B 334168
LC
191
B 54
امام
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GENERAL LIBRARY
В Е С ЕЕ 2
OF
ELALE JEALA
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PRESENTED
рү
А.
и
U Greene
4 ж. 1894
с. БЕЖЕхаг .......................4
.
г.
114
DO NOT CIRCULATE
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der
32
ما معنے ہی
In drisi a, heen
Dec. 14, 1894
REV. DR. BETHUNE:S ORATION
BEFORE
THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY.
7
7sm ar enero .
Dee y gu
THE CLAIMS OF OUR COUNTRY ON ITS LITERARY MEN.
5-16-92
AN
OR A TION
BEFORE
THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY
OF
V
HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
JULY 19, 1849.
BY
GEORGE W. BETHUNE.
ashington
CAMBRIDGE:
PUBLISHED BY JOHN BARTLETT.
1849.
m
LC
191
B54
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by
JOHN BARTLETT,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
CAMBRIDGE:
METCALF AND COMPANY,
PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.
OR A TI O N.
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF
THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY :
The next difficulty, after gaining courage to ad-
dress so distinguished an assembly, is the choice
of a subject. The orator's habits may, through
your characteristic courtesy, influence his decision ;
and, as you have laid the honorable appointment
upon one who has been consecrated an advocate
of Christian morals, you will not be displeased, if
his theme should accord with his calling. His
task will, then, be more proportionate to his pow-
ers; for the discovery of truth is seldom a privi-
lege of man, and the illustration of well-known
principles in a manner that gives them attractive
freshness is an art of rare genius; but to urge
simply, yet earnestly, the motives of duty, is not
above the pitch of an ordinary strength. You
have, also, gone beyond your own ranks, (every
man of which were more worthy of the office,) and
commanded the present service from a stranger of
a distant city, nurtured at the bosom of another
4
Alma Mater, who, without a drop of New Eng-
land blood in his veins, has little knowledge of
your sectional topics, sympathies, or predilections;
therefore, while deeply grateful for the compliment,
he unhesitatingly assumes the full right, which
your request implies, of speaking as it becomes
him before a society of American scholars, fear-
less of giving offence by a frank utterance of his
thoughts, certain of a kindly hearing from those
whom talent, cultivated under the best auspices,
has made liberal, candid, and considerate.
THE CLAIMS OF OUR COUNTRY UPON ITS LITER-
ARY MEN have been often discussed; but the field
is so rich, that it may well reward an hour's
gleaning, though many strong reapers have gone
before.
Patriotism has been regarded by some as a vision-
ary virtue, existing only in boyish dreams, romantic
rhapsodies, and declamations of demagogues; by
others it has been denounced as a narrow vice,
the opposite of Christian philanthropy. The first
are at variance with the general sense of mankind;
the last, with the moral economy ordained by
God. That there are those who, while professing
love for their country, would sacrifice its welfare
to their selfishness, proves no more than their
infirmity or hypocrisy. Human weakness is no
argument against the reality of a virtue; on the
contrary, a false pretence of a moral principle tes-
tifies to its value, for cunning bad men cloak their
evil with the semblance of good. It were mere
5
commonplace of quotation to cite instances show-
ing the power of patriotic sentiment. Every page
of history, and of none more than our own, re-
cords its courage in conflict, or its devotion under
defeat. Poetry, the language which genius gives
to the heart, exults with its pride, or saddens with
its sorrow.
The orator appeals to it, seldom in
vain, as among the strongest passions of our na-
ture. The ethical philosopher defines its limits
and adjusts its rules. The Holy Scriptures sancti-
fy it by their infallible authority, when they pre-
serve “ for our learning” the mournful elegies of
captive Judah, mingling her tears with the waters
of Babylon; or bid us Weep not for the dead,
neither bemoan him, but weep sore for him who
goeth away, for he shall return no more, nor see
his native country”; or, above all, exhibit the
sympathy of Christ himself, the Divine perfection
of humanity, who, on his way to die for the
world, paused to lament over Jerusalem, and, as
he sent forth the “glad tidings which shall be for
all people,” commanded that they should be pro-
claimed first throughout the land of his birth.
Nay, amidst the shades of this venerable Academy,
where so many mighty spirits have gathered wis-
dom that they might go out to give their grateful
fellow-citizens oracles of far-reaching, conservative,
animating counsel, and so many, worthy of their
ancestry, are at this time refreshing their zeal by
the contemplation of such high examples; with
the sacred fields round about us on which the
proto-martyrs of our country poured forth their
6
blood like water, and in close sight of Bunker's
Hill, -- who, under the glory of “so great a cloud of
witnesses,” dares question the reality of a virtue so
magnanimous in trial and so grand in successes ?
One, who has been a companion and fellow of
miscalled politicians, holding the base creed, that
offices made for our country's advantage are the
legitimate pay of successful, because unscrupulous,
conspirators, until he has “ quite lost the divine
quality of his first being," may sneer at patriotism
as a profligate does at conscience, or a wanton at
modesty; an atrabilious misanthrope, eager after
proofs of human pravity, may have no leisure for
observing the beautiful workings of God within
man “ both to will and to do of His good pleas-
ure”; a mystical abstractionist, inverting his reason
from the actualities of common life, may forget the
common feelings of common men; but a little
child, whose heart leaps at the word home, and
knows why the cannon roars on the twenty-second
of February or the fourth of July, can lead us to
a purer, more generous, more uplifting, more philo-
sophical sentiment.
Love to all men is, indeed, the law of Chris-
tianity. God, “who hath made of one blood all the
nations of the earth, for to dwell together on the
face of the whole earth," never meant that the
brotherhood should be broken by territorial boun-
daries, or limited by expedients of trade. Yet
none, but those who have gone mad upon remote
generalisms and unities, will deny that kindred,
vicinage, and organized reciprocity impose peculiar
7
obligations. The maxim, that " charity begins at
home,” though much abused, is true. While God
is the great object of all obedience, each man is
made the centre of his human relations. His re-
gard for himself is the inspired rule and measure
of the regard due from him to his fellows. Next
to himself is his household, then the immediate
community in which he lives, then his country,
then the world. Genuine benevolence is systemat-
ically expansive. It is educated in the family for
the state, in the state for mankind. A disobedient
child will not make a good citizen, nor one un-
faithful to his countrymen a philanthropist. These
affections are concentric circles, described by the
hand of the All-Wise around the heart; nor is it
possible for our love to reach the outer, but by
overflowing the inner. Hence the mistake of the
illogical communist is apparent, when, to realize
the idea, truthful in itself, of a universal family,
he would destroy the germ from which the grand
sociality must spring, and, with it, the house-
hold dependencies that teach a mutual well-being,
the household needs that urge a combination of
effort. We sympathize with him in his aim, but
we deny the wisdom of his process.
For the very reason that these affections are
concentric, they never clash. The Divine law,
which assumes it to be right that a man should
love himself, because he is, under God, the guar-
dian of his own welfare, enjoins upon him love for
his neighbour; and, as the same authority requires
his care for those to whom he is more immediately
8
related in his own house, so should he care for his
country, which is an enlargement of his home, and
for the world, which is the common home of his
heavenly Father's human family. But, as self-love
becomes sinful selfishness when it prompts a man to
war against, or even neglect, his neighbour's good,
so does love of country become a vice when it seeks
national aggrandizement by injury done the people
of other lands. The same rule that measures duty
between man and man is equally applicable to na-
tions. As an individual is dependent upon his fel-
lows, as a community is prosperous through a dis-
tribution of labor and a reciprocity of benefits, so
must international exchanges be for the good of
each and of all; and, since it is a law of retributive
providence, political science should adopt as an
axiom,“ The liberal deviseth liberal things, and by
liberal things shall he stand.”
The nearly synonymous use, in these remarks,
of the terms duty and affection has arisen from no
confusedness of thought, but from the difficulty,
or rather impropriety, of treating them apart from
each other. What life is to the animal frame, love
is to morals. The anatomist may dissect a dead
body, and demonstrate the functions of each part
in the wonderful mechanism ; but the mysterious
motive-power, which gave impulse to all, is gone.
So the moralist who leaves love out of view, how-
ever accurately he may define our relations and
deduce rules of conduct, presents us with a cold,
inanimate abstraction. Such is not the system of
the Bible. There, all duty is comprehended by
9
love. Love is the vital principle of obedience to
God and of service to man. Reason, unduly lauded
as the superior quality of our nature, is, even when
embracing by faith “the wisdom from above," valu-
able only as it advances the development of love
towards its heavenly perfection in the likeness of
God. Hence, by the Divine arrangement, there is
for every duty an inspiring affection. The love of
parents for their child precedes proof of parental
obligation; the love of a child for its parents is the
stem on which filial duty must be grafted. Om-
niscient grace exhibits the forgiveness of God,
" that he may be feared”; and constrains us from
sin to the love of Christ, by “shedding his love
abroad in our hearts"; because, “if we love him,
we shall keep his commandments.” Thus love of
country is first called forth by the power of asso-
ciation over our natural sensibilities. As a babe
learns to love the face which smiles kindly on
him, the voice which gently soothes him, the bosom
which yields him sustenance, the clasping arm which
embraces him, so do we love the scenes about our
early home, the haunts of familiar and friendly
intercourse, the fields which give us bread. They
may be rugged and unattractive to a stranger's
eye, but the heart radiates over them its own
beauty. His icy plains are as dear to the hyper-
borean as the Alpine valley to the Swiss, or
the vine-clad hills, laughing shore, and purple sea
to the Italian. Then, as reason expands, the love
expands. We learn to love the people whose wel-
fare is united with our own, and the soil held
2
10
in common with them; to cherish the government
whose laws afford us protection ; or, if it be tyran-
nical, to struggle for a better, and to die rather
than suffer foreign domination. Yet, though ra-
tional self-interest should enhance the affection, it
is not, of itself, a sufficient principle of duty; for,
if we consider only the profit which our country
brings us, we shall serve it only so far as the ser-
vice is profitable. Love is the strength of patriot-
ism ; for love alone is capable of that unhesitating,
self-sacrificing devotion which seeks reward in our
country's honor, holding fortune, ease, and life,
as our country's fathers held them, cheap for its
sake. Nor can we doubt that a sentiment so nat-
ural, so generous, so energetic, divinely indicates a
corresponding obligation; or that unfaithfulness to
our country is unfaithfulness to God.
This brief reasoning may seem unnecessary, and
it would be, were it not for a disposition, too often
shown by some claiming superior refinement, to
treat patriotism as, at best, a weakness of the vul-
gar, forgetting that many of what are called weak-
nesses belong to the best parts of humanity. Like
the early, fragrant blossoms of the vine, they prom-
ise fruits of active usefulness; or, like its slight,
graceful tendrils, they twine our pliant infirmity
around the upright strength of ascertained rule.
The spirit of patriotism has also decayed among
our people generally. Vain and boastful as we
have been said to be, it is only in the United States
of America that you can hear natives speaking con-
temptuously of their country. Some causes for this
11
may be discerned.
The immense extent of our
country, our allegiance to which passes through our
allegiance to our several States, whose rights must
be watchfully guarded; the consequent variety of
products and circumstances, creating a supposed,
but not real, opposition of interests; the very great-
ness and unprecedented progress of our prosperity,
allowing no salutary lessons from grave adversity;
the licentiousness of party rancour, stimulated far
more by the cupidity of profligate office-seekers
than by any substantial difference of political
doctrine; the inability of the less educated or
less gifted to look over the vast field, and compre-
hend the stretch of their personal responsibility ;
the too general aversion of the good and wise to
meddle with canvasses made purposely annoying
by gross demagogues, who, Aristophanes tells us,
are like the eel-fishers of the Copaïs, that do best in
dirty waters * ; - all these have a tendency to cool
down our ardor to a more latent heat; but above all,
the remoteness of other countries, which renders less
noticeable the contrast of our unequalled privileges.
We see the evils that exist among ourselves, and
feel what Locke calls our "present uneasiness,"
while we admire what appears desirable abroad
under the “ enchantment” of distance. Besides,
our Anglo-Saxon blood, though tempered by alter-
nating extremes of heat and cold, retains its pro-
*
"Οπερ γάρ οι τάς έγχέλεις θηρώμενοι πέπονθας. .
"Οταν μεν η λίμνη καταστη, λαμβάνουσιν ουδέν.
Εάν δ' άνω τε και κάτω τον βόρβορον κυκωσιν,
Aipowol.
IMIHE, 864 - 867.
12
pensity to quarrel and (pardon the rude English,
— no other language supplies us with a synonyme)
to grumble; so, having none else to quarrel with,
nothing else to grumble at, we vent our hereditary
spleen upon ourselves and our government. In a
word, we lack a proper degree of loyalty.
Loyalty is the very term to describe the sentiment
that cordially acknowledges the claims of our nation
upon our love and service. It has indeed signified,
almost exclusively, the fidelity of a subject to his
prince; nor, though, from our political habits, we
cannot comprehend the feeling, can we help ad-
miring the many instances of heroic valor, patient
constancy, disregard of loss or suffering, and zeal
through good or evil fortunes, which such attach-
ment has prompted. Yet, though the principle has
undoubtedly come down from those early times
when the patriarch was the chief of his tribe, its
more modern name is clearly derived from con-
sidering the monarch as the head of the state,
because the representative of the incorporating law.
To uphold the authority of him who sat upon the
throne, because it was necessary for the stability of
government and the safety of the people, became
a virtue as well as a policy; yet, (such is our
nature,) through the force of association, the per-
son of the reigning prince grew to be so sacred,
that it often attracted and absorbed the homage
due him only in his official character; and history
tells us of men clinging desperately to the an-
ointed fool who sported with their destinies, the
priest-ridden bigot who persecuted their religion,
13
and the licentious tyrant who preyed upon their
substance or wasted their lives.
Loyalty, with us, is more agreeable to the ety-
mology of the term. It is a reverent attachment to
law emanating from the people according to the
Constitution. Our magistrates, it is true, are, dur-
ing their term of office, representatives of the law,
and, as such, should receive our venerating obe-
dience; nay, very grave must be the provocation,
before we
so 'bate
The place its honor for the holder's sake
but our loyalty cannot be given to them, because
they are the creatures of the popular will. Our
only sovereign, under God, is the people acting
legally; and to them, while just in the exercise of
their constitutional sovereignty, is due that fealty
which political propriety, with the Word of God,
commands from us to “the higher powers” of the
land. Hence, the loyalty of an American citizen
is of a more intellectual character, and, therefore,
more difficult to be maintained. The person of a
king is a visible, tangible object, and men can re-
gard him as a man; but our people are such an im-
mense multitude, that it is not easy to regard them
in their aggregate capacity, except as a theoretical
idea; though, truly, the king is the figment, the
people the substantial reality. The will of a mon-
arch comes down upon his subjects from a height
which long prescription has taught them to consider
the source of law; the will of our people ascends
through their ballots, and, when justified by the
14
national compact, becomes the law, which, by the
same compact, we are bound loyally to obey. But
in the formation of this law, each citizen, as a con-
stituent part of the legislating people, has a share;
so that, as far as his vote has effect, he is his own
sovereign and a law unto himself. The law is the
result of the general suffrage, perhaps of long dis-
cussion, angry dispute, and a small majority. The
ballot-box, like a mighty crucible, fuses together
the conflicting prejudices, sectional jealousies, an-
tagonist opinions, and rival aims, which move the
millions acting their several parts within the vast
republic. It is, therefore, not easy to hush the
passions which have stirred us during the exercise
of our elective right; to acknowledge with due
submission the supremacy of the general over the
individual will; to own the rule of those who,
though the majority, we believe are in the wrong;
to respect and love (ay, love, for without respect
and love there is no loyalty) the people whose
errors we see, whose faults we condemn, whose
policy we dread. Still, such loyalty must be cher-
ished, or our Union, now moving in harmony, like
the heavenly orbs, by the nice balance of its cen-
trifugal and centripetal forces, would soon become
a chaos of fragments wild, jostling, and mutually
destructive.
Why should not such loyalty be cherished ?
Will not the issue of our ballot-box come nearer
the right than the will of a crowned despot, or of
an hereditary nobility, or of any privileged class ?
Has history shown the world so well governed by
15
the autocrat or the few, the happiness of the many
so cared for by those who held themselves above
and not of them; has political virtue so run in
the line of legitimacy, or political wisdom so been
the consequence of high birth, that, for some
slight mistakes or even disastrous failures, we
should abandon our popular system to adopt any
other ? On the contrary, has not experience
proved the safety and self-perpetuating energy of
our institutions ? When our national government
was formed, how many scornful voices in the Old
World confidently prophesied its speedy downfall,
from the alleged want of elemental adhesiveness !
Yet, short as our history is, our system has sur-
vived most of the European governments, and, as
the signs of the times strongly indicate, may, at
no very distant date, outlast them all ; except,
perchance, our sister republics of the Swiss, which,
now seven hundred years old, tower, like their Alps,
above the prostrate or shaking thrones around them.
How often, as this party or the other came upper-
most, have the disappointed leaders rent their
clothes, and, with ashes on their heads, howled
dolefully over the land, that our ruin was gh,
that our commerce would be destroyed, our manu-
factures crushed, or our agriculture impoverished !
Yet, notwithstanding the mischievous vacillations
of our economical policy, where, a few years since,
there was one ship, there is now a fleet of merchant-
men ; single manufactories have grown into pros-
perous cities; there is scarcely a farmer in the old
States, who has not pulled down his house and
16
barns to build better and larger ; while, in the new,
the virgin forests have gone down to let the sun-
shine smile upon fields of plenty so rich and vast
that their statistics almost stagger belief. We are
but seventy-three years old, yet our States are
thirty where there were thirteen ; nor can any one,
who candidly compares the two periods, deny that
we have grown more united as our millions have
multiplied, and more consolidated as our territory
has expanded, until our Constitution, like a noble
arch, stronger by every fresh weight imposed upon
it, now upholds in a prosperity unexampled an
area equal to the continent of Europe.
There are, doubtless, differences of opinion re-
specting some of the steps by which these results
have been attained; but it is only with things as
they are, or promise to be, that our present reason-
ing is concerned. In the year 1824, the Oration
was pronounced before you by a gentleman then
not unknown to fame as an accomplished scholar,
but since eminently distinguished as the erudite
statesman of whose eloquent power Massachusetts
has been justly very proud, as the dignified repre-
sentative of American culture while diplomatically
representing the United States at the first court of
Europe, and (not the least of his well-merited hon-
ors) as the head of your great University. His dis-
course then was fervid with patriotic hopes, and
demonstratively prescient of our country's rapid ad-
vancement; but how must his generous heart rejoice
to see that the accomplished reality has far tran-
scended his warmest anticipations! Indeed, the aim
17
of the address you are now hearing so patiently is
humbly to follow out, through the accumulated facts
of 1849, some of the thoughts with which he stirred
our youthful ambition twenty-five years ago.
That there are portentous evils existing among
us, national crimes provoking the wrath of Heaven,
practices widely inconsistent with the just theory
of equality which we avow, and fearful perils to
be met at no very distant day, it were folly to
deny; but let us remember that everything hu-
man is necessarily imperfect, that Heaven, while
condemning sin, is mercifully patient with the in-
firmities of the sinner, and that reform is ardu-
ously slow, as vice is precipitant. Instead of de-
sponding because all we desire has not been done,
we should be highly encouraged by the achievement
of so much. Certainly, no people ever made such
growth in wealth, arts, general knowledge, and,
considering all the circumstances, social virtues.
The large scope given to expression of thought,
and the multiplying opportunities of moral influ-
ence, have already wrought most salutary changes
of public sentiment on important subjects. The
triumph of truth with the prevalence of right,
though delayed, is certain, and, when gained, will
be permanent. Let us, then, not heed the mur-
murs of the self-conceited dogmatist because his
opinion is not the pivot on which the nation
swings; of the sordid gain-seeker, who would turn
the country's force to enhance the profits of his
ship or his furnace, his cotton-plant or his spindle ;
or of the fanatic nullifier, of whatever latitude, who
3
18
would sever his State or his section from such a
league of powerful coadjutants, to dwindle in puny
isolation. Thank God, the Samson is not, never
will be, born, who can pull down our glorious edi-
fice for the silly gratification of breaking his own
pate! One honest American woman's scissors are
more than a match for all the strength such heads
can wear.
Our people deserve our trust. Far and wide as
they have stretched themselves, they hold one polit-
ical faith. The new States, allowing for the dif-
ference of period and circumstances, are but repe-
titions of the old thirteen. At this time of nearly
universal uprising and struggles for reform else-
where, we present to the world the unprecedented
spectacle of unanimous satisfaction with the system
of government established by our national fathers.
Within the past and the coming years, there will
have gone from among us, lured by the hope of
golden rewards, to our new territory on the Pa-
cific, numbers, principally of hardy, well-taught, de-
termined young men, equalling the population of
an entire State; an instance unparalleled through-
out the history of emigration ; yet no one doubts
that they will choose for themselves the same
forms of government under which they have been
educated, or that they will cordially maintain their
allegiance to the Union. A citizen of the United
States cannot imagine the possibility of living in
happiness under any other system ; and now, when
contemplating the efforts of distant nations, sprung
from the same loins that we are, for the establish-
19
ment of constitutional freedom, we estimate their
chances of permanent success by their approach in
forms to our own, in spirit to ourselves. Nor have
we been inconsistent with our professions; for,
whatever has been the decree of the ever-shifting
majority, submission to law, and reliance upon the
constitutional methods of correcting error, have
steadily prevailed. At least, the exceptions have
been too inconsiderable to impair the rule, and
were speedily settled. Wonderful as was the rev-
olution which made the colonies free, independent,
confederate States, every national exercise of the
elective right is, though on different grounds,
worthy of equal admiration. We change our na-
tional rulers, and, with them, our national policy;
yet, from one end of the country to the other,
there is less riot than in England at the election
of a member of Parliament. Nor can the most
inveterate laudator temporis acti, who has read the
newspapers published at the time of the earlier
contests, deny that each general election is better
conducted than were those before.
We are emphatically one people. The constant
and expanding flood of emigrants from less favor-
ed lands gives in some sections a temporary, super-
ficial diversity of customs, and even of language.
Yet, as they come moved by an admiring wish to
share our privileges, and a grateful respect for the
nation which has made itself so prosperous, while
it sets open its gates so hospitably wide, they
readily adopt our usages, and soon become homo-
geneous with the mass through which they are
20
in any town of our
distributed. Until they or their children are edu-
cated in free citizenship, they follow; but rarely,
and then never successfully, attempt to lead. As
the Anglo-Saxon tongue is the speech of the na-
tion, so it is the Anglo-Saxon mind that rules.
The sons of those who triumphed in the war of
Independence have subdued the distant forest,
making the wilderness to rejoice with the arts
and virtues of their fathers. The patronymics
borne by the most influential among them are
most frequently such as are familiar and honor-
able among us.
Summon together the dwellers
northern, States, and you will find that there is
scarcely a State of the Union where they have
not relatives. The representative in Congress from
the farthest West laughs over their school-boy
frolics with the representative of the farthest East.
The woodsman on the Aroostook talks of his
brother on the Rio Grande ; the tradesman in the
seaport, of his son, a judge, in Missouri. The true-
hearted girl, who has left her mountain birth-place
to earn her modest paraphernalia amidst the pon-
derous din of a factory near the Atlantic coast,
dreams sweetly on her toil-blest pillow of him who,
for her dear sake, is clearing a home in the wilds of
Iowa, or sifting the sands of some Californian Pac-
tolus. We all claim a common history, and, what-
ever be our immediate parentage, are proud to
own ourselves the grateful children of the mighty
men who declared our country's independence,
framed the bond of our Union, and bought with
21
their sacred blood the liberties we enjoy. Nor is
it an insincere compliment to assert, that, go where
you will, New England is represented by the
shrewdest, the most enlightened, the most success-
ful, and the most religious of our young popula-
tion. Nearly all our teachers, with the authors of
our school-books, and a very large proportion of our
preachers, as well as of our editors, (the classes
which have the greatest control over the growing
character of our youth,) come from, or receive their
education in, New England. Wherever the New
Englander goes, he carries New England with him.
New England is his boast, his standard of perfec-
tion, and “So they do in New England !” his con-
fident answer to all objectors. Great as is our
reverence for those venerable men,
those venerable men, he rather
wearies us with his inexhaustible eulogy on the
Pilgrim Fathers, who, he seems to think, have
begotten the whole United States. Nay, enlarging
upon the somewhat complacent notion of his an-
cestors, that God designed for them, “his chosen
people,” this Canaan of the aboriginal heathen, he
looks upon the continent as his rightful heritage,
and upon the rest of us as Hittites, Jebusites, or
people of a like termination, whom he is commis-
sioned to root out, acquiring our money, squatting
our wild lands, monopolizing our votes, and
marrying our heiresses. Whence, or how justly,
he derived his popular sobriquet, passes the guess
of an antiquary; but certain it is, that, if he meets
with a David, the son of Jesse has often to take up
the lament in a different sense from the original, -
on
22
“I am distressed for thee, my Brother Jonathan!”
Better still, his sisters, nieces, female cousins,
flock on various honorable pretexts to visit him
amidst his new possessions, where they own with
no Sabine reluctance the constraining ardor of our
unsophisticated chivalry; and happy is the house-
hold over which a New England wife presides !
blessed the child whose cradle is rocked by the
hand, whose slumber is hallowed by the prayers,
of a New England mother! The order of the
Roman policy is reversed. He conquered, and then
inhabited; the New Englander inhabits, then gains
the mastery, not by force of arms, but by mother-
wit, steadiness, and thrift. That there should be,
among us of the other races, a little occasional
petulance, is not to be wondered at; but it is only
superficial. The New Englander goes forth not as
a spy or an enemy, and the gifts which he carries
excite gratitude, not fear. He soon becomes iden-
tified with his neighbours, their interests are soon
his, and the benefits of his enterprising cleverness
swell the advantage of the community where he
has planted himself, thus tending to produce a
moral homogeneousness throughout the confeder-
асу. .
Yet let it be remembered that this New
England influence, diffusing itself, like noiseless
but transforming leaven, through the recent and
future States, while it makes them precious as
allies, would also make them formidable as rivals,
terrible as enemies. The New Englander loses
little of his main characteristics by migration. He
is as shrewd, though not necessarily as economical,
23
a calculator in the valley of the Mississippi, as his
brethren in the East, and as brave as his fathers
were at Lexington or Charlestown. It were the
height of suicidal folly for the people of the mari-
time States to attempt holding as subjects or trib-
utaries, directly or indirectly, the people between
the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains; but
those who have not travelled among our prairie
and forest settlements can have only a faint idea
of the filial reverence, the deferential respect, the
yearning love, with which they turn to the land
where their fathers sleep, and to you who guard
their sepulchres. The soul knows nothing of dis-
tance; and, in their twilight musings, they can
scarcely tell which is dearer to their hearts, — the
home of the kindred they have left behind them,
or the home they have won for their offspring. Be
it your anxious care, intelligent gentlemen of New
England, that so strong a bond is never strained to
rupture !
Variety of climate, of soil and position, must
make variety in pursuits of life and habits of
thought. The energy of our national character in
various departments of productive skill (the rela-
tions of which to each other are, as yet, not gen-
erally well understood) must excite competition,
perhaps some jealousy. Nor can all be expect-
ed to think alike on many questions of national
policy. On the other hand, Providence has so
wisely distributed its blessings, that we may not
choose but to be mutually dependent. The products
of our immense inland territory must find vent
24
for the surplus through the ports of the sea-
board, through which, again, must come the lux-
uries or necessaries we require from abroad. The
agricultural States offer the best markets for the
manufactures of those whose soil is less fertile,
yet dearer, and labor more abundant ; while these,
in their turn, are rewarded with plenty of bread-
stuffs and other provision. Iron, lead, coal, cop-
per, gold, pass each other on their way to dis-
tant localities. There are no empty return-wagons,
rail-cars, or coasting vessels ; each carries back
wealth purchased by the wealth which it brought.
Our immense lakes, with their rich teeming bor-
ders thousands of miles about, act like inner im-
pelling arteries to the trade of the whole country.
Our great navigable rivers, with their numerous
tributaries, ramify, like veins, for the circulation of
a common life through leagues none pretends to
count, and millions whose increase none dares to
guess. Nay, by the wonderful inventions of recent
years, we are no longer dependent upon the watery
ways of nature, and wellnigh annihilate distance.
On the wings of steam, the population and wealth
of whole towns may speed, swifter than a bird,
along the roads which, binding us together by iron
sinews, pierce mountains, span valleys, and measure
the continuous level by minutes, not miles, so that
we say, “How long?" instead of “ How far?” The
slender wires, now stretching like network over the
land, quickly as living nerves, thrill thought and
feeling between correspondents the most remote.
And, by the admirable working of our confederate
25
unity, is felt through all, like the beating of a cen-
tral heart, the power of one national will. In a
word, we realize more fully than Rome, with its
Senate and Plebs, could do, the fable of old Mene-
nius Agrippa, and are as virtually connected as the
several parts of the human anatomy,
6 that there
may be no schism in the body, but that the mem-
bers should have the same care one for another ;
and whether one member suffer, all the members
suffer with it, or one member be honored, all the
members rejoice with it."
Suppose, for one melancholy moment, that this
healthful economy of exchanges were broken up, -
that the Western valley were shut out from the sea
by adverse governments, — that those on the coast
were hemmed in to their own narrow limits by
hostile forts along the mountain ridges, that be-
tween the North and the South there were neither
commercial nor moral sympathy, - that at every
State line passports were demanded and a tariff
set; — who must not shrink from describing the
terrible consequences; the stagnation of trade; the
silence of brotherly counsel ; the constant feuds; the
multiplication of armies; the Cain-like, exterminating
wars; the overthrow of law by military dictators;
the utter ruin of all that makes us prosperous at
home and respected abroad; the sure catastrophe,
moral and national death! O that those, who, for
any reason, talk lightly of dissolving this Union,
would consider the immensely greater evils such a
rupture would inevitably cause, the awful guilt it
would bring upon themselves! Whatever may be
4
26
peace
the cant of words, no lover of law could ever kindle
the torch of such incendiarism, no lover of
provoke such fratricidal slaughter, no lover of free-
dom plot for such general slavery, no lover of God
and man undermine the eminent watch-tower whose
light is now shedding over the world such bright
promise of a universal brotherhood. Were it pos-
sible that an American womb could be so cursed as
to bring forth so diabolical a monster, and the
malignant Erostratus could be successful, a loud,
bitter, heaven-compelling cry would go up from all
the earth, swelled by generation after generation,
until the final fires shall have swept to hell all
trace of human crimes: “ Anathema! Anathema !
ANATHEMA MARANATHA !”
We ought, it is true, to have little fear of our
being overtaken by so terrible a calamity; but our
courage can rationally be derived, under God, only
from a warranted confidence in our people, that they
will have sense enough, probity enough, religion
enough, to pursue the conduct upon which the per-
manence of our welfare depends. For these rea-
sons, this feeble but earnest voice calls upon you,
gentlemen, and, so far as it can reach, upon literary
men throughout the country, to exert, by the many
legitimate means at hand, the vast influence Prov-
idence has intrusted us with, for the cultivation of a
high, generous, unsectional patriotism; a patriotism
whose rule can be best given in the immortal words
of one who, more than once, has upborne on his
Atlantic shoulders, safe through perils, the sphere of
the Constitution : “Our country, our whole coun-
try, and our country as one !”
27
God has not given us talents, and permitted us to
cultivate them, that they may be terminated upon
ourselves. Fascinating as the charms of study are,
and delightful the calm, secluded hours in which
we hold converse with the philosopher, the poet,
the orator, and the historian, made immortal by
their pages; and unwilling as we may be to tear
ourselves away from pleasures so exquisite, for any
living society or engagements of the outer world,
neither the law of our Creator, nor the urgencies
of the times, permit such luxurious self-indulgence.
Thought, truthful, clear, and argumentative of good
deeds, is an oracle from heaven; eloquence, whether
of the voice or of the pen, comes from a divine
afflatus ; and woe, woe, in this world and in the
next, to that man whom God has thus ordained
his prophet, if he utters not, or if he perverts,
the revelation! Study, when not directed to use-
ful ends, becomes a vice; and superior knowledge
makes us more guilty than our fellow-men, if we
offer them no share in our acquisitions. Yes ! far
more worthy of thanks from man, and of reward
from God, is the digger of the ditch that drains
the marsh, the hewer of the wood that warms a
dwelling, the veriest menial that serves our ne-
cessities, than the scholar who refuses his enlarged
powers to the benefit of his race, - who distin-
guishes with more than Hermaic subtilty between
" the Me" and the “not Me,” yet neglects the ac-
tual morals around him, — who would sing solitarily
his own pumice-worn numbers, self-charmed by their
Attic purity, though the city were burning, — who,
28
intent over his problem, cares not that an enemy
has forced the gates, or who exhausts upon the
particles of a dead language an energy which
might save immortal souls !
Your candor, gentlemen, will interpret these
remarks, not as disrespectful to learning; (which
would be sacrilege on an occasion like this, but
as hortatory to its proper use, and as dissuasive
from a selfishness more refined, yet scarcely less
guilty, than the hoarding of a miser. Error is nev-
er idle, never uncommunicative, but, like its malig-
nant father, goes pestilently about to corrupt human
happiness. Ignorance is never idle, but rushes on
from blind impulse, often the more mischievous
when honest, because superstition, prejudice, or
fanaticism, inspires it with the strength of con-
science. Mind will be active, the moral being will
be busy; and if they who have the skill direct not
its force to good, it will be working evil. It is the
plan of God, “the Father of lights,” — Pater ipse
colendi, — that men shall be regenerated and sanc-
tified by truth, — truth communicated through the
instrumentality of men whom he calls to work with
himself, — truth, the proper, sole medium of his om-
nipotent rule over the freedom of his rational crea-
tures. We are, therefore, verily faithless to God and
dishonest towards men, if we bury his gift, which,
through a zealous usury, might make many rich,
or hide the light which he has kindled in our souls
for the scattering of darkness around us. Yes! the
miser who hoards gold is despicable, yet he with-
draws only a temporary convenience; the speculator,
29
Our re-
who stores away bread in time of famine, makes
gain of mortal suffering ; the skilful physician,
who, from cowardice or love of ease, attempts not
the rescue of his neighbours sick of a plague, is
negatively a murderer; but he who knows truth
and the method of imparting it, yet keeps it back,
secretes the riches of eternity, the food of immortal
spirits, the sure, only remedy of all human woe.
The lessons of the abstract, when apprehended
aright, tend steadily to the practical.
searches as scholars are in the past, but our busi-
ness is in the present and the future. And what
an unprecedented field does our present and future
open to the philanthropic exertions of intellectual
men !
Human nature is ever radically the same.
That as yet anonymous science which concerns the
knowledge of human nature has few fundamental
axioms. Solomon wrote proverbs for all ages. The
characters of Tacitus transmigrate through all gen-
erations. But the developments, the combinations
and phases of human action, in these times, are
unexampled. The labyrinth has become so com-
plicated, that our hand cannot securely grasp the
ball of the clew. Zeno himself could not keep cool
amidst such universal, multiform, constant excite-
ment. Once, a few thought, and still fewer led;
now, all think, and none are willing to follow.
Mountains, seas, diversities of language, hereditary
enmities of races, scarcely retard the revolution-
ary contagion. Armies receive the command to
“charge!” — they obey; but first come “right about
face," and rout with their bayonets l'état major.
30
Bulls, whose roar once shook terribly the earth
like one wide Bashan, now wail plaintively and
feebly as a famishing calf outside the gate of
its paddock. The pawns toss kings and queens,
knights, bishops, and rookish nobles from the
board, to play out the game among themselves.
Constitutions are woven in a night, and are swept
away like cobwebs by the morning broom. Rul-
ers and ministries treat oaths as lightly as do smug-
glers in a custom-house. The giant, MAN, long
crushed by usurpers of divine right, is flinging off
the Ætna from his mangled breast. His limbs are
not yet drawn from under the quaking, groaning,
fire-spouting mass ; but he is sure to rise. He will
reel blindly, at first, from inveterate weakness of
limb, his head dizzy with his new uprightness; his
enemies will hurl on him their frightened ven-
geance; he will stagger, stumble, fall; but, gain-
ing strength each time he presses the bosom of his
mother earth, he will gather himself up, drive op-
posing powers irrevocably back to more than Egyp-
tian darkness, and stride triumphantly forwards un-
til he reaches the goal which the good God has
promised him, consummate freedom, happiness
undefiled, imperishable dignity in the Divine image.
The truth of a liberated Gospel will dissipate his
errors, as Minerva did the mists from the eyes of
Diomed, and the noble prophecy of the Tusculan
be fulfilled : “ Perfecta mens, id est absoluta ratio,
quod est idem virtus.”
Such is the agitated, hopeful world, and such
the crisis of its changes in which we are called to
31
labor ; but our immediate sphere is our own coun-
try, the sphere where our zeal will tell most effec-
tively on the destinies of mankind. The example
of our national character, developed by our liberal
institutions, has, more than all other causes com-
bined, waked up the spirit of the Old World. The
radiance of our well-adjusted freedom is melting
away the icy fetters that have, from time imme-
morial, frozen to moral numbness the larger por-
tion of Continental Europe. The name of America
sounds like that of heaven on earth to the volun-
tary exiles who leave their fatherlands in the con-
fidence of finding, for themselves and their children,
a better country, fulness of bread, and the rights of
their own sweat. The eyes of their kindred follow
them to our shores. The news of our advancement,
our state papers, the issues of our unshackled press,
go back, despite of the keenest surveillance, with
their endorsement to their native hamlets. Political
philosophers and ardent philanthropists come west-
ward, that they may study our recent but vigorous
systems, as the Greek once went to the older land
of the Nile. A strong word, distinctly spoken here,
echoes through hut and palace, cabinet and camp,
of distant but anxious listeners. O, then, let us
work now, that we may work for the stupendous
future; let us work for our country, that we may
benefit the world!
There are those who will turn away in disgust,
sallow and smoke-dried as a mediæval legend, from
these exhortations to the present and future, as
from the ravings of an upsetting radical ; - men, so
32
oppugnant in their mental temper, that they can
never think out of an antithesis to common sense,
counting it glory when they deny the obvious and
advocate the exploded, - or who, shuddering, with-
out faith in the Presiding Spirit, at the friction,
the order-working friction, of conflicting opinions,
imagine that chaos is come again, and grasp, like
drowning swimmers, at any floating fragment of pre-
cedent or authority. There is a fashion (for fashion
dresses the inside as well as the outside of the head)
of tergiversant sentimentality, a sombre affectation,
which looks back admiringly and regretfully upon
the middle centuries, as Lot's wife would have
looked upon the Dead Sea, had she survived till
the next morning; whining “ like a sick girl” over
the sturdy plainness, the prosaic directness, the un-
poetical utilitarianism, of our modern republican
ways; sighing for the priestly pomps, the bril-
liant chivalry, the royal stateliness of feudal times,
when portly abbots locked up the rare Bible, but
doled fragments of the monkish feasts to the rag-
ged, kneeling, cruci-signing rabble of pilgrims at
the refectory gate; or the letterless vassal tilled the
soil for his lord's profit, fought in his lord's quarrel,
and held his life by his lord's caprice. Shocked
at the crowding of the vulgar many into the very
penetralia of knowledge and social amenities, these
resurrectionists of mortified deformity shudder at
the scream of a locomotive as though it were a
fiery dragon, while there is no Saint George to meet
its fury; the hum of machinery threatens them with
a moral earthquake; and a primary school they re-
33
gard as a nursery of precocious conspirators against
prescribed faith and stagnant order. The evil spares
nothing it can reach. The delicious, dreamy seat,
to whose undulating excellence Boston had the hon-
or of giving invention and a name, is thrust aside
for a high, straight-backed chair of torture, after an
Elizabethan pattern of old-maidish prudery; nor can
we approach our nightly resting-place without dan-
ger of being knocked on the head by some Gothic
hobgoblin. Our fairest books and their delicate
etchings are overlaid by facsimiles of illuminated
parchments, on whose pages a clumsy-fingered cen-
obite has plastered rickety angels and epileptic
martyrs, in patches of coarse gold-leaf, staring azure,
and red lead.* Nay, you may see our own poets
set forth with such barbaric embellishment, in
which they figure as appropriately as Piers Plough-
man would in gaiter-boots, or Juliana Berners in a
Jenny-Lind. Head-men of parishes are ridden by
architectural nightmare, until the white, airy, clap-
boarded meeting-house, where their fathers wor-
shipped God in the simple Man of Nazareth, gives
place to a low-eaved, steep-roofed, cold, damp, rough-
stone barn, in which the preacher's voice is lost
among the groined rafters, and his people cannot
see to read his text by the dim light that comes
through painted, lanceolated windows, streaming a
distorted rainbow over the 'congregation, making
the wife wonder why her husband looks so blue,
* Minium, red oxide of lead, was much used in the embellishment of
manuscripts. Hence miniatores, and, as some think, illumination.
5
34
while the good man fears she is seized with jaun-
dice and the children with scarlet fever; yet, after
all, the grotesque pigmy no more resembles the
grand picturesque of England's old churches, than
a graveyard obelisk Cleopatra's Needle.
Far be it from us to speak disrespectfully of
the few minds which shone in the twilight of Eu-
rope, looming larger through the fog, yet herald-
ing the dawn. No true-hearted student is with-
out a strong antiquarian sense of the interest at-
tached to the beginning of art, letters, and civil-
ization; neither can one, who has visited the min-
sters and cathedrals of Britain by day, or Melrose
and Glastonbury by moonlight, ever forget his ad-
miration of the creative genius which combined
more than Cyclopean strength with more than Co-
rinthian luxuriance; but we must protest against
this sacrificing of convenience for an imitation of
the antique, this making venerable of all that is
old, this condemnation of the useful as the un-
spiritual. To an elevated, healthy imagination,
there is more poetry in a nicely constructed steam-
engine, working with its Titan sinews and Bria-
rean hands, yet breathing softly as a sleeping child,
than in all the knightly tournaments and sacer-
dotal shows that our ancestors ever wondered at;
all the troubadours of Provence had not a tithe
of the romance that a clear, æsthetical eye can see
hanging round a village of factory-girls, every one
of whom is a living story of love, hope, constancy,
and courage; a modern linen-weaver's label often
presents as fine specimens of Arabesque as can be
35
found in a virtuoso's cabinet; nay, if richness of
design, grace of drawing, and harmonious contrasts
of color be criteria of good taste, we may point to
a Sunday group of servant-maids, in the fresh pride
of their Lowell printed calicoes, and say, — “ Solo-
mon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these !
Be it our aim, gentlemen, as it is our privilege,
to learn all that the past can teach us by its suc-
cesses and its failures, to take out of it only what
is good, beautiful, true, and right. It were the folly
of dotage to do more. As for the rest, “Let the
dead bury their dead,” but let us “ go and preach
the Gospel,” light for the ignorant, justice for the
laborer, freedom for the slave,“ peace on earth
and good-will towards men.” Antiquity! What
is antiquity ? Is the world growing younger ?
Had our fathers more experience than we, who
have their experience added to our own?
“ We
are the ancients,” said the great leader of modern
science. The present is the better antiquity; the
future will be the best.
It were presumption to set forth before you the
methods in which we, as literary men, may serve
our country. Our responsibilities are in accord-
ance with our faculties and our opportunities.
There are various degrees of mental force, some
forms of talent are better adapted to have power
over men than others, and equal chances for exer-
cising zeal are not given ; but every literary man,
because he can reach many, is, by calling, a public
servant, and bound to act upon a larger theatre
|
36
than the less gifted individual, who can reach only
a few,
Whatever tends to promote true religion
and the happiness necessarily connected with sound
morals, to improve the arts of life, to refine the
general taste, to enlarge the public mind, to throw
elevating or endearing associations around our
country, is a patriotic service. The preacher of
Christ in his pulpit, the teacher of youth in his
school, the man of science in his experimental
lucubrations, the historian in his researches, the
artist in his studio, the poet in the melodies of his
lute or lyre, every man who employs his educated
powers, should act from patriotic motive; not
the patriotism of a section, but of our whole
country; which, unless this argument has been
sadly erroneous, is eminently consistent with duty
to God and devotion to our race. The stern Dor-
drechtian theology of your orator (which, he is well
aware, has but little favor here, even among the
straitest sects of the Orthodox) will not allow him
to speak of disinterested benevolence; for, as he
believes, the Divine system recognizes no such vir-
tue. The harmony of a soul, which Aristotle con-
siders its moral perfection, lies in an accurate
adjustment of self and love. Self is an authorized
motive, but only when hand in hand with love.
The delight accompanying intellectual
intellectual exertion
and desire of fame, both of which every literary
man feels so keenly, becomes a noble enthusiasm
when we make the aim of our scholar's life the
benefit and illustration of our native land. True
as the oft-repeated maxim may be, -
- Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,''
37
it is not less sweet and honorable to live and labor
for its lasting interests. The most perilous warfare
is that in which only fearless reason can win vic-
tory for the right; and there are knots in the
cords binding man's soul, which can be cut by no
sword, however keen, but must be untied by strong,
persevering logic. Neither warrior nor statesman
adorns his birth-place with more imperishable glory
than the author who achieves immortal usefulness.
In a single night were written both verse and
melody of that Marseilles Hymn, which, like a
whirlwind, has swept down successive tyrannies,
and will be chanted as a spell of liberating might,
until the brave shall no longer need to arm at the
call of freedom. Shame upon our men of genius,
that our people have as yet neither national song
nor air worthy of the name! The poet who will
indite for us such a song, the composer who will
give us such an air, may be sure of a fame to
which that of Pindar is poor. Where on earth is
there a river, except the old Nile, the yellow Tiber,
or the sacred Jordan, to which a pilgrim turns
with higher emotion than the “ Silver Avon”?
Virgil, when, amidst the splendors of the Augus-
tan city, he recalled, as the Shepherd Tityrus, his
early haunts, sang smilingly,
“ Urbem, quam dicunt Romam, Melibee, putavi
Stultus ego huic nostræ similem”;-
but when the author of the Æneid came to die,
the first words he dictated for his funeral urn
were a legacy of his fame to his native village,
“ Mantua me genuit."
38
The waves of the Ægean, as they dash against its
vine-surmounted cliffs, echo the name of him who
from his misty throne looks down without a peer
in epic grandeur,
“ The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle."
A curious traveller may find on the innermost
curve of the Gulf of Contessa the wretched village
of Stauros. There once stood the strong, magnifi-
cent city of a mighty people, who, with mortal
courage, contending against perfidious Athens, per-
ished amidst its ruins. All the names of those
martyrs for liberty with whose blood the Strymon
ran red are passed from the memory of man, and
their grand examples lost in the obscurity of un-
recorded time; but a mention of The Stagirite
comes upon our souls like a charm of power, as
the name of him who, through more than two
decades of centuries, since he died an exile on the
shore of the Euripus, has swayed the widest em-
pire over human thought ever granted to an unin-
spired mind.
Gentlemen, be it yours to glorify
with similar, if not equal, trophies the land of
your birth!
Under those governments which fetter the press
and allow the people no just share in deciding
their own fortunes, where words of right are no
sooner heard than the fearless voice that uttered
them is hushed by death or the dungeon door,
there may be excuse for educated men who give
themselves up wholly to mere abstract studies or
pursuits strictly scholastical.
The guilt of their
39
as we.
silence is on their oppressors. Here, not only is
there perfect freedom in expressing opinion, but,
in speaking to the people, we address the govern-
ing will. Of that governing will we are ourselves
a part, and therefore we are bound by our share
in the government to contribute all we can for
its direction and prosperity. Our simple votes are
not enough ; the most ignorant boor, the vilest
ragamuffin of our cities, can cast his vote as well
It is our duty, because it is within our
power, to enlighten others who vote with us. The
principles of our government are few, and firmly,
logically settled by the Constitution, in so plain a
manner as scarcely to leave room for an honest
doubt; yet its nature is so unexampled, that it
must continue to be, as it has been, eminently one
of experiment. The questions that will arise will
be such as should receive the intelligent considera-
tion of every citizen ; but, at the same time, they
will be chiefly questions of political ethics and
political economy.
If the moral integrity and
substantial wealth of the country be cared for,
there remains little, if anything, else to demand
our attention. Both these subjects come fairly
within the reach of the studious man. It may even
be said, that he only is capable of investigating
them candidly and of treating them thoroughly.
In those countries where rule is usurped by the
few, the privileged classes repress the knowledge
of the rest; in ours, where the people have the
power, and, through our diffused education, more
or less a habit of reasoning, the effort of designing
40
self-seekers is to mislead by specious sophistry,
garbled facts, or distorted statistics. Every present,
accidental, temporary uneasiness, every sectional
interest, every prejudice attached to the sound of
words, (and they are as manifold as they are mis-
chievous,) is eagerly seized upon to create a popu-
lar excitement for the furtherance of narrow or
unnational views. The charm of party is thrown
round selfish ends. The priests of the idol taboo
every subject, a misrepresentation of which can
help them to office, that none others may open it
and expose their iniquity. It is our duty, as edu-
cated men, trained in the calmness of study, ac-
quainted with the certainties of knowledge, to
disabuse our people of the false and edify them
on the true. We are, or should be, elevated by the
advantages we profess above many of the difficulties
and temptations which hinder common minds in
searches after truth. Prejudice of every kind, like
the mists of the lowlands, should lie far beneath
for it is our privilege, if we deserve our name,
to breathe a clear, rarefied atmosphere, where no
exhalations of earth come between us and the sun-
light. From these heights we have a wide circuit
of vision. The past opens to us its experience,
the great present is spread out before us, and, so
far as they can be inferred from the comparison of
the past with the present, we discern the contin-
gencies of the future. If it be impossible not to
feel the influences of sect, party, or vicinage, let us
not be in bondage to either. Christianity is more
than sect, patriotism more than party, our country
us;
41
than the section where we live. It is our vocation
to make known truth, and, while bad men, or nar-
row-minded men, or ignorant men, reasoning falsely
from isolated facts, would distract or mislead the
people, to show them that human legislation should
be ever in accordance with the fixed, fundamental
laws of God; that the best welfare of the whole
is the best welfare of each ; our best policy, an
unwavering vindication of the general right; our
best freedom, fidelity to God, each other, and man-
kind. Motives of personal gain should in us be
overborne by a liberal love of the beautiful, the
proper, and the good. Such demonstration of sound
political doctrine is most urgently needed. It is
high time that the discussion of themes so vital-
ly important should be no longer abandoned to
mere traders for votes, who now superciliously de-
nounce the moralist and the student as intermed-
dlers, if they speak of things concerning the public
weal; it is high time that questions of social
right and national economy should be treated on
better grounds than the pecuniary profits of classes
who insist upon contending as rivals when they
should be coadjutors ; it is high time that the
people should hear voices of warning or encour-
agement from those who ask nothing and aim at
nothing but the general good. Never will justice
be done to inquiries which most affect our na-
tional advantage, until the name of politician be
taken from the office-seeker, and given to the
Christian philosopher, who, from the fear of God
and for the sake of man, studies and “speaks the
6
42
truth in love,” “out of good conscience,” and “ with
the meekness of wisdom."
Let us not be driven from a duty so sacred and
so honorable by the sneering assertion, that such
matters can be rightly handled only by what are
called “practical men," and that bookish theorists
are out of place in the busy world. Practice?
Theory? When was there ever right practice but
where theory had gone before ? What guides the
merchant's ship, drives the manufacturer's engine,
enriches the farmer's ground, flashes instant news
across and throughout a continent, but theory?
Mark, we say theory, not hypothesis ; for the pert
bunglers always confound those terms. Hypothesis
is a guess; but theory is hypothesis proved by in-
duction from facts. What were your practical men
without theorists? Precisely what the hands, feet,
and other working parts of the human system would
be without the brain. Are we less capable of distin-
guishing fact from falsity because our eyes are not
sanded by gold, our ears stuffed with cotton, or
our consciences hypothecated in bonds payable six
months hence ? Because some screaming geese
once saved the Capitol, shall intellect be drummed
off guard ? Justice, candor, gratitude, forbid an
insinuation of the least disrespect for the admirable
virtues, public spirit, mental ability, and munificent
appreciation of knowledge, which dignify many of
those who are truly practical men, - of whom there
are nowhere finer examples than among your own
neighbours. They would repudiate the attempts
of their weaker brethren to cut them off from an
43
alliance with investigating mind. The most hum-
ble laborer in the workshop or the field has a
title to our thankful esteem that shall never be
denied. But we would fain lash, till they howled,
the vapid dunces who think that there can be no
practical judgment beyond what they have learned
from a petty practice, or an acquaintance with the
price-current and stock-list, yet not unfrequently
aspire to be theorists themselves, parading their
puny sciolism on stilts of preposterous English
and worse logic.
Such exhibitions are rather ridiculous than mel-
ancholy; but sadness mingles with indignation
when we see genius or strong reason selling itself,
for the price of bread or pleasure, to do the drudg-
ery of scheming avarice.
- In lächerlichem Zuge
Erblickt man Ochs und Flügelpferd am Pfluge.”
ever
In this respect our politics have been a very
Tartarus of talent, where we discover one
rolling arduously a sugar-hogshead; another sweat-
ing in a furnace; another lashed to extravagant
eccentricities of ethics and logic by a vindictive ne-
gro, whom he will carry chained on his back as a
proof of eminent republicanism; another whirling,
like Ixion, with the constant revolutions of a fac-
tory driving-wheel.
Such are the momentous changes now rapidly
succeeding each other, that a faithful scholar, at a
crisis perhaps not apparent to himself, may, by a
few well-digested thoughts, couched in a few well-
44
directed sentences, save his country from impend-
ing ruin. History has not a finer instance of the
power which eloquence may exert over popular
fury, than that of a year since, when a single
modulated voice stayed the most sanguinary mob
the world has ever known, stayed them for long
hours, when bent ravingly on destruction, and then
turned them back with the tricolor waving where
the red flag had glared. He, who won that tri-
umph of such incalculable value, was not a prac-
tical man, and has since, unfortunately, proved
himself not a successful statesman : yet, with all
his subsequent failures, honor, honor to Lamar-
tine, the literary man, the orator ! Honor to
the Cocles, who, single-handed, kept the bridge
against the impetuous hordes of murderous incen-
diaries ! For that one act of devotion, he deserves,
like his prototype, bread while he lives, and a
statue on the spot where he dies. God keep our
country from such a day of peril! But, should
our voice or our pen be needed, and we delay our
duty beyond the juncture of apt circumstances, our
most strenuous endeavours may be met by the
fatal response, which sealed the fate of a splendid
dynasty, “ C'est trop tard !”
The popular mind of this country is well pre-
pared and not ill-disposed to acknowledge our
frank zeal on their behalf; though, at the same
time, what are opportunities for good are also op-
portunities for evil. A general conviction, that each
participant of the democratic sovereignty should
be fitted as far as possible for the exercise of his
45
elective power, . has made the education of the
young a care of every State government; not al-
ways as wisely or thoroughly as might be wished,
yet, where the difficulties of recent settlement have
been passed through, or the incubus of slavery does
not weigh down the nominally free, it is eminently
the popular policy. In no other country are there
so many readers, or readers who read so much.
In no other country does the press labor more to
supply the demand for newspapers, periodicals, and
books. The cheapness of publication naturally in-
creases the demand, which, again, lowers the price
of the supply. There are always caterpillars on
the “tree of knowledge,” which itself bears a
double fruit, “of good and evil.”. It is not, there-
fore, to be wondered at, that the land has been
overrun by trashy and dangerously immoral writ-
ings; but the good is out-working the evil. Our
principal publishing-houses have found, by profit-
able experiments, that the market for the most
substantial books has grown in a far greater ratio
than the population; and that large editions of
works on the most useful branches of general
science or literature have been rapidly sold, which,
a few years since, would have lain like lumber in
their garrets. The treasures of old English have
been ransacked to meet in compendious forms the
appetite of a healthy taste. Writers of the first
class have arisen from among ourselves, and some
foremost of the foremost from your own ranks,
gentlemen, to compete successfully with those of
the Old World's former centuries; while others, of
46
less, though not despicable, character, especially in
the belles-lettres, are springing up like butter-
cups in a meadow. Prejudice against reading an
American book, never so great as disappointed
scribblers supposed, has given place to an over-
weening partiality for home productions, not only
in literature, but in art. Not content with boast-
ing of our truly great names, of which any land
or age might be proud, we resent it as wrong done
America, when superlative laudation is denied any
pretty pen that traces a pleasing story or a string
of creditable verses; we discover Ciceros plenty as
the stumps which serve our orators for rostra ; and
we execrate by Apollo all unable to detect a future
Angelo in every untaught youth who chips a head
out of stone, or dashes a crude conception on can-
There is no country where reputation for
talent or scholarship is so easily won, or mental
labor, except of the highest kind, is better paid.
No doubt this has in a measure repressed the
ambition of some, who, conscious of high powers,
are unwilling to be jostled on so crowded an arena.
When extreme epithets of praise are lavished upon
hasty, ephemeral trifles, there remain no terms
worthily to designate the productions of deep, long
thought. The Virgilian patience, which spends a
day upon an hexameter, will not endure being evened
with the fatal facility which improvises a hundred
lines stans pede in uno. The Olympian eloquence,
which labored for twenty years on a eulogy of
democratic Athens, would have but little chance
against the torrent hyperbole of a Western Pericles,
vas.
47
who lords it over his shouting constituents by an
inspiration caught from the buffalo-hunt, the flow
of the Mississippi, the crash of the forest before
the axe, or the solitude of the ocean-wide prairie,
yet which as seldom fails to hit the centre of hu-
man enthusiasm, as his rifle-ball the heart of a flying
deer. Nor is it surprising that a devotee to one
particular branch of science, more than sufficient
of itself for ten lives, should sometimes shrink from
the omnigenous competition which is equally ready
at inventing a cooking-stove or an ethical system,
and will take to the pulpit, the bar, a professor's
chair, a seat in the Senate, or the Presidency of the
United States, if only sure that the emoluments of
the new speculation will exceed those of a quack-
medicine, a peddling-wagon, or a singing-school.
But such readiness to honor intellectual effort
proves a liberal, upward tendency of our people,
who, though they may now applaud excessively
the less worthy, will sooner or later appreciate the
more deserving; and such restless versatility of
talent shows an energy of mental enterprise, which,
if the rich soil be cultivated aright, promises no
scanty harvest.
Besides, there is an unmistakable and increasing
disposition to philosophical methods of thought
and action. The cry is for ideas, and, though
often affected, the fashion is to demand principles,
and at least a show of demonstration. Our people
claim for themselves, and would transmit to their
children, the right of private judgment; and the
faculty, nurtured by political habits, is exercised
48
on all subjects brought before them.
It is as
natural for an American to reason as to breathe;
and his favorite method (no doubt, from shrewd
New England example) is the Socratic. He will
believe nothing, do nothing, submit to nothing,
without knowing, or thinking that he knows,
why. He is much fonder of the lecture-room than
of the spectacle. He will listen to any one on
any subject, provided the lecturer offers proof;
but his questions Why? and How ? readily silence
the most plausible declaimer. From these and
other causes, there is throughout our country
(though, for obvious reasons, greater in some sec-
tions than others) an activity and sensitiveness of
mind unexampled and increasing. The advocate
of truth can desire no opportunity more magnifi-
cent.
One thought more. With the history of this
country, God began a revolution in his treatment
and development of human nature. Up to that
moment, the great divisions, even the larger subdi-
visions, of our race had been kept apart from
each other, separated and made distinct by climate,
language, by hereditary habits. The eastern
and southern quarters of the globe we leave for
the present out of our calculation, as their time
of revival is yet far in the future, and speak of
Europe. Even Christianity has failed to accom-
plish a coalescence. The mysteries of Osiris still
linger around the altars of Magna Græcia. The
Druids have left in the customs of Britain monu-
ments lasting as Stonehenge. Tacitus may serve
49
the modern traveller as an Itinerary throughout
what was Germania Antiqua. The fetters of na-
tional prejudice have eaten into the bone, and the
quick flesh is grown over them. Each nation has
married only with its own blood, and the evils
of the incest are upon their offspring. Each has
kept its own characteristic vices and virtues apart
from those of the others; yet it is a law of Provi-
dence, that distinct vices act as checks upon their
rival passions, while virtue is stimulated by virtue.
The Italian is only an Italian, the Frank a Frank,
the Spaniard a Spaniard; and so each of the rest
is now wellnigh as distinct as when Cæsar wrote
his Commentaries. Some changes have been
wrought by Religion and the Press, but neither
Religion nor the Press has had its fair influ-
ence; the one has been distorted, the other mana-
cled, both abused by national law and national
sentiment. The higher orders of society, who
travel and read, may assimilate from a common
creed of etiquette; but the people, the plebeians,
remain distinct and the same. The men, and even
the women, (varium et mutabile foemina,) of separate
cantons, departments, duchies, or shires, have in-
herited fashions of dress from their grandfathers
and grandmothers, great, great, great beyond arith-
metic. The war of races and tribes is now deluging
Europe with blood. The enmity among them there
seems ineradicable.
But what has God done, what is He doing, what
is He about to do, in this land ? He has set it
far away to the west, and made it so circumstan-
7
50
t
tially independent, that, if all the rest of the habit-
able earth were sunk, we should feel no serious
curtailment of our comforts. The products of the
whole world are, or may soon be, found within
our confederate limits. He brought here first the
sternest, most religious, most determined represent-
atives of Europe's best blood, best faith, best intel-
lect; men, ay, and women (it is the mother makes
the child), who, because they feared God, feared
no created power,
who, bowing before His abso-
lute sovereignty, would kneel to no lord spiritual
or temporal on earth, - and who, believing the Bible
true, demanded its sanction for all law. To your
Pilgrim Fathers the highest place may well be
accorded; but forget not, that, about the time of
their landing on the Rock, there came to the
mouth of the Hudson men of kindred faith and
descent, - men equally loving freedom, men from
the sea-washed cradle of modern constitutional
freedom, whose union of free burgher-cities taught
us the lesson of confederate independent sovereign-
ties, whose sires were as free, long centuries before
Magna Charta, as the English are now, and from
whose line of republican princes Britain received
the boon of religious toleration, a privilege the
States-General had recognized as a primary article
of their government when first established; men
of that stock, which, when offered their choice of
favors from a grateful monarch, asked a Univer-
sity *; men whose martyr-sires had baptized their
* After the eventful issue of the siege of Leyden, the Prince of Orange
and the States-General, grateful to the heroic defenders of that city, of-
51
land with their blood; men who had flooded it
with ocean-waves rather than yield it to a bigot-
tyrant; men, whose virtues were sober as prose,
but sublime as poetry;- the men of Holland! Min-
gled with these, and still farther on, were heroic
Huguenots, their fortunes broken, but their spirit
unbending to prelate or prelate-ridden king. There
were others (and a dash of cavalier blood told well
in battle-field and council); - but those were the
spirits whom God made the moral substratum of
our national character. Here, like Israel in the
wilderness, and thousands of miles off from the
land of bondage, they were educated for their high
calling, until, in the fulness of times, our confede-
racy with its Constitution was founded. Already
there had been a salutary mixture of blood, but
not enough to impair the Anglo-Saxon ascendency.
The nation grew morally strong from its original ele-
ments. The great work was delayed only by a just
preparation. Now God is bringing hither the most
vigorous scions from all the European stocks, to
“make of them all one new MAN”; not the Saxon,
not the German, not the Gaul, not the Helvetian,
but the AMERICAN. Here they will unite as
brotherhood, will have one law, will share one in-
terest. Spread over the vast region from the
frigid to the torrid, from Eastern to Western ocean,
one
fered them their choice of an Annual Fair or a University. They chose
the University ; but, struck with the nobleness of the choice, the high
authorities granted them both. The University was established in 1575,
and became the Alma Mater of Grotius, Scaliger, Boerhaave, and many
other renowned men.
52
every variety of climate giving them choice of
pur-
suit and modification of temperament, the ballot-box
fusing together all rivalries, they shall have one
national will. What is wanting in one race will
be supplied by the characteristic energies of the
others; and what is excessive in either, checked by
the counter-action of the rest. Nay, though for a
time the newly come may retain their foreign ver-
nacular, our tongue, so rich in ennobling literature,
will be the tongue of the nation, the language of its
laws, and the accent of its majesty. ETERNAL God!
who seest the end with the beginning, thou alone
canst tell the ultimate grandeur of this people!
Such, gentlemen, is the sphere, present and fu-
ture, in which God calls us to work for Him, for
our country, and for mankind. The language in
which we utter truth will be spoken on this con-
tinent, a century hence, by thirty times more mil-
lions than those dwelling on the island of its
origin. The openings for trade on the Pacific
coast, and the railroad across the Isthmus, will
bring the commerce of the world under the control
of our race. The empire of our language will fol-
low that of our commerce; the empire of our in-
stitutions, that of our language. The man who
writes successfully for America will yet speak to
all the world.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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3 9015 04941 7309
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