to the test. The nation had
declared all men were born free, and had perpetuated under this
declaration, the institution of slavery. The nation had sinned against
its own life, and its God. But in civil strife the judgment came. The
victorious South beat the reveille of her drums under the very walls of
the Capitol. Five hundred thousand heroes laid down their lives in
this terrible struggle. "The South had no luck." God snatched victory
out of their hands. Defeat succeeded victory, and at last, from the
graves of the country's dead, from the earth baptized in blood, rose
the new nation to its new life,—to solidarity, nationality, fraternity.
We began a group of struggling colonies, three millions of people,
covering eight hundred thousand square miles. To-day we are eighty
millions strong, covering three million, five hundred thousand square
miles. We began in poverty; to-day we are the richest nation by
billions piled on billions. We thank God to-day because our army of
freemen has once more covered itself with glory in the struggle with
tyranny and oppression. The foe they faced before Santiago, was
brave, ignorant, desperate, half-civilized, led by mad-men, entrenched,
and armed with the most terrible weapons of modern warfare. The
50
}
history of the Spaniard is the history of blood, of cruelty and of
desperate and terrible daring. Our troops had never been under fire.
Even our regular army had never known a pitched battle. The
volunteers were from our farms, our stores, our streets,—they were
raw recruits. By the standards of the old world, they were unfit for
service. They were poorly armed, in an unknown country, beneath a
tropical sky, and in a tropical jungle; and yet, the fight they made
added new glory to the history of the Anglo-Saxon race. They drove
a desperate Spanish army out of their blood-soaked trenches, piled
with their dead; they drove them from their hills, manned by
artillery, down into the doomed walls of the city. In the two days'
battle, they killed more than a thousand, wounded more than two
thousand, captured more than two hundred of the enemy; and more
than all this, they did what the army went there to do-they drove
the Spanish fleet, the proudest fleet that Spain ever sent forth, out of
Santiago Harbor into the jaws of our victorious guns. Our losses,
judged by the standard of great battles in serious warfare, were the
smallest in our history compared with the results achieved. We lost
in killed, only two hundred and thirty men, in wounded and
missing less than fifteen hundred-a total of about eight and a half
per cent. of the men engaged. Compare this with a record of any of
our last great battles.
7
At Chancellorsville, of the 78,000 Union troops engaged, 1,606
were killed, 9,762 wounded, and 5,919 missing, making a total of 17,287,
or 22 per cent. At Chickamauga, 65,000 troops were engaged on the
Union side, and there were 1,656 killed, 9,749 wounded, and 4,774
missing, making the total loss 16,179 men, or nearly 25 per cent.
At Shiloh there were 45,500 Union troops engaged, out of which
1,754 were killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing, a total loss of
13,047, or 29 per cent. At Murfreesboro, there were 1,730 killed,
7,802 wounded, and 3,717 missing, making a total loss of 13,249, or
30 per cent.
At Gettysburg 80,000 Union troops took part, of whom
3,070 were killed, 14,497 wounded, and 5,434 missing, an aggregate of
23,001, or nearly 30 per cent. At Cold Harbor, out of only 38,000
men engaged on the Union side, there were 1,844 killed 9,077
wounded and 1,816 missing, making total loss 12,737 men, or 33 per
At Manassas, out of 35,000 Union men engaged, there were
1,747 killed, 8,452 wounded, and 4,263 missing, making the total loss
14,462 men, or 42 per cent.
cent.
What a call this achievement of our army at Santiago makes up-
on us for the future. Let us see to it that such an army is provided
with the best gnns, the best ammunition, the best equipment the world
51
affords. Let us see to it that we keep a hundred thousand such men
always in readiness for the nation's needs, and that back of them we
organize and drill a real national guard of a million men who are
ready with guns, ammunition, and uniforms, to answer the country's
call at an hour's notice.
Our navy performed before Santiago the most wonderful feat in
the history of naval warfare of the world. Well may the nation
uncover its head, and give thanks to God! What were the forces
that our ships met? Let us not underestimate them. They met the
finest fleet that the Kingdom of Spain has equipped in the nineteenth
century. Four second class battle-ships of heavier armor and guns
than the Texas, and two of the swiftest torpedo-boat destroyers in the
world. These large ships are called, in Spanish nomenclature,
armored cruisers; by our standard of naval qualification, they were
second class battle ships. They had heavier armor than our Texas,
heavier guns, swifter engines, and larger crews. Either one of those
battle ships, commanded by an American officer, and manned by an
American crew, could have sunk the Brooklyn and the New York in
an hour's fight, And yet, in a battle that lasted only four hours, this
magnificent fleet of four battle ships and two torpedo boat destroyers,
opposed by only six ships that flew the American flag, were totally
destroyed; 1200 Spanish seamen were killed, 1500 taken prisoners, a
Spanish Admiral taken captive, a second Admiral killed, a Spanish
Captain committed suicide, and the backbone of Spanish naval power
broken at a single stroke. Spain's power on the sea was in four hours,
annihilated for this generation. This is the most marvelous achieve-
ment in naval warfare in the history of the human race. There is
nothing with which to compare it except the battle of Manila, when
we remember that the American forces lost but a single man killed,
and that every ship was ready for another battle at the close of the
day. How can we account for it? There is but one explanation :-
A phantom ship led our navy once more. The whiterobed men
had risen from the dead, and as she glided past torpedo and mine and
led Dewey at Manila, so her dead sailors and officers walked the decks
of her ships, pointed their guns and flung about their armor the
power, and the majesty and the mystery of the heroic dead.
Well might Captain Phillips of the Texas say to his men, as one
of the proud ships went down, "Don't cheer, boys, they are dying.
Now let us lift up our hearts in thanks to Almighty God, whose
power and glory I here acknowledge."
The results of this war that has lasted three months have been
simply miraculous. Our army has lost in killed, only 247 men; our navy
52
has lost in killed only 8 men. Our total losses, counting the dead of
the Maine only reach 527. Spain has lost in this same period more
than 3,000 men killed at Manila and Santiago, and two fleets valued
at twenty-five million dollars, and has surrendered 23,000 trained
soldiers with their guns. Her navy has been practically annihilated,
her commerce has been swept from the sea and the spirit of her sol-
diers and the nation has been broken. Our navy leads the world.
Ship for ship, man for man, gun for gun, God has given us the
dominion of the sea. Let us build the mightiest navy in the world—
our men have proven themselves worthy of it.
Over all, we thank God for the unity and inspiration and revival
of national life witnessed in the hearts of the American people to-day.
During the past decade some of us have longed and prayed and looked
and waited for a revival of national life. God has sent it in the
breath of sacrificial death and victory in this struggle. The spirit of
loyalty, the spirit of sacrifice and patriotism, has filled the nation
from ocean to ocean. Since Santiago the men left behind are eager to
march to the front. They are as ready to lay down their lives as the
men that died. They are hoping and praying for the opportunity.
Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, foreigner and native Amer-
ican, have joined hands, we are one people. A new baptism of
patriotism is witnessed in the South as well as in the North, and out
of her ashes and poverty and sad memories of the past, the new South
has risen, glorious in her loyalty and love for the flag and its cause.
As I passed through the South last week, every hamlet, every village,
every town and city, was wrapped in the red, white and blue.
The Anglo-Saxon federation is the certainty of the near future.
For this spirit of unity and love, we lift up our hearts in thanks to
God. The dream of Tennyson, the dream of the great poets and
prophets of our race, we have lived to see fulfilled. The great nations
who have the same blood, read the same Bible, worship the same God
and hold the same ideals, henceforth in spirit, will be one people, with
one divine purpose. I glory in the future thus revealed, for the flag
of freedom. I see my country three hundred millions strong, with
her gleaming army and navy at her gates of the sea, great enough to
defy if need be, an armed and hostile world. My country, 'tis of
thee "-It seems to me that I never loved my country so before.
sing with new soul, and spirit, and meaning,
((
I
"C
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
""
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
THE PHILIPPINES-CAN WE RETREAT?
I believe that the war this nation undertook with Spain, was in-
spired of the Holy Spirit. I believe that it was founded on the deepest
principle of Christianity-the principle of sacrificial love.
I say
Jesus Christ said "The Lord hath anointed me to preach good
tidings to the poor; He hath sent me to proclaim release to the
captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them
that are bruised." It is the duty of the United States to do this work.
Foreign powers may threaten-their interference is a myth. We do
not fear foreign insolence. This nation has a continent for its home,
and nature for its storehouse. Germany is the only nation that has
shown any serious indication of a disposition to interfere with our
affairs. Germany is not in earnest, and if she is, so much the worse
for her. I say it with all due deference to German manhood.
it with all due deference to my ancestry that came from Germany
more than a hundred years ago; I say it with all due deference to
my own inherited German proclivities and appetites; if the German
Emperor undertakes to interfere with this nation in its duty in this
war, we will sink the German navy and whip her so quick that it will
not affect the price of sauerkraut in the American market. Our real
danger is at home. The only foes we will need to fear are the men
who are at all times ready to compromise principles for the sake of
peace.
A few days before the close of the Civil War, a Peace Commission
was sent to Washington to negotiate a compromise. This Commission
was composed of Vice-President Stephens, Senator Hunter and Judge
Campbell. There were men in this nation at that time who were in
favor of peace by a compromise with the Confederacy. The answer
given to this Commission was simple and direct-unconditional sur-
render was the only possible way for peace. The Confederate Congress,
on March 14, 1865, passed their famous resolution of defiance to this
answer, and yet on April the 9th, General Lee surrendered at Appo-
mattox Court House.
It is the way for the Devil to put in his fine work when the
battle has been actually fought and heroic blood has won the price of
its sacrifice. We are always urged to compromise a little short of the
actual issues involved. Every compromise of a moral issue is made in
54
Hell. It settles nothing, and it must be fought over again by our
children. The demand to-day for the surrender of the Phillipine
Islands is such an effort. Cuba was the immediate cause of the war.
The principle involved has no geographical limitation.
It is the duty
of the nation to end the history of Spanish colonial tyranny. That
issue is as large as the colonial posessions of Spain.
The United States cannot surrender one inch of blood-soaked soil
redeemed from Spanish barbarism by American manhood. We must
free Cuba, give to Porto Rico our own liberties, and establish a sov-
ereign protectorate over all the Phillipine Islands.
We must do this first, because our enemies desire that we should
not do it. What our enemies desire is a good indication of what we
should not do. France, Germany, Austria, and Russia, have shown
in this conflict that they are our enemies. They wish to-day that we
should retire from the Phillipine Islands. We would be fools to
to comply with this wish. The only nation that has shown itself the
friend of America in this conflict is Great Britain. Great Britain,
understanding our ideals, purposes and principles, desires that we
shall retain all colonies conquered. Shall we take the advice of friend
or foe in a matter of vital concern to all?
To retreat, to surrender the Phillipine Islands to-day, would be
to smirch the glory of Dewey's matchless victory. Dewey and his
men took their lives in their hands. They fought and were ready to
die for the flag that they carried. They smashed the tyranny of
Spain's medieval barbarism in a single day. They did more: the
result of that victory was to give to America the consciousness of its
manhood power. Who can forget the thrill that swept our souls on
the morning that the cables flashed the news of that victory around
the world? America lifted up her head among the nations of the
earth, a power to be honored and respected henceforth.
The Emperor William II, of Germany, sneered at this victory,
and declared it was utterly stupid, and utterly useless. Shall we
justify his sneer by an ignominious failure and retreat? Shall we fail
to rise to the splendor of the men that carried our flag to victory in
this vile slave-pen of the East?
Two British regiments had charged the Dargai hills, and fell
back, cut to pieces with a storm of molten lead. The General ordered
the Gordon Highlanders to charge and take the hill. These Gordon
Highlanders were seasoned veterans, heroes of four campaigns, and six
pitched battles of sixteen years' experience. They had never known
55
defeat.
They had left on one occasion so many of the bodies of their
men upon the field that they formed a barricade against the enemy.
Colonel Matthias stood before his soldiers and said, "Men of the
Gordon Highlanders, the General says that position must be taken at
all cost. The Gordon Highlanders will take it." The bagpipes rang
forth their thrilling cry of the Cock of the North," and the men
sprang forward in their heroic charge. The first man to reach the
foot-hills was Patrick Milne, the heroic piper. A bullet broke one
leg. He dragged himself up the hill without losing a note. A bullet
crushed the other. He fell in a heap, and for a moment the pipe
ceased its music. Then suddenly above the din of the battle rose the
scream of the pipe, playing again "The Cock of the North," calling
the Highlanders on to the heights. He had braced himself against a
boulder with both legs broken, and facing the charging Highlanders
he had piped them to a glorious victory. What would we say of the
government that would order such a regiment to march down that
hill again and tear down its flag? We would say that the British
people were a race of lions governed by asses. It is impossible to
believe that this nation could be imbecile enough to undo the heroic
work for manhood and civilization wrought by Dewey and his men in
Manila Bay.
"(
If we should surrender the Phillipine Islands we would harken to
the voice of the one contemptible traitor that this war has produced,
the pharisaical mugwump. The opposition to the retention of our flag
over these colonies has little force outside of the mugwump mind. We
have a Chinese party that worship the dead, but they are comparitively
harmless. It is a species of reminiscent senility-it is not a part of
the fibre of American manhood. The thoughtless, the timid and the
faithless doubt our capacity as a nation. The average American says
simply and bluntly, "Keep the flag over every inch of soil bought
with heroic blood. And the voice of the mugwump is the same
voice that in the beginning of this struggle struck the one continuously
unpatriotic, apologetic, brutal, and cynical note. He has systemati-
cally cursed and reviled every manifestation of American manhood
and sneered at every expression of human sympathy for the weak and
suffering. He has shown himself a moral leper. He stands for the
power of materialism that has debased this nation during the past
generation. He eats the bread of liberty while he curses Democracy
and fawns at the feet of titled fools. But the time has come for the
new manhood of America to fumigate this nation and rid itself of
such vermin.
We would prove in such a surrender, false to our solemn duty to
"}
56
the ignorant, suffering and struggling Phillipinos. The Phillipine
Islands contain seven million souls. Whatever their intellectual
status, they have proven their love of liberty in their heroic struggles.
An honest American loves the brave who fight and die for their liberty.
Spain is the enemy of modern civilization. She has never lifted her
flag over a colony save to curse it. To tear her flag from a people is
to bless the human race to the extent of that lapsed sovereignty.
Besides our moral obligations to the Phillipine insurgents are as deep
as death and as high as life. We may laugh at the insurgent chief,
Aguinaldo, but we are responsible for him. Dewey took him to
Manila on his triumphant vessels. We armed him. We sent him
forth to raise the flag of rebellion. We may laugh at his whistle, and
his gold collar, but he is our ally. We must teach him, we must lead
him, and help him and his people. If we should desert him it would
be a crime against humanity that would smirch the history of America
with unspeakable infamy. What a story would be the record of the
struggle that would follow our desertion! Spain crushed and defeated
in the east, her fleet battered wrecks at Santiago, her army crushed
and disgraced-she would pour her troops into the Phillipine Islands
to wreak their vengeance upon the only heads that could not defend
themselves. Spain has been cruel in the past as Hell itself. In her
present mood, if we should deliver the Phillipine Islands to Spanish
vengeance, every street and highway would run crimson to the sea.
The doomed people would once more feel the heel of the tyrant, and
every prison would be glutted with the innocent and the helpless and
the guilty alike. When Shafter's army captured Santiago they opened
prison doors whose hinges had rusted for a generation. Victims who
had languished for years on trumped-up charges, men and women who
were innocent and against whom no charges were found, staggered
forth into the sunlight once more. Old wrinkled women came forth
that were cast in fair girls. Old, bowed, gray-haired, wrinkled
men tottered forth that were incarcerated a generation ago, in the
prime and glory of manhood. The prisons of Manila are choked
to-day with victims of Spanish vengeance. Shall we leave them to
their fate? Shall we desert those in whose hearts we have stirred the
hope of liberty? The very thought is hideous to the man that loves
liberty.
1
Such a surrender would stultify the moral issues of this war.
What is wrong in Cuba and Porto Rico, is wrong in Manila. Spanish
colonial sovereignty is a stench in the nostrils of humanity. The
Turk and the Spaniard are not fit to govern colonies. Christian civil-
ization will see to it that they are deprived of their colonial possessions,
God has set America to the task of taking from Spain her victims.
57
All talk of a partnership with Spain in the government of the
Phillipine Islands is moral insanity. You had as well talk of a joint
commission of Americans and devils to work out a system of govern-
ment for this earth, with the Capitol in Hell. We began this war
under the inspiration of the spirit of God, to deliver humanity from
the heel of the tyrant, to set at liberty captives, give sight to the blind
and healing to the bruised. It has been the most marvelous war in
the history of the world. There is but one explanation of it, and that
is that God has guided it.
The captain of a vessel was once caught in the fury of a terrible
storm in mid-winter on the great lakes. His beautiful ship was being
slowly but surely crushed in the great fields of ice that closed about
it. His heart sank within him as he saw the last chance of escape cut
off. It was only a question of a few moments when the pressure of
the ice would crush his vessel like an egg-shell. He dropped his
wheel and went below into his cabin and fell on his knees. He begged
and wrestled with God to interpose to save his ship-the ship that
was the realization of the dream of his long hard struggle in life.
He
arose from his knees and went back on the deck, and put his hand on
the wheel again. Suddenly a breeze sprung up immediately behind
him. In a few moments it had grown to the velocity of a gale. Its
pressure suddenly parted the ice before the ship, and blowing fiercer
and fiercer, the ice field was hurled back across the dark waters. The
great sails swung out to their full length as the ship shot through the
waters. A cheer went up from the men and a sailor rushed up to the
captain, and said, “Shall we give her more canvas, sir? The captain
replied "Don't touch her! Another hand is on this wheel. Almighty
God is guiding this ship. Do not put your hand on sail or sheet.
Let her go.
"}
So I say to him who would retreat and haul down our triumphant
flag: Don't touch it! God Almighty's hand is on the wheel of the
ship of state. He who led Dewey past torpedo, mine, and fort and
shotted gun, and gave him a Spanish fleet without a life, He who flung
the awful majesty of His will over our fleet before Santiago, and giving
to ships and men a charmed life, hurled the pride and glory of modern
Spain in shattered hulks upon the beach, He who led our glorious
army up the rugged heights of Santiago and delivered into their hands
a proud city and a great army, He who delivers to us the cities of
Porto Rico with thrilling music and shouts of welcome-He is leading
our nation to its glorious destiny. Lift high Old Glory. Let its
beautiful silken folds fill the heavens with the glory of freedom. The
hand of God is lifting it aloft. Let no man dare to lower it.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
ROOSEVELT, THE HEROIC LEADER.
((
I don't believe in the etiquette that waits till a man is dead before
saying of him what we think. As a general rule a man of worth is
neglected by those who really believe in him, but who never say it,
and when he is dead they bring a boquet, throw it on his coffin, and
say, Smell this." A living public man ought to be the most force-
ful incarnation of truth that can be presented. I do not know
Theodore Roosevelt personally. I do not belong to his party or his
faction. I have no axe to grind in eulogizing his character. He is a
public man with whose career as a citizen I am familiar. He is the
kind of man I love. I love a real man-a man of flesh and blood
who loves and hates, who makes friends and enemies-a man whom
other people love and other people hate. No man of convictions can
live in this world and not make enemies. There is but one thing
absolutely contemptible in human character, and that is the effort to
be on all sides of moral issues. Hours of crisis are the hours of the
revelation of manhood. American Democracy is the one supreme
opportunity in history for the growth of elemental man. The Ameri-
can boy is heir to a kingdom, and the boundary of that kingdom is
the limit of his personal capacity.
The Sultan of Turkey once refused permission for an American
gunboat to enter the Dardanelles on the ground that only boats that
carried royal personages should have such privileges. The Admiral
replied that he had on board of his ship three hundred American citi-
zens, who were all of royal lineage, and that unless he was given
permission to enter, he would clear his decks and demonstrate their
royal prerogatives. He was given permission to enter.
The great
Republic is the supreme opportunity for powerful personality to ex-
press itself in the leadership of the people. In no nation of the earth
does initiative and executive ability count for so much. The endow-
ment of leadership is the supreme endowment of a divine gift.
The type of citizenship exemplified in Theodore Roosevelt marks
to-day the highest evolution of our American manhood.
He showed himself a practical patriot three hundred and sixty-
five days in every year long before this war began. These are the
men who are the salt of the earth. It is easy for the supercillious
critic to stand aloof from our political life and criticize its corruption
}
59
and the perversion of our institutions. Here is a man who left his
home and his 'social" duties and entered heart and soul into the
practical work of the American citizen king. Where the mud was
deepest and corruption the blackest, it was his pleasure to roll up his
sleeves and do his full duty as a full-fledged man. He is the kind of
citizen who believes that the State is the organized virtue of the com-
munity, and that politics is religion in action. He belongs to that
class of men that this nation needs to-day in its life above all others;
he is a politician, not for the love of office, but for the love of service.
He belongs to the holy order of practical political priests. He is a
man of broad culture, a deep student, a man of large wealth, and yet
he has remained a full brother in the broadest democracy of man.
He had every temptation to be a snob and a Pharisee, but he has
never yielded to such pressure. He spent his young manhood after
his university culture in the rough experiences of a Western ranch.
It was here that he won the love and admiration of the simple horny-
handed men who rallied around his standard and made the Rough
Riders invincible. Such simple elemental men never make mistakes
in their friendships. Their love and admiration is the highest tribute
that any man can covet.
<<
((
When the French Commune was overthrown in 1871, the so-called
Republic of France issued its terrible order of vengeance. The troops.
were directed to arrest all the small bands of armed insurgents scat-
tered through the city, killing them on the spot if caught bearing
arms without the form of a trial. This order was relentlessly exe-
cuted. A detachment of soldiers came upon a small band of armed
insurgents in a public garden. With them was a boy of fifteen years
still in short trousers. The band was immediately marched off for
execution. On the way this boy broke out from the ranks and placing
himself in front of the colonel said : 'Sir, you are going to shoot me
I suppose?" "Certainly, my lad, you have arms-it is the order."
"All right," said the boy, "but I live in a near-by street, and my
mother is waiting for me. If I don't come she will worry.
I just
want to go home and quiet her a bit, and then again I have got my
watch with me, and I would like to give that to my mother. Let me
run home for a little while. I give you my word of honor I will come
back to be shot." The colonel was amazed at the youngster's wit
and assurance, and seeing the extreme youth of the lad, he said to
him: "Go home." The youth obeyed, and scampered off. An hour
passed, and the colonel, busy with his bloody work had forgotten the
incident and forgotten the boy. Suddenly the door opened and the
boy Communist entered. "Here I am, sir," he exclaimed.
"I saw
60
"
my mother, and told her; and gave her the watch, and kissed her,
and now I am ready to be shot." The colonel arose and seizing the
boy by the ears, led him to the door and kicked him out, exclaiming
Get out, you young brigand. Go back to your mother as quick as you
can. ' And then muttered to his companions, as he waved his hand
toward the group of condemned insurgents, "So these scoundrels, too,
have their heroes!''
The Republic of France is a Republic in name only, for the
reason that this officer could not recognize the possibility of a hero
emerging from the humblest walks of life.
The organization of Roosevelt's Rough Riders, taken from the
plow handle, the plains of the west, the drawing rooms of our great
cities, is supremely significant of the genius of this republic, and this
magnificent democracy is a prophesy of the glory and certain destiny
of our future.
I like Roosevelt because he is a man of glorious faith in his
country. For that reason he is a man of power. The only hindrance
to our progress to-day is that we have in office a lot of small men that
have no faith in American institutions and American manhood. They
They cannot see beyond
They cry "Backward"
""
cannot think beyond what they have seen.
the end of their nose. They are afraid.
when the order of the nation is " Forward. It is such prophetic
spirits as Roosevelt that reveal to the nation in their full, its
magnificent capacities.
Mr. Roosevelt was a subordinate officer in the administration.
He was not a member of the Cabinet, but it is a simple fact in our
history that in this war and in the crisis that preceded it, his influence
over the Cabinet was greater than that of any member in it. This
nation will never forget that Dewey received his historic orders to
move upon the Phillipines while Theodore Roosevelt was in the Navy
Department. It was the daring brain and the glorious faith of this
young patriot who conceived that brilliant dash on Manila, who
persisted in declaring that we had the best men, the best guns, and
the best ships in the world, until the thunder of those guns demonstrated
the fact to all mankind.
The war with Spain has been a glorious one-its results glorious,
and the spirit of unity, of solidarity, the consciousness of power, and
the nobility of faith were never so potent in our life as now. We
must not forget to whom we owe this achievement. We must not
not forget that men high in council of the church, and high in our
61
institutions of learning, attempted to prostitute the heart and the
brain of the nation in the hour of its supreme trial.
I have filed in my scrap-book one of the most remarkable docu-
ments ever issued by American citizens in an hour of national peril.
This document is a proclamation to the working men of America.
appealing to their class prejudices and attempting by arraying class
against class, to sell the nation and its honor in an ignoble compromise,
and to desert the people of Cuba in their suffering and agony. This
document comprises four famous articles. Article 1, declares that the
destruction of the Maine is a simple question of fact, and should be
left to arbitration. Article 2, declares that Spanish cruelty in Cuba is
no greater than American cruelty in America. Article 3, declares in
substance that this is a rich man's war and the poor man's fight-that
the rich will reap the rewards and the poor fight and die. [I thank
God that our American citizenship gave the lie to this infamous
slander, in the death of the first heroic Rough Rider before Santiago,
who was himself a millionaire.] Article 4, declared to the working-
men that their home interests were of more importance than the
freedom of Cuba.
Unquestionably this is the most remarkable and the most infamous
appeal on record in America from high sources. It did not emanate
from the obscure, but from those whom we suppose to be the teachers
and the leaders of the intellectual and moral life of our people.
It was
signed by Bishop H. C. Potter, Bolton Hall, Ernest Crosby, William
Dean Howells, Charles F. Adams and J. S. Crosby.
I thank God for men like Roosevelt representing the highest
culture, and the highest manhood and the noblest class of wealth, who
stood forth in this crisis and gave the lie direct by word and example
to these men who slandered the nation and who sought as the blind to
lead the blind.
I like Roosevelt because as a heroic soldier he offered his life as
freely as he gave his time and money to his country. We stayed at
home and prayed for the cause. His prayers were deeds. This is
why we love the soldier; his business is to die for his country. On
the North coast of Scotland a ship went down in a storm. Only two
men came to the surface. They both grasped a single floating spar.
The spar was too light to hold the weight of two men. They clung
to it until exhausted. Then the younger one said, "Jim, you have
a wife and family dependent upon you. I am alone in the world.
Only one of us can be saved. You must be the man. When I am
gone climb on the top of the spar and you will be picked up." His
62
friend tried to dissuade him but he suddenly loosened his grasp and
with a (6
God bless you'' sunk from sight.
That is the kind of a man that the world must love. That is the
soldier's business. Whatever may have been our differences of opinion
with Mr. Roosevelt as to political views, when he led his heroic Rough
Riders up the Hill of San Juan, the soul of every American was with
him. His horse was shot beneath him, and springing to the ground
he seized a musket from a dying man and continued the charge until
the Stars and Stripes waved over the fallen flag of Spain. Such a
man appeals to the heart of every lover of freedom-of every true
American.
I like him because his moral heroism as an officer was greater
than his physical heroism as a soldier. He lead his men into the
thickest of the fight, and for these men whom he loved he continued
to fight against disease and hunger and stupidity and incompetence in
high places.
Let us make no mistake about it. We owe to Theodore Roose-
velt's initiative the salvation of our heroic army that conquered Spain
at Santiago. In writing his letter to Shafter he proved himself a
leader of leaders. That he was the author of the "Round Robin"
that resulted in the sailing of the transports to America no man can
for a moment doubt. The language is his-it is terse, it is to the
point and the responsibility is fixed. Hear these two sentences:
"This army must be moved at once or perish. As the army can be
safely moved now, the persons responsible for preventing such a move
will be responsible for the unnecessary loss of many thousands of
lives."
Let every soldier in that army understand that he owes his
life to Roosevelt. Let every wife, sister, and sweetheart who clasps
the hand of a loved one returned, know that but for Roosevelt's
bravery they might never have met on this earth. He did this hard
duty without regard to any party, without regard to any faction,
without regard to himself or his future in politics or in the army-
without regard to red tape. He loved his men. He went straight to
the point and determined to save them though he might sacrifice him-
self. His ideal is thus the service of his fellow-men, and his example
is an inspiration to the youth of America. He has given to the young
men of wealth who have pursued pleasure as the end of life a new
purpose, and a new view of the end of their existence.
This is the man whom a picayune politician in Washington
publicly rebukes-God save the mark. A politician sits in his com-
fortable armchair and rebukes a heroic soldier for fearlessly attempting
63
to save the lives of the men under his command. He attempts to
break the force of this manly appeal by betraying the secrets of the
Office of War, and betraying the personal confidence of an officer
under his command.
When the soldiers lay in their trenches exhausted almost unto
death with two days of fighting and without food, Roosevelt did not
wait for food to be brought. He went out himself and foraged for
food for his men. He found a bag of dried apples at the Red Cross
headquarters. He carried this bag across the burning fields on his
own shoulders, and distributed the food with his own hands to the
soldiers in the trenches. An officer declared that such an infringe-
ment of official dignity would not do the dicipline of the army any
good. Roosevelt, it is said, replied, "Damn dignity when my men
are starving."
The wealth of the nation is in such elemental manhood. These
men are the salt of the earth-the power that makes nations great,
and makes their resources exhaustless.
When Italy was struggling for national unity, and the ragged
soldiers that loved liberty had finished their term of service but had
received no pay, Garibaldi mustered them out. It was on the day
that their enlistment expired, but the cause was not exhausted—the
leader remained. Garibaldi stood before the soldiers and said, "Once
more I call for volunteers. I offer you the earth for your bed, the
sky for your canopy, stones for bread, and for your pay-the grave of
heroes. But I call for men who are willing to follow me to do and
to die for their country." Six thousand soldiers re-enlisted immedi-
iately, and accepted those terms. Such manhood is the priceless
treasure of every nation.
No office can honor such a man, he always honors the office.
Such men the people have ever loved and will love to the end of time,
and no trick of politician or slander of foe can dim the peerless glory
of their life.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
ALGER, AND WHY HE SHOULD RESIGN.
The American people have pronounced the sentence upon Secretary
Alger: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting."
I do not know the Secretary, personally. I was not born when
the controversies about his personality in the late war were brought to
a crisis. I have no inherited likes or dislikes in the matter. I speak
with great reluctance and from a sense of painful duty as a minister
of God and humanity.
This church holds that there is no secular world; that the sphere
of religion is the sphere of the human conscience; that religion has to
do with this world and not with the next; that the nation is the
organized expression of the common consciousness of God of the whole
people, and that, in time of war, the voice of the President is the voice
of God calling the people to the ordinance of sacrifice. This being
true, every officer of state is a priest ministering at the highest altar
of God,' and as such he is accountable to the people for the conduct of
his office, and the conduct of that office is a theme of the utmost im-
portance, moral and religious, to the entire nation.
We have just witnessed a magnificent parade of the victorious
battle-ships returned from the Cuban waters. No more imposing
object-lesson has been given to this nation during its national life,
than the organization, perfection, discipline and drill of that navy.
That victorious parade is not only unique in our own history, it is
unique in the history of the world. Through long, patient years our
“men behind the guns" have drilled, performing their rounds with
unceasing faithfulness, and waited in obscurity for an opportunity to
serve the people. Hitherto the navy has been neglected. Within
four months it has demonstrated its magnificent organization and
prowess and become the pride and glory of seventy-two millions of
people. In such an hour of national rejoicing criticism of the con-
dnct of the war seems an ungracious task, and yet it is a painful
duty.
There is a contrast to that glorious naval parade so dramatic, so
startling, so tragic, that it cannot pass unnoticed. While these proud
ships were moving up the Hudson-the city decorated with flags in
their honor and two millions of people cheering the victorious pageant,
quite another scene was being enacted at the army camp at Montauk
65
Point. A transport ship, unspeakably filthy, crowded with fifteen
hundred soldiers, three hundred of whom were helplessly ill, was un-
loading its precious freight in silence. There were no bands playing
a glorious welcome. There were no cheering, shouting thousands.
Grim pickets with muskets in hand kept back the few whom curiosity
led to the scene. The same government was behind that transport
ship, the same people, the same cause, and yet how different the re-
ception. Ten of the heroes who died at sea were buried. How many
have died of disease or starvation at Santiago and on the high seas we
do not know. The ships that have come in have been floating charnel
houses, and they have passed through an ocean cemetery. The dis-
cipline of the navy has been the perfection of science. It has moved
about its task silently and resistlessly. There has been no scandal,
no mismanagement, no confusion. The conduct of the army has been
so stupid and so tragic in criminal consequences that the contrast has
made upon the world the most painful impression.
Who is responsible for this mismanagement and incapacity for
which the private soldier has paid the penalty?
I am one who believes that the private soldier is the greater hero
of every war. He must bare his breast and do the fighting. His
pay is insignificant. His clothing, his food, his attention should be
the best of which a mighty nation is capable. And yet the treatment
of our soldiers has been the most shameful scandal in the history of a
great people. An overwhelming array of facts call to-day for the
retirement of Mr. Alger, the present Secretary of War, on whose
shoulders a part of the responsibility for this scandal has been fixed.
Our men were sent to fight with archaic guns, and with black powder,
against a foe armed with the finest modern weapon, and using smokeless
powder. Who did this crime? The War Department had millions of dol-
lars at its disposal long before the report on the Maine was made. What
became of those millions of dollars? The American people supposed
that the army was being equipped properly. We were assured by the
government that the delay was needed to provide guns and smokeless
ammunition. Days and weeks and months passed, before the army
was ordered to Cuba; and when Shafter's expedition landed, whole
regiments were found to be armed with ancient Springfield rifles, and
the entire army used black powder. Millions of dollars were appro-
priated to provide proper guns, and months were spent in alleged
preparation, and when the day of battle came our soldiers fought at
a terrible disadvantage, and scores of our brave men were killed and
wounded because of the criminal negligence of the War Department
to provide them with proper guns and ammunition.
There is no
66
excuse for such a crime. This nation leads the world in material
progress. Yankee genius created the modern ironclad navies of the
world. Yankee genius added the torpedo to the weapons of naval
warfare. Yankee genius has invented the most effective guns of the
world to-day. And yet, an army, heroic and enthusiastic, of Ameri-
can freemen, march against a medieval semi-barbarous people and find
in their hands better guns and better equipments. The American
people demand to know who are the men responsible for this crime.
The clothing and the equipment of our troops was another demon-
stration of the incapacity of the head of the War Department. Days,
weeks and months passed, with millions of dollars in the Treasury,
and yet our boys sweltered in semi-tropical heat, clad in uniforms
better fitted for the arctic regions, and when at last, Shafter's army
was embarked for Santiago, the entire cavalry division of the army
was sent without horses, and the infantry was loaded on board helter-
skelter, with food supplies and plunder of every description. It was
necessary while the ships were at sea for the stewards on the vessels
to remove tons of freight in order to obtain food for a single meal.
The camps selected for our troops while they were being drilled, have
proved veritable pest-holes of disease. Why were these camps select-
ed? It is alleged that favoritism, political pulls and personal influence
led to these blunders. Without a single exception every camp of our
soldiers has proven a death-trap for the brave men who went to fight
for their country's honor and life. The medical and commissary
departments in action at Santiago convicted the War Department
of criminal incapacity. The soldiers went into battle before Santiago
without any hospital equipments worthy of the name, with inadequate
surgical attendance, and the results are the most horrible scandal in
the history of modern warfare.
George Kennan, who has explored Siberia, could find no language
in which to adequately describe the facts. I quote the following sen-
tences from Mr. Kennan's report :
'There was tent shelter for only one hundred men; there were
no cots, hammocks, mattresses, rubber blankets, or pillows for sick
and wounded; the supply of woolen army blankets was short and soon
exhausted there was no food for the sick-nothing except a few
jars of beef extract and malted milk bought by Major Wood—his own
private property, and held by him in reserve for desperate cases.
:
""
"At midnight, Saturday, the number of wounded men that had
been brought into the hospital camp was about eight hundred. All
that could walk after their wounds had been dressed, and all that
67
could stand transportation to the seacoast in an army wagon, were sent
to Siboney to be put on board the hospital steamers and transports.
There remained in the camp several hundred who were so severely
injured that they could not possibly be moved, and these were carried
to the eastern end of the field and laid on the ground in the high, wet
grass. I cannot imagine anything more cruelly barbarous than to
bring a severely wounded man back four or five miles to the hospital
in a crowded, jolting army wagon, let him lie from two to four hours
with hardly any protection from the blazing sunshine in the daytime,
or the drenching dew at night, rack him with the agony of the oper-
ating table, and then carry him away, weak and helpless, put him on
the water-soaked ground, without shelter, blanket, pillow, food or
drink, and leave him there to suffer alone all night. And yet I saw
this done with scores, if not hundreds, of men as brave and heroic as
any that ever stood in battle line. It might not have been so-it
ought not to have been so, but so it was; and in this hospital there
were no means whatever of preventing it.”
The heroic men who fought that historic
to go without food for two days and nights.
and exhausted with the continuous fighting
that the results in sickness have been simply appalling.
battle were compelled
They were so weakened
without food or water
Contrast this starving line of heroic men with Dewey's conduct
in Manila Bay. In the midst of the battle Admiral Dewey stopped
the fight and called his men to breakfast. What a startling contrast
between the management, organization and discipline of the navy, and
that of our army. Colonel Roosevelt tramped miles over the blistering
fields to find one bag of dried apples which he carried to his men in
the trenches. And all this of a mighty nation with a continent for its
home, nature for its storehouse, and seventy-two millions of people
controlling wealth enough to buy one half this world. Who is respon-
sible for this crime? He cannot escape the righteous wrath of this
nation. No such incapacity has been recorded in the terrible record
of our Civil War, when food was scarce and often unattainable.
A division of Confederate soldiers were captured one day late in
the afternoon. They were marched into the Union lines at night.
They were tired, and worn and hungry. They had fought since day-
light without food, and when the brave Union men saw them they
refused to touch their supper, and said to their enemies, "You have
had nothing to eat; take our meals and we will wait."
And yet our heroic men at Santiago had to fight forty-eight hours
without food! It seems incredible, and yet the record is un-answer-
Gal
68
able. Political favoritism, and peanut politics has unquestionably
been a dominant influence in this scandal. No such criminal incap-
acity could have been displayed by men accustomed to army duties and
army life. The sons of men with a "pull,” political bummers—have
been placed in office in the Commissary Department, and have pro-
duced these criminal results. Secretary Alger is responsible for it.
He must answer for that responsibility. The American people have
convicted the Secretary of the dishonorable use of the secrets of his war
office for personal spite. Before the publication of Mr. Roosevelt's
personal letter and the Secretary's contemptible reply, I had my
doubts about Secretary Alger, and the accusations brought against
him. After his action in publishing that letter a flood of light was
thrown upon the whole action of the War Department. Petty spite,
vengeance, peanut politics, and incapacity were all revealed in this
single esipode.
The purpose of this publication was a most contemptible one.
It could possibly serve no public end. It was a betrayal of the secrets
of the War Office for the express purpose of injuring the supposed
political aspirations of Col. Roosevelt and his friends. Mr. Alger
believed that if he could make it appear that Roosevelt had boasted
about his own men's valor to the disparagement of the other volunteers,
he could array the friends of these volunteers against the brave leader
of the Rough Riders. It failed to work. I have yet to see a soldier
that does not love to follow an officer who believes in his men. I have
yet to hear a single soldier condemn Col. Roosevelt for bragging on
his own command. I have yet to hear the friend or the relative of a
soldier complain of the Colonel. I have yet to hear of any man that
ever heard a soldier complain of the Colonel. Mr. Alger struck a
false note. It does not run in the soldier's blood, and no man with
an ounce of manhood and soldier in him could conceive of the idea of
striking at his personal enemy with such a weapon. The contemptible
littleness of a great Cabinet Officer thus displayed passes belief. If
there is anything that is despicable in a man who holds public office,
it is the exhibition of littleness of soul. That such a man should be
Secretary of War is a disgrace to this Republic. The nation that has
made the record of Manila and Santiago deserves a different type of
man at the head of its war office.
Mr. Alger's order to move Shafter's army into the interior after
the surrender of Toral, was a piece of folly that this nation will never
forgive. It was a revelation of bad faith to the whole people. The
people of the United States were led to believe by the War Depart-
69
ment that Shafter had discretionary power to move his army back to
the United States at any time. Days and weeks of terrible suspense
followed each other, and not a transport sailed, nor would it ever have
sailed except with the bodies of the dead, had not Col. Roosevelt,
with his leading letter and round robin, "bullied" the War Depart-
ment into an ignominious retreat. If Alger's order for the removal
of that army into the interior had been executed, it would have
resulted in the death of thousands of men. It was his spite at Roose-
velt for revealing his incapacity, that led up to the publication of his
letter.
When the removal of this army began the scandal of mismanage-
ment once more revealed itself in the transports used. The first ship
to arrive in New York was the Seneca. She carried 99 wounded
soldiers and 40 passengers. These wounded men were packed in
wooden bunks, four deep. There was no ice on board, the drinking
water was putrid, there were no medicines, no bandages for the
wounded, not enough food to eat, only two surgeons and one volunteer
nurse to care for the men. The trip of this ship to New York reads
like a story of the Dark Ages. The brave nurse of the Red Cross,
who volunteered at the last moment to accompany the men, was com-
pelled to tear up her clothing, to find bandages with which to bind
up the wounds that broke out afresh. The surgeons were not sup-
plied with surgical instruments. They were compelled to use pocket.
knives in their operations. Dozens of men became delirious in their
awful sufferings on this trip. And this ship flew the flag of the
American Republic, the richest and mightiest nation of modern times.
And this is the treatment that it gave the heroic men that carried its
flag to the heights of Santiago, and ended the war with Spain.
"Put
The Seneca was followed by the Concho. The Concho had no
ice on board, and no medical stores. She had one surgeon who had
nothing with which to work. He had not a single antiseptic, and
insufficient food even. The Concho anchored at Hampton Roads,
and the captain made the wires hot with appeals for help. Three men
died while she lay at anchor, and the only answer received was.
to sea and bury the dead." He put to sea, and buried the dead in
bags, and three more died as the ship passed out to the Capes. And
this ship flew the flag of the American Republic, the richest and
mightiest nation of the modern world.
While our naval pageant passed to the boom of guns and the
scream of whistles, through the beautiful waters of the Hudson, and
sailed by shores lined with cheering thousands, the Mobile, another
70
transport, was unloading at Montauk Point. She brought fifteen
hundred soldiers packed like pigs in a pig-sty. Three hundred of
them were wounded, and herded like swine in bunks whose uncleanli-
ness was indescribable.
Who is responsible for these crimes? Our brave soldiers drove
Cervera's fleet into the hands of Sampson and Schley. They stormed
the heights, took the city, and fought the only battle of this historic
and glorious war. Were they criminals returning from a penal
settlement, they could not be treated with greater inhumanity. I
charge the War Department, its incapacity and its peanut politics-
with the murder of hundreds of our heroic boys. I charge the
Department with the maiming of thousands of those brave men for life.
There are sadder home-comings than the dead. We mourn for
the mother who weeps upon the body of her boy stricken in the front
of the battle. But he comes with the splendor and the glory of the
charge about his body. Sadder than this home-coming of the dead is
the home-coming of the living dead. The wasted skeleton forms that
will never know what health is again, the diseased, the starved, the
broken and the shattered.
I saw one of these soldiers returning the other morning, a skeleton
wearing the uniform of my country. The shadow of death was on
his brow, but his eyes looked out of their sunken sockets, brilliant
、and scintillating with fever. And yet, he was not cursing the War
Department. He was not talking about himself. His thought was of
his country, and of its glorious deeds. He was telling with fevered
lips of the glorious charge the men made up the hills of Santiago.
He was telling how they fell thick and fast about him; how they
planted the flag at last upon the ramparts of the fleeing enemy.
These are the men for whom I speak.
A nurse was passing through a hospital in the field. She saw a
boy evidently dying. She asked him if she could write a letter home
for him. He thanked her and replied that she could, but turning to
another wounded soldier near him said, "I can wait. Take him first.
He is about to go." The nurse did not believe that he could wait,
and insisted upon taking his letter first. She told him there was time
for both. He replied, "No, I can wait. Take him first." She
turned to the other wounded man and began rapidly to write his
letter, and as she did so she would glance furtively at the first boy.
When he saw that his pale face disturbed her, he called a passing
surgeon and had him turn his face away so that the nurse as she
wrote could not see the creeping of the death shadows over it. When
71
the letter was finished the nurse hastened to his side to write the
letter he had desired, and the boy was dead. This is the spirit of our
brave private soldiers: "I serve myself last; I can wait." These
are the men for whom I speak to-day; for the voiceless thousands
who have fought and suffered in silence. The American people hear
them. The American people will see that their cause is not only
heard but vindicated in the reorganization of the army of this
Republic.
The least that Mr. Alger can do is to resign. No one believes
that he is responsible alone for this scandal; we all believe that he is
responsible for some of it, and to be responsible for any of it is an
inexcusable crime.
Let the sternest investigation be at once instituted. Every officer
of our army directly responsible for these criminal horrors should be
courtmartialed and shot. Every executive officer above him, indi-
rectly responsible, should be unceremoniously removed from office.
The American people demand it in the name of our heroic soldiers
who fought, suffered and died. The American nation demands it for
its future progress and life.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
MCKINLEY AS WAR PRESIDENT.
There has never been a dishonest man in the President's office.
We have had Presidents whose ignorance of large issues coupled with
pigheadedness has caused sometimes startling developments, but these
men without exception were striving to the best of their ability to
honorably fulfil the duties of their exalted office. This is one of the
priceless glories of the American Republic and a striking vindication of
our theory of government.
Politics is religion in action and the President of the United
States is our highest religious functionary. The nation is the organ
of the common consciousness of God and right for all the people, and
our President is the chief incarnation of that consciousness. Mr.
McKinley has proven in many respects an ideal War President.
He has shown himself a man of breadth, versatility and progres-
sive spirit. His life work was as a tariff specialist. He was elected
on a currency issue, and at once turned from his hobby to an honest
effort at the solution of the financial problem. When the war engulfed
both financial and tariff issues he met the new crisis with remarkable
energy and wisdom.
Whatever his enemies may say as to the motives, the fact remains
that he has given us the best demonstration we have ever had of a
government by the people.
During the war he sought to be in fact the chief executive of the
people's will. He did this, too, at a time when as Commander-in-Chief
of the Army and Navy he exercised more absolute power than the
Czar of Russia. In honoring thus the people he honored himself.
The only serious exception to this, has been the tardiness with
which he has responded to the overwhelming demand of the people for
the retirement of Secretary Alger and the stern investigation of our
negligence and incompetence in the details of the conduct of the war.
If the President allows his personal regard for any subordinate to out-
weigh the justice of this demand for inquiry and reform, the glory of
74
his administration will be obscured if not destroyed by it. Such an
eclipse would be all the more pathetic, when we recall the brilliance of
his conduct of the larger issues of the war.
An elected monarch, he has incarnated the swiftest, most
responsible, and most resistless power in the history of the world.
The Republic has thus demonstrated its superiority over mon-
archial form. His administration of the war was government in
the open light of day. Its will was executed with the swiftness of the
movement of a single mind. The Queen Regent of Spain not only
had no actual power in such a crisis but the monarchy's chief concern
seem to be to so manipulate the news and so throttle public opinion
in Spain that a tottering throne might be preserved. Men talk of the
inadaptability of a Republic to the government of foreign territory.
Such talk always comes from the man in whose mind lingers doubt as
to the value of democratic institutions. This war has shown that a
Republic is the superior form of government in war or peace. The
ideas on which this nation is built are the world conquering ideas of
the centuries before us. Our word in this war was absolute. It was
the decree of fate itself. No more absolutely responsible form of gov-
ernment could be imagined under the present conditions of human
society. The government was moreover resistless in its every demand
because every demand by the President was backed by the brain,
treasure, heart and life-blood of 72,000,000 freemen, who knew the
reason and the justice of every position taken. The President spoke
their minds.
To impress the world with his authority, King Ludwig, of
Barvaria built the most gorgeous palaces in the world. Instead of im-
pressing the world with his power he bankrupted his little Kingdom
and the world dubbed him the Mad King. But the Citizen President,
William McKinley, called for a loan of $200,000,000 and was offered
nearly two billions!
He showed remarkable force of character in the crisis that pro-
ceeded the war. When the nation was boiling with the fury of its
righteous wrath over the crime of the destruction of the Maine, the
President represented the dignified reserved power of a mighty nation.
With one hand he calmed the fury of the people, with the other hand
he sent his secret messages of preparation for war to the limits of
the earth.
The President showed himself great in the broad lines of the
war's conduct. He summoned the best brain of the nation and made
it his own and the people's. He conducted the war on a world plan.
75
}
He perceived that while the immediate cause of the war was local its
issues were world issues, the conflict of modern democratic civilization
with the reaction and death of a world medieval tryanny. Hence he
struck Spain as a world power.
He struck her with the arm of a
giant and at her weakest points left exposed, the Phillipines as well as
the West Indies.
The President measured up to the hour in meeting the overtures
for peace in a proper spirit, and in secnring a peace as glorious for the
nation as was the purposes for which we entered the conflict. His name
will be historically associated with some of the sublimest hours in the
story of the birth of the nation as a world power. His messages
were temperate, even restrained, but they quivered with the heart beat
of millions of loyal Americans.
Under McKinley's generous spirit the crisis of the war ended for-
ever the bitterness of sectionalism. He honored the ex-confederate
with high command along side the Union veteran. He grasped the
extended hand of the new and loyal South with perfect faith. His
friendly feelings toward Great Britain helped to make the glorious old
motherland our virtual ally, and effected the moral reunion of the English
speaking world, one of the most dramatic and most important events in
the nineteenth century. His name will be imperishably linked with
Manila and Santiago words that are big with the destiny of the world of
the 20th century. While the younger element may chafe at his ap-
parent indecision as to the expansion of the new nation wrought by
Dewey's men and guns, our souls are devoutly thankful to God that a
Cleveland of Hawiian fame is not in the White House in this crisis of our
history. At least the President has sought diligently to express the will
of the nation. And it is a refreshing contrast to the stupid bull-necked
contempt for the people's will shown by some of his predecessors.
McKinley has shown the power of adjustment to the sweep of epoch-
making progress in the minds of the people.
Such a President honors the Republic. He is a new demonstration
of the dignity and glory of the elemental man. He has taught a new
America's Message to the world. That the child of the common
people can sit upon the throne of empire, holding in his hands the
life and death of millions, with the dignity of King or Czar, and
remain the simple servant of the people.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
DESTINY OF AMERICA.
The great Hebrew prophet who was statesman first in his
methods, declared that the work of righteousness shall be peace.
The dream of universal peace to the philosophic mind is one of
supreme fascination. It is as old as the hope of human redemption.
Its realization is as far as the millennium.
The most remarkable proposal looking toward universal peace
that this century has seen was recently made by the Czar of Russia.
Of all the incongruous propositions the world has heard of late this is
the climax. The greatest tyrant of the world supreme in authority
over the lives of one hundred and twenty-five millions of people pro-
poses a conference to establish a permanent peace ! In such a world
I believe that peace is a possibility for the human race; but I am
certain that peace can only come through the establishment of right-
eousness. The work of righteousness is peace, and there is no other
foundation for peace except in the establishment of right relations.
As justice and civilization advance the possibility of peace becomes
more and more an attainable fact. That nation the foundation of
whose national life is most in accord with the right relations that con-
stitute the righteousness of nature stands nearest its realization.
Personally, I count myself free from the prejudices and hatreds of
races and nationalities. I recognize as an Anglo-Saxon what I owe
to the Latin; I recognize my debt to the Chinaman, whose cunningly
devised toys bring to my children the joys of the Fourth of July and
and Christmas holidays; to the "unspeakable Turk" I concede my
obligations for the patterns of my carpets and rugs; and, to the naked
African, who bears from the interior his treasures of ivory, I likewise
acknowledge my debt.
The world tends towards unity. That unity is the dream of all
souls that love humanity; and yet thoughtful men recognize that at
least two hundred years of fierce struggle separates the civilized world
from the basis upon which such a peace can be constructed.
77
There must come two hundred years of conflict in which right
shall meet and annihilate wrong; in which righteousness shall be
established as the foundation of human society, and government shall
become the organized virtue of every community. Within these two
hundred years I believe that my country has been given a divine op-
portunity.
I believe it is the decree of nature, and therefore the voice of God
that America in the twentieth century shall become the most powerful
and influential nation in the world.
Our history gives us promise of such immortality. We are
young; we have but four hundred years of historic life as a
continent; but one hundred and twenty-four years of national
existence, and yet, in this brief period of time what wonders
have been accomplished! The unknown seas have been conquered ;
there is no more sea. The wild jungles that have been deemed impassa-
ble to the foot of civilized man have yielded to the plowshare and the
thoroughfares of crowded cities. Mountains that formed impassable
barriers even to the human mind, have become as mole-hills, and their
tunnels are the high-ways of the world's commerce. Deserts that
were supposed unconquerable by the genius of man are to-day waiving
fields of golden grain. A continent once inhabited by painted savages
is to-day peopled by seventy-two millions of intelligent freemen.
Progress has been the watchword of the nation; expansion the
law of its life, and every fear as to its growth and progress has been
proven by time utterly groundless.
The supreme problem which our nation faced was the problem of
sectionalism. It was the problem as to whether there could be a real
unity in the widest diversity of climate, race and temperament. It
was the problem as to whether the local community should be
sovereign, or the unified nation the sovereign. That supreme issue
was settled in the fiercest and most terrible war in the history of the
human race.
The nation was baptized in the blood of five hundred
million heroes, and from ashes and dust rose again to its new life.
It
was feared that the fierceness of this conflict, the awful number of
fatalities, the scars that it left upon the souls of its people, would lead
to fresh outbreaks, and that though the struggle had been ended upon
the basis of force, the actual problem had not been settled. And yet
within a generation of the close of that terrible problem, the prayer
upon the dying lips of General Grant has been realized. To-day
there is no North, no South, no East, no West; we are one people.
78
Moreover we have demonstrated our power to amalgamate and
unite all races, from all climates and conditions of the human race.
This is the continued evidence of immortal life in the make-up of the
American nation. I am proud of my colonial ancestry; and yet I re-
joice that my nation is not an exclusive organization for native
Americans only. I rejoice that its portals are as wide as the need and
sorrow of the human race. I rejoice that the oppressed from every
land may find in it a home, hope and a future. I have watched the
emigrants as they have landed on our shores. Their worn faces
haunt the soul with indescribable pathos. My glorious land has ever
welcomed them. It has demonstrated its capacity to make of them
noble citizens.
·
A group of emigrants gathered in the dreary passage of the
Jersey City station. People who waited for the midnight train
observed the pathetic look upon their faces. The group consisted of
the old grandmother, the father and mother, and a family of half-
grown children— little men and women who moved and talked like
old folks. Yet they sat silent and motionless on the hard benches on
which their baggage was piled.
Between the father and mother was
a rough bed made of shawls, and a coarse coat, and on that bed slept
the youngest of the family. There was something in the aspect of
the group that attracted the attention of the passengers. Some one
asked if the child was sick. The Danish people shook their heads; it
was an unknown tongue; but one of the boys who had picked up a
few words of English, replied: "Yesh-shleeps." An hour later an
officer of the road attracted to the group turned back the covering
from the child's face with a tender hand, and starting back exclaimed,
'Why, the child is dead!" "Yesh," said the boy, "shleep — dead.”
These people had sat by their dead for eight long hours, racked by
anxiety, distracted by grief, yet unable to express their trouble. They
left the little yellow-haired baby in a foreign grave and went on their
There were tears in sympathetic eyes when they laid the quaint
little figure, in its blue woollen dress, and round white cap, and tiny
wooden shoes, alone under the trees of the cemetery in Jersey City.
The sympathizing Americans could not understand the language of
the Danes, but the language of tears is the universal language of
humanity. There may be danger in the attempt to amalgamate all the
tongues of the human race, yet the motive principle that underlies it-
the principle of universal human love, is that foundation on which this
republic is built that makes it heir to immortality.
((
Ma
way.
It is this principle that is the saving grace even of our corrupt
politics. Much as we may deplore the power and influence Tam-
Sp
79
many Hall, one thing we must grant, it is an actual fact that Tam-
many has taken the rude material from foreign shores and molded it
into loyal American citizenship. In our war with Spain, Tammany
Hall could have mobilized an army of thirty thousand men, composed
principally of foreign-born citizens, who would have freely given their
lives for the flag of this republic.
Our resources make us independent of all nations and of their
conditions. We can provide food enough to feed the world; clothes
enough to clothe the world; and our children are born faster than
any foreign war that could be organized could destroy them.
The American nation is the incarnate genius of that democracy
that is conquering the world. There may be an eddy in the stream;
but the tendency of human thought, of human civilization, is steadily
towards this goal. Our institutions are more nearly in harmony with
this law of nature than any other established government in the world.
The human mind thus freed, bounds forward to the conquest of
nature, her laws and her forces. The material progress of the
American nation is the miracle of the nineteenth century. Material
progress is the forerunner of moral progress. The building of a rail-
road into the heart of a savage jungle means the end of savagery, the
death of barbarism, the inauguration of justice and civilization. John
C. Calhoun, the great statesman of the old regime of the South, oppos-
ed the building of railroads across Mason and Dixon's line. Calhoun's
mind was the incarnation of resistless logic. Every spike that was
driven into a cross-tie of a railroad between the North and the South
was a nail driven in the coffin of the institution of slavery.
•
The inventive genius of the American is conquering the material
world, and therefore laying foundations for the conquest of the moral
world that shall be built upon this material advance.
The expansion of such a nation is, of course, the prime necessity
of its growth. Therefore America will add territory in the future as
it has added territory in the past. The past has been but the prophesy
and the preparation for the future-expansion, political and moral.
Our flag is a challenge to every throne in the world. As that
flag has destroyed every throne in the Western World, it will continue
its triumphal and immortal march in the future. It will continue to
form the advance line of the confederated democracy of the world. God
has thus made the American nation the pioneer in the establishing of
the basis of righteousness in human government.
80
There can be no permanence in human government until it is in
harmony with right relations; there can be no right relations in human
government except they shall express themselves in self-government.
In the fierce conflicts of the dawning century and the century
which shall follow, and in the carrying out of this natural evolution of
our national life, America will need her army and navy. To this
end the navy will be built, and the army will be equipped.
No political corruption nor incompetence can balk this step
for the simple reason that the American citizen is the king.
Political corruption can only be temporary. The remedy is in the
ballot-box, and the American citizen knows how to apply that remedy.
It is childish twaddle for any rational man to attempt to hush up the
scandals connected with the management of our army. The Ameri-
can people demand to know the worst, and they are going to know it,
and when they find it out they are going to apply the remedy. Incom-
petence, stupidity and corruption will receive their reward. The
American army will be reformed from the War Office down to the
private soldier.
Gard
This nation will see to it that the private soldier who wears its
ever-glorious uniform, shall have not only as good clothes, as good
food, as good attention, as good equipment, as the armies of the
tyrannies of the old world, but that he shall have better food, better
clothes, better attention, better equipment,,than any army in the world.
If a republic cannot give these things to its soldiers it is not worthy of
the name. The king should have the best; the American-citizen-
soldier is the king.
H
We have demonstrated in the past a practically infinite capacity
for adjustment. Socialism has no terror for this republic for the
reason that social reforms as the natural work of evolution incarnate
themselves with the growth of the nation in our form of government.
So every problem can be ultimately solved by the people in their sove-
reign capacity assembled at the ballot-box.
Therefore I appeal to Young America. The approaching elections
in the fall are the most important in our history since the civil war.
Issues that will tell upon the centuries that lie before us are to be met
and settled. The new nation has entered upon its new life. It is
time to cleanse it from the rubbish of the old. It is time to kill insects,
pharisees and fools that cumber the national highways. The time
has come for the nation to move forward to its wider world-destiny!
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
THE BULWARKS OF THE NATION.
Before the war the mugwump and the croaker said that we
would have a long and terrible struggle, filled with defeats, disasters,
bombardments, sunken fleets, drafts and business ruin.
Now that our wonderful victories have thrilled the world, they
tell us that our victories are worse in their consequences than defeat.
They tell us that we have captured white elephants and inherited
death and ruin. These men were traitors to humanity, and their
country before the war. They are traitors to humanity and their
country to-day. Their cry of retreat and reaction is the cry of crimi-
nal selfishness and infidelity. They mean that they have no faith in
popular institutions, or their voice is the cry of reminiscent senility,
the wail of the timid, the tired and the superannuated. Two forces
contend for the mastery of men and nations-faith, progress,
and life, against doubt, reaction and death.
I maintain that no nation in the history of the world was ever
built on the foundations of the American Republic-liberty, equality,
fraternity, free schools, free press, and a free church. These founda-
tions are in harmony with nature. They are eternal. They are the
forces of that democracy that is slowly but surely under all forms of
government conquering the world.
I hold that our Republic is capable of indefinite expansion be-
cause of these foundations. The American free school, in particular,
is an unique institution in the world's history, the universal training
of the free brain of the free child by free teachers.
No empire of the past ever conceived of such a principle of
government, therefore the ruins of Persia, Babylon, Greece, Rome, or
the Middle Ages, furnish no proof of our coming downfall. Here for
the first time we find the recognition at its full value of the elemental
man. The humblest child that enters the school door may cherish
the ambition to be the President of the Republic. It is the realized
dream of the poet soul of a Michael Angelo, who, finding a piece of
marble, covered with dirt, saw its fine quality in spite of the dirt, and
exclaimed with enthusiasm: "There's an angel in the stone!"
82
The spread of knowledge is a divine work which builds moral
character, and seals the unity of human society.
Knowledge is social. All who know the secrets of an art or a
science are of a brotherhood. All who add to the knowledge of the
world add to the unifying strength of society. Why do the ties of
college life bind so strongly? Because they are founded upon the
unity of soul that results from the possession of common knowledge.
When Sontag first appeared in opera, she was hissed off the stage by a
clique organized by Amelia Steininger, then at the heighth of her fame.
Yet years afterwards Sontag saw her fomer rival a poor old blind
woman, led about the streets by her daughter, and the sight overwhelmed
her with pity. She sent for her former rival and enemy and cared for her
the remainder of her life. Why? Because the possession by these
two women of the knowledge of music and all it means of struggle
and work was a bond stronger than the memory of wrong and hate.
C
The impartation of knowledge then, is a sacrament of the great
universal church. This church is divided roughly into seven grand di-
visions, namely, the assembly for public worship, commonly called the
church, the home, the school, the arts, social intercourse, labor, the State.
The work of the school is to impart knowledge or truth. Truth is a
name for God. Art is the effort to incarnate beauty, and beauty is an at-
tribute of God. So we can trace each of these great human currents
back to the heart of God. There is no such thing as secular education.
All education is sacred for all truth is divine. History is the foot-
print of God on Time. Science is the discovery of God's eternal laws.
Philosophy is the search for the mind of God.
Ignorance is the soil of vice and crime and the disorganizing force
of human society. Now the State is the organ through which the
whole people search for righteousness, and it is the only organ that
expresses this common consciousness of God on the part of all the
people. For this reason the State alone is competent to give universal
instruction to the child. The claim of priestcraft to the right to
educate is founded on bigotry and superstition. No church organiza-
tion for public worship has ever given universal education to a
people, or ever will. No priest, catholic or protestant is fit to teach
the child of a freeman. The sectarian bias is fatal to knowledge. The
Roman Catholic Church had again and again a fair trial. She had
absolute power, fabulous wealth and centuries in which to work.
What are the results? Two answers are sufficient, Italy and Spain.
These are to-day the two most hopelessly ignorant nations in the
civilized world. And yet, they should to-day be the teachers of men.
83
Italy the mother of Art and Science is mocked to-day by the babble of
her ignorant millions. Spain, the builder of nations and the first of
modern peoples to build a world empire, sits now on a dung heap of
ignorance, corruption and incapacity, stripped of her empire.
Here we
The free school of the Republic is the patriotic furnace in which
our clashing sects, races, and nationalities have become one.
fulfil Nature's law of progress formed on the prolonged period of infancy
for the child. And every child, rich or poor, having the same period
of teachableness has the same birthright under a law of equal oppor-
tunity. When Harvey announced the discovery of the circulation of
the blood, his only believers were young people under thirty years of
age. We are producing a race of vigorous, progressive and hospitable
minds. Their mechanical genius is revolutionizing the social and
political world in the continual harassing of the forces of nature. A
scourge of yellow fever once raged in a great city. A steamer was
chartered one night by a crowd of people who tried to escape for their
lives. They ran down the river for about a mile, when the engineer
fell at his post. The man in charge of the boat asked the passengers
if any one understood machinery and called for a volunteer engineer.
A man declared that he did and took charge of the engine-room. They
started and were soon going at a terrific speed. Rushing to the
engine room they found the new engineer seated on the safety valve a
raging maniac. He flourished a revolver and swore he was commis-
sioned to drive that boat to hell. With great difficulty they got him
down and stopped the machinery before an accident occurred. They
anchored in the river and did not escape. And death claimed his own.
Such was the plight of Spain in our war. She had war-ships, but in
the agony of her trial she had no men who knew the technique of
modern mechanics and they were useless and worse. They lured her on
to death and ruin. The ship of our State carries a crew every one of
whom is being a trained expert, who can take his place at wheel or
engine when the call comes. Such a nation is endowed with immor-
tality. Let us strengthen and enlarge our training for every child
beneath the flag. The nation that carries such training to all its
people can solve every problem that the most unpromising spot of
earth can present. Under such a system deserts have been transform-
ed into gardens and frowning rocks into gleaming gold. Shall we fear
with such weapons to attack the most fertile and beautiful portions of
the earth's surface?
Knowledge is moral, social, and the cement of human society. I
defy mortal man to present a problem of economics or politics that
will not yield to its power.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
KITCHENER AND DEWEY.
The magnificent victory of General Kitchener on the Upper Nile,
is an event of world importance. It means the retreat of barbarism,
and the advance of civilization. The track of his army is the foot-
print of God in history. It is a fitting climax of this drama that on
the very spot where General Gordon was foully murdered ten thousand
children of his murderers were slain with but 48 casualties to the
British army. So do God's judgment days come. Men must reap
what they sow. We rejoice with our motherland over this glorious
achievement. We rejoice because our own people speaking the lan-
guage our mothers taught us from the cradle wrought this work for
humanity. And our rejoicing has a deeper personal import in this
hour. We glory in the victory of General Kitchener, because our
brethren across the sea rejoiced with us in the splendor of Dewey's
work in Manila Bay and Sampson and Schley before the hills of San-
tiago! Our eyes are moist with tears of pride in British valor, be-
cause the Briton first extended to us across the black wreck of the
Maine the hand of fellowship, love and tenderest sympathy. We re-
joice with Great Britain because a band of unity wrought under the
shadows of European hate in the crisis of a war has cemented our
friendship forever. Our practical alliance is already an accomplished
moral fact. The stress of the past few months has revealed to both
of us our common hopes, ideals and purposes.
The soil redeemed from savagery, rapine and cruelty, by this
achievement, will never again be covered by its black shadows. It
will be held as a trust for humanity and opened to the progress of the
race. England has given to Egypt order and civilization. Her only
mistake in Egypt have been her orders to retreat from territory once
redeemed.
The struggle for the control of the tropics involves the fate of the
world in the dawning centuries. The tropics were the cradle of
human life. Their fertility and wealth of nature make them the
arena of the great human struggle for the mastery of the world's ma-
terial resources. The pressure of life in the present centres of civil-
85
ization makes expansion of power over the tropics the law of life to
the peoples who are to rule the earth. France and Germany have
already perceived this tremendous fact and begun the desperate if late
attempt to sieze and fence off as large portions of this fertile earth as
possible.
Already the trade of Great Britain with the tropics amounts to 35
per cent. of her trade with the rest of the non-English speaking world.
While the startling fact faces us that the trade of the United States
with the tropics amounts to 65 per cent. of our trade with all the rest
of the world non-English speaking. The combined trade of Great
Britain and the United States with the tropics is equal to 44 per cent.
of their total trade with the rest of the world.
The future of the human race depends upon the development of
the tropics. Where the flag of the English-speaking world is raised
there follows civil and religious liberty, the freedom of commerce, and
the advance of education and human welfare At present the advance
of Russia, France and Germany mean restrictions, exploitations, and
tryanny.
I believe it is the duty of the English speaking race to hold these
garden spots of nature as a solemn trust for civilization and progress.
Where the flag of freedom is raised let it float till every man beneath
it is free! This is God's commission to-day to us in the Phillipines
as it is to Kitchener and his men in Egypt.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
THE FREE LANCE.
With this number our little Magazine takes a name.
This name
indicates its character. It will be the Champion of the weak, the foe
of every wrong, and on every page an independent patriot fighting for
the larger life of the new Church and the new Nation.
A LETTER FROM SANTIAGO.
ON THE EAST SIDE OF SANTIAGO DE Cuba.
JULY 20TH, 1898.
REV. THOMAS DIXON, New York.
DEAR SIR :
Having great faith in the kind of religion that you try to teach,
and also great faith in your ability to teach it I feel that if there is
anything that I can do to assist you I am only too glad to do so.
When I left New York I was a seat holder in your church and I
shook hands with you Sunday afternoon, May 1st, and you asked me
to write and I promised to do so, and if you will overlook mistakes of
all kinds I will endeavor to tell you some things that I have seen that
I think will interest you as well as give you some knowledge as to how
different people act under the same circumstances.
Being a member of Company K, 71st Regiment, N. Y. Volunteers,
I have had unequalled opportunities to observe human character, as
there are privates in this regiment that follow all branches of profes-
sions and labors, and some are worth a half a million dollars and others
not worth a cent.
It was positively grand to see men that were worth thousands of
dollars going around picking up scraps and doing general scavenger
duty in our different camps and never a murmur from them, and the
real acts of true courage, such as that and lots of other unpleasant
duties will never be known.
We have been out now very nearly three months and have suffered
all kinds of hardships from food, weather, sickness and battle, and one
point I intended to watch closely has proven to my full satisfaction that
the nearer a gentleman a man is the better the soldier, and the rough
and tough has been proven to be a coward, both under fire and in the
trials of campaigning.
87
We are in a bad condition now as of the eighty-three men that
left New York, only twenty-five are fit for duty to-day as they are
almost all down with a fever, that so far, has not been fatal, but very
debilitating.
So far my health has been superb and I have been greatly bene-
fitted by the experience, and I would not have missed it for any amount
of money or position.
If it had not been that I went to hear you preach every Sunday,
I believe that maybe I would not have enlisted, but from the fact of
listening to you I believe I am able to bear up better under trials that
beset us, as I think I am fighting for higher principles than most of the
boys, and for that much I feel grateful to you.
As an instance of what I mean is the fact that almost the entire
army is very much disgusted with the native Cuban, and are grumb-
ling that they are compelled to fight for such a people, while I am not
in the least disappointed, as I realize how they have been downtrodden,
and then there is the fact that I am fighting for the noblest cause that
this world has ever seen.
I will grant that I am disappointed myself in certain ways, but I
have had some opportunities to observe their personality, and they
have some noble traits.
Their physical courage reminds me very much of the Spartan
courage we used to read about in Greek history.
For instance, one day I visited a Cuban camp and some of the
Cubans were showing me how they handled their machetes when one of
them foolishly commenced to get too close to one of his men and sud-
denly he cut one of their hands and almost severed the thumb, but the
one that was cut never complained or even looked at where he was
hurt, although it was bleeding fiercely, but slowly walked to a bush
and plucked off a leaf and wound it around the finger and continued
to take part in the conversation.
Another instance of their lack of fear was shown to me one day as
we were walking along a path through a dense wood, a large snake
appeared on one side of the path and several soldiers jumped away
from it, but quick as a flash a little Cuban boy, about five or six years
old, made a dive for the snake with both hands, and although the snake
got away, it illustrated how devoid of fear these Cubans are.
On the morning of July 1st, we broke camp at 3.30 a. m., and
started for the Spanish lines, and while we were still marching, about
88
seven o'clock, a shell suddenly exploded in front of us, and that very
nearly caused a panic, but we continued to advance when a man just
to my rear was shot down and then we were ordered to unsling our
packs, throw them to one side and march into a smaller path at our
left where the bullets and shells came thick and fast, and several men
were killed and wounded at once.
Our Colonel then received orders to take us up to the firing line
at once, and he started us all right, but after about two hundred yards
he stopped, and there we lay a perfect target for sharpshooters, with no
opportunity to defend ourselves as we were liable to shoot our own
men if we fired from our position at that time
When the regiment halted it left me just in front of General
Kent's headquarters, and when he saw us at a halt-when he had given
our Colonel orders to advance us he called us cowards and everything
else, but quick as a flash, Major Keck of our battalion jumped up and
informed General Kent that he had received no orders from Colonel
Downs to advance, but if he, (General Kent) would give him author-
ity he would take his battalion to the front at once. General Kent
gave the necessary orders and away we went for the enemy.
We got into an open space and about a quarter of a mile in front
of us was a hill with a Spanish block house and intrenchment, and we
advanced under fire and reached the top of the hill about five minutes
after our troops had taken it.
Then about thirty of us went to the top of the hill to fire at the
retreating enemy, and we were subject to a hot fire from those
Spaniards that had already reached their intrenchments.
That night we dug trenches to lay in, and our Colonel came up
during the night with the rest of the Regiment.
I have often thought that it was a great pity that you were not
chaplain of some regiment here as I am sure you would value the ex-
perience and it would better enable you to teach men.
In saying that gentlemen made the best soldiers as I did in a fore-
going paragraph, I do not mean parlor gentlemen, but manly men, and
for that matter the man in my company that I consider the best soldier
in our company is a German, and although he is rather crude he is
one of those men that was born manly.
Hoping that this small effort will interest you, I am,
Yours respectfully,
Company K, 71st Reg., N. Y. Vol.
H. G. M.
ROOSEVELT'S PERSONALITY.
The history of our republic is a glorious one. Every great crisis
of the past has produced its divinely chosen leaders, the men of the
hour, who led the people on to their larger life. The achievements of
these men are the priceless inheritance of their children. As a people
we have entered a new era. A new nation has been born, and new
leaders are stepping forward with larger faiths and nobler hopes to
lead the Republic to its world destiny.
Foremost among these men of the new nation stands the rugged
figure of Col. Theodore Roosevelt, the young hero of Santiago, the
prophet of greater America !
I believe it is the duty of every patriot in New York to vote for
Col. Roosevelt, no matter what his past party affiliations may have
been.
I. Because he is personally an ideal candidate for Governor.
Altogether he possesses the biggest brain, the widest culture, and the
most powerful personality of any man named for such an office within.
my knowledge of politics. His training in the Legislature gives him
perfect command of the details and conditions of law making. His
record as civil service commissioner fits him to give the best appoint-
ments to public service. His record as police commissioner shows that
he holds the loftiest conception of the duty of an executive officer. He
executed the laws, not because he liked them, for he was opposed to
the excise laws as they stood. He enforced them because he had
sworn to do it, and because they represented as law the dignity of the
sovereignty of a great people. In a course of fifteen years as a public
servant he has ever shown himself honest, patriotic, intelligent, and
as brave as a lion. His only fault has been that he has always shown
himself a man of rugged and powerful personality, When great
issues arose he was always found on one side or the other. He never
beat the devil around the stump. He has always been a manly man,
a man of flesh and blood, who loves and hates, and whom others love
and hate. If this be a fault I love him for it. May God give us more
such men in public life—a prophet not a parrot, a man not a martinet.
II. Because he showed himself a heroic soldier in war.
He was
nobly serving his country in the navy department. But this was not
enough for his stirring spirit. He felt and heard the call of the best
to lay down life upon his country's altar. He declared with pride
that he had done all in his power to bring about that war for liberty
and humanity. And when the bugle rang its clarion blast he was
found in the front ranks. Where the red feet of war pressed hardest
90
there his voice was heard, his breast was bared. Men have said that
if he had done nothing more than lead that heroic charge up the blood-
stained hills of Santiago they might not vote for him! Well, I want
to confess that I would. If this were all his record it is enough for
me. I must love the man who dies for me. He bared his breast to
Spanish shot and shell that I might be defended, my home and loved
ones protected, and my country made glorious. Let me confess that
with choking breath and tear-filled eyes I read the story of that
charge, and my soul went out to his in love and gratitude and loyal
admiration. And I'll vote for him for it if it's the last thing I ever
do. The man that is not moved by such motive has no soul. And I
say all honor to the party leaders who had the wisdom and the patriot-
ism to hear this heart-cry of the people and give us an opportunity to
make him our Governor. He was not only a heroic soldier on the
field of battle he was the brave leader and tireless guardian of the
lives of his men after the battle. It was his fearless voice, raised at
the point of court martial and the ruin of his career, that saved our
brave army from disease and death before Santiago and brought them
home alive. The time has not yet come for the patriot to become a
partisan. Roosevelt incarnates the war with Spain. He represents
all that glorious war stands for in our history and all it promises for
a mighty future. Every man who believes in that war, in its divinely
inspired purpose, in its marvellous results, should work for the hero
of Santiago with might and main. He is the only conspicuous figure
of that war before the people. His defeat would be a national dis-
grace, his election by a small majority would be a national calamity.
It would encourage Spain in her struggle against us. It would
encourage our enemies in Europe to strike us. If for no other reason
that the direct issue of the war is involved we should elect him by
200,000 majority. Let us forget that we are Democrats or Republi-
cans so long as an armed foe of this nation stands ready to strike. It
is too soon for the patriot to become a partisan.
III. Because he is the one conspicuous young American who
represents the new nation born in the hot breath and fiery clouds of
Dewey's guns on the first day of last May! In one hundred days the
God, of our fathers, has set forth the civilization of the world a
hundred years! Young men have lived a life time in these few
months, and strong men have shrivelled and died. Men who
towered as giants before are lost as pigmies in the rising tide of a new
national life. The dream of centuries has been realized in a few
months. A great readjustment is inevitable. There are still hun
dreds of men who were born under the old regime and still rattle
91
1
around in their places. They are dead and don't know it. Judge Van
Wyck is a good man, but he belongs to the past, and the past is dead.
Roosevelt is the prophecy of a grander and nobler life for the Re-
public. He has set a new ideal for the wealth and culture of the
nation. He is the leader or organizer of the Rough Riders, of a new
social Democracy, whose soul has the broad vision of two oceans and
the boundless plains of our great west. He has demonstrated anew
for humanity that classes and clothes are but thin disguises that hide
the eternal childhood in the soul.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
WHAT IS SIN?
Sin is lawlessness.—I John iii. 4.
I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see a
different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,
and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my
members.-Romans vii, 22, 23.
All have sinned.-Romans iii, 23.
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.-Galatians vi, 7.
And the sin, when it is full grown, bringeth forth death.-
James i, 15.
p
A man who pretends to be a teacher of truth is reported to have
recently said that a liar is as good as an honest man; that a convict is
as good as a free citizen; that the harlot and the roue are as good as
the people of virtue; that a thief is as good as his accuser.
This same man also makes a specialty of advanced science, so
called. He pretends to believe and teach that the advance of modern
thought has destroyed moral distinctions. Is this true? Is sin a
reality, or is it a fiction? Have moral relations been destroyed, or is
such an expression but the desire of the darkened soul of the man who
made the declaration? Does he not simply wish that it were so?
THE BIBICAL DOCTRINE.
Has the advance of modern thought affected the foundation of
ethics, of morals? Is sin a joke? Can it ever be right to do wrong
in any world with any amount of light and knowledge? Has the
Bible doctrine of sin been destroyed? What is this Biblical doctrine
of sin? It seems to me that the Bible asserts clearly four things
of sin:
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First. That sin is the violation of the divine in man.
Second. That it is a universal fact in the history of man.
Third. That men cannot escape its consequent penalty.
Fourth. That the wages of sin is death.
Are these things still true?
A TRUER AND DEEPER INSIGHT.
I wish to bring to you this morning this message. So far from
modern thought destroying the Bible doctrine of sin, it has confirmed.
and re-emphasized its eternal truths. We observe this first in the fact
that the revelation of the method of divine creation given us by
science has thrown a flood of light on man's true nature. This has
given us a deeper and truer insight into the meaning of Scripture.
teaching upon the subject of sin.
First. We learn that humanity is intrinsically divine. Sin is
inhuman essentially. It is the violation of the human. Man grew
up from the world below, but man did not become man until he
ceased to be an animal. When he ceased to be an animal he partook
of God's nature, blossomed to his image. That which distinguishes.
man as man is the one element that distinguishes him from the
animal world, out of which he grew. This we recognize as the divine
element in man, which is none other than that which makes him
human.
A flower grows out of the soil, but the flower is not dirt. Man
grew out of the animal, but man is not an animal merely. He has
bound within him the divine and the brutal-two natures that are at
war. Here we find the true explanation of the mystery of our dual
being and the unending conflict between the brute inheritance and the
human.
TOTAL DEPRAVITY.
When man returns to the dirt he falls from his high estate; he
sins against his real nature, the divine law of his being. We are of
course aware that such an interpretation of man's nature destroys
the medieval superstition known as "total depravity." It is time
this superstition was destroyed. It is a libel on God. No man—to
say nothing of all men-is totally depraved. When we closely
analyze such doctrines as individual predestined election and total
depravity, we find that the key to such monstrosities of theology is
not the Bible, for they are not Biblical.
The key is really the selfish nature of man, who has read them
into the Bible. I never saw a man who believed in individual election
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I never
as against the world who did not believe that he was elected.
saw a man who believed in total depravity who did not except himself
from the totally depraved. I know such men make loud professions
of humility at times, but if one of them should rise in meeting and
declare himself to be the vilest sinner, totally depraved, worthy of the
lowest hell, and some fellow in the back of the church should rise and
say, “Yes, sir, that's a fact; you're the meanest scoundrel I ever
"the professor of total depravity would be ready to knock his
accuser down. That is to say, he does not really mean to say that he
is totally depraved. In his confession of humility he is really recom-
mending himself to God.
DISAGREEABLE OLD MAN.
He reminds me of a good old Irish woman on Staten Island who
recommended her husband to me for a watchman when moving from
our country place. She said of her husband: "He'll make a great
watchman, sir-he's a very disagreeable old man. He can curse and
swear like a sailor-nobody will ever come a-nigh. He's a very dis-
agreeable old man." She did not mean to be too hard on the old
man. She was really recommending him.
So of our brother who presents himself to the Lord as totally
depraved. No man is wholly bad. No man is wholly good. All
bad men have some good in them. All good men have some bad in
them. We are mixed. There are some people who profess perfec-
tion. They will do to watch. Ask a perfectionist's wife what she
thinks of the doctrine. I never saw the roof that could shelter two
perfectionists at the same time. The meanest wretch that wallows in
the ditch has still, beneath all the evil that stands uppermost in his
nature, a spark divine that may be fanned into a flame. We regard
the drunken, rowdy Irishman with pity and contempt. The Indian
we only regard as worthy of any consideration when dead.
AT PINE RIDGE.
Yet at the last slaughter of the Indian, which we inaugurated at
Pine Ridge, an Irishman who fell in the front ranks wounded, turning
to his comrads, said to them: "Roll me round, boys, and make a
fence of me.
I'm no good now." They rolled him round and used
his body for a bulwark. In front of that line of guns was the retreat-
ing mob of Indians. In front of the line of retreat was a young
Indian squaw, retreating backward with her face toward her enemies
holding her hands behind her. At last she fell pierced with several
bullets. It was found that she was sheltering behind her body the
body of a babe. The babe's life was saved and it was somebody else's
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babe. God hath made of one blood all creatures, and into every
human heart he has implanted the same divine powers.
Second. History confirms the universality of the fact of sin. If
we open the dark story of the past it is nearly all the record of sin.
History is itself the record of suffering and sin. Happiness has no
history. The function of history is to record suffering and sin.
When we read of one nation rising and laying another waste in blood
without cause; when we read the story of lost nationalities, dis-
membered peoples, enslaved races and enstrangled hosts, we stand
face to face with the fact that human history itself is one monumental
pile of human sin.
If we look at the history of to-day we are confronted with like
results. The newspaper is the history of to-day. The newspaper
principally makes record of sin. Read its columns and strike out the
story of sin-there is not much left. If you do not believe sin is a
fact, an awful fact, a fact as wide as humanity is wide, open your
eyes and walk down the streets of our great city. See written upon
the faces of men and women the record of shame and crime and
selfishness and greed.
NOT A CRIMINAL.
But you say, "I am not a criminal." True, perhaps, but open
your heart for a moment and look in upon its secrets and find there the
seeds of all the crimes of the race. You have not committed murder,
I know, yet you have hated somebody, and if that hatred had been
planted in the soil of a dark tenement district of this city and had
presented the proper provocation you would have been behind the
bars. You have not robbed your neighbor, yet in your heart of
hearts you know you have envied your neighbor his goods, and if
that seed of envy had been planted in the soil where flourishes the
thief you would have been no better.
Open your eyes and walk through the city; look into the faces of
the people, into their places of business. Read the record of the
world as it actually is to-day, without exaggeration or excuse, and
you will say that if there is no hell there will be a great many people
with nowhere to go in the beyond. They will be out of a job and out
of a home.
ADAM VASTLY RELIEVED.
I do not profess to say that the doctrine of the fall of Adam has
not been injured. Adam himself has been vastly relieved; but the
fall has been injured. Speculation in his fall has been practically
ruined. According to the doctrine of the fall of Adam, Christ came
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into this world to save man from that fall, and yet, strange to say,
Jesus Christ never mentioned it in all his ministry. If he came into
this world to save man from the fall of Adam, it seems reasonable that
he would have had some intimation of that fact.
There are some medieval theologians who made a specialty of
the fall of Adam who are out of a job to-day. It is time it were so.
The dear, good brethern have been weeping over Adam's grave for a
long time. While they have been weeping over Adam's grave the
children of Adam have been stumbling over their prostrate forms into
hell. It is time the responsibility of man's life were taken off Adam's
shoulders and put where it belongs, on the shoulder of the sinner
to-day. This is precisely what the advance of human thought has
done. This is precisely where God puts that responsibility in his
word.
NO ESCAPE FROM ITS PENALTY.
Third. That man cannot escape the penalty of sin is a scientific
fact. Science thunders this truth with greater emphasis than ever
theology uttered it. It is the law of the harvest, man must reap
what he sows. Sow wheat, reap wheat. Sow tares, reap tares. Sow
the wind, reap the whirlwind. Man must reap not only what he
sows, but what he sows redoubled, multiplied, intensified. This is
not a command extraneous to the movement of law in the universe.
It is the edict of the law of the universe itself. Man cannot escape it.
God cannot escape it.
Walk down East Twenty-sixth street, New York, the street of
sorrows. Look at its long line of hospitals and dispensaries with their
outlying pavilions; the morgue, where the unclaimed dead are laid
piled in rough pine boxes. Look at the end of the pier, where comes
the boat to take the prisoners to the workhouse and penitentiary and
the sick poor to the charity hospital. All day long the procession
comes down the street-criminals in caged wagons, the sick in ambu-
lances and invalid chairs and the dead in the city's hearses. Stand-
ing in that street, you stand in the judgment hall of sin. Men are
reaping what they have sown. They must reap. It is the law of the
universe. It is the law of God.
We should do right not because it is commanded. Command-
ments are given because they are right. They are not right simply
because they were given. God gave them because they were altogether
right. It is right to do right always, heaven or no heaven, hell or no
hell, Bible or no Bible, future or no future, immortality or worms.
.
WAGES OF SIN.
Fourth. That the wages of sin is death is pre-eminently a scien-
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tific fact as well as a Biblical declaration. Science says that the wages
of sin is death now. The violation of law means the death of the vio-
lator just in proportion to his violation. Sin is suicidal; life is the
harmony of law. Sin is lawlessness. The destruction of the harmony
of law means the destruction of life, therefore suicidal.
Sin means death in the physical or the moral world. There is a law
of commerce by which the human race is benefited. True commerce
is the pioneer of a world's industries, carries the white sails of man's
enterprise into unknown seas, people's wildernesses, subdues them,
spiritualizes them, makes them tributary to the sum total of the good
of the race.
Sin against that law of commerce now by plunging into
a fever of gambling speculation, and instead of promoting the indus-
tries of the world the industries of the world are paralyzed. The
wages of sin is death.
FORGIVENESS OR NO FORGIVENESS.
Let us bear in mind, then, these facts, that our past is what it is
and cannot be undone. We must reap what we have sown, forgive-
ness or no forgiveness of sin. We must die in proportion as we sin,
unless from some outside source a divine life be added. For every sin
of man the penalty must be paid, the sinner must pay it himself, and,
alas! sometimes hundreds of others must pay it with him.
You are making your character. Every sin of om.ssion and com-
mission goes to fix that character for time and eternity. A friend of
John Boyle O'Reilly, the Irish patriot, watched him pace the floor in
his office in Boston one day. He noticed that he always walked three
paces forward, turned and walked three paces back, exactly like the
restless turn of a lion in the cage. His friend asked him, "Boyle,
what was the length of your cell when you were in prison—how many
paces ?''
'Three," said he. "Why do you ask?'' Because when
you are absent-minded you always walk three paces forward and then
retrace your steps." He went to his grave with that characteristic
part of his life.
""
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CARLYLE AND NEVERMORE.
It is useless to cry to the past for mercy. Hear the sad wail of
poor Carlyle, when at last his brilliant wife died broken hearted from
his neglect. It is sadder than a wail from death itself. "Oh, for
five minutes more of her, to tell her with what love and admiration,
as of the beautifulest of known human souls, I intrinsically always.
regarded her. But the grave was silent-closed its greedy mouth
down over the loved dead, and gave back only the sullen croak of the
raven of despair-"Nevermore!”
>
God Almighty cannot save a man persisting in sin. To save a
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،،
man persisting in sin God must destroy himself.
Law is of the essence of God.
full grown, bringeth forth death.”
to save a man persisting in sin.
First, God is law.
Sin is lawlessness. Sin, when it is
God must himself commit suicide
"The wages of sin is death."
Last winter, on a Sunday evening, there was handed me the fol-
lowing note, written on a sheet of paper from one of the great daily
newspaper offices of the city: "Will you see me a moment—a North
Carolinian and brother of two Baptist preachers? I was born in
raised near ; published newspapers in the following cities
'
and was once a man." It was written in a beautiful hand. I
saw him after the service. His hand was unsteady, and yet through
all the evident dissipation and debauchery of manhood there flashed
forth what he once was-delicate, refined features in spite of beastly
excesses; hands small and white and beautiful as a woman's; a face
that spoke of education, of talent, power. He said he had a wife.
She was a beautiful and good woman, but had left him. He had no
hard words for her. As I looked into his debauched face and upon
his trembling form in its helplessness and wretchedness, I could but
think of the awful reality of this truth-sin runs unto death. He
was dead-dead to hope, dead to ambition, dead to the past, dead to
the future, dead to the present, dead to everything that makes life
worth the living.
Yet once he was a man.
THE STARS HAVE SAID IT.
death. The stars
Sin, when it is full grown, bringeth forth
have said it. It can bring forth nothing else. Before it can bring
forth anything else the tides must forget to come in, the laws of the
universe must be reversed, the white sails of the sea must flap dead at
their masts in the bosom of a breathless ocean, the flowers must forget
to blossom on the mountain side and in the valley, and nature's fin-
gers must forget their cunning. It is the law of science. It is the
law of philosophy. It is the law of God. It is the law of love.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
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THE LARGER CHURCH.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven
and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tab-
ernacle of God is with men; and he will dwell with them, and they
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shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their
God.
And I saw no temple therein.-Revelation xxi, 1, 2, 3 and 22.
I have often heard very fine distinctions drawn between the
church and the world by a certain class of thinkers. Such distinction
does not exist. There is no fine spun theory of church and world to
be found in the New Testament. When Christ refers to the world in
a sense of warning he means the sin there is in the world. God so
loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. God does not
hate the world; he died that the world might be saved. What is the
kingdom of God which is to come? What is the kingdom that we
are here to bring to pass? What sort of world is heaven to be? We
have outlined in these passages of Scripture this new kingdom. I call
your attention to four fundamental thoughts involved in this ideal
world that is to be :
First. I saw a new heaven and a new earth. That is, the new
heaven and the new earth are coterminous. There will be no new
heaven until there is a new earth.
Second. I saw the holy city. That is, heaven is a redeemed
municipality; a holy social organization.
Third. I saw the new Jerusalem. That is, the new nation.
Jerusalem was the capital of the Hebrew nation, the personification of
the nation's life. And lastly, I saw no temple there. That is, there
is no house of worship visible, for the dwelling-place of God is among
men. That is to say, in the redeemed world there is no ecclesiastical
machinery. The dwelling-place of God is in the relations of his
people.
The true church of Christ is a holy city, a redeemed society, a
redeemed nation, a redeemed world, redeemed man in redeemed
relations.
THE SMALL CHURCH.
This being true, there are some important inferences we neces-
sarily draw.
First. It is a mistake to identify our little organization for public
worship with the true church of Christ.
The church of Christ is an invisible empire. Wherever the soul
of man looks up into the heavens and says, Our Father," this is the
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temple of the Most High. It is exceedingly difficult for a member of
a traditional denomination to get into our heads this conception of the
invisible, universal church.
It was hard for the people in the days of Christ to understand
this. Jesus had to repeat and repeat the great thought, God is spirit.
They that worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. He had
to repeat again and again the idea that neither in the mountains of
Samaria nor in Jerusalem could be found the true temple of divine
worship, but it could only be found in the soul of man.
An evangelist walking down the aisles of a church on one occa-
sion after his sermon asked his usual stereotyped question of a lady,
"Madam, are you a Christian ?" The lady regarded the question as
somewhat impertinent. She drew herself up rather stiffly and replied,
"No, sir; I am an Episcopalian!" Her conception of the church
was confined to four walls of an historic institution. And so the Bap-
tist is inclined to think that his church in which he was born and
reared is the true apostolic church of Jesus Christ, and all others are
without.
ELECTED FOR WHAT?
But what is the church? you ask me, then. What is this organ-
ization for worship-what is it here for? It is the body of the elect.
But elected for what? There are two doctrines of election; one is
true and the other is false. The doctrine of individual election for the
purpose of individual salvation is a doctrine I cannot reconcile with
the truth of spiritual religion in Christ. I never saw a man who
believed in this doctrine of election who did not believe that he was
elected. I am always afraid of the doctrine because of that element of
personal self-interest that seems to be its determining characteristic.
I believe in the doctrine of Biblical election. The children of Israel
were an elected people; but elected for what? Chosen that in and
through them the world might be saved. The church is the chosen
body through which Christ reaches and saves the world. We are not
elected to save our individual selves; we are elected that the outside
world may be reached and saved. I read a little poem the other day
which admirably illustrates this conception of the elected position of
the saint as contradistinguished from the people in the modern minis-
ter. The poem said :
The parish priest of austerity
Climbed up in a high church steeple
To be nearer God, that he might
Hand down his word unto the people.
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So he daily wrote in sermon script
What he thought was sent from heaven;
And he dropped this down on the people's heads
Two times one day in seven.
In his age God said come down and die,
And he cried from out the steeple,
"Where art thou, Lord ?" and the Lord replied,
"Down here among my people."
HIGHWAYS OF THE LORD.
Second. All the channels through which the human and divine
excellence, love and beauty and truth enter the soul of man, these
must be the highways of the Lord, and must be regarded as holy
ground.
All societies then for the promulgation of knowledge are not sec-
ular, but sacred. The distinction between the secular and the sacred,
I honestly believe, was the invention of the devil to deceive the elect.
There is no such thing as a secular world. It is God's world. To
impart knowledge is to spread truth. What is truth? Truth is God;
God is truth. To teach the truth is to teach God. Men talk about
secular education and religious education. I do not know what men
are talking about. All education is sacred. To impart the truth is
to impart God, whether it be taught in a log cabin at the country
crossroads or whether it be taught from the sacred desk. The great
scientist who discovers the laws of nature and unfolds them to the
world is translating God into human language. Kepler, the great
scientist, when he had discovered the laws of the planetary world,
leaped to his feet in ecstasy and exclaimed, "Oh, Almighty God, I
am thinking thy thoughts after thee!" And he was. He had fol-
lowed the mind of God from star to star, from world to world, unfold-
ing the beauties and glories of the universe; teaching in lauguage
deeper and diviner than even the language of the poet the transcend-
ent truth that the heavens show forth the glory of God.
PASTEUR INSTITUTE.
The work of the scientist to-day, is it secular? Go to Pasteur's
laboratory in Paris, in the anteroom, you will find the victims gath-
ered from the four quarters of the earth, fleeing from the nightmare
that has pursued them. All come to this magician that they may be
healed at the touch of science, and at the touch of the great master
the phantom is driven away-life and hope once inore are theirs. As
you look into the joyous faces of those who have been healed, and
look at this wonderful man who, in the secrets of his laboratory solved
ΙΟΙ
this problem of the ages-is his work secular? Listen: "I was sick
and ye visited me."
The pursuit and development of art is essentially religious, not
secular. Beauty is an attribute of God. Art is the translation of the
beautiful into human language. To translate beauty is to translate.
God. Art grasps the divine and imprisons it in matter that the spirit
of man may see and know and feel and realize the nearness of the
divine. Is music seeular? The master musician who sweeps his
strings, and as he touches them sweeps the listening soul unto the
very gates of heaven itself.
Painting, is it secular? The artist who grasps the deepest secrets
of the ideal and the spiritual, and imprisons them on canvas in form
and color. A man stood in a cathedral in Europe on one occasion
looking at the great painting, "The Descent from the Cross." The
attendant announced to him that the hour to close the cathedral had
He still stood before the picture in rapt attention. When
again reminded that he must leave, he turned with tears to the attend-
ant and said, "I cannot go yet. I must stay until they take him
down."
come.
THE SOCIAL HOUR.
Social intercouse, is it secular or sacred? Social intercouse is
the highway along which the feet of angels may travel to the inmost
soul of man. It should be regarded as holy ground, whether it be the
meeting of friends and acquaintances in the parlor, the social gather-
ing, or whether the casual meeting on the street.
In Boston there was born into a home, one day, a little one with
a deformed foot. The mother and grandmother and all the household
were in tears over the sad event. They were inconsolable. From
across the street there came a crippled girl, their neighbor, who asked
them the cause of all their distress. They told her that the little one
would be a cripple for life.
She replied: "You don't understand the possibilities of such a
life. You should not be inconsolable. I have been a cripple all my
life, and this world has been a much more beautiful world to me than
to many of my friends. Everybody is kind to me. I have only seen
the beautiful and the loving side of it. When I cross the streets the
policemen will stop all the cars and all the cabs and help me tenderly
across. When I get on the train the baggage-master will put me on
the truck and roll me to the car and assist me kindly, tenderly, care-
fully into the car. I have only seen that which was beautiful and
kind in the world. "" And she had seen this in the streets. She had
learned this divine lesson from a casual meeting of the rough police-
102
man and from meeting the baggage smasher at the depot. Wherever
man meets man may be the highway of the Lord through which
divine truth may pass to our souls.
THE ENGINE OF MERCY.
Trade and labor, are they sacred or secular? Labor is the spirit-
ualization of matter. The laborer touches matter and humanizes and
spiritualizes that which he touches. He takes out the rough material
from the world and forms and fashions it into things of beauty and of
use, until the rocks speak in language divine; until our homes are
made comfortable and beautiful by this process of transforming the
raw material of nature. The man who does this work, is it secular
work simply? The blacksmith at his anvil is doing a sacred work, if
his work is done well. He makes the anchor and the chain, and in
the storm the anchor hold. The chain holds. The vessel is secure.
The work was well done.
The clothes I wear to-day, are they the result of so much labor as
a commodity, exchanged for so much money, exchanged in payment
for the commodity, labor? No. As I walk through the streets of
New York, and look up to those great tenements where the clothing
is made, it seems to me that I can feel in the very seams of my coat
the throbbing, aching nerves of women who have sewed into those
seams their very heart's blood. They did their work well, and they
were not paid for the elements of faithfulness that went into that
work. They did their work unto the Lord. "Servants, obey your
masters." Not because you are a slave and they your master; but
obey your masters as unto the Lord." Such was the only doctrine
of slavery ever taught in the Bible.
(C
The mechanic who works in his shop over the inventions which
are to move the civilizations of the world, sacred or secular? A man
started from the gulf a short time ago on a fast express for New
York. He was bitten by a mad dog, and was going to the Pasteur
institute. His life was a question of minutes. Time! That great
engine dashed through city after city until the click of the rails came
with the regularity of the tick of a watch. Through city after city
that great monster speeded on its mission of mercy. The man who
watched by the window cried in his heart for more speed. Inside of
of forty-eight hours that car was drawn into the car shed at Jersey
City. He reached the institution in time, was treated and saved.
The man who invented that magnificent machine of locomotion and
brought the four corners of this continent together, was his work
sacred or secular? Listen, "I was sick and ye visited me."
The state, is it sacred or secular? All law is divine law. Law
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that is not divine is not law. The state is the supreme embodiment
of law. It should be as holy as the altar of the church itself. Pa-
triotism is a divine sentiment. We love our country, not because we
hate the rest of the world, but because our country is a part of God's
world. Politics should be sacred. It should be as holy a work to be
governor of a state as to wear the red hat of a cardinal or do the work
of bishop or pastor. The state is the organ through which the whole
people search for righteousness. It is the expression of the common
conscienceness of God. Politics, therefore, is religion in action.
HOME A HEAVEN.
The home is a part of the church of Christ. It is holy ground.
It is a little kingdom of God in itself, where man learns the first lesson
of sacrifice and love and obedience. It is here that the foundations
of great characters are laid. It is the refuge and strength of man-
hood. It is the secret fountain from which man draws the inspiration
to meet every crisis of human life. It is the inner sanctuary where
God speaks his deepest messages to those in distress or trial.
Hawthorne lost his position under the government at Salem and
and despaired of his ability to succeed in life. He sat down in his
room after the loss of his position utterly dejected, in despair. His
wife entered the room and saw him, understood the situation. She
did not say anything at first. She lighted a fire, bright and cheerful,
until its warm glow filled the room. She brought a table and put it
down by his side, and brought pen and ink and paper. And then,
with a tender touch on his shoulder, and in her winning voice, she
said to him, "Now, my dear, you can write your book.” He looked
up into her face and hope revived. Life opened anew. He seized his
pen and wrote his book, and wrote the masterpiece of his life, "The
Scarlet Letter." The home is the secret altar from which God speaks
to man his divinest message, in that earlier life when character is
being rapidly shaped for time and eternity.
A SACRED PICTURE.
A mother in New Hampshire reared a family of eight boys. They
all left the homestead and went to sea. She was heartbroken. The
preacher visited her home and had poured into his ears this life sor-
row. She said her boys were good boys. She could not understand
why they had all gone to sea and left her. She could not understand
the mysterious work of Providence. Her heart was desolate, the
home forsaken. And she said her boys had never seen the ocean
until they were grown. She asked the preacher to explain it. He
looked around the room and over the mantel he saw a splendid picture
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of a great ship under full sail. Every white wing instinct with the
message of foreign nations. The waves that dashed against the bow
spoke of a thousand shores that had been washed as around the world
they had swept. The preacher said to her: "Why, madam, this is
the explanation. Your boys became sailors because this picture told
them of the ocean and led them around the world." The very pic-
ture on your walls, every inch of tapestry-these are sacred. They
make and unmake character. Guard them well. The foundations of
every great man's character is laid in these primal hours of life. There
is no touch like a mother's touch. There is no power to make and
unmake character like that touch.
The secular is the sacred. All things should be done unto the
Lord. Wherever man walks he walks in God's world, and this world
is his great temple and every inch of its soil should be made holy. We
call not for more church buildings, more ecclesiastical machinery; but
the great need of the age in which we live is for holy orders of mer-
chants, holy orders of workingmen, holy orders of artisans, holy
orders of lawyers, holy orders of mechanics. In other words, the re-
deemed world is that world in which all the relations of man are made
sacred. "I saw no temple therein, for the dwelling place of God was
among men."
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
>
T
DOES DEATH END ALL?
If a man die, shall he live again? It is an old, yet ever new
question that envelopes with its mystery every human soul.
At first view apparently death is the tragic end of all. Yet if we
draw near to nature's heart the tragedy is only apparent, not real.
((
Nature speaks in myriad tongues the language of man's immor-
tality. When we draw near to nature we find that death is not a
black robed nemesis pursuing life to destroy, but that death really is
the angel that leads to the gateway to a longer life. The scientist
has discovered that there can be no progress in nature except through
death. Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die it cannot
bring forth fruit. The cell is the unit of life. But the cell must die
as a cell before organic life comes forth. The cell dies-the organism
with its higher life is born. So the unity of nature to her laws teach
us that through the physical incident of death man may rise to a
higher life.
The law of the conservative of energy teaches that force may
change its form but cannot be wholly lost. Man's personal will, so
long as he does not destroy it by a process of suicide, is undoubtedly
a force. It is contrary to known law that this force should be
annihilated by a physical incident called death.
The language of creation is onward, upward! From cell to
organism, from worm to butterfly, from brute to humanity. It is a
violation of the great law to assume its end to be a catastrophe in
man, its highest product. It is unthinkable that groaning centuries.
produced such an abortion as a man who perishes as the grass in the
field.
The voice of nature within man's soul speaks the universal hope
of immortality. The testimony of human history is thus over-
whelmingly in favor of immortality. It is an universal fact of
history that all men have in all ages and under all conditions believed
in life beyond the grave. The exceptions in a few individuals with
high nerve temperaments, who have refused to believe it, simply
shows that these people were diseased mentally, and their mental
observation took that form. All races, Caucasian, African, Mongo-
106
lian alike believe it.
Only abnormal, that is insane, minds have
denied it. Dr. Hare, a great American scientist, once vehemently
denied it, and afterwards demonstrated his insanity by becoming a
spook spiritualist. Universal man from the savage to Tennyson
bear this testimony.
But more important still is the historic fact of the resurrection of
a man-Jesus Christ. The power of Christianity centres in this
historic fact. If it is not true Christianity it is a poetical dream and
has no historic reality.
The evidence of that one resurrection is to the unprejudiced mind
well-nigh invincible. We know that he rose from the dead :
FIRST-From invincible, historic testimony to the fact of his
life, crucifixion, death and resurrection.
We have historical evidence in the history of the Hebrew race in
the first place. The history of Israel is a miracle in the story of
humanity. View it from whatever point you please, there is no theory
of mere rationalism or of mythology that can explain the simple facts
of Jewish history. There is but one sane explanation, and that is that
the people of Israel were a chosen people. Their history is unique in
the history of mankind. It has no parallel and cannot be interpreted
by the ordinary laws under which nations have had their rise and
development.
THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE PROPHECIES FULFILLED.
Far back in the past there rose the race of prophets whose
language pointed forward to the coming of this mysterious personage.
We read the Twenty-second Psalm and find the description of his
death. You must leap the chasm of a thousand years from the date
of that Psalm to find the explanation of its phraseology.
In the life of Jesus Christ there were fulfilled three hundred and
thirty-three groups of prophecy from the ancient history of the Jews.
Three hundred and thirty-three distinct groups of prophetic utter-
ances were fulfilled in his life, and within these separate groups there
were smaller groups of specific prophecies which were literally fulfilled,
which would raise the possibility of such events happening by chance
to such a point that it passes the power of the mind of man to believe
such things could happen by chance.
And then we have the witness of his followers, who were at first
surprised at the thought of his resurrection. They tell the story with
the utmost simplicity. Without entering into minute details, without
straining for effect, without making any effort to impress the world
with its dramatic importance, they stand forth as the simple witnesses
107
of facts which they observe. They declare that during forty days he
appeared on distinct occasions, under different circumstances, to differ-
ent groups of the disciples, on one occasion to as many as five hundred.
These facts were proclaimed through the first century of Christianity
and remained undisputed. They remained undisputed until centuries
afterward, when before them was written the question mark of the
skeptic, who had no sympathy for or knowledge of the Christ, or of
the truths which he taught, and was therefore utterly incompetent as
a critic.
JESUS SAID So.
SECOND-We know that Jesus rose from the dead, because Jesus
said so.
The witness of such a man is invincible evidence of truth. There
are certain tests which render testimony invulnerable. By every such
test the word of Jesus stands. In the first place, there is unity and
consistency in the whole of his testimony. The story of his life pre-
sents a uniform and consistent unfolding of a sublime principle of a
kingdom invisible, eternal, which he came to establish on the earth in
utter conflict with all the powers of his day. He was perfectly will-
ing to die by that teaching as he had lived by it. And when the
hour came he calmly turned his face toward Jerusalem in spite of the
protests of his followers, was tried, condemned and crucified.
His behavior on the witness stand, in which his life and truth
hung in the balance, stamps his testimony as the essence of truth
itself. We judge a witness as to credibility by this test-his behavior.
See him, as he stands before the Sanhedrin with his life in his hands,
with his life hanging upon the answer that should fall from his lips.
The high priest puts to him the Jewish oath and on his oath asks
him the question, "Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?”
and with every word sealing his life in a death of torture he calmly
replied, "I am." And they judged him worthy of death. There is
in his demeanor the accent of truth. There is around his personality
the atmosphere of truth. When we hear such a man speak, we know
by an intuition deeper and truer than any process of reasoning that
the truth has been spoken.
}
PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S DECISION.
We remember the old story of the young woman who asked
President Lincoln for a pass through the Federal lines that she might
go into the south and see her wounded brother. The papers were
made out, and as she was about to depart the President suddenly
paused and said to her, "Of course you are loyal?" She hesitated
for a moment, her lips quivered, the tears began to gather in her
108
eyes, and turning full upon the President she replied firmly, "Yes,
loyal to the heart's core—to Virginia!" The President was surprised;
but there was that in her demeanor, in her words, in the character
that stamped itself upon her face, and in her response under this
supreme crises, that convinced the President that she could be trusted.
Without a moment's hesitation he handed her the papers and she
departed on her errand of mercy. It needed no argument to convince
him of her sincerity and truth. It was in the accent of her life, it
was in the atmosphere that surrounded her personality.
A CHILD'S SONG.
During the French revolution there was confined in a prison in
Paris the Marchioness de Bonchamps and her little daughter. Scores
of her friends and companions were daily led to slaughter. She
expected every day to be her last. Finally she was informed that her
friends had secured pardon from the judges; but the letters of pardon
did not arrive. She was startled one day at the information that
unless letters were obtained at once she would certainly be executed;
she had best use every exertion to have the letters of pardon delivered.
Having no friendly servant to send on the mission, she sent her little
daughter to the tribunal to obtain the letters of pardon. The little
child did not know just what the tribunal was and was very much
afraid of it, but she understood that she wanted to please her mother
and must deliver the message correctly. The little girl approached
the judges with much gravity and said, "Citizens, I have come to
ask you for mamma's lettres de grace. The judges chatted
pleasantly with the child for a few moments and said they would give
her the letters if she would sing them her prettiest song. She wanted
to please them, and she thought the brightest song she had was one
she had heard always gladly applauded, so she sang it with the
greatest enthusiasm. The burden of it was:
""
Long live, long live the King;
Destruction to the Republic.
The judges listened in dismay. If this had been heroism, they
would have sent her to the guillotine. The child was a child. She
sang on with the greatest cheerfulness. They saw there was no idea
of politics in her little head. She was the personification of sincerity
and truth. When she finished they smiled and handed her the letters
of pardon.
Truth thus envelops personality with its divine atmosphere. So
the truth enveloped the person of Christ. So there stands forth in
his words the invincible power of truth. The man who sincerely and
candidly opens his heart must be convinced that he is true.
109
HIS GENERAL CHARACTER.
Besides he fulfils every test of a creditable witness in any court
of justice. The character that he brings makes him worthy of the
highest confidence. His general reputation in the community was
that of a prophet, a great and wonderful man of divine power; some
said Jeremiah, some said Isaiah, but the common expression of
opinion was that he was a prophet. The testimony of his enemies as
to his character is equally explicit. Pilate, the corrupt Roman poli-
tician who condemned him to death, said of him, "I find no fault in
this righteous man." The executioner charged with carrying out the
sentence of the court, who stood on Calvary and watched him die,
said of him, "Truly, this was a righteous man!" The testimony of
his friends certainly give him the best character. John declared,
Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world!"
Peter said of him, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."
Judas, who betrayed him for silver, we see rush into the temple and
cast down the silver with the despairing cry, "I have betrayed the
innocent blood!" By every test that makes human testimony invin-
cible as to credibility, Jesus meets every requirement. I believe,
therefore, that he rose from the dead because Jesus said so.
THE CALENDAR OF TIME.
THIRD-I believe it and know it because it is the only key to the
enigma of history. Jesus Christ changed the calendar of the world.
I can understand how Julius Cæsar could make the world's calendar.
I can understand how the foremost man of all the world-master of
Rome, and therefore master of the world, with all his powers of
genius, clothed in absolute autocracy-I can understand how such a
genius could give to the world its calendar. But I cannot understand
how a century afterward one condemned as a malefactor, crucified
between two thieves, a poor, deserted peasant-I cannot understand
how he could change the calendar of Julius Cæsar and reset the history
of the world save that he was what he professed to be the Son of
God, and that the grave could not hold his body. Here is a miracle
in human history that demands explanation. Think of it for a moment
and explain it if you can. As the ages lengthen, the more over-
whelming becomes the testimony of the ages to the divinity of this
unique person.
There is no other key that unlocks the mystery of
history than this key divine of the cross of Calvary and the broken
tomb on the third day.
THE CROSS.
Take your stand outside the walls of Jerusalem on the day of his
death. Toiling up the hill you see him, a frail, friendless peasant,
IID
weak in body, unable to bear the cross. They nail him to this cross
and lift him between heaven and earth. Here you have an intensely
realistic, pathetic scene in human history. Round him stand the
Roman soldiers under the edict of the Roman governor of Judea.
They are gambling over his garments. The rabble stand by, watch-
ing the last act of the drama of his life, scoffing or laughing and
joining with the high priest in mocking him. He is dying-poor,
despised Nazarene, rejected, betrayed by his own chosen friends,
deserted by his disciples, who swore to stand by him-his life a
failure, going out in apparent darkness and despair. We hear his
cries, so weak and helpless, "I thirst." So unutterable in anguish,
"My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He taught
scarcely three years-a man without high culture in the traditional
methods of education, save by the light of the divine law within,
poor in this world's goods, the friend of no great man, crucified as a
criminal between two thieves.
THE CROWN-A FRAUD?
Yet come with me a hundred years from that day, and the histor-
ian tells us that there is to be found on the face of the earth not a
nation or a race or a tribe that gathers at a camp fire, even of a
wandering arab, that you do not hear songs and prayers to this Jesus
of Nazareth thus crucified. He moulds the wills of millions in his
own. Martyrs court death for his sake and count it gain. The his-
tory of the world is his. The calendar of time is reset to the hour of
his birth. There is no history of the world since Calvary except the
history of Christianity. Kings baptize their children in his name.
The brightest monuments of earth, in gleaming marble with glitter-
ing spires, poems of architectural beauty, speak the glory of his
name. The cross, the emblem of shame, becomes the symbol of
triumph. It has conquered all. The history of Greece and Rome,
all the civilizations of the past have flowed into the stream of history
from the cross, and in it have been lost. Is there any human explana-
tion of this phenomena of history? The only key that can unlock it
is the mystery of the divinity of this lowly man of the people who
died under the reign of Tiberius Cæsar and Pontius Pilate. A fraud
could not have changed the calendar of Julius Cæsar. A fraud could
not have rewritten the history of the world.
NERO'S TORCHES.
The only possible explanation of the triumphs of early Chris-
tianity is found in the simple fact that the early Christians were
living men whose lives were thrilled and sustained by the touch of a
III
living Christ. The persecutions through which they passed can be
accounted for in their last results only by that fact. The prison, the
scourge, the torture, were the accompanying events of the everyday
history of the Christians through the first centuries. How could
these men endure what they did unless sustained by the living touch
of the living Christ whose religion they professed? If the history of
the Roman arena alone be written and accounted for it would establish
the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Down into the sands
of the arena they led Christians, ten thousand in a day. See the
crouching group in the center of the great amphitheatre. They kneel
on the sands for a word of prayer, and some old partriarch rises and
lifts his voice and thanks the Great Father for the privilege of dying
with Christ. Every heart beats in love and in the triumph of
martyrdom. The bolts fly back from the cages, and into the arena
springs the fierce Numidian lions, gaze upon this group of men,
women and children—and then they are torn to shreds. Their
mangled bodies are removed, while the sand drinks up the blood and
the sea of human brutes cry for more sport. Personal devotion of
living Christians to a living Christ is the only possible explanation of
such a history, especially when we remember the triumph that
followed. They bore the ark through these years of blood and suffer-
ing in triumph to a world wide victory.
PEACE, BE STILL.
FOURTH-We know that he rose from the dead because he lives
to-day. We have. met him. We have seen him. We have heard
him. We have felt the touch of his hand, the throb of his heart.
His name is the one living power of to-day in the history of our
civilization. I walked down Broadway on Good Friday by the door
of the pit of modern commerce, and from that roaring hell there
issued no sound. It was still. I cannot understand how a dead
peasant, who died two thousand years ago, and was not what he pro-
fessed, but a fraud, could lay his hand to-day on this howling mob of
gambling maniacs and say to them on this Friday, "Peace, be still.”
His name is the one power that presides over the councils of nations
and of empires to-day. It is the power that touches living hearts, moulds
and fashions living characters. I am not talking about theory, but
facts. I can call this morning upon this congregation and from
among you a thousand witnesses will rise and testify to the fact that
Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, because you personally know
him as the living friend and companion of heart and life.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
A FRIENDLY WARNING TO THE NEGRO.
No rational man can justify mobs or mob violence. The recent
race riots in the South were disgraceful from any point of view.
And yet the causes that produced them are themselves likewise dis-
graceful; and if the causes are not reached and remedied, the riots
will be resumed from time to time in the future.
Such mass meetings as those held in Cooper Union recently in
behalf of the negro, can only result in aggravating the causes of dis-
turbance. The negro's deadliest foes are such friends.
The kindest thing that can be said about Mrs. Grannis-who
made that remarkable speech announcing to a startled world that the
white women of the South are tainted with negro blood-is to say that
the poor old woman is simply crazy. She represents nothing except
her own insanity. She could not voice intelligent negro views; she does
not represent the north; her utterances are simply the baldest
ravings of a diseased mind.
The spirit of that meeting was one calculated, from every point
of view, to aggravate the differences between the white people and
the negroes of the South.
There are two classes of negroes in the South, and the distinction
between them should be clearly held in mind. They represent differ-
ent ideals, different hopes, and a different future for the negro. One
of these ideals is held by such cheap demagogues as the young editor
who was driven out of Wilmington, and the low class of pot-house
politicians who fatten on the negro vote. The other class of negroes
is represented by such men as the late Prof. J. C. Price, President of
Livingston College, South Carolina, and Prof. Booker T. Washington,
of Alabama.
Since the race riots in the South, Prof. Washington delivered a
lecture in Brooklyn which presents a startling contrast to the maudlin
insanity of the Cooper Union meeting. I quote from his address the
following sentences:
"It must be apparent at this time that the effort to put the rank
and file of the colored people into a position to exercise the right of
franchise has not been a success in those portions of our country
113
where the negro is found in large numbers. Either the negro was
not prepared for any such wholesale exercise of the ballot as our
recent amendment to the constitution contemplated, or the American
people were not prepared to assist and encourage him to use the
ballot. In either case the result has been the same.
"In my mind there is no doubt that we made the mistake at the
beginning of our freedom of putting the emphasis on the wrong end.
Politics, and the holding of office, were emphasized almost to the
exclusion of every other interest, and we accepted responsibilities
which our experience and education had not fitted us to perform with
success and credit.
"To my mind the past and present teach but one lesson—to the
negro's friend and to the negro himself—that there is but one way
out, but one hope of solution, and that is for the negro in every part
of America to resolve that his pillar of fire by night and pillar of
cloud by day shall be property, skill, economy, education and
Christian character."
It is apparent that a gulf, as great as that which separates truth
from error, divides the man who can make that speech from the
political demagogues who are now beseiging Washington for Federal
interference in the South.
I desire to give the negro a word of friendly warning. I claim
in what I shall say the authority of a positive knowledge of all the
conditions involved. I know the South. I was born in it, and lived
in it twenty-three years. I know the North; I have lived in it
twelve years. I have traveled over every state. I know their people,
their temper, their principles, and their points of view. I know the
negro in the South; I know him in the North; and I know him as
he is.
own age.
The first face I ever looked on in this world was the face of an
old negro woman. My early playmate was a coal-black negro of my
We grew up together. We played together, we worked
together, we fought one another. We had common hopes, joys,
burdens and sorrows. I had ample opportunity to study his
character. He had his peculiarities; he was the greatest liar I ever
knew without any exception, and he would steal anything he could
put his hands on. I have known him to steal a palm leaf fan in the
middle of winter, with snow on the ground. And yet, with all his
faults, I loved the boy. He ran away when he was fourteen years
old and left me to do all the work. But if I knew where I could find
him I would go a hundred miles out of my way to shake hands
with him.
114
THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH CAROLINA LEGISLATURE.
I am a constant employer of the negro. I know him from the
standpoint of employer and employe. I knew him as a citizen of the
South. I was a member of the North Carolina legislature when there
were thirteen negro members of the same body. I used to help some
of them draw bills to make laws because they could not read and
write. Their capacity as law makers I pretty thoroughly under-
stand, and without a minute's hesitation I would say, in a general
way, that they are about as competent to make laws for any state as
they are to sit in an astronomical observatory and calculate the
horizontal parallax of the sun.
Brok
I am a warm friend of the negro, and believe I have his best
interest at heart in what I have to say. I say it as his friend.
The negro in America is now entering the gravest crises of his
life as a race. If he is worthy he will survive. If he is not, he will
be ground to powder. It is time that he understood this. It is true
because:
"(
EVENING POST," DR. PARKHURST AND DR. VAN DYKE.
This Republic moves forward to-day to a new world-destiny
with resistless power. This new national life is one of the develop-
ments of the closing days of this century.
1. The attempt to impede the nation in its policy of expansion is
merely the wail of the feeble, of the aged, of the weak, and of those
who are hostile to the nation's real life. An aged senator cries aloud
against expansion. Why? He is getting old-that's all. The blood
flows feebly in his veins. His day is done; his race is run. He
belongs to the past, and the past is dead. A preacher stands up—one
voice among a thousand in the affirmative—and lifts his cry against
the expanding nation. What's the matter with the preacher?
Nothing, except he has the misfortune, as Dr. Parkhurst and Dr.
Van Dyke, to read such traitorous sheets as the New York Post. All
they say is a re-hash of Godkinism; and Godkinism retranslated is
another name for the leprosy of materialism, selfishness and treachery.
2. The impulse of the late war with Spain is as wide as the
nation, as deep as its capacity to think, and as high as its aspirations.
3. Before us looms up in the dawning century a mighty
Republic of three hundred millions of people—Anglo-Saxon people,
with Anglo-Saxon government and Anglo-Saxon rulers. The negro
is a vanishing quantity in our national life. As we move toward our
great future he becomes less and less important.
115
The negro can no longer expect any artificial support from
the North. He has had an artificial support during the last thirty
years. He need expect it no longer.
1. He is better off to-day than the Northern white man of the
same class. Northern white men who are wrestling with the problem
of life, attempting to keep their families from starvation, are not
going to take up an imaginary negro problem.
NEGRO POVERTY IN SOUTH COMPARED TO WHITE MAN IN NORTH.
A man visited the South from Boston some years ago and said he
found a condition of poverty among the negroes that was most dis-
tressing. He said that he found many negroes sleeping on beds of
straw. It may be true.
It may be true. Let it be so. I will promise this gentleman
that for every negro he will find in the South sleeping on a bed of
straw, I will find ten white men in the North who haven't got any
straw to sleep on. I never knew a negro to starve to death in the
South. A day never passes in the history of New York City that a
white man or woman does not starve to death. The lower classes of
the North have got something else to think about than interesting
themselves in the more prosperous negroes of the South. The
workingman of the North faces his own problems, deeper, more
serious and far-reaching than any question of the color of skin or of
racial origin.
2. The Northern white man, as a matter, has only had a
fictitious interest in the negro, that came from the complications of
the great Civil War. In reality the Northern white man has as much
hatred for the negro as the Southern white man.
Race prejudice is a terrible fact, North and South. Our Northern
ancestors, when they landed in this country, fell first upon their
knees, and then upon the aborigines. And they made it warm for the
aborigines from that day even unto this. There are few of them left
to tell the story.
RACE PREJUDICE IN NORTH.
Race prejudice is as deep in the North as it is in the South. A
negro cannot find lodging in a decent hotel in the city of New York.
Let him try it. A negro cannot get a stateroom on a steamer that
plies between New York and Albany. Let him try it.
A negro
cannot live in a decent community in New York City. Let him try
it. If a white man in New York City says he has no prejudice
against the negro let a negro buy a house next door to him, and ask
the white man next morning if he wants to sell his property.
guarantee that he will sell it for forty per cent. less than he paid for it.
I
116
A man had a disagreeable neighbor in Brooklyn, and in order to
wreak upon his head the direst possible vengeance, he has advertised
his home to let to a negro family. His enemy will come to terms.
He cannot stand the pressure. The Northern man don't like the
negro; he don't want him near him. He don't want him as a servant.
He don't want to compete with him in the labor world.
The bitterest discrimination against the negro in America is the
economic discrimination in the North. In the South the negro is
welcomed as a land owner. The decent white people are glad to see
him take hold on the conservative elements of life. He enters every
trade that he desires. He is a house carpenter, he is a brick mason,
a stone mason, a contractor and builder. He enters every conceivable
line of economic development without let or hindrance, and his
patrons are Southern white men. His employers are Southern white
men.
No negro can belong to a carpenters' union in this climate; no
negro can lay a brick in New York City. The only thing a negro can
do in New York is to enter menial employment, and even these fields
are limited because the Northern man does not like the negro.
NEGRO TREATMENT IN PRESIDENT M'KINLEY'S STATE.
In Ohio, Mr. McKinley's own state, a negro was murdered in a
terrible manner for the crime of assault upon a white woman.
In
Illinois the governor of the state declares he will shoot down negroes
who attempt to enter the state and compete with white men in labor.
The simple truth is the Northern white man did not fight in the Civil
War to free the negro or to help the negro in any conceivable way.
The war between the States was fought for the simple reason that in
her madness the South seceded and fired on the flag of the Republic.
The North fought the South because the South threatened the Union.
The negro was and incident. His emancipation was an accident of
The abolitionists were the bitterest opponents of the war for
its first two years. They cursed and slandered Mr. Lincoln, and
villified him with all the language they could summon because he had
declared that in no way, shape, or form, would he or his administra-
tion interfere with the question of slavery. He actually freed the
negroes as a measure of war in order to strike the South a deadly
blow and save the nation. The negro who believes that the Anglo-
Saxon race fought the bloodiest war in the history of the human race
in order to help him should re-read history. White men never have
fought one another in behalf of the negro, and they are not going to
do it in the future.
war.
117
3. Bloody-shirtism in this nation has had its day, and its day
is done. The bloody shirt was buried in Manila Bay and at Santiago.
Fitzhugh Lee, Joe Wheeler, Richmond P. Hobson, Ralph Bagley
were the men who presided at the funeral. No demagogue, no
chattering old woman in politics can ever arouse the Northern people
again by any fear of Southern disloyalty. The people North in the
past war have seen with their own eyes their sons march side by side
with the sons of the South. They fought together, they died together,
for the same flag. It will be impossible in the future for the negro or
his friends or enemies to ever arouse this nation upon the issue of
alleged disloyalty because of race conflicts in the South. Heretofore
the negro has been able to appeal directly to the Union sentiment,
and to receive an artificial protection because the North retained a
lingering fear that any ill treatment of which they complained was an
indication of disloyalty to the Union on the part of the whites of the
South. This day is done. It is a serious time in the history of the
negro race. A New York newspaper telegraphed the governors of
the states after the race riots in the South and asked for their
opinions. The most significant reply of all came from the governor
of a great Northern state. This governor replied in two sentences.
He simply declared that life is to short to discuss the negro problem.
Every negro in America should place that message before his eyes and
read it twice a day. Before the Spanish-American war that sealed
the re-union of this nation, such a message as that would have been
an impossibility from any governor, North, South, East or West.
Henceforth the negro will have no more grounds for a hearing at
Washington than a white man. He will stand on his own bottom or
he will fall.
The negro's only rational course is the cultivation of the
sympathy and friendship of the Southern white man. He must do
this or lose the battle. The Southern white man really sympathizes
most deeply with him and his life. He is his best friend, and he
must realize this fact if he would find the solution of his life.
B. R. TILLMAN DOES NOT REPRESENT THE SOUTH.
1. There are white men in the South who are exceptions, and
exceptions prove the rule. B. R. Tillman does not represent the
South. He is a freak. He is an abnormalty, even in South Carolina.
He has no parallel in the history of the state or the nation, and he
will never have an imitator. If he closes his career short of the
gallows he will probably change his present tactics. Mr. Tillman no
more represents the Southern white race than the wildcat represents
the animal life in the South. The negro can cultivate the friendship
118
of the Southern white man, and such men as Prof. Booker T. Wash-
ington and Prof. J. C. Price have done it successfully. I venture the
assertion that Booker T. Washington has not an enemy in the white
race on this continent. And no such man ever suffered violence in
the South of any sort, and never will.
2. In order to cultivate the friendship of the Southern white
man, the negro must kick out of his life such disturbing elements as
the Tolberts, of South Carolina, and the young buck, Manly, who
wrote his remarkable editorial in the city of Wilmington. I do not
know the Tolberts personally; I know their class. For the old line
Whig, who was naturally a Republican on principle, who opposed the
war in the South, who remained a Republican after the war, I have
profound respect. For the Northern carpet-bagger, who went South
as an adventurer seeking his fortune in the wake of a victorious
army, I also have respect; he was fairly within the province of the
spirit of an aggressive American. But the class of whom Mr. Tolbert
is a representative is very distinct from either of these. These men
were Confederate soldiers. They fought the Union. They stood for
everything that the rebels South stood for, and after the war they cut.
a summersault in order to get a petty office under the federal govern-
ment. To get a post-office, or a custom house position, they denied
their principles-became hail-fellows with ignorant negroes, and
stirred up race hatreds. Such men have been the curse of the negro
and the white man of the South. They are worthless trash, every
one of them, and the negro, if he knows his best interest, will refuse
to shake hands with them.
3. The negro must get out of politics in the South and go into
business. The accent is placed on the wrong end of his life. He has
been taught that his ballot is his stock in trade, and that the color of
his skin is an asset that should give him a living. I am sorry for the
white man who attempts to solve the economic problem by getting an
office. He is a fool. And the negro is doubly a fool who undertakes
it. The blackest day for the negro was the day he became a voter in
the South. His enfranchisement in the manner in which it was made
was a crime of colossal proportions.
PROF. AUSTIN PHELPS DECLARES THAT SUMNER CARRIED ENFRAN-
CHISEMENT BILL THROUGH CONGRESS AS AN ACT OF
PERSONAL VENGEANCE.
Prof. Austin Phelps, of Andover, said in the public press, just
after Mr. Grady's Boston speech, that this enfranchisement was now
recognized as a blunder that has produced the most tragic results.
Prof. Phelps declares that Charles Sumner drove that bill through
119
Congress as an act of personal vengeance against the South. Summer
was knocked down by Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, in the
Senate chamber before the war. In return for this insult Charles
Sumner undertook to make the ex-slave of Preston Brooks his master.
Prof. Phelps declares that this act, rushed through our Congress when
the nation was insane over the horrors of the war, was nothing more
nor less than striking nature a blow square in the face. Its results
were terrific. It gave the South a fictitious representation in the
electoral college and in the House of Representatives. It transformed
the South into a seething furnace of race hatreds. It forced the
Southern white man to become a corrupt politician to save his own
civilization. It made the Southern white man an enemy of the negro
so long as he had the power to vote. The result has been a threat to
the progress of the Republic. From the day of negro enfranchise-
ment no public issues are discussed in the South. The Southern
people do not vote on anything except the question of the preservation
of their race and their civilization.
4. The mission of the African is not to govern the Anglo-Saxon.
It is time the negro knew this, and he is going to find it out for the
first time in his life. There are three hundred negro office holders
in eastern North Carolina. There are not three hundred negro office
holders elsewhere in the United States. The people of North
Carolina, and the people of the section Wilmington represents are not
going to stand it. It means chaos, corruption, anarchy; and the
white man is able to take care of himself under such conditions, and
he will do it.
Negroes do not hold office in New York State. There are fifty
thousand negro voters in New York. Why do they not hold office?
Simply because the mission of the negro is not to govern the Anglo-
Saxon race.
It is no use to mince matters. It is no use to lie about
it. The negro should understand these facts for his own good. This
Republic has not been great because of its suffrage laws; it has been
great in spite of them, and its future progress depends not upon the
expansion of the suffrage, but upon its intelligent restriction.
The negro should migrate from the congested districts of the
South to the Northern states, to the Western territories, to Porto
Rico, to Cuba and the Phillipine Islands. He should be encouraged
and assisted in that migration. There are too many negroes in the
black belts of the South. He must in the future look for the solution
of the difficulties in education, in industry and in Christian character.
I heard an old Baptist preacher in New York, shortly after I
came from the South, say in a speech, that of all the things he
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thanked God for in his life, one thing was particularly gratifying,
namely, that he had always voted the straight Republican ticket. To
me, fresh from the South, this was a new gospel. I wondered if the
speaker-good old Dr. Armitage-really expected to get into Heaven
on that ticket. I remember my own father, who is also a Baptist
preacher, reads the same bible, preaches the same doctrines as Dr.
Armitage, and I have heard him, seated by the fireside at home, as he
stroked his long gray beard, say with the utmost unction, that he
surely thanked God for one thing, that in all his life he had always
voted the straight Democratic ticket. There was a spectacle for you!
Two old Baptist preachers going up to the gates of Heaven, one with
a Democratic ticket and one with a Republican ticket, and both
expected to get in. What did they mean? They really mean the
same thing: Dr. Armitage in the North meant that the wealth, virtue
and intelligence of the community should rule, and my father in the
South meant that the wealth, virtue and intelligence of the commu-
nity should rule.
The two men to-day understand each other. It is a serious day
in the history of the negro race. He must stand henceforth on his
own bottom, and work out his own salvation with fear and trembling.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
DIXON ON INGERSOLL.
INGERSOLLIAN WIND.
Within the past few weeks Colonel Ingersoll has renewed his
attacks on Christianity through the public press.
I do not come to the defense of Christianity. It needs no defense.
It needs no apology. It is established. It sways the world. If there
is one thing that may be said to have won its position within the do-
main of modern civilization it is the Christianity of Christ. The his-
tory of the world is the history of Christianity. There is no history
outside of it. "He's God's anointed king, whose simple word can
mold a million wills in his." The teeming millions who make this
world worth living in to-day are followers of Christ, and owe their
character, life and genius to Christian civilization. The burden of
proof is all upon the man who attacks. The only thing necessary for
the follower of Christ to do is to point out the mistakes of the enemy's
argument.
HIS MAN OF STRAW.
The only answer necessary to give Colonel Ingersoll is to point
out his many blunders of logic, his mistakes of history, his weakness,
credulity, sophistries, contradictions and misstatements-and no argu-
ment is left. Ingersoll does not attack the living Christianity of
Christ. He sets up a man of straw called "Orthodoxy," by which
he means certain historic and traditional perversions of Christianity.
This he proceeds to knock down in the most approved style of the
modern American campaign stumper. He says many funny things
and tickles the ears of the gallery.
CON
122
RHEUMATIC STATEMENTS.
But what the colonel says is old. It is stale. It is out of date.
He got up those jokes on "Orthodoxy" a quarter of a century ago.
They smell of the dust and rubbish of bygone days. They are posi-
tively rheumatic. They limp with the palsy of old age. He hasn't
been to church lately! He does not know what is really going on in
the Christian world. He gets his information from worm-eaten paper
creeds that are really curiosities of church history to-day. He does
not know what is really being taught in this age.
I take this opportunity to invite the colonel to come to church
occasionally. I think it would do him good. I am sure it would
broaden his knowledge of the real world that now is.
RACING WITH A STUMP.
I read the other day that some years ago a Captain Blackman
was sailing a vessel on Lake Erie. On a certain occasion he was in
Dunkirk harbor, wishing to clear for Cleveland. The wind had been
blowing stiff and steady from the west for several days, and it was
very rough outside. But the captain thought he could make headway
against the heavy sea, so he tacked out, turned the point and disap-
peared from view. After he had been gone a few hours he came sail-
ing back, and when he was asked why he had returned, he answered,
I've been out there racing with a stump on the shore for two hours
and the stump beat me, so I thought I'd better come back."
((
Now about a quarter of a century ago the colonel fixed his elo-
quent eye on a stump called "Orthodoxy" on the shores of a remote
time. He has been racing with that stump ever since. And the
stump has beaten him. It's too bad. He should throw out his
anchors and he will catch up by and by.
HE CHOKED TO DEATH.
I believe in a free press and a free platform. I have no fear for
the widest publicity given the utterance of any infidel. If any infidel
can overturn my faith it is a weak thing. I do not want it. It can-
not stand the crash of worlds in the wreck of time. It's a poor faith
that can give no reason for its existence. Credulity and superstition
may fear the light of reason, but Christ said, "Ye shall know the
truth and the truth shall make you free." The church has passed
through the age of credulity and superstition, and is heir of all the
123
light and knowledge of the centuries. A poor, deluded religious
crank tried to attain sainthood the other day in Philadelphia by swal-
lowing a rosary. But it stuck in his throat and killed him. We bury
the poor fellow with a tear of pity. We call him a lunatic, not a
saint. There may have been a time in the world's ignorance when
faith meant the swallowing of hard dogmas, but that time is gone.
BALAAM'S ASS.
I am not alarmed at the colonel's assaults, nor do I feel inclined
to become angry and make mouths at him. I honestly believe that he
has had his divine uses in the history of the church. There was a
time once when God had to rebuke his own prophets. He chose
Balaam's ass as the medium through which to administer this rebuke.
So I think God may have used Colonel Ingersoll. He should cer-
tainly not be muzzled. He should not be sworn at or abused.
He
should be given full rein. We should consider carefully his message,
receive the true and reject the false. Whenever he goes beyond the
function of rebuke and ventures into the region of prophetic state-
ment we may be sure he exceeds his commission and invariably
blunders.
WIND AND FANCY.
Take the last assertion in his recent outpouring, "Infidelity puts
the seven-hued arch of Hope over every grave.”
Did immortal man ever hear such utter rubbish? You say, What
can he mean? Is such a statement merely the exhibition of con-
scienceless American cheek in a special pleader? Is it impudence?
Or does he mean to insult the intelligence of the average reader?
Neither one. This is rhetoric. It is fancy. It is wind. The colonel
was just rounding a sentence with a pleasing poetic sentiment and a
rythmic sound. It is simply the effort of an orator to brighten with
the colors of a rainbow of words the gloom of the logic of despair?
THE SCIENCE OF NOTHING.
Infidelity is the philosophy of negation. Negation is the science
of nothing. Zero raised to the millionth power still equals nothing.
Infidelity never spanned the grave of a chicken with the "seven-hued
arch of Hope !"
Such a statement is, in fact false, in philosophy an absurd con-
tradiction.
"Infidelity," to the popular mind, means a denial of God.
124
Now the denial of God is the murder of Hope. To deny God is
to strike Hope from the vocabulary of man.
REASON, LIFE, LOVE.
First-Because Hope is of divine parentage. Hope is the beauti-
ful child born of the union of Love and Life and reared in the light of
Reason. Reason, Life, Love! These are the attributes of God!
This is the divine Trinity! George Eliot has well said, "To the old
sorrow is sorrow, to the child it is despair." So it will continue to be
despair until the growing light of Reason gives to the child-heart for
its companion Hope.
Second-To deny God is to deny the Infinite Reason. The
Word was God." So David says,
(C The fool hath said in his heart
there is no God."
""
A FOOL'S DENIAL.
Even a fool does not deny God with the little brain he has. He
can only deny "with his heart;" that is because he loves that which
God hates. With the credulity of the simpleton, he must believe the
impossible and swallow the preposterous. Such a man must utterly
discredit the average human intelligence from which all our individual
intelligences are derived.
Herbert Spencer, in his "First Principles," says it is impossible
for any reasoning man to thus discredit the average human intelli-
gence. Such a denial is unscientific. Such a denial, with the present
knowledge of the world in science and philosophy, stamps the denier
as a fool. All races, all tribes, all kindreds, all tongues of the earth
have borne witness in their worship to the eternal fact of God. Have
all men, at all times, under all circumstances, in all ages, been utterly
wrong? And can one man stand before the procession of centuries,
and of the myriads who have lived, and assert a wisdom superior to
the combined verdict of all the ages that is in itself the denial and the
stultification of the sum total of the voices of the ages? If we believe
Bacon and Locke, Proctor and Spencer, Tyndal and Huxley, such a
denial to day is unscientific and preposterous.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
Abraham Lincoln put this undeniable scientific fact into popular
language when he said:
'You can fool some people all the time.
You can fool all the people for some time. But you cannot fool all the
people all the time."
125
Such a man not only denies the verdict of the sum total of human
intelligence, he must deny the intelligence of the material universe.
In this universe we see "force" working uniformly and intelligently.
To make such an observation is to confront the postulate of God.
Force" is nothing in itself. It is but a word used to describe the
action of the Infinite Power of the Universe. Assert intelligence of that
power and you can stand face to face with the personality of God.
The Reign of Law is simply the Reign of God.
66
SPENCER, DARWIN AND FISKE.
Herbert Spencer, the foremost scientific thinker of the world, says,
"Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more
they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty
that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy
from which all things proceed."
Mr. John Fiske, the most distinguished expounder of Darwinismı
and advanced scientific philosophy in America, says, on the last page
of one of his recent works: "The everlasting source of phenomena
is none other than the Infinite Power that makes for righteousness.
The Infinite and Eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation
of the universe is none other than the living God."
Crown him! Crown him! Science casts her scepter and crown
at the feet of the Lord God. Crown him! ye morning stars of light!
He rules the world of thought supreme!
"I" AND Eye.
((
Such a man must likewise deny the intelligence of the individual
soul. 'God is Spirit." Every individual soul bears witness to the
reality of spirit. The very consciousness of personality is the ever
present witness of spirit. A German once held a festival in celebra-
tion of the day his child first said "I." "I" am not flesh. "I"
am not distintegrated by the loss of eye or ear or hand or limb. To
grasp the thought of personality is to lay hold of the spirit. To deny
the spirit is to deny the reality of your very conscious existence. To
deny God is therefore to stultify the fact that you live. It is to
believe that nature created in her child a faculty, an appetite, and
furnished no food with which to satisfy it, thus stultifying herself.
The primal light from the spiritual world that lights every man who
comes into the world tells him that it is always right to do right,
126
Bible or no Bible, hell or no hell, heaven or no heaven, worms or
immortality! To deny spirit is to deny the universal fact of the soul
of man.
LIFE AND HOPE.
Third-To deny God is to deny Infinite Life.
"In Him was
life." While there is life there is hope. Without life no hope. The
spirit of God is the life of the Universe. To deny God is to assert
that life came from death. This is a scientific absurdity. No
scientist believes in spontaneous generation. Life can only come
from life. How then can man stand before an open grave-the end
of life—and hope? While this little life lasts we may hope. But how
soon it passes! Swift as the fleet of the shadow it goes.
BOOTH ON BROADWAY.
I passed a great tragedian on Broadway the other day. It seems
to me but yesterday since I saw him with flashing eye, elastic step
and kingly gesture sweep the heartstrings of listening thousands with
the wild music of tragic art! And now I pass him tottering feebly
with age, the fire of his eye put out with tears of loneliness for friends
and loved ones gone to return no more—he walks slowly and painfully
on to the last act of the drama of his own life. Such is mortal life.
Death is cold and cheerless, and gives back no answering hope to the
sobbing heart of love.
THE CHAMBER OF DEATH.
Look upon the face of the dead. Lips that yesterday quivered with
warmth and love and eloquence and truth are now cold and hard and
white and dumb. Feet that were swift and beautiful upon a thousand
errands of joy and of pity lie still and helpless. Arms, strong and
brawny, that fought well many a battle for the right, lie folded, stiff
and useless, across the silent breast. The grave opens its
greedy mouth and devours the clay. This is all we know of
mortal life. To stand by the yawning mouth of a grave and hope
man must reach beyond matter, beyond flesh, beyond clay, and lay
hold of the infinite life. Grasping this life, there is hope. Death is
but a physicial incident in an immortal career. "He that liveth and
believeth on me shall never die! Ah, here is hope! Here is
victory! Here the gate of death may be but the entrance into the
fullness of life!
""
127
LOVE AND PAIN.
Fourth-To deny God is to deny Infinite Love. God is love.”
To tell me that this world is run by "force," meaning heartless.
power, is to deliver me bound hand and foot to despair. Limit my
view of the movement of the forces of the universe strictly to the
narrowness of the natural, and I see too much of darkness and despair
to allow a moment's life to hope. Nature at this short range seems
utterly cruel and heartless. She has no heart to pity, no ear to hear,
no arm to save. The waters of Niagara grasp the boat of the
adventurer in their fatal embrace. The water does not care. Gravity
does not care. The roaring torrent has no ear to hear his wild cry of
despair. The city stricken with the plague cries in vain to nature.
The air does not care. The wind and rain and frost and sun do not
care. Mothers wring their hands in anguish and pray for a single
frost to stay the dread disease. The frost does not come. The death
cart rattles on the pavement and the driver cries, "Bring out your
dead!" In the battle's fearful fray heroes are dying all around.
The waving grain does not care. The wind does not care. The
hungry earth does not care. The soil hastens to drink the rich
libation of heroic blood and only smiles with talier, richer weeds and
flowers. Half the human race perish in infancy. Humanity marches
ever to this universal drum-beat of muffled anguish! The history of
the world is the story of incompleteness, injustice, cruelty and wrong
and suffering.
Right be ever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne-
That scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God amid the shadows
Keeping watch above his own
LOVE SUPREME.
There is no hope in it until I know that the God who rules is
Love. That the picture I see is part only of a perfected whole that is
to be. That though-
Then I can hope, believing in-
((
gettable
One God, one element one far off divine event,
Toward which the whole creation moves.
To know that however dark the hour there is one God, and his
name is Love, is to hope in the face of the blackest night.
128
HONOR BRIGHT!
Reason, Life, Love! These are the parents and nurse of Hope!
These are the attributes of God. The man who stands by an open
grave and hopes must believe in God.
Come, colonel, be honest! You cannot deny God. Then say
you believe. It may not be consistent, but it will be honest. Do not
seek refuge in the cowardice of "I don't know." There is no hope
in "I don't know!"
Do not say therefore that "Infidelity hopes."
Infidelity hopes." He who believes
in God hopes! The infidel who hopes gives up his infidelity. Infi-
delity is dying out! The advance of science and philosophy has made
it impossible for a rational man to deny God. Science has risen with
a gleaming two-edged sword, cut the dead bark off religion and cut the
heart out of infidelity. Agnosticism is only the temporary shadow in
which the despairing soul of infidelity has taken refuge. The battle
of the ages has begun. Infidelity is being driven from earth at the
sword's point of truth.
BUGLE CALL OF RETREAT.
We hear the modern bugle call of retreat given to the hosts who
deny; that note is agnosco—I do not know. The bugle call of
retreat is answered by the countless hosts of the Lord, who shout in
thunder tones that shake the earth, "We know, we know in whom
we have believed!" It rings from hilltop to hilltop. It echoes from
nation to nation. It rings across the deep. It circles the earth.
The sun of the Twentieth century is tinging the horizon. The new
sun is rising on a world of brighter faith. I veritably believe that it
will be an impossibility for an atheist or an infidel to live in the
Twentieth century. Those words are destined to be lost from the
language of the world.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
!
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE.
I. SOME FUNDAMENTALS.
Two elemental forces control the human race-hunger and love.
Hunger is nature's provision for the preservation of the individual.
Love is nature's provision for the preservation of the species. Man
must eat or die. Society must mate or die. Love is to man what
water is to the lips of the thirsty dreamer. Fierce athletic boys and
girls whose love is robust are the lords of the future who will rule the
world. Languid men and women are social dyspeptics, the sure index
of social disease and death.
In fact the unit of progressive civilization is found in this union
of man-woman. Sex differences, therefore, must be elemental. These
differences are the complimentary tones that make the harmony of
life.
Woman represents the conservative force of society. The law of
heredity makes her by nature the conservator of the past attainments
of the race. For this reason the child under normal conditions
inherits nine-tenths of its temperament from the mother. The period
of infancy for man is about twenty-one years. Hence the tremendous
power of woman over the development of the child. Hence, of
necessity, the field of her life work and its gravest responsibilities.
Hence the peculiarities of her physical and mental character. For
her love is the centre of gravity of life; for its expression is
of necessity the chief function of her being. Hence the emotions
rather than the intellectual processes are her methods of expression,
and intuition rather than logic the source of her knowledge. Femi-
ninity is a synonym for conservatism. All conservatism is essentially
feminine.
130
Man is the radical factor of society. Progress is his work.
Force, physical and mental, is his normal characteristic. His work is
to press forward, to explore unknown fields, to protect and provide
for woman in her work of conservation, yet ever to know that onward
is the watchword of life. The power of judgment and intellectualiza-
tion are the characteristic processes of his mind, and his passion for
justice determines the centre of gravity of his life. Masculinity is a
synonym for radicalism. All radicalism is essentially masculine.
There is, therefore, in nature the basis of a dual morality in sex
which the human race has always recognized in its written and
unwritten law. The greatest monstrosity in woman is an "Amazon.”
The greatest monstrosity in man is a "Sissy.' The greatest crime in
woman is the violation of her highest nature. The greatest crime in
man is the violation of his highest nature. Woman's highest nature
finds its expression in love and the domestic relations. Man's highest
nature finds its expression in justice and the wider social relations.
True marriage is the harmony resulting from the union of these
two different elements. The law of this union is love. The element
oxygen unites with hydrogen and forms water. These different
elements unite because they have "affinity" for one another. The
attempt to unite elements that have no affinity for one another some-
times results in explosions that shake the earth. Love is the expres-
sion of sex affinity. The attempt to unite people who do not have
this affinity for one another sometimes causes an explosion that
shakes society to its foundations. The primary basis of love is
physiological, and its manifestation one of the simplest phenomena of
nature. Up to the age of twelve, thirteen or fourteen, the child can
not know the meaning of love. About this age a new lobe of the
brain develops, the sex lobe, and a great physiological change occurs.
This sex lobe of the brain may be called the magnetic battery which
nature has provided to indicate the approach of persons fitted to mate
with one another. The supreme purpose of love is the preservation
of the species in progressive vital power. It finds its fulfillment
therefore only in the birth of the babe. For every woman there are
scores of men with that natural affinity that fits them to be their ideal
mate. For every man there are scores of women similarly endowed
by nature to be an ideal mate.
thus for each other meet this is
which we yet live.
As to whether the people fitted
an accident of the social chaos in
And here reason must play its great role. Love can be manifested
131
"
("
only through social contact. No man or woman should marry who
do not love. But every man and woman who love should not neces-
sarily marry. An old physician once warned a bright young man
against association with a beautiful girl whom he had seen but once
and instantly admired. She is the most beautiful creature I ever
saw!" exclaimed the enthusiastic boy. Yes, but she is not for you,
my boy-keep away from her!" answered the wise old doctor. In
the boy's family dypsomania was hereditary. In her's for three
generations there had been cases of melancholia. "It would be a
crime for you to marry that girl, knowing these facts," said the
doctor.
"Love laughs at laws even when made by doctors," the boy angrily
answered. "But there is no love yet," said the doctor. "It is only
a passing admiration. Keep out of her way!" The doctor never
mentioned the subject again. The boy persistently sought this
girl and married her. Two of their babes are dead. They were
born diseased and doomed. They had one son who lived—an idiot.
Overwhelmed with their terrible fate, the father and mother are both
in insane asylums.
Marriage is the first great social ordinance of humanity. It was
old before the church or state were born. It is the basis on which
our civilization has been built. It is more sacred than the church.
It is more authoritative than the state. Its celebration is a social rather
than an individual function, and its records are the most important
human documents filed in our archives.
II. THE IDEAL OF THE FAMILY.
Monogamic marriage, the union of one man with one woman, is
not only the corner stone of modern civilized society, its history is the
history of the evolution of civilization itself. The people who have
failed to establish monogamy have remained uncivilized, and are
perishing from the earth as organic nations. The crusty old bachelor
who declared that marriage is more solemn than death, because death
ends all trouble, while marriage is the beginning of trouble, had
certainly not studied history. The untutored man is naturally poly-
gamous. The female, under normal conditions, is monogamous.
Woman is the author of monogamic marriage, and in a most important
sense she is the founder of civilized society.
Religious monomaniacs declare that marriage is a "concession to
the flesh" and in such declarations show not their piety but their mental
132
disease. Reproduction is a divine ordinance because it is nature's law
of the self-preservation of the race. The highest expression of racial
power is found among those people whose family life has attained its
noblest expression. Hence the most beautiful and expressive word in
the language of man is the word "Home."
"Home." Here we reach the
climax of the process of natural selection in the evolution of racial
vitality. This is the one magic word in the English language,
wrought into the inner soul life of our people. It is here we touch
one of the vital secrets of Anglo-Saxon world dominance. Here they
possess a source of life and love that mark them as an elect people.
The social statistics of the modern world show that monogamic
marriage is the strongest safeguard of law and order. It is a matter
of record that of lunatics there are three times as many unmarried as
married. There are four criminals unmarried for every one
married. Vital statistics show that the unmarried are social cripples.
JA
It is not too much to say that the ideal family is the unit of the
coming Kingdom of God.
It is a divine ideal. The Hebrew seer tells us that God created
man in his own image, male and female. The image of God then is
man-woman. The division of the divine image by the cleavage of
sex indicates a divine purpose to be consummated only in its complete
reunion. This union by love lights upon the altar of the soul the
fires of joy, life and faith. The twaddle of ecclesiasticism about
"Holy Matrimony" is wholly a trick of the trade. No church can
add sanctity to marriage. Marriage "adds sanctity to the church."
་
66
'Holy Matrimony" is merely a trick of priestcraft to secure
marriage fees and hold the children born as contributors to the machine.
Marriage is "Holy" because it is a grand ordinance of nature. God's
commands are man's necessities.
/
{
1
Monogamic marriage is a divine gospel unfolding through the
ages calling man onward and upward. Man is taught his first, lesson
in the mystery and glory of human fellowship in the circle of the
home.. A new born babe is a bundle of selfishness. The training of
child life into mature humanity is merely the process of teaching the
soul and body that self must not be its centre of gravity, but the
universe outside of self. A selfish man is merely a whiskered babe
whose early training was a failure. Within the sacred precincts of the
home must be taught the first lessons of love and sacrifice and con-
sideration for others.
*
1
133
Here the mystery of parentage unfolds itself. Here the child
must receive his first lesson in authority, and the parent the first deep
meaning of responsibility incident to the wielding of power over other
lives. Here must be laid the foundation of Reverence, Order, Obedi-
ence, Government. For this reason the homeless, unloved child of
the modern street threatens the very existence of society.
In this home circle must be taught human brotherhood. The
man who truly loves his brother learns to love every other man's
brother. My baby boy thinks the sun rises and sets in "big brother."
As I see his look of rapt admiration, my memory carries me back to
the days of my own childhood, when I dogged the footsteps of my
older brother. The first great sorrow of my life was the dissolution
that overwhelmned my child soul the day he left for college to be
gone a whole year. I cried four hours in unutterable despair. What
if we differ in after life, and thousands of miles separate us? There is
nothing that can really separate us. I will love him forever, no
matter what he may do, or say, or become. I would love him in a
palace or a prison. There is no depth of crime or degradation into
which he could fall that I would deny him my love and help. I
would follow him to the jail, the gallows, or the grave with the same
tenderness and loyalty. So have I learned to love my fellow man.
In the home the child learns the deepest lesson of patriotism.
The heroes who form the rank and file of our volunteer armies are
boys who learned the love of country at their mother's knee. The
men who for the glory of their country chose stones for bread, the
earth for their bed, the sky for their canopy, and the grave for their
pay, are the boys who look up at the stars at night and dream of
home and loved ones. No great man or woman ever lived on this
earth, the roots of whose inner soul life did not strike deep into the
soil of a home.
Confronted by the sad facts of our failures and shortcomings in
the attempts to build these ideal homes, we take comfort in the fact
that imperfect as it may yet be, it is surely a divine prophecy that
must ultimately be fulfilled in life. The world is yet full of poor
fathers and mothers, and poor husbands and wives. Particularly is it
true that man is yet far from the ideal true husband of one wife.
Man seems still in the zoological period of his development. He is
still a bimanus mammiferous vertebrate, and yet he dimly sees the
light and is struggling toward it. Ideal monogamic marriage is yet
unattained, but it is the good toward which man is struggling, and
134
the darkest soul that yet lives in pure animalism is ever haunted by
the sweetness and the beauty of this dream.
III. TRAVESTIES OF MARRIAGE.
There are scores of unhappy marriages that no statutory provision
for marriage or divorce can ever remedy. They can not be reached
by the laws of society because they are the outcome of perversions
and violations of nature's laws. They are chiefly due to two causes-
wrong motives and wrong education. It may be laid down as a
general rule that the average man and woman are as happy in
wedded life as their natures give capacity for happiness. There is
more happiness than sorrow in the world, more joy than grief. We
hear of more sorrow, perhaps, but simply because happiness has no
history. Sorrow only makes history. There are some people so con-
stituted that they could not be happy on the earth, above it, or
beneath it. A professor of natural history, who was deeply interested
in snakes, complained bitterly of his wife because she refused to
allow his snakes to sleep under their bed. It would surely be impos-
sible to adjust the law of divorce to meet such a man's requirements.
Laws must be framed for the avarage normally developed human
being.
There are but two possible relations of the sexes. One is right,
the other wrong. That which is right is based squarely on the
obedience to nature's laws of love and life. That which is immoral is
any union of sex formed upon any other motive than affinity of
nature. Marriages of convenience, therefore, sometimes made in cold
blood by people of wooden temperaments are merely forms of legalized
prostitution. All marriages for money are likewise immoral. They
are merely arrangements by which marital rights over the body are
purchased for a consideration of fine houses, jewelry, clothes, money,
and what not. The procuress who slouches in an alley way and
inveigles young girls into selling their body for money is arrested and
sentenced as a criminal. A mother who cries down the heart of her
daughter, ridicules her dreams and ideals, and induces her to marry a
man for his money, is merely a procuress who wears good clothes and
moves in polite society. But she is lower than the hog of the street,
because she betrays her own child.
Marriages for position and title are likewise polite forms of pros-
Marriages arranged by parents without the heart consent of
titution.
135
children are also immoral. Such a scheme of marriage has always
produced racial degeneracy. France and China to-day give the
world a most striking illustration of this fact.
Undoubtedly much domestic discord is the result of our failure to
educate men and women for their duties as husbands and wives.
The failure of the average young woman of our modern cities in
domestic art is something appalling. It is no wonder they cannot
hold their husbands at home, and that the saloon and club soon claim
them as their own. We need a scheme of National Universities of
Domestic Art founded upon a common school system that teaches its
elements. It is far more important to teach a girl the art of cooking
and domestic economy than to instruct her in mathematics and the
classics. Education that does not prepare a child for his or her life
work is a farce.
Men are likewise almost totally ignorant of the great physiological
laws that underlie a happy marriage, and therefore few of them know
the elements of home building. Thousands of women are given a
smattering of an education that simply fills their heads with idiotic
ideals and social hysteria, and utterly unfits them for serious duties.
Love gives the only right to marriage, and love is the manifesta-
tation of the greatest law of life, upon which depends the existence of
the race, its progress or degeneracy. The time has come to teach our
boys and girls the true physical and moral meaning of love. The
theme must be stripped of the filth of mere erraticism and cleaned from
the insanity of poetic ravings. Its physiological basis must be made
the basis of a rational social science. Young men and women should
know that the most passionate love finds its complete satisfaction in
the birth of the babe, and that while no marriage is lawful without
the seal of love, there must be an adaptability of character and
temperament if happiness results from the union of two people for a
whole life. There can be no successful monogamic marriage, meaning
the union of one man with one woman for life, unless in addition to
love there shall be between these two peoples the talent for true
comradship. Love, in other words, must become a habit, and habit
become character. The training of husbands and wives, of fathers
and mothers, is of more importance to the nation than the training of
its soldiers and statesmen. When the people learn this a nobler race
will be born, and not until they learn it.
{To be concluded in next number by an article on Divorce.]
Ex
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
DIVORCE.
A marriage ceremony usually concludes with the following words:
"What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder."
It is commonly assumed by those who accept the divine authority of
the New Testament that this sentence in some way finally fixes the
indissolubility of the married relation. Yet the very meaning of the
sentence depends entirely upon the definition that we give to the word
'God." The Roman Catholic claims that it means a marriage cere-
mony duly celebrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of all
Roman Church by its duly ordained priests. The priest claims that
he, and he alone, represents God in this ceremony which he is pleased
to call a sacrament. He claims that a marriage thus celebrated is the
only lawful marriage, and that it can not be dissolved for any cause.
As a sequence of this position he declares that all marriages celebrated
by Protestant ministers or civil officers are not in reality marriages,
and that such relations of the sexes are immoral in spite of all
statutory laws and social customs. This claim is a logical one from
the point of view of Roman Catholicism.
All people who are not Roman Catholics reject such a claim with
scorn and contempt. They deny that "God" is a synonym for a
priest, and have in all civilized states deprived the priesthood of its
exclusive rights to celebrate marriages-and this even in Roman
Catholic countries.
What does the word God mean, then, if it does not stand for the
ecclesiastical power?
What is the New Testament definition of God? There are two?
God is spirit. God is love. With such a definition the meaning of
this closing sentence of our marriage ceremony becomes clear.
Jesus Christ laid down no system of laws covering the question
of modern divorce. No such problem was ever presented to him as
that contained in a modern suit before a tribunal of impartial justice
for the dissolution of the marriage vows. Jesus Christ only touched
the subject, and then only to lay down one or two general principles.
The "Putting Away" of a man's wife to which he referred under the
old Jewish law finds no parallel under our modern systems of juris-
prudence. In those days the "putting away" was all done by the
138
[
men-now divorce is chiefly granted on the petition of woman.
Divorce in that simply meant that a man got tired of his wife and
dismissed her as we do a servant. All the Mosaic law required was
that when a man did thus dismiss his wife he should give her a
"writing of divorcement," which was merely a certificate of her good
character, such as that to which a faithful servant to day is entitled
on discharge. This is the only kind of divorce to which Jesus referred,
and even here his utterances are promontory, and he gives no law
that covers the status of the guilty party in the only ground he
mentions as justification for such divorce.
Certain general principles can be deduced from his utterances.
He insists that the basis of marriage is physical, not mystical—that
the twain shall become one flesh. Therefore he asserts that its basis
is in nature, not in ceremonial or ecclesiastical law. He insists also
that the true ideal marriage is the indissoluble monogamic union.
And yet he admitted the principle of divorce for just cause, and the
one cause that he specified was an illustration of the general principle,
not a statute definitely fixing the limitations of laws. The principle
contained in this illustration is really very simple, namely, That any
transgression that violates the natural basis of the marriage vows that
sealed this closet of all physical unity-one flesh-should be a just.
ground for divorce.
Certainly it would be a difficult thing for any man to prove from
history that the world has ever been made better by the silly attempts
great states have made to prevent divorce for any cause.
There is one
state in the Union that still refuses to grant a divorce-South
Carolina. Will any sane man claim that the morals of South Caro-
lina are of a higher order than those of North Carolina or Georgia,
adjoining states where divorces have always been granted? France
for hundreds of years-even up to 1874-refused to grant divorce for
any cause. Was French home life and French morality of a higher
order than the home life of England just across the channel where
divorces were granted? Is it not an historic fact that France
inaugurated a system of divorce in an effort to stem the awful tide of
domestic corruption that had grown under the old regime?
I maintain that any transgression which violates the natural basis
of marriage should give the aggrieved party the right to absolute
divorce under the judgment of an impartial court of law.
We are to remember in such a scheme of law that the purpose of
marriage is the reproduction of a nobler race, that is a social not an
139
individual ordinance, and that the social law furnishes the principles
of its development.
It follows, therefore, that infidelity or failure to fulfill the
marriage vows from whatever cause are just grounds for its dissolution.
Desertion, because it violates the fundamental basis and purpose
of marriage is just ground for divorce. Coercion used upon either
party by parents or from any other source is a violation of the laws
of love, or sex affinity, without which there can be no moral marriage,
and is just ground for divorce.
Brutal and inhuman treatment is a gross violation of the physical
unity upon marriage rights, and should give just ground for its dis-
solution.
Habitual drunkenness is also a violation of the purpose of mar-
riage—the reproduction of a nobler race, and as marriage is a social
ordinance, human society has the right, and should enforce it with
vigor, to protect itself from a posterity of idiots and drunkards.
Incompatibility of temper may be of such a character as to defeat
the purpose and violate the basis of marriage. I knew a woman once
who murdered two husbands with her tongue that set on the fire of
hell. She married a third time and caught a tartar, an inhuman devil
who came near boiling the life out of her the first time she aroused
him. Should the law keep two such hell cats penned up together in
the cause of domesticity. No! Such a marriage is shameful, im-
moral. and a curse to humanity.
Divorce laws should be so made that the noblest posterity shall
be assured to humanity, and the highest interests of society attained.
The social ideal, not the individual whim, must fix these laws, because
marriage is the first grand social ordinance of nature.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
BACK NUMBERS.
There are about seventy-five complete sets of the magazine left.
They can be had by sending one dollar to F. L. Bussey, 227 Eighth
Avenue, New York.
INGERSOLL'S MISTAKES.
SLAVERY AND RELIGION.
Jesus Christ was born into a world of slaves. The angels who
sang their good news to the shepherds watching in the hills looked
down upon the human race herded in one vast slave pen. Jesus came
to free the world, but how could it be accomplished? The world at
that time labored beneath the triple tyranny of Rome, her brutal of-
ficers and the paid tyrants that ruled under them, besides the tradi-
tions of a priestcraft which dated back hundreds of years. If Jesus had
chosen force He might have freed the chosen people, and established
for them a national freedom which would have been merely an episode
in the history of a single nation. If He had enacted a system of laws,
such an effort would have been a failure so far as freeing a race of
slaves is concerned. Slaves are not made free by law. Man only at-
tains freedom as he attains it within. Therefore Jesus chose the only
plan possible by which a world could be free. He lived and taught
the truth in life. He knew that man is free only as he knows the
truth. He knew that when man knows the truth he cannot be bound
either by institutions, kings or priests.
THE ONLY FREEMAN.
The Christian is the only man who is really free. He has liberty
to do what he pleases. He always pleases to do what is right when he
works within the circle of his Christian life. He is higher than law
and partakes of God's own nature, becoming a law unto himself, the
law of love having swallowed all the technicalities within this univer-
sal domain. He is free from superstition, free from fear, free from the
oppression of passions of life and the mysteries of death, free to shake
off the mortal and perishable and rise to the eternal and the spiritual.
And yet Colonel Ingersoll has the credulity to say that "religion
is slavery. Our fathers were slaves and nearly all their children are
mental serfs. America is the only nation with which the gods have
had nothing to do. We all know that the Bible upholds slavery in its
worst and most cruel form."
The man who makes such wild assertions as these, and believes
such stuff, must involve himself in at least three irreconcilable ab-
surdities. He must believe that truth is responsible for error and
141
error's crimes, that the known facts of history are false, that slavery is
higher and holier and nobler than liberty.
IS TRUTH RESPONSIBLE for error?
First. Can we believe that truth is responsible for error?
A man who professes a truth really holds that truth only as he em-
bodies it in life. Deeds that contradict the principles professed are not
of the principles, because of their contradiction. Deeds that contra-
dict Christianity cannot be attributed to Christ. The bloody history
of the traditional church is not of Christ. All this is a perversion of
the truth taught by Christ. Does any man who knows the Christ
believe that he could have been present and consented to the burning
of Bruno? Is it possible to conceive that the Man of Sorrows who
staggered up the ragged steeps of Calvary, bearing the cross of a
world and dying in shame and agony the death of a martyr-that He
could have been responsible for the perpetration of such deeds? Can
any man who knows Christ assert that He is responsible for the tor-
turing of Galileo, for the burning of Servetus, for the massacres by
Alva in the Netherlands, or the horrors of the inquisition? All these
are of the anti-Christ. They are themselves the contradiction of
Christianity. In so far as the professed church did these things, the
professed church was of the devil, not of the Christ. Let us again
emphasize the fact that the Christianity of Christ is one thing, the
Christianity of history and traditions and creeds made of paper another
thing. We certainly cannot charge to Jesus Christ all the professions
of Christianity which we see to-day.
JESUS THE SOCIALIST.
Suppose that Jesus Christ in the garb of a carpenter, worn with
toil and dusty with his work, should enter a fashionable church in
New York city to-day and should speak the truth with such emphasis
and clearness as he did to the Scribes and Pharisces and hypocrites of
Judea in the days of old. I am afraid that there are some churches
that would not only put him out of the door, but would have Him
arrested and put into an insane asylum. Suppose this same lowly
Nazarene should enter some of our churches at our social gatherings
and should publicly denounce the respectable sins of this century, as
He did the respectable sins of the century in which He lived. Jesus
said few harsh things about the drunkard, the fallen and the wayward,
but with merciless hand he laid bare the secrets of pride and covetous-
ness and hypocrisy and Phariseeism. What would some men who
142
have a high seat in the synagogue to-day and cheat their neighbors
through the week-what would they say to this man who should speak
such revolutionary doctrines They would denounce Him as a crank,
as an anarchist, as a socialist, as a man who sought to destroy the
foundations of society. They would put him out and they would in-
struct the sexton not to allow Him to enter again under any conditions.
TEST OF BELIEF.
Do we charge christianity with such perversions of truth taught
by Christ? It is absurd. Two children returned from church the
other day, and the boy of seven remarked that he "would like to
know what the sermon was for, anyhow? His little sister replied,
Why, it's to give the singers a rest, of course." If you should
enter a church like this-and there are such churches-would this be
a fair test of the work of the sermon in protestantism? Could we
judge of Protestant Christianity by such a church? A true sermon is
worship, for it is the proclamation and reception of truth. What may
be considered worship by one man may be perverted by another into the
very antithesis. For instance, a teacher asked a class of children,
the other day, the question, "What does the word 'worship' mean?"
Nobody answered. She asked one boy in particular if he did not
know. He said, "I dunno. "Why," said the teacher, "why are
you so dumb? Do you not know what your father does every night
before he retires? ""
Oh, yes," said the youngster, "I know. He
goes into the pantry 'n takes a drink out'n his bottle." If you see
this performance in a professed Christian home, would it be fair to say
that Christianity causes men to go into a pantry and take a drink be-
fore retiring? Such a process of reasoning is the height of absurdity.
A man believes what he practices, not what he professes.
""
(6
MARAT AND ROBESPIERE.
Can we charge to liberty the crimes committed in the name of
liberty? Liberty is Colonel Ingersoll's god, according to his declara-
tion. I say, without the fear of contradiction, that more blood has
flowed and more dark crimes have been committed in the sacred name
of liberty than in all other names under heaven. In the sacred name
of liberty tyrants have placed their iron heels on the necks of millions
and ground out their lives without mercy. In the sacred name of
liberty Madame Roland was executed. In the sacred name of liberty
France was drenched in blood by a Danton, a Marat and Robespierre,
until the soil of France was drunk with the blood of her children.
Then, in the sacred name of liberty, Napoleon turned his guns down
143
the streets, and swept them with shot and shell, death and blood,
ascended the throne of an empire and ruled them with a rod of iron.
Is liberty responsible for all the crimes committed in her sacred name?
If so, then liberty is the one curse of curses that has filled the record
of the race with horror immeasurable, incalculable.
What is Christianity? It is that heart faith that embodies itself
in a life of love-love to God, and love to God through love to man.
Out of this sublime truth which Jesus came to teach grew the princi-
ples of human liberty. Out of this grew of necessity the truth of the
common priesthood of believers.
LOVE SCORNS DEGREES.
Love knows no class or clique, when love has embraced all man-
kind. Jesus faced a Jewish aristocracy with their doctrine of election
and special divine favor, and He taught them that God was a spirit
and 'they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth, and
that God would raise up of the stones of earth children unto Abraham and
cast them off as unworthy unless they were true to this spiritual ideal.
He taught them that God was no respector of persons. Growing out
of Christianity was the second great principle of freedom that insti-
tutions are made for man, not man for institutions. The world was
bound by the iron slavery of institutions-sacred and secular. Jesus
broke the Judaic Sabbath with impunity, because He taught the law
of love as the supreme law of life, declaring that the sabbath was
made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath, He declared,
must be a boon, not a burden. Growing out of Christianity of neces-
sity, and a part of it, was the sublime thought that the race is bound
together by union to a father. We are all, therefore, equal brethren.
Artificial distinctions were thus abolished in this new kingdom of
heaven. Here was planted the dynamite beneath every throne of the
world, that sooner or later would explode, and on the ruins draw
together the federated brotherhood of man.
THE TEMPLE OF LIBERTY.
Out of Christianity also grew the sublime truth of grace. Jesus
taught the world first that there is salvation for the lost, hope for the
hopeless, mercy for the self ruined, relief for the wretched, light for
those in darkness, freedom for the oppressed, regeneration for the un-
regenerate. Without this principle every civilization before Christ
perished, perished of its own weight. It had nowhere within it a prin-
ciple of regenerating life. Since Jesus taught the world, this process
.
144
of salvation for the weak and helpless has been growing in resistless
power. The time was when history only dealt with the so-called great
and powerful. Jesus declared that weakness shall rule strength.
"In my kingdom the meek shall inherit the earth;" and as that king-
dom grows in history, we see the eye of the world centered on the
under masses. Now the only history of the world is the history of
the weak-the dark, vulgar crowd that used to have no history. The
books that move the world to-day do not tell of kings and nobles, but
of the poor, of the masses. Here is centered the heart of literature,
the heart of religion, the heart of philanthropy, the heart of the social
movement. These four sublime principles are the corner-stone on
which men have been building the temple of liberty through the
ages of the past, and on which it is now being reared in beauty and
glory to its final capstone.
W
FOUNDED IN PRAYER.
Second. To assert such a creed as we have quoted from the
colonel, a man must believe that the incontrovertible facts of history
are not facts. During the Dark Ages the cause of liberty makes no
progress. Why? Because Phariseeism has hidden the truth again.
Christianity has been throttled for the time by traditions and institu-
tions. But printing is invented. The Bible is translated and scat-
tered over the world. Men hear once more the voice of Jesus of
Nazareth. There is a moving of the dry bones. Germany is in com-
motion, because the truth is being proclaimed. England is in
commotion because the truth is being proclaimed. France tctters and
falls beneath the shock of a free Bible. Voltaire himself is a product
of this tremendous movement that swept the world. It was the move-
ment of the birth of Christ, as the ponderous stones were rolled from
the tomb in which He had been kept through the ages of darkness.
Pioneers land on the shores of America with the Bible in their hands
and with some of it in their hearts. They are searching for liberty.
The secret of that search is found in the secret of that book embodied
in their hearts. In a little while there is commotion in America, there
is revolution, there is a declaration of independence that closes with a
prayer to God for guidance and help. This nation was founded in
prayer.
A DIVINE MIRACLE.
To say that America is the only nation with which God has had
nothing to do is to contradict every known fact in the history of the
foundation of this nation. The founding of the nation is, in fact, a
145.
I
miracle of God's mercy and God's special providence. It would have
been the work of mere child's play for the regular British army to
have overrun these feeble colonies in a single campaign had we been
pitted against England single handed, but it pleased God to make
England blind in those hours, and desperate, until at last the hand of
every nation of the earth was grasping at her throat. England stood
single handed and alone fighting the known world during these years
of conflict with her feeble colonies. Even then we had been defeated
had not again and again the providence of God snatched victory from
defeat. The battles of the Revolutionary were child's play.
read the history of one of these battles lately. It was very humiliat-
ing to my pride as a son of the Revolution. I found that when the
British regulars charged they swept the field like a cyclone. There
was nothing left of the ragged band to contest the ground. They
all got away except one little fellow who could not run fast. Some-
thing was the matter with one of his legs. He stepped into a hole
and fell. Three great British troopers rushed up, and raising their
bayonets above him shouted, "Now, you wretched rebel, we have you
at last! The little fellow piped out, "All right, kill away; you
won't get much." They spared his life.
LORD CLIVE.
That we were not defeated and Washington does not sleep in a trait-
or's grave is not due to our superior power, but simply to the righteous-
ness of the cause and the God who watched over weakness and
chose this nation as the instrument of his will. Even though England
were involved with all the world in war, we had still been defeated
had she been able to have sent to our shore a man of military genius
to command her troops. This was finally ordered. Lord Clive, the
greatest general of his day, was delegated to take command of the
British forces in the colonies. Had Lord Clive assumed command, the
chances are we would have been defeated overwhelmingly. Just as
he was ready to embark to take command of the British troops, by a
mystery yet unsolved he committed suicide. Again, when we were in
dire distress, by most mysterious providence the winds at the com-
mand of the God who watches over the weak brought into our harbor
a French fleet of warships. When they discovered the situation they
landed, went to the rescue of Washington, captured Cornwallis. The
war was ended. The history of America is the story of a miracle of
God's mercy and love. If ever there was a nation elect of God from
its very infancy it is this free republic of the New World.
146;
SUBLIME CHEEK.
The progress of the principles of Christianity as embodied in the
lives of men and nations is one with the progress of the principles of
freedom and the retreat of slavery. Of all the absurd statements of
infidelity, the absurdest of all is that the Bible upholds slavery. We
must not be too harsh in our judgment of such an expression coming
from a man who has never read the Bible. But we must say that it is
sumlime cheek in any man to pretend to be a teacher of men upon a
subject on which such profound ignorance is thus displayed. The
Bible records the fact of slavery always with the accent of condemna-
tion. The Bible covers 1,600 years in life. It covers the infancy of
the race.
God could not wipe the institution of slavery from the earth
without wiping the freedom of man from the earth. Man must grow
to the statue of a freeman, if he be free indeed and not an automaton.
The morality of the Bible is its final morality, the morality of Christ.
Though it covers 1,600 years and is composed of many books, it is one
book. Sir Walter Scott well said in his dying hours, "Bring me the
book." And when his attendants asked, "What book?" This man
of books replied, "There is but one Book, the Book, the Book of
God." The home of liberty is where the man Jesus reigns. Where
He does not reign slavery yet reigns. No, it will not do to say that
the Bible upholds slavery. Wherever the Bible has been taught it
has been impossible for slavery to exist.
ROTTEN TO THE CORE.
To say that civilization has emancipated man is to talk at random.
What is civilization? Civilization is the concrete embodiment in life
of the religion of a people. Civilization can go no further than the
heart faiths of the people. The civilization of Greece and Rome was
the embodiment of the religion of Greece and Rome. Greece and
Rome never went higher in their civilization than their religion.
Grecian civilization at the blaze of its glory was founded upon a world
of slaves. The highest dream of Grecian poet could see no higher
world than a world in which the burden and heat of the day was borne
by droves of slaves. Roman civilization was founded likewise upon
slavery. The Roman world was a slave world. The highest prophets
that Rome ever knew did not question the fact of slavery. The slaves
of Rome were the poets and scholars of the Grecian world. Roman
civilization never went higher than Roman religion. When the time
came in the history of Rome that her religion failed and one haruspex
smiled at the sight of another, then Roman civilization was rotten to
its very core, and it fell with a crash never to rise again.
147
THE MORNING COMETH.
Third. To declare that religion is slavery is to declare that slavery
is higher and nobler than liberty. If this be true, then the highest and
noblest thoughts that have ever been born were born in the bosom
of slaves. The prophets, and sages and seers of the race have all been
men of great faith. Only such men have climbed the mountain
peaks of thought and seen the dawn of better days. In the darkness
we below have cried, "Watchman, what of the night?" And down
from mountain crag, along ravine and river and valley, have rolled
the prophet cries, "The morning cometh!" Messages wet with the
dew of tears and throbbing with the prayers of love. If religion be
slavery, the prophets of the race were the slaves of slaves. The poet
has yet to be born who has touched the lyre of life and swept the
gamut of human passion and emotion who is not the son of god and
religion and spirit. Milton and Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tennyson
and Longfellow were slaves. Art and music must be the product of
slavery if this be true, for they are the outgrowth of religion. They
are the attempt to embody the beautiful in color, and sound and form.
Beauty is an attribute of God. The artist only is successful who
grasps this divine attribute and imprisons it for us in matter. The
artist is yet to be born whose work does not throb and thrill with a
divine message.
GOLDEN CHAINS.
If emancipation from sin and self and brutal passion is slavery,
then religion is slavery. If to rise above things of time and sense is
slavery, then religion is slavery. If to be free and shake the dust of
matter from the wings of the soul and rise into the blue of the infinite
and eternal and see God be slavery, then religion is slavery; if love
be slavery then such a creed is true. Love does bind, but with such
chains! Golden chains! Lives are bound by the chains of love.
I am a slave to my loved ones. I work for them, I live for them,
I die for them. I account it gain to be able to be a slave. If love be
slavery, then religion is slavery. Love does bind. Stanley lecturing
to the world, making his fortune, receives a message from beyond the
seas telling him of weakness and helplessness in the heart of darkest
Africa. And his heart is so bound in love to the race that he drops
his work, crosses the seas and goes into three long years of privation
and want, and coming out of Africa's dark forest send flashing
around the world his message of faith and love. The priest who
enters the colony of lepers and lays down his life for his fellow man is
148
a slave, if love be slavery. The woman who lays her life upon the
altar of love, unworthy of so rich a sacrifice, may be called a slave;
and yet it is only such slavery that makes this world worth the
living in.
Infidelity, I know, may not believe in this sort of religion. Infi-
delity, we are told, believes in the gospel of good clothes, good houses,
good victuals well cooked. If all the blood ever spilled by infidelity
for the good of humanity were gathered together, I fear it would not
fill a pint cup.
If love be slavery, then so is religion. It is religion
that binds heart to heart, man to man, race to race, and all in one
common bond around the great throne of God. For it is love that
binds upon our back the burden of sin, and weakness, and suffering
and sorrow, and we carry it up to the Calvary steeps of life.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
THE LAST NUMBER.
Elsewhere in this number will be found my resignation as Pastor
of the People's Church. This resignation necessarily closes the publi-
cation of this magazine which contains the sermons and preludes of the
People's Church pulpit. With this number, ten, the church year is
completed, as two numbers, July and August, were published in the
vacation time. All subscriptions expire with this number therefore.
All subscriptions were taken from the first number, or so dated as to
end with this number. If any subscriber who has paid one dollar has
not received ten numbers with this edition the matter will be satis-
factorily adjusted on application to the publishers.
I extend my
thanks to our subscribers and friends who have enabled the little
magazine to pay its way from the first. With much love
Fraternally,
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
BISHOP POTTER AND THE SALOON
Bishop Potter is reported to have said recently that the saloon
is a social necessity to the workingman under present conditions.
Is the Bishop insane? It seems so. If not, the origin of this
startling statement can be easily found. Its origin is in a shallow-
potted cosmopolitanism that cloaks rotten ethics beneath the pretense
of deep culture and wide travel. It is a notion imparted from the Old
World. Our fathers taught the Old World some things about govern-
ment. The modern American will teach the Old World yet a lesson
on quarantine for the saloon.
What is the saloon?
The saloon strikes at the foundation of social order in destroying
the poor man in his poverty. Rum strikes down the rich man's son.
It is impartial in its visitation of wrath and destruction, but its reign
supreme is in the districts of the poor. They are apparently the only
charitable institutions that are always open. They have a free lunch
counter in which the ragged wretch may gratify his hunger if he can
buy a glass of beer. But the fact that the men who sell the drink can
own magnificent homes while the man in rags eats his free lunch is
evidence sufficient that the free lunch is but a bait to the trap. They
give a free lunch and sell a man for five cents that which costs them
less than half a cent. It is here in the saloon that the poor man is
robbed of his hard earnings, and it is given to the man less worthy to
to have it. In a certain district of this city which has resounded with
the cry
of starving men and women more than once one of the saloons
is paved with silver dollars. The man who owns it is a power in the
community. He not only owns the saloon; he owns the bodies and
souls of the poor wretches who support it.
It has been said that the saloon is the poor man's club. So it is,
and for that reason it should be swept from the face of the earth. He
can go no lower. Every saloon is not only a drinking place; it is a
place where gambling is carried on every day and every night in the
year. It is also a place which is the constant resort of evil women.
The reason these things go together is because they are birds of a
feather. To separate them is an impossibility. The one calls for the
other, and in the absence of the other would produce its complement.
150
If the church itself should run a saloon, the stimulus of alcohol would
drive its frequenters to the gratification of every other passion.
T. V. Powderly says most vigorously: "I have had an experi-
ence of twenty-years among workingmen. My life so far has been
spent in working among them, and I expect the remainder of that life
will be spent in their interests. That experience causes me to say
that liquor has done more harm to workingmen than all other causes.
The cry has been sounded and parrot-like repeated that poverty makes
drunkards of workingmen. If there is any truth in that statement,
then it is not to the credit of the man or men who willfully add crime
to misfortune. Every sensible man knows that the liquor habit leads
to degradation, disease, dirt and death. It is therefore unjust when
we excuse the intemperance of a poor man to lay the blame of it to
his poverty. We find drunkards everywhere, and in proportion to
their number the wealthy have more victims to the liquor habit than
the working people."
The saloon as an institution always has been, is now and always
will be a crime breeder and a law defier. The liquor associations have
rules by which they defend their members in all cases against them,
whether they have violated the law or not. The saloon is the ren-
dezvous of criminals. It is the home of the thief, of the tough. It is
the home of the anarchist. It is the stamping ground of the dyna-
miter. It is the open slaughter pen in which are butchered honor and
truth and decency, integrity, love and manhood. It is the source of
our political degradation and political crime. It is in the saloon that
the dirty work of politics is done. It is said that forty per cent. of the
Republican caucuses and sixty per cent. of the Democratic caucuses in
our city of New York are held in saloons.
The saloon becomes a resistless power in our political life in the
city. Christians go to the ballot box like oxen and vote the tickets
which their masters, the saloon keepers, write out for them. And
the saloon keeper, who is himself a chronic violator of the law, looms
up as the maker of laws, as the judge of laws. The liquor dealers of
New York have their hands on the district attorney's office and control
its policy.
THE LICENSE SYSTEM.
The saloon forces the appetite for drink, and thus produces
abnormally thousands of drunkards. I repeat it, it is not the question
of drink and drinking. It is the question of the saloon as an institu-
tion, and the saloon as an institution forces down the throats of
151
unwilling men fifty per cent. of the alcohol that is consumed to-day.
Men who frequent saloons do not know how much they drink.
A physician recently had a patient whose disease was incurable,
from his point of view, because of the habits of the man. The doctor
insisted that the man was killing himself with drink.
The man
declared it was nonsense. The physician asked him as a test how
many drinks he took a day. The man replied that he did not know,
but certainly not more than four or five. The doctor knew that he
was a frequenter of a saloon; that he spent his time there every day.
He stationed a man the next day to watch him during the day and
count the number of drinks he took. The man reported to the doctor
that the fellow took exactly forty drinks that day, and he had
solemnly sworn that he never took more than four or five drinks a
day. Men are enticed into the saloon, are invited in, are forced in
and begged to drink and treated to drink, are coerced to drink.
The saloon as an institution tempts the weak men who need pro-
tection most. Without the saloon any man that wants to get drink
can get it; any man that wants to get drunk can get drunk. But
with the saloon thousands upon thousands get drunk who do not
want to. It is forced down their throats. There are very few
saloons in our cities that have not auxiliary establishments which
class them properly with dives. They appeal to the young, appeal
directly to their passion and make their money directly through the
debauchery of young manhood and young womanhood. The beer
gardens of our cities are the hotbeds in which are first planted the
seeds of a dissolute life in those who attend them.
Here young
workingmen and young working women go in search of pleasure and
recreation and begin their downward career. The saloon as an insti-
tution tempts the young with practically resistless power. It is
established on that principle. That is one of the main reasons for its
existence and the source of its profits.
The principal patrons of the saloon, as of the gambling hell, are
the young. In a single saloon in Cincinnati 252 men entered within
an hour.
Two hundred and thirty-six of them were young men.
In
New Albany, Ind., in an hour and a half 1,109 persons entered nine-
teen saloons. Nine hundred and eighty-three of them were young
men and boys. C. H. Yatman declares that in Newark, N. J., in
5 minutes he counted 62 young men entering one saloon. He passed
his watch to a friend and asked him to stand and count for thirty minutes.
In that time 592 entered the saloon, most of them young men.
Rich-
152
ard Morse says: "A city of 17,000 population had 3.000 young men.
One thousand and twenty-one of them entered forty-nine saloons in
one hour on Saturday night. In Milwaukee, on a certain evening,
468 persons entered a single saloon, nearly all of whom were young
men and boys. If this process continues for another generation it
needs no prophet to foretell the character of the manhood of that gene-
ration that succeeds the present.”
The saloon as an institution makes crime a daily incident of life
and makes it respectable with a large class of people. The license
fallacy introduces the liquor business with all its criminality into the
domain of law. No license system has ever been enforced in the
history of the world. In the very nature of things it cannot be
enforced. Law to be law must have back of it a moral power. The
license system is a compromise with the devil. It satisfies neither the
devil nor the forces of good. There never was a prohibition law that
stood squarely upon the platform of suppression that was not better
enforced than any license law under the same conditions.
We have a license system in the City of New York. There are
no less than 3,000 places where liquor is sold without any license at
all. And there is not a saloon in this city that does not violate the
excise law at some point. They keep open at illegal hours during
the days of the week. They sell on Sunday. They sell to minors.
And they are banded together to defend each other when interfered
with, whether guilty or not guilty.
Saloons are forbidden to harbor dissolute women, and yet scores
of saloons keep regularly all the way from twenty-five to thirty-five
of these women practically in their employ. A license law is a roaring
farce. It has never been enforced; it never can be enforced.
What, then, shall be done with it? The forces of civilization are
rapidly dividing into only two classes on this question-those who
believe in the saloon, that it is a good thing, that it should be pro-
tected, and those who believe that it is an unmitigated curse and must.
be destroyed and outlawed. Regulation has been tried and found
wanting. License is a dismal failure. The idea that the saloon as
an institution can be improved is a dream of madness. It has been
said by the church taking charge of the saloon the evil of the drink
traffic can be mitigated. The difficulty is that alcohol is a poison.
which produces disease. The difficulty is that no man ever becomes a
drunkard except he first becomes a moderate drinker. The road to
drunkenness is the way of moderation.
153
The church cannot afford to cultivate the appetite for drink and
create habits that kill the majority of those who form them. France
and Belgium, the two nations where light alcoholic drinks are most
indulged in by so-called moderate drinkers, now lead the world in the
number of drunkards. They are the most drunken nations on the
face of the earth. To say that God made alcohol is true. We must
also remember that he made strychnine and arsenic; that he made
Benedict Arnold and William M. Tweed and Tammany Hall. In like
manner God made hell and hurled the devil into it. It may be said
you cannot sweep out darkness with a broom. You can banish it with
a candle-meaning thereby that you can mitigate the drink curse by
making the saloon better. The trouble with this proposition is that
you propose to sweep out alcohol with alcohol. I repeat, how can you
sweep out darkness by turning on the hose pipe charged with ink?
Can weeds be routed out by sowing weeds? I do not see how you can
sweep out hell by flooding the earth with liquid damnation.
IT MUST BE CRUSHED.
The plea is absurd. The saloon as an institution must be crushed
and outlawed. Men will drink? Yes. They will sneak round the
corner and find it? Yes. But the weak and the young will be pro-
tected. The poor will be rescued from its clutches. All that is
necessary to bring this question home to the hearts of every citizen is
for it to touch his own life.
WHAT THE SALOON DOES.
The saloon cuts down youth in its vigor, manhood in its strength
and age in its weakness. It breaks the father's heart, bereaves the
mother, extinguishes natural affections, erases conjugal love, blasts
parental hopes and brings down mourning age in sorrow to the grave.
It produces weakness, not strength; sickness, not health; death, not
life. It makes wives, widows; children, orphans; fathers, fiends-and
all of them paupers and beggars. It feeds rheumatism, nurses gout,
welcomes epidemics, invites cholera, imparts pestilence and embraces
consumption. It fills your jails, supplies your almshouses and de-
mands your asylums. It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels and
cherishes riots. It crowds your penitentiaries and furnishes victims
to your scaffolds. It is the life-blood of the gambler, the element of
the burglar, the prop of the highwayman and the support of the
154
midnight incendiary. It defames benevolence, hates love, scorns
virtue and slanders innocence. It incites the father to butcher his
helpless offspring, helps the husband to massacre his wife and the
child to grind the parricidal ax. It burns up men, consumes women,
detests life, curses God and despises heaven. It suborns witnesses,
nurses purjury, defiles the jury box and stains the judicial ermine.
It degrades the citizen, debases the legislature, dishonors the states-
man and disarms the patriot. It brings shame, not honor; terror,
not safety; despair, not hope; misery, not happiness, and with the
malevolence of a fiend it calmly surveys its frightful desolation, then
curses the world and laughs at its ruin. It does all that and more—it
murders the soul. It is the sum of all villainies, the father of all
crimes, the mother of all abominations, the devil's best friend and
God's worst enemy.
If a riot breaks out in New York what happens? The first thing
the authorities do is to close every saloon. If the saloon is a social
necessity, why close it in a crisis? No, it is false as hell. The man
who wears the robes of a Bishop and makes such an assertion dis-
graces the church of God and the cause of humanity.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
TO THE CONGREGATION OF THE
PEOPLE'S CHURCH
GRAND OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK.
I beg leave to offer my resignation as pastor of the People's
Church to take effect March 1st, the end of the fourth year of our
work. While our church is now in as good condition as at any time
in its history, I can see no sure future for it along the lines on which
it was projected four years ago. Desiring to continue my work among
the down town masses of New York, I resigned my pastorate of the
23d Street Baptist Church. I organized the People's Church on the
principle of Christian Union-personal faith in Christ being the sole
basis of its active membership. I felt there was a call for organic
Christian Union in our great cities, and I felt that such a church would
155
1
command the co-operation of earnest Christians of all denominations
who realize the great needs of this down town work, besides rallying
to its support the masses of the people who were out of touch with all
church life.
Earnestly and persistently in two of the largest auditoriums in the
city, I have made this effort for the past four years. The results have
been disappointing; we have had great congregations; I have
preached to more people in these four years than in the eight previous
years of my ministry. But from our missionary location
and many other causes, we have never been able to gather
more than six hundred and fifty members into the work of the
church at any one time, nor have we ever been able to raise on an
No such
average more than $10,000 a year to meet our expenses.
work as that we have projected can be decently maintained in New
York on less than $20,000 a year. The only two popular churches in
this quarter of the city that have met with any success command re-
sources of $50,000 each annually, and neither of them carry the bur-
dens of enormous rents as we do, all their income going directly into
the work.
During these four years I have only been able to secure from out-
side sources about four thousand dollars to meet pressing deficits from
time to time. Of this sum 80 per cent. was contributed by my Baptist
friends. I have been disallusioned as to the idea of organic Christian
Union; there is no real call for such a thing. What we gained in
breadth, we lost in vital force.
Denominationalism is merely the personal equation in religious
life. Its destruction would not be a gain but a distinct loss to Chris-
tianity. I have determined therefore as I have never made any denom-
inational change to resume my position in the regular Baptist Ministry.
During the past four years everything I have said as Pastor of
the People's Church, I could have said in a Baptist pulpit with equal
propriety and greater force.
The fact is, no reasonable man can ask for more intellectual lib-
erty than the Baptist denominations of to-day grants its ministry un-
der the inspiring leadership of its great institutions of learning.
For ten years I have fought here in this crowded center
the terrific battle of the disintegrating church against the surging life
of the modern city. I have seen in these ten years a dozen strong
churches in this neighborhood surrender and move-the process con-
156
;
tinues steadily. I do not believe anything can stop this movement.
I do not lay down my part of the work as a pessimist, but as an op-
timist. These ten years of struggle have left no bitterness in my
heart and no battle scar that has not healed.
I cherish to day a larger and more serene faith.
I believe that this disintegration of organic church life in our
civic centers is merely a part of a larger divine plan. The organization
for public worship, which we call the church, is but one of the ways
through which the Kingdom of God, a divinely just social order, is
coming in this world.
All the ways through which knowledge, truth, life, beauty and
love enter the soul-these are also God's ways of bringing his king-
dom to pass.
My deepest sorrow is to part with the six hundred members of
this church, all my personal friends. Your faithful service; your
stalwart personal loyalty, your unfailing friendship and love will ever
be to me one of the richest inspirations of life. I could ask of no people
more loyal and faithful co-operation than you have given to me in
every hour. May the peace of God that passeth understanding be yours.
Fraternally,
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
GRAND OPERA HOUSE,
NEW YORK, JAN. 14, '99.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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