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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 ESSAYS FOR COLLEGE 
 ENGLISH 
 
 SELECTED AND EDITED 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES CLOYD BOWMAN, A.M. 
 
 LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, A.M. 
 
 LEROY BETHUEL GREENFIELD, Ph.M. 
 
 BRUCE WEIRICK, A.M. 
 
 OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH OF THE 
 IOWA STATE COLLEGE 
 
 D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
 
 Copyright, 191 5, 
 By D. C. Heath & Co. 
 
 11.6 
 
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 ;*^i>t*- 't**,^ '-v'' 
 
 it C 9 <
 
 
 -i 
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 This opportunity is taken to return special thanks to those 
 who have so generously granted permission to reprint copy- 
 righted essays, — to the Independent for " The New Farming 
 Generation" by Charles M. Harger; to The Nation for the 
 editorial, "Country Life Problems;" to The Annals of the 
 American Academy and to the author, John M. Gillette, for 
 " Conditions and Needs of Country Life; " to Harper's Maga- 
 ^ zine for " The Rural Reformation " by Robert W. Bruere; to 
 t^ Ginn and Company for "Problems of Rural Social Life" by 
 :^ N» Thomas Nixon Carver; to the Macmillan Company for " The 
 Way to Better Farming and Better Living" by Sir Horace 
 Plunkett, for " The Realm of the Commonplace " by L. H. 
 Bailey, and for " The Fatalism of the Multitude " by James 
 ^1 Bryce; to The Atlantic Monthly and to the author, Myron T. 
 \ Herrick, for "The Farmer and Finance;" to G. P. Putnam's 
 Sons and to the author, Paul Elmer More, for "A Hermit's 
 Notes on Thoreau; " to The Atlantic Monthly and to the author, 
 Henry S. Pritchett, for "Science;" to Houghton Mifflin Com- 
 ^ pany for " Huxley " by Paul Elmer More; to D. C. Heath and 
 <:^^^ Company and to the author, Eugene Davenport, for " Educa- 
 tion for Efficiency; " to Science and to the author, W. H. Jordan, 
 for " The Function and Efficiency of the Agricultural College; " 
 to The University of Chicago Press and to the author, F. J. 
 Turner, for "The Significance of the Frontier in American 
 History." 
 
 r74967
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Books of selected essays, introducing the student to the 
 more fundamental and far-reaching movements of thought of 
 our times, are being more and more widely used in Freshman 
 work in English. They have been, without exception, of a 
 general nature and not specifically adapted to students in 
 technical courses. This volume is an attempt to supply a 
 collection especially suited to students in Agricultural Colleges. 
 There is no reason, however, why students of other colleges 
 should not find these essays equally fitted to their needs. 
 
 The editors have been confronted with an unusual oppor- 
 tunity. The Agricultural College is forced by circumstances 
 to regard itself — even more than other colleges — as an edu- 
 cational institution for developing leaders. Its graduates who 
 return to practical farming achieve at once, if they are equal 
 to it, a position of prominence and influence in the whole life 
 of their respective communities. It is of the greatest impor- 
 tance, therefore, that these students acquire a definite professional 
 outlook characterized by perspective and breadth. The editors 
 of this volume have tried to collect such essays as would, all 
 together, provide these students with the great ideas and ideals 
 necessary for a worthy interpretation of their profession. As 
 leaders in country life, the graduates of our Agricultural 
 Colleges — in common with the graduates of other colleges — 
 should have the power of applying ideas to their life so as to 
 reveal its excellencies, its present shortcomings, and its latent 
 possibilities. To help supply these ideas is a privilege. 
 
 The essays have been grouped so as to indicate the large 
 problems which the agriculturist as a professional man — in
 
 VI PREFACE 
 
 common with other men — must necessarily confront and study. 
 A group of essays championing the various activities of the 
 Country Life Movement is placed first, because they are 
 designed to lead the student to consider what values ought 
 to be achieved in individual and social life in the country. 
 Inasmuch as Agriculture is based on science, the next group 
 of essays discuss the place of science in human life. A third 
 group, presenting each of the various movements of education, 
 should help the student to formulate his collegiate ideals and 
 to broaden his intellectual perspective. Finally, it is desirable 
 that the student should consider with care some of the more 
 general problems of American life. 
 
 Essays from opposite points of view have frequently been 
 included in order to arouse students to thought and discussion. 
 While both range of treatment and the variety of subject 
 matter may develop the critical faculties of the student, much 
 argumentation is probably of doubtful value. A careful study 
 of the other side is more wholesome and more likely to lead to 
 a true perspective. Nevertheless, at the end of the discussion, 
 each student should have acquired new ideas, which he feels 
 sure are true and significant. The study of such essays as this 
 volimie contains should, therefore, stimulate students of Agri- 
 culture, or students of other subjects, to a high intellectual 
 attitude toward their profession as well as toward the common 
 problems of life.
 
 A SUMMARY OF THE SUBJECTS 
 DISCUSSED IN THE ESSAYS 
 
 Problems of Country Life 
 
 The contribution of mechanical conveniences to farm 
 hfe, conditions and needs of country Hfe, the problems of 
 the social center, the country church, the country school, 
 the country home, farm credits, the relation of the out-of- 
 doors to country life. 
 
 Science 
 
 The demand for scientific knowledge in order that man 
 may conquer his environment, a review of the last fifty 
 years in science, what remains for science to do, the limi- 
 tations of science. 
 
 Education 
 
 The education in the applied science of Agriculture, 
 corrective problems in this education in applied science, 
 the education in pure science, the education in humane 
 letters. 
 
 Problems of Life in General 
 
 Influence that the open country has had in developing 
 American characteristics, the influence of democracy upon 
 the individual, the influence of taste upon the various 
 problems of life, the influence of character upon the work 
 that a man does.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction xi 
 
 I. The New Farming Genera- 
 tion Charles M. Harger . i 
 
 II. Country Life Problems . . The Nation .... 4 
 
 III. Conditions and Needs of 
 
 Country Life John M. Gillette . . 7 
 
 IV. The Social Center .... Woodrow Wilson . . 18 
 V. The Rural Reformation . Robert W. Bruere . . 30 
 
 VI. Problems of Rural Social 
 
 Life Thomas Nixon Carver 47 
 
 VII. The Way to Better Farm- 
 ing and Better Living . Sir Horace Plunkett . 97 
 VIII. The Farmer and Finance . Myron T. Herrick . . 109 
 IX. The Realm of the Com- 
 monplace L. H. Bailey .... 124 
 
 X. A Hermit's Notes on 
 
 Thoreau Paul Elmer More . .152 
 
 XI. On the Advisableness of Im- 
 proving Natural Knowl- 
 edge Thomas Henry Huxley 168 
 
 XII. Science (1857-1907) .... Henry S. Pritchett . . 185 
 
 XIII. Conservation of Natural 
 
 Resources Theodore Roosevelt. . 209 
 
 XIV. Huxley Paul Elmer More . .221 
 
 XV. Education for Efficiency . Eugene Davenport . .257 
 
 XVI. The Function and Effi- 
 ciency OF THE Agricultu- 
 ral College Whitman H. Jordan . 280 
 
 XVII. A Liberal Education and 
 
 Where to Find It . . . Thomas Henry Huxley 302
 
 X CONTENTS 
 
 XVIII. Literature and Science . . Matthew Arnold . . 326 
 XIX. The Significance of the 
 Frontier in American 
 
 History Frederick J. Turner . 349 
 
 XX. The Fatalism of the Mul- 
 titude James Bryce .... 390 
 
 XXL Traffic John Ruskin .... 402 
 
 XXII. The American Scholar . . Ralph Waldo Emerson 426
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The Analysis of Essays 
 
 To master the thoughts of others is the one business of the 
 college student. From the moment he enters his first class- 
 room with his text-book, until he goes out from his last lecture 
 with his completed notes, he is continually trying to assimilate 
 the ideas of teachers and of writers. The ability to master 
 these thoughts easily and quickly makes him a leader — its 
 lack, a dullard. 
 
 The difficulty with most inexperienced students is that they 
 read only sentences, and are unable to grasp the thought of 
 an entire piece of writing. Their eyes race along the lines 
 and they read statement after statement until, at the end 
 of fifteen or twenty pages, their minds are so depressed with a 
 vast number of unrelated ideas that, when asked to explain 
 the meaning of the essay or of the chapter, they become con- 
 fused and finally give up in despair. 
 
 The remedy for this sort of confusion is the careful analysis 
 of long essays. This may prove a bit tedious at first, but soon 
 the student will realize that every careful author proceeds 
 according to some definite plan. He will then try to grasp 
 this plan and the point that the author is attempting to enforce 
 by its use. Gradually he will begin to read for ideas, and 
 will come to assimilate thoughts. 
 
 Analysis, then, is not merely an exercise in English — it is 
 a training in careful thinking. Whether the student is asked 
 to study an article in a magazine or a chapter in a book, he 
 will be able to do it the better, the easier, and the quicker for 
 having analyzed a number of representative essays. Analysis 
 is also of the greatest aid to the student in writing long themes.
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 Not until he fully understands, through analysis, the care 
 with which trained writers order their thought, is he ready 
 to undertake the writing of long themes for himself. Not 
 until he has mastered their methods will he find that he is 
 able to express his own thoughts clearly and compactly. 
 
 In analyzing an essay, the most important problem is to 
 grasp the one particular point which the author wishes to 
 impress. If the reader understands this, he is at the very 
 heart of the mystery, but if he misses it — regardless of how 
 many other minor ideas he may grasp — he is merely groping 
 about in uncertainty. The first question, then, to ask is, 
 "What point is the author trying to make?" 
 
 In order to find it, the reader should know that the careful 
 author hints at this point in his title. In the first few para- 
 graphs he attempts to interest the reader in the point and to 
 prepare him to take a sympathetic attitude toward it. As 
 soon as he has done this, — and he seldom uses more than half 
 a dozen paragraphs even in an essay of twenty or thirty pages, 
 — he states the point as clearly and concisely as possible. 
 In order that the reader may more easily find it, he places 
 this statement at the beginning of a paragraph or in a short 
 paragraph by itself. Having presented the point, he is in 
 duty bound to impress its truth upon the reader. Where it 
 is possible, he presents in chronological order the facts which 
 will do this; otherwise, he leads the reader from what is 
 generally known to be true about the point, to what is not 
 generally known. He is sure to arrange these facts in some 
 logical order, so that when the reader recognizes what the 
 order is, he can more easily hold the entire essay in mind. 
 The author guides the reader, in passing from the discussion 
 of one of these facts to the next, by the use of transitional 
 sentences and brief summaries. Near the end of the essay 
 he restates his point and quickly reiterates the main facts 
 which he has used to impress its truth. In concluding the essay, 
 he gives his final judgment regarding the point.
 
 INTRODUCTION xiu 
 
 Once the reader has found the point of the essay and has 
 discovered the main ideas by which its truth is impressed, 
 he is ready to ask a second important question, "Does the 
 author really make his point?" Many students take it for 
 granted that, once a thing gets itself into print, it is neces- 
 sarily true. Such an attitude bewilders the mind with a 
 mass of undigested and conflicting statements. If the reader 
 is ever to master knowledge, he must pause and question each 
 new thought that is presented to him. 
 
 How is the reader to answer intelligently whether or not 
 the writer has made his point? He may reach his conclusion 
 through a series of tests. The first is to ascertain whether the 
 author sticks to his point throughout his entire essay. Some- 
 times a careless writer aims at nothing in particular, and in this 
 case, is sure to shoot wide of the mark. But if he finds that the 
 author has the point in mind in his title and has arranged every 
 idea — from the first paragraph to the last — so that it con- 
 tributes to the point that he is trying to make, the reader may 
 feel satisfied with the first test. He should then make a 
 second test. After summarizing the main ideas which the 
 author has used to impress his point, the reader should examine 
 these separately to see that the author has shown each to be 
 true. If he finds any idea the truth of which has not been 
 established, he should discard it; he should then take the 
 remaining facts and ask, if these are granted true, whether 
 it necessarily follows that the main point is true. If he can 
 answer these questions in the affirmative, he may be fairly 
 certain that the author has not failed to make his point. 
 
 Then there is a third question that the student should ask 
 concerning every essay that he reads, "Has the author made 
 his point in the most effective manner?" Much slovenly 
 thinking and writing grow out of the attitude that it matters 
 not in what manner the author proceeds, so long as he makes 
 his point. Just as efiiciency demands that a man examine 
 every detail of his business to see which contribute to his
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 profits and which do not, so the careful student must test each 
 idea to see whether it helps the author to impress the point 
 of his essay. 
 
 To answer whether the writer has made his point in the 
 most effective manner, the reader should inquire whether 
 the main ideas could be arranged in a different order so as to 
 be more logical or more forceful. He should also ask whether 
 the most important ideas have been given the most emphatic 
 places in the essay — the beginning and the end. He should 
 further question whether each idea has been given space pro- 
 portional to its importance. If an important idea is hidden 
 away in an essay like a "joker" in a law, and if an unimpor- 
 tant idea is given ten paragraphs while an important idea 
 receives but three, then the reader may rightfully doubt 
 whether the author has been as effective as he should be. 
 Finally, the reader should examine whether the author has 
 expressed himself clearly and compactly, with skill and ease; 
 whether he has used the right word in the right place; whether 
 his phrases are felicitous; and whether he has so ordered his 
 thought as to keep the reader mentally alert and interested. 
 If a writer is to be really effective, he must be able to satisfy 
 all these tests. 
 
 In analyzing essays, the student will find that the Thought 
 Analysis, the Summary, and the Criticism are guides to careful 
 work. In order to secure uniform results, the student should 
 use the following definite rules: — 
 
 The Thought Analysis 
 
 I. Summarize the point of the entire essay in a single 
 complex sentence. 
 
 The principal clause should contain the leading thought; 
 the subordinate elements, the limiting thoughts. Matthew 
 Arnold's essay, "Literature and Science,"^ may be sum- 
 marized as follows: — 
 
 1 See pages 326-348 of this book.
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 In spite of the present movement in favor of science, humane letters 
 are not in much danger of being thrust out from their leading place in 
 education, since they are related to the instinct for self-preser\^ation in 
 mankind in a way that science is not. 
 
 2. Summarize — using a single sentence for each — the 
 main ideas which the author uses to enforce his point. Unless 
 the student proceeds carefully, he will confuse these main ideas 
 with subordinate material. An author does not employ, 
 usually, more than five main ideas; often he limits himself 
 to two or three. The main ideas of Matthew Arnold's essay, 
 "Literature and Science," may be summarized as follows: — 
 
 I. Humane letters will, in the long run, keep their leading place in educa- 
 
 tion, since they satisfy the aim of culture — which is to know the 
 best that has been thought and said in the world. 
 
 II. Science cannot long maintain the chief place in the education of the 
 
 majority of mankind, since it leaves one important thing out of 
 account — the constitution of human nature. 
 
 III. Humane letters will not long remain neglected because they satisfy 
 
 the need which the vast majority of men feel for relating what they 
 have learned and known to the sense which they have in them of 
 beauty and of conduct. 
 
 IV. Greek letters will continue to be studied since they satisfy the sense 
 
 of beauty better than do any other letters. 
 
 3. Summarize — using a single sentence for each — the 
 subordinate thoughts which the author uses to enforce each 
 of his main ideas. Main idea II of Matthew Arnold's essay, 
 "Literature and Science," may be summarized as follows: — 
 
 A. The powers which go to the building up of human life are conduct, intel- 
 
 lect and knowledge, beauty, and social life and manners. 
 
 B. Science is in the sphere of intellect and knowledge and does not relate 
 
 itself to the other powers which go to the building up of human life. 
 
 4. Condense, whenever it is consistent with clearness, the 
 author's statement of each idea. 
 
 5. Match the statement of coordinate ideas by parallel 
 construction.
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 6. Relate the principal ideas to the subordinate by the use 
 of connectives. The most common of these are, "in that," 
 "that is," "for," "because," "the following." The ten- 
 dency to use "therefore," "accordingly," and "hence" will 
 be found, upon careful analysis, to be due to the confusion of 
 principal with subordinate ideas. 
 
 7. Use the following system of symbols to distinguish 
 between coordinate and subordinate ideas: — 
 
 I. 
 A. 
 I. 
 a. 
 
 i'. 
 a'. 
 
 8. Remember that every statement in the Thought Analysis 
 must be in the form of a complete sentence. 
 
 Complete Thought Analysis of Matthew Arnold's "Literature 
 
 AND Science" 
 
 The Point of the Essay 
 
 In spite of the present movement in favor of science, humane letters 
 are not in much danger of being thrust out from their leading place in 
 education, since they are related to the instinct for self-preservation in 
 mankind in a way that science is not. 
 
 The Thought Analysis Proper 
 
 I. Humane letters will, in the long run, keep their leading place in educa- 
 tion since they satisfy the aim of culture, which is to know the best 
 that has been thought and said in the world, for, 
 
 A. Professor Huxley's objection to this study because it is an 
 elegant one, — but slight and ineffectual, — because it is a 
 superficial humanism, — the opposite of science or true knowl- 
 edge, — is without weight because he confuses humane letters 
 with belles Icttres. 
 
 B. Knowing Greek and Roman antiquity helps us to know our- 
 selves and the world in that it helps us to know who these 
 ancient peoples were and what they did in the world; vhat we 
 get from them, and what is the value of their bequest.
 
 INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 II. Science cannot long maintain the chief place in the education of the 
 majority of mankind, since it leaves out of account the constitution of 
 human nature; that is, 
 
 A. The powers which go to the building up of human life are 
 conduct, intellect and knowledge, beauty, and social life and 
 manners. 
 
 B. Science is in the sphere of intellect and knowledge, and does 
 not relate itself to the other powers which go to the building 
 up of human life. 
 
 III. Humane letters cannot long remain neglected, because they satisfy 
 the need which the vast majority of mankind feels for relating what 
 they have learned and known to the sense which they have in them of 
 beauty and of conduct, because, 
 
 A. Medieval education so deeply engaged men's hearts because 
 it so simply, easily, and powerfully related itself to their desire 
 for conduct and beauty through the logic of scripture and church. 
 
 B. Since modern science has changed man's view of the universe, 
 there is a greater need than ever for humane letters to establish 
 a relation between the new conceptions and our instinct for 
 beauty and for conduct. 
 
 C. We shall find as a matter of experience, if we know the best 
 that has been thought and uttered in the world, that humane 
 letters have a fortifying, elevating, quickening, and suggestive 
 power. 
 
 D. Humane letters call out a man's being at more points and 
 make him live more fully than do the natural sciences, for the 
 former are always coupled with a knowledge of the great general 
 conceptions of modern physical science, while a study of the 
 natural sciences brings no knowledge of humane letters. 
 
 IV. Greek letters will always continue to be studied, since they satisfy 
 the sense of beauty better than do the letters of any other nation, for, 
 
 A. While English letters have striking ideas and weU-executed 
 details, the}' have not the high symmetry combined with the 
 satisfying and dehghtful effect wliich characterizes Greek 
 letters. 
 
 B. So long as human nature remains what it is, the instinct for 
 self-preservation in humanity will bring men back to Greek by 
 their wants and aspirations.
 
 xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 The Summary 
 
 1. Condense the entire essay into a single paragraph. 
 Make the point of the essay the topic sentence. 
 
 2. Take up the main ideas in the same order in which the 
 author uses them. 
 
 3. Give each main idea space proportional to the author's 
 treatment of it. 
 
 4. The summary should contain the author's thought and 
 not the student's reaction toward the thought. 
 
 5. The sentences should be fitted together so that they 
 read smoothly. 
 
 Summary of Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science" 
 
 In spite of the present movement in favor of science, humane letters 
 are not in much danger of being thrust out from their leading place in 
 education. This is true because they satisfy the aim of culture, which is 
 to know the best that has been thought and said in the world, in a way that 
 science does not. They relate themselves to the powers which go to the 
 building up of himian hfe — to conduct, to intellect and knowledge, to 
 beauty, and to social life and manners — • in a way that science does not. 
 It has been through this ability to relate itself to these various powers that 
 education in the past has been able to engage men's hearts so deeply. Now 
 that science has overturned all the past conceptions of the universe, there 
 is a greater need than ever before for humane letters to establish a relation 
 between the new conceptions and these instincts. We shall find, if we 
 give them a chance, that humane letters will have a fortifying, an elevating, 
 and a quickening power upon us. We shall find, too, that they will call 
 out our lives at more points and niake us Uve more than science is able to 
 do. We shall therefore find, so long as human nature remains what it is, 
 that the instinct for self-preservation, the warits and aspirations in hu- 
 manity will keep men from substituting the natural sciences for Greek 
 and the humane letters of other nations. 
 
 The Criticism 
 
 I. The criticism should answer the following questions: 
 I. Has the author made his point?
 
 INTRODUCTION xk 
 
 A. Has he made every idea in the essay contribute 
 to the point? 
 
 B. Has he made a sufficient number of ideas 
 contribute to the point to make it necessarily 
 true? 
 
 11. Has the author made his point in the most effective 
 manner? 
 
 A. Has he presented his ideas in such an order that 
 the most important ones are given the most 
 important places? 
 
 B. Has he given each idea space proportional to 
 its importance? 
 
 C. Has he expressed himself clearly, compactly, 
 and felicitously? 
 
 2. The criticism should be so written that it makes its 
 point and makes it in the most effective manner. 
 
 3. The criticism should contain the student's point of view 
 toward the essay. It should be based, not upon narrow 
 prejudice, but upon careful analysis of the thought. 
 
 4. Frequently the students should write criticisms of one 
 another's long themes. 
 
 James Cloyd Bowman
 
 ESSAYS FOR COLLEGE 
 ENGLISH 
 
 THE NEW FARMING GENERATION ^ 
 
 Charles M. Harger 
 
 An encouraging note for the future of the farming sections 
 comes out of the Middle West where there has been reached 
 a stage of development that includes something more than 
 the counting of bushels and acres. It is the report that a 
 larger number of young men each year are choosing farming 
 for their life occupation. The agricultural colleges are expand- 
 ing their facilities to accommodate increased attendance and 
 the demand for "institutes" which shall instruct the agri- 
 cultural communities is insistent. This means that the posi- 
 tion of the farmer as a business man is being established, and 
 his sons, instead of hurrying to the city to seek another occu- 
 pation, are realizing that there is a field for their best endeavor 
 on the old homestead — though that term has almost passed 
 into the realm of melodrama. 
 
 The new generation of farmers is something of a surprise 
 to the student familiar with that of early days. It comes with 
 something of an awakening to hear the man in overalls, milk 
 pail or pitchfork in hand, talk in clear English of "balanced 
 nutrition," "economy of production," and "scientific breed- 
 ing." He discusses the quality of soil ingredients and moral- 
 izes on the benefits of crop rotation. He has learned farming 
 from books, which was a method that our fathers scorned, 
 
 ^ Copyright. Reprinted by permission from The Independent for Feb- 
 ruary 3, 1910.
 
 2 CHARLES M. HARGER 
 
 but the fact that he is able to produce more bushels to the acre 
 and more profit from the year's work is earning him respect. 
 He stands for a new era on the farm and in its management. 
 
 Not alone in the better management of the fields is the new 
 generation of farmers making advancement. That is but a 
 part of the accomplishment of an agricultural education. 
 The fact that the young men have been out in the world and 
 have learned how others do things gives them ideas in accom- 
 plishment of farm duties with less exertion. The bane of 
 the farmer's life has been that he was compelled to rise with 
 the sun and work until long after its setting. He found it 
 difiicult to obtain farm help because the days were so long 
 and the relaxation so limited. The new generation is changing 
 this, partly through the more systematic management of 
 farm work and more by the introduction of new methods. 
 
 Milking cows is at best a wearisome task, and the farm boy 
 who spent two or three hours of early morning and of late 
 evening at that task, looks back upon it as a nightmare in 
 his home life. Nowadays the educated young farmer equips 
 the dairy with milking machines which enables him to milk 
 faster than three expert men could do it, and have no labor 
 except that of overseeing the process. Following the plow 
 day after day wears out the most willing youth. Even the 
 sulky-plow did not entirely remove the burden, for the tired 
 horses always called for sympathy. The modern farmer 
 places in the field a gasoline engine to which is attached a half 
 dozen plows, and the plowboy becomes a field chauffeur, 
 getting through the task with little weariness and much satis- 
 faction. Water pipes through the barns and water pressure 
 through the house means comfort to the farmer and his family, 
 motor cars diminish distance and give pleasure, amply paid 
 for by the increase of health and economy of time. 
 
 These and many other things that relieve the farmer's 
 life from dreariness have come through the enterprise and 
 advancement of the new generation. Where the boy has been
 
 THE NEW FARMING GENERATION 3 
 
 sent to college and then allowed to carry into effect the lessons 
 he learned there is little for commissions and economists to 
 do — the farmer's problem is taking care of itself. 
 
 Not much can be expected of the older generation. The 
 man who has farmed in the old way for forty years is going to 
 keep on in his accustomed path. In no profession or avoca- 
 tion is there more unyielding adherence to habit and tradition 
 than on the farm. If this be doubted, visit a rural community 
 in one of the older States and note the processes to which older 
 farmers yet cling. 
 
 In contrast inspect a farm in the Middle West where the 
 spirit of progress and advancement is manifest. The modern 
 machinery, the new methods and the larger grasp of the possi- 
 bilities in making farming a business speak for themselves. 
 The attitude of the worker toward his task takes on a new 
 aspect, he considers his land as so much equipment, the 
 factory against which are placed fixed charges and from which 
 are to be derived legitimate profits. This viewpoint marks 
 the real reason for the modern farmer's success, for out of it 
 is evolved the planning and calculation that result in a steady 
 measure of prosperity, the source of a farmer's happiness. 
 
 Given a conviction that he can obtain from the soil a regular 
 income and do it with no greater exertion than is required to 
 succeed in any other business, the attraction of the farm for 
 the young man will be ample — what he has objected to has 
 been the intense labor and uncertainty of results. 
 
 This is exactly the object of the education given by the 
 agricultural schools, and as they turn out their hundreds of 
 educated farmer youth there should be a change in the farming 
 community commensurate with the infusion of scientific 
 methods and a more intelligent comprehension of possibilities. 
 This must come from the young generation, and the father 
 will do well to give his sons opportunity to test their theories 
 and to put into practice their new ideas, instead of insisting 
 that old ways be followed simply because they are old.
 
 COUNTRY LIFE PROBLEMS ^ 
 
 Ex-Secretary Garfield, in an address at the Young Men's 
 Christian Association dinner last week, dealt with the failing 
 attractions of country life, especially life on the farm. As a 
 member of the Country Life Commission, he referred to recent 
 investigations and said that they pointed to increasing "stag- 
 nation and decline" in rural regions, upon which the cities 
 still exercise their vast power of action. President Taft 
 touched upon the same subject in one of his recent speeches 
 in the South. Admitting the evils, he was, characteristically, 
 more sanguine than Mr. Garfield. In the President's opinion, 
 country life is in the way of being made so fascinating that it 
 may soon reassert its old place in our civilization, and check 
 the seemingly irresistible drift to the city. "The suburban 
 electric railroads," said Mr. Taft, "the telephone, the rural 
 postal delivery, inventions, and cooperative arrangements 
 are reaching such a point that it will soon become, I trust, 
 more comfortable to live in the country than in the city." 
 
 There is truth in this view, but there is also fallacy. Increas- 
 ing conveniences do, indeed, make country life more tolerable 
 to those who feel themselves condemned to it, but is there 
 any evidence that these new and extending facilities operate 
 to hold on the farm the young men who are burning to get 
 away from it? The telephone in the remote countryside is 
 unquestionably a great blessing. With a service made rela- 
 tively cheap by the use of party-lines, it brings the distant 
 farmhouse into instant touch with physician and shopkeeper 
 and postmaster. It also makes possible a daily interchange 
 
 ' Copyright. Reprinted by permission. An editorial from The Nation 
 for November i8, 1909.
 
 COUNTRY LIFE PROBLEMS 5 
 
 of neighborhood gossip and a frequent meeting of friends 
 which are, in many sections, giving a wholly new cast to the 
 social side of life in the country. All this must be recognized 
 thankfully, yet the doubt remains whether such civilizing 
 inventions do or can keep down that persistent and growing 
 distaste for life on the farm of which ex-Secretary Garfield 
 spoke so regretfully. Because the boy in a New Hampshire 
 farmhouse can telephone to the nearest village, is he the less 
 likely to slip away to Boston to get a job as motorman? We 
 know of no statistics on the point, yet the fact that farms 
 continue to be abandoned, and that the city keeps on pulling 
 to itself country-bred youth, would seem to argue that neither 
 telephone nor trolley nor the daily newspaper left in the mail- 
 box by the roadside will suddenly make thousands of men 
 and women fall in love with the country which they now 
 hate. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it may be plausibly argued that the very 
 introduction in the country of a modicum of urban comforts 
 and conveniences merely whets the longing for the city. Sir 
 Horace Plunkett, who for twenty years has been a close student 
 of agricultural conditions in Ireland and in the United States, 
 is distinctly of the mind that the thing actually works in that 
 way. The trolley car passing once an hour simply renders 
 the appeal of subway and elevated and the two-minute head- 
 way all the stronger. The farm telephone is very good, but 
 how if it puts into the youth's head a still more vivid conception 
 of the charm of a great city knit together in the enjoyment 
 of every modern facility? What possible chance has the 
 newspaper which reaches the farm in the evening, or a day 
 late, of competing in excitement with the city editions appear- 
 ing clamorously all day long and far into the night? Sir 
 Horace Plunkett soberly concludes that the trend to the cities 
 has actually been heightened, not diminished, by giving the 
 country a fuller taste of urban pleasures and conveniences. 
 Having got a small part, the country folk desire the whole,
 
 6 "THE NATION" 
 
 more than ever. Careful inquiry should be directed to ascer- 
 taining whether this is really the fact. 
 
 For so deep a social disturbance as the steady forsaking 
 of country life by those who can escape it, remedies that go 
 deep are obviously necessary. And they will have to be felt 
 by the masses rather than presented by the rural "uplifters." 
 Causes both economic and social must get powerfully in opera- 
 tion before we shall see the beginnings of the desired effect. 
 The argument from material well-being seems already to be 
 slowly making headway. Historically, the flight from the 
 country to the city was at first a part of the industrial revo- 
 lution of the last century. The great factories, the more 
 numerous jobs, were in urban communities, and farm workers, 
 with those whose house-industries had been destroyed by 
 machinery and specialization, went to the towns to find work. 
 It may be that a reaction will set in, also for economic reasons. 
 The struggle for existence may drive people back to the land. 
 With farming made easier and more scientific and profitable, 
 the terrible pressure in cities may soon begin to extrude to 
 country districts many who must seek a new environment 
 and opportunity if they are to maintain themselves above 
 want or beggary. Until some such solid advantages, or social 
 necessities, can be made the rural set-off to the artificial charm 
 of the city, it will be in vain to hope for a repopulation of 
 deserted hillsides. To reinforce the economic argument by 
 every appeal on the score of health and sentiment is, of course, 
 an obvious duty. Nothing that can be done to improve 
 country schools, or to promote human intercourse among 
 scattered farmers, should be omitted. And it might well be 
 hoped that a change of mental attitude could be brought 
 about so that men and women would again associate their 
 happiest experiences with country sights and sounds, and 
 have such remembered thrills of pleasure as stirred De Quincey 
 when he recalled his joy, as a child, at the blossoming of the 
 crocuses in his father's garden.
 
 CONDITIONS AND NEEDS OF COUNTRY LIFE i 
 
 John M. Gillette 
 
 There seems to be a consensus of opinion that there is 
 something wrong with the country. Articles discussing the 
 subject are myriad. Did the agricultural population view 
 itself as urban writers appear to view it, it would doubtless 
 consider itself as a fit subject for treatment at the old-time 
 "mourner's bench." That certain portions of our rural in- 
 habitants are interested in the "improvement of rural matters" 
 is evident from the appearance of discussions of some of those 
 matters at various kinds of farmers' meetings. But that the 
 agriculturalists view the situation with alarm is by no means 
 evident. In order to help clear up the situation, it may be 
 well to attempt to determine just what is the rural problem. 
 It may be well to show first what it is not. 
 
 I. Negative Aspects of the Problem 
 
 I. It would be a mistake to suppose that the problem 
 consists in rural deterioration or arises because of rural degen- 
 eration. There has taken place in the United States no such 
 thing as general rural deterioration. A slight acquaintance 
 with the history of our country will aff'ord ample evidence 
 that there has been general advance almost all along the line 
 in country life. As compared with pre-national times the 
 farm population is better housed, better clothed, better fed, 
 better educated and informed, is more productive, produces 
 what it does produce more easily, has better implements 
 and agencies with which to work, and the farm women have 
 
 ' CopjTight. Reprinted by permission from The Annals of the Ameri- 
 can Academy, Vol. xl, March, 1912, pp. 3-1 1.
 
 8 JOHN M. GILLETTE 
 
 been emancipated from much of the arduous labor which fell 
 to their lot in the period of household industry. 
 
 Indeed one does not have to recur to so remote a period 
 as that to find striking contrasts. Many of our aged contem- 
 poraries who were reared on the farm well remember the back- 
 ward conditions which obtained in matters of production, 
 marketing, transportation, obtaining necessaries of life in the 
 home, methods of living, and education. Respect for truth 
 impels us to recognize a great advance in the general condi- 
 tions of life of country populations. It is well to remember 
 that the "rural problem" is the product of intelligence, 
 directed towards a province which has hitherto been somewhat 
 remote from comparison and criticism. We have evolved 
 certain ideals of life with the growth of cities and civilization, 
 have brought them to bear on country life with the result 
 that the latter has been found backward in some respects 
 as measured by those ideals. The few instances of rural 
 arrested development or of deterioration are a minimum in 
 total country life as compared with the extensive slums of 
 the cities. 
 
 2. It is also a mistake to assume, as is so frequently done, 
 that the problem lies in the direction of rural depopulation. 
 It is commonly taken for granted that the vast growth of 
 urban centers has taken place at the almost entire expense 
 of rural districts. There is a movement to the cities of rural 
 populations. It may have its serious aspects. But it is not 
 the problem preeminently. An analysis of the census reports 
 and those of the Commissioner General of Immigration gives 
 these results. City growth ensues from four factors, namely, 
 incorporation, natural increase, migration from the country, 
 and immigration. The first is inconsequential. Natural 
 increase accounts for about 20 per cent of city increase, immi- 
 gration, for from 65 to 70 per cent, and rural migration for 
 the remainder, say from 10 to 15 per cent. 
 
 Much of the seeming loss of population to the cities arises
 
 NEEDS OF COUNTRY LIFE 9 
 
 as a result of movement of farmers away from their old loca- 
 tions to newer agricultural regions. Practically all of the older 
 states have been heavy losers from this condition. Iowa 
 lost population during the last decade because the value of 
 land was high and farmers sold to others and purchased lands 
 in the Dakotas and Canada, helping to raise the land values 
 in those regions enormously. 
 
 Nor must it be expected that the movement to cities which 
 actually takes place is likely to be prevented in great measure. 
 The forces at work in developing civilization and which must 
 be considered basic and inevitable are largely accountable 
 for the movement. The matter may be simply stated. One 
 farmer produces sustenance for the support of many besides 
 himself. Double his productive capacity and his produce 
 supports double the original number. Carry this principle 
 into operation generally and it will be seen that non-agri- 
 cultural communities must be depended on to absorb the 
 released population. Hence cities must continue to make 
 large advances in population as compared with the country. 
 
 3. Nor is the rural problem one of improving production 
 chiefly, for the nation as a whole, although there are sections 
 such as much of the South where improved agriculture must 
 take place before other essential things may be added unto 
 them. The motive of this statement is not one of minimiz- 
 ing the importance of inducing a more scientific and pro- 
 ductive agriculture. The economic aspects of farming are 
 exceedingly important. Increased production should mean 
 an increased profit and this in turn should mean higher stand- 
 ards of living, better education of children, and improvement 
 in methods of living. Farmers no doubt get too little out of 
 their soil. Much greater results might be secured also by 
 placing agriculture on a business basis, by regarding it as a 
 capitalistic enterprise and measuring its business success by 
 the extent of profits. Organization of the various factors 
 entering into the business so as to secure the combination
 
 lo JOHN M. GILLETTE 
 
 which would yield the largest returns, and keeping a record 
 of all phases of the business so as to have exact knowledge of 
 cause and effect, should prove advantageous. A more equi- 
 table marketing system by means of which the agricultural 
 producers secure a larger share of the consumer's price than 
 they do at present is desirable and constitutes a very con- 
 siderable problem in itself. 
 
 While some portions of the nation are backward economi- 
 cally in agriculture, it is not true as a whole even as compared 
 with many other businesses. Our farmers are as progressive 
 in their business as a class as are the mass of retail merchants, 
 or as the mass of small factory men. Further there is nothing 
 critical in the present method of agricultural production. 
 We are faced by no famine. Our exportations of farm produce 
 are still large and promise to continue so for some time to 
 come. Farmers are not going into bankruptcy because of 
 poor methods. They are prosperous as a class. Admit, as 
 we must, that it would be far better if methods which did not 
 pauperize the soil were employed, yet this is not the funda- 
 mental diflficulty in farm life. 
 
 II. Positive Aspects of the Problem 
 
 I. The very center and essence of the rural problem is the 
 necessity of securing the establishment of a new point of 
 view, a wider and more vital outlook on the part of the resi- 
 dents of the rural regions. At first consideration this may 
 seem rather a bizarre statement of the problem, one that is 
 remote from the pressing needs of those regions. But granting 
 for a moment that the statement is valid, let us recall in what 
 the value of a point of view consists. 
 
 The fact of dynamogenesis emphasizes the truth that every 
 idea seeks to realize itself in action, to get itself carried out by 
 means of the physical organism. There is a tremendously 
 significant relation between ideas and activities. Ideas, in 
 the evolutionary sense, are not for playing mental checkers
 
 NEEDS OF COUNTRY LIFE ii 
 
 with but to direct activities and conduct. Philosophers may 
 speculate about them or with them, but for the mass of man- 
 kind they are entertained in order to be put into execution. 
 And the more powerful the ideas are the more true this is, 
 that is the more immediate is the execution. The ideas which 
 are bathed in a glow of feeling are the most executive. They 
 carry themselves out most speedily. 
 
 Ideals of life and the action are among the more dynamic 
 forms of ideas. They are the ones which appeal to men as the 
 most desirable to actualize, are most longed for, have the 
 largest element of feeling. But an ideal is only a point of 
 view. An ideal as to a certain line of action expresses the 
 individual's viewpoint relative to that section of human 
 activities. My ideal for the farmer is expressed in the state- 
 ment of my point of view for the farmer. 
 
 When talking of viewpoints we are speaking of the most 
 fundamental factor in a given situation. A wholesome view- 
 point makes a wholesome life. A changed viewpoint changes 
 the life. Obtain the power to shape the point of view of the 
 succeeding generation and you can lead it where you will. 
 Hence, whatever is backward in country life is due to its 
 outlook, and we cannot hope for very great improvement until 
 the outlook of rural inhabitants relative to the place and 
 significance of farm life is transformed. 
 
 2. There are two vital points on which a new outlook 
 must be developed among agriculturalists. If this can be 
 secured all the other problems may be associated with it as 
 incidents of attainment. 
 
 (a) One of these points is the matter of living. A new 
 outlook on life, its meaning, its possibilities of enjoyment 
 and satisfaction, and as to the means which are fit to secure 
 those ends is intensely needed. Life to the average farmer is 
 devoid of the larger and more attractive elements. His life 
 is a round of eating, working, sleeping, saving, economizing, 
 living meagerly, recognizing only the bare necessaries, skimp-
 
 12 JOHN M. GILLETTE 
 
 ing along with inconveniences, especially in the home, which 
 is uncalled for considering his wealth. The wealthy farmer 
 is one of the most helpless of men in the matter of finding 
 satisfaction. This appears whenever he moves into the city 
 to live. He still practices the stern economies, lives in houses 
 without modern conveniences, keeps the old rag carpets, 
 attends no theaters, goes to no lectures unless they are free, 
 and acts as a man in a strange world or as one with a starved 
 soul. The enjoyment side of life is lacking. His cultural and 
 esthetic soul is in a state of suspended animation. 
 
 Such facts as these in the lives of the multitude of rich 
 residents of rural districts make it apparent that the funda- 
 mental problem is not one of economics but of transforming 
 farmers so that they look at life in a different manner. The 
 appreciative qualities of life must be built up. They need to 
 have developed the sentiment that the fullest and most 
 successful life is the one which obtains the greatest number 
 of satisfied wants in passing. Under this transformation the 
 country will build good houses, comfortable in the modern 
 sense, having the conveniences which lighten the lives of the 
 indoor workers, and the equipment which renders the place 
 sanitary and healthful. It will put in machinery everywhere 
 possible to do the hard work, to reduce labor, to eliminate 
 chores, as well as to make production more profitable. It 
 will beautify the grounds, improve the roads for travel pur- 
 poses, and look to nature as a source of inspiration. 
 
 (b) The other vital point is to secure a social outlook. 
 The farmer has been burdened with an individualism which 
 has been extreme and in a measure disastrous. Under the 
 system of education under which he has been schooled it is 
 perfectly natural that this should be so. The social side of 
 life has never been opened to him. That he was a part 
 of human society, that he worked under inexorable laws of 
 markets and politics, that a community life may be made a 
 means of satisfaction and training were not self-evident and
 
 NEEDS OF COUNTRY LIFE 13 
 
 axiomatic propositions. In fact he has no conception of such 
 truths nor had his immature teachers in the "little old red 
 schoolhouse." His universe was bounded by physical nature 
 in the shape of sunshine, rain and frost, and in a very small 
 measure by his family and one or two neighbors. He and 
 nature accounted for what he obtained. There were no 
 human interlopers, save at critical times. There was no social 
 accountability that was very persistent and apparent. 
 
 As a consequence he never caught sight of the fact that the 
 farmers are a great social class and have a worth and dignity 
 as such. It has wealth of enormous proportions, approximat- 
 ing one-fourth of the nation's wealth; numbers of still greater 
 proportions, practically one-half of the nation's population; 
 characteristics and interests which are common to its members 
 and which differentiate it from all other social classes. Its 
 work is worthy, its position secure, its future promising. But 
 in commanding power and influence in the direction of national 
 affairs this really great social class is lacking and manifests its 
 extreme weakness. Only by its vote at election times does 
 it demonstrate its existence. It has not enough power to 
 protect itself from the exploitation of other classes of a preda- 
 tory nature. It has been victimized by the politicians, the 
 trusts, the railways, and now mercilessly by the middle-men. 
 What it needs is to develop a class-consciousness which is 
 self-respecting, potent for organization purposes relative to 
 government and marketing, and which operates to secure a 
 greater regard for its rights and possibilities. 
 
 On another side the farmer's social outlook has been want- 
 ing. In rural communities the community, sociability, 
 associational side of life has lain fallow. There has been a 
 reign of social stagnation and social poverty. Without social 
 intercourse the life of the average person would be considered 
 empty notwithstanding the largeness of the farm, the heavy 
 yield of produce, the quality of live stock, and the extent of 
 the bank account. In social matters, even to a greater degree
 
 14   JOHN M. GILLETTE 
 
 than in those of finding satisfaction in Hving, the country is 
 far behind the corresponding grades of city life. 
 
 In one sense this dearth is due to a lack of intellectual 
 stimulus and ferment. Reading has not been cultivated as a 
 source of pleasure and a means of larger information. Social 
 intercourse of a larger general nature is likely to be empty 
 where an intellectual circulating medium is absent. A grasp 
 and discussion of the more important social matters awaits 
 the development of information. 
 
 Associations of a recreative and entertainment sort are 
 little appreciated in the country. Men of the farms have not 
 discovered the play life. Its possibilities have not been 
 opened to them. Organized games for the children and recrea- 
 tion for the adults are among the greatest desiderata of rural 
 communities. Opportunities for these will present themselves 
 as soon as their appreciation is developed. 
 
 Deficiencies of social contact and co-operative stimulus 
 are apparent. Cities abound in means and agencies to satisfy 
 these ends. Isolation has seemed to insulate farmers from 
 each other. It is an obstacle whose gravity must be realized 
 although its prohibitive strength is likely to be overrated. 
 Organizations for bringing about community co-operative 
 activities for both economic and sociability purposes are 
 highly desirable and necessary and are coming into existence 
 as fast as the appreciation of their worth is discovered by the 
 farming community. 
 
 3. There are certain fundamentals which are incident to 
 the realization of this needed point of view. They must be 
 obtained before the larger and better outlook can be fully 
 and permanently rooted as a part of the working capital of 
 rural society. 
 
 (a) Leadership of a residential and effective kind is neces- 
 sary to enable the country to work out its destiny along the 
 lines indicated above. A trained resident leadership is 
 largely wanting in agricultural neighborhoods. Young men
 
 NEEDS OF COUNTRY LIFE 15 
 
 and women who go to higher institutions of learning seldom 
 settle in the country. Even the students from agricultural 
 colleges must be included in this statement. The country is 
 being sapped of its ability of the trained sort by the towns 
 and cities. It has plenty of natural ability left but it is not 
 developed into a working leadership. The country is there- 
 fore forced to look to other sources outside itself for initiative 
 and organizing ability which is required. So long as this is 
 the case it must suffer accordingly. Every class and com- 
 munity m.ust ultimately expect to depend on its own intelli- 
 gence and the sympathetic devotion of its own able managers. 
 Even fairly intelligent communities are handicapped without 
 them. 
 
 (b) The reorganization of rural education is a necessary 
 step toward the realization of a changed viewpoint and a 
 larger rural life. The country school is one of the few things 
 that has remained practically unchanged during the last 
 quarter of a century. While farms have grown, farming has 
 been improved, houses and barns have become larger and 
 better, the country church has been better housed and manned, 
 the old schoolhouse has remained as it was, and the course of 
 study has become little more adjusted to the needs of the 
 times. To meet the demands of the situation some important 
 modifications must be made in rural schools. 
 
 First, they must be depended on to furnish the resident 
 leadership which is required. Higher institutions of learning 
 cannot do this because of the leakages noted above, and 
 because they cannot touch the life of every boy and girl 
 directly in necessary ways. A leadership must be informed on 
 the things which are close to farm life; matters of agriculture, 
 marketing, organization for protective purposes as well as for 
 constructive objects, the worth and value of sociability func- 
 tions of the upbuilding sort, and the improvement of home 
 life. In order to understand and appreciate those things it 
 must have a training and culture in them during the education
 
 i6 JOHN M. GILLETTE 
 
 period. Every one must be so informed and skilled that he 
 or she may rise to take a leading part in the affairs of the 
 community if the abihty is present. This means that the 
 schools of the region must contain and teach the matters 
 which are crucial and intrinsic to farm life. Agriculture, 
 domestic economy, rural sociology, are some of the necessary 
 and pressing subjects which must be taught. 
 
 Second, the consolidation of schools constitutes another 
 necessary step to realize the object denoted. The single- 
 room school-house is entirely inadequate to meet the situation. 
 It cannot supply the grading, the able teaching force, the 
 equipment and room for carrying on work of a vocational 
 nature, the numbers of pupils needed to carry on organized 
 play, the differentiated housing and facilities demanded for 
 the sociability, recreational, entertainment, and cultural 
 activities of the adults as organized into a social center, and 
 other important neighborhood functions. Moreover, the 
 consolidated school, while providing for all of the above 
 essential needs, can extend its course of study so as to include 
 high-school work as a further qualification of that leadership 
 and to appreciate intelHgence which the country neigh- 
 borhood demands. The latter would afford time for the 
 gradual and completer inculcation of the larger and finer 
 ideals of life, and teach the things which will make the life 
 of the average man and woman something more than a mere 
 existence. 
 
 4. A closing remark may well be devoted to the proper point 
 of view with which the rural problem is to be regarded. A 
 very large part of the emphasis in the discussions of farm life 
 has been laid on the necessity of improving it in order to keep 
 the boys and girls from drifting to the cities. The assumption 
 has been that the country needs them and that city attractions 
 established in the country would be effective in holding them 
 there. However effective this procedure might prove to ac- 
 complish what is urged, and its effectiveness may well be
 
 NEEDS OF COUNTRY LIFE 17 
 
 doubted, it does not appear to be the highest motive which 
 may be furnished. 
 
 A more just view regards the improvement of farm life as a 
 procedure which of right belongs to that great multitude of 
 good people who will always be rural residents. They have a 
 humanity in common with the residents of the cities. They 
 have needs of life and work which they ought to realize if 
 they can only obtain a vision of their possibility and worth. 
 They are the heirs of the products which the myriads of the 
 makers of civilization have created and conserved and should 
 of right come into the enjoyment of them. Country popula- 
 tions have a right in their own stead to enjoy all that life offers, 
 even if they do not contemplate leaving the soil for the city. 
 The great problem is to discover a way by which their outlook 
 on life and society may be transformed into one which appre- 
 ciates the worth of realizing the greatest satisfactions and 
 possibilities which may come to them as rural citizens of the 
 great republic.
 
 THE SOCIAL CENTER: A MEANS OF COMMON 
 
 UNDERSTANDING ' 
 
 WooDROW Wilson 
 
 I DO not feel that I have deserved the honor of standing 
 here upon this occasion to make what has been courteously 
 called the principal address, because five months ago I did 
 not know anything about this movement. I have taken no 
 active part in it, and I am not going to assume, as those who 
 have preceded me have assumed, that you know what the 
 movement is. I want, if for no other purpose than to clarify 
 my own thinking, to state as briefly as possible what the 
 movement is. 
 
 The object of the movement is to make the schoolhouse the 
 civic center of the community, at any rate in such commu- 
 nities as are supplied with no other place of common resort. 
 
 Ready for Use — The Means oj Concerting Common Life 
 
 It is obvious that the schoolhouse is in most communities 
 used only during certain hours of the day, those hours when 
 the rest of the community is busily engaged in bread-winning 
 work. It occurred to the gentlemen who started this move- 
 ment that inasmuch as the schoolhouses belonged to the 
 community it was perfectly legitimate that the community 
 should use them for its own entertainment and schooling 
 when the young people were not occupying them. And that, 
 therefore, it would be a good idea to have there all sorts of 
 gatherings for social purposes, for purposes of entertainment, 
 
 1 An address delivered before the First National Conference on Civic 
 and Social Center Development, at Madison, Wis., October 25, 1911.
 
 THE SOCIAL CENTER 19 
 
 for purposes of conference, for any legitimate thing that 
 might bring neighbors and friends together in the school- 
 houses. That, I understand it, in its simplest terms is the 
 civic-center movement — that the schoolhouses might be 
 made a place of meeting — in short, where by meeting each 
 other the people of a community might know each other, and 
 by knowing each other might concert a common life, a common 
 action. 
 
 Spontaneous Development 
 
 The study of the civic center is the study of the spontaneous 
 life of communities. What you do is to open the schoolhouse 
 and light it in the evening and say: "Here is a place where 
 you are welcome to come and do anything that it occurs to 
 you to do." 
 
 And the interesting thing about this movement is that a 
 great many things have occurred to people to do in the school- 
 house, things social, things educational, things political — 
 for one of the reasons why politics took on a new complexion 
 in the city in which this movement originated was that the 
 people who could go into the schoolhouses at night knew what 
 was going on in that city and insisted upon talking about it, 
 and the minute they began talking about it many things 
 became impossible, for there are scores of things that must 
 be put a stop to in our politics that will stop the moment they 
 are talked of where men will listen. The treatment for bad 
 politics is exactly the modern treatment for tuberculosis — 
 it is exposure to the open air. 
 
 Now, you have to begin at the root of the matter in order 
 to understand what it is you intend to serve by this move- 
 ment. You intend to serve the life of communities, the life 
 that is there, the life that you cannot create, the life to which 
 you can only give release and opportunity; and wherein does 
 that life consist? That is the question that interests me. 
 There can be no life in a community so long as its parts arc
 
 20 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 segregated and separated. It is just as if you separated the 
 organs of the human body and then expected them to produce 
 life. You must open wide the channels of sympathy and 
 communication between them, you must make channels for 
 the tides of life; if you clog them anywhere, if you stop them 
 anywhere, why then the processes of disease set in, which are 
 the processes of misunderstanding, which are the disconnec- 
 tions between the spiritual impulses of different sections of 
 men. 
 
 Common Center Essential to Community Life 
 
 The very definition of community is a body of men who 
 have things in common; who are conscious that they have 
 things in common; who judge those common things from a 
 single point of view, namely, the point of view of general 
 interest. Such a thing as a community is unthinkable, 
 therefore, unless you have close communication; there must 
 be a vital interrelationship of parts, there must be a fusion, 
 there must be a coordination, there must be a free intercourse, 
 there must be such a contact as will constitute union itself 
 before you will have the true course of the wholesome blood 
 throughout the body. 
 
 Therefore, when you analyze some of our communities you 
 will see just how necessary it is to get their parts together. 
 Take some of our great cities for example. Do you not realize 
 by common gossip even the absolute disconnection of what 
 we call their residential sections from the rest of the city? 
 Isn't it singular that while human beings live all over a city, 
 we pick out a part, a place where there are luxurious and 
 well-appointed houses, and call that the residential section? 
 As if nobody else lived anywhere in that city! That is the 
 place where the most disconnected part and in some instances 
 the most useless part of the community lives. There men do 
 not know their next-door neighbors; there men do not want 
 to know their next-door neighbors; there is no bond of sym-
 
 THE SOCIAL CENTER 21 
 
 pathy; there is no bond of knowledge or common acquaint- 
 anceship. 
 
 I am not speaking of these things to impeach a class, for I 
 know of no just way in which to impeach a class. 
 
 It is necessary that such portions of the community should 
 be linked with the other portions; it is necessary that simple 
 means should be found by which by an interchange of points 
 of view we may get together, for the whole process of modern 
 life, the whole process of modern politics, is a process by which 
 we must exclude misunderstandings, exclude hostilities, ex- 
 clude deadly rivalries, make men understand other men's 
 interests, bring all men into common counsel, and so discover 
 what is the common interest. 
 
 That is the problem of modern life which is so specialized 
 that it is almost devitalized, so disconnected that the tides 
 of life will not flow. 
 
 Means to the Unity of Communities 
 
 My interest in this movement, as it has been described to 
 me, has been touched with enthusiasm because I see in it a 
 channel for the restoration of the unity of communities. 
 Because I am told that things have already happened which 
 bear promise of this very thing. 
 
 I was told what is said to be a typical story of a very fine 
 lady, a woman of very fine natural parts, but very fastidious, 
 whose automobile happened to be stalled one night in front 
 of an open schoolhouse where a meeting was going on over 
 which her seamstress was presiding. She was induced by some 
 acquaintances of hers whom she saw going into the building 
 to go in, and was at first filled with disdain; she didn't like 
 the looks of some of the people; there was too much mixture 
 of the sort she didn't care to associate with — an employee 
 of her own was presiding — but she was obliged to stay a 
 little while; it was the most comfortable place to stay while 
 her automobile was repaired; and before she could get away
 
 2 2 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 she had been touched with the generous contagion of the 
 place. Here were people of all sorts talking about things 
 that were interesting, that revealed to her things that she had 
 never dreamed of before with regard to the vital common 
 interests of persons whom she had always thought unlike 
 herself, so that the community of the human heart was re- 
 vealed to her, the singleness of human life. 
 
 Worth Any Ejfort to Promote 
 
 Now, if this thing does that, it is worth any effort to promote 
 it. If it will do that, it is the means by which we shall create 
 communities. And nothing else will produce hberty. You 
 cannot have liberty where men do not want the same liberty, 
 you cannot have it where they are not in sympathy with one 
 another, you cannot have it where they do not understand 
 one another, you cannot have it when they are not seeking 
 common things by common means; you simply cannot have 
 it. We must study the means by which these things are 
 produced. 
 
 In the first place, don't you see that you produce commu- 
 nities by creating common feeling? I know that a great 
 emphasis is put upon the mind in our day, and as a university 
 man I should perhaps not challenge the supremacy of the 
 intellect; but I have never been convinced that mind was 
 really monarch in our day, or in any day that I have yet 
 read of; or, if it is monarch, it is one of the modern monarchs 
 that rules and reigns but does not govern. 
 
 Common Feeling Essential to Free Government 
 
 What really controls our action is feeling. We are governed 
 by the passions, and the most that we can manage by all our 
 social and political endeavors is that the handsome passions 
 shall be in the majority — the passion of sympathy, the pas- 
 sion of justice, the passion of fair dealing, the passion of
 
 THE SOCIAL CENTER 23 
 
 unselfishness (if it may be elevated into a passion). If you 
 can once see that a working majority is obtained for the 
 handsome passions, for the feeUngs that draw us together 
 rather than for the feelings that separate us, then you have 
 laid the foundation of a community and a free government; 
 and, therefore, if you can do nothing else in the community 
 center than draw men together so that they will have common 
 feeling, you will have set forward the cause of civilization and 
 the cause of human freedom. 
 
 As a basis of the coming feeling you must have a mutual 
 comprehension. The fundamental truth in modcM-n life, as I 
 analyze it, is a profound ignorance. I am not one of those 
 who challenge the promoters of special interests on the ground 
 that they are malevolent, that they are bad men; I challenge 
 their leadership on the ground that they are ignorant men; 
 that when you have absorbed yourself in a particular business 
 through half your life you have no other point of view than 
 the point of view of that business, and that, therefore, you are 
 disqualified by ignorance from giving counsel as to the com- 
 mon interests. 
 
 A witty English writer once said: "If you chain a man's 
 head to a ledger and knock off something from his wages 
 every time he stops adding up, you can't expect him to have 
 enlightened views about the antipodes." Simply, if you 
 immerse a man in a given undertaking, no matter how big 
 that undertaking is, and keep him immersed for half a life- 
 time, you can't expect him to see any horizon, you can't 
 expect him to see human life steadily or sec it whole. 
 
 Means to Liberal Education 
 
 I once made this statement, that a university was intended 
 to make young people just as unlike their fathers as possible. 
 By which I do not mean anything disrespectful to their 
 fathers, but merely this, by the time a man is old enough to 
 have children in college, his point of view is apt to have
 
 24 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 become so specialized that they would better be taken away 
 from him and put in a place where their views of life will be 
 regeneralized and they will be disconnected from the family 
 and connected with the world. That I understand to be 
 the function of education, of the liberal education. 
 
 Now, a kind of liberal education must underlie every 
 wholesome political and social process, the kind of liberal 
 education which connects a man's feeling and his comprehen- 
 sion with the general run of mankind, which disconnects him 
 from the special interests and marries his thought to the 
 common interests of great communities and of great cities 
 and of great States and of great nations, and, if possible, with 
 that brotherhood of man that transcends the boundaries of 
 nations themselves. 
 
 Those are the horizons, to my mind, of this social center 
 movement, that they are going to unite the feelings and clarify 
 the comprehension of communities, of bodies of men who draw 
 together in conference. 
 
 Conference Always Modifies and Improves Thought 
 
 I would like to ask if this is not the experience of every 
 person here who has ever acted in any conference of any 
 kind. Did you ever go out of a conference with exactly the 
 same views with which you went in? If you did, I am sorry 
 for you; you must be thought-tight. For my part I can 
 testify that I never carried a scheme into a conference without 
 having it profoundly modified by the criticism of the other 
 men in the conference and without recognizing when I came 
 out that the product of the common council bestowed upon 
 it was very much superior to any private thought that might 
 have been used for its development. The processes of attri- 
 tion, the contributions to consensus of minds, the compromises 
 of thought create those general movements which are the 
 streams of tendency and the streams of development.
 
 THE SOCIAL CENTER 25 
 
 Will Make Easier Solution of Great Problems 
 
 And so it seems to me that what is going to be produced 
 by this movement — not all at once, by slow and tedious 
 stages, no doubt, but nevertheless very certainly in the end 
 — is in the first place a release of common forces now un- 
 discovered, now somewhere banked up, and now somewhere 
 unavailable, the removal of barriers to the common under- 
 standing, the opening of mind to mind, the clarification of 
 the air and the release in that clarified air of forces that can 
 live in it, and just so certainly as you release those forces you 
 make easier the fundamental problem of modern society, 
 which is the problem of accommodating the various interests 
 in modern society to one another. 
 
 Adjustment Necessary to Liberty 
 
 I used to teach my classes in the university that liberty 
 was a matter of adjustment, and I was accustomed to illustrate 
 it in this way: When you have perfectly assembled the parts 
 of a great steam engine, for example, then when it runs, you 
 say that it runs free; that means that the adjustment is so 
 perfect that the friction is reduced to a minimum, doesn't 
 it? And the minute you twist any part out of alignment, 
 the minute you lose adjustment, then there is a buckling up 
 and the whole thing is rigid and useless. Now, to my mind, 
 that is the image of human liberty; the individual is free in 
 porportion to his perfect accommodation to the whole, or, 
 to put it the other way, in proportion to the perfect adjust-, 
 ment of the whole to his life and interests. 
 
 Take another illustration. You are sailing a boat. When 
 do you say that she is running free, when you have thrown 
 her up into the wind? No; not at all. Every stick and 
 stitch in her shivers, and you say she is in irons. Nature 
 has grasped her and says, "You cannot go that way." But 
 let her fall off, let the sheets fill, and see her run like a bird
 
 26 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 skimming the waters. Why is she free? Because she has 
 adjusted herself to the great force of nature that is brewed 
 with the breath of the wind. She is free in proportion as 
 she is adjusted, as she is obedient, and so men are free in 
 society in proportion as their interests are accommodated to 
 one another, and that is the problem of liberty. 
 
 Analysis Accomplished — now Assembled 
 
 Liberty as now expressed is unsatisfactory in this country 
 and in other countries because there has not been a satis- 
 factory adjustment, and you cannot readjust the parts until 
 you analyze them. Very well, we have analyzed them. 
 Now, this movement is intended to contribute to an effort to 
 assemble them, bring them together, let them look one another 
 in the face, let them reckon with one another, and then they 
 will cooperate, and not before. 
 
 You cannot bring adjustment into play until you have 
 got the consent of the parts to act together, and then, when 
 you have got the adjustment, when you have discovered and 
 released those forces and they have accommodated themselves 
 to each other, you have that control which is the sovereignty 
 of the people. 
 
 There is no sovereignty of the people if the several sections 
 of the people be at loggerheads with one another. Sover- 
 eignty comes with cooperation; sovereignty comes with 
 mutual protection; sovereignty comes with the quick pulses 
 of sympathy; sovereignty comes by a common impulse. 
 
 You say, and all men say, that great political changes are 
 impending in this country. Why do you say so? Because 
 everywhere you go you find men expressing the same judg- 
 ment, alive to the same circumstances, determined to solve 
 the problems by acting together, no matter what older bonds 
 they may break, no matter what former prepossessions they 
 may throw off, determined to get together and do the thing.
 
 THE SOCIAL CENTER 27 
 
 Enlightened Control in Place oj Management 
 
 And so you know .that changes are impending because what 
 was a body of scattered sentiment is now becoming a con- 
 centrated force, and so with sympathy and understanding 
 comes control, for, in place of this control of enlightened and 
 sovereign opinions, we have had in the field of politics, as 
 elsewhere, the reign of management, and management is 
 compounded of these two things, secrecy plus concentration. 
 
 You cannot manage a nation, you cannot manage the 
 people of a State, you cannot manage a great population, 
 you can manage only some central force. What you do, 
 therefore, if you want to manage in politics or anywhere else, 
 is to choose a great single force or single group of forces and 
 then find some man or men sagacious and secretive enough to 
 manage the business without being discovered. And that has 
 been done for a generation in the United States. 
 
 Now, the schoolhouse, among other things, is going to break 
 that up. Is it not significant that this thing is being erected 
 upon the foundation originally laid in America, where we 
 saw from the first that the schoolhouse and the church were 
 to be the pillars of the Republic? Is it not significant that, 
 as if by instinct, we return to those sources of liberty undefiled 
 which we find in the common meeting place — in the place 
 owned by everybody, in the place where nobody can be 
 excluded, in the place to which everybody comes as by right? 
 
 And so what we are doing is simply to open what was shut, 
 to let the light come in upon places that were dark, to sub- 
 stitute for locked doors open doors, for it does not make any 
 difference how many or how few come in provided anybody 
 who chooses may come in. So, as soon as you have estabhshed 
 that principle, you have openings, and these doors are open 
 as if they were the floodgates of life.
 
 28 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Faith in People Justified 
 
 I do not wonder that men are exhibiting an increased con- 
 fidence in the judgments of the people, because wherever you 
 give the people a chance, such as this movement has given 
 them in the schoolhouse, they avail themselves of it. This 
 is not a false people, this is not a people guided by blind 
 impulses, this is a people who want to think, who want to 
 think right, whose feelings are based upon justice, whose 
 instincts are for fairness and for the light. 
 
 So what I see in this movement is a recovery of the con- 
 structive and creative genius of the American people, because 
 the American people as a people are so far different from 
 others in being able to produce new things, to create new 
 things out of old. 
 
 This Movement Fundamentally American 
 
 I have often thought that we overlook the fact that the 
 real sources of strength in the community come from the 
 bottom. Do you find society renewing itself from the top? 
 Don't you find society renewing itself from the ranks of 
 unknown men? Do you look to the leading families to go 
 on leading you? Do you look to the ranks of the men already 
 established in authority to contribute sons to lead the next 
 generation? They may, sometimes they do, but you can't 
 count on them; and what you are constantly depending on 
 is the rise out of the ranks of unknown men, the discovery of 
 men whom you had passed by, the sudden disclosure of 
 capacity you had not dreamed of, the emergence of somebody 
 from some place of which you had thought the least, of some 
 man unanointed from on high, to do the thing that the genera- 
 tion calls for. Who would have looked to see Lincoln save a 
 nation? Who that knew Lincoln when he was a lad and a 
 youth and a young man — but all the while there was spring- 
 ing up in him as if he were connected with the very soil itself,
 
 THE SOCIAL CENTER 29 
 
 the sap of a nation, the vision of a great people, a sympathy 
 so ingrained and intimate with the common run of men that 
 he was like the people impersonated, sublimated, touched 
 with genius. And it is to such sources that we must always 
 look. 
 
 No man can calculate the courses of genius, no man can 
 foretell the leadership of nations. And so we must see to it 
 that the bottom is left open, we must see to it that the soil of 
 the common feeling of the common consciousness is always 
 fertile and unclogged, for there can be no fruit unless the 
 roots touch the rich sources of life. 
 
 And it seems to me that the schoolhouses dotted here, there, 
 and everywhere, over the great expanse of this Nation, will 
 some day prove to be the roots of that great tree of liberty 
 which shall spread for the sustenance and protection of all 
 mankind.
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION ^ 
 Robert W. Bruere 
 
 We are in the midst of a rural revolution. The pre-emption 
 of the "area available for agricultural purposes" which, 
 according to the Federal census, was practically complete at the 
 beginning of the new century, has set in motion forces that 
 are swiftly transforming the spirit of American farm life and 
 the character of the economic and social institutions in the 
 open country. 
 
 For more than a hundred years — approximately from the 
 time when the embargo of 1807 established the "nursing of 
 infant industries" as our dominant national policy — the 
 industrial revolution, with its teeming commercial and manu- 
 facturing centers, has shaped the course of American civili- 
 zation. Notwithstanding the fact that throughout the 
 nineteenth century the rural population greatly outnumbered 
 the population of the cities, its influence upon national affairs 
 remained definitely secondary. So long as there were millions 
 of acres available for agricultural settlement, the power of 
 the rural majority was subject to ready control. Whenever 
 the farmers attempted to organize, as they did through the 
 Grange in the sixties and seventies, and again through the 
 Populist uprising of the early nineties, their ranks were broken 
 and scattered by the opening of vast reserves of arable land. 
 Effective group action is impossible without stability, an 
 economic surplus, and leisure; cheap lands meant cheap prices 
 for agricultural products; so long as "Uncle Sam was rich 
 enough to give us each a farm," the rural majority could be 
 
 1 Copyright. Reprinted by permission from Harper's Magazine, No- 
 vember, 19 14.
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 31 
 
 held at an economic, political, and social disadvantage. But 
 the final pre-emption of the "area" available for agricultural 
 purposes has done for the American farmer what powder and 
 the crossbow did for the English yeomen at Crecy. The cheap 
 lands of the Argentine Repubhc and of Little Russia will not 
 suffice to break their ranks again. 
 
 The sign of the new sovereignty is on every one's lips. 
 Not within living memory, certainly not in times of peace, 
 has the high cost of living had such universal currency. 
 Economists tell us that the cause of high prices is to be found 
 in the abnormal increase of the world's gold supply, in the 
 "brigandage of the middleman," in the growth of luxury, 
 the aggressions of labor, and all manner of disturbances in 
 the industrial world. But there is yet another explanation 
 which has not received the consideration its reasonableness 
 demands. In great agricultural states like Illinois and Iowa 
 less land is under cultivation to-day than fourteen years ago; 
 many important counties in states hke Ohio are producing 
 less food than they did before the Civil War. During the last 
 census period population in the United States increased 21 
 per cent, but agricultural production increased 10 per cent 
 only. To meet an increase of 21 per cent in the number of 
 mouths to be fed, the production of wheat increased only 3.8 
 per cent, of orchard fruits 1.8 per cent, while the production 
 of corn actually fell off by 4.3 per cent. The expert of the 
 census of agriculture, in commenting upon the situation, 
 says: 
 
 We have reached a stage in the history of this country when 
 farmers in average years do not produce much more of the raw 
 materials used for food, forage, and clothing than is needed within 
 the country. In poor years the production may not in future equal 
 the demands of the consumers. 
 
 And while production has remained stationary, the market 
 value of farm products has practically doubled; while the 
 cities are filled with wailing over high prices, the farmers are
 
 32 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 jubilant! Within little more than a decade, the pre-emption 
 of the "area available for agricultural purposes" has shifted 
 the balance of economic control from the cities to the owners 
 of our agricultural lands. 
 
 And everywhere the farmers, exhilarated by their new 
 sense of power, are in revolt against the traditional barrenness 
 of agricultural life. Throughout the dominance of the in- 
 dustrial revolution and the era of territorial expansion, they 
 have had to look on from the family circle while the cities sat 
 at the banquet-table of civilization. But their position no 
 longer compels them to listen passively to the pastoral flights 
 of uncalloused after-dinner speakers. They are in a position 
 to demand what they want. They want homes as comforta- 
 ble and as well equipped as the best homes in the cities; they 
 want schools that conform to the best modern standards; 
 they want the best facilities for having "a. good time"; they 
 want music and art and the drama: they want their full share 
 in all the amenities of twentieth-century civilization. And 
 if they cannot get what they want in the country, they will 
 turn from agricultural production to speculation in land over 
 which they now have a monopolistic control, and move to 
 the cities to get it. All along the line they are in revolt, and 
 already they have reason to wonder at the swiftness with 
 which their rebellion is humbling the cities. 
 
 For it is from the cities quite as much as from the farmers 
 themselves that the cry for scientific agriculture, soil conser- 
 vation, and socialization of rural life is coming. It is city 
 capital that is sending agricultural experts by the hundreds 
 to the tradition-bound fields of the farmers. It is city capital 
 that is promoting country-life conferences with their increas- 
 ing emphasis upon rural credits and economic cooperation. 
 The cities are quite as keen as the farmers for the establish- 
 ment of more intimate relations by the extension of the rural 
 mail and the parcels post. And most significant of all, it is 
 principally city money which, through the country-life depart-
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 33 
 
 ments of the Protestant denominations especially, and the 
 "county work" of the Young Men's and the Young Women's 
 Christian Associations, is supporting the men and women 
 who are effecting a reformation in the country church com- 
 parable in scope and depth to the great Reformation of Wyclif 
 and Hus and Luther. 
 
 The church has always loomed larger in country than in 
 city life. The city church has been overshadowed by the 
 high-schools and universities, the newspapers and social 
 settlements, the theaters, scientific museums, the ostentatious 
 public and private philanthropies. But the pipes to which 
 the city crowds dance have echoed but faintly in the open 
 country. Throughout the turmoil of the nineteenth century 
 the church remained the dominant social, intellectual, and 
 spiritual institution of rural life. 
 
 But within recent years the country church has seen its 
 easy ascendancy threatened by the rivalry of the same secular 
 forces before which the city church has for more than a century 
 retreated as before a conquering enemy. The development 
 of the rural public-school system, the spreading influence of 
 the state universities and colleges, the "extension work" of 
 the state and federal departments of agriculture, the traveling 
 libraries, the automobile, and the motion-picture theaters 
 have brought it face to face with a crisis with which the city 
 church failed to cope. And for a time it showed a disposition 
 to oppose the demands for a fuller life arising out of the rural 
 revolution, as the city church had opposed the "growth of 
 luxury among the common people" arising out of the develop- 
 ment of invention and the machine. "The weakness of the 
 city church," says Professor Fagnani, of the Union Theological 
 Seminary, "has been and is that with it religion is religion 
 and not life." And similarly the country church, instead of 
 losing its life in the new movement in order that so it might 
 find it, began by railing against the "Godlessness of the 
 rising generation," when it should have sought the cause of
 
 34 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 its waning prestige in the changing wants of the people and 
 its own failure to satisfy them. But this blind policy was 
 proving its own penalty; the countryside was being strewn 
 with the wreckage of abandoned church buildings. And the 
 injury was not to the church alone. As the central institu- 
 tion of country life, the failure of the church to adjust itself 
 to the new conditions was depriving the nation of its most 
 powerful instrument for turning the rural revolution from 
 selfish into patriotic channels. Fortunately, before the 
 damage had become irreparable, the country church de- 
 veloped a new leadership, which, largely financed by city 
 capital, is reforming its methods in statesman-like conformity 
 with the spirit of the times. 
 
 The essence of the new reformation is the definite abandon- 
 ment of authoritarian dogmatism and the candid adoption 
 of the open-minded methods of modern science. In the 
 language of churchmen, they are seeking the will of God, not 
 exclusively in the threshed straw of medieval creeds and 
 scholastic speculations, but primarily in the scientifically 
 ascertained facts of contemporary realities. The best de- 
 scription of the new policy is contained in the series of rural 
 surveys made during the past four years by the Department 
 of Church and Country Life of the Presbyterian Church, 
 undet" the general supervision of the Rev. Warren H. 
 Wilson. 
 
 The Presbyterian Church in the United States [says the intro- 
 duction to the survey of three rural counties in northern Missouri] 
 has been ministering to country parishes for more than a century. 
 It has sought farmers through forests and across deserts. It has 
 built innumerable little white churches on the country cross-roads 
 for them to worship in. It has baptized the farmer's children, 
 taught them, married and buried them. It has striven to save the 
 farmer's soul — striven earnestly, valiantly, sometimes heroically. 
 
 But never until within this year has it made a thorough scien- 
 tific study of the country community it has attempted to serve. It 
 has done everything in its power to pave the farmer's road to the
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 35 
 
 Celestial City, but it has paid little attention to his road to the 
 nearest village. 
 
 It has given great sums to alleviate poverty, but given little 
 thought to the causes that make for poverty — the American sys- 
 tem of farm tenantry, the robbing of the soil, and the stripping the 
 hillside of its trees. 
 
 It has pictured the beauties of the heavenly mansions and taken 
 no account of the buildings in which men and women must spend 
 their lives here and now. 
 
 Hereafter it is going to know something about the communities it 
 attempts to serve — of what stuff they are made, v/hat their needs 
 and aspirations. It will take an interest in the every-day affairs of 
 the farmer — his crops and stock, his buildings and machinery, his 
 lodge and recreation. 
 
 The spires of the little cross-road church will still point to the skies, 
 but its foot-stone will lie on the commonplace work of the day. 
 
 This declaration of principle is as radical a departure from 
 the prevailing policy of the church in our generation as the 
 declaration of Luther that "a Christian man is a most free 
 lord of all things and subject to no one" was from the autoc- 
 racy of the medieval hierarchy. It marks the end, so far as 
 the followers of the new reformation are concerned, of the 
 long war between science and the church. And wherever it 
 has been adopted as a guide to action, in poor lands and rich 
 alike, the church is experiencing a renascence of constructive 
 leadership in both material and spiritual things. 
 
 In the course of a recent spring, I traveled by buggy through 
 the poverty-stricken fastnesses of the north Virginia moun- 
 tains. The dogwood and the crimson Judas trees were in 
 bloom. The upward-winding road was fragrant with sprout- 
 ing fern, its banks mottled with violets, yellow sorrel bells, 
 and bloodroot blossoms — soft enamel liHes lustrous against 
 the silvery moss. No sharp corners, no checker-board thor- 
 oughfares. But the houses I passed in my long climb through 
 the Blue Ridge were, for all their isolation, curiously like the 
 shambling tenements I knew so well in New York, East 
 Boston, South Chicago, and North St. Louis. Women in
 
 36 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 drab calicoes stared dumbly from ungarnished kitchen door- 
 ways. Tousled children fled shyly down the road and hid in 
 thickets and behind tumbling stone fences. Men with rusty 
 guns went by, looking oddly like the men in the urban "bread 
 line," except for a vagrant alertness to the stir of wild life in 
 the brush. 
 
 Through Simmon's Gap, along the boulder-strewn bed of a 
 mountain stream, over the hump of a crouching hill, down a 
 steep path broken by gullies and jutting rock, across a plowed 
 field and a half-stumped clearing, I came at last to the Blue 
 Ridge Industrial School and the home of the Rev. George P. 
 Mayo. From the veranda of his house we looked across a 
 valley dotted with orchards, fields of young grain, and soft, 
 green pastures. Beyond the barns and the brook and the 
 meadow to the north, two little white churches confronted 
 each other from opposite sides of a road, Hke pugilists stripped 
 for a fight. 
 
 They were the last survivors of generations of sectarian 
 warfare; all the rest had gone down in the struggle. And 
 while the denominations had fought one another, moonshine 
 had flourished in the mountains, children had been born out 
 of wedlock, boys and girls had grown up innocently dissolute. 
 For all their revival meetings, the "needle's eye" had remained 
 as an open door compared with the mountaineer's chances of 
 entering heaven here or hereafter. They had regularly broken 
 the law to make moonshine whisky because they wanted life, 
 and whisky was the only way they knew to a living. Forty 
 per cent of them had remained illiterate because whisky 
 created neither the desire nor the necessary economic surplus 
 for schools. They had made a virtue of dirt and disease and 
 immorality because the only semblance of spiritual exaltation 
 they had ever experienced came from the momentary thrills 
 of vice. They were criminals for the same reason that the 
 gangs in our city slums are criminals. And the churches, in 
 the intervals of mutual recrimination, preached a flat and
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 37 
 
 irrelevant goodness, ignoring the causes of the general poverty 
 under the cloud of which they and the people perished. 
 
 This was the situation into which Mr. Mayo brought the 
 policy of the new reformation. 
 
 "I began," he told me, "with the conviction that the 
 day of doctrinal controversy is over; that the time has 
 come for the church to give an accounting of her steward- 
 ship." 
 
 The day before, I had come through Shifflet's Hollow, the 
 rugged pocket in the mountains where Mr. Mayo held his 
 first charge. I had seen the Settlement House, the base from 
 which during eight years he had served a territory stretching 
 for twenty miles along the eastern slope of the Greene County 
 range. Adjoining the Settlement House, I had seen the 
 small, well-equipped hospital where scores of mountain men, 
 women, and children had had their first experience of decent 
 care in sickness. Across the road, I had seen the first public 
 school ever opened in the region — built with church money, 
 but operated in cooperation with the state Department of 
 Education. And high up the mountain, on a small plot of 
 relatively smooth soil, I had seen the demonstration acres 
 through which Mr. Mayo had experimentally learned the 
 agricultural possibilities of the mountains. 
 
 The outgrowth of those scientific tests of the capacity of 
 both the soil and the people is the Blue Ridge Industrial 
 School, with its demonstration farm of more than five hundred 
 acres; its sawmill and dairy; its dormitories, class-rooms, 
 workshops, and kitchens; its orchards and fields for every 
 grain and grass and fruit that scientific study of the soils and 
 climate has shown to be susceptible of profitable cultivation. 
 Possibly the most striking thing about that splendid church 
 enterprise is the absence of a separate church building. That 
 has been left to the last, because Mr. Mayo has informed the 
 everyday life at the school with the deepest' though most 
 unobtrusive religious spirit, and because he believes that the
 
 38 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 only sound basis for a vital church to-day is the spontaneous 
 religious emotion of a happy and prosperous people. 
 
 During the afternoon I saw fine mountain girls baking 
 bread and studying poultry, mountain boys harrowing after 
 the plow and mending tools in the smithy. And morning 
 and evening I heard them singing together and cooperating 
 in work and in play — mountain girls who, under the old 
 dispensation, might have been mothers at fourteen, whether 
 married or not; and mountain boys who would have become 
 outlaws in the barren solitude of the hills. 
 
 And through the children Mr. Mayo is trying to spread the 
 spirit of cooperation and mutual aid throughout the neigh- 
 borhood. As yet he is not advocating church unity or federa- 
 tion, because this, he fears, would only serve to rekindle the 
 old habit of interdenominational strife. ''But," he said to 
 me, "if we are not yet ready to get together inside the church, 
 we can and must get together outside the church as human 
 beings and citizens." And so, while administering his school, 
 he is taking the lead in organizing the people into community 
 associations for the spread of the telephone — the harbinger 
 of the new neighborliness; for the improvement of the roads, 
 the study of markets, cooperation in production, buying, and 
 selling. Every one in Bacon's Hollow — the popular name for 
 the valley — is gradually coming to see that where blue grass 
 grows wild, and apples will ripen, and corn and wheat will 
 yield abundantly, ignorance and moonshine and crime have 
 no providential sanction; that physical vigor and prosperity 
 and happiness are not at variance with the will of God. And 
 the people are gathering in unprecedented number to Mr. 
 Mayo's support, because through him the church has humbled 
 itself, to be reborn in the spirit of science and to win its claim 
 to leadership by the concrete quality of its daily human 
 service. 
 
 The Blue Ridge Industrial School is only one of a chain of 
 church enterprises — largely financed with city capital —
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 39 
 
 that is being stretched through the southern mountains to 
 meet the reproach: "The poor ye have always with you." 
 They are acting as a sort of spiritual middlemen to hitch up 
 the farmers' demand for more life with the cities' demand for 
 more food. With the mountaineers the primary problem is 
 the elimination of poverty, and this the church is helping 
 them to meet by the development of a community social and 
 educational, and an economic programme based upon scien- 
 tifically ascertained facts. 
 
 And the same method is proving effective in the fat lands 
 of the Middle West, though there the problem is of an entirely 
 different character. The people of the Corn-Belt are not 
 crying feebly for enough to eat and to wear, but in powerful, 
 full-fed voices are demanding the higher satisfactions of life 
 — recreation and knowledge and art — and they are demand- 
 ing these things with the vigor of men who will and do climb 
 into their automobiles and speed away to the town if the 
 mountain of civilization will not come to them. The city- 
 ward migration, the growth of tenant farming, land specula- 
 tion, and absentee landlordism is not only undermining the 
 ancient authority of the country church, but is responsible for 
 the menace to the national food supply. 
 
 My train, swinging up into Iowa from the South, found 
 itself on a limitless level. It was May, and the corn, which 
 was later to shoot up into green rockets and burst into tassels 
 of showering gold, was just being planted. Everywhere men 
 and horses dragged slowly back and forth, pulverizing the rich 
 brown bareness or turning under the eager weeds — hungry 
 tramps to be beaten back again and again that the coming 
 corn might be fed. The wheat was well up — great blankets 
 of vivid green, so thick, so lush, that every blade shouldered 
 its neighbor and the roots stole from one another. The fields 
 lying fallow in pasturage were alive with soft, wabbly-kneed 
 calves and the twinkling ears of tiny mule-colts; and hundreds 
 upon hundreds of fat little red or black shoats scampered
 
 40 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 away as the train rushed by. Here in the Corn Belt the 
 prayer for daily bread, which is just being raised in the Blue 
 Ridge, has been abundantly fulfilled. 
 
 "It is the richest land on God's green earth," said a grizzled, 
 red-cheeked farmer leaning affably over the back of my seat. 
 "Rain or shine, the corn crop ain't never failed in loway. 
 Prices been good? Wal, yes, tol'ble; but I don't bother so 
 very much about prices. Where does my money come from? 
 That's my land over yonder where you see that maple wind- 
 break. I go out to see my man that I got working it about 
 every month or so. Forty year ago when I come out here 
 you could get all of that land you might want for seven dollars 
 an acre. It's worth from twenty to thirty times that now. 
 I owned a thousand acres once, but I sold off all but a section 
 and moved up to town. My man he works it on half-shares. 
 But I ain't worrying much about prices; all I got to do is 
 just to sit tight!" 
 
 Sitting tight — especially after moving to town — has 
 come to be an immensely popular occupation in the Corn 
 Belt. The farmers who have what money they want take 
 the shortest cut to the satisfactions of life, secure in the 
 knowledge that there are no more vast "areas available for 
 agricultural purposes" to break the market for their land. 
 And real-estate speculation and farming on shares have such 
 obvious advantages over the rough work of plowing and sow- 
 ing and reaping! Speculation is rife throughout the Corn 
 Belt and production is at a standstill. In Iowa, for example, 
 there were 11,578 fewer farms in 19 10 than in 1900, and 
 406,353 fewer acres under cultivation. And whereas a short 
 while ago practically all of the farms were worked by their 
 owners, from two-fifths to a half, and in some sections seventy 
 per cent of the farms are worked by tenants, who, having 
 a one-year lease, are compelled to rob the soil to get a living. 
 The effects of this revolution, both upon the church and the 
 nation, are described as follows in the survey of forty-four
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 41 
 
 rural communities in Illinois made by the Presbyterian 
 Church: 
 
 Only a few years ago this region was entirely farmed by the 
 owners themselves, but within the past few years many of the 
 owners have moved to the cities and towns or sold their farms to 
 speculators, until now fifty-three per cent of the farms are run by 
 tenants. These tenants have generally a one-year lease; their chance 
 of purchasing land is very small, and their interest in the commu- 
 nity is therefore at the lowest point. 
 
 In a community where the churches are struggling hard to sur- 
 vive, a farmer said that fifteen years ago his land was producing 
 ninety bushels of corn per acre; now it is producing forty-eight. 
 Then it was worth seventy-five dollars an acre; now it is worth 
 one hundred and ninety doUars an acre. 
 
 The speculative price of land kills the country church. The 
 middle-Illinois landlord is not a friend of the improvement of the 
 country community. In many cases he is a mere absentee, drawing 
 rent from the farm he owns, and caring nothing save for the in- 
 creasing of his rent with the rising price of land. These landlords 
 should be caUed to account by the churches. 
 
 Owners of land in a country where the soil is producing less every 
 year, where the churches and schools are deteriorating, where the 
 human stock is being exploited and an American peasantry pro- 
 duced, are responsible men. Mere evangelism, with talks about 
 saving of souls and promise of heavenly life, is not enough ; in such a 
 situation the unlimited promise of heavenly salvation is false to the 
 kingdom. 
 
 In self-defense, the Illinois country churches will be forced in the 
 future to promote the conservation of the soil. If they do not save 
 the soil, they will lose the right to save the soul. 
 
 There is a refreshing courage about this indictment of the 
 past failure of the church by a churchman. For it must be 
 remembered that the deterioration of rural life here described 
 took place while the church was the dominant institution in 
 the open country. The development of absentee landlordism 
 is in large measure due to the neglect of the church to enter 
 into the spirit of contemporary realities and to take the 
 leadership in creating social and intellectual conditions in the 
 country that would have held the owners upon the land.
 
 42 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 During the early stages of the rural revolution, the church, 
 instead of setting an example of cooperation and broadly 
 humanitarian patriotism, followed the precedent of the city 
 church in concentrating its energies upon a short-sighted 
 effort to preserve its institutional integrity. Instead of 
 making all other considerations secondary to the social, 
 economic, and spiritual advancement of the rural communities, 
 it fostered a petulant selfishness by the evil example of its 
 own inter-denominational strife. The Presbyterian survey of 
 three typical agricultural counties in Indiana reveals forty- 
 one denominations quarreling for the possession of a popula- 
 tion which in 1900 numbered eighty thousand souls, but which 
 in 1 910 had dropped to seventy-six thousand. The records 
 of 232 churches for the past ten years show 38.6 per cent 
 growing, 13.6 per cent standing still, and 47.8 per cent losing 
 ground or dead. 
 
 "It is true," says the author of the survey, "that many of 
 these churches need to die," because many of them were built 
 in the first instance to despite denominational rivals, not to 
 serve either man or God. But many of them continue to 
 fail because they place their entire emphasis upon stupid 
 denominational bigotry. As the survey puts it: 
 
 Denominational strife shows itself in various ways. At its worst 
 it may be seen in the competition of two or more churches for con- 
 verts and in the jealousy of one church over the success of others in 
 revival meetings. Three such churches were found in a village of 
 seven hundred. The Methodists were accused of proselyting. The 
 United Brethren were censured for building a church when it was 
 neither needed nor wanted. Both had some grievances against the 
 Disciples. One of the ministers, speaking of the success of his work, 
 said: "I have taken in 113 members in my three churches this year, 
 and 35 of them have come from other denominations." A certain 
 inhabitant of the village — no doubt an ardent church member — 
 said that "if the Methodist church were on fire, and if he should 
 happen to pass by, and if there were a bucket of water standing 
 near, he would kick the bucket over!"
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 43 
 
 Is there reason to wonder that of ninety-one churches in 
 one of these counties twenty-five have not a single young 
 man under twenty-one years of age in their congregations? 
 Such conduct on the part of an institution which should have 
 been the leader in the socialization of rural morality — a 
 course upon which its own life and the healthy prosperity of 
 the rural community depended — has tended to aggravate 
 the worst evils attending the changing rural order. The 
 Indiana survey thus summarizes the matter: 
 
 The influence of the church on the community is individualistic; 
 that is, its chief care is for individual souls. Few churches have as 
 their mission the salvation of the community. The saving of men 
 for heaven is much emphasized — with what results the incident of 
 the bucket of water illustrates. The saving of men for Indiana re- 
 ceives httle emphasis. The saving of Indiana for men receives from 
 the churches practically no emphasis at all. 
 
 But a church which can so clearly diagnose its own malady 
 is not likely to miss a cure. In the Salt River parish in 
 Missouri, the churches of all denominations have united in a 
 plan of reorganization; they are abandoning superfluous 
 churches and are consolidating weak churches of one denomi- 
 nation with weak churches of another. Certain churches in 
 Pennsylvania are preaching the gospel of the agricultural 
 colleges, realizing that their own future is bound up with 
 better farming. In the middle of the Corn Belt I visited a 
 little Baptist church, which has been able to organize the 
 social and intellectual life of the open country about it so that 
 it draws members from the nearest towns instead of losing to 
 them, and has actually succeeded in stemming the rising tide 
 of tenant farming. The people there are prosperous, the land 
 is rich; but six years ago seven out of ten farms on the road 
 on which the church stands changed hands within a year, and 
 the church fell into decay. Then a new minister was sent to 
 them who had in him the spirit of the new reformation. He 
 began by gathering the people of the neighborhood into a
 
 44 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 singing-club, a non-sectarian form of amusement which the 
 nearest town could not match. Through this singing-club 
 the church developed literary and industrial branches, held 
 picnics, established an orchestra, carried through a fair, 
 supported a lecture course, and organized an inter-township 
 school contest and annual athletic meet. These were new 
 forms of religious activity; they gave the people a better 
 quality of amusement than they could get in the nearest 
 town, and the fact that the townspeople came out to their 
 socialized church helped to show them how valuable it was. 
 There is something interesting going on all the time; their 
 imaginations are alive; and the man who rents his farm and 
 goes to town is not so much envied as blamed. 
 
 "You'd think he'd do better by his boys than to leave them 
 hanging around Main Street all the time." 
 
 "Look at how his land is getting all run down — the way 
 his renter don't manure it." 
 
 "He may not have much to do; but I can't see what he 
 gets out of living- in town." 
 
 This was a new sort of comment, directly traceable to the 
 fact that one little country church had based its teaching on 
 the holiness of this world and made life interesting by feeding 
 the socially hungry and cheering the intellectually faint. 
 
 On the June Sunday when I attended service at this church, 
 the automobiles and the fine horses of these prosperous farmers 
 and the town folks from six miles away filled the carriage- 
 sheds and monopolized the fence-posts. And the congrega- 
 tion, made up from a half-dozen old-line denominations, filled 
 the flower-trimmed, newly painted church building to the 
 very doors. No one had preached church federation; it had 
 come about spontaneously! 
 
 Farther north, I found a young clergyman who had organ- 
 ized a baseball team in the neighborhood, on which he was 
 pitcher, and which played every Saturday afternoon, to the 
 joy of the whole county. In Wisconsin and Dakota there are
 
 THE RURAL REFORMATION 45 
 
 clergymen who have organized the people into cooperative 
 associations for buying and selling, in order that through 
 cooperative business they may have a daily practical illustra- 
 tion of the Golden Rule. In the country town of Pine Island, 
 Minnesota, I attended a moving-picture show, run in the 
 local opera-house by the board of directors of the Methodist 
 church. As the pastor explained it, the theory was that the 
 young people and the isolated farmers of the district must 
 have the best recreation that could be suppHed. 
 
 Such church activities are springing up in spots throughout 
 the open country; but in many places it seems easier to de- 
 velop a new institution to meet the rising demands of the 
 farming population than to reform the stiff-necked churches 
 directly. The young people who have left the churches of 
 the old order to the generation that grew up in them — who, 
 like the Chinesie, see more likeness than difference between 
 Baptists and Presbyterians, and have not acquired religion 
 through the revival meeting and mourners' bench, but have 
 graduated into Christianity from the Sunday-school — 
 cannot be brought to see religion in sectarian terms. It is 
 because the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian 
 Associations serve the purposes of the rural revolution out- 
 side of denominational lines, that they are proving such 
 valuable aids to the new reformation. The idea that the 
 Christian exists in a sort of social vacuum no longer obtains 
 to-day. 
 
 "It makes a great appeal to the girls," a worker in Red 
 Wing, Minnesota, told me — "the idea that by joining the 
 Y. W. C. A. they come in touch, not only with the girls of New 
 York and San Francisco, but of India and China, too." 
 
 The secretaries of the rural Y. M. C. A. declare that "the 
 inherent organization germ of their work is social," and that 
 their programmes include, not only Bible study and reli- 
 gious meetings, but also "practical talks, lectures, educational 
 classes, agricultural institutes and contests, literary and de-
 
 46 ROBERT W. BRUERE 
 
 bating clubs, boy scouts, athletics, gymnastics and aquatics, 
 summer camps, hikes, educational tours, and conferences." 
 
 It is because the demands of the revolting farmers include 
 these social satisfactions that can be had only after prosperity 
 and a certain intellectual freedom have been attained that 
 these extra-denominational associations are doing such 
 effective work. They command secretaries of special training 
 such as is generally outside the requirements for the ministry. 
 The churches accept ministers whose preparation varies from 
 a bachelor's degree supplemented by a theological course and 
 an assistant pastorate to what is vaguely called "some per- 
 sonal religious experience." This may or may not be enough; 
 but the Y. M. C. A. takes no such chances. The international 
 secretary says, "It is not sufficient that the county secretary 
 should be a successful evangehst, Bible teacher, or executive." 
 The Association's aim is to provide nothing but college men, 
 preferably graduates of the agricultural colleges. Is it not 
 possibly because of this different training that the average 
 salary of all ministers of all denominations in places with less 
 than twenty-five thousand inhabitants is $573 a year, while 
 the county secretaries can and do command, at the start, 
 salaries averaging $1,400? 
 
 The leaders in the new reformation are reminding the 
 church that since it has developed a paid ministry, society 
 has also developed a utilitarian civilization and has grown to 
 expect every adult male, parsons included, to earn his keep. 
 They are urging the church to think, not in terms of one person 
 at a time, but of the whole social body at once; to preach, 
 not a religion of the individual, but a religion of the social 
 order. They are meeting with opposition, as Wyclif and Hus 
 and Luther met with opposition; but the future of the country 
 church is with them, because they have made themselves an 
 essential force in this vitally progressive rural revolution.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE ^ 
 
 Thomas Nixon Carver 
 
 No other problem is even second in importance to that of 
 maintaining the native quality of the rural population. The 
 rural districts are the seed bed from which even the cities 
 are stocked with people. Upon the character of this stock, 
 more than upon anything else, does the greatness of a nation 
 and the quality of its civilization ultimately depend. If the 
 native vigor, physical and mental, of the people should decline, 
 nothing could save its civilization from decay. Not even 
 education itself can permanently arrest such decay when the 
 inborn capacity to be educated is disappearing. Every horse- 
 man believes in careful training as a preparation for racing, 
 but no horseman, no matter how excellent his system of 
 training might be, would expect to maintain or improve the 
 speed of his stable if he bred mainly from scrub stock. Nor 
 should any country, however excellent its educational system, 
 expect to maintain the capacity and productive efficiency of 
 its people if the most capable and efficient of them multiply 
 least rapidly, and the least capable and efficient multiply 
 most rapidly. 
 
 But what is really meant by capacity and productive effi- 
 ciency in a people? There is a story of an aged savage who, 
 having lived most of his life among civilized men, returned 
 in his old age to his native tribe, saying that he had tried 
 civilization for forty years, and that it was not worth the 
 trouble. A great deal of the philosophy of civilization is epit- 
 omized in this story. To a savage mind civilization is never 
 
 1 Copyright. Reprinted by permission from Principles of Rural Ece- 
 nomics, Ginn and Company, publishers.
 
 48 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 worth the trouble, for the reason that taking trouble is dis- 
 tasteful to the savage mind. Only those races which have 
 the capacity for taking trouble, or to whom taking trouble is 
 not painful, are capable of becoming civilized. Civilization 
 consists largely in taking pains. To some people it is too 
 much trouble. They prefer to remain barbarians, even though 
 they live in civilized surroundings. Other people have so 
 much mental energy that they do not mind taking pains; 
 in fact they rather enjoy it. They are the builders of our 
 civilization. Individual genius was once defined as the 
 capacity for taking infinite pains. The genius of a race or of 
 a nation, and its capacity for civilization, may be defined in 
 precisely the same terms. 
 
 Efiicient agriculture requires forethought, planning for 
 next year, and the year after, and the year after that; putting 
 in a great deal of careful, painstaking work to-day, with no 
 prospect of seeing a tangible result for years to come; looking 
 after an interminable number of details day by day, week by 
 week, month by month, and year by year, in expectation of 
 returns so distant in the future as to lie beyond the vision of 
 lesser minds. Only the men or the races which possess this 
 kind of capacity are capable of efficient agriculture or of 
 efficient industry of any kind. Whatever other admirable 
 qualities the savage may possess, — and he may possibly 
 boast superiority over the civilized man in many respects, — 
 lacking these qualities, he will remain a beaten race. Simi- 
 larly, whatever admirable and amiable qualities an individual 
 of our own race may possess, lacking these he will be a beaten 
 man. It is idle for either a race or an individual to complain, 
 or to say that in some other kind of a world it would not have 
 been beaten. This happens to be this kind of a world, and 
 in this kind of a world it happens that success comes to those 
 races which possess in the highest degree the economic virtues 
 of industry, sobriety, thrift, forethought, reliability, knowledge 
 of natural laws, and mutual helpfulness. These are the
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 49 
 
 qualities which bring success to a race or a nation, and the 
 possession of these qualities constitutes, therefore, what we 
 call capacity and efiSciency. We may persuade ourselves that 
 we like other qualities or people who possess them, but nature 
 pays very little attention to our likes and dislikes in such 
 matters. However much we may like other qualities, the 
 peoples who lack these qualities will fail; and however much 
 we may persuade ourselves that we despise the sober, homely, 
 economic virtues, the peoples who possess them will succeed 
 and eventually dominate the world. 
 
 The problem of maintaining the capacity of the rural 
 population for civilization will depend upon two questions: 
 (i) Is it the most or the least capable individuals who marry 
 earliest and have the largest families? (2) Is it the most or 
 the least capable individuals who leave the farms and migrate 
 to the cities? 
 
 Ideally it would seem as though the most capable young 
 men should arrive first at a position of independence, where 
 it would be possible to marry and settle down to the work of 
 building up an estate and a family. Where social ideals are 
 sound this is doubtless the case; but where they are unsound 
 it is otherwise. Where the social ideals are such that it is 
 regarded as an honorable ambition — as the most honorable 
 ambition, in fact — to found a family, with a family estate to 
 support it, or to perpetuate a family already honorably 
 established, and to maintain its standards and traditions, the 
 capable young men will be guided by this ideal, and the most 
 capable of them will succeed best in realizing it. But where 
 the end and aim of economic life centers in the gratification 
 of the senses or of individual vanity, in attracting public 
 notice because of individual achievement in fashionable 
 society, in art, literature, or scholarship, or in any other of 
 the so-called polite pursuits, the family ideal is lost from 
 sight. Under such circumstances, there is a tendency to 
 look upon achievement in some of these directions as an end
 
 50 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 in itself, rather than as a means of family building; to assume 
 that an honorable ambition is realized when success along 
 these other lines is attained, regardless of the fate of the 
 family ideal. Such perverted social ideals are likely to prove 
 disastrous to the race, because they lead the capable young 
 men and women to follow those other ambitions and to aban- 
 don that of the family builder. 
 
 The Family Builder 
 
 The general abandonment of the ambition of the family 
 builder will prove disastrous to the race for several reasons. 
 In the first place, it leads capable and ambitious young men 
 to choose their wives for other reasons than their capacity as 
 mothers. The man whose ideal of life centers in individual 
 gratification will, if he is successful enough in an economic 
 sense to give him some opportunity for choice in the matter, 
 choose a wife on the ground of her capacity to minister to his 
 vanity or to his sensuahty; to choose one, for example, who 
 will help him in fashionable society, whose face will please his 
 fancy, etc. The man whose dominant ambition is to found a 
 splendid family, or to achieve immortality by leaving behind 
 him a family of capable children, well trained and disciplined 
 for the battle of life, and dominated by high ideals of morality, 
 patriotism, etc., will choose a wife who is capable of helping 
 him to achieve that ambition. She must be sound physically 
 and capable of bearing and nursing healthy children; she must 
 also be possessed of unusual mental power, and therefore 
 capable of transmitting that mental power to her children ; 
 and, finally, she must be dominated by high ideals of moraUty 
 and social service, in order that she may give her time and 
 strength unsparingly to the task of training her children for 
 good citizenship. When the family-building ambition domi- 
 nates the people, this is the kind of woman who will be most 
 sought after in marriage, who will least frequently remain 
 unmarried and childless, who will marry earliest and therefore
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 51 
 
 have the longest child-bearing period, and who will get the 
 most capable and vigorous husbands, and therefore bear the 
 most capable and vigorous children. Where different ideals 
 prevail, a different type of woman will be most sought after in 
 marriage. Women weaker physically, mentally, and morally 
 may satisfy other desires better than the type just described; 
 consequently the stronger type of women will be more likely 
 to remain unmarried and childless, or to marry later and 
 therefore have a shorter child-bearing period, or to get less 
 capable and vigorous husbands and therefore bear less capable 
 and vigorous children. In addition to all this, where other 
 than the family ideal dominates marriage, there will be more 
 childless marriages. 
 
 The country which maintains the soundest ideals and 
 ambitions in the way of family building will be the country 
 peopled with the strongest and most capable citizens. The 
 country with the strongest and most capable citizenship will 
 be the strongest and the most prosperous country. Since 
 the citizenship of the country is, in the end, recruited mainly 
 from the rural districts, it is especially important that sound 
 ideals should predominate there. To fail in this respect is, 
 eventually, to fail in everything. Therefore there need not 
 be the slightest hesitation in saying that the most important 
 ambition which can be cherished in the country is the ambi- 
 tion of every capable man and woman to found or perpetuate 
 an honorable, capable, and vigorous family. The aim of 
 successful agriculture should be to enable the successful 
 agriculturist to maintain a family estate for the support and 
 perpetuation of such a family. Nothing could be more 
 disastrous than the idea that successful agriculture, or a rich 
 farm, was an end in itself, or that it was a means to any such 
 end as sensual gratification, personal vanity or ostentation, 
 or more luxurious ease.
 
 52 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 Rural Migration 
 
 Next in importance to the character of the family ideal as 
 a factor in race building is the character of rural migration. 
 If it should happen that the most vigorous, capable, and enter- 
 prising youths should continually leave the country for the 
 city, there to become sterilized, as is usually the case, through 
 the pursuit of sensuality, vanity, or false ambition, only one 
 result would be possible. The less vigorous, capable, and 
 enterprising youths being left in the country, there to marry 
 and bring up families, and the same process of selection going 
 on generation after generation, the quality of the rural popula- 
 tion would inevitably deteriorate. This would happen as 
 certainly as it would if a horse or cattle breeder should follow 
 the practice of selling his best animals and keeping the inferior 
 ones for breeding purposes. If such a breeder should con- 
 tinue this practice, he would eventually have no first-rate 
 animals to sell. Similarly, if the rural population should 
 degenerate, there would eventually be no superior men and 
 women to send to the cities, and the cities themselves would 
 then degenerate. But if it should happen that the best, the 
 strongest, the most intelligent, and the most enterprising 
 youths should stay in the country, and the inferior ones should 
 be sent to the cities to be sterilized by false ambitions, then 
 it would follow that the quality of the rural population would 
 improve. So long as the rural population is improving there is 
 no danger of national decay or weakness, or of a decline of civili- 
 zation. It is therefore of great importance that the farms shall 
 retain at least their fair share of the talent of the country. 
 
 In order that young men and women of talent and capacity 
 may be induced to remain on the farms, rural life must be 
 made attractive to them. Farm life cannot be attractive to 
 such men and women unless it offers opportunities for a liberal 
 material income, for agreeable social life, and for intellectual 
 and aesthetic enjoyment.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 53 
 
 An Adequate Income 
 
 The problem of securing an adequate income to the farmer's 
 family is partly a problem of securing an adequate supply of 
 land and capital for them. There is very little in the peasant 
 type of farming, where the farmer is so inadequately supplied 
 with land as to make efficient agriculture impossible, and 
 where even machinery and good teams are unprofitable, to 
 attract men and women of high spirit and enterprise. This 
 is the type of farming, however, which would be forced upon 
 us if the agricultural population should increase in such a 
 way as to bring about a continuous morcellement, or sub- 
 division of farms into smaller and smaller units. Such an 
 increase in the number of the rural population would therefore 
 inevitably result in a decline in its quality, because such petty 
 farming, being unattractive to men and women of capacity 
 for larger things, would drive them cityward and leave in the 
 country only the type fitted for small affairs. 
 
 This presents a phase of the problem of rural depopulation 
 which is too frequently overlooked. Where the decline in 
 numbers comes about as a result of a readjustment of agricul- 
 tural methods, it may be, in the end, a good thing. Where 
 the farms have proved too small for the most efficient agri- 
 culture, and where therefore the owners of small farms find 
 them so unprofitable as to be induced either to buy out their 
 neighbors or to sell out to them, the result is larger farms and 
 a smaller number of farmers. If the change results in making 
 farming more attractive to men and women of capacity, and 
 in keeping such people on the farms, the decline in numbers 
 is compensated for by a permanent improvement in quality. 
 They who believe that quality is more important than quantity 
 must approve the change. 
 
 Fortunately the transfer of land is so easy and inexpensive 
 in this country as yet, especially in the newer states, that 
 there are no serious obstacles in the way of this process
 
 54 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 Where the farms are either too small or too large to secure 
 their highest value, they tend to be combined in the former 
 case, or to be subdivided in the latter, until they approximate 
 the size which gives them greatest value. The reason why 
 this process does not go on in the same way in some of the 
 older countries is because of the difficulties in the way of 
 transferring land. The long history of a given title, the vast 
 number of complicated legal rights and claims which may have 
 accrued, the ridiculously pious care with which even the 
 most remote rights of distant relatives are guarded by the 
 courts, make the process of transferring a piece of land a 
 formidable task. 
 
 Where, however, rural depopulation results in the sheer 
 abandonment of the land and allowing it to go to waste, the 
 problem is somewhat different. Even though the land is so 
 poor as to attract only a poor grade of farmers, it may be 
 better to have it occupied by a low-grade population than not 
 to have it occupied at all, though even that is open to question. 
 It is a mistake to assume that all unoccupied land is going to 
 waste. In New England it speedily grows up to timber, and 
 in some cases that is the most productive use to which land 
 can be put. The essential thing to remember is that a dense 
 agricultural population, if that density means a small income 
 per family, invariably means, under modern conditions, a 
 low-grade population, because men and women of spirit and 
 capacity will not stay. They will leave the country districts 
 in the possession of people who can do no better anywhere 
 else, and who are therefore content to remain and accept a 
 low standard of living. But a relatively sparse population, 
 if it means a large income per family, will generally mean a 
 high-grade population, because such conditions will help to 
 attract and hold men and women of spirit and capacity. If 
 we once understand this, we shall not be alarmed over a decline 
 in the rural population until we know the reasons and the 
 results.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 55 
 
 Still more important as a means of securing adequate 
 incomes for intelligent farmers is the existence and accessi- 
 bility of exact scientific knowledge to those who have the 
 capacity to acquire and apply it. Our agricultural colleges, 
 the experiment stations, and the agricultural literature which 
 they are publishing and distributing, all combine to give to 
 the farmer of intelligence a higher differential advantage over 
 the ignoramus. Only the man of intelligence is capable of 
 understanding and applying the results of scientific study and 
 experiment. He is the man who will profit most, therefore, 
 and who will in the end be able to buy out his ignorant neigh- 
 bor and send him off to town to work under a boss. Such an 
 improvement in our rural population augurs well for the 
 future of the republic. 
 
 An Agreeable Social Life 
 
 Quite as important as the question of an adequate income 
 is that of an agreeable social life as a means of attracting a 
 superior type of men and women to the farms. Few people 
 realize how much more dependent the farmer is than any one 
 else upon his social surroundings. A business man in the 
 city can choose his neighbors without changing his place of 
 business, for the reason that his residence and his place of 
 business are entirely disconnected. If he does not like one 
 neighborhood as a place of residence and a place in which to 
 bring up his family, he can move to another without disturb- 
 ing his business relations. The farmer must live on his farm 
 and must bring up his children there. Whatever the social 
 surroundings of the neighborhood are, he must accept them 
 or else sell out and move, thus upsetting all his business rela- 
 tions and hazarding his business prosperity on the chance of 
 improving his social relations. Again, the man in the city is 
 usually within easy reach of a great variety of schools, 
 churches, and other social agencies. If one does not suit 
 him, he can make use of another without great inconvenience.
 
 56 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 In the country, where all such things are farther apart, it would 
 ordinarily be a great inconvenience to send his children to any 
 other school than the one belonging to his own district, or to 
 take his family to another church than one of those of the 
 neighborhood. Again, even though the city man does not 
 choose his place of residence wisely, he is not dependent upon 
 his neighbors for his social life. Where the neighborhood 
 idea does not prevail, as it usually does not in the city, one 
 may ignore his own neighbors and still have an agreeable 
 social life among the members of his class, trade, occupation, 
 or club. This is probably, in the end, a vicious tendency, but 
 it does, at any rate, help to make the city man relatively 
 independent of the social conditions of his immediate neigh- 
 borhood. But the farmer cannot pick and choose in this way. 
 Perhaps it is well that he should not, but this at least shows 
 that he is dependent upon his neighborhood. As a result of 
 this dependence he is compelled, more than any other class of 
 men, to take an interest in neighborhood affairs. The safety 
 and well-being of his own family depend upon his having good 
 neighbors and good moral and social conditions within his 
 neighborhood. This is doubtless a good thing in the end, 
 because it forces him, if he is interested in his family and the 
 future careers of his children, to give time and energy to the 
 work of neighborhood improvement. But temporarily it may 
 be a hardship to the man of clean habits and sound principles, be- 
 cause, before he can get the neighborhood cleaned up, his family 
 may have suffered from the lack of a wholesome social life. 
 
 Whatever may be said upon that point, it can scarcely be 
 denied that the farmer, more than any one else, has reason 
 to take an active interest in the local church, the school, the 
 grange, the library, local sports, and every other agency which 
 may contribute to the social life of the neighborhood. If he 
 allows these things to degenerate, it will profit him little to 
 have come into possession of broad acres, to have grown big 
 crops, and to have built big barns to hold them.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 57 
 
 The Country Church 
 
 Among the agencies for the building up of a wholesome 
 social life in the country the rural church deserves first men- 
 tion; if for no other reason, because it is the oldest. Un- 
 fortunately there has been a close parallelism between the 
 practices of the rural churches in America and the type of 
 agriculture which has prevailed. In the pioneering stage 
 agriculture has consisted mainly in harvesting the soil, and 
 very little attention has been paid to soil building. Similarly, 
 the pioneering churches have too generally followed the plan 
 of harvesting a membership by revivalistic methods and have 
 given too little attention to membership building. A certain 
 pioneer preacher, of picturesque fame, was once reported to 
 have opposed the education of men for the ministry on the 
 ground that there were plenty of well-educated men to be 
 had, and if the Lord wanted an educated minister all he 
 needed to do was to seize upon one of these educated sinners 
 and shake him over the pit until he came to his senses and 
 agreed to preach the gospel. Fortunately this argument did 
 not prevail; but it has looked, at times, as though some of 
 the more popular churches have relied upon a similar policy for 
 the recruiting of their membership. They seem to have relied 
 more upon the making of converts from among mature repro- 
 bates than upon the training of successive generations of boys and 
 girls into good, mutually helpful neighbors; into productive, 
 efficient, prosperous farmers; in short, into good substantial 
 citizens such as build up a community, increase the productivity 
 of its farms, and make it a desirable place in which to live. 
 
 However, things are improving in one respect at least, and 
 the pioneering stage of church activity is giving way to a more 
 permanent and constructive form of church activity. The 
 transition period, however, is a critical one, and in many cases 
 there appears to be an inability on the part of the country 
 church to live through it.
 
 58 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 One serious danger, against which the warning cannot be 
 made too strong, is the snare of a sentimental type of spiritu- 
 ality, a kind of spirituality which wastes itself in mere aesthetic 
 or emotional enjoyment — a kind of spiritual Sybaritism. 
 The church which yields to this temptation, and cultivates a 
 form of religious emotionalism as an end in itself, will fail; 
 and it will deserve to fail because it will be of no use to its 
 members or to the world. The church which realizes that its 
 spirituality must meet the practical test of productivity; 
 that its members must be made better farmers and better 
 citizens generally by reason of their spirituality; that the 
 more religious they are the better crops they will grow, the 
 better stock they will keep, the better care they will give it, 
 and the better neighbors they will be, is the church which will 
 deserve to succeed and in the end will succeed. 
 
 It may be laid down as a general law of rural economy that 
 the productive land in any farming community will tend to 
 pass more and more into the hands of those who can cultivate 
 it most efficiently, — that is, into the hands of the most 
 efficient farmers, — unless it is prevented from doing so by 
 some kind of military force exercised by an aristocratic ruling 
 class, or by an expensive and cumbersome system of trans- 
 ferring land titles. In a democratic country like the United 
 States, where there are few impediments in the way of the 
 free transfer of land, we need look for nothing else. The 
 men who can make the land produce the most will be able to 
 pay the most for it, and in the end they will get it and hold 
 it. This looks simple enough, no doubt, and may not at 
 first seem to signify much, but it is weighted with consequences 
 of the most stupendous and far-reaching character, — conse- 
 quences which it would be suicidal for the church to ignore. 
 
 It means simply and literally that the rural districts are 
 never to be thoroughly Christianized until Christians become, 
 as a rule, better farmers than non-Christians. If it should 
 happen that Christians should really become better farmers
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 59 
 
 than non-Christians, the land will pass more and more into 
 the possession of Christians, and this will become a Christian 
 country, at least so far as the rural districts are concerned. 
 The first result would probably be to paganize the cities, since 
 the non-Christians displaced from the rural districts by their 
 superior competitors would take refuge in the towns. But 
 since nature has a way of exterminating town populations in 
 three or four generations, and the towns have therefore to be 
 continuously recruited from the country, the Christianizing 
 of the rural districts would eventually mean the Christianizing 
 of the towns also. But, vice versa, if non-Christians should 
 become the better farmers, by reason of some false philosophy 
 or supercilious attitude toward material wealth and economic 
 achievement on the part of the church, then this would even- 
 tually become a non-Christian country for the same reason. 
 
 But if, as a third possibility, there should be no perceptible 
 difference between Christians and non-Christians as to their 
 knowledge and adaptability, or as to their general fitness to 
 survive and possess the earth, — fitness, that is, as determined 
 by nature's standard rather than by some artificial standard 
 of our own devising, — the result would be that Christians 
 would remain indefinitely a mere sect in the midst of a 
 non-Christian or nondescript population. The only way of 
 avoiding this rather unsatisfactory situation would be to force 
 the whole population into a nominal Christianity by military 
 force. But, assuming that physical force is not to be used, 
 and that the ordinary economic forces are to operate undis- 
 turbed by such violent means, then the contention will hold. 
 This is what is likely to happen if certain religious leaders 
 should succeed in identifying Christianity with millinery, 
 with emotionalism, with abstract formulas respecting the 
 invisible world, or with mere loyalty to an organization, 
 rather than with rational conduct. By rational conduct is 
 meant that kind of conduct which conserves human energy 
 and enables men to fulfill their mission of subduing the earth
 
 6o THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 and ruling over it, which enables them to survive in the 
 struggle with nature. This is the essence of all genuine 
 morality. 
 
 If the significance of this law is once clearly understood, 
 there is little danger that the church will make the wrong 
 choice or hesitate long in making the right one. It v/ould at 
 once decide to make better farmers of its rural members than 
 non-members can possibly become, since non-members would 
 lack the stimulating influences which go with membership. 
 The only danger is that the churches, some of them at least, 
 will fail to see the point, or refuse to see it, and continue to 
 hug the delusion that they are under the guidance of a higher 
 power than political economy, and may therefore safely 
 ignore its laws. That would be a delusion, because a law is 
 a law, and the words higher and lower have no application. 
 To believe that there may be a conflict between divine law 
 and physical law, or between divine law and economic law, is 
 to believe that this is an irrational universe, at war with 
 itself. Moreover, we must form our conclusions as to the will 
 of God and the duty of man on the basis of the observed facts 
 and uniformities of the world of actual experience; and the 
 laws of political economy are among these observed uni- 
 formities. Our only way of knowing that we are in tune 
 with the Infinite is by observing that we are in tune with the 
 finite; and we cannot possibly be in tune with the finite unless 
 we act in harmony with known physical and economic 
 laws. 
 
 There may be some excellent people who hold that it should 
 not be the mission of the church to make good farmers, but 
 to convert to Christianity those who are already good farmers. 
 Reliance upon the process of conversion may appeal to some 
 as the right policy for the church to pursue; but unless 
 conversion means increased efficiency, greater adaptability, 
 greater fitness for the struggle for existence, better conserva- 
 tion of human energy, the church can scarcely hold the ground
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 6i 
 
 which it wins by that process, but will be continually losing 
 ground through economic competition with the more efl&cient 
 non-Christians. 
 
 But if this is a rational universe, must we not conclude 
 that any religion or any religious movement, however attract- 
 ive it may seem, is proved a false religion or a misdirected 
 religious movement, which does not increase the capacity of 
 its followers to control the forces of nature, to dominate the 
 earth and to rule over it, which does not increase their adapta- 
 bility, which does not make the nation which adopts it a 
 prosperous nation? Conversely, must we not conclude, assum- 
 ing still a rational universe, that that is a true religion which, 
 if adopted by a whole community or a whole nation, would 
 increase the adaptability of that community or that nation 
 and enable it to subjugate the earth and to outgrow both in 
 power and wealth, in comfort and prosperity, the nation which 
 does not adopt it? The alternative to this conclusion would 
 seem to be to fall back upon the concept of an irrational 
 universe, on the belief that this world is Satan's world, in 
 conflict with God's law, instead of God's world in harmony 
 with itself. 
 
 This doctrine is not so revolutionary as it may seem. In- 
 deed, it is so old-fashioned as to be positively reactionary, 
 and that is why it may seem new and revolutionary to those 
 who have forgotten certain old truths. If it be correct to 
 say that the rural districts will become Christianized only in 
 proportion as Christians become better farmers than- non- 
 Christians, it must also be true that whatever permanent 
 success the rural church has had in the past has been due to 
 the same reason, except where force or some other non-economic 
 factor has intervened. Such is, as a matter of fact, the case. 
 In spite of the emphasis of the church upon spirituality, or 
 because of its emphasis upon a sane and wholesome kind of 
 spirituality, men have usually become better farmers under 
 its influence. For, along with certain formalities of belief
 
 62 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 and conduct, there has generally been, for one reason or 
 another, considerable emphasis upon the plain economic 
 virtues of industry, sobriety, thrift, forethought, and mutual 
 helpfulness. Wherever there has been a pure and elevated 
 type of Christianity, there Christians have exhibited these 
 virtues in somewhat greater degree than non-Christians. 
 This simply means that they have wasted less of their energy 
 in vice, dissipation, brawling, or in riotous living, than their 
 non-Christian neighbors. Economizing their energy, they 
 were able to prevail over those who wasted theirs. Some- 
 times, however, war and persecution have been resorted to, 
 to check this economic growth. At other times Christians 
 themselves have resorted to these non-economic methods of 
 gaining ground. But where economic forces have been allowed 
 to work unhindered, and where Christianity has been of a 
 type worth preserving, there it has grown strong by reason of 
 these economic forces alone, and it has not needed to appeal 
 to physical force or to the state to spread itself. 
 
 But is not agricultural competition itself a form of war? 
 Certain misinformed philosophers have fallen into the habit 
 of saying so. There is this difference. In war success de- 
 pends upon the power and the willingness to destroy. In 
 agriculture success depends upon the power and willingness 
 to produce. In war they win who inflict the greatest pain 
 and injury. In agriculture they win who render the greatest 
 utility or service; and to a sober mind this must appear to be 
 a real difference. 
 
 But why confine these observations to agriculture and 
 rural economy? Are not the conditions of economic success 
 the same in the city as in the country? And must not religion 
 prevail over irreligion in the city as well as in the country, 
 provided religion secures a greater conservation of human 
 energy than does irreligion? In a certain very broad sense, 
 or in the long run, — with a great deal of emphasis on the 
 word "long," — that is probably true. But the conditions
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 63 
 
 of individual economic success in cities are so complex, and 
 there are so many opportunities for 
 
 ways that are dark 
 And for tricks that are vain, 
 
 as to obscure though not to obliterate entirely the working of 
 this law under which success depends upon productive service. 
 In agriculture one must wrest a living from nature, and 
 nature cannot be tricked or deluded. But a large element of 
 our city populations —   and generally they are the dominant 
 element — get their living out of other people; and people 
 are easily deceived. Instead of laboring to make two blades 
 of grass grow where one had grown before, their business is 
 to make two dollars emerge from other people's pockets where 
 one had emerged before. Neither impudence, nor a smooth 
 tongue, nor a distinguished manner, nor lurid rhetoric ever 
 yet made an acre of land yield a larger crop of grain; but 
 they have frequently made an office, a sanctum, a platform, 
 and even a pulpit yield a larger crop of dollars. They who 
 get their living out of other people must, of necessity, interest 
 those other people; and men are so constituted that queer 
 and abnormal things are more interesting to them than the 
 usual and the normal. They will pay money for the privilege 
 of seeing a two-headed calf, when a normal calf would not 
 interest them at all. The dime-museum freak makes money 
 by showing to our interested gaze his physical abnormalities. 
 He is an economic success in that he makes a good living by 
 it, but it does not follow that he is the type which is fitted to 
 survive, or which religion ought to try to produce. Other 
 men, going under the names of artists, novelists, or dramatists 
 of certain nameless schools, make very good livings by reveal- 
 ing to interested minds their mental and moral abnormalities. 
 They, like the dime-museum freaks, are economic successes 
 in that they make good livings, but it does not follow that 
 they are the type of man fitted to survive, or that religion
 
 64 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 ought to try to produce. This type of economic success is 
 an urban rather than a rural one, and it flourishes under 
 urban rather than rural conditions. So long as it flourishes 
 there is no reason why religious men who conserve their 
 energies for productive service should succeed in crowding 
 them out of existence. The only chance of attaining that 
 end will be for religion to give people a saner appreciation of 
 things, teach them to be more interested in normal calves 
 than in two-headed calves, in normal men than in dime- 
 museum freaks, in sane writers than in certain degenerate 
 types now holding the attention of the gaping crowd. If 
 this can be brought about, then it will result that the religious 
 type of man, even in cities, will more and more prevail over 
 the irreligious, provided the religion itself is worth preserv- 
 ing, — that is, provided it becomes a positive factor in the 
 conservation of human energy. 
 
 As has already been suggested, there is a great deal more 
 involved in the making of a good farmer than in the teaching 
 of scientific agriculture. Mr. Benjamin Kidd, in his Social 
 Evolution, has done well to emphasize the importance of moral 
 qualities as compared with intellectual achievements. In 
 the first place, intellectual achievements, or their results, can 
 only be utilized where there is a sane and wholesome morality 
 as a basis. In the second place, the results of the intellectual 
 achievement of one race or of one man may be borrowed freely 
 by the rest of the world, provided the rest of the world have 
 the moral qualities which will enable them to profit by so 
 doing; whereas moral qualities cannot be borrowed from one 
 race by another. Japan, for example, could easily borrow 
 from European nations the art of modern warfare, together 
 with its instruments of destruction; but she did not borrow, 
 and could not borrow, that splendid courage and discipline 
 which enabled her to utilize so efficiently the inventions 
 which she borrowed. So one nation can easily borrow farm 
 machinery and modern methods of agriculture, but it cannot
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 65 
 
 borrow the moral qualities which will enable it to profit by 
 them. Saying nothing of mental alertness and willingness to 
 learn, which might be classed as mental rather than moral, 
 it could not borrow that patient spirit of toil, nor that sturdy 
 self-reliance, nor that stern and unrelenting sense of duty, 
 nor that forethought which sacrifices present enjoyment to 
 future profit, nor that spirit of mutual helpfulness, all of 
 which are essential to any effective rural work. Again, a 
 nation cannot easily borrow a sane and sober reason, a willing- 
 ness to trust to its own care in preparing the soil rather than 
 to the blessing of the priest upon the fields ; nor can it borrow 
 a general spirit of enterprise which ventures out upon plans 
 and projects which approve themselves to the reason. And, 
 finally, it cannot borrow that love for the soil, and the great 
 outdoors, and the growing crops, and the domestic animals, 
 which marks every successful rural people. These things 
 have to be developed on the soil, to be bred into the bone and 
 fiber of the people, and they are the first requisites for good 
 farming. After them comes scientific knowledge. In the 
 development of such moral qualities as these the church has 
 been, and may become again, the most effective agency. 
 
 Because of such moral qualities as these, the Puritans were 
 able to subdue the New England forest and to build up a 
 great rural civilization on the basis of a sterile soil and an 
 inhospitable climate, and without any great amount of scien- 
 tific knowledge, though as compared with other communities 
 their knowledge of agriculture was not inferior. They took 
 their work seriously, as befitted those who had such a task 
 before them as the building of a wilderness empire. Their 
 unbending sense of duty and their thrift and foresight have 
 become proverbial, as have their keenness, their alertness, 
 and their humor. But their mutual helpfulness, though less 
 proverbial, is attested by their log-rollings, their house rais- 
 ings, their husking bees, and the like, making even their 
 pleasures bring them useful results, both material and social,
 
 66 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 — material in the sense of having something more substantial 
 than headaches to show for their festivities, social in the 
 sense of having the strongest of all bonds of social sym- 
 pathy, namely cooperative labor, as the basis of their social 
 enjoyment. 
 
 It is said that the great problem of the country church 
 to-day is that of an adequate support of the ministry. How 
 can the ministry be adequately supported? One obvious 
 answer is to reduce the number of churches, where there are 
 too many churches for the community to support. This is a 
 good answer; perhaps that is the easiest way, but it is the 
 second-best way. Another way is to build up the community 
 in order that it may furnish adequate membership and ade- 
 quate support for all the churches. This may be a harder 
 way, but where it is not impossible it is the best. 
 
 There was a time when the finance ministers of European 
 governments were hard pressed to provide a revenue for the 
 expenses of the state. They eventually found that the best 
 way to get adequate support for the state was to increase the 
 prosperity of the country. When they began studying how 
 to make the country prosperous, the science of national 
 economy, or political economy, was born. When they who 
 are charged with the task of raising money for the support of 
 the churches and the ministry awaken to the fact that the 
 best way to secure adequate support is to make the parish 
 more prosperous, the science of parish economy will be born. 
 This will be, for our rural churches, as fortunate an event as 
 the birth of political economy was for modern governments. 
 
 Of course there should be continued emphasis, in the teach- 
 ings of the church and the pulpit, upon the plain economic 
 virtues of industry, sobriety, thrift, practical scientific knowl- 
 edge, and mutual helpfulness; but much more emphasis than 
 heretofore should be placed on the last two. Practical scien- 
 tific knowledge of agriculture and mutual helpfulness in the 
 promotion of the welfare of the parish are absolutely essential,
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 67 
 
 and unless the churches can help in this direction they will 
 remain poor and inadequately supported. For those who 
 think that the church should hold itself above the work of 
 preaching the kind of conduct that pays, or the kind of life 
 that succeeds, the economic law stated above is the strongest 
 argument. 
 
 If the kingdom of God is a kingdom of service, these efforts 
 are quite consistent with the mission of the church. If it 
 will seek to serve the community in this way, seeking first to 
 be of service, all the other things — that is, sufficient wealth, 
 membership, esteem, etc. — will be added unto it. If, how- 
 ever, it seeks first merely to make proselytes, to increase its 
 membership, or to get money, it will have no reason to expect 
 or deserve permanent success. 
 
 Organized efforts in the churches for the study of parish 
 economy, for gaining more and more scientific knowledge of 
 agriculture, for the practical kind of Christian brotherhood 
 which shows itself in the form of mutual helpfulness and 
 cooperation, in the form of decreasing jealousy and suspicion, 
 in the form of greater public spirit, greater alertness for 
 opportunities of promoting the public good and building up 
 the parish and the community, in helping young men and 
 young women to get started in productive work and in home 
 building, in helping the children to get the kind of training 
 which will enable them to make a better living in the parish, 
 — efforts of this kind will eventually result in better support 
 for the churches themselves, because the community will 
 then be able to support the church more liberally, and, what 
 is more important, it will then see that the church is worth 
 supporting. 
 
 This ideal of a church which makes itself a factor in building 
 up a community, even in material things, is not an impossible 
 ideal. It has been realized in the past and it can be realized 
 again. An illustrious example is that of Jean Frederic Oberlin, 
 the pastor of the Steinthal. Numberless other examples can
 
 68 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 be found in the religious orders of the medieval church, — 
 examples of communities which were made rich and prosperous 
 by the teachings and the example of self-sacrificing leaders. 
 This ideal will, however, never be realized by a church which 
 affects to despise this world and the things of this world, 
 which regards the world itself as lost, and conceives of its own 
 mission as consisting in saving as many individual souls as 
 possible from the wreck. 
 
 If the church will assume that the world is not going to 
 perdition, that it is going to last for a long time, and that it 
 will eventually be a Christian or a non-Christian world, accord- 
 ing as Christians or non-Christians prove themselves more 
 fit to possess it, — according as they are better farmers, bfetter 
 business men, better mechanics, better politicians, — then 
 the church will turn its attention more and more to the mak- 
 ing of better and more progressive farmers, business men, 
 mechanics, and politicians. 
 
 What is Social Service ? 
 
 Much is being said nowadays about social service as the 
 mission of the church. That is, in itself, an excellent thing; 
 but there is a tendency to take too narrow a view of social 
 service, just as there was formerly a tendency to take too 
 narrow a view of spirituality. The result is that as much cant 
 is being preached in the name of social service as ever was 
 preached in the name of spirituality. This is to be expected 
 of those who do not realize that all productive work, such as 
 growing corn, wheat, or cattle, to feed the world, or growing 
 wool or cotton to clothe the world, is social service; and that 
 the best social service which the average man can performx is 
 to do his regular work well, — to grow good crops if he is 
 a farmer, and to bring up his family in habits of industry, 
 sobriety, thrift, reliability, and mutual helpfulness; that 
 anything, in short, is social service which builds up the country 
 and makes it strong, powerful, progressive, and prosperous.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCL\L LIFE 69 
 
 The church which preaches and teaches social service in 
 this broad and constructive sense will become a powerful 
 factor in the progress and prosperity of the country, and is 
 not likely to lack for adequate support. 
 
 The dependence of the farmer upon his social surroundings, 
 as previously pointed out, gives the country church a unique 
 opportunity for real service outside the field of agricultural 
 production. The organizations which can supply the farmer 
 and his family with an agreeable social life will supply one of 
 the greatest needs of rural people and will deserve their sup- 
 port. If the church can do this, there need be no rival organ- 
 ization spring up to divide the loyalty and support of the 
 people. If the church does not do it, some other organiza- 
 tion will. The need is too great to be left unsatisfied, and will 
 create the means for its own satisfaction. 
 
 In order that the country church may contribute its share 
 toward supplying opportunities for a wholesome and agree- 
 able social life, it is not necessary that it undertake an elaborate 
 program of entertainments, concerts, gymnastic classes, etc., 
 though all these things are good in their places. One thing, 
 and only one thing, is essential, though it is sometimes difficult 
 to attain and is always capable of infinite variation. It is 
 essential that people with a common interest should occa- 
 sionally be brought together, that is, within speaking distance 
 of one another. If that can be done, social life will take care 
 of itself. But it is not always easy to find a common interest. 
 In some times and places theological speculation, in others 
 political or scientific speculation, has so occupied men's minds 
 as to give them an all-absorbing theme of common interest. 
 When they came together their common interests made them 
 agreeable company for one another and gave them ample 
 opportunity for high converse on great themes. Where there 
 is no common and absorbing interest of this kind something 
 must be found or created, otherwise conversation will revolve 
 interminably around such themes as the weather and crops
 
 70 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 But it is not at all necessary that conversation should center 
 in speculative themes, either theological, political, or scientific. 
 Problems of parish or neighborhood economy, of rural beau- 
 tification, are large enough to occupy the time and attention 
 of several generations. The problems of the beautification 
 of rural roads, bridges, schoolhouses and grounds, church 
 grounds, etc., are enough to occupy the spare time and atten- 
 tion of rural America for a hundred years to come. A neigh- 
 borhood which becomes possessed with a common passion 
 for beautification will never lack for social life. The church 
 which can arouse such an interest as this, or any other equally 
 noble interest, will have gone a long way toward solving 
 the problem of a wholesome and agreeable social life in the 
 country. 
 
 But the well-known and regularly established means of 
 social grace must not be overlooked. Most people like to 
 eat and drink, and when they can be brought together around 
 a common table, they have, in a small way at least, every 
 essential of social -life; that is, you have your people together 
 with a common interest. From this as a beginning there is 
 possible a vast widening of the social life. It can scarcely 
 be regarded as profane to suggest that we have, in this ele- 
 mentary social principle, one of the great facts of life which 
 are symbolized in the Holy Communion. Again, there are 
 the common social amusements and recreations. Of particular 
 value for rural communities is choral singing, the highest form 
 of social amusement known to man. Where a group of people 
 sing together for their own delectation, rather than for that 
 of an audience, we have one of the best possible solvents of 
 private differences and idiosyncrasies, and one of the highest 
 possible means of promoting a sense of brotherhood and soli- 
 darity, as well as one of the oldest and most primitive forms 
 of social communion. Even dancing is not to be despised 
 as a means of grace, where it can be carried on in the proper 
 spirit.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RUR.\L SOCIAL LIFE 71 
 
 The Example of Denmark 
 
 The most remarkable example of agricultural regeneration 
 in modern times is Denmark. In 1864 she was facing national 
 ruin. As the result of a disastrous war, itself a heavy drain 
 upon the country, she had lost some of her best provinces. In 
 addition to this she was obliged to pay a heavy war indemnity. 
 Finally, and worst of all, her German market was cut off by 
 the German tariff wall. But as one result of this accumulation 
 of calamities there was developed an intense feeling of national 
 patriotism and solidarity. Out of this feeling grew a number 
 of cooperative measures for the rebuilding of the country, 
 especially in the field of agriculture. Within fifty years 
 Denmark became the most prosperous country on the con- 
 tinent of Europe, and stands to-day as a monument to the 
 efficiency of the spirit of intelligent cooperation. It is a 
 cooperation not forced upon the people by a government, but 
 a spontaneous cooperation growing out of a general spirit 
 of patriotism and mutual helpfulness. Every student who 
 is intimately acquainted with the history of this movement 
 agrees that the popular recreations and festivities have been 
 powerful factors in creating this spirit, and that the popular 
 songs and hymns, and the habit of singing them together on 
 all occasions, have given to these recreations and festivities 
 a patriotic and religious character which is to be found nowhere 
 else to-day on so large a scale. 
 
 Every college student is familiar with the fact that when 
 a body of students unites upon a common interest, like an 
 athletic contest, there is not the slightest difficulty in getting 
 them together, and when they do get together there is not the 
 slightest difficulty in keeping things going. Even singing 
 seems to be a perfectly natural and fitting form of expression. 
 Precisely the same principle has been seen in operation on a 
 larger scale by any one who has lived through a great national 
 crisis, like a war. When the people are intensely interested
 
 72 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 in the same thing their gatherings are never dull. Singing 
 together is a natural way of expressing the common feeling, 
 and no one questions its propriety. 
 
 The Danish people have demonstrated that it is possible 
 for a whole people to become as thoroughly united and as 
 enthusiastic upon the common interest of agricultural pro- 
 duction and national upbuilding as it is for a body of college 
 students to become upon the subject of an athletic contest, 
 or for a nation to become on the subject of war. The church 
 which can give its people or its neighborhood a great and noble 
 enthusiasm Hke this will have no difficulty in creating a vibrat- 
 ing social life. Then it will not seem out of place, or bad 
 taste, for the people to sing whenever they get together.^ 
 The absence of any common enthusiasm means a disunited, 
 egoistic, disintegrating social life, compared with which even 
 war, horrible as it is, may be the lesser evil if it results in uniting 
 the people in a common interest and a common cause. Since 
 Denmark has shown that a people may develop a common 
 enthusiasm for the arts of peace, it ought to furnish a basis 
 for a constructive faith in its possibility elsewhere. If the 
 church is not to be the conservator of that constructive kind 
 of faith, where shall we look for it? 
 
 The Country School 
 
 The country school, though a younger institution than the 
 country church, is regarded by many as the more powerful and 
 influential of the two. It has certain manifest advantages, 
 chief among which is the fact that it belongs to the whole 
 community instead of a part of it. Therefore it can be made 
 the center of the life of the whole neighborhood more easily 
 than the church can, especially where denominational differ- 
 ences tend to divide the community. On the other hand, 
 
 1 Incidentally it may be mentioned that many of the oldest recorded 
 hymns of the Indo-European branch of the human race, those of the Rig- 
 Veda, are agricultural hymns.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 73 
 
 the fact that the school is a territorial institution — that is, 
 that it belongs to all the people living within a certain terri- 
 tory — puts it at a disadvantage as compared with the church 
 in a neighborhood where the majority of the voters are un- 
 progressive and unenlightened. In such a neighborhood the 
 school is likely to be of little use, except in so far as it is com- 
 pelled by higher state authorities to fulfill its function properly. 
 But if the church, being a voluntary institution, should happen 
 to have in its membership the more enlightened and pro- 
 gressive part of the community, it may begin a work of social 
 regeneration which would be impossible for the school. But, 
 of course, if the church should be in the control of the least 
 intelligent and least progressive part of the community, as 
 is sometimes the case, it possesses all the disadvantages and 
 none of the advantages of the school. 
 
 The country school is, of course, primarily an educational 
 institution, and as such must give its attention mainly to 
 instruction in certain conventional subjects which the world 
 has come to regard as the necessary basis of an education, or 
 as the essentials of a preparation for life. Remembering 
 always that every kind of productive work is social service, 
 we need have no difficulty in seeing that the first duty of the 
 school is to fit its students for individual success in some line 
 of production, and that the line for which the rural school 
 is best fitted to prepare its pupils is agricultural production. 
 But inasmuch as our present purpose is not to discuss the 
 general problem of rural education, but only to consider how 
 the rural school may be made a factor in developing a more 
 wholesome and agreeable social life in the country, we need 
 not consider the rural-school curriculum. 
 
 There is already an admirable interest in the school as a 
 means of developing patriotism. The flag raisings, the cele- 
 bration of national holidays, the reading of patriotic literature, 
 the memorizing of national classics, all are excellent, and show 
 how thoroughly awake our people are to some of the broader
 
 74 
 
 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 aspects of the problem. Much remains yet to be done, how- 
 ever, in giving definiteness and concreteness to the patriotic 
 sentiments which we are trying to develop. It is one thing 
 to develop patriotism as an abstract virtue; it is quite a dif- 
 ferent thing to develop it as a passion for a definite, concrete, 
 national achievement. At all times and in all lands the desire 
 for victory in war has been the most powerful stimulus to 
 patriotism. That gives the people something definite to 
 strive for, — a concrete achievement around which patriotic 
 sentiments may crystallize. That "peace hath her victories 
 no less renowned than war," we doubtless believe in a general 
 sort of way; but until our belief becomes particular, and we 
 come to center our desires upon some definite productive 
 achievement in the arts of peace, we shall never be able to 
 arouse the patriotic passion as effectively in peace as in war. 
 This ought to be especially clear to students who will have 
 observed that school loyalty, merely as an abstract virtue, is 
 difficult to develop without some definite achievement like 
 an athletic contest or a debate, or even a spelHng match, to 
 be carried through. For our country schools, as well as for 
 every other social agency in the country, one great problem, 
 therefore, must be to particularize the patriotic sentiments 
 of the community and give them a definite, productive aim. 
 
 People Generally Get What They Want Most 
 
 When a common or universal passion for productive achieve- 
 ment is once definitely aroused in a community, the achieve- 
 ment will follow as a matter of course. Any community can 
 have as beautiful a countryside as it wants, provided it wants 
 it seriously enough, and with sufficient unanimity, to spend 
 the time and energy necessary to beautify it. Any community 
 can have as moral a community or as prosperous a community 
 as it wants, under the same conditions. Conversely, the lack 
 of a common desire or a common social interest means failure 
 in the arts of peace as surely as in those of war.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 75 
 
 The desire to make the village the most beautiful village 
 in the world, or to make one's township the most beautiful 
 township, or to make it the greatest corn- or cotton- or wheat- 
 or potato-growing township, or to make its schools the best in 
 the world, or to produce the finest cattle or horses or hogs in 
 the world, — any really useful purpose, in fact, if it will unite 
 the people and call out a common and universal enthusiasm, 
 — will do more to dignify the social life of the village or town- 
 ship than all the purposeless social entertainments that could 
 be invented. A social life is not created by merely saying. Go 
 to, now, let us be sociable. It is created by having a common 
 purpose, worthy enough to commend itself to all right-minded 
 people, and large enough to demand their attention, their 
 time, and their hard work. The young men and women in 
 particular, of our race, have never yet failed to respond to a 
 call to hard work and self-sacrifice, when the work and the 
 sacrifice were for an object of common good which they really 
 thought worth achieving. 
 
 Next to a common interest and enthusiasm, the most im- 
 portant factors in the creation of a wholesome and agreeable 
 social life in the country are opportunities for meeting and 
 ease of communication. Aside from all the purely religious 
 services rendered by the church, the mere fact that it brings 
 people together in the room once a week is of immeasurable 
 value. The most civilizing influence in the world is contact 
 of man with man. Men cannot habitually meet together and 
 look into one another's eyes without developing some kind of 
 a sense of unity; nor can they live entirely separate and apart 
 from one another without becoming suspicious, morose, and 
 unsympathetic. The school, likewise, in addition to its purely 
 educational functions, renders a service by the mere fact 
 that it brings the juvenile population together day after day. 
 
 In addition to these regular occasions for meeting, there 
 are the extraordinary occasions, such as national holidays 
 and special rural festivities. Unfortunately we have, in this
 
 76 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 country, failed to live up to our opportunities in the way of 
 rural sports and festivities. In earlier days the corn huskings, 
 barn raisings, quiltings, and a multitude of other occasions 
 of the same general description supplied the need for whole- 
 some recreation. Now we have outgrown the need for those 
 precise forms of social gathering, and have not, as yet, devel- 
 oped anything satisfactory to take their place. We may say 
 distinctly, therefore, that here is one of the unsolved problems 
 of American rural life, though a partial solution has already 
 been found in some sections of the country. In the old- 
 fashioned Southern barbecue, which still survives in certain 
 favored communities; in the Old Settlers' Day, which is 
 celebrated in some communities of the central West; and in 
 the Old Home Week of New England, we have examples of 
 rural festivities which illustrate what may be done in any 
 community where the whole countryside turns out for a hol- 
 iday. Doubtless there are numerous other examples in other 
 parts of the country. In some of the older countries the 
 number and character of these festivals constitute an attractive 
 feature of rural life. 
 
 The Tough Neighborhood 
 
 One difficulty with us is that we are not yet far enough 
 removed from the backwoods stage to have entirely eliminated 
 the rowdy element from our rural population. This element 
 is frequently so much in evidence on these occasions, especially 
 in backwoods neighborhoods, as to keep the more decent and 
 self-respecting element away, thus destroying the value of 
 the festival. A few generations of severe competition will 
 doubtless give the advantage more and more to the sober, 
 steady-going, self-respecting element, especially where the 
 land is highly desirable. The restless, turbulent, rowdy ele- 
 ment being crowded out, one of the greatest drawbacks to a 
 wholesome social life in the country will have disappeared. 
 This process is noticeably taking place in the best farming
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 77 
 
 regions, where there is something to attract a more progress- 
 ive class of people. It has not yet shown itself so clearly 
 in poorer regions, where there is little to attract a superior 
 type of men and women. 
 
 In fact, it is an open question whether the poorest land is 
 not destined to remain ultimately in the possession of a poorer 
 type of man. A selective process seems to be going on, which 
 tends to bring about such a result. Where the land is fertile 
 and the opportunities for agricultural enterprise are good, 
 the intelligent and progressive youths are induced to remain 
 on the farm. They will be able to beat the less intelligent in 
 competition and to buy the land away from them. At the 
 same time, such lands attract the more intelligent and pro- 
 gressive farmers who are looking for a place in which to locate. 
 An unintelligent and unprogressive farmer stands a poor show 
 in such a place. The other class will offer so much for land 
 that he will not be able to buy it. If he owns it already, they 
 will offer him so much for it that he will generally yield to 
 the pressure sooner or later, and sell out. On the other hand, 
 where the land is poor and opportunities meager, the more 
 capable of the growing youths tend to move away, so long at 
 least as there are better opportunities to be found elsewhere. 
 Again, the men who are crowded off the richer lands will some- 
 times drift toward those cheaper lands where they do not have 
 to bid against competent, but only against incompetent, 
 farmers. Eventually, however, it is possible that the com- 
 petition even here may become so severe as to drive out the 
 undesirable element. 
 
 The Standard of Living 
 
 The suggestion that the best lands tend to get into the hands 
 of the best farmers needs qualification. It sometimes looks 
 as though they tended to get into the hands of the farmers with 
 the cheapest standard of living. It has often been noticed 
 and remarked upon that foreign-born farmers are buying out
 
 78 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 our native American farmers, not because the foreigners are 
 better farmers, but because they can Hve more cheaply and 
 thus accumulate capital for investment more rapidly. This, 
 it is claimed, is merely a triumph of a lower over a higher 
 standard of living, and indicates a tendency toward keeping 
 farm life on a low level. 
 
 Against this pessimistic view there are two arguments. In 
 the first place, during the entire latter third of the nineteenth 
 century agriculture was relatively unprofitable in this country. 
 This is the period when the displacement of American-born 
 by foreign-born farmers was so noticeable. For an American 
 of good education and business capacity, who was therefore 
 fitted for business or professional life, there is no doubt that 
 during that period the city offered better opportunities than 
 the country, on the average. The foreigner, unless he were 
 a man of unusual education and culture, had to take his choice 
 between farming on the one hand, and some form of hand 
 labor on the other. To him farming was frequently the only 
 attractive opportunity. The reason the American farmer 
 was willing to sell out at a price which the foreigner could pay 
 was not altogether because the foreigner could make the farm 
 pay better, but because the American had opportunities in 
 the city which the foreigner did not have, not having yet 
 become sufficiently adjusted to the conditions of American 
 life. Now that agriculture is becoming more prosperous, 
 so that the American-born farmer may have as good oppor- 
 tunities in the country as in the city, it remains to be seen 
 whether he can be displaced by the foreigner, that is, whether 
 he will generally be willing to sell out at a price which the 
 foreigner can afford to pay, or whether he will not be willing 
 and able to pay as much for land as the foreigner will. In the 
 second place, a cheap standard of living is not necessarily an 
 efficient one. A more expensive standard, provided it is 
 rational, may be more efficient in competition than a cheaper 
 one. An expensive standard of living, which includes forms
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 79 
 
 of expenditure that minister to mere pride and ostentation, 
 or to unwholesome appetites, and does not add to one's intel- 
 ligence or working capacity, will handicap one in competition 
 with men whose standards of living do not include these 
 irrational forms of expenditure. But an expensive standard 
 of living, which includes only such forms of expenditure as 
 maintain strength and working capacity, stimulate mental 
 energy and alertness, and minister to the higher intellectual, 
 social, and aesthetic desires, will never handicap any one in 
 competition with men of lower standards. One result of a 
 competition among standards of living will be, in the long 
 run, to rationalize the standards, eliminating those forms of 
 expenditure which add nothing, and preserving those which 
 add something, to efficiency. This will come about through 
 the greater success of those families whose standards of living 
 approach most nearly to rationality, and through the lesser 
 success of those families whose standards of living depart 
 most widely from rationality. When farming becomes suffi- 
 ciently profitable to furnish opportunities approximately as 
 good as those furnished by the businesses and professions of 
 the city, there is no reason why farmers with a high standard 
 of living should be displaced by those with a low stan- 
 dard, provided the high standard is National, and not one 
 which ministers to enervating appetites or mere vanity and 
 ostentation. 
 
 Rural Sports and Recreations 
 
 Every hard-working student will easily understand how 
 essential a reasonable amount of recreation is to the main- 
 tenance of a high state of mental and physical efficiency. He 
 will then appreciate the statement that a rational standard 
 of living must include a reasonable expenditure of time or 
 money on recreations: Just what is a reasonable expenditure 
 for this purpose may not be easy to determine, though there 
 need be no disagreement as to the general principle that too
 
 8o THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 little recreation, which produces dullness of body and mind, 
 is as bad as too much, which is mere dissipation or waste of 
 time, energy, and money. Nor need there be any disagree- 
 ment as to the principle that the recreations should be such 
 as to appeal to all members of the community. While econ- 
 omists generally approve a division of labor in industry, there 
 are few who will approve a kind of division of labor which is 
 too frequently found in rural communities, where most of the 
 men work all the time and never play, while a few loafers 
 amuse themselves all the time and never work. 
 
 Rural sports are the natural adjunct of rural festivals as a 
 means of maintaining a wholesome and agreeable social life 
 in the country. Owing to a natural excitability and tendency 
 to excess, Americans have found it difficult to develop dis- 
 tinctive rural sports as a permanent and dignified institution 
 of rural life, except in a few favored localities. Fox hunting 
 and horse racing tend, in this country, to be spoiled as rural 
 sports by their affectation by urban magnates in the one case 
 and livery-stable toughs in the other. Nothing is finer and 
 more dignified than for a group of neighboring, well-to-do 
 farmers to unite for a day's hunting, when the purpose is to 
 rid the country of vermin; but when a group of townsmen, 
 who have learned to ride under a roof in a professional riding 
 school, proceed to the country and advertise their solvency 
 by chasing a timid fox across the fields, the sight is not cal- 
 culated to inspire admiration. Nor is there any sport more 
 fitting than for a group of horse-breeding farmers to meet 
 for the purpose of testing the speed of their colts in a fair and 
 open competition. It is only by such open competition that 
 successful horse breeding is made possible. But when horse 
 racing degenerates into a mere vaudeville "stunt," or, as is 
 more frequently the case, into a mere opportunity for a group 
 of professional gamblers from the purlieus of the livery stables, 
 who have been initiated into the mysteries of race-track man- 
 agement, to enrich themselves at the expense of the unini-
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 8i 
 
 tiated, it is not too much to say that it has lost its virtue as 
 the inspirer of a wholesome and agreeable social life in the 
 country. 
 
 In view of the well-kno^^Ti excitability of the American 
 temperament, and its tendency to excess, it is important that 
 rural sport in this country should be of a character which does 
 not lend itself readily to extreme specialization; otherwise 
 it will tend to drift into the hands of speciaUsts, who do the 
 playing while the public looks on. This produces a spectacle 
 rather than a sport. It is also important that there should 
 be considerable variety in the forms of sport, in order that as 
 many as possible should be able to participate. Of particular 
 importance, however, is the requirement that these sports 
 should fit into the seasonal character of rural work. City 
 work is so uniform that the time for recreation can be evenly 
 distributed throughout the year. Short hours with regular 
 weekly, biweekly, or monthly half holidays give the city worker 
 ample time for wholesome recreation. But since in every 
 farming country there are rush seasons, when short hours and 
 half holidays would mean a loss of crops, it is obvious that 
 recreation time cannot be so evenly diffused. To make up 
 for this, it is desirable that during the seasons when work is 
 slack there should be regular periods of recreation, and games 
 which need not be crowded into a single afternoon. 
 
 This suggests the need also of regular annual festival occa- 
 sions, suited to each section of the country and its type of 
 agriculture, when there can be a general relaxation from the 
 strenuous toil of the rush seasons. In anticipation of such a 
 period of jollity, the grinding fatigue of the busy season is 
 borne with more patience, particularly by the young people, 
 and the work is done more vigorously because more cheerfully. 
 Again, there is the possibility of uniting social pleasure with 
 rural work to a somewhat greater degree than is now done. 
 If the spirit which showed itself among our ancestors in the 
 barn raisings, logrollings, and similar occasions could be re-
 
 82 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 stored, it is possible that the present generation could get a 
 great deal of social pleasure out of the threshing season and 
 other occasions of a similar character. This would seem to 
 be the natural time for the harvest home celebration, which 
 has been so important an event in all old rural civilizations. 
 In former days, however, as the writer can testify, threshing 
 was such prodigiously hard work, and a great deal of it was 
 so dusty and disagreeable, as to stifle any spirit of jollification 
 which might otherwise have arisen. But with the more power- 
 ful engines and more highly improved machinery of the present, 
 the hardest and most disagreeable part of the work of thresh- 
 ing has been eliminated. Under such conditions it is at least 
 a theoretical possibility that the threshing season in any neigh- 
 borhood might be made a festival occasion, to be participated 
 in by women as well as by men — by priest, parson, and school- 
 ma'am as well as by the farmers themselves. This, however, 
 is only by way of suggestion. 
 
 The Grange 
 
 Of all the organizations which are now contributing on a 
 large scale to the social life of rural America, the grange is, at 
 the present time, one of the most effective, partly, perhaps, 
 because it is organized for the purpose. It is, however, some- 
 what exclusive, in that it serves the social needs of its own 
 membership rather than those of the whole community. Even 
 more exclusive in character are the lodges of the various secret 
 and fraternal orders, which also serve the social needs of their 
 own members. This brings us face to face with one of the 
 most difficult problems in the whole field of rural social econ- 
 omy, — Is it possible to maintain a social life except through 
 some agency of selection and exclusion? In aristocratic 
 countries, where class distinctions are of ancient and historic 
 standing, the social life runs pretty definitely within class 
 lines, but within those boundaries it runs freely. In demo- 
 cratic America, where caste and hereditary class distinctions
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 83 
 
 are not allowed, we have not yet become adjusted to the new 
 situation, especially in the rural districts; and there is a strong 
 tendency toward the formation of groups on the basis of likes 
 and dislikes, and for the social life to run within these groups. 
 This is clearly a long step in advance of the caste system, or 
 of the stratification of society according to aristocratic prin- 
 ciples, in that the grouping is based upon something besides 
 the accident of birth; but it falls short of a thoroughly demo- 
 cratic ideal, according to which social life ought to run freely 
 without regard to the boundaries of class, creed, or fraternal 
 order. This ideal, however, has not yet been realized, for 
 those countries and communities where hereditary aristocracy 
 is least in evidence are the places where secret societies and 
 fraternal orders are most highly developed and most influen- 
 tial. Doubtless they furnish a protection against the dis- 
 agreeable obtrusiveness of the mob element in our aggressive 
 democracy; but there is danger that their very exclusiveness 
 should breed a spirit of snobbishness. 
 
 Shall Rural People Set Their Own Standards, or Shall They 
 
 Imitate City People? 
 
 But all the organizations and agencies which contribute 
 to the social life of rural communities will fall short of their 
 highest possibilities unless they make rural life socially self- 
 supporting, and independent of the standards and fashions 
 of the city; unless, in short, they give to the social life of the 
 country a character and dignity of its own, instead of being 
 a bad copy of city life. So long as country life lacks this 
 distinctive character and dignity, so long as country people 
 look to the cities for their standards of dress, their social 
 habits, and their ideals of propriety, so long will rural social 
 life remain unsatisfactory. The domination of the city over 
 the country is, in last analysis, a mental or spiritual domina- 
 tion. It will end when country people are able to set their 
 own standards, when they stop trying to be city people, or
 
 84 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 to be like city people. When they develop a reasonable pride 
 in the fact that they are country people, and in their country 
 dress, country habits, country customs; and when this pride 
 is justified by the inherent sanity and simple, unostentatious 
 dignity of their lives, — then we shall have a rural civiliza- 
 tion worthy of the name. Unless this result is achieved, many 
 of the so-called rural improvements will merely serve to link 
 the country to the city and still further increase the domina- 
 tion of the latter over the former. If rural free delivery 
 does no more than to bring to the farmer the daily paper from 
 the city, with its garish advertisements and its neurotic sen- 
 sationalism, and if this should develop among country people 
 a desire for those forms of excitement which city people seem 
 to like and to be willing to pay for, the result will be not to 
 diminish but to increase the lure of the city. When the quiet 
 and serenity of country life are referred to in such terms as 
 lonesomeness and monotony, and the rural free delivery is 
 regarded merely as a means of relieving that lonesomeness and 
 monotony, the symptoms are not favorable for the develop- 
 ment of a wholesome rural life. But if rural free delivery, 
 like the rural telephone, is a means of linking one country 
 neighborhood with another, of exchanging ideas among country 
 people as well as between city and country, if it results in 
 the development of an esprit de corps among country people, 
 and enables them to develop a social life of their own, all these 
 things will help in the building of a worthy rural civilization, 
 and in making country life satisfying and agreeable. 
 
 This is a factor of great financial as well as social importance. 
 When the city contains everything which country people 
 really want, then the city will be the place where country 
 people will go to spend their money. If a farmer becomes 
 prosperous enough to retire from work, he will go to town to 
 live; he will buy a lot and build a house in the town and spend 
 his time and his money there. But if the country contains 
 the things which country people want, then the country is
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 85 
 
 the place where they will go to spend their money. If the 
 farmers who wish to retire from active work would spend in 
 the country, on their own farms, for example, the money 
 which would be necessary to buy and maintain residences in 
 the towns and cities, it would not take very long to make the 
 country a most attractive place of residence. Schools, 
 churches, library facilities, plumbing, and steam heat can all 
 be had in the country as well as in the city. But if people 
 cultivate a liking for the noises, the electric displays, the 
 large billboards, and other similar delectations of the cities, 
 the country can furnish few attractions of this kind to com- 
 pete with the city. Country people will continue to move 
 cityward, seeking a chance to spend their money for the things 
 of their choice. 
 
 It may be supposed that if the country should furnish the 
 things which city people really want and are willing to pay 
 for, it would contribute to the financial prosperity of the 
 country; but this conclusion must not be too hastily reached. 
 It must not be imagined that a mere willingness on the part 
 of certain townspeople to spend a part of their time and money 
 in the country is in itself a mark of genuine appreciation of 
 country life, or that it tends to make real farmers, who have 
 to make their living at farming, more appreciative of rural 
 enjoyments. It is one thing to go to the country once in a 
 while to disburden one's self of an accumulation of surplus 
 cash, and then return to the city to talk about it; it is quite 
 another thing to appreciate the quiet and homely enjoyments 
 which lie within the reach of the plain farmer, — enjoyments 
 which do not require even an automobile as an accessory. 
 Against the idea that the rural-life problem is to be solved by 
 a few wealthy capitalists building themselves palatial resi- 
 dences in the country and spending a part of their surplus 
 time there. Sir Horace Plunkett uses the following weighty 
 words:
 
 86 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 I am not, so they tell me, up to date in my information; there is a 
 marked reversion of feeling upon the town versus the country question; 
 the tide of the rural exodus has really turned, as I might have observed 
 without going far afield. At many a Long Island home I might see on 
 Sunday, weather permitting, the horny-handed son of week-day toil in 
 Wall Street, rustically attired, inspecting his Jersey cows and aristocratic 
 fowls. These supply a select circle in New York with butter and eggs, 
 at a price which leaves nothing to be desired, — imless it be some infor- 
 mation as to cost of production. Full justice is done to the new country 
 life when the Farmers' Club of New York fulfills its chief function, — the 
 annual dinner at Delmonico's. Then agriculture is extolled in fine Vir- 
 giHan style, the Hudson villa and the Newport cottage being permitted 
 to divide the honors of the rural revival with the Long Island home. 
 But to my bucolic intelligence it would seem that against the "back-to- 
 the-land" movement of Saturday afternoon the captious critic might set 
 the rural exodus of Monday morning.^ 
 
 A few magnificent villas, where wealthy townsmen spend 
 the money which they acquire in town, will not help to solve 
 the problem of country life for those who have to make their 
 living from the soil, except where wealth is combined with 
 taste, tact, and sympathy. If these qualities are absent, 
 the display of urban magnificence in the country tends rather 
 to increase the discontent of the young men and women of 
 the neighborhood. It helps to create the impression that the 
 only satisfactory way to live in the country is to go to town 
 and make a fortune, and then come back to the country to 
 spend it. There were many magnificent villas owned by 
 Roman magnates in Italy, even in the very worst period of 
 rural decline under the Roman Empire. The dominance of 
 the city was so complete that the country was never looked 
 upon as a place in which to live unless one had a fortune to 
 spend there. Aside from its function of furnishing pleasing 
 sites for villas, the country was regarded merely as a place 
 where the city could get supplies of food. People really lived 
 in town. In fact, this dominance of the town over the country 
 was one of the characteristics of ancient civilization, though 
 
 ^ The Rural Life Problem In the United States (New York, igio), p. 152.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 87 
 
 that dominance was more complete at certain times than at 
 others. 
 
 On this point the following passages are significant: 
 
 Rome was, in its origin, only a municipality, a corporation. The 
 government of Rome was merely the aggregate of the institutions which 
 were suited to a population confined within the walls of a city; these 
 were municipal institutions, — that is their distinguishing character. This 
 was not the case with Rome only. If we turn our attention to Italy at 
 this period, we find around Rome nothing but towns. That which was 
 then called a people was simply a confederation of towns. The Latin 
 people was a confederation of towns. The Etruscans, the Samnites, the 
 Sabines, the people of Grascia Magna, may all be described in the same 
 terms. 
 
 There was at this time no country, — that is to say, the country was 
 wholly unlike that which at present exists; it was cultivated, as was 
 necessary, but it was uninhabited. The proprietors of lands were the in- 
 habitants of the towns. They went forth to superintend their country 
 properties, and often took with them a certain number of slaves; but 
 that which we at present call the country, that thin population — some- 
 times in isolated habitations, sometimes in villages — which everywhere 
 covers the soil, was a fact almost unknown in ancient Italy. 
 
 When Rome extended herself, what did she do? Follow history, and 
 you will see that she conquered or founded towns; it was against towns 
 that she fought, with towns that she contracted alhances; it was also into 
 towns that she sent colonies. The history of the conquest of the world 
 by Rome is the history of the conquest and foundation of a great num- 
 ber of towns. . . . 
 
 In Gaul, in Spain, you meet with nothing but towns. At a distance 
 from the towns the territory is covered with marshes and forests. 
 Examine the character of the Roman monuments, of the Roman roads. 
 You have great roads, which reach from one city to another; the mxilti- 
 plicity of the minor roads, which now cross the country in all directions, 
 was then unknown; you have nothing resembling that countless number 
 of villages, country seats, and churches, which have been scattered over 
 the country since the Middle Ages. Rome has left us nothing but im- 
 ' mense monuments, stamped with the municipal character, and destined 
 for a numerous population collected upon one spot. Under whatever 
 point of view you consider the Roman world, you will find this almost 
 exclusive preponderance of towns and the social nonexistence of the 
 country.! 
 
 ! Guizot, F., The History of Civilization (London, 1856), Vol. I, pp 27-29.
 
 88 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 The establishment of the feudal system produced one of these modifi- 
 cations, of unmistakable importance; it altered the distribution of the 
 population over the face of the land. Hitherto the masters of the soil, 
 the sovereign population, had lived united in more or less numerous 
 masses of men, whether sedentarily in cities, or wandering in bands 
 through the country. In consequence of the feudal system these same 
 men lived isolated, each in his own habitation, and at great distances 
 from one another. You will immediately perceive how much influence 
 this change was calculated to exercise upon the character and course of, 
 civilization. The social preponderance, the government of society, passed 
 suddenly from the towns to the country; private property became of 
 more importance than public property; private life than public life. 
 Such was the first and purely material effect of the triumph of feudal 
 society. The further we examine into it, the more will the consequence 
 of this single fact be unfolded to our eyes.^ 
 
 Elsewhere Guizot points out the well-known fact that the 
 rise of modern civilization is again reversing the order and 
 tending to concentrate population, wealth, and power in the 
 cities, and to emphasize urban rather than rural ideals. 
 
 Farming v?,. Talking as a Field for Ambition 
 
 One striking evidence of the general dominance of urban 
 over rural ideals in America is the almost total indifference 
 of our people to agriculture as a field of distinguished achieve- 
 ment. Great efficiency in the practical application of science 
 to agriculture, or in the organization of the factors of agri- 
 cultural production, are recognized in the abstract by every 
 thoughtful person as of the highest possible value to the coun- 
 try as a whole; but in the concrete we pay very little attention 
 to it. The ancient remark about the value of the man who 
 makes two blades of grass to grow where one had grown before, 
 as compared with the politician (or the talker), we approve- 
 in a general way, but specifically we think a great deal more 
 of the talker. The man who applies great executive ability 
 and scientific knowledge to agriculture may get good crops 
 
 ' Guizot, F., The History of Civilization (London, 1856), Vol. I, p. 68.
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 89 
 
 and make profit for himself; he may also win local recogni- 
 tion, particularly among farmers; but unless he talks or 
 writes about it, he does not gain general recognition among 
 the people at large. In proof of this, let any one look through 
 Who's Who in America, which is supposed to contain the names 
 of those who have achieved marked success in every large 
 field of human endeavor. Judging by its pages, either agri- 
 culture is not a large field of human endeavor, or else there are 
 no markedly successful farmers. Choosing those states in 
 which agriculture is commonly supposed to be a large field of 
 endeavor, we find in the edition of 1 908-1 909 almost no farmers. 
 The number of distinguished persons connected with agri- 
 culture and allied fields of work is as follows: 
 
 Maine, i farmer-manufacturer, i horticulturist (at the State University) 
 
 Ohio, I agricultural educator, i agriculturist 
 
 Indiana, i arboriculturist 
 
 Illinois, I farmer 
 
 Iowa, I forester, i horticulturist (both in the State College at Ames), 
 
 I breeder, i farmer 
 Kansas, i stockman, i f^-uit grower 
 Nebraska, i agricultural educator, i forester, i farmer 
 
 This lack of recognition of the farmer is not, of course, 
 the fault of the editors of Who's Who. They include in their 
 publication only the names which are widely known or talked 
 about. The fact that an eminently successful farmer is not 
 widely known or talked about is due to the fact that our 
 people have no interest in that kind of achievement. 
 
 Another proof of the same thing is the fact that almost no 
 farmer has secured, in recent years, any political recognition. 
 Even Mr. Roosevelt, with all his enthusiasm for rural uplift, 
 consistently preferred the man who talked about farming to 
 the man who did the work of farming. His Rural Life Com- 
 mission, for example, was an excellent commission, but it was 
 not made up of farmers, but of eminent men who had talked 
 a great deal and very wisely about agriculture and the prob-
 
 90 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 lems connected with it. This helps to explain why farmers 
 were generally so skeptical as to the results of the commission's 
 work. 
 
 So long as men are so constituted as to crave distinction and 
 wide public esteem, so long will they tend to avoid an occu- 
 pation which seems to furnish no opportunities in that direc- 
 tion. Until our esteem for the farmer ceases to be merely 
 an approval of farming in the abstract, and begins to show 
 itself in the form of an appreciation of the individual farmer 
 and his particular achievement, we shall not accomplish very 
 much in the way of checking the movement of the more am- 
 bitious youths toward the city. 
 
 Absentee Landlordism 
 
 Next to war, pestilence, and famine, the worst thing that 
 can happen to a rural community is absentee landlordism. 
 In the first place, the rent is all collected and sent out of the 
 neighborhood to be spent somewhere else; but that is the 
 least of the evils. In the second place, there is no one in 
 the neighborhood who has any permanent interest in it except 
 as a source of income. The tenants do not feel like spending 
 any time or money in beautification, or in improving the 
 moral or social surroundings. Their one interest is to get as 
 large an income from the land as they can in the immediate 
 present. Because they do not live there, the landlords care 
 nothing for the community, except as a source of rent, and 
 they will not spend anything in local improvements unless 
 they see that it will increase rent. Therefore such a com- 
 munity looks bad, and possesses the legal minimum in the 
 way of schools, churches, and other agencies for social improve- 
 ment. In the third place, and worst of all, the landlords and 
 tenants live so far apart and see one another so infrequently 
 as to furnish very little opportunity for mutual acquaintance 
 and understanding. Therefore class antagonism arises, and 
 bitterness of feeling shows itself in a variety of ways. Where
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCLAL LIFE 91 
 
 the whole neighborhood is made up of a tenant class which 
 feels hostile toward the absent-landlord class, evasions of 
 all kinds are resorted to in order to beat the hated landlords. 
 On the other hand, the landlords are goaded to retaliation, 
 and the rack-rent system prevails. Sometimes the community 
 feeling among tenants becomes so strong as to develop a kind 
 of artificial "tenant right," which is in opposition to the laws 
 of the land, and the laws of the land are then made more severe 
 in order to control the "tenant right." ^ 
 
 Even where the class antagonism is not carried to this 
 extreme, there is a wasteful expenditure of human energy 
 in the efforts of one class to circumvent the other, and the 
 attractiveness and dignity of rural life are destroyed by the 
 jealousy and rancor thus created. 
 
 In this country we are accustomed to look mth disfavor 
 upon any system of tenancy; but whatever may be said of 
 tenancy as such, there is not the slightest doubt that the worst 
 possible system is that under which the landowner lives at 
 a distance and maintains no connection with the land except 
 as a receiver of rent. Where the landlord lives upon his own 
 estate and takes an interest in it, the worst features of tenancy 
 disappear. The landowner's interest in his ov>'n home creates 
 in him an attitude toward the rural neighborhood which is 
 quite different from that of the absentee. 
 
 The Resident Landlord as Leader 
 
 Besides, there are some advantages in a system which gives 
 the large landowner a chance to devote his time to broad 
 
 ^ In some parts of France, under the old regime, the tenants would 
 combine to fix rents and to prevent newcomers from renting land. The 
 tenant would even sell his "right," or bequeath it to his son, very much as 
 though he owned the land. Any one else who would lease the land so 
 bequeathed, or interfere with the son's possession, would be Uable to injury 
 or murder. The laws of the coimtry were ineffective against this deter- 
 mined stand of the tenants.
 
 92 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 schemes of improvement while his tenants are completely 
 occupied with the immediate problem of growing crops. This 
 is the one serious disadvantage of the American type of agri- 
 culture under which the land is owned by small- or medium- 
 scale farmers who do their own work. No one has the time 
 or the surplus capital to carry on elaborate experimenting, 
 extensive drainage operations, or similar large-scale improve- 
 ments. Under the English system the large landed proprietors 
 have led in most of these progressive movements, without 
 waiting for a general public awakening. In the United States, 
 and other countries of small proprietors, these enterprises 
 have been carried on either by the state or by cooperative 
 enterprises. These methods are excellent in themselves, 
 but they are necessarily slower than the English method, for 
 the simple and sufficient reason that the general public is 
 always slower than a few of its most intelligent individuals. 
 At the present time, in the United States, the federal Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture, the state agricultural colleges, and the 
 experiment stations are carrying on this kind of work on a 
 more elaborate scale than is possible for a group of individual 
 proprietors, however large their estates, though much pioneer 
 work was done on great English estates. 
 
 Another advantage of the tenancy system, as it exists in 
 England, is that it furnishes a kind of organization of agri- 
 cultural interests, — or at least a very good substitute for 
 organization. A great landowner living on his estate, and 
 interested in its prosperity, is a natural leader and organizer 
 of the rural community consisting of his tenants. It is every- 
 where recognized in the United States that the great difficulty 
 in the way of organization of rural communities is the lack of 
 leaders. If this difficulty is still further accentuated by a 
 feeling of jealousy, as is too frequently the case, among the 
 farmers of a neighborhood, the problem of organization is 
 well-nigh insoluble. Unless the country church can remove 
 this feeling of jealousy and suspicion by the effective preach-
 
 PROBLEMS OF RUR.\L SOCIAL LIFE 93 
 
 ing of a gospel of brotherhood, it is difficult to see what can 
 be done for such a neighborhood. With the well-known 
 efficiency of our agricultural colleges and experiment stations, 
 and of our national Department of Agriculture, we have done 
 a great deal to remove the one disadvantage of the system of 
 detached, one-family farming. If we can, in addition, bring 
 about an effective organization of our rural interests, we shall 
 have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of 
 •the system of tenancy under large proprietors. 
 
 Organization for a Purpose, or Organization for its 
 
 Own Sake 
 
 It is extremely unlikely that any effective or permanent 
 organization of rural interests can ever be brought about 
 without some pretty definite object to be accomplished. 
 Organization for organization's sake is a poor program. Again, 
 it is extremely unlikely that any single object, or group of 
 objects, can be made the basis of a national organization. Our 
 agricultural interests are too diverse for that. All attempts 
 to form a general homogeneous organization of the farmers 
 of the country wiU probably fail, as they have hitherto. This 
 points unmistakably to the organization of local interests 
 for definite purposes. When several farmers in a certain 
 locality have a clear and definite purpose to accomplish, they 
 have no difficulty in organizing for that purpose. One of the 
 best examples of this is the California Fruit Growers Exchange. 
 A large number of fruit growers, seeing that they must organize 
 their marketing arrangements or become bankrupt, had a 
 sufficient motive. The question of leadership solves itself 
 under such conditions. The man who knows how to do what 
 everybody wants done is a leader by the only kind of divine 
 right, — namely, natural fitness. An illustration of the same 
 principle on a smaller scale is furnished by the farmers of a 
 certain New Hampshire township, who needed a market.
 
 94 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 They organized and opened a store in Cambridge, Massa- 
 chusetts, to which they sent their produce. In this case the 
 leader was a country pastor. A multitude of other examples, 
 large and small, could be named, all illustrating the same 
 principle, namely, that tjie organization must be local to begin 
 with, and that it must have a clear and definite object to 
 accomplish. 
 
 The organization of rural interests need not, however, 
 remain local and scattered. They may be federated. Those 
 who are interested in rural organization may well take lessons 
 from the organizers of the labor movement. The attempt to 
 form a general, homogeneous organization of all laboring 
 men had a promising beginning in the Knights of Labor, 
 but it lacked the element of definiteness and of local unity. 
 Its influence, therefore, waned rapidly, whereas the American 
 Federation of Labor rose to great prominence, power, and 
 influence. Organizing local unions among members of each 
 separate trade, and then federating these unions, leaving to 
 each a great deal of independence and local autonomy, this 
 movement has proceeded on sound principles of organiza- 
 tion. This points to the principle of federation as the correct 
 one upon which to attempt the general organization of rural 
 interests. A beginning is already made in the various local 
 and special organizations scattered over the country. If 
 these can be federated into state and national organizations, 
 leaving each local body independent and autonomous, at 
 least so far as its own special objects are concerned, a move- 
 ment may be started which will do for farmers what the Amer- 
 ican Federation of Labor has done for wageworkers, though 
 the active program need not be the same. 
 
 It cannot be too much emphasized, however, that any 
 organization whose objects are not constructive, and designed 
 to promote the welfare of the country as a whole, is foredoomed 
 to ultimate failure, because it ought to fail. It is for the 
 interest of the country as a whole that the supply of fruit
 
 PROBLEMS OF RURAL SOCIAL LIFE 95 
 
 should be adjusted to the demand, and that there should not 
 be a glut in one market while there is a scarcity in another. 
 A fruit-growers' exchange, by organizing the shipping and 
 selling of its fruit so as to bring about a more uniform and 
 equal adjustment of the supply to the demand, is performing 
 a productive function for the country as a whole, and deserves 
 success. When it begins to abuse its power and, instead of 
 adjusting the supply to the demand, undertakes merely to 
 charge monopoly prices, it will deserve to fail, and will even- 
 tually fail. The same may be said of an organization of dairy- 
 men, market gardeners, cotton growers, etc. However, it 
 is not necessary that such organizations should be philan- 
 thropic. On the contrary, it is probably better that they 
 should be strictly self-interested; but it is essential that self- 
 interest should be followed in economic rather than in un- 
 economic ways, as these terms were defined in Chapter I. 
 To attempt to promote one's self-interest in a way which 
 contributes to the productivity of the whole country is to 
 deserve success; to attempt to promote it in any other way 
 is to deserve failure. That is why cooperative enterprises, 
 when actuated by mere jealousy of some storekeeper, or of 
 any one else who is doing useful and honest work, usually 
 fail. But cooperative enterprises which attempt something 
 constructive, like the starting of a new industry, the opening 
 of a new market, or the prevention of real waste, and are 
 therefore actuated by a higher motive than hate or jealousy, 
 are usually successful, and redound to the interest and profit 
 of the participants. 
 
 This part of our discussion may be summed up by saying 
 that until our rural interests become organized our rural life 
 will continue to be dominated by urban interests, urban 
 standards, urban ideals, and that this will leave rural life in 
 a weak and undignified position. Furthermore, it will not 
 be easy to organize rural interests in any single homogeneous 
 organization, because our agricultural interests are too diverse
 
 96 THOMAS NIXON CARVER 
 
 and heterogeneous; but the organization must proceed through 
 the formation of local associations having definite, tangible, 
 and constructive aims, and the gradual federation of these 
 local organizations into a general organization combining 
 unity and solidarity with diversity and local autonomy.
 
 THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING AND 
 BETTER LIVING 1 
 
 Sir Horace Plunkett 
 
 In no way is the contrast between rural and urban civiliza- 
 tion more marked than in the application of the teachings of 
 modern science to their respective industries. Even the most 
 important mechanical inventions were rather forced upon the 
 farmer by the efficient selling organization of the city manu- 
 facturers than demanded by him as a result of good instruction 
 in farming. On the mammoth wheat farms, where, as the 
 fable ran, the plough that started out one morning returned 
 on the adjoining furrow the following day, mechanical science 
 was indeed called in, but only to perpetrate the greatest 
 soil robbery in agricultural history. Application of science 
 to legitimate agriculture is comparatively new. In my ranch- 
 ing and farming days I well remember how general was the 
 disbelief in its practical value throughout the Middle and Far 
 West. In cowboy terminology, all scientists were classified 
 as "bug-hunters," and farmers generally had no use for the 
 theorist. The non-agricultural community had naturally 
 no higher appreciation of the farmer's calling than he himself 
 displayed. When some Universities first developed agricul- 
 tural courses, the students who entered for them were nick- 
 named "aggies," and were not regarded as adding much to the 
 dignity of a seat of higher learning. The Department of 
 Agriculture was looked upon as a source of jobs, graft being 
 the nearest approach to any known agricultural operation. 
 
 ^ Copyright. Reprinted from The Rural Life Problem of the United 
 States by permission of the Macmillan Company.
 
 98 SIR HORACE PLUNKETT 
 
 All this is changing fast. The Federal Department of 
 Agriculture is now perhaps the most popular and respected of 
 the world's great administrative institutions. In the Middle 
 West, a newly awakened public opinion has set up an honour- 
 able rivalry between such States as Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, 
 Nebraska and Minnesota, in developing the agricultural 
 sides of their Universities and Colleges. None the less, Mr. 
 James J. Hill has recently given it as his opinion that not more 
 than one per cent of the farmers of these regions are working 
 in direct touch with any educational institution. It is prob- 
 able that this estimate leaves out of account the indirect 
 influence of the vast amount of extension work and itinerant 
 instruction which is embraced in the activities of the Univer- 
 sities and Colleges. I fear it cannot be denied that in the 
 application of the natural sciences to the practical, and of 
 economic science to the business of farming, the country folk 
 are decades behind their urban fellow-citizens. And again 
 I say the disparity is to be attributed to the difference in their 
 respective degrees of organization for business purposes. 
 
 The relation between business organization and economic 
 progress ought, I submit, to be very seriously considered by 
 the social workers who perceive that progress is mainly a 
 question of education. Speaking from administrative experi- 
 ence at home, and from a good deal of interested observation 
 in America, I am firmly convinced that the new rural educa- 
 tion is badly handicapped by the lack of organized bodies of 
 farmers to act as channels for the new knowledge now made 
 available. In some instances, I am aware, great good has 
 been done by the formation of farmers' institutes which have 
 been established in order to interest rural communities in 
 educational work and to make the local arrangements for 
 instruction by lectures, demonstrations, and otherwise. But 
 all European experience proves the superiority for this pur- 
 pose of the business association (which, by the way, has a 
 much better permanence) to the organization ad hoc.
 
 THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING 99 
 
 Again, the influence upon rural life of the agricultural 
 teaching of the Colleges and Universities, as exercised to 
 their pupils, may be too easily accepted as being of greater 
 potential utility than any work which these institutions can 
 do amongst adults. This is a mistake. The thousands of 
 young men who are now being trained for advanced farming 
 too often have to restrict the practical application of their 
 theoretic knowledge to the home circle, which is not always 
 responsive, for a man is not usually a prophet in his own 
 family. It is here that the educational value of co5perative 
 societies comes in; they act as agencies through which scien- 
 tific teaching may become actual practice, not in the uncertain 
 future, but in the living present. A cooperative association 
 has a quality which should commend it to the social reformer 
 — the power of evoking character; it brings to the front a 
 new type of local leader, not the best talker, but the man whose 
 knowledge enables him to make some solid contribution to 
 the welfare of the community. 
 
 I come now to the last part of the threefold scheme — that 
 which aims at a better life upon the farm. The cooperative 
 association, in virtue of its non-capitalistic basis of constitu- 
 tion and procedure (which, as I have explained, distinguishes 
 it from the joint stock company), demands as a condition of 
 its business success the exercise of certain social qualities of 
 inestimable value to the community life. It is for this reason, 
 no doubt, that where men and women have learned to work 
 together under this system in the business of their lives, they 
 are easily induced to use their organization for social and 
 intellectual purposes also. 
 
 The new organization of the rural community for social 
 as well as economic purposes, which would follow from the 
 acceptance of the opinion I have advanced, would bring 
 with it the first effective counter-attraction to the towns. 
 Their material advantages the country cannot hope to rival; 
 nor can any conceivable evolution of rural life furnish a real
 
 lOO SIR HORACE PLUNKETT 
 
 counterpart to the cheap and garish entertainments of the 
 modern city. Take, for example, the extravagant use of 
 electric light for purposes of advertisement, which affords 
 a nightly display of fireworks in any active business street 
 of an American city far superior to the occasional exhibition 
 at the Crystal Palace in London, which was the rare treat of 
 my childhood days. These delights — if such they be — cannot 
 be extended into remote villages in Kansas or Nebraska; but 
 their enchantment must be reckoned with by those who would 
 remold the life of the open country and make it morally and 
 mentally satisfying to those who are born to it, or who, but for 
 its social stagnation, would prefer a rural to an urban existence. 
 
 In one of his many public references to country life, Presi- 
 dent Roosevelt attributed the rural exodus to the desire of 
 "the more active and restless young man and woman" to 
 escape from "loneliness and lack of mental companionship." 
 He is hopeful that the rural free delivery, the telephone, the 
 bicycle and the trolley will do much towards "lessening the 
 isolation of farm life and making it brighter and more attract- 
 ive." Many to whom I have spoken on this subject fear 
 that the linking of the country with the town by these applica- 
 tions of modern science may, to some extent, operate in a 
 direction the opposite of that which Mr. Roosevelt anticipates 
 and desires. According to this view, the more intimate 
 knowledge of the modern city may increase the desire to be 
 in personal touch with it; the telephone may fail to give 
 through the ear the satisfaction which is demanded by the 
 eye; among the "more active and restless young men and 
 women" the rural free delivery may circulate the dime novel 
 and the trolley make accessible the dime museum. In the 
 total result the occasional visit may become more and more 
 frequent, until the duties of country life are first neglected 
 and then abandoned. 
 
 I do not feel competent to decide between these two views, 
 but I offer one consideration with which I think many rural
 
 THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING loi 
 
 reformers will agree. The attempt to bring the advantages 
 of the city within the reach of the dwellers in the country 
 cannot, of itself, counteract the townward tendency in so 
 far as it is due to the causes summarized above. However 
 rapidly, in this respect, the country may be improved, the 
 city is sure to advance more rapidly and the gap between 
 them to be widened. The new rural civilization should aim 
 at trying to develop in the country the things of the country, 
 the very existence of which seems to have been forgotten. 
 But, after all, it is the world within us rather than the world 
 without us that matters in the making of society, and I must 
 give to the social influence of the cooperative idea what I 
 believe to be its real importance. 
 
 In Ireland, from which so much of my experience is drawn, 
 we have found a tendency growing among farmers whose 
 combinations are successful, to gather into one strong local 
 association all those varied objects and activities which I 
 have described as advocated by the Irish Agricultural Organ- 
 ization Society. These local associations are ceasing to have 
 one special purpose or one object only. They absorb more 
 and more of the business of the district. One large, well- 
 organized institution is being substituted for the numerous 
 petty transactions of farmers with middlemen and small 
 country traders. Gradually the Society becomes the most 
 important institution in the district, the most important in 
 a social as well as in an economic sense. The members feel 
 a pride in its material expansion. They accumulate large 
 profits, which in time become a kind of communal fund. In 
 some cases this is used for the erection of village halls where 
 social entertainments, concerts and dances are held, lectures 
 delivered and libraries stored. Finally, the association 
 assumes the character of a rural commune, where, instead of 
 the old basis of the commune, the joint ownership of land, 
 a new basis for union is found in the voluntary communism 
 of effort.
 
 I02 SIR HORACE PLUNKETT 
 
 A true social organism is thus being created with common 
 human and economic interests, and the clan feeling, which 
 was so powerful an influence in early and medieval civiliza- 
 tions, with all its power of generating passionate loyalties, 
 is born anew in the modern world. Our ancient Irish records 
 show little clans with a common ownership of land hardly 
 larger than a parish, but with all the patriotic feeling of large 
 nations held with an intensity rare in our modern states. 
 The history of these clans and of very small nations like the 
 ancient Greek states shows that the social feeling assumes its 
 most binding and powerful character where the community 
 is large enough to allow free play to the various interests of 
 human life, but is not so large that it becomes an abstraction 
 to the imagination. Most of us feel no greater thrill in being 
 one of a State with fifty million inhabitants than we do in 
 recognizing we are citizens of the solar system. The rural 
 commune and the very small States exhibit the feeling of 
 human solidarity in its most intense manifestations, working 
 on itself, regenerating itself and seeking its own perfection. 
 Combinations of agriculturists, when the rural organization 
 is complete, re-create in a new way the conditions where 
 these social instincts germinate best, and it is only by this 
 complete organization of rural life that we can hope to build 
 up a rural civilization, and create those counter-attractions 
 to urban life which will stay the exodus from the land. 
 
 I do not wish to exaggerate even the interest which the 
 rural life of my own little island may have for those who are 
 concerned for the vast and wealthy expanses of the American 
 farm lands. But, even in the United States, I have seen the 
 really simple life, which in its commonest manifestation is a 
 thing that rather simple people talk about. In a properly 
 organized rural neighborhood could be developed that higher 
 kind of attraction which is suggested by the very word neigh- 
 bourhood. Once get the farmers and their families all working 
 together at something that concerns them all, and we have
 
 THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING 103 
 
 the beginning of a more stable and a more social community 
 than is likely to exist amid the constant change and bustle 
 of the large towns, where indeed some thinkers tell us that 
 not only the family, but also the social life, is badly breaking 
 down. When people are really interested in each other — 
 and this interest comes of habitually working together — • 
 the smallest personal traits or events affecting one are of 
 interest to all. The simplest piece of amateur acting or 
 singing, done in the village hall by one of the villagers, will 
 arouse more criticism and more enthusiasm among his friends 
 and neighbours than can be excited by the most consummate 
 performance of a professional in a great city theatre, where 
 no one in the audience knows or cares for the performer. 
 
 But if this attraction — the attraction of common work 
 and social intercourse with a circle of friends — is to prevail 
 in the long run over the lure which the city offers to eye and 
 ear and pocket, there must be a change in rural education. 
 At present country children are educated as if for the purpose 
 of driving them into the towns. To the pleasure which the 
 cultured city man feels in the country — because he has been 
 taught to feel it — the country child is insensible. The 
 country offers continual interest to the mind which has been 
 trained to be thoughtful and observant; the town offers 
 continual distraction to the vacant eye and brain. Yet, the 
 education given to country children has been invented for 
 them in the town, and it not only bears no relation to the 
 life they are to lead, but actually attracts them towards a 
 town career. I am aware that I am here on ground where 
 angels — even if specialized in pedagogy — may well fear to 
 tread. Upon the principles of a sound agricultural educa- 
 tion pedagogues are in a normally violent state of disagree- 
 ment with each other. But whatever compromise between 
 general education and technical instruction be adopted, the 
 resulting reform that is needed has two sides. We want two 
 changes in the rural mind — not omitting the rural teacher's
 
 I04 SIR HORACE PLUNKETT 
 
 mind. First, the interest which the physical environment 
 of the farmer provides to followers of almost every branch 
 of science must be communicated to the agricultural classes 
 according to their capacities. Second, that intimacy with 
 and affection for nature, to which Wordsworth has given the 
 highest expression, must in some way be engendered in the 
 rural mind. In this way alone will the countryman come to 
 realize the beauty of the life around him, as through the teach- 
 ing of silence he will learn to realize its truth. 
 
 Upon this reformed education, as a basis, the rural economy 
 must be built. It must, if my view be accepted, ensure, first 
 and foremost, the combination of farmers for business pur- 
 poses in such a manner as will enable them to control their 
 own marketing and make use of the many advantages which 
 a command of capital gives. In all European countries — 
 with the exception of the British Isles — statesmen have 
 recognized the national necessity for the good business organ- 
 ization of the farmer. In some cases, for example France, 
 even Government officials expound the cooperative principle. 
 In Denmark, the most predominantly rural country in Europe, 
 the education both in the common and in the high school 
 has long been so admirably related to the working lives of 
 the agricultural classes that the people adopt spontaneously 
 the methods of organization which the commercial instinct 
 they have acquired through education tells them to be suit- 
 able to the conditions. The rural reformer knows that this 
 is the better way; but our problem is not merely the educa- 
 tion of a rising, but the development of a grown-up generation. 
 We cannot wait for the slow process of education to produce 
 its effect upon the mind of the rural youth, even if there were 
 any way of ensuring their proper training for a progressive 
 rural life without first giving to their parents such education 
 as they can assimilate. Direct action is called for; we have 
 to work with adult farmers and induce them to reorganize 
 their business upon the lines which I have attempted to define.
 
 THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING 105 
 
 Moreover, this is essential to the future success of the work 
 done in the schools, in order that the trained mind of youth 
 may not afterwards find itself balked by the ignorant apathy 
 or lazy conservatism of its elders. 
 
 I hold, then, that the new economy will mean a more sci- 
 entific mastery of the technical side of farming, when farmers 
 will make a much larger use of the advice, instruction and 
 help which the Nation and the States offer them through the 
 Department of Agriculture and the Colleges. It is equally 
 certain that there will arise a more human social life in the 
 rural districts, based upon the greater share of the products 
 of the farmer's industry, which the new business organization 
 will enable him to retain; stimulated by the closer business 
 relations with his fellows which that organization will bring 
 about, and fostered by the closer neighbourhood which is 
 implied in a more extensive cultivation. 
 
 The development of a more intensive cultivation must carry 
 with it a much more careful consideration of the labour prob- 
 lem. The difficulty of getting and keeping labour on the 
 farm is a commonplace. I think farmers have not faced the 
 fact that this difficulty is due in the main to their own way 
 of doing their business. Competent men will not stay at farm 
 labour unless it offers them continuous employment as part 
 of a well-ordered business concern; and this is not possible 
 unless with a greatly improved husbandry. 
 
 To-day agriculture has to compete in the labour market 
 against other, and to many men more attractive, industries, 
 and a marked elevation in the whole standard of life in the 
 rural world is the best insurance of a better supply of good 
 farm labour. Only an intensive system of farming can afford 
 any large amount of permanent employment at decent wages 
 to the rural labourer, and only a good supply of competent 
 labour can render intensive farming on any large scale prac- 
 ticable. But the intensive system of farming not only gives 
 regular employment and good wages; it also fits the labourer
 
 io6 SIR HORACE PLUNKETT 
 
 of to-day — in a country where a man can strike out for him- 
 self — to be the successful farmer of to-morrow. Nor, in 
 these days of impersonal industrial relations, should the fact 
 be overlooked that under an intensive system of agriculture, 
 we find still preserved the kindly personal relation between 
 employer and employed which contributes both to the pleas- 
 antness of life and to economic progress and security. 
 
 Moreover, in a country where advanced farming is the rule, 
 there is a remarkable, and, from the standpoint of national 
 stability, most valuable, steadiness in employment. Good 
 farming, by fixing the labourer on the soil, improves the 
 general condition of rural life, by ridding the countryside of 
 most of its present pests. Those wandering dervishes of 
 the industrial world, the hobo, the tramp — the entire family 
 of Weary Willies and Tired Timothys — will no longer have 
 even an imaginary excuse for their troubled and troublesome 
 existence. But the farmer who was the prey of these pests 
 must, if he would be permanently rid of them, learn to respect 
 his hired farm hand. He must provide him with a com- 
 fortable and a modest garden plot upon which his young 
 family may employ themselves; otherwise, whatever the 
 farmer may do to attract labour, he will never retain it. In 
 short, the labourer, too, must get his full and fair share of 
 the prosperity of the coming good time in the country. 
 
 There is one particular aspect of this improved social life 
 which is so important that it ought properly to form the sub- 
 ject of a separate essay; I mean the position of women in 
 rural life. In no country in the world is the general position 
 of woman better, or her influence greater, than in the United 
 States. But while woman has played a great part there in 
 the social life and economic development of the town, I hold 
 that the part she is destined to play in the future making of 
 the country will be even greater. 
 
 In the more intelligent scheme of the new country life, 
 the economic position of woman is likely to be one of high
 
 THE WAY TO BETTER FARMING 107 
 
 importance. She enters largely into all three parts of our 
 programme, — better farming, better business, better living. 
 In the development of higher farming, for instance, she is 
 better fitted than the more muscular but less patient animal, 
 man, to carry on with care that work of milk records, egg 
 records, etc., which underlies the selection on scientific hnes 
 of the more productive strains of cattle and poultry. And 
 this kind of work is wanted in the study not only of animal, 
 but also of plant life. 
 
 Again, in the sphere of better business, the housekeeping 
 faculty of woman is an important asset, since a good system 
 of farm accounts is one of the most valuable aids to successful 
 farming. But it is, of course, in the third part of the pro- 
 gramme — better living, — that woman's greatest opportunity 
 lies. The woman makes the home life of the Nation. But 
 she desires also social life, and where she has the chance she 
 develops it. Here it is that the establishment of the coopera- 
 tive society, or union, gives an opening and a range of con- 
 ditions in which the social usefulness of woman makes itself 
 quickly felt. I do not think that I am laying too much stress 
 on this matter, because the pleasures, the interests and the 
 duties of society, properly so called, — that is, the state of 
 living on friendly terms with our neighbours, — are always more 
 central and important in the life of a woman than of a man. 
 The man needs them, too, for without them he becomes a mere 
 machine for making money, but the woman, deprived of them, 
 tends to become a mere drudge. The new rural society economy 
 (which implies a denser population occupying smaller holdings) 
 must therefore include a generous provision for all those forms 
 of social intercourse which specially appeal to women. The 
 Women's Sections of the Granges have done a great deal of 
 useful work in this direction; we need a more general and 
 complete application of the principles on which they act. 
 
 I have now stated the broad principles which must govern 
 any effective scheme for correcting the present harmful sub-
 
 io8 SIR HORACE PLUNKETT 
 
 ordination of rural life to a civilization too exclusively urban. 
 Before I bring forward my definite proposal for a remedy 
 calculated to meet the needs of the situation, I must antici- 
 pate a line of criticism which may occur to the mind of any 
 social worker who does not happen to be very familiar with 
 the conditions of country life. 
 
 I can well imagine readers who have patiently followed 
 my arguments wishing to interrogate me in some such terms 
 as these: "Assuming," they may say, "that we accept all 
 you tell us about the neglect of the rural population, and agree 
 as to the grave consequences which must follow if it be con- 
 tinued, what on earth can we do? Of course the welfare 
 of the rural population is a matter of paramount importance 
 to the city and to the nation at large; but may we remind 
 you that you said the evil and the consequences can be removed 
 and averted only by those immediately concerned — the actual 
 farmers — and that the remedy for the rural backwardness 
 was to be sought in the rural mind? " Canst thou minister to 
 a mind diseased?. Must not the patient 'minister' to himself?" 
 
 Fair questions these, and altogether to the point. I answer 
 at once that the patient ought to minister to himself, but he 
 won't. He has acquired the habit of sending for the physi- 
 cian of the town, whose physic but aggravates the disease. 
 Dropping metaphor, the farmer does not think for himself. 
 In rural communities, there is as great a lack of collective 
 thought as of cooperative action. All progress is conditional 
 on public opinion, and this, even in the country, is a very much 
 town-made thing. 
 
 So I am, then, in this difficulty. My subject is rural, my 
 audience urban. I have to commend to the statesmen and 
 the philanthropists of the town the somewhat incongruous 
 proposal that they should take the initiative in rural reform. 
 Neither the thought nor the influence which can set in motion 
 what in agricultural communities is no less than an economic 
 revolution are to be found in the open country.
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE ^ 
 
 Myron T. Herrick 
 
 The importance of agriculture as an economic and social 
 factor is not a newly discovered fact. As long ago as 1859, 
 in a speech before the Wisconsin Agricultural Society, 
 Abraham Lincoln said, "Population must increase rapidly, 
 more rapidly than in former times and ere long the most val- 
 uable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable sub- 
 sistence from the smallest area of soil. No community 
 whose every member possesses this art can ever be the victim 
 of oppression in any of its forms. Such community will be 
 alike independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land 
 kings." 
 
 Unfortunately, perhaps the truth contained in Lincoln's 
 words was not sufficiently well appreciated to modify the course 
 of the economic development of the country. Nations, like 
 individuals, are accustomed to regard lightly those things that 
 are easily acquired. Conditions in this country always have 
 been so favorable to agriculture that it has been accepted as 
 an industry needing little encouragement. On the other 
 hand, manufacturing and commerce did not seem to possess 
 the inherent qualities of self-development, and, as a result, 
 the economic policy of the country has been consciously 
 framed to build up these industries, — not exactly at the 
 expense of agriculture, but at least with the consequence of 
 diverting the attention of the people from the danger of neg- 
 lecting farming interests. Consequently, the industry of 
 
 ' From The Atlantic Monthly, vol. cxi, pp. 170-178. Reprinted by 
 permission of the author and the publishers.
 
 no MYRON T. HERRICK 
 
 cultivating the soil has been left to develop along the lines 
 of least resistance, — that of seizing temporary profits, with- 
 out regard to future possibilities. The complaisant indif- 
 ference with which agricultural development has been regarded 
 has had its logical result. Agriculture has failed to progress 
 with anywhere near the rapidity with which the population 
 of the country and the demand for food-products have 
 increased. 
 
 From 1900 to 1910 the population of the United States 
 increased twenty-one per cent; during the same period the 
 number of farms increased only ten and five-tenths per cent; 
 which indicates that, in the ten years, rural population increased 
 about one-half as much as the total population. In 1909 
 the per-capita production of cereals was only forty-nine 
 and one-tenth bushels; in 1899 it was fifty-eight and four- 
 tenths, — a decrease of nine bushels per head in ten years. 
 Between 1899 and 1909 the aggregate production of cereals 
 increased only one and seven-tenths per cent, but their market 
 value was higher by seventy-nine and eight-tenths per cent 
 in 1909 than in 1899, — the increase in price being forty- 
 seven times the increase in quantity. In 1909 there was one 
 farm for every thirteen and two-tenths persons; in 19 10 
 there was one farm for every fourteen and five-tenths persons. 
 On the average, therefore, each farm now has to furnish food 
 for more than one more person than in 1900. In 1900, there 
 were five and five-tenths acres of improved farm land per 
 capita of population; by 19 10 the per-capita improved acre- 
 age had declined to five and two-tenths acres. 
 
 These figures make it clear why the exports of food-stuffs in 
 crude condition, and food animals, have decreased from 
 $227,300,000 or 16.59 per cent of the total exports, for the 
 fiscal year of 1900 to $99,900,000, or only 4.6 per cent of the 
 total for the fiscal year of 191 2; and why similar imports 
 have increased from $68,700,000 in 1900, to $180,120,000 in 
 191 2. Of course the splendid crops of this year will, for the
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE iii 
 
 time being, alter the tendency of imports of foodstuffs to 
 increase and of exports to decrease, but unfortunately experi- 
 ence indicates that another bumper crop is not likely for 
 several years. Regardless of other influences the increasing 
 disparity between the supply of and demand for foodstuffs, 
 as shown by the foregoing data, would seem almost to furnish 
 an adequate explanation for the fact that on October i, 191 2, 
 Bradstreet's index number of prices made a new high record 
 
 of $9.4515- 
 
 Surprising as it may seem, it is within the last few years that 
 
 the people of the United States have recognized the danger 
 that lies in the increasing prices of food. The uneasiness 
 with which the rise in the prices of necessities is now regarded 
 is amply justified, for if there is a further considerable advance, 
 a lowering of the standard of living of a great number of the 
 American people, with its certain inimical consequences to 
 the quality of our citizenship, is bound to occur. It is largely 
 the apprehension of this possibility that has impelled the 
 national government, the states, various associations, and 
 individuals, to undertake the promotion of scientific farming, 
 to the end that the output of the farms of this country may 
 be raised to a maximum consistent with economic production 
 and the conservation of the vital qualities of the soil. Edu- 
 cational activity of this sort is excellent and necessary, and 
 should, if possible, be continued with greater enthusiasm. 
 However agriculture is similar to other industries in that 
 knowledge alone is not sufficient for success. Like those 
 engaged in other kinds of business, farmers must have capital, 
 in addition to knowledge and skill, and it is highly important 
 that they obtain the capital they need on terms consistent 
 with their credit. 
 
 What is being done to promote better farming, through 
 education and the establishment of land-and-agricultural 
 credit institutions, is due to the great importance of the in- 
 dustry, and not to any lack of intelligence on the part of the
 
 112 MYRON T. HERRICK 
 
 farmers themselves. There is no more reason to assume that 
 farmers are incapable of, or indifferent to, progress than 
 there is to assume that bankers are deficient because they 
 operate under a faulty and inadequate banking system. The 
 farmers of the United States are the intellectual superiors 
 of the farmers in any other country in the world, and, with 
 equal facilities, they will set the pace in scientific agriculture. 
 
 A superficial knowledge of agricultural conditions in the 
 United States is all that is necessary to understand that the 
 particular pressing need of American farmers is financial 
 machinery whereby the potential credit that they possess in 
 abundance can be made negotiable. There is in this country 
 a serious lack of financial institutions suited to supply farmers 
 with funds. In this respect the United States is the most 
 backward of any of the important nations of the world, and, 
 consequently, it is safe to say that this is the prime reason 
 why this country is so far behind many other countries in the 
 per-acre production of food-stuffs. The average yield of 
 grain in the United States is about fifty per cent less than it 
 is on the continent of Europe, and the average per acre yield 
 of potatoes is not more than thirty per cent of what it is in 
 Germany. The most striking and important difference 
 between farming conditions here and in many European 
 countries, is that there farmers can readily obtain the funds 
 they need, whereas in this country agricultural financing is 
 difficult and costly. 
 
 In its capital requirements, farming is not unlike other 
 industries and it is like other industries in that unless these 
 capital requirements are supplied, progress will be slow and 
 dubious. Like the merchant and the manufacturer, the 
 farmer needs funds: first, for the purchase of property and 
 for its permanent improvement; and second, for temporary 
 purposes, — such as financing crops. These two general 
 divisions of agricultural capital requirements should be pre- 
 served in the nature of loans that are made to secure funds.
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE 113 
 
 Each of these two divisions can and should support its own 
 credit, known respectively as land credit and agricultural 
 credit. For the purpose of buying land and making permanent 
 improvements, farmers should be able to make mortgage 
 loans which have a long time to run, and which they can 
 gradually repay by small yearly installments. Money in- 
 vested in land or permanent improvements becomes fixed 
 capital, and the proportion of a farmer's income that can be 
 attributed to this sort of capital is so limited that it is illogical 
 and unreasonable to expect the money so invested to be repaid 
 except after a considerable period of years. The maximum 
 length of a farm loan in this country is from three to five years, 
 and, at the end of that time, it may or may not be possible 
 to secure a renewal. As a rule, a farm-mortgage loan here 
 has a very restricted market, and, consequently, the borrower 
 frequently is obliged to pay an unreasonable rate of interest, 
 and to submit to burdensome conditions from which the 
 nature of the security he has to offer entitles him to be exempt. 
 Until some way is provided by which farm mortgages can 
 be made the basis of a long-time security, with the marketable 
 qualities of a railroad or industrial bond, and which can be 
 sold at a price very nearly determined by the soundness of 
 the security, the farmers of this country will continue to be 
 burdened by the terms they must accept in making mortgage 
 loans. That it is possible to create a security of this sort is 
 shown by the success of the mortgage-loan companies and 
 associations of foreign countries, whose obligations sell on a 
 basis as favorable as that of bonds of the most successful 
 railroad and industrial corporations. The farmers of the 
 United States have as good a claim to cheap money as have 
 railroad and industrial corporations, because farm land con- 
 stitutes as good security as a railroad or factory. The mar- 
 velous and rapid development of the railroads of the country, 
 to a very large extent, is due to the low cost at which they 
 have been able to obtain vast sums of money for purposes
 
 114 MYRON T. HERRICK 
 
 of development. There is absolutely no reason why just as 
 cheap money should not be similarly available for the accel- 
 eration of agricultural development. 
 
 For the financing of temporary capital requirements, the 
 personal credit of farmers should be made available. A 
 farmer should not be obliged to mortgage his land to obtain 
 funds to operate his property. As in the case of mortgage 
 loans, the facilities in this country for making negotiable the 
 personal credit of farmers are inadequate. There is no reason 
 why the industrious capable farmer should not be able to 
 borrow on his personal obligation as easily as does the mer- 
 chant. A few American farmers do a banking business on 
 a scale sufficiently large to make them desirable clients of 
 local, state, and national banks, but, for the great majority, 
 it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to secure the per- 
 sonal credit accommodation they need, and to which their 
 responsibility entitles them. 
 
 The success of foreign rural cooperative banking associa- 
 tions in reducing the rate of interest on loans to farmers, and 
 the almost negligible amount that has been lost through the 
 operations of these associations, clearly indicates that the 
 high rate of interest that farmers in this country must pay, 
 is due, not to any inherent weakness in their credit, but to 
 the lack of properly organized facilities for making their 
 credit negotiable. The lack of agricultural banking facilities 
 is a tremendous hardship for the farmers. It means that 
 they are laboring under a handicap which those engaged in 
 no other kind of industry have to bear. Under present 
 arrangements, farmers are paying two, two and a half, and 
 three per cent more for money than they should. Upon the 
 enormous amount of borrowed funds that the farmers of this 
 country are obliged to employ, the excessive interest amounts 
 to a sum so large that if it could be saved and expended in 
 increasing the productivity of our farms, it would do much 
 toward solving the problem of inadequate crops.
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE 115 
 
 Fortunately, in the attempt to establish banking facilities 
 for the farmers of the United States, it is not necessary to 
 work in the dark. Many of the farm credit institutions of 
 other countries are established on principles so broad and 
 sound that, with some modifications, they can be adapted 
 to conditions in this country. It is important, therefore, to 
 know all we can of foreign land and agricultural credit 
 institutions. 
 
 Germany is, perhaps, the country where agriculture is 
 the most thoroughly and most intelligently organized. There 
 are organizations in Germany for the purpose of supplying 
 farmers with capital, and organizations for carrying on nearly 
 all of the operations connected with the cultivation of the 
 soil — all owned and managed by the farmers themselves. 
 These organizations have revolutionized agricultural condi- 
 tions in Germany. They not only have been the means of 
 immensely increasing the productivity of the farms, but have 
 also wonderfully improved the economic and social status 
 of the farmers themselves. The first kind of agricultural 
 cooperative organization started in Germany was for credit 
 or banking purposes, and the entire fabric of agricultural 
 cooperation in Germany now rests on its elaborate and effi- 
 cient system of credit societies. Consequently it is reasonable 
 to assume that these credit societies are responsible for. the 
 advanced condition of agriculture. Agricultural credit in Ger- 
 many is based on the principles of self-help and cooperation. 
 
 In those European countries where land and agricultural- 
 credit facilities are the most complete, as a rule, long-time 
 mortgage loans and short-time personal loans are made by 
 different institutions organized along different lines. Of 
 the two kinds of credit institutions, perhaps the most success- 
 ful and efficient are the Raiffeisen banks in Germany and the 
 Credit Foncier in France. These two institutions differ in 
 many essential particulars. A Raiffeisen bank is a mutual 
 association, the Credit Foncier is an incorporated company;
 
 ii6 MYRON T. HERRICK 
 
 the Raiffeisen banks loan for the most part on personal obli- 
 gations, the Credit Fonder on first mortgages; the Raiffeisen 
 banks secure most of their funds through the deposits of the 
 farmers themselves, the Credit Foncier, through the debenture 
 bonds that it issues, obtains funds for its loans from the con- 
 servative investors of all classes. It is because of these and 
 other characteristic differences, and by reason of the wonder- 
 ful success of these two institutions, that a knowledge of how 
 the Raiffeisen banks and the Credit Foncier operate, and what 
 they have accomplished, is peculiarly illuminating and prof- 
 itable. Each of these two types of credit organizations pos- 
 sesses many features well adapted for systems of farm-credit 
 institutions in this country. 
 
 The Raiffeisen banking system was founded by Frederick 
 William Raiffeisen primarily for the purpose of freeing small 
 farmers from the exactions of usurers. Raiffeisen knew noth- 
 ing of finance, but he did understand the needs of those who, 
 under the most discouraging circumstances, were bravely 
 trying to gain a living from the soil — a class among whom 
 credit was the particular and essential thing lacking. Sir 
 Horace Plunkett, who has done so much for the agricultural 
 development of Ireland, has said that the establishment of 
 the Raiffeisen banks was second in economic importance only 
 to the discovery of steam. 
 
 The Raiffeisen banking system is based on the principle 
 of combining borrowers, to the end that by association they 
 may secure credit facilities which, as individuals, it would be 
 impossible for them to obtain. The fundamental provisions 
 of the Raiffeisen banks, as contemplated by Herr Raiffeisen, 
 were those of gratuitous management, unlimited liability of 
 members, and a strictly local field of operation. For the 
 most part the Raiffeisen banks adhere to those provisions. 
 The membership of the banks is made up almost exclusively 
 of farmers. In 1909 the number of members for each bank 
 averaged 92, In the beginning the Raiffeisen banks had no
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE 117 
 
 capital stock, but in 1876 a law was passed which made it 
 necessary for them to issue shares of stock. The value of 
 the shares was fixed at what was little more than a nominal 
 amount. In 1909 the average paid-up capital per member 
 was only 19 marks. The dividends that the Raiffeisen banks 
 can pay are strictly limited — in no event can they exceed the 
 rate of interest charged on loans. In 1909 these banks made 
 a new profit in excess of 7,000,000 marks, but of this only 13 
 per cent was paid out in dividends — the balance being 
 passed to the credit of the reserve fund. Because of the nature 
 of its business the sphere of operation of each bank is very 
 limited. It is necessary for the members to know each other, 
 and to know for what purpose each loan is made, and to see 
 that the money is so used. The Raiffeisen banks have done 
 much to encourage thrift, because they have supplied a new 
 incentive for saving. Inasmuch as the successful manage- 
 ment of these banks requires a keen sense of responsibility on 
 the part of the individual members, their moral effect is very 
 considerable. Through their membership in the Raiffeisen 
 banks many German farmers have become familiar with the 
 nature and uses of credit and have acquired a knowledge of 
 business. Altogether, these small rural banks have much 
 improved the financial position and the moral and intellec- 
 tual caliber of their members. 
 
 Because of its small size and restricted field of operation, 
 the management of a Raiffeisen bank is very simple and in- 
 expensive. In 1909 the average cost of management per bank 
 was only 638 marks. The funds that the banks have to loan 
 to their members are made up of the proceeds of the sale of 
 capital stock, the reserve accumulated from profits, deposits 
 — both savings and current account — and loans from the 
 central cooperative banks, from other banks, and from in- 
 dividuals. In 1909, 88 per cent of these funds consisted of 
 the deposits of the farmers themselves. The size of the average 
 deposit is about $370.00.
 
 ii8 MYRON T. HERRICK 
 
 The loans which these banks make are either on current 
 account — a form of overdraft often used by European 
 banks — or for fixed periods. There is a tendency to extend 
 the practice of making loans on current account, as that seems 
 to be the form best suited for members. As a rule the loans 
 made by the Raiffeisen banks are for a short period — usually 
 for one year, with a maximum of five. For the most part the 
 loans are granted on the personal obligations of the borrowers, 
 to which usually is added the guaranty of one or two associate 
 members. Occasionally loans are secured by deposit of col- 
 lateral, or by mortgages. The average loan indicates, the 
 Raiffeisen banks primarily are institutions for supplying 
 credit accommodations to the small landowner. 
 
 The Raiffeisen banking system in Germany now comprises 
 about 15,000 local banks, with a membership of approximately 
 2,000,000. These banks are now doing a yearly aggregate 
 business of about $1,500,000,000. The local Raiffeisen banks 
 are grouped under 35 provincial banks, which, in turn, are 
 affiliated with two general central cooperative banks. The 
 local banks borrow money from the provincial banks, when 
 required, and also loan to them their surplus funds. The 
 provincial central banks are cooperative societies, with lim- 
 ited liabiHty, and they occupy much the same position toward 
 the local rural banks that the latter do toward their members. 
 Their working capital is made up of the paid-up shares of 
 their members (the local banks), of the deposits of the local 
 banks, and of loans from other banks. By means of these 
 provincial and central cooperative banks, agricultural credit 
 in those parts of Germany where these banks operate possesses 
 the element of fluidity in a remarkable degree — moving 
 from those localities where it is not needed to those where 
 it is needed. Altogether the Raiffeisen banks of Germany 
 make up a wonderfully efficient organization, which, by supply- 
 ing an enormous amount of agricultural credit, has revolu- 
 tionized farming in Germany.
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE 119 
 
 Up to the middle of the last century, France was almost 
 entirely lacking in land- and agricultural-credit facilities. 
 As a result of much agitation there was passed in 1852 a 
 law providing for land-mortgage banks, and under this the 
 Credit Foncier was organized. Because of the success of the 
 Landschaf ten in Germany, many of the principles and methods 
 of these associations were incorporated in the French law. 
 The Credit Foncier is unlike the Landschaften in the very 
 important particular that it is an incorporated company, not 
 a cooperative association. The Credit Foncier has a capital 
 of 200,000,000 francs and operated under the supervision of 
 the state. In the beginning (1852) the government granted 
 the Credit Foncier a subsidy of 10,000,000 francs, in order to 
 help it make loans at a rate advantageous for that time. The 
 subsidy was not renewed, and the state does not now intervene, 
 except occasionally, to exercise control. The Credit Foncier 
 possesses many special privileges, pertaining to the issuance 
 of bonds and to its loans, that give it a practical, if not a legal 
 monopoly of the kinds of business in which it is engaged. 
 
 The purposes of the Credit Foncier are: — 
 
 1. Lending money to landowners, counties, communes, 
 and public services. 
 
 2. Creating and negotiating mortgage bonds, or, more 
 properly, debentures, to a value which cannot exceed the 
 amount of the sums due from its borrowers. 
 
 3. As a necessary accessory to its principal business, the 
 Credit Foncier has the right to carry on ordinary banking 
 operations within well-defined limits, and, in that connection, 
 it is permitted to receive deposits; but the aggregate of 
 deposits must not exceed 100,000,000 francs. 
 
 A large part of the funds received on deposit is employed 
 in discounting commercial bills, on condition that they have 
 two signatures and do not run over three months. The shares 
 of the Credit Foncier which are dealt in on the Bourse, are 
 issued at five hundred francs, and any one can own them.
 
 I20 MYRON T. HERRICK 
 
 The stock now receives six per cent dividends, and sells for 
 about 750 francs a share. The government appoints the 
 governor and two sub-governors, who, by virtue of their office, 
 are members of the Council of Administration. There must 
 also be three treasurers-general — state officials — among the 
 23 members of the Council of Administration. These treas- 
 urers are appointed by the general assembly of the company, 
 but before presenting their names to the assembly it is cus- 
 tomary to obtain the approval of the Minister of Finance. 
 The general assembly represents all the stockholders, and is 
 composed of the . two hundred who own the largest amount 
 of stock. These stockholders meet once each year to ratify 
 the accounts, vote the dividends, and dispose of such other 
 business as may properly be presented to them. The general 
 assembly elects a Council of Administration of 23 members. 
 The governor has a right to veto the acts of both the general 
 assembly and the Council, but there are only a very few 
 instances on record of his having used this power. The 
 Council of Administration meets once each week, and, among 
 other things, passes upon all loans. 
 
 The two principal kinds of loans made by the Credit Foncier 
 are mortgage loans and communal loans, and its total out- 
 standing loans now amount to about 4,000,000,000 francs. 
 So far as this country is concerned that part of its operations 
 covering the making of mortgage loans to landowners is of 
 the greatest interest. Our municipalities now have a broad 
 and steady market for their securities. 
 
 The Credit Foncier makes loans to landowners on the fol- 
 lowing terms: — 
 
 1. Short-time loans, without amortization, for a period of 
 from one to nine years. 
 
 2. Long-time loans, with annual amortization for a period 
 of from ten to seventy-five years. 
 
 The rate of interest on these loans is 4.30 per cent at the 
 present time, and the rate is the same for all kinds of property.
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE 121 
 
 The rate charged on a loan must not exceed the rate at which 
 money is obtained from the sale of bonds by more than six- 
 tenths of one per cent. Loans are made only on first-mortgage 
 security, and the amount of the loan cannot exceed one-half 
 of the value of the property, except that loans on wine and 
 timber lands must not exceed one-third of their value. When 
 the loan is made for a short period, the borrower pays each 
 year only the amount of interest due, and the principal sum 
 must be paid in full at the end of the term of the loan — from 
 one to nine years. Long-time loans are amortized; that is 
 they are gradually paid by means of an annuity, which includes 
 the interest and a small fraction of the principal. As a rule, 
 the borrower himself fixes the length of time that the loan is 
 to run. The amortization extends over the whole period of 
 the loan, so that the total of the interest and capital amount 
 is repaid from a constant yearly annuity. Consequently, 
 the cost of amortization depends on the length of the loan, 
 and on the rate of interest. On a loan running for seventy- 
 five years at 4.30 per cent interest, the annuity — including 
 interest and amortization — is at the rate of 4.48 per cent 
 per annum. The borrower has the right to pay the principal 
 of the loan at any time, and to profit by the amortization 
 already made. He can also make partial payments and 
 thereby reduce the amount of the annuity. 
 
 The bonds issued by the Credit Foncier have no fixed 
 maturity, but are called for payment by lot. Each payment 
 of bonds must be of such an amount that the bonds remaining 
 in circulation do not exceed the balance of the principal owed 
 upon the hypothecated loans. If the government approves, 
 there can be added to the bonds called for payment certain 
 prizes and premiums. The funds received from the usual 
 amortization, or anticipated payments, must be used to amor- 
 tize or redeem bonds, or to make new loans. In general the 
 bonds bear 3 per cent on the nominal capital, and the total 
 cost of recent loans to the company, including interest, prizes,
 
 122 MYRON T. HERRICK 
 
 and premiums, is about 3.60 per cent. The bonds are sold 
 by public subscription, and may be paid for in installments. 
 About every three years the company issues bonds sufficient 
 to yield from 300,000,000 to 350,000,000 francs. The bonds 
 are subscribed for by people of small means, and usually remain 
 in their hands; consequently the quotations of the bonds 
 show little fluctuation — less than French railway bonds. 
 The company always keeps a few bonds on hand for sale, but 
 the bulk of them are disposed of by public subscription. 
 
 The Credit Foncier has departed from its original purpose 
 to the extent that at the present time a very large part of its 
 loans are made on urban real estate. However, this is simply 
 an incident, and does not reflect on the appHcabflity of the 
 principles on which the Credit Foncier is founded, to an insti- 
 tution confining its operations to loans on rural land. 
 
 In view of the wonderful success of the Credit Foncier and 
 kindred institutions, it is hard to understand why the prin- 
 ciple of debenture bonds, secured by long-time real-estate 
 loans, payable by amortization, should not, long ago, have 
 been put in practice in this country. The business of loaning 
 money on farm mortgages in the United States is still carried 
 on in a primitive way. We are still making farm-mortgage 
 loans for such short periods that frequent renewals — often 
 very embarrassing to debtors — are inevitable. The existence 
 of facilities whereby farm-mortgage loans could be made for 
 long terms — say fifty years or more, with provision for easy 
 payment by amortization — would be a wonderful boon to 
 American farmers, and a decided stimulant to the develop- 
 ment of efficient, scientific farming. 
 
 Neither the Raiffeisen banks nor the Credit Foncier involve 
 strange financial principles. In this country, the splendid 
 record of the mutual savings banks proves that cooperation 
 can be safely and wisely applied in banking. We are familiar 
 with the principle of debenture bonds, and we know something 
 of the principle of amortization. Of course it is impossible
 
 THE FARMER AND FINANCE 
 
 123 
 
 to pick up any of the foreign farm-credit systems, out of its 
 social setting, and say, offhand, that it would be as successful 
 in this country. The history and success, as well as the details 
 of organization, of every one of the foreign farm-credit systems 
 have been very largely determined by the temperament, the 
 social and economic status of the people, and by the condi- 
 tions of climate and soil of the country in which they are sit- 
 uated. Consequently in working out the plans of agricultural- 
 and land-credit systems for this country, we must be cautious 
 in our adherence to foreign models. We must remember 
 that the value and success of every institution depends upon 
 its being in harmony with its environment. 
 
 The importance of adequate credit facilities for our farmers 
 is beginning to be keenly appreciated. The American Bankers' 
 Association, the Southern Commercial Congress, and other 
 organizations are doing splendid pioneer work by agitating 
 the need of an agricultural banking system, and by dis- 
 seminating information as to what has been accomplished 
 abroad. 
 
 The establishment of agricultural- and land-credit systems 
 in this country is not a political question; it is an economic 
 question of the gravest import — the proper solution of which 
 demands a patriotic national purpose and constructive ability 
 of a high order.
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE ^ 
 L. H. Bailey 
 
 Not long ago, I sat at the window of a hotel chamber, 
 looking down a thoroughfare of a great city. I saw thousands 
 of human beings pouring in and out, up and down, as if moved 
 by some relentless machinery. Most of them were silent 
 and serious and went quickly on. Some sauntered, and re- 
 turned again and again as if looking for something that they 
 did not expect to find. Carriages went up and down in endless 
 pageant. Trolley-cars rushed by, clanging and grinding as 
 they headlonged into the side streets. Meretricious auto- 
 mobiles with gorgon-eyed drivers whirred into the crowds, 
 scattering the street crossers. Men passed with banners and 
 advertising placards. Women paraded with streaming head- 
 gear and tempestuous gowns. A resplendent trumpeter 
 rolled by in a tallyho. A hundred other devices to attract 
 the eye and distract the ear came out and vanished; and yet 
 no one stopped and no one seemed to care. Now and then 
 I saw a knot of men form, as some one fell or as wagons col- 
 lided; but the knots as quickly dissolved, and I saw that 
 they were made up of the idle who were amused for the moment 
 and then floated on hoping for fresh entertainment. A hurdy- 
 gurdy attracted only a bevy of scurrying children. A little 
 girl with an armful of newspapers moved in and out unnoticed. 
 
 Suddenly a dog leaped down a flight of steps and was fol- 
 lowed by two little children laughing and screaming. The 
 dog felt his freedom and the children were in pursuit. The 
 
 ^ Copyright. Reprinted from The Outlook to Nature, by permission of 
 the Macmillan Company.
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 125 
 
 crowd stopped; the stern-faced men with high hats stopped; 
 the well-dressed women stopped. Even a cabby pulled up 
 his horse as the children dashed on the pavement after the 
 escaping dog. Back and forth the children ran. On the far 
 side of the street the people halted and took their hands out 
 of their pockets. The children caught the dog and bundled 
 it lovingly into the house; the crowd applauded, and dispersed. 
 
 Every person seemed to be surprised that he had stopped. 
 From my height I thought I could discern the reason for this 
 curious phenomenon: in all the blare and blazonry of that 
 tumultuous thoroughfare, this was the only episode of real 
 spontaneous and unaffected human nature. All else was a 
 kind of acting, and every person unconsciously recognized 
 that it was so. I thought how rare must common naturalness 
 be and how much has it been driven from our lives! 
 
 If a person has given any serious thought to public questions, 
 he has his own contribution to make as to the causes of present 
 conditions and the means of bettering them; so I make mine: 
 what is now much needed in the public temper is such a change 
 of attitude as will make us to see and appreciate the common- 
 place and the spontaneous, and to have the desire to maintain 
 and express our youthful and native enthusiasms. And it 
 is my special part to try, so far as possible, to open the eyes 
 and the heart to nature and the common-day environment. 
 My point of view is, of course, that of the countryman, and 
 no doubt it has the countryman's bias. 
 
 So great has been the extension of knowledge, and so many 
 the physical appliances that multiply our capabilities, that 
 we are verily burdened with riches. We are so eager to enter 
 all the strange and ambitious avenues that open before us 
 that we overlook the soil at our feet. We live in an age of 
 superlatives, I had almost said of super-superlatives, so 
 much so that even the superlatives now begin to pall. The 
 reach for something new has become so much a part of our 
 lives that we cease to recognize the fact and accept novelty
 
 126 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 as a matter of course. If we shall fail to satisfy ourselves 
 with the new, the strange, and the eccentric, perhaps we shall 
 find ourselves returning to the old commonplace and the 
 familiar, and perhaps we shall be able to extract new delights 
 from them because of the flights we have taken. Perhaps 
 in their turn the commonplaces will be again the superlatives, 
 and we shall be content with the things that come naturally 
 and in due order. Certain it is that every sensitive soul feels 
 this longing for something simple and elemental in the midst 
 of the voluminous and intricate, something free and natural 
 that shall lie close to the heart and really satisfy our best 
 desires. 
 
 It is not likely that we shall greatly simplify our outward 
 physical and business affairs. Probably it is not desirable 
 that we should do so, for we must maintain our executive 
 efl&ciency. We have seen a marvelous development of affairs, 
 expressed in the renovation of a hundred old occupations and 
 the creation of a thousand new ones. Most of these occu- 
 pations and businesses are clear gain to the world, and we may 
 expect them to endure. This rise of affairs has emphasized 
 the contrasts of business and of home. Machinery and com- 
 plexity belong to affairs; but a simpler and directer mental 
 attitude should belong to our personal and private hours. 
 Perhaps our greatest specific need is a wholesome return to 
 nature in our moments of leisure, — all the more important 
 now that the moments of leisure are so few. This return to 
 nature is by no means a cure-all for the ills of civilization, 
 but it is one of the means of restoring the proper balance and 
 proportion in our lives. It stands for the antithesis of acting 
 and imitation, for a certain pause and repose, for a kind of 
 spiritual temper, for the development of the inner life as con- 
 trasted with the externals. 
 - The outlook to nature is, of course, the outlook to optimism, 
 for nature is our governing condition and is beyond the power 
 of man to modify or to correct. We look upward and outward
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 127 
 
 to nature. Some persons have supposed, however, that the 
 "contentment" preached by the nature-lover imphes un vexed 
 indifference to the human affairs of the time, and that there- 
 fore it makes for a kind of serene and weak utopianism; but, 
 to my mind, the outlook to nature makes for just the reverse 
 of all this. If nature is the norm, then the necessity for 
 correcting and amending the abuses that accompany civiliza- 
 tion becomes baldly apparent by very contrast. The repose 
 of the nature-lover and the assiduous exertion of the man of 
 affairs are complementary, not antithetical, states of mind. 
 The return to nature affords the very means of acquiring the 
 incentive and energy for ambitious and constructive work of 
 a high order; it enforces the great truth that, in the affairs 
 of men, continued progress is conditioned upon a generous 
 discontent and diligent unrest. 
 
 By nature, I mean the natural out-of-doors, — the snow 
 and the rain, the sky, the plants, the animals, the running 
 brooks, and every landscape that is easy of access and unde- 
 filed. Every person desires these things in greater or lesser 
 degree: this is indicated by the rapidly spreading suburban 
 movement, by the astonishing multiplication of books about 
 nature. Yet there are comparatively very few who have any 
 intimate contact with nature, or any concrete enjoyment from 
 it, because they lack information that enables them to under- 
 stand the objects and phenomena. 
 
 The currents of civilization tend always to take us out of our 
 environment rather than to fit us into it. We must recast 
 our habits of thought so as to set our faces nature-ward. This 
 is far more important than any effort at mere simplicity or 
 toward lopping off the redundancies: it is fundamental direc- 
 tion and point of view. 
 
 The outlook to nature is the outlook to what is real, and 
 hearty, and spontaneous. Our eager civilization prematurely 
 makes us mentally old. It may be true that the span of 
 man's life is increasing, but at twenty we have the knowledge
 
 128 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 and the perplexities that our grandfathers had only at forty. 
 Our children may now be older when they are graduated from 
 school, but the high school course of to-day is more complex 
 than was the college course of fifty years ago. All this has 
 a tendency to lessen the years of free and joyous youth. You 
 have only to see the faces of boys and girls on your city streets, 
 to discover how old the young have grown to be. In home 
 and school our methods have been largely those of repression: 
 this is why the natural buoyant outburst that I saw on the 
 city thoroughfare challenged such instant attention and 
 surprise. We need to emphasize the youthful life. 
 
 Therefore, I preach the things that we ourselves did not 
 make; for we are all idolaters, — the things of our hands we 
 worship. I preach the near-at-hand, however plain and ordi- 
 nary, — the sky in rain and sun; the bird on its nest and the 
 nest on its bough; the rough bark of trees ; the frost on bare 
 thin twigs; the mouse skittering to its burrow; the insect 
 seeking its crevice; the smell of the ground; the sweet wind; 
 the leaf that clings to its twig or that falls when its work is 
 done. Wisdom flows from these as it can never flow from 
 libraries and laboratories. 
 
 "There be four things," say the Proverbs, "which are Uttle upon the 
 earth, but they are exceeding wise: 
 
 "The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the 
 summer : 
 
 "The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the 
 rocks; 
 
 "The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands; 
 
 "The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces." 
 
 Some of us do not enjoy nature because there is not enough 
 sheer excitement in it. It has not enough dash and go for this 
 uneasy age; and this is the very reason why we need the solace 
 and resource of nature so much. On looking over the lists 
 of Christmas books I was surprised to find how often the 
 word "sensation" occurs. In the announcement of the
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 129 
 
 forthcoming number of a magazine, I find twenty articles, 
 of which at least nineteen are to be "tragic," "thrilling," 
 "mystery-laden," or otherwise unusual. The twentieth 
 one I hope to read. One would think that a piece of writing is 
 valuable in porportion as it is racy, exciting, startling, striking, 
 sensational. In these days of sensational sales, to have a 
 book sell phenomenally well is almost a condemnation of it. 
 An article or book that merely tells a plain story directly and 
 well is too tame; so even when we write of nature we must 
 pick out the unusual, then magnify and galvanize it. From 
 this literature the reader goes out to nature and finds it slow 
 and uninteresting; he must have a faster pace and a giddier 
 whirl of events. He has little power to entertain himself; 
 and, his eyes never having been trained to see what he looks 
 at, he discovers nothing and the world is vacuous and void. 
 He may find temporary relief in some entertainment provided 
 for him out of hand, as the so-called news of the newspapers 
 or some witless frippery on the stage. Yet, unless all poets 
 and philosophers have misled us, the keenest and most' re- 
 sourceful delights that men have found have been the still 
 small voices of the open fields. 
 
 There is another objection to much of the nature writing, 
 — the fact that it is unrepresentative of nature. It exploits 
 the unusual and exceptional, and therefore does not give the 
 reader a truthful picture of common and average conditions. 
 This has been true to some extent even of text-books, — they 
 choose so-called "typical" forms and structures, forgetting 
 that typical examples exist only in books for purposes of 
 definition. The best nature writing, as I conceive of it, is 
 that which portrays the commonplace so truthfully and so 
 clearly that the reader forthwith goes out to see for himself. 
 Some day we shall care less for the marvelous beasts of some 
 far-off country than for the mice and squirrels and wood- 
 chucks of our own fields. If I were a naturalist, I should go 
 forthwith to study the mice and then write of them for all
 
 I30 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 children; for, of all untamed animals, what ones are known to 
 a greater number of children? — and yet what do the children 
 know except that they have been early taught by their elders 
 to abhor these animals? 
 
 The embodiment of all grace and agility, of all quick dis- 
 patch, of all neat habits and of comeliness, of unseen and 
 devious ways, is the mouse. What other object was ever so 
 swift and silent and graceful as it slides along the corners of 
 your room as noiseless as a shadow! What explorer was ever 
 so successful as it peers into drawers and sniffs in cupboards! 
 A few years ago a mouse was my nightly companion for 
 perhaps a month. He was employed in some great engineering 
 enterprise in the timber work over my chamber. Hour by 
 hour he alternately gnawed rapidly, stopped, gnawed and 
 stopped again, in regular intermittence. I suppose that in 
 the moments of silence he was listening for eavesdroppers; 
 or perhaps he was resting. He began far at one side of my 
 ceiling and worked steadily toward the center. I wondered 
 what curious plans he had in his head and whether he had 
 calculated on the cost of all his labor. At length the region 
 of his excavations lay immediately over my head, and my 
 interest in him, although he was unseen, became quite unusual. 
 At last he seemed to have made an extra effort, another silence 
 came, — a silence that was never broken. For nights I 
 waited; and to this day I wonder. In my boyhood the field 
 mice were a constant source of entertainment and mystery. 
 I found them scuddled in the corn shocks, burrowed in the 
 dry grass, nesting in the corn-crib. I saw their faint narrow 
 trails on new-fallen snow, leading into strange pigmy caverns. 
 One winter I helped to fell a tree, in the hollow hole of which 
 we found a full peck of beechnuts neatly shelled and stored 
 against the cold. Let us have the commonplace, for indeed 
 it is rare! 
 
 Just now I said something of the "news." It is important 
 that we recur to this subject, since we are a people of news
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 131 
 
 readers, and continuous reading strongly, though silently, 
 influences our outlook toward nature and affairs. Much 
 of what is called news is so unimportant that it is not worth 
 the while of a person whose time is of value; but my chief 
 objection to it, as to some of the nature writing, is that it is 
 no way representative of human affairs, — if it were, I suppose 
 it would not be new and therefore would not be news. It is 
 made up to a large extent of exceptional and meaningless 
 episodes and extravagancies. Yesterday I saw hundreds 
 of persons on cars and ferries eagerly reading the "news." 
 I bought a paper resplendent with photography and colored 
 ink. The first page had eight articles, seven of which were 
 devoted to cases of divorce, common rascality and crime, 
 and unimportant local accidents, all displayed as if it would 
 advantage a man to read them. Only one article dealt with 
 public affairs, and this was hidden underneath small headlines. 
 The newspaper had no sense of proportion. All the details 
 of a divorce case were given with as much circumstantial 
 minutiae as if it were of equal importance with a debate in 
 Congress or the deliberations of the international peace con- 
 ference. As I was about to write these sentences, I chanced 
 to pick up the following editorial paragraph from a country 
 newspaper (the Seneca Falls, N.Y., Reveille): 
 
 The sound and wholesome quaHties which make for all that is most 
 prized in life are to be found in the great masses of the people, and are 
 scarcely touched by the currents of the time which make for evil, and with 
 which the news of the day is necessarily so largely concerned. It is not 
 the doings or the ways of the great bulk of the people — those who quietly 
 earn a modest living by ordinary industry — that furnish much material 
 either for news or for comment. We take all that for granted, and when 
 we think of the tendencies of the time, we almost forget its existence. When 
 a touch of nature happens to bring into unaccustomed rcHcf the existence 
 of the homely but sturdy and sterhng virtues of the great American people, 
 their right-mindedness and true-heartedness, it is well to draw from the 
 event the lesson that manhood and merit are after all the things which 
 create the very best character for our country and government.
 
 132 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 We gather from this extract the opinion that what we call 
 the "slow" and "dull" may, after all, be the saving strength 
 of the nation. In the hamlets and villages and small country 
 cities, great problems are working themselves out just as 
 effectively as in the mighty cities; and although slowly, or 
 even because slowly, they may be working out more funda- 
 mentally than elsewhere. The great mass of mankind is 
 unrecorded and practically unknown. A few of us are actors, 
 and we pass with some noise and flourish across the stage; 
 but the sources of events are behind and beyond. I have 
 heard the saying attributed to a statesman that if the discus- 
 sions either at the country four-corners or in the president's 
 cabinet were to cease, it were better to do away with the cab- 
 inet. Public opinion does not seem to originate to any extent 
 with the leaders: the leaders are more likely to catch and 
 voice the crystallizing sentiments of the commonplace, orig- 
 inating slowly and perhaps unconsciously with those who work 
 first-handed with the forces that make for wealth. 
 
 We might go even farther than the hamlet or the town, — 
 to the family unit on the remotest farm. This unit is con- 
 sidered by most of the other members of the race to be the 
 commonplace of the commonplace; yet, along with the farm- 
 ing, human problems are being worked out. There boys 
 and girls are being reared and even trained, who some day 
 may come to your cities and distance your own sons and 
 daughters; for it is a discouraging fact that, with all we are 
 doing for schooling, merit and efficiency do not seem to in- 
 crease in proportion, and those whom we are in the habit of 
 calling uneducated may take the highest prizes that the world 
 has to give. The farm, in its turn, is being exploited in our 
 current literature; and, significantly enough, much of this 
 literature is of the sensational order. Of all things that 
 should not be sensationalized, the farm is the chief. The 
 farm need not be prosaic nor devoid of intellectual interest; 
 but its very spirit is that of stability and constancy. We
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 133 
 
 should develop the ideals in every occupation; but the ideal 
 should follow closely the facts and the spirit of the real. 
 We need to idealize the commonplace, for then we show its 
 possibilities. 
 
 We need a new literature of nature and the open country, 
 a literature that shall not be merely and plainly descriptive. 
 We need short, sharp, quick, direct word-pictures that shall 
 place the object before us as vividly as the painter would 
 outline some strong figure with a few bold strokes of his 
 brush. Every object and every common labor awaken some 
 response beyond themselves, and this response can be set to 
 words. The man employed at useful and spontaneous work 
 is a poetic figure, full of prophecy and of hope. The cow in 
 the field, the tree against the sky, the fields newly plowed, 
 the crows flapping home at night, the man at his work, the 
 woman at her work, the child at its play — these all are 
 worth the stroke of the artist. 
 
 I saw a man walking across the fields, with spade on his 
 shoulder and dog at his side; I saw his firm long stride; I 
 saw his left arm swing; I saw the weeds fall beneath his feet; 
 I saw the broad straight path that he left in the grass. There 
 were brown fields, and woods in the first tint of autumn. 
 I saw birds; and in the distance was the rim of the sky. And 
 beyond him, I saw the open ditch to which he was returning. 
 
 With the nature writers I like to include some of the authors 
 who do not write specific natural history topics. If they write 
 from the out-of-doors, with a keen love of it and a knowledge 
 of what it comprises, adding to it touches of good human 
 nature, then they lead men to the open as effectively as those 
 to whom we customarily apply the term "nature- writer." 
 The landscape is as important as any object that it contains, 
 and the human sentiment is more important than either. 
 These writers invariably write the commonplace, and touch 
 it into life and meaning. One of the greatest of these writers, 
 to my thinking, is Stevenson, — simple, direct, youthful,
 
 134 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 tender and heartsome. His life was with nature; his work 
 touches the cosmic and elemental. 
 
 O Stevenson ! On far Samoa's tropic shore 
 
 You moored your slender bark, 
 
 And there in calm secludedness did Uve 
 
 To write the spirit of your gentle soul, 
 
 And over all the world to povu: 
 
 The fragrance from the tropic of your heart. 
 
 And thence you passed beyond, — 
 
 Passed not with the proud acclaim 
 
 Of pageant and tempestuous bells 
 
 That drown themselves in black forgetfulness, — 
 
 But fell away as falls the wind at eventide; 
 
 And all the trees on aU the isles and shores 
 
 Bowed their heads in solitude. 
 
 I like to think that our nature poetry is also leading us 
 natureward in a very practical way, since it is becoming more 
 personal and definite, and brings us into closer touch with 
 specific objects and demands greater knowledge of them. 
 It has been the progress of our attitude toward nature to 
 add the concrete to the abstract; and this may be expected 
 to proceed so far that every object of the environment and 
 every detail of our lives will be touched with inspiration. 
 If I cannot catch a note of inspiration from the plainest thing 
 that I touch, then to that extent my life is empty and devoid 
 of hope and outlook. The great voices appealed to the early 
 Greeks, — the thunder, the roaring wind, the roll of the 
 waves, the noise of war; but we do not know that the shape 
 of the leaf, and the call of the young bird, and the soft gray 
 rain, appealed much to them. The Greek lyrics are mostly 
 personal or personifying, and lack any intimate touch with 
 the phases of natural phenomena. As men have come more 
 and more to know the near-at-hand and the real in nature, 
 this knowledge has been interpreted in the poetry; for poetry 
 always reflects the spirit of the time. All English poetry 
 illustrates this general tendency; but what we are in the
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 135 
 
 habit of calling "nature poetry" is of comparatively recent 
 growth. It is to be hoped that we shall never have less 
 nature poetry that expresses the larger moods; but we must 
 have more that is specific and concrete in natural history 
 details, and which will still be poetry, for the race is coming 
 nearer to the environment in which it lives. The individual 
 seems sometimes to recapitulate the experience of the race; 
 as each of us grows old and conventionalities lose their mean- 
 ing and the small voices make a stronger appeal, we are 
 conscious that we have had Wordsworth's experience: 
 
 In youth from rock to rock I went, 
 From hill to hiU in discontent, 
 Of pleasure high and turbulent, 
 
 Most pleased when most imeasy; 
 But now my own delights I make, — 
 My thirst from every rUl can slake, 
 And gladly Nature's love partake 
 
 Of thee, sweet Daisy! 
 
 It is often said that as this is a practical age, with industrial- 
 ism developing everywhere, therefore poetry must die away. 
 Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is true that 
 industrialism is developing at great pace; this, in fact, is the 
 glory of our time, for civilization has entered on a new epoch. 
 Men's minds are concerned with things that never concerned 
 them before; yet, the resources of the old earth have merely 
 been touched here and there, and the wealth of mankind will 
 increase. But all this does not mean that sentiment is to be 
 crushed or that the horizon of imagination is to be contracted, 
 but rather the reverse. The flights of science and of truth 
 are, after all, greater than the flights of fancy. If sentiment 
 is necessarily eliminated from business transactions, it is all 
 the more important that it be added to the recreation and the 
 leisure. The great constructive agencies of the time are 
 essentially poetic; and the world never needed poetry so much 
 as now. This thought is forcibly expressed in Charles Eliot
 
 136 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 Norton's advice, that has now been so effectively used by 
 the press: 
 
 Whatever your occupation may be. and however crowded your hours 
 with affairs, do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for 
 refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry. 
 
 But this poetry of nature must be of the new kind. Per- 
 haps the day of the formal "sustained" poem has passed, — 
 with its ambitious disquisitions, long periods, heavy rhetoric, 
 labored metaphors. It is a question, also, whether even the 
 sonnet, although highly artistic, is free and plastic enough to 
 express the nature-feeling of our time; for this feeling seems 
 to be more and more impatient of historical limits and forms. 
 The new nature poetry must be crystal clear, for we have no 
 time for riddles, even though they are set in metre and rhyme. 
 It must be definite, and it must apply. The best nature 
 poetry will be hopeful, joyous, and modern. At least some 
 of it must deal with objects, phenomena, and emotions that 
 are common to common men: then it will become a part of 
 men's Hves, not merely an accomplishment to be used with 
 proper manners and on occasion. Perhaps this more vital 
 song will relieve poetry writing of much that is too theoretical 
 and fine-spun; and I hope that it may also divert the current 
 from the weak and petty lovelorn type of verse-making 
 which exploits personal love affairs that ought to be too 
 private and sacred for publication and which in the end 
 contributes nothing to the poetry of emotion. 
 
 This poetry, whether its flight is small or great, must be 
 born of experience, and must be intrinsic; it must be the 
 expression of a full heart, not the sentiment of a looker-on. 
 It must not be assumed or forced. No man whose heart is 
 not full of the beauty and meaning of a leaf should write 
 even a distich on the leaf. So, too, the nature poem of wide 
 reach must be the poem of the man who is free. Such poetry 
 must spring from the open air; perhaps it must be set to words 
 there, — at least outside the city. The city will have its
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 137 
 
 great poems, but they will rise out of the city as Venus rose 
 out of the sea. It seems to me that we have really very 
 little genuine nature poetry. Our poets, in spirit or in fact, 
 now write largely from the city and the study outward, and 
 their work is bookish. The product is the cultured poetry 
 of the library and the study, and is under the influence of 
 the schools. It continues to be burdened with outworn and 
 useless metaphor, and it follows traditional forms of verse 
 and line, as if verse and line were more than essence. Walt 
 Whitman — poet of the commonplace — has most com- 
 pletely freed himself from the bondage of literary form; and 
 he is only an earnest of what shall come. It is doubtful 
 whether the great nature poet will be taught in the formal 
 curricula of the schools. His spirit and his method will be 
 as unconfined as the inaccessible mountains, the great plains, 
 or the open sea. His poetry must be much more than pleas- 
 ing and local: it must be rugged and continental. 
 
 It must be true that the appreciation of poetry is increasing; 
 and poetry is prophecy. If it is not increasing, then our 
 education is worse than most of us think; but if appreciation 
 of poetry is increasing, then we are acquiring a stronger hold 
 on aspirations that are simple and elemental and universal. 
 I am constantly surprised at the poems that busy and practi- 
 cal men know; and also at the poetry that many busy men 
 can write. There is reason to believe that there were never 
 so many poets in the world as now. Poetry-making is not 
 an occupation, but the incidental spark that strikes off from 
 useful labor; it is the result of full and serious lives. The 
 roll of machinery is rhythm and rhyme; the blowing of the 
 wind is music. 
 
 It has been my fortune to have had many years' experience 
 in the teaching of farm boys. They are interesting boys, — 
 strong, virile, courageous. They have not been stuffed and 
 pampered, and have not had too much schooling. They 
 have had the tremendous advantage of having been let alone,
 
 138 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 and of having developed naturally. They hold their youth ; 
 their minds are capable of receiving new impressions with 
 faith and enthusiasm. It is my habit to call these agricul- 
 tural students together twice each month, and, amongst other 
 exercises, to read them poetry. Usually at first they are 
 surprised; they had not thought of it before; or they thought 
 poetry is for girls: but they come again. They may hide it, 
 but these farm boys are as full of sentiment as an egg of meat. 
 There was one fellow who had to support himself and help 
 members of his family. He was a good student, but the 
 lines of his life had been hard. Whenever he called at my 
 office it was to ask advice about money affairs or to tell me 
 of difficulties that he feared he could not overcome. Appar- 
 ently there was no sentiment in his life, and no room for it. 
 One evening I read to the students Matthew Arnold's "Buried 
 Life." The next day, Jenkins came to my office, entered 
 hesitatingly as if requesting something that he might not 
 have, and asked whether I would loan him the poem till he 
 could learn it, for he could not afford to buy. 
 
 I believe, then, in the power of poetry, — in its power to 
 put a man at work with a song on his lips, and to set the mind 
 toward nature and naturalness. I like the definite poem of 
 a tree, or a stone, or a dog, or a garden, if only it tells the 
 truth and stops when the truth is told. The old-time short 
 nature poem was wont only to point a moral, — usually 
 dubious and far-fetched and factitious — having little vitality 
 of its own. It really was not a nature poem, for the real 
 nature poem is its own moral. The poems and stories of the 
 Old Testament are always interesting to my students because 
 they have something to say, they are direct, not surfeited 
 with adjectives or burdened with rhetoric, and they are 
 moral because they tell the truth and do not preach. We 
 need to treasure the nature poem because it contains the 
 elements of youth. So weary-old have we grown that we 
 seem to be afraid to express our real selves; when now and
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 139 
 
 then some person expresses himself in high places uncon- 
 ventionally and with native feeling, we hail him as a "strong 
 man." It is only when we are with ourselves under the free 
 open heaven that we seem to be able to feel things keenly 
 and newly and freshly. When in the open I am hopeful and 
 resilient; when in my study I am conventional and dull. 
 I wrote this lecture in my study. 
 
 We need now and then to take ourselves away from men 
 and the crowd and conventionalities, and go into the silence, 
 for the silence is the greatest of teachers. Walt Whitman 
 expresses this well: 
 
 When I heard the learn'd astronomer, 
 When the proofs, the figures, were 
 
 ranged in columns before me, 
 When I was shown the charts and 
 
 diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them. 
 When I sitting heard the astronomer where 
 
 he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, 
 How soon imaccountable I became tired and sick. 
 Till rising and ghding out I wander'd 
 
 oil by myself. 
 In the mystical and moist night-air, and 
 
 from time to time, 
 Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. 
 
 It will be gleaned from what has been said that we are to 
 consider literature, including poetry, to be one of the means 
 of the enjoyment of nature. It is fundamentally important, 
 however, that we regard literature only as a means: it is not 
 nature. Literature has its own place and value; beyond 
 all this, is our point of view toward the natural world in 
 which we live. One can never be fully appreciative of this 
 natural world unless he has technical knowledge of some 
 special part of it. One assuredly cannot be zoologist, geolo- 
 gist, botanist, and meteorologist; but if he has intimate 
 personal knowledge of one limited part, he has the key to 
 the whole. As the real love of nature rests on knowledge,
 
 I40 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 the person must have pursued some branch of natural history 
 for a time with serious purpose, — the purpose to discover 
 and to know the subject-matter for himself. This gives him 
 point of view; tells him what to look for; enables him to 
 look beneath the surface; trains his judgment as to causes 
 and effects; guides him in distinguishing the essential; saves 
 him from humiliating error. 
 
 But before one takes up any serious bit of study for him- 
 self, he must have the desire to take it up. In every person 
 there is a latent desire to know something of the enclosing 
 world. This desire is usually ironed out in the intellectual 
 laundering processes. It is important that some one lead on 
 this desire before it is overwhelmed by a multitude of less 
 relevant affairs. In some persons this native desire is so 
 strong that nothing extinguishes it: these persons become 
 professional investigators and widen the boundaries of knowl- 
 edge. Most of us, however, must give our main thought to 
 other matters, and let the outlook to nature be chiefly a 
 well-guided affection. Having this reasonable affection, the 
 proper literature deepens it and adds a charm of its own. 
 
 The best possible introduction to nature is that afforded 
 by a sympathetic person who knows some aspect of nature 
 well. You imbibe your friend's enthusiasm at the same time 
 that you learn birds, or plants, or fishes, or the sculpturing 
 of the fields. I say enthusiasm, for this is quite as important 
 as knowledge, — perhaps it is more important than knowl- 
 edge. But by enthusiasm I mean never mere exclamatory 
 demonstration, but that quiet and persistent zeal that follows 
 a subject to the end for the love of it, even though it take a 
 month. This person need not be a professed "scientist," 
 unless he is also a good teacher and knows what is most 
 important in the subject and most relevant to you. The 
 earlier the child has such a guide — if arrived at the age of 
 reason — the more vital and lasting the effect: even one or 
 two excursions afield may change the point of view and open
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 141 
 
 the way for new experiences, although neither the guide nor 
 the child may be aware of it at the time. The ideal guide 
 was "Gramp," as James Buckham knew him {Country Life 
 in America): 
 
 What a man to f:sh and camp, 
 
 What a hand to hunt and tramp 
 
 Up and down the woods, was Gramp ! 
 
 How he led me, high and low, 
 Plunging through the brush and snow! 
 Boy-like, how I loved to go ! 
 
 Oh, the sweet days that we spent 
 In the forest's pure content ! 
 Oh, the long, still miles we went ! 
 
 Keen-eyed Gramp! How well he knew 
 Where the biggest berries grew. 
 Where the witch-hke woodcock flew! 
 
 Learned was he in all the lore 
 Of the wood-wise men of yore — 
 Subtle knowledge, taught no more. 
 
 Ah, a happy boy was I, 
 
 Loving God's free woods and sky, 
 
 With dear Gramp to teach me why ! 
 
 That which is first worth knowing is that which is nearest 
 at hand. The nearest at hand, in the natural environment, 
 is the weather. Every day of our lives, on land or sea, whether 
 we will or no, the air and the clouds and the sky surround us. 
 So variable is this environment, from morning till evening 
 and from evening till morning and from season to season, 
 that we are always conscious of it. It is to the changes in 
 this environment that we apply the folk-word "weather," — 
 that is akin to wind. No man is efficient who is at cross- 
 purposes with the main currents of his life; no man is content 
 and happy who is out of sympathy with the environment in 
 which he is born to live: so the habit of grumbling at the
 
 142 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 weather is the most senseless and futile of all expenditures 
 of human effort. Day by day we complain and fret at the 
 weather, and when we are done with it we have — the weather. 
 There is no other effort at which human beings are so per- 
 sistent, and none at which they are so universally unsuccessful. 
 The same amount of energy put into productive wholesome 
 work would have set civilization far in advance of its present 
 state. "What cannot be cured must be endured;" but there 
 is really nothing in the weather to cure. It is not a human 
 institution, and therefore it cannot be "bad." I have seen 
 bad men, have read bad books, have made bad lectures, 
 have lived two years about Boston, — I have never seen bad 
 weather! 
 
 "Bad weather" is mainly the fear of spoiling our clothes. 
 Fancy clothing is one of the greatest obstacles to a knowledge 
 of nature: in this regard, the farm boy has an immense 
 advantage. It is a misfortune not to have gone barefoot in 
 one's youth. A man cannot be a naturalist in patent-leather 
 shoes. The perfecting of the manufacture of elaborate and 
 fragile fabrics correlates well with our growing habit of living 
 indoors. Our clothing is made chiefly for fair weather; 
 when it becomes worn we use it for stormy weather, although 
 it may be in no respect stormy weather clothing. If our 
 clothes are not made for the weather, then we have failed 
 to adapt ourselves to our environment, and we are in worse 
 state than the beasts of the field. Much of our clothing 
 serves neither art nor utility. Nothing can be more pro- 
 hibitive of an interest in nature than a millinery "hat," even 
 though it be distinguished for its floriculture, landscape 
 gardening, and natural history. 
 
 The discomforts of the weather are largely the result of 
 unsuitable garments. I am always interested, when abroad 
 with persons, in noting the various mental attitudes toward 
 wind; and it is apparent that most of the displeasure from 
 the wind arises from fear of disarranging the coiffure or from
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 143 
 
 the difi&culty of controlling a garment. Let us sing the 
 wind! 
 
 The wind, the wind, 
 
 The moaning wind! 
 In monotone 
 Alone, alone 
 It weeps and groans, 
 It croons and moans, 
 
 And the chilly moon 
 
 Rides aloft at noon 
 
 In the moaning, moaning wind. 
 
 The wind, the wind, 
 
 The thieving wind! 
 It whisks and starts, 
 It scuds and darts, 
 It flings the sheaves, , 
 
 It shakes the leaves, 
 
 And the apples lie 
 
 Where the weeds are high 
 
 In the thieving, thieving wind. 
 
 The wind, the wind. 
 
 The summer wind ! 
 In idle ease 
 Thro' weeds and trees 
 It wafts and woos, 
 It soothes and sues, 
 
 And I fall asleep 
 
 Where the grass is deep 
 
 In the summer, summer wind. 
 
 The wind, the wind. 
 
 The winter wind! 
 It sweeps and soars, 
 It howls and roars, 
 It drives the snow, 
 It piles the floe, 
 
 And the drifting sky 
 
 Runs sterile and dry 
 
 In the winter, winter wind.
 
 144 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 Our estimate of weather is perhaps the best criterion of 
 our outlook on nature and the world. The first fault that 
 I would correct in mankind is the habit of grumbhng at the 
 weather. We should put the child right toward the world 
 in which he is to live. What would you think of the mariner 
 who goes to sea only in fair weather? What have not the 
 weather and the climate done for the steadiness and virility 
 of the people of New England? And is this influence working 
 as strongly to-day as in the times when we had learned less 
 how to escape the weather? We must believe in all physical 
 comfort, — it contributes to the amount of work that we can 
 accomplish; but we have forgotten that it is possible to 
 bear an open storm with equanimity and comfort. The 
 person who has never been caught in rain and enjoyed it has 
 missed a privilege and a blessing. I never want to live in 
 one of those featureless climates that cannot get up spunk 
 enough to raise a storm. Give us the rain and the hail and 
 the snow, the mist, the crashing thunder, and the cold biting 
 wind! Let us be men enough to face it, and poets enough to 
 enjoy it. In "bad" weather is the time to go abroad in field 
 and wood. You are fellow then with bird and stream and 
 tree; and you are escaped from the crowd that is forever 
 crying and clanging at your heels. 
 
 Weather is the universal environing condition: it is but a 
 step from this environment to the special objects therein. 
 The customary objects are the ones that should first receive 
 attention. Do not wander in remote places or in foreign 
 lands merely to find nature: she is at your door. Touch 
 the things near at hand: you will then understand the things 
 far away. The first consideration of special study should be 
 the inhabitants of your yard and garden : they are yours; 
 or if they are not yours, you are not living a right life. Do 
 you wish to study botany? There are weeds in your door- 
 yard or trees on your lawn. You say that they are not in- 
 teresting: that is because you do not know them. Every
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 145 
 
 plant is as interesting as every other plant; if not, the fault 
 is not with the plant. We have made the mistake all along 
 of studying only special cases. We seem to have made up 
 our minds that certain features are interesting and that all 
 other features are not. It is no mere accident that many 
 persons like plants and animals but dislike botany and zoology. 
 It is more important to study plants than special subjects as 
 exemplified in plants. Why does the weed grow just there? 
 Answer that, and you have put yourself in pertinent relation 
 with the world out-of-doors. 
 
 Of course he who is to lead an effective and reposeful life 
 must be in sympathy also with artificial environments, as 
 factories and streets; but it is not my special purpose to 
 teach of these. The natural environment is the more impor- 
 tant, because it is the condition of our existence. The other 
 environments are incidental, human, capable of great im- 
 provement; yet we are brought into sympathetic touch with 
 them if we have had the training of a wholesome outlook to 
 nature. I like Timrod's sonnet to the factory smoke: 
 
 I scarcely grieve, O Nature! at the lot 
 
 That pent my life within a city's bounds, 
 
 And shut me from thy sweetest sights and sounds. 
 
 Perhaps I had not learned, if some lone cot 
 
 Had nursed a dreamy childhood, what the mart 
 
 Taught me amid its turmoil; so my youth 
 
 Had missed full many a stern but wholesome truth. 
 
 Here, too, O Nature! in this haunt of Art, 
 
 Thy power is on me, and I own thy thrall. 
 
 There is no unimpressive spot on earth I 
 
 The beauty of the stars is over all, 
 
 And Day and Darkness visit every hearth. 
 
 Clouds do not scorn us; yonder factory's smoke 
 
 Looked like a golden mist when morning broke. 
 
 I would preach the surface of the earth, because we walk 
 on it. When a youth, I was told that it was impossible for 
 me to study geology to any purpose, because there were no
 
 146 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 outcroppings of rocks in my region. So I grew up in ignorance 
 of the fact that every little part of the earth's surface has a 
 history, that there are reasons for sandbanks and for bogs 
 as well as for stratified rocks. This is but another illustration 
 of the old book-slavery, whereby we are confined to certain 
 formal problems, whether or not these problems have any 
 relation to our conditions. 
 
   The landscape is composed chiefly of three elements, — 
 the surface of the earth, the sky, the vegetation. I well 
 remember what a great surprise it was to learn that the 
 sculpturing of the fields can be understood, and that the 
 reasons for every bank and knoll and mud-hole can be worked 
 out. There was a field back of the barn that contained 
 hundreds of narrow knolls, averaging three to four feet high. 
 At one side of every knoll was a narrow deep pocket that 
 until midsummer was filled with water. The field was so 
 rough that it could not be plowed, and so it was continuously 
 used as a pasture. It was an Elysian field for a boy. Every 
 pool was a world of life, with strange creatures and mysterious 
 depths, and every knoll was a point of vantage. Near one 
 edge of the field ran a rivulet, and beyond the rivulet were 
 great woods. What was beyond the woods, I could only 
 surmise. I recall how year by year I wondered at this field, 
 until it became a sort of perpetual and unexplainable mystery, 
 and somehow it came to be woven as a natural part of the 
 fabric of my life. To this day I try once each year to visit 
 this dear old field, even though it is long since leveled. All 
 the sweep of my childhood comes back to me unbidden. 
 The field is still a pasture, but generations of cows have 
 passed on since then. Yet, as much as this field meant to 
 me, I do not remember to have had any distinct feeling that 
 there was any cause for the pools and knolls. My father cut 
 the field from the forest, yet I do not remember that I ever 
 asked him why this field was so; and I never heard any 
 person express any curiosity about it. We all seemed to have
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 147 
 
 accepted it, just as we accept the air. As I think of it now, 
 this field must have been the path of a tornado that turned 
 over the trees; and long before the settlers came, the prostrate 
 trunks had decayed and a second forest had grown. Would 
 that I could have known that simple explanation! One 
 sentence would have given me the clew. How the mystery 
 of the ancient tornado and the rise of another forest would 
 have conjured a new world of marvel and discovery. 
 
 When I had written this sketch of my pasture field, I called 
 in a little school girl and read it to her. I wanted to hear her 
 estimate of it, — for children are the best critics and also 
 honest ones. 
 
 "That's a nice story," she said; "but I don't want to 
 study such things in school." 
 
 "And why not?" I asked. 
 
 "Because they are hard and dry," she said. 
 
 Poor child! She was thinking of her books; and to think 
 that I also had written books! 
 
 I would preach the sky. When in the open country we 
 are impressed most with the sense of room and with the sky. 
 City persons have no sky, but only fragments of a leaky 
 roof; for the city is one structure and needs only a roof to 
 make it a single building. They have no free horizon line — 
 no including circle laid on the earth, no welkin. There are 
 no clouds, — only an undefined something that portends rain 
 or hides the sun. One must have free vision if he is to know 
 the sky. He must see the clouds sweep across the firmament, 
 changing and dissolving as they go. He must look deep into 
 the zenith, beyond the highest cirrus. We have almost lost 
 the habit of looking up: 
 
 Look unto the heavens, and see; 
 
 And behold the skies, which are higher than thou. 
 
 Or, if we note the sky, it is chiefly a mid-day or sunset recogni- 
 tion. Our literature is rich in sunsets, but poorer in sunrises.
 
 148 L. H. BAILEY 
 
 Civilization has led us away from the morning, and at the 
 same time it has led us away from youthfulness. We have 
 telescoped the day far into the night, and morning is becom- 
 ing obsolete. We are owls. I know that this cannot be 
 helped; but it can be mentioned. I have asked person after 
 person whether he ever saw the sun rise. The large number 
 have said no; and most of those who had seen the sun rise 
 had seen it against their will and remembered it with a sense 
 of weariness. Here, again, our farm boy has the advantage: 
 he leads something like a natural life, I doubt whether a 
 man can be a poet if he has not known the sunrise. 
 
 The sky is the one part of the environment that is beyond 
 our reach. We cannot change it; we cannot spoil it; we 
 cannot paint signs on it. The sky is forever new and young; 
 the seasons come out of it; the winds blow out of it; the 
 weather is born from it: 
 
 Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow, 
 Or hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail? 
 
 I preach the mountains, and everything that is taller than a 
 man. Yet it is to be feared that many persons see too many 
 mountains and too many great landscapes, and that the "see- 
 ing" of nature becomes a business as redundant and weari- 
 some as other affairs. One who lives on the mountains does 
 not know how high they are. Let us have one inspiration that 
 lifts us clear of ourselves: this is better than to see so many 
 mountains that we remember only their names. The best 
 objects that you can see are those in your own realm; but 
 your own realm becomes larger and means more for the sight 
 of something beyond. 
 
 It is worth while to cherish the few objects and phenomena 
 that have impressed us greatly, and it is well to recount them 
 often, until they become part of our being. One such phe- 
 nomenon stands out boldly in my own experience. It was 
 the sight of sunrise on Mt. Shasta, seen from the southeastern
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 149 
 
 side from a p'oint that was wholly untouched by travelers. 
 From this point only the -main dome of the mountain is seen. 
 I had left the Southern Pacific train at Sisson's and had ridden 
 on a fiat-car over a lumber railroad some eighteen miles to 
 the southeast. From this destination, I drove far into the 
 great forest, over old lava dust that floated through the 
 woods like smoke as it was stirred up by our horses and wagon- 
 wheels. I was a guest for the night in one of those luxurious 
 lodges which true nature-lovers, wishing wholly to escape the 
 affairs of cities, build in remote and inaccessible places. The 
 lodge stood on a low promontory, around three sides of which 
 a deep swift mountain stream ran in wild tumult. Giant 
 shafts of trees, such shafts as one sees only in the stupendous 
 forests of the far West, shot straight into the sky from the 
 very cornices of the house. It is always a marvel to the 
 easterner how shafts of such extraordinary height could have 
 been nourished by the very thin and narrow crowns that 
 they bear. One always wonders, also, at the great distance 
 the sap-water must carry its freight of mineral from root to 
 leaf and its heavier freight from leaf to root. 
 
 We were up before the dawn. We made a pot of coffee, 
 and the horses were ready, — - fine mounts, accustomed to 
 woods trails and hard slopes. It was hardly light enough to 
 enable us to pick our way. We were as two pigmies, so 
 titanic was the forest. The trails led us up and up, under 
 spruce boughs becoming fragrant, over needle-strewn floors 
 still heavy with darkness, disclosing glimpses now and then 
 of gray light showing eastward between the boles. Suddenly 
 the forest stopped, and we found ourselves on the crest of a 
 great ridge : and sheer before us stood the great cone of 
 Shasta, cold and gray and silent, floating on a sea of darkness 
 from which even the highest tree crowns did not emerge. 
 Scarcely had we spoken in the miles of our ascent, and now 
 words would be sacrilege. Almost automatically we dis- 
 mounted, letting the reins fall over the horses' necks, and
 
 ISO L. H. BAILEY 
 
 removed our hats. The horses stood, and dropped their 
 heads. Uncovered, we sat ourselves on the dry leaves and 
 waited. It was the morning of creation. Out of the pure 
 stuff of nebulae the cone had just been shaped and flung 
 adrift until a world should be created on which it might rest. 
 The gray light grew into the mountain. Gradually a ruddy 
 light appeared in the east. Then a flash of red shot out of 
 the horizon, struck on a point of the summit, and caught 
 from crag to crag and snow to snow until the great mass was 
 streaked and splashed with fire. Slowly the darkness settled 
 away from its base; a tree emerged, a bird chirped, and the 
 morning was born! 
 
 Now a great nether world began to rise up out of Chaos. 
 Far hills rose first through rolling billows of mist. Then 
 came wide forests of spruce. As the panorama rose, the 
 mountain changed from red to gold. The stars had faded 
 out and left the great mass to itself on the bosom of the rising 
 world, — the mountain fully created now and established. 
 Spriggy bushes and little leaves — little green-brown leaves 
 and tender tufts of herbs — trembled out of the woods. The 
 illimitable circle of the world stretched away and away, its 
 edges still hung in the stuff from which it had just been fash- 
 ioned. Then the forest rang with calls of birds and a hundred 
 joyous noises, and the creation was complete. 
 
 I have now reviewed some of the characteristics of the 
 sympathetic attitude toward nature, and have tried to show 
 how this outlook means greater efficiency, hopefulness, and 
 repose. In the subsequent lectures I shall enlarge on its 
 bearings on certain practical and very essential affairs. I 
 have no mind to be iconoclast, to try to tear down what has 
 been built, or to advise any man to change his occupation or 
 profession. That would be impossible to accomplish, even 
 were it desirable to advise. But even in the midst of all our 
 eagerness and involvedness, it is still possible to open the 
 mind toward nature, and it will sweeten and strengthen our
 
 THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 151 
 
 lives. Nature is our environment, and we cannot escape 
 it if we would. The problem of our life is not yonder; it is 
 here. The seeking of truth in fresh fields and for the love of 
 it is akin to the enthusiasm of youth. Men keep young by 
 knowing nature. They also should keep true. One of the 
 New Sayings of Jesus is this: "Raise the stone, and there 
 thou shalt find me; cleave the wood, and there am I."
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU ^ 
 
 Paul Elmer More 
 
 Near the secluded village of Shelburne that lies along the 
 peaceful valley of the Androscoggin, I took upon myself to 
 live two years as a hermit after a mild Epicurean fashion of 
 my own. Three maiden aunts wagged their heads ominously; 
 my nearest friend inquired cautiously whether there was any 
 taint of insanity in the family; an old gray-haired lady, a 
 veritable saint who had not been soured by her many deeds of 
 charity, admonished me on the utter selfishness and godless- 
 ness of such a proceeding. But I clung heroically to my 
 resolution. Summer tourists in that pleasant valley may 
 still see the little red house among the pines, — empty now, 
 I believe; and I dare say gaudy coaches still draw up at the 
 door, as they used to do, when the gaudier bonnets and hats 
 exchanged wondering remarks on the cabalistic inscription 
 over the lintel, or spoke condescendingly to the great dog lying 
 on the steps. As for the hermit within, having found it 
 impossible to educe any meaning from the tangled habits of 
 mankind while he himself was whirled about in the imbroglio, 
 he had determined to try the efficacy of undisturbed medita- 
 tion at a distance. So deficient had been his education that 
 he was actually better acquainted with the aspirations and 
 emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges than with those 
 of the modern toilers by the Hudson or the Potomac. He 
 had been deafened by the "indistinguishable roar" of the 
 streets, and could make no sense of the noisy jargon of the 
 
 ^ Copyright. Reprinted from Shelburne Essays by permission of 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons and of the author.
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 153 
 
 market place. But — shall it be confessed? — although he 
 discovered many things during his contemplative sojourn in 
 the wilderness, and learned that the attempt to criticise and 
 not to create literature was to be his labor in this world, 
 nevertheless he returned to civilization as ignorant, alas, of 
 its meaning as when he left it. 
 
 However, it is not my intention to justify the saintly old 
 lady's charge of egotism by telling the story of my exodus to 
 the desert; that, perhaps, may come later and at a more 
 suitable time. I wish now only to record the memories of 
 one perfect day in June, when woods and mountains were as 
 yet a new delight. 
 
 The fresh odors of morning were still swaying in the air 
 when I set out on this particular day; and my steps turned 
 instinctively to the great pine forest, called the Cathedral 
 Woods, that filled the valley and climbed the hill slopes behind 
 my house. There, many long roads that are laid down in 
 no map wind hither and thither among the trees, whose leaf- 
 less trunks tower into the sky and then meet in evergreen 
 arches overhead. There, 
 
 The tumult of the times disconsolate 
 
 never enters, and no noise of the world is heard save now and 
 then, in winter, the ringing strokes of the woodchopper at 
 his cruel task. How many times I have walked those quiet 
 cathedral aisles, while my great dog paced faithfully on 
 before! Underfoot the dry, purple-hued moss was stretched 
 like a royal carpet; and at intervals a glimpse of the deep 
 sky, caught through an aperture in the groined roof, reminded 
 me of the other world, and carried my thoughts still farther 
 from the desolating memories of this life. Nothing but pure 
 odors were there, sweeter than cloistral incense; and murmur- 
 ous voices of the pines, more harmonious than the chanting 
 of trained choristers; and in the heart of the wanderer nothing 
 but tranquillity and passionless peace.
 
 154 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 Often now the recollection of those scenes comes floating 
 back upon his senses when, in the wakeful seasons of a summer 
 night, he hears the wind at work among the trees; even in 
 barren city streets some sound or spectacle can act upon him 
 as a spell, banishing for a moment the hideous contention of 
 commerce, and placing him beneath the restful shadows of 
 the pines. May his understanding cease its function, and his 
 heart forget to feel, when the memory of those days has 
 utterly left him and he walks in the world without this con- 
 solation of remembered peace. 
 
 Nor can I recollect that my mind, in these walks, was much 
 called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of 
 the herbalist or bird-lorist, for I am not one zealously addicted 
 to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of Nature. It never 
 seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing 
 the construction of its ovaries, or assumed a new importance 
 when I learned its trivial or scientific name. The wood 
 thrush and the veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as 
 to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a little 
 ignorance is wholesome in our communion with Nature, until 
 we are ready to part with her altogether. She is feminine in 
 this as in other respects, and loves to shroud herself in illu- 
 sions, as the Hindus taught in their books. For they called 
 her Maya, the very person and power of deception, whose 
 sway over the beholder must end as soon as her mystery is 
 penetrated. 
 
 Dear as the sound of the wood thrush's note still is to my 
 ears, something of charm and allurement has gone from it 
 since I have become intimate with the name and habits of the 
 bird. As a child born and reared in the city, that wild, ring- 
 ing call was perfectly new and strange to me when, one early 
 dawn, I first heard it during a visit to the Delaware Water 
 Gap. To me, whose ears had grown familiar only with the 
 rumble of paved streets, the sound was like a reiterated un- 
 earthly summons inviting me from my narrow prison existence
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 155 
 
 out into a wide and unexplored world of impulse and adventure. 
 Long afterwards I learned the name of the songster whose 
 note had made so strong an impression upon my childish 
 senses, but still I associate the song with the grandiose scenery, 
 with the sheer forests and streams and the rapid river of the 
 Water Gap. I was indeed almost a man — though the 
 confession may sound incredible in these days — before I 
 again heard the wood thrush's note, and my second adventure 
 impressed me almost as profoundly as the first. In the 
 outer suburbs of the city where my home had always been, 
 I was walking one day with a brother, when suddenly out of 
 a grove of laurel oaks sounded, clear and triumphant, the 
 note which I remembered so well, but which had come to have 
 to my imagination the unreality and mystery of a dream of 
 long ago. Instantly my heart leapt within me. "It is the 
 fateful summons once more!" I cried; and, with my com- 
 panion who was equally ignorant of bird-lore, I ran into the 
 grove to discover the wild trumpeter. That was a strange 
 chase in the fading twilight, while the unknown songster led 
 us on from tree to tree, ever deeper into the woods. Many 
 times we saw him on one of the lower boughs, but could not 
 for a long while bring ourselves to believe that so wondrous 
 a melody should proceed from so plain a minstrel. And at 
 last, when we had satisfied ourselves of his identity, and the 
 night had fallen, we came out into the road with a strange 
 solemnity hanging over us. Our ears had been opened to 
 the unceasing harmonies of creation, and our eyes had been 
 made aware of the endless drama of natural life. We had 
 been initiated into the lesser mysteries; and if the sacred 
 pageantry was not then, and never was to be, perfectly clear 
 to our understanding, the imagination was nevertheless awed 
 and purified. 
 
 If the knowledge and experience of years have made me a 
 little more callous to these deeper influences, at least I have 
 not deliberately closed the door to them by incautious prying.
 
 156 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 Perhaps a long course of wayward reading has taught me to 
 look upon the world with eyes quite different from those of 
 the modern exquisite searchers into Nature. I remember 
 the story of Prometheus, and think his punishment is typical 
 of the penalty that falls upon those who grasp at powers and 
 knowledge not intended for mankind, — some nemesis of a 
 more material loneliness and a more barren pride torturing 
 them because they have turned from human knowledge to an 
 alien and forbidden sphere. Like Prometheus, they shall in 
 the end cry out in vain: 
 
 O air divine, and O swift-winged winds ! 
 
 Ye river fountains, and thou myriad-twinkling 
 
 Laughter of ocean waves! O mother earth! 
 
 And thou, O all-discerning orb o' the sun ! — 
 
 To you, I cry to you; behold what I, 
 
 A god, endure of evU from the gods. 
 
 Nor is the tale of Prometheus alone in teaching this lesson 
 of prudence, nor was Greece the only land of antiquity where 
 reverence was deemed more salutary than curiosity. The 
 myth of the veiled Isis passed in those days from people to 
 people, and was everywhere received as a symbol of the veil 
 of illusion about Nature, which no man might lift with 
 impunity. And the same idea was, if anything, intensified 
 in the Middle Ages. The common people, and the Church 
 as well, looked with horror on such scholars as Pope Gerbert, 
 who was thought, for his knowledge of Nature, to have sold 
 himself to the devil; and on such discoverers as Roger Bacon, 
 whose wicked searching into forbidden things cost him four- 
 teen years in prison. And even in modern times did not the 
 poet Blake say: "I fear Wordsworth loves nature, and nature 
 is the work of the Devil. The Devil is in us as far as we are 
 nature"? It has remained for an age of scepticism to sub- 
 stitute investigation for awe. After all, can any course of 
 study or open-air pedagogics bring us into real communion 
 with the world about us? I fear much of the talk about
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 157 
 
 companionship with Nature that pervades our summer life 
 is little better than cant and self-deception, and he best 
 understands the veiled goddess who most frankly admits 
 her impenetrable secrecy. The peace that comes to us from 
 contemplating the vast panorama spread out before us is 
 due rather to the sense of a great passionless power entirely 
 out of our domain than to any real intimacy with the hidden 
 deity. It was John Woolman, the famous New Jersey Quaker, 
 who wrote, during a journey through the wilderness of Penn- 
 sylvania: "In my traveling on the road, I often felt a cry 
 rise from the center of my mind, thus, 'O Lord, I am a stranger 
 on the earth, hide not thy face from me.'" 
 
 But I forget that I am myself traveling on the road; and 
 all this long disquisition is only a chapter of reminiscences, 
 due to the multitudinous singing of the thrushes on this side 
 and that, as we — I and my great dog — trod the high cathe- 
 dral aisles. After a while the sound of running water came 
 to us above the deeper diapason of the pines, and, turning 
 aside, we clambered down to a brook which we had already 
 learned to make the terminus of our walks. Along this 
 stream we had discovered a dozen secret nooks where man 
 and dog might lie or sit at ease, and to-day I stretched myself 
 on a cool, hollow rock, with my eyes looking up the long, 
 leafy chasm of the brook. Just above my couch the current 
 was dammed by a row of mossy boulders, over which the waters 
 poured with a continual murmur and plash. My head was 
 only a little higher than the pool beyond the boulders, and, 
 lying motionless, I watched the flies weaving a pattern over 
 the surface of the quiet water, and now and then was re- 
 warded by seeing a greedy trout leap into the sunlight to 
 capture one of the winged weavers. Surely, if there is any 
 such thing as real intimacy with Nature, it is in just such 
 secluded spots as this; for the grander scenes require of us a 
 moral enthusiasm which can come to the soul only at rare 
 intervals and for brief moments. From these chosen moun-
 
 158 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 tain retreats, one might send to a scientist, busy with his 
 books and his instruments and curious to pry into the secret 
 powers of Nature, some such appeal as this : — 
 
 Brother, awhile your impious engines leave; 
 
 Nor always seek with flame-compelling wires 
 Out of the palsied hand of Zeus to reave 
 
 His dear celestial fires. 
 
 What though he drowse upon a tottering bench, 
 
 Forgetful how his random bolts are hurled! 
 Are you to blame? or is it yours to quench 
 
 The thunders of the world? 
 
 Come learn with me through folly to be wise: 
 
 Think you by cunning laws of optic lore 
 To lend the enamelled fields or burning skies 
 
 One splendour lacked before? 
 
 A wizard footrule to the waves of sound 
 
 You lay, — hath measure in the song of bird 
 
 Or ever in the voice of waters found 
 One melody erst imheard? 
 
 Ah, for a season close your magic books, 
 
 Your rods and crystals in the closet hide; 
 I know in covert ways a hundred nooks, 
 
 High on the mountain side, 
 
 Where through the golden hours that follow noon. 
 
 Under the greenwood shadows you and I 
 May talk of happy hves, until too soon 
 
 Night's shadows fold the sky. 
 
 And while like incense blown among the leaves 
 Our fragrant smoke ascends from carven bowl, 
 
 We'll con the lesser wisdom that deceives 
 The Questioner in the soul, 
 
 And laugh to hoodwink where we cannot rout: — 
 
 Did Bruno of the stubborn heart outbrave, 
 Or could the mind of Galileo flout 
 
 The folly of the Grave?
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 159 
 
 So it seemed to me that the lesser wisdom of quiet content 
 before the face of Nature's mysteries might be studied in the 
 untrained garden of my hermitage. But I have been dream- 
 ing and moralizing on the little life about me and the greater 
 life of the world too long. So lying near the level of the still 
 pool I began to read. The volume chosen was the most 
 appropriate to the time and place that could be imagined, — 
 Thoreau's Walden; and having entered upon an experiment 
 not altogether unlike his, I now set myself to reading the 
 record of his two years of solitude. I learned many things 
 from that morning's perusal. Several times I had read the 
 Odyssey within sight of the sea; and the murmur of the 
 waves on the beach, beating through the rhythm of the poem, 
 had taught me how vital a thing a book might be, and how 
 it could acquire a peculiar validity from harmonious sur- 
 roundings; but now the reading of Thoreau in that charmed 
 and lonely spot emphasized this commonplace truth in a 
 special manner. Walden studied in the closet, and Walden 
 mused over under the trees, by running water, are two quite 
 different books. And then, from Thoreau, the greatest by 
 far of our writers on Nature, and the creator of a new senti- 
 ment in literature, my mind turned to the long list of Ameri- 
 cans who have left, or are still composing, a worthy record of 
 their love and appreciation of the natural world. Our land 
 of multiform activities has produced so little that is really 
 creative in literature or art! Hawthorne and Poe, and 
 possibly one or two others, were masters in their own field; 
 yet even they chose not quite the highest realm for their 
 genius to work in. But in one subject our writers have led 
 the way and are still preeminent: Thoreau was the creator 
 of a new manner of writing about Nature. In its deeper 
 essence his work is inimitable, as it is the voice of a unique 
 personality; but in its superficial aspects it has been taken 
 up by a host of living writers, who have caught something 
 of his method, even if they lack his genius and singleness of
 
 i6o PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 heart. From these it was an easy transition to compare 
 Thoreau's attitude of mind with that of Wordsworth and the 
 other great poets of his century who went to Nature for 
 their inspiration, and made Nature-writing the characteristic 
 note of modern verse. What is it in Thoreau that is not to 
 be found in Byron and Shelley and Wordsworth, not to 
 mention old Izaak Walton, Gilbert White of Selborne, and a 
 host of others? It was a rare treat, as I lay in that leafy 
 covert, to go over in memory the famous descriptive passages 
 from these authors, and to contrast their spirit with that of 
 the book in my hand. 
 
 As I considered these matters, it seemed to me that 
 Thoreau's work was distinguished from that of his American 
 predecessors and imitators by just these qualities of awe and 
 wonder which we, in our communings with Nature, so often 
 cast away. Mer? description, though it may at times have 
 a scientific value, is after all a very cheap form of literature; 
 and, as I have already intimated, too much curiosity of detail 
 is likely to exert . a deadening influence on the philosophic 
 and poetic contemplation of Nature. Such an influence is, 
 as I believe, specially noticeable at the present time, and 
 even Thoreau was not entirely free from its baneful effect. 
 Much of his writing, perhaps the greater part, is the mere 
 record of observation and classification, and has not the 
 slightest claim on our remembrance, — unless, indeed, it 
 possesses some scientific value, which I doubt. Certainly 
 the parts of his work having permanent interest are just 
 those chapters where he is less the minute observer, and 
 more the contemplative philosopher. Despite the width 
 and exactness of his information, he was far from having the 
 truly scientific spirit; the acquisition of knowledge, with him, 
 was in the end quite subordinate to his interest in the moral 
 significance of Nature, and the words he read in her obscure 
 scroll were a language of strange mysteries, oftentimes of 
 awe. It is a constant reproach to the prying, self-satisfied
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU i6i 
 
 habits of small minds to see the reverence of this great-hearted 
 observer before the supreme goddess he so loved and 
 studied. 
 
 Much of this contemplative spirit of Thoreau is due to the 
 soul of the man himself, to that personal force which no 
 analysis of character can explain. But, besides this, it has 
 always seemed to me that, more than in any other descriptive 
 writer of the land, his mind is the natural outgrowth, and 
 his essays the natural expression, of a feeling deep-rooted in 
 the historical beginnings of New England; and this founda- 
 tion in the past gives a strength and convincing force to his 
 words that lesser writers utterly lack. Consider the new life 
 of the Puritan colonists in the strange surroundings of their 
 desert home. Consider the case of the adventurous Pilgrims 
 sailing from the comfortable city of Leyden to the unknown 
 wilderness over the sea. As Governor Bradford wrote, 
 "the place they had thoughts on was some of those vast 
 & unpeopled countries of America, which are frutfull & fitt 
 for habitation, being devoyd of all civill inhabitants, wher 
 ther are only salvage and brutish men, which range up and 
 downe, little otherwise than ye wild beasts of the same." 
 In these vast and unpeopled countries, where beast and bird 
 were strange to the eye, and where "salvage" men abounded, 
 — men who did not always make the land so "fitt" for new 
 inhabitants as Bradford might have desired, — it was inevi- 
 table that the mind should be turned to explore and report 
 on natural phenomena and on savage life. It is a fact that 
 some of the descriptions of sea and land made by wanderers 
 to Virginia and Massachusetts have a directness and graphic 
 power, touched occasionally with an element of wildness, that 
 render them even to-day agreeable reading. 
 
 This was before the time of Rousseau, and before Gray 
 had discovered the beauty of wild mountain scenery; inevi- 
 tably the early American writers were chiefly interested in 
 Nature as the home of future colonists, and their books are
 
 1 62 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 for the most part semi-scientific accounts of what they studied 
 from a utilitarian point of view. But the dryness of detailed 
 description in the New World was from the first modified 
 and lighted up by the wondering awe of men set down in the 
 midst of the strange and often threatening forces of an untried 
 wilderness; and this sense of awful aloofness, which to a 
 certain extent lay dormant in the earlier writers, did never- 
 theless sink deep into the heart of New England, and when, 
 in the lapse of time, the country entered into its intellectual 
 renaissance, and the genius came who was destined to give 
 full expression to the thoughts of his people before the face 
 of Nature, it was inevitable that his works should be domi- 
 nated by just this sense of poetic mystery. 
 
 It is this New World inheritance, moreover, — joined, of 
 course, with his own inexplicable personality, which must not 
 be left out of account, — that makes Thoreau's attitude toward 
 Nature something quite distinct from that of the great poets 
 who just preceded him. There was in him none of the fiery 
 spirit of the revolution which caused Byron to mingle hatred 
 of men with enthusiasm for the Alpine solitudes. There 
 was none of the passion for beauty and the voluptuous self- 
 abandonment of Keats; these were not in the atmosphere he 
 breathed at Concord. He was not touched with Shelley's 
 unearthly mysticism, nor had he ever fed 
 
 on the aerial kisses 
 Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses; 
 
 his moral sinews were too stark and strong for that form of 
 mental dissipation. Least of all did he, after the manner of 
 Wordsworth, hear in the voice of Nature any compassionate 
 plea for the weakness and sorrow of the downtrodden. Phi- 
 lanthropy and humanitarian sympathies were to him a desola- 
 tion and a woe. "Philanthropy is almost the only virtue 
 which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is 
 greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 163 
 
 it," he writes. And again: "The philanthropist too often 
 surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off 
 griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy," Similarly 
 his reliance on the human will was too sturdy to be much 
 perturbed by the inequalities and sufferings of mankind, and 
 his faith in the individual was too unshaken to be led into 
 humanitarian interest in the masses. "Alas! this is the cry- 
 ing sin of the age," he declares, "this want of faith in the 
 prevalence of a man." 
 
 But the deepest and most essential difference is the lack 
 of pantheistic reverie in Thoreau. It is this brooding over 
 the universal spirit embodied in the material world which 
 almost always marks the return of sympathy with Nature, 
 and which is particularly noticeable in the writers of the 
 past century. So Lord Byron, wracked and broken by his 
 social catastrophes, turns for relief to the fair scenes of Lake 
 Leman, and finds in the high mountains and placid waters a 
 consoling spirit akin to his own. 
 
 Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part 
 Of me and of my soul, as I of them? 
 
 he asks; and in the bitterness of his human disappointment 
 he would "be alone, and love Earth only for its earthly sake." 
 Shelley, too, "mixed awful talk" with the "great parent," 
 and heard in her voice an answer to all his vague dreams of 
 the soul of universal love. No one, so far as I know, has yet 
 studied the relation between Wordsworth's pantheism and 
 his humanitarian sympathies, but we need only glance at his 
 lines on Tintern Abbey to see how closely the two feelings 
 were interknit in his mind. It was because he felt this 
 
 sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the livdng air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
 
 1 64 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 it was because the distinctions of the human will and the 
 consequent perception of individual responsibility were 
 largely absorbed in this dream of the universal spirit, that 
 he heard in Nature "the still, sad music of humanity," and 
 reproduced it so sympathetically in his own song. Of all 
 this pantheism., whether attended with revolt from responsi- 
 bility or languid reverie or humanitarian dreams, there is 
 hardly a trace in Thoreau. The memory of man's struggle 
 with the primeval woods and fields was not so lost in antiquity 
 that the world had grown into an indistinguishable part of 
 human life. If Nature smiled upon Thoreau at times, she 
 was still an alien creature who succumbed only to his force 
 and tenderness, as she had before given her bounty, though 
 reluctantly, to the Pilgrim Fathers. A certain companion- 
 ship he had with the plants and wild beasts of the field, a 
 certain intimacy with the dumb earth; but he did not seek 
 to merge his personality in their impersonal life, or look to 
 them for a response to his own inner moods; he associated 
 with them as the soul associates with the body. 
 
 More characteristic is his sense of awe, even of dread, 
 toward the great unsubdued forces of the world. The loneli- 
 ness of the mountains such as they appeared to the early 
 adventurers in a strange, unexplored country; the repellent 
 loneliness of the barren heights frowning down inhospitably 
 upon the pioneer who scratched the soil at their base; the 
 loneliness and terror of the dark, untrodden forests, where 
 the wanderer might stray away and be lost forever, where 
 savage men were more feared than the wild animals, and 
 where superstition saw the haunt of the Black Man and of 
 all uncleanness, — all this tradition of sombre solitude made 
 Nature to Thoreau something very different from the hills 
 and valleys of Old England. "We have not seen pure Na- 
 ture," he says, "unless we have seen her thus vast and drear 
 and inhuman. . . . Man was not to be associated with it. 
 It was matter, vast, terrific, — not his Mother Earth that
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 165 
 
 we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — 
 no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, 
 — the home, this, of Necessity and Fate." After reading 
 Byron's invocation to the Alps as the palaces of Nature; or 
 the ethereal mountain scenes in Shelley's Alastor, where all 
 the sternness of the everlasting hills is dissolved into rainbow 
 hues of shifting light as dainty as the poet's own soul; or 
 Wordsworth's familiar musings in the vale of Grasmere, — 
 if, after these, we turn to Thoreau's account of the ascent of 
 Mount Katahdin, we seem at once to be in the home of another 
 tradition. I am tempted to quote a few sentences of that 
 account to emphasize the point. On the mountain heights, 
 he says of the beholder: 
 
 He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial 
 thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men in- 
 habit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, Uke 
 the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, 
 caugfit him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does 
 not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came ye 
 here before your time? This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not 
 enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy 
 feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot 
 pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where 
 I am kind. 
 
 I do not mean to present the work of Thoreau as equal in 
 value to the achievement of the great poets with whom I 
 have compared him, but wish merely in this way to bring out 
 more definitely his characteristic traits. Yet if his creative 
 genius is less than theirs, I cannot but think his attitude 
 toward Nature is in many respects truer and more wholesome. 
 Pantheism, whether on the banks of the Ganges or of the 
 Thames, seems to bring with it a spreading taint of effeminacy ; 
 and from this the mental attitude of our Concord naturalist 
 was eminently free. There is something tonic and bracing 
 in his intercourse with the rude forces of the forest; he went 
 to Walden Pond because he had "private business to transact,"
 
 1 66 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 not for relaxation and mystical reverie. "To be a philoso- 
 pher," he said, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor 
 even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live accord- 
 ing to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magna- 
 nimity, and trust; "and by recurring to the solitudes of Nature 
 he thought he could best develop in himself just these manly 
 virtues. Nature was to him a discipline of the will as much 
 as a stimulant to the imagination. He would, if it were 
 possible, "combine the hardiness of the savages with the 
 intellectualness of the civilized man;" and in this method of 
 working out the philosophical life we see again the influence 
 of long and deep-rooted tradition. To the first settlers, the 
 red man was as much an object of curiosity and demanded as 
 much study as the earth they came to cultivate; their books 
 are full of graphic pictures of savage life, and it should seem 
 as if now in Thoreau this inherited interest had received at 
 last its ripest expression. When he travelled in the wilder- 
 ness of Maine, he was as much absorbed in learning the 
 habits of his Indian guides as in exploring the woods. He 
 had some innate sympathy or perception which taught him 
 to find relics of old Indian life where others would pass them 
 by, and there is a well-known story of his answer to one who 
 asked him where such relics could be discovered: he merely 
 stooped down and picked an arrowhead from the ground. 
 
 And withal his stoic virtues never dulled his sense of awe, 
 and his long years of observation never lessened his feeling 
 of strangeness in the presence of solitary Nature. If at 
 times his writing descends into the cataloguing style of the 
 ordinary naturalist, yet the old tradition of wonder was too 
 strong in him to be more than temporarily obscured. Un- 
 fortunately, his occasional faults have become in some of his 
 recent imitators the staple of their talent: but Thoreau was 
 pre-eminently the poet and philosopher of his school, and I 
 cannot do better than close these desultory notes with the 
 quotation of a passage which seems to me to convey most
 
 A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 167 
 
 vividly his sensitiveness to the solemn mystery of the deep 
 forest: 
 
 We heard [lie writes in his Chesuncook^, come faintly echoing, or creep- 
 ing from afar, through the moss-clad aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound, 
 with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxu- 
 riant and fungus-Uke forest, Hke the shutting of a door in some distant 
 entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not beer there, no 
 mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe [the Indian gmde]] in a whisper 
 what it was, he answered, — "Tree fall."
 
 ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 
 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Thomas Henry Huxley 
 
 This time two hundred years ago — in the beginning of 
 January, 1666 — those of our forefathers who inhabited this 
 great and ancient city took breath between the shocks of 
 two fearful calamities: one not quite past, although its fury 
 had abated; the other to come. 
 
 Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are as- 
 sembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly malady, 
 the plague, appeared in the latter months of 1664; and, 
 though no new visitor, smote the people of England, and 
 especially of her capital, with a violence unknown before, in 
 the course of the following year. The hand of a master has 
 pictured what happened in those dismal months; and in that 
 truest of fictions. The History of the Plague Year, Defoe shows 
 death, with every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking 
 through the narrow streets of old London, and changing their 
 busy hum into a silence broken only by the wailing of the 
 mourners of fifty thousand dead; by the woful denunciations 
 and mad prayers of fanatics; and by the madder yells of 
 despairing profligates. 
 
 But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to 
 nearly its ordinary amount; a case of plague occurred only 
 here and there, and the richer citizens who had flown from 
 the pest had returned to their dwellings. The remnant of 
 the people began to toil at the accustomed round of duty, or 
 of pleasure; and the stream of city life bid fair to flow back 
 along its old bed, with renewed and uninterrupted vigour.
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 169 
 
 The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, 
 indeed, returned no more; but what it had done for the 
 Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 
 1666, did for London; and, in September of that year, a heap 
 of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all 
 that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the city within the 
 walls. 
 
 Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for each 
 of these calamities. They submitted to the plague in humility 
 and in penitence, for they believed it to be the judgment of 
 God. But, towards the fire they were furiously indignant, 
 interpreting it as the effect of the malice of man, — as the 
 work of the Republicans, or of the Papists, according as their 
 prepossessions ran in favour of loyalty or of Puritanism. 
 
 It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing 
 where I now stand, in what was then a thickly peopled and 
 fashionable part of London, should have broached to our 
 ancestors the doctrine which I now propound to you — that 
 all their hypotheses were alike wrong; that the plague was 
 no more, in their sense, Divine judgment, than the fire was 
 the work of any political, or of any religious sect; but that 
 they were themselves the authors of both plague and fire, 
 and that they must look to themselves to prevent the recur- 
 rence of calamities, to all appearance so peculiarly beyond the 
 reach of human control — so evidently the result of the wrath 
 of God, or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy. 
 
 And one may picture to one's self how harmoniously the 
 holy cursing of the Puritan of that day would have chimed in 
 with the unholy cursing and the crackling wit of the Rochesters 
 and Sedleys, and with the revilings of the political fanatics, 
 if my imaginary plain dealer had gone on to say that, if the 
 return of such misfortunes were ever rendered impossible, it 
 would not be in virtue of the victory of the faith of Laud, or 
 of that of Milton; and, as little, by the triumph of republican- 
 ism, as by that of monarchy. But that the one thing needful
 
 I70 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 for compassing this end was, that the people of England should 
 second the efforts of an insignificant corporation, the establish- 
 ment of which, a few years before the epoch of the great 
 plague and the great fire, had been as little noticed, as they 
 were conspicuous. 
 
 Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague a few 
 calm and thoughtful students banded themselves together for 
 the purpose, as they phrased it, of "improving natural knowl- 
 edge." The ends they proposed to attain cannot be stated 
 more clearly than in the words of one of the founders of the 
 organization : — 
 
 Our business was (precluding matters of theology and state affairs) 
 to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries, and such as related 
 thereunto: — as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, 
 Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments; 
 with the state of these studies and their cultivation at home and abroad. 
 We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the veins, 
 the vense lacteae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican h3rpothesis, the 
 nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape (as 
 it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots on the sun and its turning on its 
 own axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several phases 
 of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes and grinding of 
 glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility 
 of vacuities and nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in 
 quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration 
 therein, with divers other things of Hke nature, some of which were then but 
 new discoveries, and others not so generally known and embraced as now 
 they are; with other things appertaining to what hath been called the New 
 Philosophy, which from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis 
 Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, 
 France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England. 
 
 The learned Dr. Wallis, writing in 1696, narrates in these 
 words, what happened half a century before, or about 1645. 
 The associates met at Oxford, in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, 
 who was destined to become a bishop; and subsequently 
 coming together in London, they attracted the notice of the 
 king. And it is a strange evidence of the taste for knowledge
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 171 
 
 which the most obviously worthless of the Stuarts shared 
 with his father and grandfather, that Charles the Second was 
 not content with saying witty things about his philosophers, 
 but did wise things with regard to them. For he not only 
 bestowed upon them such attention as he could spare from his 
 poodles and his mistresses, but, being in his usual state of 
 impecuniosity, begged for them of the Duke of Ormond; 
 and, that step being without effect, gave them Chelsea College, 
 a charter, and a mace : crowning his favours in the best way 
 they could be crowned, by burdening them no further with 
 royal patronage or state interference. 
 
 Thus it was that the half-dozen young men, studious of 
 the "New Philosophy," who met in one another's lodgings in 
 Oxford or in London, in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
 grew in numerical and in real strength, until, in its latter 
 part, the "Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural 
 Knowledge" had already become famous, and had acquired 
 a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever 
 since retained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in 
 our islands, and the chief champion of the cause it was formed 
 to support. 
 
 It was by the aid of the Royal Society that Newton pub- 
 lished his Principia. If all the books in the world, except 
 the Philosophical Transactions, were destroyed, it is safe to 
 say that the foundations of physical science would remain 
 unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last 
 two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded. 
 Nor have any signs of halting or of decrepitude manifested 
 themselves in our own times. As in Dr. Wallis's days, so in 
 these, "our business is, precluding theology and state affairs, 
 to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries." But 
 our " Mathematick " is one which Newton would have to go 
 to school to learn; our "Staticks, Mechanicks, Magneticks, 
 Chymicks, and Natural Experiments" constitute a mass of 
 physical and chemical knowledge, a glimpse at which would
 
 172 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 compensate Galileo for the doings of a score of inquisitorial 
 cardinals; our "Physick" and "Anatomy" have embraced 
 such infinite varieties of beings, have laid open such new- 
 worlds in time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, 
 with such complex problems, that the eyes of Vesalius and of 
 Harvey might be dazzled by the sight of the tree that has 
 grown out of their grain of mustard seed. 
 
 The fact is perhaps rather too much, than too little, forced 
 upon one's notice, nowadays, that all this marvelous intel- 
 lectual growth has a no less wonderful expression in practical 
 life; and that, in this respect, if in no other, the movement 
 symbolized by the progress of the Royal Society stands with- 
 out a parallel in the history of mankind. 
 
 A series of volumes as bulky as the Transactions of the Royal 
 Society might possibly be filled with the subtle speculations 
 of the Schoolmen; not improbably, the obtaining a mastery 
 over the products of mediaeval thought might necessitate an 
 even greater expenditure of time and of energy than the ac- 
 quirement of the "New Philosophy"; but though such work 
 engrossed the best intellects of Europe for a longer time than 
 has elapsed since the great fire, its effects were "writ in water," 
 so far as our social state is concerned. 
 
 On the other hand, if the noble first President of the Royal 
 Society could revisit the upper air and once more gladden his 
 eyes with a sight of the familiar mace, he would find himself 
 in the midst of a material civihzation more different from 
 that of his day, than that of the seventeenth was from that 
 of the first century. And if Lord Brouncker's native sagacity 
 had not deserted his ghost, he would need no long reflection 
 to discover that all these great ships, these railways, these 
 telegraphs, these factories, these printing-presses, without 
 which the whole fabric of modern English society would 
 collapse into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism, — 
 that all these pillars of our State are but the ripples and the 
 bubbles upon the surface of that great spiritual stream, the
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 173 
 
 springs of which only, he and his fellows were privileged to 
 see; and seeing, to recognize as that which it behoved them 
 above all things to keep pure and undefiled. 
 
 It may not be too great a flight of imagination to conceive 
 our noble revenant not forgetful of the great troubles of his 
 own day, and anxious to know how often London had been 
 burned down since his time, and how often the plague had 
 carried off its thousands. He would have to learn that, 
 although London contains tenfold the inflammable matter 
 that it did in 1666; though, not content with filling our rooms 
 with woodwork and light draperies, we must needs lead 
 inflammable and explosive gases into every corner of our 
 streets and houses, we never allow even a street to burn down. 
 And if he asked how this had come about, we should have 
 to explain that the improvement of natural knowledge has 
 furnished us with dozens of machines for throwing water upon 
 fires, any one of which would have furnished the ingenious 
 Mr. Hooke, the first "curator and experimenter" of the 
 Royal Society, with ample materials for discourse before 
 half a dozen meetings of that body; and that, to say truth, 
 except for the progress of natural knowledge, we should not 
 have been able to make even the tools by which these machines 
 are constructed. And, further, it would be necessary to add, 
 that although severe fires sometimes occur and inflict great 
 damage, the loss is very generally compensated by societies, 
 the operations of which have been rendered possible only by 
 the progress of natural knowledge in the direction of mathe- 
 matics, and the accumulation of wealth in virtue of other 
 natural knowledge. 
 
 But the plague? My Lord Brouncker's observation would 
 not, I fear, lead him to think that Englishmen of the nineteenth 
 century are purer in life, or more fervent in religious faith, 
 than the generation which could produce a Boyle, an Evelyn, 
 and a Milton. He might find the mud of society at the 
 bottom, instead of at the top, but I fear that the sum total
 
 174 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 would be as deserving of swift judgment as at the time of the 
 Restoration. And it would be our duty to explain once more, 
 and this time not without shame, that we have no reason to 
 believe that it is the improvement of our faith, nor that of 
 our morals, which keeps the plague from our city; but, again, 
 that it is the improvement of our natural knowledge. 
 
 We have learned that pestilences will only take up their 
 abode among those who have prepared unswept and ungar- 
 nished residences for them. Their cities must have narrow, 
 unwatered streets, foul with accumulated garbage. Their 
 houses must be ill-drained, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated. Their 
 subjects must be ill-washed, ill-fed, ill-clothed. The London 
 of 1665 was such a city. The cities of the East, where plague 
 has an enduring dwelling, are such cities. We, in later times, 
 have learned somewhat of Nature, and partly obey her. 
 Because of this partial improvement of our natural knowledge 
 and of that fractional obedience, we have no plague; because 
 that knowledge is still very imperfect and that obedience yet 
 incomplete, typhoid is our companion and cholera our visitor. 
 But it is not presumptuous to express the belief that, when 
 our knowledge is more complete and our obedience the expres- 
 sion of our knowledge, London will count her centuries of 
 freedom from typhoid and cholera, as she now gratefully 
 reckons her two hundred years of ignorance of that plague 
 which swooped upon her thrice in the first half of the seven- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which is not 
 fully borne out by the facts? Surely, the principles involved 
 in them are now admitted among the fixed beliefs of all think- 
 ing men? Surely, it is true that our countrymen are less 
 subject to fire, famine, pestilence, and all the evils which 
 result from a want of command over and due anticipation of 
 the course of Nature, than were the countrymen of Milton; 
 and health, wealth, and well-being are more abundant with 
 us than with them? But no less certainly is the difference
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 175 
 
 due to the improvement of our knowledge of Nature, and 
 the extent to which that improved knowledge has been incor- 
 porated with the household words of men, and has supplied 
 the springs of their daily actions. 
 
 Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which the 
 depredators of natural knowledge are so fond of urging, that 
 its improvement can only add to the resources of our material 
 civilization; admitting it to be possible that the founders of 
 the Royal Society themselves looked for not other reward 
 than this, I cannot confess that I was guilty of exaggeration 
 when I hinted, that to him who had the gift of distinguishing 
 between prominent events and important events, the origin 
 of a combined effort on the part of mankind to improve 
 natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague 
 and have outshone the glare of the Fire; as a something 
 fraught with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in compari- 
 son with which the damage done by those ghastly evils would 
 shrink into insignificance. 
 
 It is very certain that for every victim slain by the plague, 
 hundreds of mankind exist and find a fair share of happiness 
 in the world by the aid of the spinning jenny. And the great 
 fire, at its worst, could not have burned the supply of coal, 
 the daily working of which, in the bowels of the earth, made 
 possible by the steam pump, gives rise to an amount of wealth 
 to which the millions lost in old London are but as an old song. 
 
 But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but 
 toys, possessing an accidental value; and natural knowledge 
 creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the praises 
 of which do not happen to be sung because they are not 
 directly convertible into instruments for creating wealth. 
 When I contemplate natural knowledge squandering such 
 gifts among men, the only appropriate comparison I can find 
 for her is to liken her to such a peasant woman as one sees in 
 the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily burdened, and with 
 mind bent only on her home; but yet without effort and
 
 176 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 without thought, knitting for her children. Now stockings 
 are good and comfortable things, and the children will un- 
 doubtedly be much the better for them; but surely it would 
 be short-sighted, to say the least of it, to depreciate this 
 toiling mother as a mere stocking-machine — a mere provider 
 of physical comforts? 
 
 However, there are blind leaders of the blind, and not a 
 few of them, who take this view of natural knowledge, and 
 can see nothing in the bountiful mother of humanity but a 
 sort of comfort-grinding machine. According to them, the 
 improvement of natural knowledge always has been, and 
 always must be, synonymous with no more than the improve- 
 ment of the material resources and the increase of the grati- 
 fications of men. 
 
 Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real mother of 
 mankind, bringing them up with kindness, and, if need be, 
 with sternness, in the way they should go, and instructing 
 them in all things needful for their welfare; but a sort of 
 fairy god-mother, ready to furnish her pets with shoes of 
 swiftness, swords of sharpness, and omnipotent Aladdin's 
 lamps, so that they may have telegraphs to Saturn, and see 
 the other side of the moon, and thank God they are better 
 than their benighted ancestors. 
 
 If this talk were true, I, for one, should not greatly care to 
 toil in the service of natural knowledge. I think I would just 
 as soon be quietly chipping my own flint axe, after the manner 
 of my forefathers a few thousand years back, as be troubled 
 with the endless malady of thought which now infests us all, 
 for such reward. But I venture to say that such views are 
 contrary alike to reason and to fact. Those who discourse 
 in such fashion seem to me to be so intent upon trying to see 
 what is above Nature, or what is behind her, that they are 
 blind to what stares them in the face in her. 
 
 I should not venture thus to speak strongly if my justifica- 
 tion were not to be found in the simplest and most obvious
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 177 
 
 facts, — if it needed more than an appeal to the most notorious 
 truths to justify my assertion, that the improvement of natural 
 knowledge, whatever direction it has taken, and however low 
 the aims of those who may have commenced it — has not only 
 conferred practical benefits on men, but, in so doing, has 
 effected a revolution in their conceptions of the universe and 
 of themselves, and has profoundly altered their modes of 
 thinking and their views of right and wrong. I say that 
 natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found 
 the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that 
 natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of com- 
 fort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay 
 the foundations of a new morality. 
 
 Let us take these points separately; and first, what 
 great ideas has natural knowledge introduced into men's 
 minds? 
 
 I cannot but think that the foundations of all natural 
 knowledge were laid when the reason of man first came face 
 to face with the facts of Nature; when the savage first learned 
 that the fingers of one hand are fewer than those of both ; 
 that it is shorter to cross a stream than to head it; that a 
 stone stops where it is unless it be moved, and that it drops 
 from the hand which lets it go; that light and heat come and 
 go with the sun; that sticks burn away in a fire; that plants 
 and animals grow and die; that if he struck his fellow savage 
 a blow he would make him angry, and perhaps get a blow in 
 return, while if he offered him a fruit he would please him, 
 and perhaps receive a fish in exchange. When men had 
 acquired this much knowledge, the outlines, rude though they 
 were, of mathematics, of physics, of chemistry, of biology, 
 of moral, economical, and political science, were sketched. 
 Nor did the germ of religion fail when science began to bud. 
 Listen to words which, though new, are yet three thousand 
 years old : —
 
 1 78 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 . . . When in heaven the stars about the moon 
 Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, 
 And every height comes out, and jutting peak 
 And valley, and the immeasurable heavens 
 Break open to their highest, and all the stars 
 Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart. 
 
 If the half-savage Greek could share our feelings thus far, 
 it is irrational to doubt that he went further, to find as we do, 
 that upon that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow, — 
 the little light of awakened human intelligence shines so mere 
 a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; 
 seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imper- 
 fections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot 
 be realized, of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this 
 consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open 
 secret which he cannot penetrate, hes the essence of all reli- 
 gion; and the attempt to embody it in the forms furnished 
 by the intellect is the origin of the higher theologies. 
 
 Thus it seems impossible to imagine but that the founda- 
 tions of all knowledge — • secular or sacred — were laid when 
 intelligence dawned, though the superstructure remained 
 for long ages so slight and feeble as to be compatible with the 
 existence of almost any general view respecting the mode of 
 governance of the universe. No doubt, from the first, there 
 were certain phenomena which, to the rudest mind, presented 
 a constancy of occurrence, and suggested that a fixed order 
 ruled, at any rate, among them. I doubt if the grossest of 
 Fetish worshippers ever imagined that a stone must have a 
 god within it to make it fall, or that a fruit had a god within 
 it to make it taste sweet. With regard to such matters as 
 these, it is hardly questionable that mankind from the first 
 took strictly positive and scientific views. 
 
 But, with respect to all the less familiar occurrences which 
 present themselves, uncultured man, no doubt, has always 
 taken himself as the standard of comparison, as the centre
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 179 
 
 and measure of the world; nor could he well avoid doing so. 
 And finding that his apparently uncaused will has a powerful 
 effect in giving rise to many occurrences, he naturally enough 
 ascribed other and greater events to other and greater voli- 
 tions, and came to look upon the world and all that therein 
 is, as the product of the volitions of persons like himself, 
 but stronger, and capable of being appeased or angered, as 
 he himself might be soothed or irritated. Through such 
 conceptions of the plan and working of the universe all m.an- 
 kind have passed, or are passing. And we may now consider 
 what has been the effect of the improvement of natural knowl- 
 edge on the views of men who have reached this stage, and who 
 have begun to cultivate natural knowledge with no desire 
 but that of "increasing God's honour and bettering man's 
 estate." 
 
 For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere material 
 point of view, more innocent, from a theological one, to an 
 ancient people, than that they should learn the exact succes- 
 sion of the seasons, as warnings for their husbandmen; or 
 the position of the stars, as guides to their rude navigators? 
 But what has grown out of this search for natural knowledge 
 of so merely useful a character? You all know the reply. 
 Astronomy, — which of all sciences has filled men's minds 
 with general ideas of a character most foreign to their daily 
 experience, and has, more than any other, rendered it impos- 
 sible for them to accept the beliefs of their fathers. Astron- 
 omy, — which tells them that this so vast and seemingly 
 solid earth is but an atom among atoms, whirling, no man 
 knows whither, through illimitable space; which demonstrates 
 that what we call the peaceful heaven above us, is but that 
 space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter whose particles 
 are seething and surging, like the waves of an angry sea ; 
 which opens up to us infinite regions where nothing is known, 
 or ever seems to have been known, but matter and force, oper- 
 ating according to rigid rules; which leads us to contemplate
 
 i8o THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 phenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they 
 must have had a beginning, and that they must have an end, 
 but the very nature of which also proves that the beginning 
 was, to our conceptions of time, infinitely remote, and that 
 the end is as immeasurably distant. 
 
 But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask 
 for bread and receive ideas. What more harmless than the 
 attempt to lift and distribute water by pumping it; what 
 more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? Yet out of pumps 
 grew the discussions about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; 
 and then it was discovered that Nature does not abhor a 
 vacuum, but that air has weight; and that notion paved the 
 way for the doctrine that all matter has weight, and that the 
 force which produces weight is co-extensive with the universe, 
 — in short, to the theory of universal gravitation and endless 
 force. While learning how to handle gases led to the discovery 
 of oxygen, and to modern chemistry, and to the notion of the 
 indestructibility of matter. 
 
 Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than 
 the attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heating when 
 the wheel turns round very fast? How useful for carters and 
 gig drivers to know something about this; and how good 
 were it, if any ingenious person would find out the cause of 
 such phenomena, and thence educe a general remedy for them. 
 Such an ingenious person was Count Rumford; and he and 
 his successors have landed us in the theory of the per- 
 sistence, or indestructibility, of force. And in the infinitely 
 minute, as in the infinitely great, the seekers after natural 
 knowledge of the kinds called physical and chemical, have 
 everywhere found a definite order and succession of events 
 which seem never to be infringed. 
 
 And how has it fared with " Physick " and Anatomy? Have 
 the anatomist, the physiologist, or the physician, whose 
 business it has been to devote themselves assiduously to that 
 eminently practical and direct end, the alleviation of the
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE i8i 
 
 sufferings of mankind, — have they been able to confine their 
 vision more absolutely to the strictly useful? I fear they are 
 the worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set 
 before us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical 
 eternity of the duration of the universe; if the physical and 
 chemical philosophers have demonstrated the infinite minute- 
 ness of its constituent parts, and the practical eternity of 
 matter and of force; and if both have alike proclaimed the 
 universality of a definite and predicable order and succession 
 of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all 
 these, but have added more startling theses of their own. 
 For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the 
 universe, but an eccentric speck, so the naturalists find man 
 to be no centre of the living world, but one amidst endless 
 modifications of life; and as the astronomers observe the 
 mark of practically endless time set upon the arrangements 
 of the solar system so the student of life finds the records of 
 ancient forms of existence peopling the world for ages, which, 
 in relation to human experience, are infinite. 
 
 Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as dependent 
 for its manifestation of particular molecular arrangements 
 as any physical or chemical phenomenon; and wherever he 
 extends his researches, fixed order and unchanging causation 
 reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest of Nature. 
 
 Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the germ of 
 Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of 
 the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is 
 not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of 
 Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Super- 
 stition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits 
 and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for 
 my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs 
 from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present 
 has become more scientific than that of the past; because it 
 has not only renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but
 
 1 82 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 begins to see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols 
 built up of books and traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical 
 cobwebs: and of cherishing the noblest and most human of 
 man's emotions, by worship "for the most part of the silent 
 sort" at the Altar of the Unknown. 
 
 Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted in our 
 minds by the improvement of natural knowledge. Men 
 have acquired the ideas of the practically infinite extent of the 
 universe and of its practical eternity; they are familiar with 
 the conception that our earth is but an infinitesimal fragment 
 of that part of the universe which can be seen; and that, 
 nevertheless, its duration is, as compared with our standards 
 of time, infinite. They have further acquired the idea that 
 man is but one of innumerable forms of life now existing on 
 the globe, and that the present existences are but the last of 
 an immeasurable series of predecessors. Moreover, every 
 step they have made in natural knowledge has tended to extend 
 and rivet in their minds the conception of a definite order of 
 the universe — which is embodied in what are called, by an 
 unhappy metaphor, the laws of Nature — and to narrow the 
 range and loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or 
 in changes other than such as arise out of that definite order 
 itself. 
 
 Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not the ques- 
 tion. No one can deny that they exist, and have been the 
 inevitable outgrowth of the improvement of natural knowledge. 
 And if so, it cannot be doubted that they are changing the 
 form of men's most cherished and most important convictions. 
 
 And as regards the second point — the extent to which the 
 improvement of natural knowledge has remodelled and altered 
 what may be termed the intellectual ethics of men, — what 
 are among the moral convictions most fondly held by bar- 
 barous and semi-barbarous people? 
 
 They are the convictions that authority is the soundest 
 basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness to believe;
 
 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 183 
 
 that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and sceptisicm a 
 sin; that when good authority has pronounced what is to 
 be believed, and faith has accepted it, reason has no further 
 duty. There are many excellent persons who yet hold by 
 these principles, and it is not my present business, or inten- 
 tion, to discuss their views. All I wish to bring clearly before 
 your minds is the unquestionable fact, that the improvement 
 of natural knowledge is effected by methods which directly 
 give the lie to all these convictions, and assume the exact 
 reverse of each to be true. 
 
 The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to 
 acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the 
 highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And 
 it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural 
 knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, 
 the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of 
 the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science 
 holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most 
 venerates hold them; not because their verity is testified 
 by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches 
 him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into 
 contact with their primary source. Nature — whenever he 
 thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to 
 observation — Nature will confirm them. The man of 
 science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but 
 by verification. 
 
 Thus, without for a moment pretending to despise the 
 practical results of the improvement of natural knowledge, 
 and its beneficial influence on material civilization, it must, 
 I think, be admitted that the great ideas, some of which I 
 have indicated, and the ethical spirit which I have endeavoured 
 to sketch, in the few moments which remained at my dis- 
 posal, constitute the real and permanent significance of natural 
 knowledge. 
 
 If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to be more
 
 1 84 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 and more firmly established as the world grows older; if that 
 spirit be fated, as I believe it is, to extend itself into all de- 
 partments of human thought, and to become coextensive 
 with the range of knowledge; if, as our race approaches its 
 maturity, it discovers, as I believe it will, that there is but one 
 kind of knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then 
 we, who are still children, may justly feel it our highest duty 
 to recognize the advisableness of improving natural knowl- 
 edge, and so to aid ourselves and our successors in our course 
 towards the noble goal which lies before mankind.
 
 SCIENCE! 
 
 (1857-1907) 
 
 Henry S. Pritchett 
 
 The progress of science — like human progress in all direc- 
 tions — is a somewhat irregular process. In this process we 
 can generally distinguish several stages, which, however, 
 merge constantly into one another. The first stage is that 
 of the collection of scientific data; the next, some sort of log- 
 ical arrangement of the data; and finally, generalizations 
 made in the effort to interpret the phenomena. This chrono- 
 logical arrangement, however, is subject to constant varia- 
 tions. The human mind is active in the construction of 
 theories formed far in advance of positive knowledge; and 
 while such theories are often erroneous, they nevertheless 
 serve to stimulate investigation and to lead ultimately to 
 truth. Scientific progress is thus made up of a continuous 
 series of collections of fact, while efforts at interpretation 
 occur, not in their chronologic order, but rather in the order 
 which the temperaments of men and the tendencies of the 
 age may suggest. 
 
 For this reason it is seldom possible to compare sharply 
 the state of science at two distinct epochs. There are, to be 
 sure, discoveries which belong to a given year, but they are 
 ordinarily the culmination of long periods of collection and 
 comparison of facts, which represent rather processes than 
 distinct efforts, and the men who contribute most to the col- 
 lection and correlation of facts are often unknown to the 
 public. 
 
 ' From the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 100, pp. 613-625. Nov., 1907. Re- 
 printed by permission of the author and the pubUshers.
 
 1 86 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 Furthermore, it is to be remembered when one considers 
 physical science that the facts and the phenomena of science 
 are the same to-day as fifty years ago. Chemical reactions, 
 the nature and growth of microbe organisms, the transforma- 
 tions of energy, are the same in nature to-day as they were 
 a half-century ago. For this reason, the state of science at 
 two distinct epochs cannot be contrasted in the same way 
 as one might compare two epochs in a creative art, such as 
 literature, in which a whole new school of authors may have 
 grown up in consequence of a new social factor or a new 
 literary cult. 
 
 Comparisons of scientific progress at two distinct epochs 
 resemble rather two views from a mountain, one view-point 
 a little higher than the other, each looking out upon the same 
 topography, but showing hills and valleys and streams in 
 greater detail or with greater clearness from one point than 
 from the other by reason of the difference in altitude. In 
 some such way one may compare the outlook in science to-day 
 with that of a half-century ago; the facts and the phenomena 
 are the same, the point of view has changed enormously. 
 
 To bring such a view within the compass of a brief discus- 
 sion, one needs also to keep in mind two other facts. First, 
 that in making such a comparison, one is viewing the scien- 
 tific horizon, not from the standpoint of the specialist in 
 any department of science, but rather from the standpoint 
 of the educated American. Such a man is not interested in 
 the minute subdivisions of science, nor in the names of the 
 specialists who have served it; but rather in the outcome, in 
 the direction both of utilitarian ends and of intellectual and 
 moral results, which the progress of science promises to the 
 race. Second, in making such a comparison from the stand- 
 point of the general reader, it is most important to keep in 
 view the unity of human knowledge. Science is essentially 
 one, and while, for the sake of convenience, it must be classi- 
 fied into numerous subdivisions, these parts have a relation
 
 SCIENCE 187 
 
 to the whole. Thus, physical science not only concerns itself 
 with the objective world, but it goes far beyond this and works 
 at the relation between human circumstances and the neces- 
 sary laws which govern physical objects. In the same way, 
 the historical sciences transcend the social phenomena with 
 which they are immediately concerned and attempt an inter- 
 pretation of these in the light of physical law. Thus all 
 divisions of science are inextricably yoked together in the 
 common effort to explain the history of man, and the adjust- 
 ment of the human race to its environment. 
 
 When one considers science in this larger aspect he realizes 
 that the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning 
 of the twentieth are two extremely interesting epochs to 
 compare. After centuries of accumulation of facts, the men 
 of the first half of the nineteenth century had begun those 
 great generalizations which the mid-century saw securely in 
 the grasp of the human mind, and the fifty years which 
 have since elapsed have borne a rich fruitage of those 
 generalizations. 
 
 The fundamental contrasts which stand out most promi- 
 nently in such a comparison may be grouped under four 
 heads: — 
 
 1. The last fifty years have seen a great betterment of the 
 theoretical basis of physical science. 
 
 2. This development has been marked by a notable stim- 
 ulation of scientific research; a differentiation of scientific 
 effort, and the creation thereby of a great number of special 
 sciences or departments of science. 
 
 3. The possession of a secure theoretical basis and the 
 intellectual quickening which has followed it have resulted 
 in the application of science to the arts and to the industries 
 in such measure as the world has never before known. These 
 applications have to do with the comfort, health, pleasures, 
 and happiness of the human race, and affect vitally all the 
 conditions of modern life.
 
 1 88 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 4. Last, but perhaps in many respects the most significant 
 of all, is the effect which has been produced upon the religious 
 faith and the philosophy of life of the civilized world by the 
 widespread introduction of what may be called the modern 
 scientific spirit. 
 
 I shall endeavor to point out the more significant move- 
 ments which group themselves under these four heads, begging 
 the reader always to bear in mind the fundamental facts to 
 which I have alluded, that is to say, the desire to present a 
 view, not of the scientific specialist, but of the educated intel- 
 ligent American; and secondly, to keep in mind at the same 
 time, notwithstanding the differentiations of science, the 
 essential unity of human knowledge. 
 
 The Betterment of the Theoretical Basis of Physical Science 
 
 The fundamental sciences which have opened to us such 
 knowledge of the laws of the universe as we now possess are 
 mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The first of these 
 deals with numerical relations, and it has been the tool with 
 which the human mind has had most experience. It had 
 advanced to a high stage of perfection long before any other 
 branch of science had attained even respectable standing. 
 Men learned to reason in abstract relations with great skill 
 and proficiency long in advance of the time when they reasoned 
 from physical phenomena to their cause. The end of the 
 eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth 
 saw a galaxy of astronomers and mathematicians of whom 
 Laplace and Gauss were the most fruitful, who carried mathe- 
 matical treatment of the problems of astronomy and geodesy 
 to a point which left little to be desired. The last century 
 has seen little improvement in these processes, but mathe- 
 matics has remained the most facile tool in the hands of the 
 physical investigator, in the interpretation of physical phe- 
 nomena, and in the expression of the transformations of 
 energy. But for the significant progress which has been
 
 SCIENCE ' 189 
 
 made in the last fifty years we are indebted to the other two 
 fundamental sciences, chemistry and physics. The first 
 deals with the composition and transformation of matter; 
 the second with energy and the transformation of energy. 
 
 The connection between physics and chemistry is so inti- 
 mate that it is impossible to draw a line of separation. In 
 general, we are concerned in chemistry with the elements 
 which, by their combination, form various substances, and 
 with the composition of these substances; while in physics 
 we are concerned with matter as a mass, as a substance repre- 
 senting a fixed composition, though subject to changes of 
 form and of place. Changes by which the identity of the 
 body is affected, such as, for example, when hydrogen and 
 oxygen combine to form water, are chemical changes and do 
 not belong to physics; while changes which matter undergoes 
 without altering its composition or destroying the identity 
 of the body are physical and are part of the study of physics. 
 Inasmuch, however, as chemical changes are accompanied 
 by changes of energy, there is a broad region which belongs 
 to the investigations both of the physicist and of the chemist, 
 and which completely connects those two fundamental sciences. 
 
 In the early part of the nineteenth century, John Dalton 
 announced his famous atomic theory, which has served to 
 unify the known or suspected laws of chemical combination. 
 Dalton discovered that to every element a definite number 
 could be assigned, and that these numbers, or their multiples, 
 govern the formation of all compounds. Oxygen, for instance, 
 unites with other elements in the proportion of eight parts 
 of weight, or some multiple thereof, and never in other ratios. 
 With the help of these atomic weights — or combining parts, 
 as they are sometimes called — the composition of any sub- 
 stance could be represented by a simple formula. This theory 
 had become well established by the middle of the nineteenth 
 century as the thread upon which all chemical results hung, 
 and the second half of the century began under the stimulation
 
 I go 
 
 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 which this discovery brought about. Before this period, 
 inorganic chemistry — that is, the chemistry of the metals, 
 of earths, of common oxides, bases, and salts — had received 
 the greatest attention, and during the first half of the nine- 
 teenth century inorganic chemistry embraced almost all the 
 work of chemists. The second half of the nineteenth century 
 has been the day of organic chemistry. It was at first sup- 
 posed that the two fields of research were absolutely distinct, 
 but this belief was overthrown by Woehler, who showed that 
 urea, an organic body, was easily prepared from inorganic 
 materials, and since that day a vast number of organic 
 syntheses have been effected. Out of this study has grown 
 the basis of the chemical theory of to-day, that is to say, the 
 conception of chemical structure, which has placed the chem- 
 istry of the twentieth century upon a theoretical foundation 
 vastly more secure and vastly more significant than that of 
 half a century ago. 
 
 Briefly stated, this theory of chemical structure is as follows: 
 Every atom, so far as its union with other atoms is concerned, 
 is seen to have a certain atom-fixing power, which is known 
 as its valence. For example, take hydrogen as the standard 
 of reference, and consider some of its simplest compounds. 
 In hydrochloric acid, one atom of hydrogen is added to one 
 of chlorine. These elementary atoms combine only in the 
 ratio of one to one. They are called "univalent," that is, 
 their power of fixing or uniting with other atoms is unity. In 
 water, on the other hand, a single oxygen atom holds two of 
 hydrogen in combination, and so oxygen is called a bivalent 
 element. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements go still 
 farther and are trivalent, while carbon is a quadrivalent sub- 
 stance, forming, therefore, compounds of the most complex 
 t)q)e. The theory as thus stated is no mere speculation. It is 
 the statement of observed fact, and this shows that the atoms 
 unite, not at haphazard, but according to certain rules. 
 
 A notable advance took place in the years i860 to 1870 in
 
 SCIENCE 191 
 
 the discovery of a general law connecting all the chemical 
 elements. That those elements are related was early rec- 
 ognized, but it was not until the epoch-making work of 
 Mendeleeff that the periodic variation in their properties was 
 recognized, and the connection between the valency of the 
 atom and its properties and compounds was interpreted. 
 
 Within twenty years chemistry has been enormously 
 developed upon its electrical side, both theoretically and 
 practically. From a purely chemical point of view, probably 
 the most important electrical phenomena are those of elec- 
 trolysis. When a current of electricity passes through a 
 compound solution, the latter undergoes decomposition, and 
 the dissolved substance is separated into two parts which 
 move with unequal velocities in opposite directions. The 
 conducting liquid is called an electrolyte, and the separated 
 parts, or particles, of the compound in solution are termed 
 its ions. One ion is positively, the other negatively, electri- 
 fied, and hence they tend to accumulate around the opposite 
 poles. Under suitable conditions, the separation can be made 
 permanent, and this fact is of the greatest significance in the 
 different processes of electrometallurgy. 
 
 The modern science of physics has its basis in the doctrine 
 of the conservation of energy. This doctrine as stated in 
 the words of Maxwell is, "The total energy of any material 
 system is a quantity which can neither be increased nor 
 diminished by any action between the parts of the system, 
 though it may be transformed into any of the forms of which 
 energy is susceptible." A little more than a half-century 
 ago, our knowledge of physics consisted in the main of a large 
 mass of facts loosely tied together by theories not always 
 consistent. Between 1845 and 1850 the labors of Mayer, 
 Joule, Helmholtz, and Sir William Thomson had placed the 
 theory of the conservation of energy upon firm ground, and 
 for the last half-century it has been the basic law for testing 
 the accuracy of physical experiments and for extending phys-
 
 192 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 ical theory. To the presence of such a highly defined and 
 consistent theory is due the great development which our 
 generation has witnessed. 
 
 The most remarkable development of the half-century 
 in the domain of physics has gone on in that field included 
 under the name radio-activity, a development which bids 
 fair to affect the whole theory of physical processes. By 
 radiation is meant the propagation of energy in straight lines. 
 This is effected by vibrations in the ether which fills all space, 
 both molecular and inter-stellar. This theory is based upon 
 the conception that the vibrations are due to oscillations of 
 the ultimate particles of matter. 
 
 Experiments in vacuum tubes by various investigators 
 led to a long series of most interesting results, culminating 
 in the discovery by Roentgen in 1895 of the so-called X-rays. 
 These rays have properties quite different from those of 
 ordinary light. They are not deflected by a magnet and will 
 penetrate glass, tin, aluminum, and in general metals of low 
 atomic weight. In 1896, Becquerel discovered that uranium 
 possessed the property of spontaneously emitting rays capable 
 of passing through bodies opaque to ordinary light. 
 
 Shortly after the discovery of this property in uranium 
 Madame and Professor Curie succeeded in separating from 
 pitchblende two new substances of very high radio-activity, 
 called radium and polonium, the latter named after her native 
 land, Poland. 
 
 The radiations from these various substances are invisible 
 to the eye, but act upon a photographic plate and discharge 
 an electrified body. A very active substance like radium 
 will cause phosphorescent substance to become luminous. 
 
 If a magnetic field is applied to a pencil of radium rays 
 the rays are separated out into three kinds, much as light 
 rays are sifted out by passing through a prism. One set of 
 rays is bent to the left, another to the right, and the third 
 set keeps on in the original direction.
 
 SCIENCE 193 
 
 The emission of the particles which deviate to the left and 
 right appears to proceed from explosions in some of the atoms 
 of these substances. It is estimated that two hundred thou- 
 sand millions are expelled from one gram of radium bromide 
 every second, yet the number of atoms in a gram is so 
 enormous that this rate of emission may continue some 
 years without an appreciable wasting of the mass of the 
 substance. 
 
 The discovery of these substances with their remarkable 
 properties has not only led to interesting applications of the 
 most novel kind, but has stimulated the imagination of inves- 
 tigators, and given rise to various new explanations of cosmic 
 phenomena. For example, it has been suggested that the 
 internal heat of the earth may be kept up by the heat emitted 
 from radium and other radio-active matter. All such theories 
 are yet in the speculative stage. It may be said in general 
 that, while the phenomena presented by the radio-active 
 substances have caused physicists to revise physical theory 
 in respect to molecular energy, nothing has been discovered 
 which is inconsistent with the fundamental law of the con- 
 servation of energy. 
 
 Progress no less real has been made in those sciences which 
 deal with the study of the human body and the human mind. 
 Physiology, during the last half of the nineteenth century, 
 has gained nearly all our present knowledge of the chemistry 
 of digestion and secretion and of the mechanics of circulation, 
 while psychology has advanced from a branch of philosophy 
 to the position of a distinctive science. 
 
 From whatever point of view one regards human progress, 
 he will be led to realize that one of the greatest achievements 
 of the race is the work of the army of scholars and investigators 
 to whom is due the betterment in these fifty years of the 
 theoretical basis of these two fundamental physical sciences, 
 a basis which is not only intellectually sound, but intellectually 
 fruitful. The roll of these names — chemists, physicists,
 
 194 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 biologists, inventors, investigators in all fields of human knowl- 
 edge — is made up from all lands. It is a world's roll of honor 
 in which not only individuals but nations have earned immor- 
 tality. Of all the men whose names are here written, there 
 are two whose work is so fundamental and far-reaching that 
 the world is glad to accord to them a preeminence. These 
 are the Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, and the Englishman, 
 Charles Darwin. 
 
 The Differentiation of Science and the Development of 
 Special Sciences 
 
 Under the stimulus of the great fundamental theories which 
 have tended to unify chemistry and physics, and also to direct 
 attention to a vast field common to both and previously un- 
 explored, a large number of special sciences, or divisions of 
 science, have been developed. Once the law of chemical 
 structure was ascertained and the possibilities were made 
 evident which this law involved, and once the law of the con- 
 servation of energy was clear and the multiform transforma- 
 tions which might be made under such a law formulated, 
 there was opened in every nook and corner of the physical 
 universe the opportunity for new combinations and for new 
 transformations. The result of this has been that in the last 
 five decades physicists and chemists, having these threads 
 in their hands as guides, have gone off into all sorts of by- 
 paths. There has grown up through these excursions a great 
 number of minor divisions of science, dependent on processes 
 partly physical and partly chemical, but all related to one 
 another and to the fundamental sciences of chemistry and 
 physics. 
 
 By means of that wonderful instrument, the spectroscope, 
 has arisen the combination of the old science of astronomy 
 with physics, known as astro-physics. There have been in- 
 teresting gains in the older astronomy during this period, 
 such as the discoveries of the new satellites of Mars, of Jupiter,
 
 SCIENCE 195 
 
 and of Saturn, all by American astronomers; the discovery 
 of some hundreds of asteroids with the unexpected form of 
 some of their orbits; and the variation of the terrestrial lati- 
 tude. All these discoveries are in the direction of the appli- 
 cations of gravitational astronomy upon the foundations laid 
 by Newton, Laplace, and Gauss. The significant gains have 
 come, however, in the new astronomy, which is really celestial 
 physics, and are the outcome of the modern spectroscope 
 and photographic plate. The motion of stars and nebulae 
 in the line of sight, and discovery of invisible companions by 
 the doubling of the lines of the spectrum, and above all, the 
 determinations of the physical constitution of the distant suns 
 and nebulae have thrown a great light not only upon cosmic 
 evolution, but upon the probable history of our own planet. 
 Perhaps no one result of the whole study is so significant as 
 this: In the far-distant suns which shine upon us, as well 
 as in our own sun, we find only those same elements which 
 exist in our own soil and in our own atmosphere. Just as 
 the law of the combination of chemical elements and of the 
 conservation of energy points to a uniform physical law on 
 our planet, so also the unity of material composition through- 
 out the universe of stars seems to point with equal significance 
 to a physical unity of the whole universe. 
 
 Early in the seventeenth century, certain "animalculae," 
 as they were called, became recognized as the simplest form 
 of life; but the modern science of bacteriology dates from the 
 epoch-making investigations of Pasteur and Koch, conducted 
 within the last thirty-five years. One of the most important 
 steps was the introduction by Koch of trustworthy methods 
 for separating individual bacterial species. Since many 
 distinct species are indistinguishable from one another by 
 size and shape, it was obviously impossible by the older 
 methods of study to separate one from the other. Koch 
 suggested the use of solid materials as culture media, thereby 
 representing the conditions so often seen when such organic
 
 196 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 matter as bread becomes mouldy. He demonstrated that the 
 addition of gelatin to the infusions employed for the successful 
 cultivation of bacteria converted them into practically solid 
 culture media without robbing them of any of their useful 
 properties; and by the employment of such media it was 
 possible to separate as pure cultures the individual species 
 that one desired to analyze. The introduction of this method 
 for the isolation and study of bacterial species in pure cultures 
 constitutes perhaps the most important stimulus to the devel- 
 opment of modern bacteriology. 
 
 The studies made by Pasteur upon fermentation and the 
 souring of wine, and upon the maladies of silkworms, together 
 with Koch's studies upon the infections of wounds, and the 
 appropriate methods of analyzing them, were rich in suggestion 
 to the workers in this new field. Two of the most important 
 results have been in the application of these studies to the 
 problems of the sanitary engineer and to the work of preventive 
 medicine. 
 
 The drinking w-ater of our cities is purified to-day by the 
 process of natural sand filtration, by the septic tank process, 
 etc. In these methods the living bacteria are the instruments 
 by which the results are obtained. The sand grains in the 
 filters serve only as objects to which the bacteria can attach 
 themselves and multiply. By the normal life processes of 
 the bacteria the polluting organic matter in the water is used 
 up and inert material given off as a result. 
 
 But even more important than this work of sanitation is 
 the contribution of bacteriology to preventive medicine. 
 Early in the course of his work, Pasteur discovered that certain 
 virulent pathogenic bacteria, when kept under certain con- 
 ditions, gradually lost their disease-producing power, with- 
 out their other life properties being disturbed. When injected 
 into animals in this attenuated state, there resulted a mild, 
 temporary, and modified form of infection, usually followed 
 by recovery. With recovery the animal so treated was
 
 SCIENCE 197 
 
 immune from the activities of the fully virulent bacteria of 
 the same species. The development of this fruitful idea has 
 not only resulted in the saving of millions of money, but it 
 has resulted as well in the prevention of human disease, the 
 greatest triumph of modern science. 
 
 A study of the laws of physics and chemistry in relation to 
 living plants and animals led in a similar way to the discovery 
 that the processes of the entire race history are reflected 
 in the processes of the growth of the embryo, a result which 
 created the new science of embryology. 
 
 Similarly, in the studies of energy differentiations have gone 
 on. Fifty years ago, our colleges had a single professor of 
 what was called at that day natural philosophy. To-day, 
 a modern college will divide this field among a corps of teachers 
 and investigators, one devoting his attention to mechanics, 
 another to heat, another to electricity, another to magnetism, 
 and another to sound and light. In turn, electricity will be 
 subdivided, the investigator concerning himself with a con- 
 stantly narrowing field of phenomena, with the expectation 
 of working out completely the problem whose solution is 
 sought. All these departments of physical science, with 
 their numerous sub-divisions, are the offspring of the funda- 
 mental sciences chemistry and physics. No contrast is more 
 striking in comparing the science of to-day with that of fifty 
 years ago than this differentiation, unless it be the even more 
 significant fact that, notwithstanding this differentiation and 
 division of labor, the essential unity of science is more appar- 
 ent than ever before. Astronomy, geology, and biology were, 
 fifty years ago, separate, and to a large extent unrelated, 
 sciences. To-day they are seen to flourish in a common soil. 
 
 The Application of Science to the Arts and to the Industries 
 
 In no other way has the march of science in the last half- 
 century been so evident to the eyes of the average intelligent 
 man as in its practical applications to the arts and industries.
 
 1 98 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 Modern life to-day is on a different plane from that of fifty 
 years ago by reason of applied science alone. Whether this 
 has added to the joy of living, and to the general happiness 
 of mankind, is another question; but that it has raised the 
 standard of health, that it has added enormously to the com- 
 fort and to the conveniences of man, no one can dispute. 
 The house of fifty years ago lacked the facilities of pure water; 
 it was illuminated, at the best, by imperfect gas jets; it was 
 warmed by the old-fashioned stove; and if situated in an iso- 
 lated place, communication was possible only by messenger 
 at the expense of time and labor. The modern sanitary water 
 service, electric lighting, modern means of construction, and 
 the telephone, make the dwelling-house of to-day a wholly 
 different place from the dwelling-house of fifty years ago. 
 
 Steam transportation had already begun its marvelous 
 work before the epoch at which we start, but its great applica- 
 tion has been made in the last half-century. Just as the fruit- 
 ful theories of physics and chemistry have advanced physical 
 science in all its applications, so also the elementary develop- 
 ment and application of steam have blossomed in the last 
 half-century into a transportation system which makes the 
 world of to-day a wholly different world from that of fifty 
 years ago. 
 
 Perhaps the fundamental application of science which has 
 done the most to change the face of the civilized world is the 
 invention by Sir Henry Bessemer of a cheap means of manu- 
 facturing steel from pig iron. On August 13, fifty-one years 
 ago, he read before the British Association at Cheltenham 
 a paper dealing with the invention which has made his name 
 famous. His paper was entitled "The Manufacture of Malle- 
 able Iron and Steel without Fuel" and described a new and 
 cheap process of making steel from pig iron by blowing a blast 
 of air through it when in a state of fusion, so as to clear it 
 of all carbon, and then adding the requisite quantity of carbon 
 to produce steel. Not one man in ten thousand knows who
 
 SCIENCE 199 
 
 Sir Henry Bessemer was or what he did, but every man who 
 touches civilization leads to-day a different life from that which 
 he would have led, by reason of Bessemer's invention. Cheap 
 steel is the basis of our material advancement. 
 
 One of the most interesting applications of chemistry is 
 that involved in the manufacture of aniline colors. Up to 
 the time of the investigation of Sir William Perkin in 1856, 
 commerce had depended on vegetable colors, which had been 
 obtained at great cost and difficulty. That these rainbow 
 hues could ever be procured from so insignificant a substance 
 as coal tar seemed as improbable as anything which one could 
 imagine, and yet from the labors of the chemist there have 
 come in the last thirty years colors surpassing in beauty 
 anything produced by nature. The manufacture of such 
 colors has come to be a great industry, employing thousands 
 of men and enormous capital, and this too out of a waste 
 product which manufacturers were once quite ready to throw 
 away. 
 
 One of the most interesting combinations of chemistry and 
 physics is that shown in the modern photograph. Photog- 
 raphy as an art had reached a considerable stage of develop- 
 ment by the early fifties, but the wet collodion process, as 
 it was called, while possible for the professional, was difficult 
 for the amateur. Plates had to be prepared and finished on 
 the spot, transportation was difficult, and there was a demand 
 for a process which could be used in the field as easily as in 
 the office. The first step came in 1856 in the invention of 
 what was called dry collodion, followed rapidly by similar 
 inventions which did away with the troublesome preparation 
 of the plate, and the modern camera, an instrument, so con- 
 venient and easy of transportation, and yet so safe and sure 
 in its results, that on the wildest expeditions the most perfect 
 photographs can be taken. 
 
 To-day the word which best represents to the popular mind 
 the triumphant application of science is the word "electricity."
 
 200 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 The fruitful idea that electricity, like light, was only a form 
 of energy, lies at the base of great inventions which have been 
 made. The moment that electricity was produced by trans- 
 forming other forms of energy, there became possible all sorts 
 of machines which could not be imagined under any other 
 hypothesis. It was in the development of this idea that the 
 inventors have perfected during this half-century the electric 
 motor, the electric light, the telephone, and the thousand 
 separate devices by which mechanical energy is transformed 
 into electric energy, and this again into heat or light. It is 
 the machines for these marvelous transformations which have 
 been invented in the last generation that have made the 
 greatest difference in our modern life. The storage battery, 
 the arc light, the incandescent light, and the telephone have 
 all come in as actual parts of our everyday life within the 
 memory of men of middle age, and, as a crowning exploit 
 of the century, telegraphy without wires brings us messages 
 from ships in mid-ocean. In every department of domestic 
 life, in every line of transportation, in almost all methods 
 of communication between men and cities, the application 
 of electricity has come to play a great role. So numerous 
 are these applications, so important are they to our comfort 
 and to our well-being, that we have ceased to wonder at them, 
 and year by year new applications are made which a few 
 decades ago would have called forth astonishment, but which 
 we receive as a part of the day's work. So great is this field, so 
 promising are the applications which we may hope to see made, 
 that no man can foretell what the inventions of the future 
 may be. 
 
 To-day we are interested not less in the applications of 
 electricity than in its supply. So well is the law of transforma- 
 tion of energy now understood and so sure are the results of 
 our inventors, that we may confidently expect that the appli- 
 cations of electricity to the arts and industries will reach 
 almost any point of perfection. A vital question is, can a
 
 SCIENCE 20I 
 
 supply of energy be found which can be efficiently and cheaply 
 transformed into electric energy? 
 
 At present our chief source of electricity is coal, and the 
 century just closing has given no particular indication of a 
 possible rival to coal, unless it be water power. Over a large 
 part of the earth's surface, however, neither coal nor water 
 power is accessible. Furthermore, the supply of coal is limited. 
 It is likely to become in the near future more and more expen- 
 sive, and one of the great problems which the inventors of 
 our day face is the problem of devising a cheap and effective 
 source of energy for the production of power. 
 
 There is one source to which all minds revert when this 
 question is mentioned, a source most promising and yet one 
 which has so far eluded the investigator. The sun on a clear 
 day delivers upon each square yard of the earth's surface the 
 equivalent of approximately two horse-power of mechanical 
 energy working continuously. If even a fraction of this 
 power could be transformed into mechanical or electrical 
 energy and stored, it would do the world's work. Here is 
 power delivered at our very doors without cost. How to 
 store the energy so generously furnished, and keep it on tap 
 for future use, is the problem. That the next half-century 
 will see some solution thereof, chemical or otherwise, seems 
 likely. 
 
 Perhaps in no way have the applications of science so min- 
 istered to human happiness as in the contributions of the last 
 fifty years to preventive medicine, surgery, and sanitation. 
 Within this half-century Pasteur did his great work on sponta- 
 neous generation and in the development of the theory of anti- 
 toxins. Following in his steps, Lister applied the principles 
 which Pasteur had enunciated, in the treatment of wounds and 
 sores. The whole outcome has been a splendid step forward, 
 not only in such matters as the treatment of diphtheria, yellow 
 fever, and malaria, but also in the direction of preventive 
 medicine. The scientific world is organizing for a fight to the
 
 202 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 death with tuberculosis, that worst malady of mankind, and 
 if there is any such advance in general education and in gen- 
 eral knowledge during the next fifty years as in the last, it 
 is not too much to hope that this dread scourge of humanity 
 may be vanquished. In no direction in which science touches 
 life is there a greater contrast between the life of fifty years 
 ago and that of to-day than in these matters of preventive 
 medicine, of surgery, and of sanitation; and it is worth recall- 
 ing that these advances have come, not through the profes- 
 sional physician or surgeon, but through the laboratory 
 investigations of the chemist and of the physicist. Applied 
 chemistry and physics are the sources from which our sanitary 
 and surgical gains have resulted. 
 
 A no less striking application of science in this half-century 
 is to be found in those matters which affect transportation, 
 whether on land or sea. Within this brief span of a genera- 
 tion and a half, steam transportation has been so enormously 
 advanced that the transit of the largest oceans has become 
 little more than a pleasure trip. Within this period the first 
 electric car was set rolling over the earth's surface, and the 
 whole development of modern transportation, including 
 the automobile, belongs to this half-century. 
 
 Equally impressive, but not so often referred to, are the 
 applications of science in the transmission of intelligence. 
 Fifty years ago the land telegraph was in its infancy, and its 
 use was restricted to messages of pressing business importance. 
 Within the span of time of which we are speaking, the tele- 
 graph has been developed into an indispensable adjunct of 
 every civilized man's business. Submarine cables extended 
 under the sea connect all the continents of the earth. Not 
 only have these enormous changes come, but the invention 
 of the telephone makes it possible to transmit the human 
 voice across the space of hundreds of miles; and finally, as 
 a first-fruit of the twentieth-century inventor's work, wireless 
 telegraphy sends its messages through the air from the distant
 
 SCIENCE 203 
 
 ship to the shore. These appHcations, which enable each 
 civilized man to know the business of all the rest, are to have 
 an effect on our mode of life, on our relations with other nations, 
 and on the general culture of the civilized world, such as we 
 perhaps cannot even to-day imagine. One of the results of 
 this development in America is the modern newspaper, filled 
 with news from the ends of the earth. The ease of trans- 
 mission makes it possible to report not only the important 
 things, but the scandal and the gossip, each item of which 
 ought to die in its own cradle. The modern sensational paper 
 is one of the unripe fruits of the scientific applications of our 
 age. Social development in the last half-century has lagged 
 behind scientific progress and application. The education 
 of the American people in obedience to law and in framing 
 effective legislation for the distribution of the proceeds of 
 production are far behind the scientific efficiency of the age. 
 A serious question of civilization is, "How may the nation 
 be rightly educated and wisely led, to the end that the tre- 
 mendous productivity of applied science may ennoble and 
 enrich, rather than vulgarize and corrupt it?" 
 
 The Effect of Modern Scientific Research on the Religious Faith 
 and the Philosophy of Life of the Civilized World 
 
 It is not too much to say that the development of science 
 in these last five decades has produced a greater effect upon 
 the beliefs and the philosophy of civilized man than that of 
 all the centuries preceding. Fifty years ago the scientific 
 world stood upon the brink of a great philosophical conception 
 as to the origin of the system of nature which we see about us. 
 The epoch-making work of Laplace and his contemporary 
 mathematicians upon the development of the solar system, 
 the researches of Lyell concerning the history of our own earth, 
 the work of Buffon and Lamarck, the reflections of the earlier 
 thinkers, like Leibnitz, Schelling, and Kant, all served in their 
 respective branches of science to prepare the world for some
 
 204 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 generalizations as to the origin of life and the variations of 
 living forms. In human history there had been recognized 
 an evolution, one form of institution growing out of another, 
 one race out of another, one language out of another. The 
 evidence was beginning to be cumulative that the present is 
 the child of the past, and that the living creatures which 
 we see about us have been evolved, being descendants of 
 ancestral forms on the whole simpler; that those ancestors 
 were descended from still simpler forms, and so on backward. 
 What was needed in 1857 was some well-grounded, intelli- 
 gible explanation of the variation of species. This explana- 
 tion came in 1859 in the publication of Charles Darwin's 
 epoch-making book. The Otigin of Species by Means of 
 Natural Selection. Darwin showed that in natural selection, 
 or what has also been called "the survival of the fittest," is 
 found a natural process which results in the preservation of 
 favorable variations. This process leads to the modification 
 of each creature in relation to its organic conditions of life, 
 and in most cases' the change may be regarded as an advance 
 in organization. "Darwinism" is not to be confused with 
 "evolution." Darwin's name has been given to one particular 
 interpretation of the process of evolution. The actual fact 
 of development is proved from so many converging lines that 
 there can be no doubt of the fact itself, although the future 
 growth of our ideas may largely modify the explanation that 
 Darwin has given of it. 
 
 Perhaps no single work has produced so great an impression 
 upon the spirit of any age as has Darwin's memorable book 
 upon the intellectual life of Europe and America. The book 
 became at first the centre of a fierce intellectual discussion. 
 Scientific men themselves were divided in their estimate of 
 its importance and its soundness. In Boston, before the 
 American Academy of Science and Arts, there went on during 
 the winter of 1859 and i860 one of the most spirited scientific 
 debates which our country has ever known, between Professor
 
 SCIENCE 205 
 
 Louis Agassiz in opposition to Darwin's theory and Professor 
 William A. Rogers in favor of it. Both were eloquent men, 
 both were eminent in science, and perhaps no series of dis- 
 cussions before a scientific body has been more interesting 
 than those which these two great men carried on at this time. 
 
 The outcome of the work of Darwin and his successors 
 has been the practical acceptance by civilized men of the 
 general theory of evolution, however they may differ about 
 the process itself. While the work of the scientific men who 
 have built up the doctrine of evolution, which to-day stands 
 more firmly than ever as a reasonable interpretation of organic 
 nature, was a scientific one and had nothing to do with ulti- 
 mate problems, nevertheless it was inevitable that such a 
 theory should excite the strongest opposition on the part 
 of the theology of that day. The acrimony of that discussion 
 has long since worn away. Men have had in fifty years a 
 breathing time sufficient to see that however opposed such an 
 explanation of nature may be to the then accepted orthodox 
 theory of creation, neither one nor the other was necessarily 
 connected with true religious life. To-day, in one form or 
 another, nearly all educated men accept the general theory of 
 evolution as the process by which the universe has been 
 developed. 
 
 The chief effect, however, of the advance of science during 
 these fifty years upon religious belief and the philosophy of 
 life has come, not so much from the acceptance of the theory 
 of evolution, or the conservation of energy, or other scientific 
 deductions, but rather from the development of what is com- 
 monly called "the scientific spirit." To-day a thousand men 
 are working in the investigations of science where ten were 
 working fifty years ago. These men form a far larger pro- 
 portion of the whole community of intelligent men than they 
 did a half-century ago, and their influence upon the thought 
 of the race is greatly increased. They have been trained in 
 a generation taught to question all processes, to hold fast
 
 2o6 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 only to those things that will bear proof, and to seek for the 
 truth as the one thing worth having. It is this attitude of 
 mind which makes the scientific spirit, and it is the widespread 
 dissemination of this spirit which has affected the attitude 
 of the great mass of civilized men toward formal theology 
 and toward a general philosophy of life. The ability to believe, 
 and even the disposition to believe, is one of the oldest acquire- 
 ments of the human mind. On the other hand, the capacity 
 for estimating evidence in cases of physical causation has 
 been a recent acquisition. The last fifty years has added 
 enormously to the power of the race in this capacity, and in 
 the consequent demand on the part of all men for trustworthy 
 evidence, not only in the case of physical phenomena, but in 
 all other matters. This spirit is to-day the dominant note of 
 the twentieth century. It is a serious spirit and a reverent 
 one, but it demands to know, and it will be satisfied with no 
 answer which does not squarely face the facts. This intel- 
 lectual gain is the most note-worthy fruitage of the last fifty 
 years of science and of scientific freedom. 
 
 A direct outcome of this development of scientific spirit 
 has been the growth of what has come to be called the higher 
 criticism. The higher criticism is a science whose aim is the 
 determination of the Uterary history of books and writings, 
 including inquiries into the literary form, the unity, the date 
 of publication, the authorship, the method of composition, 
 the integrity and amount of care shown in any subsequent 
 editing, and into other matters, such as may be discovered 
 by the use of the internal evidence presented in the writing 
 itself. It is termed the higher criticism to distinguish it 
 from the related science of lower, or textual, criticism. This 
 science is almost wholly a child of the last half-century, and 
 in particular is this true so far as Biblical study and criticism 
 are concerned. The development of this school of study 
 along scientific lines has, in connection with the wide spread 
 of the scientific spirit itself, had an enormous effect on the
 
 SCIENCE 207 
 
 attitude of civilized man toward formal theology and toward 
 formal religious organizations. 
 
 What the outcome of this intellectual development will be, 
 whether it will result in a change of the organizations them- 
 selves or the evolution of new organizations for religious teach- 
 ing along other lines than those which now exist, no one to-day 
 can say. Of this much, however, we may be fairly sure: that 
 although the work of the evolutionists and the higher critics 
 may have affected formal theology, there is no reason for 
 belief that the innate religious spirit of mankind has been 
 weakened. True religion is a life, not a belief; and the re- 
 ligious life of the twentieth century promises to be as deep 
 and genuine, and perhaps more satisfactory, than that of the 
 century before. To-day the figure of Jesus Christ looms 
 larger to the world than it did fifty years ago, and partly for 
 the reason that his life and work are being studied apart 
 from formal theology and independently of formal religious 
 organizations. 
 
 The general effect of the whole evolutionary development of 
 the last fifty years upon the philosophy of life of civilized 
 man has been a hopeful one. The old theology pointed man 
 to a race history in which he was represented as having fallen 
 from a high estate to a low one. The philosophy of evolution 
 encourages him to believe that, notwithstanding the limita- 
 tions which come from a brute ancestry, his course has been 
 upward, and he looks forward to-day hopefully and confidently 
 to a like development in the future. 
 
 One who looks over this half-century of development of 
 science cannot but feel something of this hopefulness as he 
 looks forward to the half-century just begun. So little do 
 we know of nature and of nature's laws, so large is their intent 
 in comparison, that we may confidently expect the discoveries 
 of the next half-century to more than equal those of the half- 
 century just passed. The applications of chemistry and of 
 physics arc now being pushed by thousands of men better
 
 2o8 HENRY S. PRITCHETT 
 
 trained for research than in any generation which preceded. 
 Organized effort in scientific research is begun; transporta- 
 tion, already so highly developed, will become still more con- 
 venient. Preventive medicine may well be expected to make 
 enormous strides in the struggle with the great plagues of 
 mankind. The whole scale of human living, so far as comfort 
 and convenience are concerned, we may confidently expect 
 to improve as rapidly as it has in the fifty years gone by. 
 The house of 1950 will be as much superior in comfort and 
 convenience to our homes of to-day as these are to those of a 
 half-century ago. 
 
 Finally, we may be sure that during the next fifty years, 
 as during the past, that question which will most interest 
 man is the old one. What is life, and how came it to be? This 
 question has not yet been answered by any fruitful hypothesis 
 like those of Darwin or Lamarck, which have been such effect- 
 ive tools in the hands of investigators. In the aid of the 
 solution of this problem all scientific men are working, either 
 consciously or unconsciously. Much of what they do seems 
 trivial and dry in the eyes of those who are occupied with 
 other thoughts. The man who is engaged in accumulating 
 a million dollars may not easily understand how a student 
 will toil patiently in a laboratory, laboriously gathering to- 
 gether minute data, in order that the generalizers of science 
 may go a step farther in the solution of the problem. To-day 
 the world stands firmly convinced of the universal force of the 
 principle of evolution, and on the other hand looks forward 
 to the realization of independent life and action in the separate 
 cell. Whether in the next half-century science may be able 
 to vanquish the difficulty presented by the atom of living 
 potential protoplasm, the cell, we cannot say, but we may 
 feel sure that great steps toward its solution will be made, 
 and that these steps will be taken in the service of the truth 
 for the truth's sake, which is the watchword of the science 
 of to-day.
 
 CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL RESOURCES ' 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt 
 
 Governors of the Several States and Gentlemen: 
 
 I WELCOME you to this conference at the White House. 
 You have come hither at my request so that we may join 
 together to consider the question of the conservation and 
 use of the great fundamental sources of wealth of this nation. 
 So vital is this question that for the first time in our history 
 the chief executive officers of the states separately and of 
 the states together forming the nation have met to consider it. 
 
 With the Governors come men from each state chosen for 
 their special acquaintance with the terms of the problem that 
 is before us. Among them are experts in natural resources 
 and representatives of national organizations concerned in 
 the development and use of these resources; the Senators 
 and Representatives in Congress; the Supreme Court, the 
 Cabinet and the Inland Waterways Commission have like- 
 wise been invited to the conference, which is therefore national 
 in a peculiar sense. 
 
 This conference on the conservation of natural resources 
 is in effect a meeting of the representatives of all the people 
 of the United States called to consider the weightiest problem 
 now before the nation, and the occasion for the meeting lies 
 in the fact that the natural resources of our country are in 
 danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods 
 of exploiting them longer to continue. 
 
 With the rise of peoples from savagery to civilization, 
 and with the consequent growth in the extent and variety 
 
 ' Address to the Congress of Governors on the Conservation of National 
 Resources, Washington, May 13, 1908.
 
 2IO THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 of the needs of the average man, there comes a steadily in- 
 creasing growth of the amount demanded by this average 
 man from the actual resources of the country. Yet, rather 
 curiously, at the same time the average man is likely to lose 
 his realization of this dependence upon nature. 
 
 Savages, and very primitive peoples generally, concern 
 themselves only with superficial natural resources; with 
 those which they obtain from the actual surface of the ground. 
 As peoples become a little less primitive their industries, 
 although in a rude manner, are extended to resources below 
 the surface; then, with what we call civilization and the 
 extension of knowledge, more resources come into use, in- 
 dustries are multiplied and foresight begins to become a 
 necessary and prominent factor in life. Crops are cultivated, 
 animals are domesticated and metals are mastered. 
 
 Every step of the progress of mankind is marked by the 
 discovery and use of natural resources previously unused. 
 Without such progressive knowledge and utilization of natural 
 resources population could not grow, nor industries multiply, 
 nor the hidden wealth of the earth be developed for the benefit 
 of mankind. 
 
 From the first beginnings of civilization, on the banks of 
 the Nile and the Euphrates, the industrial progress of the 
 world has gone on slowly, with occasional setbacks, but on 
 the whole steadily, through tens of centuries to the present 
 day. But of late the rapidity of the progress has increased 
 at such a rate that more space has been actually covered dur- 
 ing the century and a quarter occupied by our national life 
 than during the preceding six thousand years that take us 
 back to the earliest monuments of Egypt, to the earliest cities 
 of the Babylonian plain. 
 
 When the founders of this nation met at Independence 
 Hall in Philadelphia the conditions of commerce had not 
 fundamentally changed from what they were when the Phoeni- 
 cian keels first furrowed the lonely waters of the Mediterranean.
 
 CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL RESOURCES 211 
 
 The differences were those of degree, not of kind, and they 
 were not in all cases even those of degree. Mining was 
 carried on fundamentally as it had been carried on by the 
 Pharaohs in the countries adjacent to the Red Sea. 
 
 The wares of the merchants of Boston, of Charleston, like 
 the wares of the merchants of Nineveh and Sidon, if they 
 went by water were carried by boats propelled by sails or 
 oars; if they went by land were carried in wagons drawn by 
 beasts of draft or in packs on the backs of beasts of burden. 
 The ships that crossed the high seas were better than the 
 ships that had once crossed the ^gean, but they were of the 
 same type, after all — they were wooden ships propelled by 
 sails; and on land the roads were not as good as the roads of 
 the Roman Empire, while the service of the posts was prob- 
 ably inferior. 
 
 In Washington's time anthracite coal was known only as 
 a useless black stone; and the great fields of bituminous coal 
 were undiscovered. As steam was unknown, the use of coal 
 for power production was undreamed of. Water was practi- 
 cally the only source of power, save the labor of men and 
 animals; and this power was used only in the most primitive 
 fashion. But a few small iron deposits had been found in 
 this country, and the use of iron by our countrymen was 
 very small. Wood was practically the only fuel, and what 
 lumber was sawed was consumed locally, while the forests 
 were regarded chiefly as obstructions to settlement and 
 cultivation. 
 
 Such was the degree of progress to which civilized mankind 
 had attained when this nation began its career. It is almost 
 impossible for us in this day to realize how little our Revolu- 
 tionary ancestors knew of the great store of natural resources 
 whose discovery and use have been such vital factors in the 
 growth and greatness of this nation, and how little they 
 required to take from this store in order to satisfy their needs. 
 
 Since then our knowledge and use of the resources of the
 
 212 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 present territory of the United States have increased a hun- 
 dredfold. Indeed, the growth of this nation by leaps and 
 bounds makes one of the most striking and important chapters 
 in the history of the world. Its growth has been due to the 
 rapid development, and, alas! that it should be said, to the 
 rapid destruction, of our natural resources. Nature has 
 supplied to us in the United States, and still suppHes to us, 
 more kinds of resources in a more lavish degree than has ever 
 been the case at any other time or with any other people. 
 Our position in the world has been attained by the extent and 
 thoroughness of the control we have achieved over Nature; 
 but we are more, and not less, dependent upon what she 
 furnishes than at any previous time of history since the days 
 of primitive man. 
 
 Yet our fathers, though they knew so little of the resources 
 of the country, exercised a wise forethought in reference 
 thereto. Washington clearly saw that the perpetuity of the 
 states could only be secured by union and that the only 
 feasible basis of union was an economic one; in other words, 
 that it must be based on the development and use of their 
 natural resources. Accordingly, he helped to outline a scheme 
 of commercial development, and by his influence an inter- 
 state waterways commission was appointed by Virginia and 
 Maryland. 
 
 It met near where we are now meeting, in Alexandria, 
 adjourned to Mount Vernon, and took up the consideration 
 of interstate commerce by the only means then available, 
 that of water. Further conferences were arranged, first at 
 Annapolis and then at Philadelphia. It was in Philadelphia 
 that the representatives of all the states met for what was in 
 its original conception merely a waterways conference; but 
 when they had closed their deliberations the outcome was 
 the Constitution which made the states into a nation. 
 
 The Constitution of the United States thus grew in large 
 part out of the necessity for united action in the wise use of
 
 CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL RESOURCES 213 
 
 one of our natural resources. The wise use of all of our 
 natural resources, which are our national resources as well, 
 is the great material question of to-day. I have asked you 
 to come together now because the enormous consumption of 
 these resources, and the threat of imminent exhaustion of some 
 of them, due to reckless and wasteful use, once more call for 
 common effort, common action. 
 
 Since the days when the Constitution was adopted, steam 
 and electricity have revolutionized the industrial world. 
 Nowhere has the revolution been so great as in our own 
 country. The discovery and utilization of mineral fuels and 
 alloys have given us the lead over all other nations in the 
 production of steel. The discovery and utilization of coal 
 and iron have given us our railways, and have led to such 
 industrial development as has never before been seen. The 
 vast wealth of lumber in our forests, the riches of our soils 
 and mines, the discovery of gold and mineral oils, combined 
 with the efficiency of our transportation, have made the 
 conditions of our life unparalleled in comfort and convenience. 
 
 The steadily increasing drain on these natural resources 
 has promoted to an extraordinary degree the complexity of 
 our industrial and social life. Moreover, this unexampled 
 development has had a determining effect upon the character 
 and opinions of our people. The demand for efficiency in 
 the great task has given us vigor, effectiveness, decision and 
 power, and a capacity for achievement which in its own lines 
 has never yet been matched. So great and so rapid has been 
 our material growth that there has been a tendency to lag 
 behind in spiritual and moral growth; but that is not the 
 subject upon which I speak to you to-day. 
 
 Disregarding for the moment the question of moral pur- 
 pose, it is safe to say that the prosperity of our people depends 
 directly on the energy and intelligence with which our natural 
 resources are used. It is equally clear that these resources 
 are the final basis of national power and perpetuity. Finally,
 
 214 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 it is ominously evident that these resources are in the course 
 of rapid exhaustion. 
 
 This nation began with the belief that its landed possessions 
 were illimitable and capable of supporting all the people who 
 might care to make our country their home; but already the 
 limit of unsettled land is in sight, and indeed but little land 
 fitted for agriculture now remains unoccupied save what can 
 be reclaimed by irrigation and drainage. We began with an 
 unapproached heritage of forests; more than half of the 
 timber is gone. We began with coal fields more extensive 
 than those of any other nation and with iron ores regarded as 
 inexhaustible, and many experts now declare that the end of 
 both iron and coal is in sight. 
 
 The mere increase in our consumption of coal during 1907 
 over 1906 exceeded the total consumption in 1876, the cen- 
 tennial year. The enormous stores of mineral oil and gas are 
 largely gone. Our natural waterways are not gone, but they 
 have been so injured by neglect and by the division of re- 
 sponsibility and utter lack of system in dealing with them 
 that there is less navigation on them now than there was 
 fifty years ago. Finally, we began with soils of unexampled 
 fertility and we have so impoverished them by injudicious 
 use and by failing to check erosion that their crop-producing 
 power is diminishing instead of increasing. In a word, we 
 have thoughtlessly, and to a large degree unnecessarily, 
 diminished the resources upon which not only our prosperity 
 but the prosperity of our children must always depend. 
 
 We have become great because of the lavish use of our 
 resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. 
 But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen 
 when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil and 
 the gas are exhausted, when the soils shall have been still 
 further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting 
 the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation. 
 These questions do not relate only to the next century or to
 
 CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL RESOURCES 215 
 
 the next generation. It is time for us now as a nation to exer- 
 cise the same reasonable foresight in deaHng with our great 
 natural resources that would be shown by any prudent man 
 in conserving and wisely using the property which contains 
 the assurance of well-being for himself and his children. 
 
 The natural resources I have enumerated can be divided 
 into two sharply distinguished classes accordingly as they 
 are or are not capable of renewal. Mines if used must neces- 
 sarily be exhausted. The minerals do not and can not renew 
 themselves. Therefore, in dealing with the coal, the oil, the 
 gas, the iron, the metals generally, all that we can do is to 
 try to see that they are wisely used. The exhaustion is cer- 
 tain to come in time. 
 
 The second class of resources consists of those which can 
 not only be used in such manner as to leave them undimin- 
 ished for our children, but can actually be improved by wise 
 use. The soil, the forests, the waterways, come in this cate- 
 gory. In dealing with mineral resources, man is able to 
 improve on nature only by putting the resources to a bene- 
 ficial use, which in the end exhausts them; but in dealing 
 with the soil and its products man can improve on nature 
 by compelling the resources to renew and even reconstruct 
 themselves in such manner as to serve increasingly beneficial 
 uses — while the living waters can be so controlled as to 
 multiply their benefits. 
 
 Neither the primitive man nor the pioneer was aware of 
 any duty to posterity in dealing with the renewable resources. 
 When the American settler felled the forests he felt that 
 there was plenty of forest left for the sons who came after 
 him. When he exhausted the soil of his farm he felt that his 
 son could go West and take up another. So it was with his 
 immediate successors. When the soil washed from the farmer's 
 fields choked the neighboring river he thought only of using 
 the railway rather than boats for moving his produce and 
 supplies.
 
 2i6 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Now all this is changed. On the average the son of the 
 farmer of to-day must make his living on his father's farm. 
 There is no difficulty in doing this if the father will exercise 
 wisdom. No wise use of a farm exhausts its fertility. So 
 with the forests. We are on the verge of a timber famine in 
 this country, and it is unpardonable for the nation or the 
 states to permit any further cutting of our timber save in 
 accordance with a system which will provide that the next 
 generation shall see the timber increased instead of diminished. 
 Moreover, we can add enormous tracts of the most valuable 
 possible agricultural land to the national domain by irrigation 
 in the arid and semi-arid regions, and by drainage of great 
 tracts of swamp land in the humid regions. We can enor- 
 mously increase our transportation facilities by the canaliza- 
 tion of our rivers so as to complete a great system of waterways 
 on the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts and in the Mississippi 
 Valley, from the Great Plains to the Alleghenies and from 
 the northern lakes to the mouth of the mighty Father of 
 Waters. But all- these various uses of our natural resources 
 are so closely connected that they should be co-ordinated, 
 and should be treated as part of one coherent plan and not in 
 haphazard and piecemeal fashion. 
 
 It is largely because of this that I appointed the Waterways 
 Commission last year, and that I have sought to perpetuate 
 its work. I wish to take this opportunity to express in 
 heartiest fashion my acknowledgment to all the members of 
 the commission. At great personal sacrifice of time and 
 effort they have rendered a service to the public for which 
 we cannot be too grateful. Especial credit is due to the 
 initiative, the energy, the devotion to duty and the far- 
 sightedness of Gifford Pinchot, to whom we owe so much of 
 the progress we have already made in handling this matter of 
 the coordination and conservation of natural resources. If 
 it had not been for him this convention neither would nor 
 could have been called.
 
 CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL RESOURCES 217 
 
 We are coming to recognize as never before the right of 
 the nation to guard its own future in the essential matter of 
 natural resources. In the past we have admitted the right 
 of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his 
 own present profit. The time has come for a change. As a 
 people we have the right and the duty, second to none other 
 but the right and duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring 
 and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against 
 the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether 
 that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such 
 resources or by making them impossible of development 
 hereafter. 
 
 Any right-thinking father earnestly desires and strives to 
 leave his son both an untarnished name and a reasonable 
 equipment for the struggle of life. So this nation as a whole 
 should earnestly desire and strive to leave to the next genera- 
 tion the national honor unstained and the national resources 
 unexhausted. There are signs that both the nation and the 
 states are waking to a realization of this great truth. On 
 March 10, igo8, the Supreme Court of Maine rendered an 
 exceedingly important judicial decision. This opinion was 
 rendered in response to questions as to the right of the Legis- 
 lature to restrict the cutting of trees on private land for the 
 prevention of drouths and floods, the preservation of the 
 natural water supply and the prevention of the erosion of such 
 lands and the consequent filling up of rivers, ponds and lakes. 
 The forests and water power of Maine constitute the larger 
 part of her wealth and form the basis of her industrial life, 
 and the question submitted by the Maine Senate to the 
 Supreme Court and the answer of the Supreme Court alike 
 bear testimony to the wisdom of the people of Maine and 
 clearly define a policy of conservation of natural resources 
 the adoption of which is of vital importance not merely to 
 Maine but to the whole country. 
 
 Such a policy will preserve soil, forests, water power as a
 
 2i8 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 heritage for the children and the children's children of the 
 men and women of this generation; for any enactment that 
 provides for the wise utilization of the forests, whether in 
 public or private ownership, and for the conservation of the 
 water resources of the country must necessarily be legislation 
 that will promote both private and public welfare; for flood 
 prevention, water power development, preservation of the 
 soil and improvement of navigable rivers are all promoted 
 by such a policy of forest conservation. 
 
 The opinion of the Maine Supreme bench sets forth un- 
 equivocally the principle that the property rights of the 
 individual are subordinate to the rights of the community, 
 and especially that the waste of wild timber land derived 
 originally from the state, involving as it would the impover- 
 ishment of the state and its people and thereby defeating one 
 great purpose of government, may properly be prevented 
 by state restrictions. 
 
 The court says that there are two reasons why the right 
 of the public to control and limit the use of private prop- 
 erty is peculiarly applicable to property in land: "First, 
 such property is not the result of productive labor, but is 
 derived solely from the state itself, the original owner; second, 
 the amount of land being incapable of increase, if the owners 
 of large tracts can waste them at will without state restric- 
 tions, the state and its people may be helplessly impoverished 
 and one great purpose of government defeated. . . . We do 
 not think the proposed legislation would operate to 'take' 
 private property within the inhibition of the Constitution. 
 While it might restrict the owner of wild and uncultivated 
 lands in his use of them, might delay his taking some of the 
 product, might delay his anticipated profits and even thereby 
 might cause him some loss of profit, it would nevertheless 
 leave him his lands, their product and increase, untouched, 
 and without diminution of title, estate or quantity. He would 
 still have large measure of control and large opportunity to
 
 CONSERVATION OF NATIONAL RESOURCES 219 
 
 realize values. He might suffer delay — but not deprivation. 
 . . . The proposed legislation . . . would be within the 
 legislative power and would not operate as a taking of private 
 property for which compensation must be made." 
 
 The Court of Errors and Appeals of New Jersey has adopted 
 a similar view, which has recently been sustained by the 
 Supreme Court of the United States. In delivering the 
 opinion of the court on April 6, igo8, Mr. Justice Holmes 
 said: "The state as quasi-sovereign and representative of 
 the interests of the public has a standing in court to protect 
 the atmosphere, the water and the forests within its territory, 
 irrespective of the assent or dissent of the private owners of 
 the land most immediately concerned. ... It appears to us 
 that few public interests are more obvious, indisputable and 
 independent of particular theory than the interest of the 
 public of a state to maintain the rivers that are wholly within 
 it substantially undiminished, except by such drafts upon 
 them as the guardian of the public welfare may permit for 
 the purpose of turning them to a more perfect use. This 
 public interest is omnipresent wherever there is a state, and 
 grows more pressing as population grows. . . . We are of 
 opinion, further, that the constitutional power of the state 
 to insist that its natural advantages shall remain unimpaired 
 by its citizens is not dependent upon any nice estimate of the 
 extent of present use or speculation as to future needs. The 
 legal conception of the necessary is likely to be confined to 
 somewhat rudimentary wants, and there are benefits from a 
 great river that might escape a lawyer's view. But the state 
 is not required to submit even to an esthetic analysis. Any 
 analysis may be inadequate. It finds itself in possession of 
 what all admit to be a great public good, and what it has it 
 may keep and give no one a reason for its will." 
 
 These decisions reach the root of the idea of conservation 
 of our resources in the interests of our people. 
 
 Finally, let us remember that the conservation of our
 
 220 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 natural resources, though the gravest problem of to-day, is 
 yet but part of another and greater problem to which this 
 nation is not yet awake, but to which it will awake in time, 
 and with which it must hereafter grapple if it is to live — the 
 problem of national efficiency, the patriotic duty of insuring 
 the safety and continuance of the nation. When the people 
 of the United States consciously undertake to raise them- 
 selves as citizens, and the nation and the states in their several 
 spheres, to the highest pitch of excellence in private, state 
 and national life, and to do this because it is the first of all 
 the duties of true patriotism, then and not till then the future 
 of this nation in quality and in time will be assured.
 
 HUXLEY 1 
 
 Paul Elmer More 
 
 In a world that is governed by phrases we cannot too often 
 recur to the familiar saying of Hobbes, that ''words are wise 
 men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are 
 the money of fools " ; and so to-day, when the real achievements 
 of science have thrown a kind of halo about the word and 
 made it in the general mind synonymous with truth, the first 
 duty of any one who would think honestly is to reach a clear 
 definition of what he means when he utters the sanctified 
 syllables. In this particular case the duty and difficulty are 
 the greater because the word conveys three quite different 
 meanings which have correspondingly different values. Posi- 
 tive science is one thing, but hypothetical science is another 
 thing, and philosophical science is still another; yet on the 
 popular tongue, nay, even in the writings of those who pretend 
 to extreme precision, these distinctions are often forgotten, 
 to the utter confusion of ideas. 
 
 By positive science I mean the observation and classifica- 
 tion of facts and the discovery of those constant sequences in 
 phenomena which can be expressed in mathematical formulae 
 or in the generalized language of law; I mean that procedure 
 which Huxley had in mind when he said that science is "noth- 
 ing but trained and organized common sense, differing from 
 the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: 
 and its methods differ from those of common sense only so 
 far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner 
 in which a savage wields his club." Now for such a proce- 
 dure no one can feel anything but the highest respect — 
 
 1 From The Drift of Romanticism ; copyright. Reprinted by permis- 
 sion of the author and of Houghton Mifflin Company.
 
 222 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 respect which in the lay mind may well mount to admiration 
 and even to awe. He has but a poor imagination who cannot 
 be stirred to wonder before the triumphs over material forces 
 gained by methods of which he can confess only humble 
 ignorance; and beyond these visible achievements lies a 
 whole region of intellectual activity open to the man of science, 
 but closed and forever foreign to the investigator in other 
 kinds of ideas. I am bound to insist on the fact that I have 
 no foolish desire to belittle the honors of science in its practi- 
 cal applications, and that I can in a way estimate its rewards 
 as an abstract study, however far the full fruition of the 
 scientific life may lie beyond my reach. 
 
 Positive science, thus defined as that trained observation 
 which brings the vision of order out of disorder, system out 
 of chaos, law out of chance, might seem splendid enough in 
 theory and useful enough in practice to satisfy the most 
 exorbitant ambition. But it must be remembered that a 
 law of science, however wide its scope, does not go beyond a 
 statement of the relation of observed facts and tells us not 
 a word of what lies behind this relationship or of the cause 
 of these facts. Now the mind of man is so constituted that 
 this ignorance of causes is to it a constant source of irritation ; 
 we are almost resistlessly tempted to pass beyond the mere 
 statement of law to erecting a theory of the reality that 
 underlies the law. Such a theory is an hypothesis, and such 
 activity of the mind is hypothetical science as distinguished 
 from positive science. But we must distinguish further. 
 The word hypothesis is used, by the man of science as well as 
 by the layman, in two quite different senses. On the one 
 hand, it may mean the attempt to express in language bor- 
 rowed from our sensuous experience the nature of a cause or 
 reality which transcends such experience. Thus the luminif- 
 erous ether is properly an hypothesis: by its very definition it 
 transcends the reach of our perceptive faculties; we cannot 
 see it, or feel it in any way; yet it is^ or was, assumed to
 
 HUXLEY 223 
 
 exist as the cause of known phenomena and its properties 
 were given in terms of density, elasticity, etc., which are 
 appropriate to material things which we can see and feel. 
 On the other hand, the word hypothesis is often taken to 
 signify merely a scientific law which belongs to the realm of 
 positive science, but which is still to be established. Confu- 
 sion would be avoided if we employed the term scientific 
 conjecture for this second, and proper, procedure, and con- 
 fined the use of the term hypothesis to the former, and as I 
 think improper, procedure. To make clear these distinctions 
 let me give an illustration or two. The formula of gravitation 
 merely states the regularity of a certain group of known 
 phenomena from the motion of a falling apple to the motion 
 of the planets about the sun. When this formula first dawned 
 on the mind of Newton, it was a scientific conjecture; when 
 it was tested and proved to conform to facts, it became an 
 accepted scientific law. Both conjecture and accepted law 
 are strictly v/ithin the field of positive science. But if New- 
 ton, not content with generalizing the phenomena of gravita- 
 tion in the form of a law, had undertaken to theorize on the 
 absolute nature of the attraction which caused the phenomena 
 of gravitation,^ he would have passed from the sphere of 
 positive science to that of hypothetical science. So when 
 Darwin, by systematizing the vast body of observations in 
 biology and geology, showed that plants and animals develop 
 in time and with the changes of the earth from the simplest 
 forms of animate existence to the most complex forms now 
 seen, and thus gave precision to the law of evolution, he was 
 working in the field of positive science: he changed what 
 had been a conjectured law to a generally accepted law. 
 But when he went a step further and undertook to explain 
 the cause of this evolution by the theory of natural selection 
 or the survival of the fit, he passed from positive to hypo- 
 thetical science. 
 
 ^ On this point compare Berkeley, Siris, §§ 245-250.
 
 224 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 In my essay on Newman I found it convenient to classify 
 the minds of men figuratively in an inner and an outer group. 
 In the outer group I placed the two extremes of the mystic 
 and the sceptic, and in the inner group the non-mystical 
 religious mind and the non-sceptical scientific mind. These 
 two classes of the inner group differ in their field of interest, 
 the one being concerned with the observation of spiritual 
 states, the other with the observation of material phenomena; 
 but they agree in so far as the former passes from the facts 
 of his spiritual consciousness to the belief in certain causes 
 conceived as mythological beings and known by revelation, 
 while the latter passes from the facts of his material observa- 
 tions to the belief in certain causes conceived as hypotheses 
 and known by inference. Hypotheses, in other words, are 
 merely the mythology, the deus ex machina, of science, and 
 they are eradicated from the scientific mind only by the 
 severest discipline of scepticism, just as mythology is eradi- 
 cated from the religious mind by genuine mysticism. I am 
 aware of the danger of inculcating such an eradication. As 
 for most men to take away the belief in their gods as known 
 realities would be to put an end to their religion, so, it may 
 be objected, to take away these hypotheses would be to en- 
 danger the very foundations of science. Yet, even if scientific 
 hypotheses, in consideration of human frailty, may have 
 their use just as mythologies have their use, I still protest 
 that they are not necessary to scientific discovery, as is proved 
 by the great example of Newton. I believe, though my 
 temerity may only be equalled by my ignorance, that they 
 have oftener introduced confusion into pure science than 
 they have aided in the discovery of new laws or in the broaden- 
 ing of known laws; and I am confirmed in this belief by the 
 present state of biology. Darwin's law of evolution has re- 
 mained virtually unshaken and has, I suppose, been the 
 instigation of innumerable discoveries; but, so far as I may 
 judge from my limited reading in the subject, Darwin's
 
 HUXLEY 225 
 
 hypothesis of natural selection and the survival of the fit has 
 on the one hand been seriously and widely questioned as a 
 cause sufficient to account for evolution, and on the other 
 hand has led to speculation to find a substitute for it which 
 in wildness of theorizing and in audacity of credulousness 
 can only be likened to the intricacies of religious scholasticism. 
 The condemnation of hypothetical science as dangerous to 
 integrity of mind is no new thing. Even in the seventeenth 
 century Joseph Glanvill saw how surely the enthusiasm en- 
 gendered by the foundation of the Royal Society would lead 
 to vain hypotheses. In his Scepsis Scientifica he sets forth 
 their nature and forestalls Hume's destructive analysis of 
 our notion of causality, with strong warning that the man of 
 science should not "build the Castle of his intellectual security, 
 in the Air of Opinions. . . . Opinions [he adds, meaning 
 hypotheses] are the Rattles of immature intellects. . . . 
 Dogmatizing is the great disturber both of our selves and the 
 world without us." In the next age Bolingbroke, in his 
 Essays Addressed to Mr. Pope, argued the question of the 
 limits of human knowledge and the fallacies of hypothetical 
 theorizing with a clearness and penetration which would 
 have made that work one of the bulwarks of English philoso- 
 phy, were it not for my Lord's disdain of the rules of com- 
 position and the tediousness of his endless repetitions, and 
 were it not above all for his own inconsistency in urging the 
 most colossal of all hypotheses, that of universal optimism. 
 In particular he takes up, more than once, the common plea 
 that hypotheses are useful, whether true or not. 
 
 It will be urged, perhaps, as decisive in favor of hypotheses [he observes], 
 that they may be of service, and can be of no disservice to us, in our pur- 
 suit of knowledge. An hypothesis founded on mere arbitrary assumptions 
 will be a true hypothesis, and therefore of service to philosophy, if it is con- 
 firmed by many observations afterwards, and if no one phenomenon stand 
 in opposition to it. An hypothesis that appears inconsistent with the 
 phenomena will be soon demonstrated false, and as soon rejected.
 
 226 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 In reply he shows by example how hypotheses have kept 
 men from the right path of investigation and how they have 
 been maintained (what rich and even ridiculous examples he 
 might have produced from our age) after they have been 
 proved inconsistent with facts and common sense. "The 
 fautors of hypotheses would have us believe that even the 
 detection of their falsehood gives occasion to our improvement 
 in knowledge. But the road to truth does not lie through 
 the precincts of error." Now, it is true that neither Glanvill 
 nor Bolingbroke distinguished between the legitimate use of 
 scientific conjecture and the illegitimate use of hypotheses, 
 but they had chiefly in mind, I think, not the mere formulation 
 of law but the attempt to penetrate into ultimate causes. 
 
 The chief fault of hypotheses, however, lies not in the 
 entanglement of pure science among perilous ways and in 
 the lifting up of the scientific imagination to idolatrous wor- 
 ship, as it were, of the chimara bombinans in vacuo, but in the 
 almost irresistible tendency of the human mind to glide from 
 hypothetical science into what I have called philosophical 
 science, meaning thereby the endeavor to formulate a philoso- 
 phy of life out of scientific law and hypothesis. An hypothesis 
 may be proclaimed by the man of science as a purely sub- 
 jective formula for a group of phenomena, and as a confessedly 
 temporary expedient for advancing a little further in the 
 process of bringing our observations under the regularity of 
 law; the man of science may pretend verbally to a purely 
 sceptical attitude towards his transcendental definitions, but 
 in practice this scepticism almost invariably gives way to a 
 feeling that the formula for causes is as real objectively as the 
 law of phenomena which it undertakes to explain, and to a 
 kind of supercilious intolerance for those who maintain the 
 sceptical attitude practically as well as verbally, or for those 
 who build their faith on hypotheses of another sort than his 
 own. Hence the hostility that has constantly existed be- 
 tween those who base their philosophy of life on intuition and
 
 HUXLEY 227 
 
 the humanities and those who base it upon scientific law and 
 hypothesis. At the very beginning of the modern scientific 
 movement this antagonism made itself felt, and, as religion 
 had then the stronger position in society, took the form of 
 apologetics on the part of science. In what may be called 
 the authorized History of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat 
 undertook to allay the suspicions that had immediately arisen 
 against the chartered organization of experimental science. 
 With specious sophistry he argued that the "new philosophy" 
 would never encroach on the established system of education 
 in the humanities. He admitted the natural alliance between 
 science and industry against the feudal form of government, 
 but asserted that science in this was only a handmaid of the 
 times. 
 
 Nor ought our Gentry [he declares] to be averse from the promoting of 
 Trade, out of any little Jealousy, that thereby they shall debase themselves, 
 and corrupt their Blood: For they are to know, that Trafick and Commerce 
 have given Mankind a higher Degree than any Title of Nobility, even 
 that of Civility and Humanity itself. And at this time especially above 
 all others, they have no reason to despise Trade as below them, when it has 
 so great an influence on the very Government of the World. In former Ages 
 indeed this was not so remarkable. 
 
 Primarily, however, Sprat, as a prelate in good standing, 
 contended that religion stood in no danger from the deductions 
 of the new philosophy: 
 
 I do here, in the beginning, most sincerely declare, that if this Design 
 [of the Royal Society] should in the least diminish the Reverence, that is 
 due to the Doctrine of Testis Christ, it were so far from deserving Protec- 
 tion, that it ought to be abhorr'd by all the Politic and Prudent; as well 
 as by the devout Part of Christendom. . . . With these Apprehensions 
 I come to examine the Objections, which I am now to satisfy: and having 
 calmly compar'd the Arguments of some devout Men against Knowledge, 
 and chiefly that of Experiments; I must pronounce them both, to be alto- 
 gether inoffensive. I did before afTirm, that the Royal Society is abundantly 
 cautious, not to intermeddle in Spiritual Things. ... So true is that Say- 
 ing of my Lord Bacon, That by a little Knowledge of Nature Men become 
 Atheists; but a great deal returns them back again to a sound and religious
 
 2 28 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 Mind. In brief, if we rightly apprehend the Matter, it will be found that 
 it is not only Sottishness, but Prophaneness, for Men to cry out against the 
 understanding of Nature; for that being nothing else but the Instrument 
 of God, whereby he gives Being and Action to Things: the Knowledge of 
 it deserves so little to be esteem'd impious, that it ought rather to be reckon'd 
 as Divine. 
 
 It may seem a little illogical in the good Bishop first to 
 apologize for science as having no finger in Spiritual Things 
 and then to exalt it as a bulwark against atheism, but such an 
 inconsistency is very human, and it is an example of the 
 almost irresistible tendency of the mind to use its own specific 
 form of knowledge as a criterion of all knowledge. The 
 vacillation between apology and presumption introduced by 
 the historian of the Royal Society has persisted to this day, 
 and in essay after essay of Huxley's you will find the modern 
 president of the Society maintaining on one page the self- 
 limitations of positive science and on another page passing 
 from hypothesis to a dogmatic philosophy, here rebuking 
 those who confound the domains of scientific and spiritual 
 law and there proclaiming science as a support of what he 
 deems true religion. Much that he wrote was directed to 
 temporary questions, and to open his volumes may seem even 
 now to breathe the dust of battles fought long ago and rendered 
 meaningless by the advance of time; but in reality, though 
 their outer form may change, the disputes in which he engaged 
 have not yet been settled as he so fondly believed they were, 
 and can never be settled unless a sullen apathy be taken for 
 assent. 
 
 Certainly Huxley, looking back from his quiet retirement 
 at Eastbourne over his long and belligerent career, might be 
 justified in thinking that victory was altogether the reward of 
 his laborious life. He had had no other regular instruction 
 than what he received for a couple of years in the semi-public 
 school at Ealing of which his father was assistant master, and 
 what he gained from lectures in Sydenham College, London, 
 and at Charing Cross Hospital. In 1846, at the age of twenty-
 
 HUXLEY 
 
 22g 
 
 one, he was appointed surgeon to H.M.S. Rattlesnake which 
 was bound for a long surveying cruise in the Torres Straits. 
 After four years in the Far East he returned to England, with 
 a large experience in zoological and ethnological work, and 
 with no immediate prospects of advancement. His first 
 experience in London was embittered by governmental delays 
 and neglect, but in 185 1 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal 
 Society, receiving the Gold Medal the next year, and in 1854 
 he was appointed professor of natural history at the School 
 of Mines. After that honors and offers came to him in 
 rapid succession. He could not be tempted to leave London, 
 where he felt himself at the centre of things, but in 1872 he 
 accepted the position of Lord Rector of Aberdeen University, 
 since this office afforded him an opportunity of exerting an 
 influence on national education without giving up his resi- 
 dence in -the capital. In 1883 he was chosen president of the 
 Royal Society, and in 1892, in lieu of a title which he would 
 not accept, he was raised to the Privy Council. It is not 
 insignificant of his position in England that, on the occasion 
 of kissing hands with the other Councillors at Osborne, when 
 he snatched an opportunity for obtaining a close view of the 
 Queen, he found Her Majesty's eyes fixed upon himself with 
 the same inquisitiveness. 
 
 But the most sensible triumphs were no doubt those that 
 came to him in public as the recognized spokesman of the 
 new philosophy, and of these, two of a personal sort, gained 
 at Oxford, the very citadel of the forces leagued against him, 
 must have been peculiarly sweet. Every one knows of his 
 famous tilt with Wilberforce at the meeting of the British 
 Association at Oxford in i860. It was just after the publica- 
 tion of The Origin of Species, and the Bishop of Oxford thought 
 it a proper occasion to demolish the rising heresy with argu- 
 ment and ridicule. The lecture-room was crowded, the 
 clergy being massed in the centre of the audience, and the 
 very windows being packed with ladies who encouraged
 
 230 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 the champion of religion with their fluttering handkerchiefs. 
 The Bishop spoke for an hour, assuring his hearers that there 
 was nothing in the idea of evolution, and then, turning "with 
 a smiling insolence" to Huxley who was sitting on the plat- 
 form, "begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his 
 grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey." 
 At this Huxley is said to have struck his hand upon his knee, 
 and to have exclaimed to his neighbor, "The Lord hath 
 delivered him into mine hands." Then, as the event was 
 described in Macmillan's Magazine, he "slowly and deliber- 
 ately arose. A slight, tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet 
 and very grave, he stood before us and spoke those tremendous 
 words — words which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, 
 could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning 
 took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to 
 what it was." According to Huxley's son and biographer 
 the most accurate report of the concluding words is in a letter 
 of John Richard Green: 
 
 I asserted — and I repeat — that a man has no reason to be ashamed 
 of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I 
 should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man — a man of restless 
 and versatile intellect — who, not content with an equivocal success in 
 his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he 
 has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and 
 distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent 
 digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. 
 
 Again, at another meeting of the British Association at 
 Oxford, in 1894, Huxley appeared as a champion of Dar- 
 winism against the insinuations of Lord Salisbury, who, in 
 his speech as president, spoke with delicate irony "of the 
 'comforting word, evolution,' and, passing to the Weisman- 
 nian controversy, implied that the diametrically opposed 
 views so frequently expressed nowadays threw the whole 
 process of evolution into doubt." ^ But things were not 
 
 ^ Professor H. F. Osborn in Transactions of the N. Y. Acad. Sci., vol. xv.
 
 HUXLEY 
 
 231 
 
 what they had been. The ready and vociferous applause 
 was for the prophet of Darwinism, and Huxley, instead of 
 repelling sarcasm with invective, now conscious of his trium- 
 phant position and of the courtesy due to one who as Prime 
 Minister had only two years before honored him with the 
 Privy Councillorship, was compelled to veil "an unmistak- 
 able and vigorous protest in the most gracious and dignified 
 speech of thanks." It was his last public appearance on any 
 important occasion, a proper and almost majestic conclusion 
 to his long warfare. He died on June 29 of the following 
 year, having just completed his threescore and ten. By his 
 direction three lines from a poem by his wife were inscribed 
 on his tomb-stone: 
 
 Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; 
 For still He giveth His beloved sleep, 
 And if an endless sleep He wills, so best. 
 
 Better, if he could have known them, would have been the 
 words spoken only the other day by the Vice-Chancellor of 
 Cambridge at the great dinner given at the university on the 
 occasion of Darwin's centenary: 
 
 I claim as a theologian — and I see representatives of law, music, and 
 letters, and many other sciences and arts present — that only one spirit 
 animates us all, and I should beg that we might be included in the term 
 "naturalists." 
 
 Now to Huxley more than to any other one man in England 
 is due this victory, seeming to some so complete and final; 
 he more than any other one man stood in the nineteenth 
 century for the triple power of positive and hypothetical 
 science and of philosophical science in the form of naturalism. 
 Of his work in positive science I am incompetent to speak, 
 but I can at least say that it was important enough to give 
 him honourable standing among investigators and to clothe 
 his popular utterances with authority. His great opportunity 
 came with the publication of The Origin of Species when he
 
 232 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 was thirty-four years old, and for the remaining thirty-six 
 years of his life he was the valiant and aggressive champion 
 of evolution and the Darwinian hypothesis against all comers, 
 whether they were mighty men of the Church or of Parlia- 
 ment. He was, so to speak, the Plato to the Socrates of the 
 new philosophy, applying its premises to every department 
 of life. His power in this field was conditioned by his knowl- 
 edge of science and of philosophy, but it depended also on his 
 consummate skill in the use of language. To read his essays, 
 which deal so magnificently with old disputes and forgotten 
 animosities, is to feel — at least a literary man may be par- 
 doned for so feeling — that here is one of the cunning artif- 
 icers lost to letters, an essayist who, if he had devoted his 
 faculties to the more permanent aspect of truth, might have 
 taken a place among the great masters of literature. Cer- 
 tainly in sarcasm and irony he had no superior, unless it was 
 Matthew Arnold, whom, indeed, he in many superficial respects 
 resembles. He had, no doubt, easy material in the bishops, 
 and the epithet episcopophagous, which he pleasantly coined 
 for himself, tells the story of that contest in a word. Better 
 material yet was afforded by Gladstone when, rushing in 
 where bishops feared to tread, he undertook to uphold the 
 cosmogony of Genesis as scientifically correct. Whatever 
 one's attitude towards philosophical science may be, one can 
 acknowledge a feeling of unreserved glee in seeing that flabby, 
 pretentious intellect pricked and slashed in such masterly 
 fashion. Satire like the following is never old: 
 
 In particular, the remarkable disquisition which covers pages ii to 14 
 of Mr. Gladstone's last contribution [to the Nineteenth Centtiry, January, 
 18863 liS'S greatly exercised my mind. Socrates is reported to have said of 
 the works of Heraclitus that he who attempted to comprehend them should 
 be a "DeUan swimmer," but that, for his part, what he could understand 
 was so good that he was disposed to believe in the excellence of that which 
 he found unintelligible. In endeavouring to make myself master of Mr. 
 Gladstone's meaning in these pages, I have often been overcome by a feel- 
 ing analogous to that of Socrates, but not quite the same. That which I do
 
 HUXLEY 233 
 
 understand has appeared to me so very much the reverse of good, that I 
 have sometimes permitted myself to doubt the value of that which I do 
 not understand. 
 
 That is the true joy of battle, that keeps the wrangling of 
 ancient days forever young: 
 
 Full of the god that urged their biu-ning breast, 
 The heroes thus their mutual warmth express'd . 
 
 In the case of Huxley himself there is no question of what 
 we understand and what we do not understand. All in his 
 writing is of that peculiarly lucid quality which is an argu- 
 ment in itself, for we are prone to accept the canon that what 
 is clear must be true. Yet there is a distinction. Though, 
 so far as regards the end immediately in view, Huxley is 
 always a master of logical precision, one discovers, in reading 
 him largely, that his ends are not always the same, and that 
 in the total effect of his works there lies concealed an insoluble 
 ambiguity. So it is that, though in one sense his strongest 
 intellectual trait was, as his son says, "an uncompromising 
 passion for truth," yet in the sum of his thinking he was one 
 of the master sophists of the age. And the tracks of his 
 sophistry lead straight to that confusion of positive science 
 and hypothetical science and philosophical science which is, 
 perhaps, the most characteristic mark of the last century. 
 
 Agnosticism, according to Huxley's own definition of the 
 word which he invented to sum up his intellectual procedure, 
 is neither scepticism nor dogmatism; it "is not properly 
 described as a 'negative' creed, nor indeed as a creed of any 
 kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the 
 validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual, 
 . . . that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of 
 the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce 
 evidence which logically justifies that certainty." Agnosti- 
 cism, then, is merely the honest adherence to evidence. Now 
 no state of mind could be more exemplary than that of the 
 agnostic when so defined. It has only one weakness, that,
 
 234 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 if we could accept their own opinion, it includes all men, 
 and so defines nothing. Huxley, indeed, contrasts the proce- 
 dure of the agnostic with theology, and declares that "agnos- 
 ticism can be said to be a stage in its evolution, only as death 
 may be said to be the final stage in the evolution of life." 
 Really, the whole argument, for one so keen as Huxley, is 
 rather naive. Does he suppose that Cardinal Newman, for 
 instance, would admit that his theological hypothesis was 
 any less supported by evidence than the evolutionary hy- 
 pothesis? As a matter of fact Newman might retort that he 
 had with him the evidence of ages, whereas Huxley was 
 depending at bottom on the evidence of only a few decades 
 of time. The difference between them does not lie in their 
 loyalty or disloyalty to evidence per se, but in the kind of 
 evidence from which they start; nor has Huxley, so far as I 
 know, ever shown, or even seriously tried to show, that the 
 inner evidence which gives us the sense of moral liberty and 
 responsibility, of sin and holiness, is less logically trust- 
 worthy than the evidence of the eye and the ear. 
 
 That is the weakness of agnosticism as defined by its in- 
 ventor, but it has a compensating advantage. As actually 
 used by him it is at once a sword of offense and a buckler of 
 safety; permitting the most truculent dogmatism when the 
 errors of an enemy are to be exposed and the most elusive 
 scepticism when the enemy charges in return. Indeed, an 
 agnostic might briefly and not unfairly be defined as a dog- 
 matist in attack and a sceptic in defense, which is but another 
 way of calling him a sophist. With what dexterity Huxley 
 wielded this double weapon may be seen in his use of the 
 great question of scientific law. More than once {e.g., Science 
 and Christian Tradition, p. 134), when certain deductions from 
 the rigid application of law are brought home to him, he 
 takes refuge in a sceptical limitation of law to the mere formu- 
 lation of objective experience in a world which is ultimately 
 moved by forces beyond the reach of man's perceptive faculties.
 
 HUXLEY 235 
 
 And against the preacher who rashly invades the scientific 
 field he can declare that "the habitual use of the word 'law,' 
 in the sense of an active thing, is almost a mark of pseudo- 
 science; it characterizes the writings of those who have appro- 
 priated the forms of science without knowing anything of its 
 substance." Yet in the same essay, when he opens the 
 attack upon those who would retreat into a region beyond 
 scientific law, he avows boldly "the fundamental axiom of 
 scientific thought," "that there is not, never has been, and 
 never will be, any disorder in nature. The admission of the 
 occurrence of any event which was not the logical consequence 
 of the immediately antecedent events, according to these 
 definite, ascertained, or unascertained rules which we call 
 the 'laws of nature,' would be an act of self-destruction on 
 the part of science." And elsewhere: "We ignore, even as a 
 possibihty, the notion of any interference with the order of 
 Nature." Now when we consider that to regard the act of 
 the will which originates the motion of raising the arm as a 
 force in any way contrary to the law of gravitation, is in 
 Huxley's mind an unscientific absurdity {Pseudo-Scientific 
 Realism, passim), that, in other words, life and the world 
 are to him a pure mechanism, and when we consider further 
 that he identifies the claims of science with the desire of 
 truth {Universities: Actual and Ideal, passim), it really should 
 not have seemed to him so grave an error to use the word 
 law for that force which produces the absolute uniformity 
 defined by law. It is Huxley himself in these moments of 
 attack who virtually, if not literally, takes law "in the sense 
 of an active thing," which in his moments of defense he so 
 vigorously repudiates. 
 
 Inevitably this ambiguity of attitude becomes even more 
 perplexed when he applies the notion of scientific law to the 
 deeper problems of life. In one place, for instance, he asserts 
 that "there lies in the nature of things a reason for every 
 moral law, as cogent and as well defined as that which under-
 
 236 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 lies every physical law." But in another place he takes 
 what, from his principles, must be regarded as the opposite 
 point of view: "The notion that the doctrine of evolution can 
 furnish a foundation for morals seems to me to be an illusion"; 
 and again he states roundly that "cosmic nature is no school 
 of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical na- 
 ture." This ambiguity of his position involves not only 
 morals but the fundamental question of spirituality and 
 materialism. In his freer moments of attack he does not 
 hesitate to fling out the most relentless dogmas of materialism. 
 The actuality of the spiritual world, he declares in one of his 
 prefaces, lies entirely within the province of science — that 
 is to say, is amenable to the undeviating operation of me- 
 chanical law; "the materials of consciousness are products 
 of cerebral activity," and are "the result of molecular forces"; 
 "we are," by an extension of the Cartesian theory of the 
 lower animals, "conscious automata, . . . parts of the great 
 series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, 
 composes that which is, and has been, and shall be — the 
 sum of existence." That should seem to be the most explicit 
 materialism and necessitarianism; yet hear the same man 
 on the other side! "For my part, I utterly repudiate and 
 anathematize the intruder [this same necessitarianism]. 
 Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is Necessity, save 
 an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?" In other 
 words, when your enemy talks loosely of miracles and spiritual 
 experiences and supernatural freedom, it is easy to crush him 
 with this bludgeon of an unbroken law of mechanical cause 
 and effect; but when your enemy turns on you and begins 
 to draw disagreeable conclusions from this fatal sequence, 
 it is the part of the skilful fencer to denounce as an empty 
 shadow any connection between such a law and necessity! 
 Further than that, Huxley when hard pressed, instead of 
 abiding manfully by his premises, was ready to sink into 
 that last sophistry of the scientific mind and deny that there
 
 HUXLEY 237 
 
 is any distinction between the materialistic and the spiritual- 
 istic conception of life. "In itself," he says, "it is of little 
 moment whether we express the phaenomena of matter in 
 terms of spirit; or the phtenomena of spirit in terms of matter." 
 This view he buttresses {Science and Morals) by calmly 
 assuming that St. Augustine and Calvin were at one with 
 him in holding to a fatal determination. Is it necessary to 
 say that St. Augustine and Calvin — whether rightly or 
 wrongly is here not the question — believed in a spiritual power 
 apart from and undetermined by natural law? This power 
 might have its own determinism, but, relatively to natural 
 law, it was spontaneous and incalculable. The difference 
 to philosophy and conduct between holding a spiritual 
 fatalism and holding a mechanical determinism marks the 
 distance between religion and science — or, at least, between 
 the positions of the English bishops and of Huxley. If there 
 is no distinction here, why then all the pother, and what 
 meaning is there in Huxley's cheerful assumption that science 
 was to be the end of the Church and that men of science 
 were to supplant the bishops? 
 
 Now these inconsistencies in Huxley are not the result of a 
 progressive change in his views, nor are they infrequent or 
 superficial. They lie at the very foundation of the system 
 of which he was the most distinguished spokesman, and they 
 are more conspicuous in him than in others merely because 
 at any given moment his style is so eminently transparent. 
 They spring, indeed, from a false extension of the procedure 
 of science into a philosophy of naturalism. The fact is 
 simply this: When the matter is squarely faced there can be 
 no science, properly speaking, except in so far as the world 
 appears to us a strictly closed mechanical system, a "block- 
 universe" as William James called it, which contains its end 
 in its beginning and displays the whole in every part. As it 
 has been picturesquely expressed: "Were a single dust-atom 
 destroyed, the universe would collapse." Absolute regularity
 
 238 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 is the sine qua nan of scientific law, and the moment any 
 element of incalculable spontaneity is admitted into the 
 system, that moment the possibility of scientific law is so 
 far excluded: there is no law of the individual or the unpre- 
 dictable; there is no science of the soul unless man, as Taine 
 says, is no more than "a very simple mechanism which analysis 
 can take to pieces like clockwork." This does not mean that 
 any given law is final and embraces the whole content of 
 phenomena; but it does mean that further knowledge, while 
 it may modify a law or supplant one law by another, still 
 leaves us within the realm of absolute mechanical regularity. 
 Such a closed system is properly called nature; it was clearly 
 conceived and given to philosophy by the great naturalists of 
 the seventeenth century. 
 
 Nature, thus conceived as a block-system, is the proper 
 field of positive science, and leads to no embarrassment so 
 long as we do not attempt anything more than the classifi- 
 cation of physical phenomena under laws. But there is 
 a tendency in the human mind which draws it almost irre- 
 sistibly to pass from the formulation of laws to the definition 
 of the force or cause underlying them. This is hypothetical 
 science. Such a procedure already involves a certain violence 
 to scientific evidence, but it does not stop here. Suppose 
 there exists a body of testimony, accumulated through thou- 
 sands of years, to the effect that a whole world of our inner 
 life lies outside of that block-universe of mechanical deter- 
 minism: what then is the man of hypothetical science to do? 
 He may deny the validity of any evidence apart from that 
 which leads to scientific law, and having erected this law of 
 mechanical regularity into an active cause governing and 
 controlling the world, he may set it in opposition to the hy- 
 pothesis of a personal God which Christians have created 
 from the evidence of their inner experience. He may be 
 onesided, but he will be consistent. In this sense, and with 
 a consequence different from what he intended, Frederic
 
 HUXLEY 239 
 
 Harrison was justified in saying that "agnosticism as a reli- 
 gious philosophy per se rests on an almost total ignoring of 
 history and social evolution." But suppose further that our 
 scholar, having naturally broad interests and sympathies, 
 is still importuned by all that evidence in the moral and 
 political spheres which he could not bring into conformity 
 with his hypothesis: what will he do? In attempting to 
 cling to an hypothesis which is based on the exclusion of 
 half the evidence of life, while at the same time he feels the 
 appeal of the whole range of evidence, he will try to develop 
 that hypothesis into a complete philosophy of life, and in 
 doing so he will necessarily fall into just those inconsistencies 
 which strike us over and over again in Huxley. He will become 
 a victim of that huge self-contradiction which I have called 
 philosophical science. 
 
 Now we all know how completely this sophism took posses- 
 sion of England and the world about the middle of the last 
 century. In particular the magnitude of Darwin's work in 
 the field of positive science and the superb simplicity of his 
 explanation of the whole order of existence, including man, 
 as the product of a mechanical law of selection, easily imposed 
 the evolutionary hypothesis as a lawgiver upon education and 
 morals and religion and government. And to the authority 
 of Darwin was added the persuasiveness of Huxley's masterly 
 skill as lecturer and writer. It seemed to the men who heard 
 his voice as if the long obscurity that had involved human 
 destiny was to be rolled away, as if at last the pathway of 
 truth had been found, and the world's great age was about to 
 be renewed. And however we may now see the inconsistencies 
 and feel what in another man might be called the duplicity 
 that underlay Huxley's method of attack and defense, there 
 was enough of the stuflf of positive science in his doctrine to 
 give it a certain moral stiffness and intellectual rigor which 
 must always claim our admiration. But with the passage 
 of years a change has come upon philosophical science. The
 
 240 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 human mind could not long rest content with a system which 
 was so glaringly at war with itself, and indeed there are signs 
 that Huxley himself was not always satisfied with his position. 
 But where lay the way of escape? These men would not 
 willingly give up the authority which seemed to be derived 
 from the actualities of positive science, yet they began to 
 see that the hypothesis of a block-universe had brought them 
 to an absolute impasse. The history of the intellect since 
 the days of Darwin's supremacy, therefore, has been marked 
 by an attempt to preserve the facts of evolution as the basis 
 of a scientific philosophy, but to alter the evolutionary hypoth- 
 esis so as to bring it into harmony with the spontaneous part 
 of human nature. The process has widened the distance 
 between positive science and philosophical science; it has 
 introduced a new set of inconsistencies, not to say absurdities, 
 into thought, but it is extremely interesting for the way in 
 which it has finally brought together two currents of the nine- 
 teenth century that might have seemed to a superficial observer 
 the very opposites of each other. What appeared in Huxley's 
 time, and still more in the half-century preceding him, to be 
 the very bulwark against those laxer principles and tendencies 
 which may be grouped together as romantic, has gradually 
 thrown off its hard rationalism, until now in our day philo- 
 sophical science and romanticism are actually merging to- 
 gether and becoming almost indistinguishable. In place 
 of Huxley we have William James and Bergson. The change 
 is significant and worthy of analysis, for the true meaning 
 of a movement is known by its end. So much we may learn 
 from Pragmatism, even while criticizing it. 
 
 Nor is it difficult, if we regard the material and moral 
 forces from which science and romanticism respectively take 
 their start, so see how these two apparent enemies have come 
 to join hands in a truce if not in an alliance. We do not often 
 stop to reflect on the world of pain and horror which underlies 
 this surface of things on which we move so comfortably. Only
 
 HUXLEY 241 
 
 now and then some accident, some physical rebellion as it 
 might be called, sets loose the pent-up demonic powers, and 
 for a moment life is as it would be if in a madhouse the phren- 
 zied patients were to break their fetters and overcome their 
 keepers. Each force of nature in itself seems to be hmitless 
 in its potential activity, and in so far as it is unchecked or 
 unbalanced by some other force becomes the source of ruin 
 to mankind. Manifestly that orderly subordination which 
 is the condition of our physical well-being depends on some 
 principle of control and balance which is not inherent in the 
 individual forces of nature. Furthermore, if our horror at 
 these calamities, if the physical repugnance that lies always 
 concealed in our breast, have any meaning, it is in the testi- 
 mony they bear to a certain correspondence on the one hand 
 between our sense of moral evil and the destructive limit- 
 lessness of any natural force in itself, and on the other hand 
 between our sense of moral justice and the imposition of order 
 and subordination upon those forces. We are thrust by our 
 emotions into an absolute dualism. Now the point to consider 
 is that pure science deals with these forces in themselves and 
 as unlimited, and without any thought of such human dis- 
 tinctions. A little spark kindles a fire, and instantly the 
 flames sweep over a city, consuming life and property and 
 spreading everywhere destruction and terror. Yet with this 
 terror science has nothing to do; it is concerned with the laws 
 of heat. Again some movement takes place within the earth; 
 the crust on which we walk is rent and shaken, and the helpless 
 human creatures are killed and mutilated as ruthlessly as the 
 ants in their little mound over which we inadvertently stumble. 
 Yet with this hideous fear science has nothing to do; it is 
 concerned with the laws of motion. Nor is the human body 
 itself free from these incursions of uncontrolled energy. One 
 very close to us, one whose fragile beauty has filled us with a 
 long apprehension of love, is seized by a loathsome disease; 
 those lower forms of life which to our vanity we seem to have
 
 242 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 trampled down in our progress have suddenly risen up like 
 avenging furies and laid their obscene grip on what was 
 dearest and fairest to us. We look on in an agony of suspense, 
 as if in this precious body the very armies of good and evil 
 were at war. Yet all the while the physician watches with 
 impassive, critical eye, studying symptoms, applying reme- 
 dies, awaiting calmly the results: his very efficacy as a man of 
 science depends on his freedom from those emotions which 
 are tearing at our heartstrings; he is concerned with the laws 
 of parasitic life. 
 
 Science is properly the servant of our emotions and of the 
 corresponding sense of dualism, but in its method of work it 
 not only ignores our emotions, but can perform its true service 
 only so long as it ignores them and deals with the pure forces 
 of nature. The error and danger arise when it disdains to 
 be a servant and sets itself up as mistress, raising its means 
 into an end and its procedure into a philosophy. Moved 
 by our importunate consciousness of order and disorder, yet 
 bound in its hypothetical explanation of evolution to consider 
 the forces of nature alone, without the admission of any law 
 of control outside of them, it has come gradually to a con- 
 ception of the world as an entity containing within itself 
 some force of vitalism, some elan vital, which by its inherent 
 limitlessness is the source of constant creation, making the 
 sum of things actually greater to-day than it was yesterday 
 and, from our human point of view, more orderly. Sheer 
 expansiveness becomes the law of physical life. The accept- 
 ance of this hypothesis of an incalculable energy, whose action 
 to-day can in no wise, or only imperfectly, be predicted from 
 its action yesterday, might seem to evict the very possibility 
 of scientific law; but there are two things to consider. In the 
 first place this hypothesis is just an hypothesis and has little 
 or no relation to the actual work of positive science. And 
 in the second place it seduces the scientific mind by seeming 
 to get rid altogether of that dualism which is ignored in
 
 HUXLEY 
 
 243 
 
 scientific procedure. As a matter of fact it merely changes 
 the character of that duahsm by setting the two terms apart 
 at the beginning and end of time instead of regarding them as 
 existent together and independent of time.^ 
 
 From this rather slippery hypothesis of a universe in the 
 process of continual self-expansion it is but a step to the modern 
 scientific philosophy of human progress as depending, not 
 on any ideal outside of evolution, but as — what shall I 
 say? — as self-causative. Here precisely enters the point of 
 connection between philosophical science and romanticism;^ 
 but to understand its full meaning we must look back into the 
 sources of the second member of the alliance. 
 
 Now, in attempting to characterize the historic romanticism 
 of the nineteenth century, the first trait that is forced upon our 
 attention is the note of rebellion from the classics. That 
 hostility between romanticism and classicism is fundamental: 
 we cannot escape it. Greek philosophy, as it touches upon 
 human conduct and as it was handed down to the modern 
 world, was summed up in the Nicomachean Ethics, at the very 
 heart of which lies the classical distinction between the infinite, 
 as the absolute, and the Hmitless. According to Aristotle 
 
 1 The middle term between the hypothesis of a purely mechanical evo- 
 lution and the hypothesis of evolution as conceived by Bergson may be 
 found in the evolutionary monism of Haeckel, which has been beautifully 
 analyzed and demoHshed by M. Emile Boutroux in his recent work, La 
 Science et la Religion dans la philosophic contemporainc. 
 
 ' This union was clearly foreshadowed in Diderot; it was developed by 
 Comte; but its great authority could not come untU after the work of 
 Darwin. In one of his essays Huxley speaks with scorn of Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison's Positivism, and asks: "What has Comtism to do with the 
 'New Philosophy' [i.e., the philosophy of science]?" Mr. Harrison might 
 easily have retorted. In fact when Huxley boasted that the bishops were 
 to be replaced by the "new school of the prophets [i.e., men of science]" 
 as " the only one that can work miracles," and when he acknowledged that 
 "the interests of science and industry are identical," he was merely re- 
 peating Comte's early theory of the supplanting of the priest and the soldier 
 by the man of science and the man of busmess.
 
 244 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 the active nature of man is made up of desires, or impulses 
 {kTndvixlaC), which in themselves are incapable of self-restraint 
 and therefore hmitless (aireLpos yap i] rrjs e7ri(9u/ztas ^yo-ts, 
 Pol., II, 4; the translation of aireLpos in Greek generally as 
 "infinite" instead of "limitless" has been the source of endless 
 confusion of ideas). Furthermore this limitlessness is of the 
 very essence of evil, whereas good in itself may be defined as 
 a limit (to yap KaKov rod aTelpov to d' ayadou tov Teirepacrfxepov) 
 and the aim of conduct is to acquire that golden mean which 
 is nothing other than a certain bound set to the inherent 
 limitlessness of our impulsive or desiring nature. The deter- 
 mination of this bound in each case is the function of reason, 
 which embraces the whole existence of man as an organism 
 in his environment and says to each impulse as it arises, thus 
 far shalt thou go and no further. But as the basis of practical 
 life is the hmitless sway of unrelated impulses, reason, to 
 establish its balance and measure, to find, that is, its norm of 
 unity, must look ultimately to some point quite outside of the 
 realm of impulse- and nature. Hence the imposition of 
 the theoretical life, as Aristotle calls it, upon the practical — 
 the contemplation of that absolute unity which is unmoved 
 amid all that moves. This unity not of nature is the infinite; 
 it is the very opposite of that limitlessness which is the attri- 
 bute of nature itself; it is not a state of endless, indefinite 
 expansion, but is on the contrary that state of centralization 
 which has its goal in itself (Trap' avTrjv ovSevos e^tecr^at reXous). 
 The revolt from this essential dualism of classical philosophy 
 began in the seventeenth century. That age was notably a 
 time of confused thinking and of reaching out in many direc- 
 tions. But at its beginning, and always in the background, 
 lay a certain mode of regarding life, the orthodox mode of 
 supernaturalism. On the one side was the great flux of nature, 
 embracing in its endless activity the heart of man and the 
 phenomenal world. "The sea itself," says Bossuet, "has not 
 more waves when it is agitated by the winds than are the
 
 HUXLEY 245 
 
 diverse thoughts that rise from this abyss without bottom, 
 from this impenetrable mystery of the heart of man." Within 
 this chaos of the human breast sat reason as a kind of king 
 or arbiter, by its command bringing order out of disorder. 
 But reason itself, as understood by the characteristic minds 
 of the age, belonged to nature, and was a sufficient guide only 
 so long as it listened to the voice of a restraining power above 
 and outside of nature. The true division was not between 
 reason and instinct or desire, but between all these together, 
 as forces of nature, and superrational insight. That is to say, 
 the orthodox view of the seventeenth- century was the clas- 
 sical duaUsm which had become involved and obscured in 
 a vast system of Christian mythology and theology. The 
 irremediable fault, default one might say, of the age was that 
 it never attained to a clear and untrammelled definition of 
 the superrational insight upon which its faith was based. 
 Pascal, indeed, approached such a definition when he set the 
 heart over against reason and concupiscence, meaning by 
 heart not so much the desires and emotions, as the contrast 
 with concupiscence plainly shows, but that faculty by which 
 we intuitively apprehend the infinite and eternal. Yet even 
 in Pascal this faculty of intuition was never freed from the 
 bondage of revelation and questionable authority, while in 
 most of his religious contemporaries it was inextricably con- 
 fused with some external voice of the Bible or the Church. 
 Not many men to-day have the patience to read far in the 
 endless theological literature of that age; and with reason. 
 It is the curse of the Reformation that the search for truth 
 was largely diverted by it into a monstrous and deadening 
 discussion over the particular instrument or institution to 
 which the truth was supposed to be once and for all imparted 
 as a sacred deposit. He who is willing and strong to read 
 those mighty books may be fortified in his own soul by feeling 
 that the tremendous earnestness of this war over authority 
 must have implied, beneath all the battle of words, an equal
 
 246 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 earnestness over the truth for which the debated authority 
 was supposed to stand. But the actual result of that debate 
 was to weary and bewilder the mind of contemporary men. 
 Gradually the whole question of traditional authority, and 
 with it the higher intuition which had been so obstinately 
 identified with this authority, begins to lose its hold, and in 
 its place comes the new reign of naturalism. 
 
 Now naturalism is precisely the denial of any revealed 
 authority or supernatural intuition whatsoever. For the 
 government of the fluctuating element of nature it looks to 
 reason alone, which it recognizes as but another, if higher, 
 aspect of the same nature. Hence the dominant philosophy 
 of the eighteenth century was a rationalism, which in religion 
 denied, or at least minimized, all that is mysterious and escapes 
 the net of logic, and in science regarded the world as a vast 
 machine which can be perfectly expressed in a mathematical 
 equation. Literature followed the lead and became rational 
 and pseudo-classic. I would not exaggerate the regularity 
 of this development, for, after all, the human mind remains 
 always essentially the same and varies only as one or another 
 element comes uppermost. And in particular any comment 
 on the pseudo-classic literature (which in itself has many 
 comfortable excellences) should not fail to distinguish the 
 truly Augustan circle of Butler and Johnson and Reynolds 
 and Goldsmith and Burke, whose humanism, like that of 
 Horace, contained, not so much explicitly as in solution, the 
 higher insight which the philosophy of their age was so busily 
 hiding away. They contained, that is to say, some marks of 
 true classicism as contrasted with pseudo-classicism. Never- 
 theless the main current of the times was evident enough, 
 and on its surface carried religion and science and literature 
 in a compliant brotherhood. 
 
 Johnson and his school belonged essentially to the main 
 rationahstic stream of the age, though in some respects they 
 surpassed it. But by their side there was springing up another
 
 HUXLEY 247 
 
 school, equally a child of naturalism, but hostile to what may- 
 be called the official philosophy. Naturalism acknowledged 
 both the reason and the instincts or emotions as belonging 
 to the nature of man, and thus manifestly left the door open 
 to a revolt against the tyranny of one element of nature over 
 the other. Accordingly, almost with the beginning of ration- 
 alism we see springing up, timidly and uncertainly at first, 
 various forms of appeal to pure instinct and unrestrained 
 emotion. This voice of insubordination first became clear 
 and defiant and fully self-conscious in Blake; and the message 
 of Blake, repeated in a hundred various notes, now tender 
 and piercingly sweet, now blurred by strange rumblings of 
 thunderous madness, is everywhere a summons to the perfect 
 freedom of instinct and primitive emotion and a denunciation 
 of the control demanded by reason or by authority of any sort: 
 
 Those who restrain deske, do so because theirs is weak enough to be 
 restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the 
 unwilUng. 
 
 The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. 
 
 He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. 
 
 These epigrams are from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 
 a book which Swinburne was to rank "as about the greatest 
 produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry 
 and spiritual speculation,''^ and which to Mr. Arthur Symons 
 was an anticipation of Nietzsche: "No one can think and 
 escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and 
 will pass before Blake passes." Now Swinburne and Mr. 
 Symons were indubitably right in seeing in such passages as 
 these the very bible of romanticism, and Blake's place as an 
 expositor of that movement, for England at least, is coming 
 to be generally admitted. But in holding up Blake's revolt 
 against reason as spiritual speculation they, and others, have 
 fallen into the error which, as it seems to me, has made of 
 romanticism the source of endless illusions.
 
 248 PAXIL ELMER MORE 
 
 In the field of the imagination the school of Blake at the 
 last carried victory with a high hand over the pseudo-classic 
 and humanistic writers, and the nineteenth century opens 
 upon a world pretty well divided between the quarrelsome 
 twins of rational science and irrational romanticism. In so 
 far as the romantic imagination yields to the self-sufiiciency 
 of instinct and emotion it implies a real revolt from rationalism; 
 it is in a way even more hostile to rationalism than the classic 
 use of the imagination, for classicism never involved a rejec- 
 tion of the reason, though it differed from pseudo-classicism 
 by leaving the door open to an intuition above reason. But 
 the peculiar tone of romantic writing comes not so much from 
 the mere revolt against pseudo-classicism as from the illusion 
 that this revolt is a return to spiritual insight. Here I am tread- 
 ing on slippery ground, and it behooves me to walk warily. 
 That all the spiritual aspirations of the nineteenth century 
 were of a bastard birth, only a very ignorant or willful man 
 would assert. Humanity is larger than any formula, and no 
 age can be limited by a label. In the romantic literature 
 that unfolds from Blake there is much that is simply true, 
 much that is beautiful and magnificent, and there are moments 
 that express the divine awe that belongs to the sudden 
 inflooding of the veritable other- world; but in the most char- 
 acteristic moods of that literature, when it expresses most per- 
 fectly the main current of the age, there will be found, I believe, 
 a deep confusion of ideas which results from assimilating the 
 rebellion of the lower element of our nature with the control 
 that comes from above nature. For the infinite spirit which 
 makes itself known as a restraining check and a law of con- 
 centration within the flux of nature, this new aspiration of 
 liberty would substitute the mere endless expansion which 
 ensues upon the denial of any restraint whatsoever; in place 
 of the higher intuition which is above reason it would commit 
 mankind to the lower intuition which is beneath reason. This 
 illusion of the senses has dazzled the human mind in other
 
 HUXLEY 249 
 
 ages as well as in the present. It shows itself here and there 
 in the classics of antiquity. It developed a special form in 
 the Alexandrian union of Oriental religion and Occidental 
 philosophy, and was thus passed on to the Middle Ages. It 
 can be found in the seventeenth century beside the true 
 insight. It assumes many disguises and is often extremely 
 difficult to distinguish from the supreme disillusion. The very 
 fact that the same word, romantic, is used to designate the 
 wonder of the infinite and the wonder of the limitless shows 
 how easily we merge together these extreme opposites. But 
 the historic romanticism of the nineteenth century, when it 
 strikes its central note, whether it be the morbid egotism of 
 a Beckford, or the religious defalcation of a Newman, or the 
 asstheticism of a Pater, or the dregs of naturalistic pantheism 
 seen in a Fiona Macleod, or the impotent revolt from human- 
 itarian sympathy of a Nietzsche — this romanticism is in 
 its essence a denial of classical dualism and an illusory sub- 
 stitution of the mere limitless expansion of our impulsive 
 nature for that true infinite within the heart of man, which 
 is not of nature and whose voice is heard as the inner check, 
 restraining, centralizing, and forming. 
 
 If romanticism is thus rightly defined, its point of contact 
 with science is easily marked. Those limitless forces which 
 were raised into the scientific hypothesis of a self-evolving, 
 or rather self-creating, universe are the exact counterpart* in 
 outer nature of those limitless desires or impulses in the heart 
 which are the substance of the romantic illusion. They 
 find their union in that very modern philosophy of life which 
 may be called indifferently scientific or romantic. As it is 
 concerned with conduct and the inner life rather than with 
 material phenomena, it may be regarded as the offspring of 
 romanticism; as it enjoys its great authority from a supposed 
 connection with the actual discoveries of physical law, and has 
 obtained its precise character from the evolutionary hypothesis, 
 it may with equal propriety be regarded as the bastard off-
 
 250 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 spring of science — as, in a word, the latest form of philosoph- 
 ical science. The keynote of this new philosophy, whether 
 it take one of the many forms of Pragmatism or express itself 
 in the evolutionary language of M. Bergson or conceal itself 
 in the sardonic indifference of the man in the street, is a kind 
 of laissez-faire, a belief that, as the physical world has unrolled 
 itself by its own expansive forces, so human society progresses 
 by some universal instinct, needing no rational and selective 
 guidance, no imposition of moral restraint, no conscious 
 insight. 
 
 And mark well, we are here concerned not with an idle 
 question of the schools, but with a very real outcome in 
 conduct. You will find the trace of this philosophy in every 
 department of life. It has remolded our whole practice 
 of education; and this perhaps is the point where its influence 
 is clearest and where attack may be most successfully directed. 
 Perhaps we do not often stop to consider the relation between 
 the usurpation of purely scientific studies in our college 
 curriculum with the Rousselian notion that education must 
 place no restraint upon the child, but must merely help him 
 to expand in the direction of his emotional instincts; yet in 
 reality that relation is to-day the main factor in shaping our 
 pedagogical theories. Positive science is a noble vocation, 
 but just so sure as it is made in considerable part the basis of 
 education, instead of being treated as a profession, like law 
 or medicine, to be taken up after a general education, just so 
 surely the confusions of philosophical science will follow and 
 claim authority in our schools. The unhampered elective 
 system, which is merely the pedagogical form of the new 
 philosophy of laissez-faire, is in a way anything and every- 
 thing; but one characteristic and one result of it are omni- 
 present. It is characterized by a revolt from Greek and Latin, 
 due in part no doubt to such subsidiary causes as the pedantry 
 which laid its paralyzing hand on classical instruction, but 
 due more essentially to the hostility between the classical
 
 HUXLEY 251 
 
 way of viewing life and the new juncture of romantic and 
 scientific philosophy. The result of the modern system is 
 a laxity of mind in those who have drifted through our insti- 
 tutions from kindergarten to university, a repugnance for 
 good reading, in a word, that lack of real education which is 
 more and more deplored by instructors in school and 
 college. 
 
 In politics the spirit of laissez-faire shows itself in the feel- 
 ing that to be right we need only follow unhesitatingly the 
 clamor of the day; whereas any suppression of a self-assert- 
 ive movement in favor of a saner ideal already established 
 is denounced as reaction and death. Take, for instance, our 
 attitude towards socialism. Perhaps no comment is more 
 frequently on the lips of the man in the street —   that myste- 
 rious arbiter of civilization — than the words: It is bound to 
 come, why strive against it? As a matter of fact socialism, 
 in some very imperfect form, may indeed come, but is by no 
 means bound to come. To say that the whole teaching of 
 history proves its necessity is to forget most of the chapters 
 of that book, and is to fall into the common error of the half- 
 educated who extend their knowledge of one age over all ages. 
 I cannot see much difference between those who accept some 
 form of socialism because by the very definition of Karl Marx 
 it is a "fatal necessity," and those who accepted the old scho- 
 lastic notion of God, with all its consequences, because by their 
 own definition of God he must exist. The question here, 
 however, is not the goodness or evil of socialism in itself, but 
 the perilous state of any society which for some blind law of 
 evolution surrenders its right to criticize and to determine 
 its own course rationally. "Man," says M. Georges Sorel, 
 the philosopher and for a time one of the leaders of the "syn- 
 dicalist" branch of socialism in France — "man has genius 
 only in the measure that he does not reflect." And when 
 asked what new form of government should be erected on the 
 ruins of society brought about by the general strike, M. Sorel
 
 252 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 replied that with such constructive thought for the future we 
 had nothing to do; we had learned from Bergson to trust 
 ourselves implicitly to the bUnd instinctive forces of nature. 
 
 In like manner in regard to female suffrage: we deceive 
 ourselves if we suppose that its admission or rejection will be 
 the result of argument and rational conviction. The power 
 that is bringing it into practical life is the sentiment heard from 
 the mouth of every other man you meet: If the women want 
 it, why, let them have it. And this sentiment finds support 
 in the weary fatalism of the day: It is bound to come whether 
 you like it or not; why resist the irresistible? Again, the 
 question is not whether female suffrage is a good or an evil 
 thing in itself, but the ignoble abdication of judgment in 
 accepting any present tendency as a fatal force which it is 
 useless, if not wrong, to curb. 
 
 And so, to pass to quite another field, the laissez-faire of 
 philosophical science is beginning to modify our whole treat- 
 ment of crime. We no longer punish the criminal as a being 
 responsible for his acts, under the belief that there is in man a 
 voluntary power to shape his own character, but when we 
 punish him at all, we do so apologetically, as if society and not 
 he were the guilty party, and as if his crime were merely one 
 of the products of evolution, like any disease to be cured 
 by fresh air and flattery. I have no desire to enter into the 
 intricacies of the new penology. But I have been impressed 
 by two opinions from very diverse sources. I recall reading 
 in one of the books of that connoisseur of the underworld, 
 the late Josiah Flynt, the remark of a professional burglar 
 to the effect that the only prevention against crime was sure 
 and sharp punishment. And I connect with this observation 
 the recent statement of the Police Commissioner of New York, 
 to the effect that the excess of violence and lawlessness in 
 this city is due to the number of suspended sentences and the 
 general feeling among those criminally disposed that the courts 
 will not convict. Mr. Waldo may have had various reasons
 
 HUXLEY 253 
 
 for offering such an apology for his department, but it is sig- 
 nificant to compare certain statistics of New York with those 
 of London where the older habits of swift and relentless judg- 
 ment still prevail. In our American city the average annual 
 number of murders for the years 1908-10 was one hundred 
 and seventeen, while the average number of convictions was 
 only twenty-five. In London, with its population of seven 
 million, the average for those years was twenty murders, for 
 which fifteen persons either committed suicide before police 
 action or were convicted.^ Among the causes for this alarming 
 disproportion our evolutionary attitude towards crime is 
 certainly not the least effective. In the end this whole phi- 
 
 1 The following statistics from a leading article in the London Nation 
 of March 30, 191 2, entitled The Breakdown of Americatt Justice, give a 
 wider range to the question: "Since 1885 there have been some 177,000 
 murders and homicides in the United States, but under 3000 executions. 
 In 1885 the number of murders was 1808; in 1895 it had risen to 10,500; 
 in 1910 it stood at 8975. In 1885 the number of executions was 108; in 
 189s it was 132; in 1910 it was 104. Roughly speaking, Americans are 
 now killing one another at the rate of over 9000 a year. Looking over the 
 statistics of the past seven-and-twenty years, one finds that, while execu- 
 tions have remained \drtually stationary, murders and homicides have 
 multiplied five-fold. In 1885 for every murderer executed seventeen 
 murders were committed; in 1895 the proportion was one to seventy-nine; 
 in 1910 it was one to eighty-six. There are, indeed, few crimes of which 
 an American can more safely be guilty. If he commits a murder the odds 
 are more than three to one against his ever being brought to trial; they 
 are more than ten to one against his being sentenced to imprisonment; 
 and, as has been said, they are more than eighty to one against his suffering 
 the extreme penalty of the law. Those are the chances officially ascer- 
 tained from official statistics, and they apply to the country as a whole 
 and to all its people. But it need hardly be said that if the murderer is a 
 white man the odds in his favor are very much above the statistical aver- 
 age, and very much below them if he is a negro. Only one country in the 
 world, Mexico, exceeds the American record of murders, a record that is 
 proportionally five times as great in the United States as in AustraHa, more 
 than fourteen times as great as in England and Wales, eight times as great 
 as in Japan, ten times as great as in Canada, and about twenty-five times 
 as great as in Germany."
 
 254 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 losophy of naturalism, which bids us follow the lead of some 
 blind self-developing instinct, is subject to the rebuke uttered 
 by Bishop Butler long ago: "A late author [Wollaston] of 
 great and deserved reputation says, that to place virtue in 
 following nature, is at best a loose way to talk. And he has 
 reason to say this, if what I think he intends to express, though 
 with great decency, be true, that scarce any other sense can 
 be put upon those words, but acting as any of the several 
 parts, without distinction, of a man's nature happened most 
 to incline him." 
 
 In these practical and, perhaps, debatable applications we 
 may seem to have got far away from the man whom I upheld as 
 the typical spokesman of philosophical science. In fact the 
 rational hypothesis of evolution as proclaimed by Huxley was, 
 superficially considered, the very opposite of the confessedly 
 anti-rational hypothesis that lends authority to the doctrine 
 of moral laissez-faire. Nevertheless their parentage is certain, 
 and even in Huxley hints of the derived philosophy are not 
 infrequent. 
 
 In education, though Huxley's interests were too broad 
 and in some respects too literary to permit a harsh condemna- 
 tion of humanities, yet all his energy was devoted to intro- 
 ducing science into the curriculum of the universities and 
 schools. No doubt his action was justifiable to a certain 
 extent and redounded to the genuine profit of pure science; 
 but it had also the negative result at least of starting that 
 transformation which has made of our classrooms a nursery 
 for the sophisms of philosophical science. He was convinced 
 that the sciences in themselves are sufficient for a liberal 
 education, and on occasion he was ready to commend a foun- 
 dation which made "no provision for 'mere literary instruc- 
 tion and education,'" meaning by this "the ordinary classical 
 course of our schools and universities." Biology, he thought, 
 included really the whole philosophy of life; and education 
 he limited to "instruction of the intellect in the laws of nature."
 
 HUXLEY 255 
 
 If there was apparent liberality in his extension of these laws 
 of nature to include "not merely things and their forces, but 
 men and their ways," there was also in it the germ of a 
 mischievous ambiguity. 
 
 In matters political Huxley's practical sense of affairs kept 
 his judgment clearer, and I do not know that there is anything 
 in his writings which contradicts his expressed fear and dis- 
 like of "regimentation and individualism — enforced Socialism 
 and Anarchy." He has ringing words of rebuke for the whole 
 policy of drifting (see, for instance, his letter of March 21, 1886, 
 to a Member of Parliament). Yet the real tendency of his 
 ideas comes out plainly enough in his attitude towards female 
 suffrage. He was himself strongly opposed to the admission of 
 women into politics, holding for biological reasons a sharp 
 distinction between the spheres of the two sexes. Neverthe- 
 less, when he came to deal directly with the emancipation of 
 women his method was that of the man in the street. "Let 
 them have a fair field," he said, "but let them understand, 
 as the necessary correlative, that they are to have no favour. 
 Let nature alone sit high above the lists, 'rain influence and 
 judge the prize.'" 
 
 The new romantic philosophy of evolution as a continuous 
 process of self-creation had scarcely arisen to perturb the 
 rationalism of Huxley, and he was too stalwartly intellectual 
 to have succumbed to it even if it had been in the air; yet the 
 outcome of his teaching was that exaltation of science which 
 laid the minds of the next generation open to its alluring 
 seduction. The final influence of his words, if not always his 
 avowed intention, was to establish the new law of progress: 
 Let nature sit high above the lists; which may be interpreted 
 by his own remark on another occasion: "The best way of 
 getting disorder into order [is] to let it alone." Not many 
 lives in the Victorian era were more unselfish than his, not 
 many men pursued truth with a nobler devotion, not many 
 had broader and finer interests ; nevertheless, in the end it
 
 256 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 must be said, sadly and reverently, that his legacy to mankind 
 was confusion of ideas and relaxation of judgment. 
 
 We have seen the triumphs of Huxley at Oxford, the seat 
 of his enemies. Let us take leave of this somewhat ungrateful 
 theme by calling up another scene at the same university. 
 In 1864, there was a Diocesan Conference at Oxford. There 
 chanced at this time to be in the neighborhood a man who was 
 neither priest nor scientist, a man given to absurd freaks of 
 intellectual charlatanry, yet showing at times also such mar- 
 velous and sudden penetration into the heart of things as 
 comes only to genius. It was Disraeli. "He lounged into 
 the assembly," so the scene is described by Froude, "in a 
 black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had 
 been accidentally passing through the town. . . . He began 
 in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously, 
 as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes." 
 And then, turning to the presiding officer, the same Bishop 
 Wilberforce whom four years earlier Huxley had so crushingly 
 rebuked, he uttered one of his enigmatic and unforgettable 
 epigrams: "What is the question now placed before society 
 with a glibness the most astounding? The question is this: 
 Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of 
 the angels." The audience, not kindly disposed to the 
 speaker, applauded the words as a jest; they were carried 
 the next day over the whole land by the newspapers; they 
 have often been repeated as an example of Disraeli's brilliant 
 but empty wit. I suspect that beneath their surface glitter, 
 and hidden within their metaphor pointed to suit an Oriental 
 taste, these words contain a truth that shall some day break to 
 pieces the new philosophy which Huxley spent his life so 
 devotedly to estabHsh.
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY ^ 
 
 Eugene Davenport 
 
 It is dangerous to attempt to educate a live boy 
 with no reference to the vocational.^ 
 
 The first general principle to be recognized is this: That 
 industrial education cannot be considered by itself alone any 
 more than industrial people can live alone. It is at best but 
 part of a general scheme of education that aims at a higher 
 eflSciency of all classes of people, and it is in this light that 
 industrial education should be studied and its problems 
 solved. 
 
 The most significant educational fact to-day is that men of 
 all classes have come to look upon education as a thing that 
 will better their condition; and they mean by that, first of 
 all, something to make their labor more effective and more 
 profitable; and second, they mean something that will enable 
 them to live fuller lives. They have no very clear idea of 
 the methods for bringing it all about, nor have they any very 
 good means of impressing their views and desires upon us at 
 educational conventions; but to better their condition through 
 education is the abiding faith and purpose of all men every- 
 where, and they will persist until it is realized. 
 
 The ruling passion of the race to-day is for education; and 
 colleges and schools of all sorts, both public and private, day 
 classes and night classes, winter and summer, are filled to 
 
 1 From Education for Efficiency; copyright. Reprinted by permission 
 of the author and of D. C. Heath and Company. 
 
 "^ This chapter covers the general line of thought developed by the 
 author in an address at the dedication of the new agricultural building at 
 the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, May 28, 1909.
 
 258 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 overflowing. The only educational institution that is being 
 deserted is the old-time district school, and that is failing 
 only where it is unable to satisfy the new demands, and 
 where this occurs its lineal successor is the public high school, 
 which is everywhere becoming the favorite agency of modern 
 education of the masses in America. 
 
 The training of the young for the duties of life is no longer 
 left to the charity of the church nor to private endowment, 
 however munificent. 
 
 We do not ask a man to pay the expense of his own educa- 
 tion, and we no longer require the parent to pay for the school 
 of his child. We have come to recognize that in the last 
 analysis the child belongs to the community, and public 
 welfare requires that he be educated. So we have the policy 
 of universal education well established among us and the 
 largest item of public as well as of private expense is for 
 schools. 
 
 Now this is not sentiment, it is business; it is not charity, 
 it is statesmanship. We propose to maintain all sorts of 
 education for all sorts of people, and to keep them in school 
 as long as we can — so far have we gone already in this worship 
 of the idol of our day and time. 
 
 Yes, truly the ruling passion of the race is for education. 
 Individuals would amass wealth; individuals would exert 
 influence and power; individuals would live lives of luxury 
 and ease, but the common purpose of the masses of men from 
 all the walks of life is a set determination to acquire knowledge. 
 Daughters of washerwomen graduate from the high school, 
 and ditchers' sons go to college — not by ones and twos, but 
 literally by hundreds and thousands, and if the ruling passion 
 fails in individual cases, we have a law that puts the child 
 into school, willy-nilly, on the ground that to this extent, 
 at least, he is public property. 
 
 Now what is to be the consequence of all this? What will 
 the daughter of the washerwoman do after she has graduated
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 259 
 
 from the high school? Will she take her mother's place at the 
 tub? What think you? If not, how will the washing be 
 done? and was her schooling a blessing or a curse to the com- 
 munity? — because the tub must stay; and if she does take 
 her place at the tub, was her schooling a blessing or a curse to 
 her? Will the ditcher's son inherit the father's spade? and if 
 not, how will ditches be dug if all men are to be educated? 
 How will the world's work get done if education takes men and 
 women out of useful and needful occupations and makes them 
 over into pseudo ladies and gentlemen of leisure? How, too, 
 will their own bills be paid except they labor as men have 
 always labored? It is idle to say that a portion of the race 
 should be left ignorant that they may perform the undesirable 
 though necessary labor. The "portion" objects, and what are 
 we going to do about it? Now these are disagreeable ques- 
 tions, and we would rather not be forced to answer them; but 
 they are fundamental, and will soon begin to answer themselves 
 in some fashion under our system of education, which is 
 rapidly becoming universal. 
 
 We are now engaged in the most stupendous educational, 
 social, and economic experiment the world has ever undertaken 
 — the experiment of universal education; and whether in 
 the end universal education shall prove a blessing or a curse 
 to us will depend entirely upon our skill in handling the issues 
 it has raised for our solution. We have entered too far upon 
 this experiment ever to retire from it, even if we desired to do 
 so, which we do not; and if the outcome is to be safety and 
 not anarchy, and if it is all to result in further development of 
 the race and not in retrogression, then a few fundamentals 
 must soon be clearly recognized and brought into and made a 
 part of our educational ideals, policies, and methods. 
 
 First, if we are to have universal education, it must contain 
 a large element of the vocational, because all the needful 
 activities must be maintained in the educated state as here- 
 tofore. The race cannot progress any more in the future
 
 26o EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 than in the past except by the expenditure of large amounts 
 of human energy. This being so, education cannot be looked 
 upon as an avenue to a life of ease, or as a means of giving 
 one man an advantage over another, whereby he may exist 
 upon the fruit of that other's labor and the sweat of that other's 
 brow. It might do for a few; it cannot do for the mass, whose 
 efficiency must be increased and not decreased by education; 
 because in the last analysis education is a public as well as a 
 personal matter, and the interests of the state require that the 
 ratio of individual efficiency in all lines shall be constantly 
 increased. 
 
 Second, within the limits of needful activities one occupa- 
 tion is as important as another, and a system of universal 
 education must enrich them all, or the end will be disastrous. 
 We need to change our views concerning what have been 
 regarded as menial employments. In the millennium no 
 woman will make her living over the washtub, nor will she 
 sing the song of the shirt day and night forever; but neither 
 will education and .elevation free her, or any one else, from a 
 fair share of the drudgery of life, because the needful things 
 must still be done. Nor must we fail to remind ourselves 
 that not all the labor of the world is at the washtub, or at the 
 bottom of the ditch, because success in any calling is the price 
 of unremitting and exhausting toil, against which education 
 is no insurance whatever. It can only promise that faithful 
 labor shall have its adequate and sure reward. And that 
 is enough, for no man has a right to ask that he be freed from 
 labor on this earth; he can only pray to be relieved from the 
 burden of aimless and fruitless drudgery — which is the 
 blessed assurance of education. 
 
 While education is no relief from labor, or even drudgery, 
 it ought, however, to lessen the totality of drudgery by 
 the further utilization of mechanical energy and the more 
 economic and intelligent direction of human effort. Educa- 
 tion will never fully justify itself until this shall have been
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 261 
 
 accomplished and the human machine be Hberated from the 
 last form of slavery — the drudgery that is born of ignorance. 
 
 No man, then, educated or uneducated, has a right to be 
 useless. Most men will continue to earn and ought to earn, 
 in one way or another, the funds to pay their bills, and in this 
 natural way will the world's work get done in the future as 
 in the past. The education of all men, therefore, is, or should 
 be, in a broad sense vocational, and the so-called learned 
 professions are but other names for developed industries. 
 In this broad sense every useful activity is included, from 
 farming to music and painting, poetry and sculpture; from 
 engineering to medicine and law, philosophy and theology; 
 as wide and as varied as the activities and capacities of the 
 human race — so wide and so varied must our education be 
 if it is to be universal and be safe. 
 
 Measured by this standard, farming has the same claims 
 upon education as have language and literature, but no more; 
 for both are useful, or may be, though in different ways. 
 Which is more useful we cannot tell any more than we can tell 
 whether food or religion is the more essential to human life; 
 or whether art or industry contributes most to its fullest 
 development. We only know that all things within the range 
 of human capacity are useful, and that education may, if 
 it will, enrich them all. 
 
 Now this demand is right, for, unless universal education 
 can be so administered as not greatly to disturb the relations 
 of needful activities, it will prove in the end a curse instead of 
 a blessing, and it is the business of educators now soberly 
 to consider the consequences of headlong policies, however 
 promising in direct results, if they do not reckon with the 
 inevitable outcome. 
 
 Third, in the working out of these plans such policies and 
 methods must be observed as shall prevent social cleavage 
 along vocational lines. Unless we can do this, democracy 
 will, in the end, fail. We cannot go on with one half of the
 
 262 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 people educated and the other half ignorant, any more than 
 we could live with one half free and the other half slave. No 
 more can we live with one half educated to one set of ideals 
 and the other half to another. If we attempt it, we shall 
 have, in due time, not civilization — but a tug of war between 
 highly educated but mutually destructive human energies. 
 The only safety for us now is in the education of all classes 
 to common ideals of individual efficiency and public service 
 along needful lines and with common standards of citizenship. 
 To this end the individual must have training, both vocational 
 and humanistic, and it is better if he does not know just 
 when or how he is getting either the one or the other. 
 
 Fourth, remembering that what is one man's vocation is 
 another's avocation, and that what is technical and profes- 
 sional to one is humanistic to another ; remembering that all 
 study is educational and that utility does not lessen its value; 
 remembering, too, that much of our education comes from 
 association and that the best of it comes in no other way — 
 remembering all these and many other considerations well 
 known to the thinking man, we must agree that in a system 
 of universal education the best results will always follow when 
 as many subjects as possible and as many vocations as may be 
 are taught together in the same school, under the same manage- 
 ment and to the same body of men. In no other way can a 
 perfectly homogeneous population be secured. In no other 
 way can universal efficiency be so closely combined with good 
 citizenship. In no other way can activity and learning be 
 so intimately united. In no other way can morals and good 
 government be so safely intrusted to a free people. 
 
 As I see it, the greatest hindrance to the natural evolution of 
 a single system of schools adapted to the education of all 
 classes of our people is academic tradition which needs 
 substantial modification in a number of important par- 
 ticulars. 
 
 The truth is, there is no such thing as a "general education,"
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 263 
 
 except one that fits for nothing in particular, leaving the pos- 
 sessor stranded without occupation or other field for the 
 exercise of his trained activities. In so far as this type of 
 general education exists among us, the quicker we abolish 
 it the better. For example, it has been fashionable to speak 
 of the courses in the arts and sciences as "general," "non- 
 technical," or "liberal," using the terms synonymously and 
 as opposed to the technical or professional. 
 
 Now this is inaccurate and leads to much confusion of mind. 
 Courses in the arts and sciences are not by nature general 
 and non-technical, because an examination of the facts will 
 discover that most of the students taking those courses in 
 colleges are taking them for professional purposes in prepara- 
 tion for definite careers, generally teaching; possibly banking, 
 railroad administration, or the business of an analytical or 
 manufacturing chemist or some other gainful occupation. 
 That is to say, the courses in the arts and sciences are mostly 
 taken as professional or vocational courses the same as are 
 those in engineering and agriculture. 
 
 The best evidence of this erroneous use of terms is that 
 those who make most of the distinction between the technical 
 and the non-technical courses; those who talk most about 
 the latter being liberal as distinct from the former; those 
 who outcry loudest against commercializing education are 
 teachers themselves, who are earning money like farmers. 
 Now by what rule do we adjudge that farming is a calling 
 and teaching a profession? that engineering is industrial and 
 journalism liberal? that courses fitting for farming are technical 
 and narrow, and those fitting for teaching or making chemical 
 determinations are general and liberal? The truth is they are 
 all alike vocational; they are all professional; they all open 
 avenues whereby men and women earn money to pay their 
 bills, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of those who are good 
 for anything in any and all these courses are taking them for 
 the same purpose, viz. to afford a congenial field of activity
 
 264 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 whereby the individual may become a worthy and self-sustain- 
 ing member of society. 
 
 The truth is that the distinction between the technical and 
 the non-technical, the professional and the non-professional, 
 the narrow and the liberal, does not inhere in courses of study 
 leading to graduation, for the same subject may be either the 
 one or the other according to the point of view of the student 
 and the purpose for which it is taken. For example, chemistry 
 per se is neither technical nor non-technical, narrow nor liberal. 
 It is a great field of science. As explored and studied by an 
 agricultural student, or by one who proposes to make his 
 living as an analytical or a manufacturing chemist — to 
 them it is a technical subject, while to the student of literature 
 it becomes a non-technical and therefore a liberal subject, 
 because it liberalizes him and broadens his outlook upon the 
 world and helps to connect him with the farmer and manu- 
 facturing chemist. To the prospective teacher it becomes 
 technical or non-technical; vocational or non-vocational, 
 according as he proposes or does not propose to teach it. 
 To the farmer, chemistry is a technical subject, and literature 
 and history non-technical, and therefore liberal. To the 
 teacher of history, conditions would be reversed. 
 
 Another academic reform is to get over our horror of the 
 vocational. The old-line courses were as distinctly vocational 
 to the learned professions as are the newer courses to the 
 industrial occupations. The services of education to the 
 industries of life and the ordinary occupations of men have 
 been so recent that final adjustments are not yet made. We 
 are only gradually beginning to learn that every useful man, 
 educated or uneducated, has a calling and that the line be- 
 tween the technical and the non-technical, between the 
 narrow and the liberal, runs across individuals, not between 
 them. Every properly educated man is trained both vocationally 
 and liberally, but one vocation is not necessarily more liberal 
 than another except as the practitioner makes it so. To sue-
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 265 
 
 ceed in any calling requires the possession of a body of specific 
 knowledge relating directly to that calling, mostly useless 
 professionally to one of another calling, but far from useless 
 as a liberalizer. 
 
 Every man, to be efficient, needs the vocational; to be 
 happy and safe he needs the other. John Bessmer was a 
 barber and made his living by his scissors, but meteorology 
 was his avocation. He was the best barber I ever knew, but 
 he talked most about meteorology. The ditcher will not ditch 
 all his waking hours. What will he think about when he is 
 awake and not in the ditch? Then is when his avocation, 
 the liberal part of his education, is his comfort and our safety, 
 for the mind is an unruly member, and if the man has no 
 training beyond his vocation, his intellect is at sea, without 
 chart, compass, or rudder, and the human mind adrift is a 
 dangerous engine of destruction. 
 
 It is well that we who are bent most upon industrial train- 
 ing and development do not forget these considerations, and 
 in our enthusiasm for technical instruction we see to it also, 
 that every individual has a fair share of the liberal as well, 
 for the chief distinction of the educated man is, after all, his 
 ability to view the world from a standpoint broader than 
 his own surroundings. 
 
 Another relic of academic ancient history that ought to be 
 eliminated is that habit of thought which runs in the form of 
 set courses of study four years long. This habit of thought 
 has stood in the way of the proper and adequate development 
 of agriculture in our colleges, and it is now standing in the 
 way of high-school differentiation and the development of 
 industrial courses therein. 
 
 For example, it has been assumed without discussion that 
 a student desiring instruction in agriculture must enter upon 
 a set course for four years, and that unless he graduated he 
 had somehow failed, or the course was too long. It never 
 seemed to occur to our educational fathers and grandfathers
 
 266 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 that perhaps the course was not adapted to his needs any 
 more than it seems to occur to some of our contemporaries 
 that men go to school to study subjects, not set courses, and 
 that the benefits of our instruction are by no means confined 
 to those who graduate. 
 
 There is nothing sacred about four years, or about a par- 
 ticular association of subjects. We must get over our fetish 
 worship of what we call a "course of study" and bestow our 
 attention upon "courses of instruction." Our somewhat 
 uniform failure to do this has been responsible for much 
 special and unnecessary limitation in the subject of agriculture. 
 Let me illustrate: A good friend some months ago asked me 
 this question: "Why do you not have a two-years course in 
 agriculture in the University of Illinois? " I replied by asking, 
 "Tell me first why do you have one in your university?" He 
 replied, "Because many young men cannot, or will not stay, 
 for a four-years course." And I said, "Then of course you 
 have also two-year courses in the arts and sciences, and in 
 engineering." And he said with an elevation of the eyebrows, 
 very significant, "No, of course not." Then I said, "Why 
 not? Do all or most of your students in the other colleges 
 remain and complete four-year courses?" He had to answer, 
 "No, not a third of them." I think I had answered his ques- 
 tion, but to make sure I said, "When the other colleges of 
 the University of Illinois find it necessary or desirable to put 
 in two-year courses because not more than one student in 
 three or four stays to graduate, then I suppose we shall do the 
 same; but until then I think we shall continue to teach 
 subjects to those who come, and bestow honors on those 
 who have earned the usual amount of credit." Here is a 
 good illustration of our futile efforts to hammer a new subject 
 into line with ancient academic custom, as if graduation from 
 something, even a two-years course, were the chief end of 
 the schooling process. 
 
 This same old habit of thought is the bane of the high schools
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 267 
 
 to-day in their effort to serve the people. Many of them 
 consider the limit reached when a four-years course is offered, 
 made up largely out of old-line subjects with little or no 
 reference to local needs, and when we talk about instruction 
 in vocational subjects they remind us that the "course is full." 
 This mistaken attitude on the part of too many high school 
 men will do more than all other causes combined to force upon 
 us a multitude of separate technical schools and destroy the 
 opportunity of the high schools forever, because men are 
 as firmly bent on vocational education of a secondary grade 
 to-day as their fathers were bent on industrial education of 
 collegiate grade half a century ago. The same forces are at 
 work in high schools now as were at work among colleges 
 then, and the issue will be the same. Either the high schools 
 will expand and teach the vocational, or other schools will be 
 established that will do it. 
 
 One good friend whom I greatly honor, because he is many 
 years my senior, and many degrees my superior in every 
 sense, writing me on this point, said in substance: "Your 
 idea that all subjects needful to the life of the community 
 should be taught in the same school is fine in theory, but how 
 are you going to get it all into the course, and what shall be 
 left out?'' How this instinctive attitude of mind clings to 
 us academic people! It is not much found except among 
 professional educators, and with them it is one of the relics 
 of academic ancient history, dating back to the time when the 
 college provided a set course for all students and which, when 
 full, was full in the same sense that the jug is full. 
 
 Recently the colleges have learned the lesson of the tremen- 
 dous complexity of modern demands, and they are beginning 
 to realize something of the depth and breadth of the meaning 
 of universal education; at least that it means the education 
 of many men for many things and by means of various mate- 
 rials and methods. This involves many courses in one school. 
 It requires that colleges teach subjects rather than set courses;
 
 268 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 and nothing is full so long as any branch of knowledge and 
 activity remains undeveloped and men and money hold out. 
 The colleges have learned this; it is also the lesson for the 
 secondary schools; indeed, in a very large sense the land- 
 grant university is the model for the public high school. 
 
 Our children look to the schools to fit them for the many 
 duties of life. Let them not be disappointed. To this end 
 we must construct such educational policies and employ such 
 materials and methods as shall make the school a true picture 
 of life outside in all its essential activities. To accomplish 
 this we must introduce vocational studies freely, not for 
 their pedagogic influence but for their own sake and for the 
 professional skill and creative energy they will give the learner. 
 We must do this, too, without excluding the non-professional 
 either from the school or from the individual. 
 
 Take a specific instance outside of agriculture, but one 
 which is typical of thousands of cases. There are many good 
 families whose daughters feel the need of earning some little 
 money during years of young womanhood between the school 
 age and matrimony. They are good typical American girls, 
 worthy the love and the service of any man, and sometime 
 the hero will come. In the meantime, what? 
 
 We will suppose that the girl in question looks with favor 
 upon stenography and typewriting as a congenial employment. 
 Now I put the question flatly, remembering there are many 
 like her in the same community, — shall the high school put 
 in courses of typewriting and stenography which she may take 
 in connection with her humanistic studies and her domestic 
 science which she will one day need? — for this typical girl 
 is, or should be, a prospective wife and mother. Will the 
 school do this? or will it force her to leave her high school in 
 order to get elsewhere this vocational training which she thinks 
 she must have, because of temporary needs, and which the 
 high school will not give her lest it should be suspected of 
 commercializing education?
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 269 
 
 I am thankful that many high schools are already putting 
 in vocational courses. May their numbers increase. It is 
 far better to hold this girl in the high school and teach her 
 also the things she will one day need much more than she will 
 then need her stenography and typewriting, — it is better 
 for her and it is better for the community than it is to force 
 her, in early years and under the exigency of immediate needs, 
 to abandon the greater for the less. Yes, it is better to take 
 stenography and typewriting, telegraphy and bookkeeping 
 into the high school than it is to drive our girls out of it even 
 into the night schools. A proper policy at this point will save 
 to American wifehood and American homes thousands of 
 bachelor maids and factory girls, and do more to reduce the 
 ratio of divorce than any other civilizing force with which 
 we hold acquaintance. 
 
 What is true of many girls is doubly true of most boys. 
 If they are good for anything, the impulse to be doing some- 
 thing definite takes hold of them early, and the only way to 
 keep a live boy in school or to make him good for anything 
 after he leaves it is to be certain that some portion of his 
 curriculum relates directly to some form of business activity 
 outside. It is dangerous to attempt to educate a live boy with 
 no refference to the vocational. 
 
 The trouble has been in the past, and is yet, that our courses 
 of instruction have been too few. We have not sufficiently 
 distinguished between what a single individual could take 
 and what the community as a whole ought to know. Accord- 
 ingly, men seeking education have found much of the subject- 
 matter and of the method grossly unsuited to the uses they 
 hoped to make of it, and have either left the school, sacrificing 
 their broader opportunity, or have stayed to the sacrifice of 
 their efficiency. 
 
 The universities have been first to recognize this fact and 
 to meet it. With the best of them there is no thought of a 
 set course which every individual must take, but rather the
 
 270 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 aim is to offer instruction in as many as possible of the branches 
 of knowledge that interest and profit men. The result is 
 that in these institutions few men are taking courses with a 
 fixed sequence, but each is after the instruction which will best 
 fit his needs, and often two men take the same subject side 
 by side with a very different purpose and from a very different 
 point of view. 
 
 Now the efficiency of modern university education, espe- 
 cially along new lines, is becoming notable, and institutions 
 conducted upon this plan are overrun with students seeking 
 definite instruction for definite purposes, all of which indicates 
 the educational policy that best meets the needs of the people. 
 Here is the cue to the general plan that should characterize 
 the high schools, upon which educators ought to bestow some 
 degree of special attention, because it is in the secondary 
 schools and not in the colleges that the American people will 
 mostly be educated. 
 
 A third particular in which we need academic reformation 
 is this: Not only college courses, but high school courses, 
 as well, are planned and conducted almost solely in the in- 
 terest of the few who graduate, with but little reference to 
 the masses who drop by the wayside. If our system of edu- 
 cation is to achieve the highest results, it must recognize the 
 natural difference in men, both qualitatively and quanti- 
 tatively, and while it trains the brightest and best for the 
 positions of most responsibility and therefore of honor, it 
 must so shape its policy that those who for any reason cannot, 
 or do not, remain to the limit of time, or whose academic 
 ability is mediocre shall drop naturally into useful places for 
 which their little schooling has somewhat definitely prepared 
 them. Thus will our human flotsam and jetsam be lessened, 
 and thus shall we become more homogeneous as a people. 
 Thus too shall we be consistent, for does not our education 
 aim to be universal? 
 
 Our high schools, or rather their constituency, are suffering
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 271 
 
 cruelly at this point to-day. The chief object in too many 
 ambitious schools is to get on the accredited list of as many 
 universities as possible, graduate as many students as may be, 
 and get them into college. So intense is this purpose that 
 in too many instances the course of study and the methods 
 of work are inadvertently but largely shaped in the interest 
 of those who are to graduate, though we know only too well 
 that their ratio is small, and that of those who go to college 
 it is still smaller. 
 
 It is time the high schools served the interests of their 
 community first of all; and if they will do that thoroughly, 
 the colleges will manage to connect with them on some terms 
 mutually satisfactory. If that is impossible, then let the 
 high school faithfully discharge its natural functions to the 
 community that gives it life and support, and leave adjust- 
 ments to the universities. The few who go beyond the high 
 school will be abundantly able to take care of themselves 
 if only their training has been thorough, and they have learned 
 habits of efficiency. I protest against the reduction of the 
 American high school to the basis of a college preparatory 
 school, unless it is first built upon what is a rational education 
 for the masses of men. We have no right to reduce, impover- 
 ish, or distort the educational opportunity of the great mass 
 of people who depend upon the high school for their only 
 education, in the interest of the few who go to college. 
 
 We are nearing the time when for various reasons we shall 
 revolutionize our secondary education as we have already 
 revolutionized our college standards. We shall offer many 
 courses of instruction in many subjects, some vocational, 
 others not; some vocational to certain students, not so to 
 others, and all in the same school. We shall not be on sound 
 ground in this matter until things are so fixed that when a 
 boy or girl comes into contact with our school system at any 
 point, even for a short time, he or she will at once and of 
 necessity strike something vocational and also something not
 
 272 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 vocational; to the end that, however soon the student leaves 
 the system, he will carry out into life at least something which 
 will make him more efficient at some point, and also more 
 cultivated, because the schools have taught him something 
 of actual life, not only in the abstract but in its application. 
 
 The greatest trouble with our educational system to-day is 
 that it is laid out too much on the plan of a trunk line railroad 
 without side switches or way stations, but with splendid 
 terminal facilities, so that we send the educational trains 
 thundering over the country, quite oblivious of the popula- 
 tion except to take on passengers, and these we take on much 
 as the fast train takes mail bags from the hood. We do our 
 utmost to keep them aboard, to the end, and we work so 
 exclusively for this purpose that those who leave us are fitted 
 for no special calling, and drop out for no special purpose, 
 but roll off like chunks of coal by the wayside — largely a 
 matter of luck as to what becomes of them. I would recon- 
 struct the policy of the system by making all trains local, 
 both to take on and leave off passengers; and I would pay 
 much attention to the sidings, and the depots, and their 
 surroundings at the way stations, to the end that those who 
 do not complete the journey may find congenial surroundings 
 and useful employment in some calling along the line. I 
 mean by this that while vocation should be neither the end   
 nor the means of the educational process, yet it should be 
 its inseparable concomitant. This is education for efficiency 
 and service, whether it ever earns an academic degree or not. 
 
 We need not fear real education for real efficiency, but we 
 may well tremble when we see a whole people gorging them- 
 selves with a mass of knowledge that has no application to 
 the lives they are to live, for this will breed in the end dis- 
 satisfaction and anarchy. The best illustration of this educa- 
 tional short-sightedness is the fondness of many a classically 
 educated colored brother for Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, not 
 so much for what they can do for him, or help to do for him-
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 273 
 
 self or others, as because the acquisition of language is a 
 pleasant exercise and its possession a satisfying novelty. 
 Fortunately Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee are in 
 the land, but unfortunately our educational blunders are not 
 limited to the colored race. It is a notable and perhaps 
 significant fact that a very large proportion of the tramps of 
 the country have had the advantages of our schools. 
 
 Another point at which our minds are in danger of wander- 
 ing far afield is in regard to the natural function of the second- 
 ary school. The American high school is a new institution, 
 and like all new institutions it lacks ideals and methods. It 
 has displaced, in the West at least, the old-time academy 
 whose function it was to fit for college. The high school, 
 lacking models, has followed very largely and quite naturally 
 the plan of the academy whose mantle it has inherited. In this 
 it has erred. The modern high school is not the lineal descen- 
 dant of the old-time academy, and its primary function is not to 
 fit for college. It is a new institution, and its function is to 
 educate its natural and local constituency for the duties of life. 
 It is as thoroughly a public institution as is the state university 
 and it should serve its community in the same way and with the 
 same spirit that the university serves the larger and more complex 
 unit. 
 
 It is the first business of the high schools to serve the public 
 needs directly through the masses of men and women who 
 constitute their natural constituency, not indirectly through 
 the colleges. Their service to education and to civilization is 
 primary, fundamental, and direct, not secondary and pre- 
 paratory. Nor in saying this do I reflect upon the great 
 work of our institutions of highest learning; far from it. 
 No man can exceed me in admiration of the supreme service 
 of the colleges and the universities of the country, but that 
 supreme service must be rendered without overshadowing, 
 distorting, or injuring that other service, which, after all, is 
 more direct, reaches a larger number, and without which the
 
 274 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 influences of the colleges and universities will be largely 
 dissipated and lost. 
 
 If the existing high schools will earnestly address them- 
 selves to this great duty, they will become, next to the church, 
 the most powerful educating and elevating agencies of our 
 civilization; but if they do not, then as sure as time passes 
 another system of schools will arise that will do it, and the 
 time will not be long hence until they will divide the field 
 with technical schools and play a losing game of chance with 
 them. The first independent schools will be trade schools 
 in the cities and agricultural schools in the country, and this 
 lead will be followed by others until we shall have a whole 
 system of vocational schools of all conceivable sorts; and the 
 high schools will be stripped, first of one opportunity to serve 
 their constituency and then of another, until their usefulness 
 will be lessened, if not entirely destroyed in the eyes of the 
 people, who alone can support them, and they will be relegated 
 to girls' schools and training schools for college admission. 
 
 This is no fanciful picture, and I am convinced that unless 
 we are quick to read and heed the handwriting on the wall 
 to-day the next decade or two will witness the permanent 
 decline of the high school under the onslaught of the multi- 
 tude of independent vocational schools that will spring up 
 everywhere and which will seem to serve well because the 
 service is direct and plainly useful. The only great future 
 for the high school is to add .vocational work, making the 
 separate technical school unnecessary, if not impossible. If 
 they will do this, their future and their service are assured; 
 but if the people find it necessary to establish another system 
 of secondary education as they did a new system of collegiate 
 grade, then they will do it; but if they do, they will certainly 
 insist upon a fair division of the revenues, because modern 
 high schools are not private institutions as were the old- 
 time colleges; they are in every sense of the term public 
 institutions.
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 275 
 
 Experience in university circles has shown that the separate 
 professional college was necessary in the past only because of 
 the indifference to new demands of the institutions then 
 existing. As soon, however, as the universities seriously set 
 about studying the new problem from their own standpoint 
 it was found that there was really nothing incompatible be- 
 tween the old and the new ideals, but rather that it took the 
 two together to make a complete system of education, and 
 where the two have been already joined, — the professional 
 and the cultural, the industrial and the humanistic, — there 
 has education flourished best in the last decade; there is the 
 educational impulse strongest to-day, and there, if wise 
 counsels prevail, will develop in good time the greatest educa- 
 tional strength and creative power of this most virile of 
 people; not only along industrial lines, but along artistic and 
 humanistic lines as well. 
 
 If the high schools make the most of their opportunity, 
 they will develop into a great system capable of training the 
 masses of our people not only industrially but for all the 
 duties of life, and in a way that can never be equaled by any 
 multiple system of separate vocational schools, however well 
 established and conducted. One school with many courses, 
 not many schools with different courses — that is the plan 
 for American secondary education. Such a school would be 
 large enough and strong enough to afford an excellent educa- 
 tion within walking or driving distance of every young person 
 — an ideal not attainable by any system of separate schools 
 that can ever be established. I have unlimited faith in the 
 final development of the high school, and cannot condemn 
 in terms too strong a pessimistic or a carping spirit toward 
 this new and remarkable system of education at the very 
 doors of the people; and I cannot oppose too strongly any 
 and all influences that tend to make its proper evolution 
 either impossible or more difficult. 
 
 We must not underrate the importance of the average
 
 276 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 citizen, either to himself or to the community, for the common 
 man with an opportunity is a common man no longer. If 
 we would know what a community of common people can 
 do when it addresses itself seriously and en masse to a single 
 purpose, consider the success of that little German village in 
 breeding canaries, marvel upon the achievements in the Pas- 
 sion Play at Oberammergau, or even the singing of the Messiah 
 in that little Swedish village of Kansas, as described in a 
 recent Outlook. 
 
 Remembering what the common man may do, with proper 
 ideals and advantages, there is no higher duty now resting 
 upon all of us, and especially upon educators, than to unite 
 education and activity by the closest possible bonds, to 
 prevent on the one hand the acquirement of knowledge to 
 no purpose, and on the other the development of operative 
 skill with little knowledge of the true relations of things; 
 to see to it that no individual shall be compelled to choose 
 between an education without a vocation, and a vocation 
 without an education. This supreme responsibility rests 
 heavily upon every American community just now, and in 
 our enthusiasm for education that is useful it is well if we 
 temper our enthusiasm with judgment and keep always in 
 mind the fundamentals on which all real education must 
 rest. If this be true, it is imperative that the high school as 
 an educational institution should take hold of and care for 
 all the essential activities of its community; and if the clay 
 working or some other interest develop into a separate organi- 
 zation with a separate plant, that it still be under the control 
 of the high school, as the different colleges of a university are 
 under one control, and their policies and aims, though different, 
 are yet harmonized into a common purpose of training for 
 actual, not apparent, efficiency. 
 
 To teach all subjects to all men in the same school — this is 
 the great educational, social, and economic opportunity of 
 America, where both collegiate and secondary education are
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 277 
 
 in the hands of the general public and not of any sect, class, 
 or faction. If we throw away this natural advantage, bought 
 with blood and treasure, or if we neglect to make the most 
 of it, we are guilty before the nation and the race of a breach 
 of trust second only to the sin of treason. 
 
 If we follow precedent blindly and transport that alien 
 institution, the European trade school, and transplant it into 
 the free soil of America simply because it is temporarily 
 easier than to complete the system we have so splendidly 
 begun, then shall we commit an educational blunder that is 
 inexcusable, and we shall richly deserve the anathemas that 
 will be ours from generations yet unborn when they come to 
 see the handicap we have laid upon them and the natural 
 advantages we have sacrificed. 
 
 I would have it so that the occupation of an American 
 citizen may not be known by his dress, his manner, his speech, 
 or his prejudices. If we can realize this ideal, it will be to 
 our perpetual advantage, for it will insure not only our eco- 
 nomic independence but our social comfort, our racial progress, 
 and our national safety. If all this is to come about, we 
 have some thinking to do now, for, as I have remarked else- 
 where, more depends on what we do now, than can depend 
 upon what we or others think and say and try to do twenty- 
 five or fifty years from now. 
 
 When the materials for American educational history are 
 all gathered, and when time enough has elapsed for its various 
 elements to assume their true proportions and perspective, 
 it will be found that the most significant fact in the educa- 
 tional movement of our day and time was the agitation that 
 led up to the establishment of the state university. 
 
 In a very large sense the founding of that unique institution 
 of learning introduced two new and distinctive elements into 
 our philosophy of education, both of which bid fair to be 
 permanent, and to control even to the extent of revolutioniz- 
 ing our educational ideals.
 
 278 EUGENE DAVENPORT 
 
 The first of these fundamental doctrines was this — that 
 no single class of men and no single class of subjects should 
 dominate the educational policies of this people; and the 
 second was that in the last analysis higher education is a 
 public and not a personal matter. 
 
 The state universities were established primarily to teach 
 the branches of knowledge especially related to the industries 
 of life; but their field has broadened in the doing, and their 
 success has shown not only that learning may be useful with- 
 out losing its educative value, but that all branches of learning 
 are both useful and educative, and thereby worthy of being 
 taught to somebody; that in the interest of the public it is 
 the business of a school as of a university to teach more things 
 than any single man may desire to know, and that it is the 
 business of our institutions of learning to reflect in their 
 laboratories and in their classrooms the life and essential 
 activities of our civilization, at least in all its major 
 aspects. 
 
 The other new idea introduced through the state university 
 is that education is first of all a public rather than a personal 
 matter. Colleges had long been maintained for the con- 
 venience of those who desired and were able to pay for an 
 education, and those who took these courses did so with a 
 view to bettering their condition personally. While the 
 campaign for industrial education savored largely of personal 
 needs and class equality in educational opportunity, yet in 
 its working out we have discovered the deeper principle; 
 viz. that the public is not well served until we educate freely 
 for all useful activities, to the end that these activities shall 
 be in the hands of educated men, under whom only will they 
 develop and by which development only will our civilization 
 as a whole prosper and progress. The ultimate purpose of a 
 great system of education is and must be the development 
 of human activities, both industrial and non-industrial, and 
 our great demand upon the individuals that have enjoyed its
 
 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 279 
 
 advantages is service — service in something, somewhere; 
 anything, anywhere. 
 
 The great mass of human happiness will always arise out 
 of doing well the common things of life, and the happiness of 
 the individual will lie in that creative genius which does to-day 
 the same thing it did yesterday, but does it better. All else 
 is spice and seasoning to life, and as we cannot live on cakes 
 and spices, so the enduring things will always be the useful 
 things. There will be no educated aristocracy, for education 
 will have a higher purpose than to give one man an advantage 
 over another. 
 
 Every man's life is a comedy, a tragedy, or a symphony, 
 according as he is educated. It was a great thing when the 
 common man iirst lifted up his head, looked about him and 
 said, "I, too, will be educated." It is our business to see to 
 it that that high resolve shall not destroy the race, but shall 
 still further bless it.
 
 THE FUNCTION AND EFFICIENCY OF THE 
 AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE i 
 
 Whitman H. Jordan 
 
 It would be an indication of ingratitude and inappreciation 
 if I failed to acknowledge at this time the great honor of 
 being elected to preside over your deliberations, an honor 
 commensurate with the distinguished history and eminent 
 usefulness of this association. Because it has been my good 
 fortune to attend these meetings from their very beginning, 
 in addressing you on this occasion I cannot be accused of 
 speaking without knowledge and understanding if at first I 
 refer in the spirit of congratulation to the benefits of this 
 organization, both for those of us who have participated in 
 its deliberations and for the institutions which it represents. 
 
 Not the least important outcome of these assemblages are 
 the personal relations that have been established. The hand 
 clasp that has spanned a continent has not only made possible 
 the formation of friendships that have greatly enriched our 
 lives, but thereby has come a sympathetic touch of laborers 
 in the same field so essential to unity of purpose and under- 
 standing. We would all feel impoverished, personally and 
 officially, if there were withdrawn from the sum of our life 
 experiences the beneficent results of the intercourse that these 
 meetings have afforded. 
 
 Because we are friends as well as coworkers, we keenly 
 feel the absence from our midst of those who have passed out 
 of life's activities. Two of the best beloved of our long-time 
 associates have entered into their final rest during the year 
 
 ' From Science, Dec. 8, 191 1. Reprinted by permission of the author 
 and the publishers.
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 281 
 
 that has passed. For many years these gatherings were 
 favored by the gentle and refined presence of Matthew H. 
 Buckham, who through a long Hfe of activity as an educator 
 exhibited the qualities of a scholar and a gentleman. May 
 many rise up with a similar type of mind and character to 
 mold the intellect and purposes of coming generations! We 
 shall not forget the kindly spirit, the manly attributes, the 
 singleness of purpose and the efficient service of Edward B. 
 Voorhees, whose life and activities were on a plane so high 
 that they presented an inspiring example of useful living. 
 The number remaining of those who aided in founding and 
 building these new educational agencies and who are still in 
 active service is small, and these pioneers in an undeveloped 
 field can but feel that they are transferring to "other men 
 and other minds" the abundant fruit of their labors. 
 
 Again, this association has been an active and most influ- 
 ential agency in augmenting the resources of the institutions 
 from which you come, and in developing and unifying their 
 administrative and pedagogical methods. Through your 
 accredited representatives an influence, national in scope, has 
 been focused upon legislation. The enlarged financial support 
 of the colleges and stations by the federal government could 
 hardly have been secured without your united effort, directed 
 along an authorized channel. You must also recognize very 
 clearly that your annual discussions have been helpful, even 
 essential, to the wise solution of administrative and educa- 
 tional problems. Probably no other influence has been more 
 potent in hastening and shaping the far-reaching readjustment 
 that has been effected during the past few decades in the 
 aims and methods of education, even in our secondary schools, 
 than has the example and propaganda of the institutions 
 arising from the first Morrill act, an influence to which your 
 deliberations have served to give form and purpose. 
 
 But the main reason for extending congratulations to you 
 at this time is the status and beneficent results of the activities
 
 282 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 here represented. It would be easy to show the marvelous 
 growth of the equipment and work of the land-grant colleges 
 and agricultural experiment stations by the use of statistics 
 that are almost startling in their proportions. I shall not 
 resort to this method, however, for you know the facts, and 
 besides, the prominent display of such large figures savors of 
 showy parade or of vainglorious pride. It is enough to say 
 that as a whole these wards of the nation and states are 
 liberally equipped as to buildings, apparatus and funds, with 
 a disposition on the part of the state governments to provide 
 for increasing demands in these directions; students are not 
 lacking, practice both in agriculture and engineering is giving 
 respectful attention to your utterances; all this indeed because 
 after nearly five decades of strenuous and almost heart- 
 breaking struggle, whatever have been your mistakes, you 
 have demonstrated your right to exist and thereby have won 
 public confidence. The colleges and stations for whose up- 
 building you have labored hard and loyally are now public 
 utilities of great importance. They are an intelligent and 
 directive force in the conservation of our resources, both 
 social and material. In brief, these institutions have come 
 to be a national asset of great and permanent value. 
 
 But now that the hardships and discouragements incident 
 to the establishment of the new and the untried are past and 
 public confidence is won, now that you are reasonably well 
 equipped and have the plastic minds of thousands of young 
 men and women with which to work your will, the time has 
 come to ask this question: Are these agencies, established and 
 maintained by public funds, doing work of a kind and in a 
 manner, under the conditions which have developed, that is 
 calculated to most fully promote public welfare? No one 
 will deny the assertion, I am sure, that the colleges were 
 brought into existence, not for the purpose of providing a 
 fraction of one per cent of our young men and women with 
 a college education as an individual favor, but to be construe-
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 283 
 
 tive and conserving factors in building and maintaining a 
 strong nation. "The community has come to be convinced 
 that education is the most competent means for the preserva- 
 tion and enrichment of itself." With this end in view, is 
 their work wisely planned and directed? 
 
 A consideration of this comprehensive question requires 
 that we bring to mind the directions along which the colleges 
 and stations exert their influence in the exercise of their 
 proper functions. These directions are mainly three: 
 
 1. The public relations of educational agencies. 
 
 2. The enlargement of the body of knowledge. 
 
 3. The development of the vocational and social efificiency 
 of the individual. 
 
 It is my purpose to direct your attention chiefly to ques- 
 tions involved in the college training of young men and 
 women and the development of knowledge, but I ask your 
 indulgence while I briefly refer to the first phase of influence 
 which I have mentioned: 
 
 As to the influence of the land-grant legislation and its 
 results upon the public or governmental relations of educa- 
 tional agencies, there can be no doubt that one of the conse- 
 quences of this legislation is a strong movement toward the 
 injection of federal aid, and the federal control necessarily, 
 accompanying the expenditure of federal money, into second- 
 ary education that so far has been exclusively supported and 
 controlled by the states. The concrete expression of this 
 movement is the introduction into congress of bills providing 
 for the annual expenditure of vast sums of federal money in 
 aid of normal schools and high schools in the various states. 
 The policy proposed, if made effective, would have far- 
 reaching results and for this reason it should be considered 
 by this body in the spirit of wise statesmanship with reference 
 to ultimate results rather than on the basis of any immediate 
 financial advantage that might accrue to states or insti- 
 tutions.
 
 284 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 It is well for us to keep in mind this law so well formulated 
 by an educator of long experience, "that the efficiency of 
 public education becomes the greater as the responsibility 
 for carrying it forward is more directly and immediately 
 felt." This admirable expression of a sound principle may 
 be supplemented by the statement that an efl&cient system of 
 public education cannot be imposed upon a community by 
 aid from without, but must be gradually developed from 
 within. 
 
 Moreover, the broadcast precipitous distribution of public 
 funds into localities where there does not exist the under- 
 standing and preparation necessary to their wise expenditure 
 is sure to result in lamentable waste. This would be a less 
 regrettable result, however, than the influence of outside aid 
 upon the spirit of initiative and self-dependence of the people, 
 in the absence of which no progress is made in any enterprise 
 whatever. The school-district system once widely in vogue 
 in the eastern states, where each political unit was practically 
 a pure democracy, while expensive, possessed certain ad- 
 vantages of simplicity and directness because of the close 
 relation of the citizen to the school. It was a system that 
 gave large latitude to the individual development of boys 
 and girls and was far removed from the mechanisms of highly 
 concentrated systems that are inelastic and attempt to force 
 square boys and girls through round holes. While the old 
 system would not meet existing conditions, which, for reasons 
 of economy, require a closer organization and a fuller concen- 
 tration of authority, we should avoid, so far as possible, the 
 dangers of bureaucracy in school administration that are by 
 no means unreal. The injection of federal aid and authority 
 into local educational affairs could but increase the dangers 
 to educational freedom that always attend a highly centralized 
 administration; and, above all other considerations in im- 
 portance, such a policy is in the direction of removing the 
 citizen too far from his direct responsibility, even through
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 285 
 
 taxation, for the maintenance of local institutions. The 
 exercise of citizenship, involving as it should a discussion of 
 public matters and a sacrifice of time and money, has great 
 training value and is an essential means of attaining the 
 civic efficiency necessary to our form of government. Have 
 we any reason to doubt that the states will provide for ad- 
 vances in secondary education as rapidly as public sentiment, 
 available pedagogical tools and opportunity will justify new 
 movements? The progress already made in several states 
 indicates that we have not. 
 
 There are those who declare that the advance of national- 
 ism, even in the control of education, is irresistible. It is 
 encouraging to note that there are already signs of an action 
 against this movement. Whatever comes to pass, we should 
 be warned that any readjustment of the relations of govern- 
 ment to education which does not fully preserve the autonomy 
 of the states, and to a reasonable degree, of localities within 
 the states, in the administration of educational matters, would 
 be repugnant to the spirit of our institutions, and a revolu- 
 tionary and dangerous innovation. 
 
 I shall introduce the other phases of this discussion by the 
 assertion that the chief and absorbing aim of the college, 
 whether it be subsidized by private endowment or by public 
 funds, should be the training of young men and women in a 
 manner and to a degree that is consistent with well-recognized 
 college standards. This statement, regarded by many as 
 expressing an obvious truth, is given prominence in this 
 connection not because there is any ambiguity in the language 
 of the first Morrill act, which specifies very clearly the func- 
 tion of the proposed institutions, but because in recent years 
 these colleges are moving with accelerated momentum towards 
 agricultural activities, costly in time and money, that have 
 only a remote relation to the training of their students. I 
 refer to public addresses, farmers' institutes, reading courses, 
 demonstration work, railroad-train instruction, fair exhibits,
 
 286 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 secondary education and similar efforts that just now 
 seem to be increasing rapidly in volume and in their 
 demands. 
 
 Because many of these activities are more or less spectacular 
 and are popular in character, they certainly attract attention 
 and stimulate interest both in the agencies which participate 
 in them and in the knowledge which it is sought to impart. 
 For these reasons they are very useful. Doubtless many of 
 us upon whom is laid the burden of administering the affairs 
 of the colleges and stations and of securing the funds necessary 
 for their development and maintenance regard extension work 
 of various kinds not only as rendering a real public service, 
 but as an efficient means of securing the public favor that 
 insures generous support. It would be an interesting problem, 
 psychological, ethical or otherwise, to determine in what 
 proportions altruism and expediency enter into the motives 
 that lie behind some of our agricultural propaganda. 
 
 But, setting aside the question of motives, there is every 
 justification for declaring that in so far as these popular 
 efforts, and secondary education within the college, minimize 
 academic efficiency through the diversion or limitation of 
 funds, through their absorption of the time and energy 
 of teachers or through their reaction upon the atmosphere of 
 the college and its standards of instruction, in so far the 
 lesser is usurping the greater. It is fully recognized that 
 this assertion is antagonistic to the view that extension work 
 is a function of the agricultural college coordinate with, and 
 of equal importance with, the training of young men and 
 women, to be maintained on an equal footing as to develop- 
 ment and permanence, and it is so meant. It may further 
 be said that because of the strong trend towards the popu- 
 larization of agricultural knowledge both within the college 
 and station and without, because of the sweep and strength 
 of the agricultural extension movement which is taking such 
 diverse forms and is so largely occupying the thought and
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 287 
 
 energy of college and station leaders, there has never been a 
 more critical period in the life of the colleges and stations or 
 a time in which their efficiency for the accomplishment of 
 their primal and fundamental purpose should be more care- 
 fully guarded. 
 
 The gravity of the situation is augmented by the fact that 
 the agricultural and business interests of the country, alive 
 to the value of our worth, are now proposing to us what we 
 shall do and are urging upon us not only efforts of our own, 
 but our active support of new efforts that are outside our 
 province, but to which we are expected to sustain relations 
 of advice and aid. These suggestions, which sometimes are 
 almost equivalent to demands, are certainly made in the 
 spirit of good will and helpfulness and are always worthy of 
 our most respectful and careful consideration, but it is seri- 
 ously to be doubted whether popular conceptions of the aims 
 and methods of education and inquiry are a safe basis on 
 which to establish the policy that shall dominate the work 
 and influence of either the college or station. 
 
 The chief reason that will here be advanced for directing 
 the means and energy of the land-grant colleges along the 
 higher ranges of educational effort is that under the conditions 
 now existing these institutions will most fully promote public 
 welfare by devoting their resources mainly to preparing men 
 and women for leadership. Our social and vocational future 
 is largely a matter of leadership. He is wildly Utopian who 
 prophesies a day when all the people, or even a majority, 
 will possess the knowledge and ability necessary to a wise 
 discrimination in civic and economic affairs. It is equally 
 fanciful to hope that any large proportion of actual farmers 
 will ever be college-trained. Secondary education must serve 
 the needs of the great majority of the occupants of the land. 
 In the past the reaction of the agricultural college upon public 
 welfare has been largely through men who have become in- 
 vestigators, teachers, publicists and managers of large agricul-
 
 288 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 tural enterprises rather than through the distribution of 
 practical farmers. 
 
 What has been true of the past seems likely to be increas- 
 ingly the experience of the future, and this fact in no way 
 minimizes the value of the college in agricultural affairs. We 
 ignore the teachings of all human experience if we look for 
 the time when the destinies of the nation and the interests of 
 agriculture or of any vocation will not be safeguarded by a 
 small minority of citizens whose training has placed them 
 outside the domination of dangerous sentiment and ignorant 
 prejudice and who possess that power of discrimination 
 derived from a knowledge of fundamental principles, without 
 which we may not expect an intelligent and judicial con- 
 sideration of either vocational or public questions. 
 
 Not only are we greatly dependent upon wise leadership 
 in both social and industrial affairs, but with the college lies 
 the opportunity for its development. It is among the young 
 men and women who seek the advantages of college instruc- 
 tion that we find those who, because of ambition and capacity, 
 constitute material with the largest possibilities of future 
 usefulness. If the college fails in wisely molding these plastic 
 minds it fails to fully occupy its one great opportunity, and 
 if, on the other hand, the training given is inadequate or 
 unbalanced or in any way less effective than is reasonably 
 possible, both the receptive student and the public are de- 
 frauded and suffer a loss that can scarcely be made good. 
 
 Not all college graduates will be leaders, and not all leaders 
 will possess a college degree; but it is a fact worthy of emphasis 
 that the opportunity of the college is with the few and not 
 with the many. Only a very small proportion (perhaps one 
 or two in a hundred) of any generation of men and women 
 will come into extended contact with college life, and these 
 few will be the medium through which the college will render 
 its largest and most effective service. The college can never 
 come into efficient touch with the many as it does with the
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 289 
 
 few. Whatever direct influence it secures over the general 
 public lacks concentration and continuity; in fact, is diffuse 
 and indefinite. Experience and observation show that a 
 discouraging proportion of the minds reached by the attempts 
 at popular instruction are either irresponsive or incapable, and 
 the constructive value of these efforts is not to be compared 
 with the life-long example and influence of those who are 
 adequately trained for social and industrial leadership. 
 
 There are those, doubtless, who believe that these institu- 
 tions, supported by public funds, should stand in especially 
 close relation to the people and that in order to do the work 
 for which they were organized they should establish a low 
 grade of admission, occupy a secondary place in our educa- 
 tional scheme, adhere closely to instruction of an ultra- 
 vocational character and engage extensively in agricultural 
 propaganda, leaving to the older colleges and universities the 
 severer training that is required in preparing men and women 
 for the higher ranges of thought and activity. It is to be 
 hoped that if we have in any measure adopted this policy we 
 shall move away from it as rapidly as circumstances will per- 
 mit. Such a policy is a practical assumption that there is no 
 place in the agricultural field for the highest type of intellectual 
 development and equipment, an assumption to which no 
 well-informed student of social and economic conditions is 
 likely to consent. If we also take into consideration the fact 
 that the dignity and importance of agricultural opportunities 
 receive little emphasis in those institutions where the main 
 trend of thought and training is in other directions, we see 
 sufficient reasons why the agricultural college should not 
 relegate to other agencies its clearly indicated function — 
 the production of the leadership that is needed for advancing 
 the interests of the farm. 
 
 And so, because of the unsatisfied demand for adequately 
 trained teachers and investigators, because of the complex 
 and difficult problems related to farm life that insistently
 
 290 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 face us, so many of which are unsolved, because the redirection 
 and upbuilding of rural-life institutions need for their accom- 
 plishment the guidance of leaders of a high order of ability, 
 and because of the greatly increasing demand for service in 
 these several directions which is only partially met, should we 
 not insist that the material resources and the human knowl- 
 edge at the command of the agricultural college and the plans 
 and purposes there nourished should be directed toward 
 sound inquiry and the training of young men and women for 
 such service as will only be rendered by the few. Until we 
 have means beyond what can reasonably be expended in 
 increasing the efficiency of the colleges and stations, is it a 
 wise policy to assign to other purposes funds that should be 
 applied to securing and holding teachers and investigators of 
 large attainments and success, those who are masters in their 
 special fields? Agriculture needs more of such men and 
 should be able to create for them a favorable environment 
 for their work. 
 
 And we now come to a question towards which this discus- 
 sion has been aiming from the very first. What conditions 
 should prevail in college instruction and what results should 
 be kept in view in the training of young men and women for 
 vocational and social leadership? 
 
 In considering this question we may well begin by asking 
 what qualities should be possessed by those who are to enter 
 effectively into the service of agriculture and country life. 
 There can be but one answer. They are the same funda- 
 mentally that are essential to efficiency and well-rounded 
 success in any calling or profession. If the teacher, the 
 investigator, the statesman, the lawyer or the business man 
 should possess integrity of thought and purpose, be able to 
 reason keenly and base their reasoning on fundamental and 
 well-grounded principles, so should those who are to assume 
 responsibility and leadership in agricultural affairs. There 
 is no place for loose thinking and the empiricisms of super-
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 291 
 
 ficial knowledge in the consideration of the economic and 
 social problems pertaining to the open country. It is hardly 
 conceivable, either, that the college will succeed in developing 
 in its students these necessary qualities by any educational 
 methods essentially different from those commended by long 
 experience. The pedagogical tools may differ from the old 
 ones, but the ultimate result, if it is worth while, will be those 
 attributes of mind and character that have long been recog- 
 nized as the distinctive marks of strong men and women. 
 
 As preliminary to a discussion of the conditions essential 
 to the attainment of this result, we may safely establish 
 certain premises on which to base any contentions that may 
 follow. These premises, conceded on every hand, are the 
 following: first, the subject-matter of the classroom should 
 be concise and severely engage the student's mind; second, 
 the instruction given, in whatever field, should represent the 
 latest and best conclusions; third, this instruction, if it is to 
 secure for the graduate an advantage over the merely practi- 
 cal man, must give a well-grounded acquaintance with funda- 
 mental facts and principles; fourth, the college should so 
 react upon the young men and women that come within its 
 influence as to develop in them high ideals of living. 
 
 There are three factors that are most intimately related to 
 these fundamental conditions, the teacher, the curriculum, 
 and as an outgrowth of these two that somewhat intangible 
 influence we call college atmosphere. 
 
 What about the larger of these factors, the teacher? It 
 should be required of him as one great essential that he be a 
 man of scholarly spirit and attainments, and being such he 
 should have opportunity for study and reflection. Is it not 
 time to inquire whether we do not need a renaissance of the 
 atmosphere of scholarship in our vocational colleges, an 
 atmosphere that must first surround the teacher, there to be 
 breathed in by the student? Because we have been exalting 
 the man with a so-called practical touch, possessed of the
 
 292 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 ability to edify the farming public, through a pleasing way 
 of discussing practical subjects or who hustles about doing 
 things, is not our vision of the scholar as an essential factor 
 in agricultural education and inquiry somewhat obscured, 
 and if scholarship is to be discounted in favor of qualities 
 that make for popularity, we may well be solicitous concern- 
 ing the standards and effectiveness of agricultural instruction, 
 a statement that is equally applicable to experiment stations 
 as instruments of research. 
 
 It is a gross error to permit a young man, or any man, to 
 believe that success with the people in conducting agricultural 
 propaganda, or the possession of superficially built and glibly 
 expressed practical knowledge, unsupported by a sound scien- 
 tific training, constitutes an adequate reason why he should 
 be a member of a college faculty or a station staff. Success 
 in the energy-consuming activities of the institute platform, 
 the fair exhibit, the railroad train or the demonstration field 
 is not an evidence of fitness for classroom or research work. 
 We are guilty of a false estimate of values when we place a 
 salary premium or any other premium on success in distribut- 
 ing diluted information, however valuable this effort may be, 
 as against the function and influence of the quiet and patient 
 scholar. 
 
 If the college is to nourish the moral character of a student, 
 the teacher must be something more than a scholar. Char- 
 acter will not be much influenced by directly aiming at such a 
 result through the teaching of ethics. Much more potent 
 will be the general tone or atmosphere of college halls, an 
 atmosphere that emanates from the teacher. In his hands, 
 teaching the sciences should not only promote scientific 
 accuracy, but should nourish integrity of thought and purpose. 
 All the exercises of the classroom should be pervaded by the 
 ethical spirit. For these reasons the standards by which a 
 faculty is selected should include something more than the 
 possession of good character, and the necessary professional
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 293 
 
 qualifications. The human attributes of the teacher are no 
 less important. 
 
 We may consider certain dangers to college instruction 
 arising from extension work. This work on the part of the 
 college teacher is a menace to his efficiency, because such 
 activities not only use the physical energy that should be 
 reserved for the classroom, but sooner or later they minimize 
 or destroy the habit of study and the spirit of scholarship. 
 The man who serves for any considerable part of his time as 
 a purveyor of popular information is almost certain not to 
 present to his students the latest and best knowledge in the 
 best way, or to add much to the stock of knowledge. 
 
 Another danger to the teacher from a diversion of his 
 thought to extension work of the popular kind is that unless 
 he possesses unusual self-discipline and control, he will carry 
 to the classroom more or less of the loose and dilute phrase- 
 ology of platform discussion and will to a greater or less extent 
 depart from the concise and severe terminology so essential 
 to the best training conditions. 
 
 These are most unfortunate results. We should carefully 
 guard and cherish the intellectual impulses and equipment of 
 the teacher and the investigator, because they are the instru- 
 ments whose edge must be fine if we are to be successful in 
 rightly fashioning the minds and hearts of young men and 
 women and in laying open the hidden recesses of truth. 
 
 What has been said concerning the qualities of the teacher 
 and the necessity for defending him against the invasion of 
 outside duties applies with equal force to the investigator. 
 The experiment stations here represented, founded as research 
 agencies, have rendered splendid service to agriculture and 
 are now firmly established in the confidence of the people. 
 Nevertheless, we should not let the popularity of these insti- 
 tutions cloud our vision or confuse our estimate of the real 
 character of their work. They have mightily stirred the mass 
 of agricultural knowledge, have conducted an extensive
 
 294 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 propaganda of existing information, have recast old facts 
 and principles into new and profitable applications and have 
 made some explorations of real value into the unknown, all 
 of this to the great benefit of the farmer and his business. 
 But the period through which we have been passing can justly 
 be characterized as much more marked for its development 
 of agencies and for its distribution of existing information 
 than for its permanent additions to agricultural science. 
 
 Moreover, leaving out of account the extensive dispersion 
 of the time and energy of experiment station workers into the 
 highways and byways of agricultural extension and consider- 
 ing only our attempts at investigation, it may reasonably be 
 doubted whether, broadly speaking, our efforts of inquiry 
 have been conducted on a plane of spirit and method as high 
 as that reached by the investigators of an earlier period. It 
 may be that we have lived up to our present possibilities, 
 doubtless we have, but whether we have or not, it is certain 
 that unless the agencies constituted for research purposes can 
 secure and maintain larger freedom in policy and more fully 
 break loose from the restrictions of expediency imposed by 
 semi-political relations and by misguided demands for popular 
 efforts on the part of supposed investigators, we shall mostly 
 continue to halt on the outskirts of great problems whose 
 solution would render to agriculture the highest possible serv- 
 ice. It is gratifying to be able to believe, however, that we 
 are on the ascending plane in the stability and effectiveness 
 of our research efforts. 
 
 These suggestions concerning the limitation of the activities 
 of the teacher and investigator are not intended to be argu- 
 ments against the eminently useful efforts directed toward 
 enlightening and stimulating the public mind. These efforts 
 should continue, but it is fair to inquire whether we have not 
 reached a point in the development of agricultural education 
 and the demands made upon it, where the widely distributed 
 popular instruction and secondary education of all forms
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 295 
 
 should be maintained through agencies organized especially 
 for these purposes, to which the college of agriculture should 
 be coordinated in an advisory relation. Extension instruction 
 and secondary education, if they are to work out the largest 
 values, must be widely available and stimulate local initiative 
 and activity. The college may well be a source of advice, 
 and, when means are abundant through a corps of experts 
 who shall be independent of other duties, it may aid in giving 
 the needed accuracy and direction to the knowledge that it is 
 sought to impart. But such aid should serve to stimulate 
 and supplement the activities of other agencies and of the 
 various communities that are to be benefited and should be 
 so related to the colleges as in no way to hamper their academic 
 work. 
 
 Has not the time come when extension work should be 
 carried on through the coordinated effort of the state depart- 
 ment of education, the department or board of agriculture, 
 the colleges, the normal and secondary schools, the churches, 
 the grange, the railroads, the chambers of commerce and other 
 business and commercial bodies, all of which should be asso- 
 ciated in a board of direction and should contribute to a 
 permanent and salaried faculty of instruction? There is 
 every reason why the agricultural college should have an 
 important place in the education of the public, but is there 
 now any reason why it should attempt to compass the whole 
 field or burden itself with the entire responsibility, financial 
 or otherwise, for such efforts? 
 
 There are those who will argue, I suspect, that the closer 
 limitation of the work of the college faculty to the higher 
 ranges of academic training would cause these institutions 
 to lose their vital connection with public thought and needs. 
 We certainly have no use for a fossilized center of learning in 
 these days when the college must be regarded as a public 
 servant, but to prevent its petrification it is not necessary 
 that the farmers' picnic, the grange hall, the institute plat-
 
 296 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 form or the railroad train shall be frequented by the teacher 
 and investigator. These excursions from college halls may- 
 be replaced by expeditions for the careful study of social and 
 economic conditions as they are seen on the farm and in the 
 various business operations that are related to agriculture, 
 with no loss, but rather a gain in the value of the service 
 rendered. 
 
 When an issue is raised concerning vocational curriculums 
 we enter upon debatable ground. This audience needs not 
 to be told that many a faculty session has been devoted to a 
 vigorous, even heated, discussion over the relative propor- 
 tions and distribution of studies in agricultural and engineer- 
 ing courses, for there are present many who are in the midst 
 of a contest that is still being waged. Only general considera- 
 tions concerning this much-debated matter are in order at 
 this time. 
 
 A proper regard for a student's success in after life requires 
 that at least three considerations shall enter into the use 
 of his time and into the arrangement and subject-matter of 
 the course of study he is expected to pursue. These are the 
 development of personal power, the cultivation of both the 
 sense and understanding of social and moral obligations, 
 and preparation for vocational activity. 
 
 The development of personal power is placed first because 
 it is the all-comprehensive factor in determining individual- 
 efficiency. It is not attained through the mere sorting of 
 information or through familiarity with technical details, for 
 knowledge and skill are but instruments for use. It consists 
 essentially of the power of initiative, the ability to think 
 clearly and to reason sanely and fundamentally, and, above 
 all, it involves that mastery of self and of the raw materials 
 of life that lies at the foundation of all individual success. 
 
 Personal power is acquired through discipline, and so the 
 disciplinary value of a course of study is a prime considera- 
 tion. Have we not to some extent lost sight of the great and
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 297 
 
 abiding truth that the intellectual and moral culture of man 
 as a man is the only road to either a social or a vocational 
 uplift? In our anxiety to demonstrate the value of these 
 institutions to the material interests of the nation, have we 
 not over-commercialized the instruction, even the atmosphere, 
 of our vocational schools and colleges? The leaders in 
 engineering education are beginning to say so, and is it not 
 true of agriculture? We may well give heed to the words of 
 a recent writer who thus comments on the educational influ- 
 ence of the ancient guilds: 
 
 The soul of this ideal education of the masses was the training of 
 character. They had no illusions that the mere imparting of informa- 
 tion would make people better, nor that the knowing of many things 
 would make them more desirable citizens. In none of the higher walks 
 of Ufe does it ever cease to be more the question how much of a man 
 one is, than how much he knows of his special business. 
 
 The cultivation of the sense and understanding of social 
 and moral obligations is placed second because human rela- 
 tions and the quality of human effort are determinative 
 factors in the larger successes and satisfactions of life, whether 
 we consider the individual or the social body. It is sound 
 doctrine to declare that, in the last analysis, the defeats of 
 individuals and of nations are moral defeats. Moreover, 
 we now see very clearly that the critical problems which 
 face agriculture are no less social than vocational. Our 
 greater weakness is not in our bread-winning capacity, but in 
 unsound business ethics and in bad social adjustments. 
 
 And then, there is the larger relation of the educated man 
 to national welfare. It has been said that the cure for the 
 ills of democracy is more democracy. If more democracy is 
 coming, and it seems to be, we shall sorely need the steadying 
 influence of wise social leadership. The education of the 
 masses is superficial. That keen observer, Mr. Bryce, has 
 said that "it is sufficient to enable them to think they know 
 something about the great problems of politics and insufiicient
 
 298 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 to show them how little they know." Bishop Newman 
 declares that "if a practical end must be assigned to a uni- 
 versity course I say it is that of training good members of 
 society. It is the art of social life and its end is fitness for 
 the world." Another writer has observed that the land- 
 grant colleges are ranked as an economic rather than a social 
 force. If this accusation is just, these institutions should 
 purge themselves of an unsound policy. We do violence to 
 the highest interests of the individual and of society if we 
 fail to cultivate in those over whom the mantle of a bacca- 
 laureate degree is thrown a sense and comprehension of their 
 obligations to society. 
 
 It is a distorted training that emphasizes bread-winning 
 capacity at the expense of fitness for social service. Our 
 national welfare is already threatened by the divorcement 
 of patriotic citizenship from industrial activity. 
 
 Preparation for vocational activity is placed last, but not 
 because the equipment of the mind with the facts of science 
 and their applications to the art of agriculture is in any sense 
 unimportant. The colleges of agriculture are dealing directly 
 with the subject-matter that is related to the farmer's voca- 
 tion, and they will violate their obligations and limit their 
 usefulness if they do not continue to do so. 
 
 In discussing the vocational and training value of courses 
 of study in agriculture I shall simply be ranging myself on 
 one side of this much debated question when I insist that 
 these courses should present good pedagogical form and 
 should lend themselves largely to training in the fundamental 
 sciences and present the lowest feasible minimum of ultra- 
 practical subjects. 
 
 Remarks concerning pedagogical form may not now be 
 pertinent to any existing situation. It has been said, however, 
 that, in the past, agricultural subjects have been taken out 
 of the normal pedagogical order and placed among the studies 
 of the freshman year, or otherwise distributed illogically in
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 299 
 
 the curriculum, simply that a student's attention shall be 
 held to agriculture and more graduates in agriculture thereby 
 secured. Doubtless such transgressions are not committed 
 now, but if they are they look very much like an attempt to 
 lasso young men and drag them at the heels of expediency. 
 What justification is there for invading the intellectual rights 
 of a student or imperiling his future success by giving him 
 less than the best possible training; and how useless such an 
 expedient! We shall not coerce a man's choice of a life work, 
 however hard we may try to do so. Young men will continue 
 to enter the door that they believe opens to them the largest 
 opportunity, as they always have done and as they ought 
 to do. 
 
 It is the subject-matter that should engage the attention 
 of the agricultural student concerning which we are likely to 
 differ most widely in opinion. Those who are seeking for 
 members of a faculty or station staff are bound to concede 
 that, as a rule, altogether too many graduates are poorly 
 trained for these positions, largely .because they are poorly 
 fitted in the sciences fundamental to the line of work in which 
 they offer themselves. 
 
 For instance, candidates for positions in horticulture are 
 generally obliged to confess a woeful lack of acquaintance 
 with physiological botany. Those supposed to be specially 
 trained in animal nutrition rarely have the necessary knowl- 
 edge of organic and biological chemistry, and graduates in 
 agronomy are likely to be more familiar with superficial facts 
 than with soil chemistry and the science of plant nutrition. 
 Judging cattle, corn and fruit; grafting trees, visiting orchards, 
 calculating rations are exercises of small training value, even 
 small vocational value, compared with severe attention to 
 the processes of nature that underlie agricultural practice of 
 all kinds. If many of the colleges expect to give their gradu- 
 ates a good start on the road to success as teachers and station 
 workers, they should seriously consider a curriculum that
 
 300 WHITMAN H. JORDAN 
 
 deals more largely with the fundamental sciences and less 
 with agricultural technics as a superstructure. 
 
 And should not the same policy be followed with those 
 who are to enter practical agriculture? A fact of fundamental 
 importance in this connection is that the farmer is equipped 
 for success in farm practice not so much through expert 
 handicraft as through a knowledge of conditions that determine 
 the successful growth of plants and animals; in other words, 
 an acquaintance with nature's processes. The mechanical 
 details of agriculture are comparatively simple, but the 
 control of nature's resources is complex and difficult. With 
 great respect for the opinions of those who hold opposite 
 views, I am constrained to express the conviction that the 
 man is best prepared for the life of a farmer who knows the 
 most about the fundamental sciences and their relation to 
 his vocation, and for this reason I can but regard the time as 
 comparatively inefficiently spent that is devoted in college to 
 observations and exercises of an ultra practical character, or 
 to gaining information that is easily acquired from the ordi- 
 nary experiences of practical life. This doctrine may be 
 reactionary but it is in accordance with movements now in 
 progress in other vocational schools. We have fallen into the 
 error, it is to be feared, of regarding the student mind as a 
 storage tank for useful facts rather than as an instrument to 
 be fashioned into soundness and efficiency. We must never 
 forget that the farmer is comprehended in the man. And 
 when we realize that many of the graduates of these institu- 
 tions will exert a dominating influence upon the mental and 
 moral development of young men and women, we see a most 
 important reason why their education should not be confined 
 to the narrow line of technical training. And above all, as 
 has been urged, these graduates are to be members of society. 
 
 After all, what are the supreme objects of education? It 
 has been reported, though I do not credit the statement, that 
 a member of an agricultural college faculty once declared that
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 301 
 
 the business of his institution was to bring about the produc- 
 tion of more hogs at greater profit. If this remark was made, 
 what a spectacle it pictures! It places the hog at the pinnacle 
 of educational aspiration with man as a lesser figure. In 
 sharp contrast to this gross conception of educational ideals 
 stand the sentiments of great minds who have seen broadly 
 and clearly the larger issues of life. 
 
 Hill says of education that it should "quicken a man's 
 mental perceptions, form in him the habit of prompt and 
 accurate judgment; lead to delicacy and depth in every 
 right feeling and make him inflexible in his conscientious and 
 steadfast devotion to all his duties." Milton wrote that 
 " the main skill and groundwork of education will be to temper 
 the pupils with such lectures and explanations as will draw 
 them into willing obedience, influenced with the study of 
 learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high 
 hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots." 
 
 Listen to Mill: 
 
 The moral or religious influence which a university can exercise con- 
 sists less in any express teaching than in the pervading tone of the 
 place. Whatever it teaches it should teach as penetrated by a sense of 
 duty; it should present all knowledge as chiefly a means of worthiness in 
 life, given for the double purpose of making each of us practically useful 
 to our fellow creatures and of elevating the character of the species 
 itself.
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION; AND WHERE 
 TO FIND IT^ 
 
 Thomas Henry Huxley 
 
 The business which the South London Working Men's 
 College has undertaken is a great work; indeed, I might say, 
 that Education, with which that college proposes to grapple, 
 is the greatest work of all those which lie ready to a man's 
 hand just at present. 
 
 And, at length, this fact is becoming generally recognized. 
 You cannot go anywhere without hearing a buzz of more or 
 less confused and contradictory talk on this subject — nor 
 can you fail to notice that, in one point at any rate, there is 
 a very decided advance upon like discussions in former days. 
 Nobody outside the agricultural interest now dares to say 
 that education is a bad thing. If any representative of the 
 once large and powerful party, which, in former days, pro- 
 claimed this opinion, still exists in a semi-fossil state, he keeps 
 his thoughts to himself. In fact, there is a chorus of voices, 
 almost distressing in their harmony, raised in favour of the 
 doctrine that education is the great panacea for human troubles, 
 and that, if the country is not shortly to go to the dogs, every- 
 body must be educated. 
 
 The politicians tell us, "you must educate the masses 
 because they are going to be masters." The clergy join in 
 the cry for education, for they affirm that the people are drift- 
 ing away from church and chapel into the broadest infidelity. 
 The manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus lustily. 
 
 ^ This essay, which was written in 1868, was influential in stimulating 
 the movement which resulted in shifting the emphasis from classical to 
 scientific studies.
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 303 
 
 They declare that ignorance makes bad workmen; that Eng- 
 land will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam 
 engines, cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod! 
 Ichabod! the glory will be departed from us. And a few voices 
 are lifted up in favour of the doctrine that the masses should 
 be educated because they are men and women with unlimited 
 capacities of being, doing, and suffering, and that it is 
 as true now, as ever it was, that the people perish for lack 
 of knowledge. 
 
 These members of the minority, with whom I confess I 
 have a good deal of sympathy, are doubtful whether any of the 
 other reasons urged in favour of the education of the people 
 are of much value — whether, indeed, some of them are based 
 upon either wise or noble grounds of action. They question 
 if it be wise to tell people that you will do for them, out of 
 fear of their power, what you have left undone, so long as 
 your only motive was compassion for their weakness and their 
 sorrows. And if ignorance of everything which it is needful 
 a ruler should know is Hkely to do so much harm in the gov- 
 erning classes of the future, why is it, they ask reasonably 
 enough, that such ignorance in the governing classes of the 
 past has not been viewed with equal horror? 
 
 Compare the average artisan and the average country 
 squire, and it may be doubted if you will find a pin to choose 
 between the two in point of ignorance, class feeling, or preju- 
 dice. It is true that the ignorance is of a different sort — 
 that the class feeling is in favour of a different class — and 
 that the prejudice has a distinct savour of wrong-headedness 
 in each case — but it is questionable if the one is either a bit 
 better, or a bit worse, than the other. The old protectionist 
 theory is the doctrine of trades unions as applied by the 
 squires, and the modern trades unionism is the doctrine of 
 the squires applied by the artisans. Why should we be worse 
 off under one regime than under the other? 
 
 Again, this sceptical minority asks the clergy to think
 
 304 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 whether it is really want of education which keeps the masses 
 away from their ministrations — whether the most completely 
 educated men are not as open to reproach on this score as 
 the workmen; and whether, perchance, this may not indi- 
 cate that it is not education which lies at the bottom of the 
 matter? 
 
 Once more, these people, whom there is no pleasing, venture 
 to doubt whether the glory, which rests upon being able to 
 undersell all the rest of the world, is a very safe kind of glory — 
 whether we may not purchase it too dear; especially if we 
 allow education which ought to be directed to the making of 
 men, to be diverted into a process of manufacturing human 
 tools, wonderfully adroit in the exercise of some technical 
 industry, but good for nothing else. 
 
 And, finally, these people inquire whether it is the masses 
 alone who need a reformed and improved education. They 
 ask whether the richest of our public schools might not well 
 be made to supply knowledge, as well as gentlemanly habits, 
 a strong class feeling, and eminent proficiency in cricket. 
 They seem to think that the noble foundations of our old 
 universities are hardly fulfilling their functions in their present 
 posture of half-clerical seminaries, half racecourses, where 
 men are trained to win a senior wranglership, or a double 
 first, as horses are trained to win a cup, with as little reference 
 to the needs of after-life in the case of the man as in that of 
 the racer. And while as zealous for education as the rest, 
 they affirm that if the education of the richer classes were 
 such as to fit them to be the leaders and the governors of the 
 poorer; and if the education of the poorer classes were such 
 as to enable them to appreciate really wise guidance and good 
 governance, the politicians need not fear mob-law, nor the 
 clergy lament their want of flocks, nor the capitalist prog- 
 nosticate the annihilation of the prosperity of the country. 
 
 Such is the diversity of opinion upon the why and the 
 wherefore of education. And my hearers will be prepared to
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 305 
 
 expect that the practical recommendations which are put 
 forward are not less discordant. There is a loud cry for com- 
 pulsory education. We English, in spite of constant experi- 
 ence to the contrary, preserve a touching faith in the eflScacy 
 of acts of parliament; and I believe we should have compulsory 
 education in the course of next session if there were the least 
 probability that half a dozen leading statesmen of different 
 parties would agree what that education should be. 
 
 Some hold that education without theology is worse than 
 none. Others maintain, quite as strongly, that education 
 with theology is in the same predicament. But this is certain, 
 that those who hold the first opinion can by no means agree 
 what theology should be taught; and that those who main- 
 tain the second are in a small minority. 
 
 At any rate "make people learn to read, write, and cipher," 
 say a great many; and the advice is undoubtedly sensible 
 as far as it goes. But, as has happened to me in former 
 days, those who, in despair of getting anything better, advocate 
 this measure, are met with the objection that it is very like 
 making a child practise the use of a knife, fork, and spoon, 
 without giving it a particle of meat. I really don't know 
 what reply is to be made to such an objection. 
 
 But it would be unprofitable to spend more time in dis- 
 entangling, or rather in showing up the knots in, the ravelled 
 skeins of our neighbours. Much more to the purpose is it to 
 ask if we possess any clue of our own which may guide us 
 among these entanglements. And by way of a beginning, 
 let us ask ourselves — What is education? Above all things, 
 what is our ideal of a thoroughly liberal education? — of that 
 education which, if we could begin life again, we would give 
 ourselves — of that education which, if we could mould the 
 fates to our own will, we would give our children? Well, 
 I know not what may be your conceptions upon this matter, 
 but I will tell you mine, and I hope I shall find that our views 
 are not very discrepant.
 
 3o6 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune 
 of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his 
 winning or losing a game at chess. Don't you think that we 
 should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least 
 the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of 
 a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting 
 out of check? Do you not think that we should look with 
 a disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who 
 allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to 
 grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight? 
 
 Yet, it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, 
 the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more 
 or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our 
 knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more 
 difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has 
 been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us 
 being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The 
 chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the 
 universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of 
 nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We 
 know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But 
 also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, 
 or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man 
 who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of 
 overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight 
 in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated — without 
 haste, but without remorse. 
 
 My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture 
 in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with 
 man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that 
 picture a calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, 
 and would rather lose than win — and I should accept it as 
 an image of human life. 
 
 Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of 
 this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruc-
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 307 
 
 tion of the intellect in the laws of nature, under which name I 
 include not merely things and their forces, but men and their 
 ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will 
 into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with 
 those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less 
 than this. Anything which professes to call itself education 
 must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, 
 I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of 
 authority or of numbers upon the other side. 
 
 It is important to remember that, in strictness, there is 
 no such thing as an uneducated man. Take an extreme case. 
 Suppose that an adult man, in the full vigour of his faculties, 
 could be suddenly placed in the world, as Adam is said to have 
 been, and then left to do as he best might. How long would 
 he be left uneducated? Not five minutes. Nature would 
 begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the 
 properties of objects. Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow 
 telling him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the 
 man would receive an education which, if narrow, would be 
 thorough, real, and adequate to his circumstances, though 
 there would be no extras and very few accomplishments. 
 
 And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam, or, 
 better still, an Eve, a new and greater world, that of social 
 and moral phenomena, would be revealed. Joys and woes, 
 compared with which all others might seem but faint shadows, 
 would spring from the new relations. Happiness and sorrow 
 would take the place of the coarser monitors, pleasure and 
 pain; but conduct would still be shaped by the observation 
 of the natural consequences of actions; or, in other words, 
 by the laws of the nature of man. 
 
 To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as 
 to Adam. And then, long before we were susceptible of any 
 other mode of instruction, nature took us in hand, and every 
 minute of waking life brought its educational influence, 
 shaping our actions into rough accordance with nature's
 
 3o8 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 laws, so that we might not be ended untimely by too gross 
 disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education 
 as past, for any one, be he as old as he may. For every man 
 the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of 
 untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them. And 
 nature is still continuing her patient education of us in that 
 great university, the universe, of which we are all members 
 — nature having no Test-Acts. 
 
 Those who take honours in nature's university, who learn 
 the laws which govern men and things and obey them, are 
 the really great and successful men in this world. The great 
 mass of mankind are the "Poll," who pick up just enough to 
 get through without much discredit. Those who won't 
 learn at all are plucked; and then you can't come up again. 
 Nature's pluck means extermination. 
 
 Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so 
 far as nature is concerned. Her bill on that question was 
 framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legis- 
 lation, that of nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. 
 Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience — in- 
 capacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature's 
 discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; 
 but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out 
 why your ears are boxed. 
 
 The object of what we commonly call education — that 
 education in which man intervenes and which I shall dis- 
 tinguish as artificial education — is to make good these defects 
 in nature's methods; to prepare the child to receive nature's 
 education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful 
 disobedience; and to understand the preliminary symptoms 
 of her pleasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In 
 short, all artificial education ought to be an anticipation of 
 natural education. And a liberal education is an artificial 
 education — which has not only prepared a man to escape the 
 great evils of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 309 
 
 him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards which nature 
 scatters with as free a hand as her penalties. 
 
 That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been 
 so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his 
 will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a 
 mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, 
 logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth 
 working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to 
 any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the 
 anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge 
 of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the 
 laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full 
 of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to 
 heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; 
 who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of 
 art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. 
 
 Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal edu- 
 cation; for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony 
 with nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. 
 They will get on together rarely; she as his ever-beneficent 
 mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister 
 and interpreter. 
 
 Where is such an education as this to be had? Where is 
 there any approximation to it? Has any one tried to found 
 such an education? Looking over the length and breadth 
 of these islands, I am afraid that all these questions must 
 receive a negative answer. Consider our primary schools 
 and what is taught in them. A child learns: — 
 
 1. To read, write, and cipher, more or less well; but in 
 a very large proportion of cases not so well as to take pleasure 
 in reading, or to be able to write the commonest letter properly. 
 
 2. A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which the child, 
 nine times out of ten, understands next to nothing. 
 
 3. Mixed up with this, so as to seem to stand or fall with 
 it, a few of the broadest and simplest principles of morality.
 
 3IO THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 This is, to my mind, much as if a man of science should make 
 the story of the fall of the apple in Newton's garden an inte- 
 gral part of the doctrine of gravitation, and teach it as of 
 equal authority with the law of the inverse squares. 
 
 4. A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian geography, 
 and perhaps a little something about English history and the 
 geography of the child's own country. But I doubt if there 
 is a primary school in England in which hangs a map of the 
 hundred in which the village lies, so that the children may be 
 practically taught by it what a map means. 
 
 5. A certain amount of regularity, attentive obedience, 
 respect for others: obtained by fear, if the master be in- 
 competent or foolish ; by love and reverence, if he be wise. 
 
 So far as this school course embraces a training in the theory 
 and practice of obedience to the moral laws of nature, I gladly 
 admit, not only that it contains a valuable educational ele- 
 ment, but that, so far, it deals with the most valuable and 
 important part of all education. Yet, contrast what is done 
 in this direction with what might be done; with the time given 
 to matters of comparatively no importance; with the absence 
 of any attention to things of the highest moment; and one 
 is tempted to think of Falstaff's bill and "the halfpenny worth 
 of bread to all that quantity of sack." 
 
 Let us consider what a child thus "educated" knows, and 
 what it does not know. Begin with the most important topic 
 of all — morality, as the guide of conduct. The child knows 
 well enough that some acts meet with approbation and some 
 with disapprobation. But it has never heard that there lies 
 in the nature of things a reason for every moral law, as cogent 
 and as well defined as that which underlies every physical 
 law; that stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed 
 by evil consequences as putting your hand in the fire, or jump- 
 ing out of a garret window. Again, though the scholar may 
 have been made acquainted, in dogmatic fashion, with the 
 broad laws of morality, he has had no training in the applica-
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 311 
 
 tion of those laws to the difificult problems which result from 
 the complex conditions of modern civilization. Would it 
 not be very hard to expect any one to solve a problem in conic 
 sections who had merely been taught the axioms and defini- 
 tions of mathematical science? 
 
 A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, 
 while he sees others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs 
 with what would keep his children from starvation. Would 
 it not be well to have helped that man to calm the natural 
 promptings of discontent by showing him, in his youth, the 
 necessary connection of the moral law which prohibits stealing 
 with the stability of society — by proving to him, once for 
 all, that it is better for his own people, better for himself, 
 better for future generations, that he should starve than 
 steal? If you have no foundation of knowledge or habit 
 of thought to work upon, what chance have you of persuading 
 a hungry man that a capitalist is not a thief "with a circum- 
 bendibus?'^ And if he honestly believes that, of what avail 
 is it to quote the commandment against steaHng when he 
 proposes to make the capitalist disgorge? 
 
 Again, the child learns absolutely nothing of the history 
 or the political organization of his own country. His general 
 impression is, that everything of much importance happened 
 a very long while ago; and that the Queen and the gentle- 
 folks govern the country much after the fashion of King 
 David and the elders and nobles of Israel — his sole models. 
 Will you give a man with this much information a vote? In 
 easy times he sells it for a pot of beer. W^hy should he not? 
 It is of about as much use to him as a chignon, and he knows 
 as much what to do with it, for any other purpose. In bad 
 times, on the contrary, he applies his simple theory of govern- 
 ment, and believes that his rulers are the cause of his sufferings 
 — a belief which sometimes bears remarkable practical fruits. 
 
 Least of all, does the child gather from this primary "edu- 
 cation " of ours a conception of the laws of the physical world,
 
 312 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 or of the relations of cause and effect therein. And this is 
 the more to be lamented, as the poor are especially exposed 
 to physical evils, and are more interested in removing them 
 than any other class of the community. If any one is con- 
 cerned in knowing the ordinary laws of mechanics one would 
 think it is the hand-labourer, whose daily toil lies among 
 levers and pulleys; or among the other implements of artisan 
 work. And if any one is interested in the laws of health, it 
 is the poor man, whose strength is wasted by ill-prepared food, 
 whose health is sapped by bad ventilation and bad drainage, 
 and half of whose children are massacred by disorders which 
 might be prevented. Not only does our present primary 
 education carefully abstain from hinting to the poor man 
 that some of his greatest evils are traceable to mere physical 
 agencies, which could be removed by energy, patience, and 
 frugality; but it does worse — it renders him, so far as it 
 can, deaf to those who could help him, and tries to sub- 
 stitute an Oriental submission to what is falsely declared to be 
 the will of God, for his natural tendency to strive after a better 
 condition. • 
 
 What wonder then if very recently an appeal has been made 
 to statistics for the profoundly foolish purpose of showing that 
 education is of no good — that it diminishes neither misery 
 nor crime among the masses of mankind? I reply, why should 
 the thing which has been called education do either the one 
 or the other? If I am a knave or a fool, teaching me to read 
 and write won't make me less of either one or the other — 
 unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing 
 to wise and good purposes. 
 
 Suppose any one were to argue that medicine is of no use, 
 because it could be proved statistically that the percentage 
 of deaths was just the same among people who have been 
 taught how to open a medicine chest and among those who 
 did not so much as know the key by sight. The argument 
 is absurd; but it is not more preposterous than that against
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 3^3 
 
 which I am contending. The only medicine for suffering, 
 crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach 
 a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the 
 great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another matter 
 whether he ever opens the box or not. And he is as likely 
 to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he swallows 
 the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may 
 as well be purblind, as unable to read — lame, as unable to 
 write. But I protest that if I thought the alternative were a 
 necessary one, I would rather that the children of the poor 
 should grow up ignorant of both these mighty arts, than that 
 they should remain ignorant of that knowledge to which these 
 arts are means. 
 
 It may be said that all these animadversions may apply 
 to primary schools, but that the higher schools, at any rate, 
 must be allowed to give a liberal education. In fact, they 
 professedly sacrifice everything else to this object. 
 
 Let us inquire into this matter. What do the higher schools, 
 those to which the great middle class of the country sends 
 its children, teach, over and above the instruction given in 
 the primary schools? There is a little more reading and 
 writing of English. But, for all that, every one knows that 
 it is a rare thing to find a boy of the middle or upper classes 
 who can read aloud decently, or who can put his thoughts on 
 paper in clear and grammatical (to say nothing of good or 
 elegant) language. The ''ciphering" of the lower schools 
 expands into elementary mathematics in the higher; into arith- 
 metic, with a little algebra, a Httle Euclid. But I doubt if 
 one boy in five hundred has ever heard the explanation of a 
 rule of arithmetic, or knows his Euclid otherwise than by 
 rote. 
 
 Of theology, the middle-class schoolboy gets rather less 
 than poorer children, less absolutely and less relatively, 
 because there are so many other claims upon his attention. 
 I venture to say that, in the great majority of cases, his ideas
 
 314 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 on this subject when he leaves school are of the most shadowy 
 and vague description, and associated with painful impres- 
 sions of the weary hours spent in learning collects and cate- 
 chism by heart. 
 
 Modern geography, modern history, modern literature; 
 the English language as a language; the whole circle of the 
 sciences, physical, moral, and social, are even more completely 
 ignored in the higher than in the lower schools. Up till 
 within a few years back, a boy might have passed through any 
 one of the great public schools with the greatest distinction 
 and credit, and might never so much as have heard of one of 
 the subjects I have just mentioned. He might never have 
 heard that the earth goes round the sun; that England under- 
 went a great revolution in 1688, and France another in 1789; 
 that there once lived certain notable men called Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller. The first 
 might be a German and the last an Englishman for anything 
 he could tell you to the contrary. And as for Science, the only 
 idea the word would suggest to his mind would be dexterity 
 in boxing. 
 
 I have said that this was the state of things a few years 
 back, for the sake of the few righteous who are to be found 
 among the educational cities of the plain. But I would not 
 have you too sanguine about the result, if you sound the minds 
 of the existing generation of public school-boys on such topics 
 as those I have mentioned. 
 
 Now let us pause to consider this wonderful state of affairs; 
 for the time will come when Englishmen will quote it as the 
 stock example of the stolid stupidity of their ancestors in the 
 nineteenth century. The most thoroughly commercial people, 
 the greatest voluntary wanderers and colonists the world has 
 ever seen, are precisely the middle classes of this country. 
 If there be a people which has been busy making history on 
 the great scale for the last three hundred years — and the most 
 profoundly interesting history — history which, if it happened
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 315 
 
 to be that of Greece or Rome, we should study with avidity 
 — it is the Enghsh. If there be a people which, during the 
 same period, has developed a remarkable literature, it is our 
 own. If there be a nation whose prosperity depends abso- 
 lutely and wholly upon their mastery over the forces of nature, 
 upon their intelligent apprehension of, and obedience to the 
 laws of the creation and distribution of wealth, and of the 
 stable equilibrium of the forces of society, it is precisely this 
 nation. And yet this is what these wonderful people tell 
 their sons: — "At the cost of from one to two thousand pounds 
 of our hard-earned money we devote twelve of the most 
 precious years of your lives to school. There you shall toil, 
 or be supposed to toil; but there you shall not learn one single 
 thing of all those you will most want to know directly you 
 leave school and enter upon the practical business of life. 
 You will in all probabiHty go into business, but you shall not 
 know where or how any article of commerce is produced, 
 or the difference between an export or an import, or the mean- 
 ing of the word 'capital.' You will very likely settle in a 
 colony, but you shall not know whether Tasmania is part of 
 New South Wales, or vice versa. 
 
 "Very probably you may become a manufacturer, but you 
 shah not be provided with the means of understanding the 
 working of one of your own steam-engines, or the nature of 
 the raw products you employ; and when you are asked to buy 
 a patent you shall not have the slightest means of judging 
 whether the inventor is an impostor who is contravening the 
 elementary principles of science, or a man who will make 
 you as rich as Croesus. 
 
 " You will very likely get into the House of Commons. You 
 will have to take your share in making laws which may prove 
 a blessing or a curse to millions of men. But you shall not 
 hear one word respecting the polilical organization of your 
 country; the meaning of the controversy between freetraders 
 and protectionists shall never have been mentioned to you;
 
 3i6 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 you shall not so much as know that there are such things as 
 economical laws. 
 
 "The mental power which will be of most importance in your 
 daily life will be the power of seeing things as they are without 
 regard to authority; and of drawing accurate general conclu- 
 sions from particular facts. But at school and at college you 
 shall know of no source of truth but authority; nor exercise 
 your reasoning faculty upon anything but deduction from 
 that which is laid down by authority. 
 
 "You will have to weary your soul with work, and many a 
 time eat your bread in sorrow and in bitterness, and you 
 shall not have learned to take refuge in the great source of 
 pleasure without alloy, the serene resting-place for worn 
 human nature — the world of art." 
 
 Said I not rightly that we are a wonderful people? I am 
 quite prepared to allow, that education entirely devoted to 
 these omitted subjects might not be a completely liberal 
 education. But is an education which ignores them all a 
 liberal education? Nay, is it too much to say that the edu- 
 cation which should embrace these subjects and no others 
 would be a real education, though an incomplete one; while 
 an education which omits them is really not an education at 
 all, but a more or less useful course of intellectual gymnastics? 
 
 For what does the middle-class school put in the place of 
 all these things which are left out? It substitutes what is 
 usually comprised under the compendious title of the "classics" 
 — that is to say, the languages, the literature, and the history 
 of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the geography of so 
 much of the world as was known to these two great nations 
 of antiquity. Now, do not expect me to depreciate the earnest 
 and enlightened pursuit of classical learning. I have not the 
 least desire to speak ill of such occupations, nor any sympathy 
 with those who run them down. On the contrary, if my oppor- 
 tunities had lain in that direction, there is no investigation
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 317 
 
 into which I could have thrown myself with greater delight 
 than that of antiquity. 
 
 What science can present greater attractions than philology? 
 How can a lover of literary excellence fail to rejoice in the 
 ancient masterpieces? And with what consistency could I, 
 whose business lies so much in the attempt to decipher the 
 past, and to build up intelligible forms out of the scattered 
 fragments of long-extinct beings, fail to take a sympathetic, 
 though an unlearned, interest in the labours of a Niebuhr, a 
 Gibbon, or a Grote? Classical history is a great section of 
 the palaeontology of man; and I have the same double respect 
 for it as for other kinds of palaeontology — that is to say, a 
 respect for the facts which it establishes as for all facts, and 
 a still greater respect for it as a preparation for the discovery 
 of a law of progress. 
 
 But if the classics were taught as they might be taught — 
 if boys and girls were instructed in Greek and Latin, not 
 merely as languages, but as illustrations of philological science; 
 if a vivid picture of life on the shores of the Mediterranean 
 two thousand years ago were imprinted on the minds of 
 scholars; if ancient history were taught, not as a weary series 
 of feuds and fights, but traced to its causes in such men placed 
 under such conditions; if, lastly, the study of the classical 
 books were followed in such a manner as to impress boys with 
 their beauties, and with the grand simplicity of their statement 
 of the everlasting problems of human life, instead of with their 
 verbal and grammatical peculiarities; I still think it as little 
 proper that they should form the basis of a liberal education 
 for our contemporaries, as I should think it fitting to make that 
 sort of palaeontology with which I am familiar the back-bone 
 of modern education. 
 
 It is wonderful how close a parallel to classical training 
 could be made out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In 
 the first place I could get up an osteological primer so arid, so 
 pedantic in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the
 
 3i8 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous production of the 
 head-masters out of the field in all these excellences. Next, 
 I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring out all 
 their powers of memory and all their ingenuity in the appli- 
 cation of my osteogrammatical rules to the interpretation, or 
 construing, of those fragments. To those who had reached 
 the higher classes, I might supply odd bones to be built up 
 into animals, giving great honour and reward to him who suc- 
 ceeded in fabricating monsters most entirely in accordance 
 with the rules. That would answer to verse-making and 
 essay-writing in the dead languages. 
 
 To be sure, if a great comparative anatomist were to look 
 at these fabrications he might shake his head, or laugh. But 
 what then? Would such a catastrophe destroy the parallel? 
 What, think you, would Cicero, or Horace, say to the produc- 
 tion of the best sixth form going? And would not Terence 
 stop his ears and run out if he could be present at an English 
 performance of his own plays? Would Hamlet, in the mouths 
 of a set of French' actors, who should insist on pronouncing 
 English after the fashion of their own tongue, be more hide- 
 ously ridiculous? 
 
 But it will be said that I am forgetting the beauty, and the 
 human interest, which appertain to classical studies. To 
 this I reply that it is only a very strong man who can appre- 
 ciate the charms of a landscape as he is toiling up a steep 
 hill, along a bad road. What with short-windedness, stones, 
 ruts, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of rest and be thank- 
 ful, most of us have little enough sense of the beautiful under 
 these circumstances. The ordinary school-boy is precisely 
 in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there 
 is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look 
 about him till he gets to the top. And nine times out of ten 
 he does not get to the top. 
 
 But if this be a fair picture of the results of classical teach- 
 ing at its best — and I gather from those who have authority
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 319 
 
 ► to speak on such matters that it is so — what is to be said of 
 classical teaching at its worst, or in other words, of the classics 
 of our ordinary middle-class schools? ^ I will tell you. It 
 means getting up endless forms and rules by heart. It means 
 turning Latin and Greek into English, for the mere sake of 
 being able to do it, and without the smallest regard to the 
 worth, or worthlessness, of the author read. It means the 
 learning of innumerable, not always decent, fables in such a 
 shape that the meaning they once had is dried up into utter 
 trash; and the only impression left upon a boy's mind is, 
 that the people who beheved such things must have been 
 the greatest idiots the world ever saw. And it means, finally, 
 that after a dozen years spent at this kind of work, the sufferer 
 shall be incompetent to interpret a passage in an author he 
 has not already got up; that he shall loathe the sight of a 
 Greek or Latin book; and that he shah never open, or 
 think of, a classical writer again, until, wonderful to re- 
 late, he insists upon submitting his sons to the same 
 process. 
 
 These be your gods, Israel! For the sake of this net 
 result (and respectabihty) the British father denies his chil- 
 dren all the knowledge they might turn to account in life, 
 not merely for the achievement of vulgar success, but for 
 guidance in the great crises of human existence. This is 
 the stone he offers to those whom he is bound by the strongest 
 and tenderest ties to feed with bread. 
 
 If primary and secondary education are in this unsatis- 
 factory state, what is to be said to the universities? This is 
 an awful subject, and one I almost fear to touch with my 
 unhallowed hands; but I can tell you what those say who have 
 authority to speak. 
 
 The Rector of Lincoln College, in his lately published 
 
 1 For a justification of what is here said about these schools, see that 
 valuable book, Essays on a Liberal Education, passim.
 
 320 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 valuable Suggestions for Academical Organization with special 
 reference to Oxford, tells us: — 
 
 The colleges were, in their origin, endowments, not for the elements 
 of a general liberal education, but for the prolonged study of special 
 and professional faculties by men of riper age. The universities em- 
 braced both these objects. The colleges, while they incidentally 
 aided in elementary education, were specially devoted to the highest 
 learning. . . . 
 
 This was the theory of the middle-age university and the design 
 of coUegiate foundations in their origin. Time and circumstances 
 have brought about a total change. The colleges no longer promote 
 the researches of science, or direct professional study. Here and 
 there college walls may shelter an occasional student, but not in 
 larger proportions than may be found in private Hfe. Elementary 
 teaching of youths under twenty is now the only function performed 
 by the university, and almost the only object of coUege endowments. 
 Colleges were homes for the life-study of the highest and most ab- 
 struse parts of knowledge. They have become boarding schools in 
 which the elements of the learned languages are taught to youths. 
 (P. 127.) 
 
 If Mr. Pattison's high position, and his obvious love and 
 respect for his university be insufficient to convince the 
 outside world that language so severe is yet no more than just, 
 the authority of the Commissioners who reported on the 
 University of Oxford in 1850 is open to no challenge. Yet 
 they write: — 
 
 It is generally acknowledged that both Oxford and the country at 
 large suffer greatly from the absence of a body of learned men devot- 
 ing their lives to the cultivation of science, and to the direction of 
 academical education. 
 
 The fact that so few books of profound research emanate from the 
 University of Oxford, materially impairs its character as a seat of 
 learning, and consequently its hold on the respect of the nation. 
 
 Cambridge can claim no exemption from the reproaches 
 addressed to Oxford. And thus there seems no escape from 
 the admission that what we fondly call our great seats of 
 learning are simply "boarding schools" for bigger boys;
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 321 
 
 that learned men are not more numerous in them than out 
 of them; that the advancement of knowledge is not the object 
 of fellows of colleges; that, in the philosophic calm and med- 
 itative stillness of their greenswarded courts philosophy does 
 not thrive, and meditation bears few fruits. 
 
 It is my good fortune to reckon amongst my friends resident 
 members of both universities, who are men of learning and 
 research, zealous cultivators of science, keeping before their 
 minds a noble ideal of a university, and doing their best to 
 make that ideal a reality; and, to me, they would necessarily 
 typify the universities, did not the authoritative statements 
 I have quoted compel me to believe that they are exceptional, 
 and not representative men. Indeed, upon calm considera- 
 tion, several circumstances lead me to think that the Rector 
 of Lincoln College and the Commissioners cannot be far 
 wrong. 
 
 I believe there can be no doubt that the foreigner who 
 should wish to become acquainted with the scientific, or 
 the Uterary, activity of modern England, would simply lose 
 his time and his pains if he visited our universities with that 
 object. 
 
 And, as for works of profound research on any subject, 
 and, above all, in that classical lore for which the universities 
 profess to sacrifice almost everything else, why, a third-rate, 
 poverty-stricken German university turns out more produce 
 of that kind in one year than our vast and wealthy foundations 
 elaborate in ten. 
 
 Ask any man who is investigating any question, profoundly 
 and thoroughly — be it historical, philosophical, philological, 
 physical, literary, or theological; who is trying to make 
 himself master of any abstract subject (except, perhaps, 
 poHtical economy and geology, both of which are intensely 
 Anglican sciences), whether he is not compelled to read half 
 a dozen times as many German as English books? And 
 whether, of these English books, more than one in ten is the
 
 322 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 work of a fellow of a college, or a professor of an English 
 university? 
 
 Is this from any lack of power in the English as compared 
 with the German mind? The countrymen of Grote and of 
 Mill, of Faraday, of Robert Brown, of Lyell, and of Darwin, 
 to go no further back than the contemporaries of men of 
 middle age, can afford to smile at such a suggestion. England 
 can show now, as she has been able to show in every generation 
 since civilization spread over the West, individual men who 
 hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old 
 tradition of her intellectual eminence. 
 
 But, in the majority of cases, these men are what they are 
 in virtue of their native intellectual force, and of a strength 
 of character which will not recognize impediments. They 
 are not trained in the courts of the Temple of Science, but 
 storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts of irregular ways, 
 and with much loss of time and power, in order to obtain 
 their legitimate positions. 
 
 Our universities not only do not encourage such men; 
 do not offer them positions in which it should be their highest 
 duty to do thoroughly that which they are most capable of 
 doing; but, as far as possible, university training shuts out 
 of the minds of those among them, who are subjected to it, 
 the prospect that there is anything in the world for which 
 they are specially fitted. Imagine the success of the attempt 
 to still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I have men- 
 tioned, by putting before him, as the object of existence, the 
 successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the 
 roll of Ciceronian prose. Imagine how much success would 
 be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such men that 
 the education which leads to perfection in such elegancies is 
 alone to be called culture, while the facts of history, the process 
 of thought, the conditions of moral and social existence, and 
 the laws of physical nature are left to be dealt with as they may 
 by outside barbarians!
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 323 
 
 It is not thus that the German universities, from being 
 beneath notice a century ago, have become what they are 
 now — the most intensely cultivated and the most productive 
 intellectual corporations the world has ever seen. 
 
 The student who repairs to them sees in the list of classes 
 and of professors a fair picture of the world of knowledge. 
 Whatever he needs to know there is some one ready to teach 
 him, some one competent to discipline him in the way of 
 learning; whatever his special bent, let him but be able and 
 diligent, and in due time he shall find distinction and a career. 
 Among his professors he sees men whose names are known 
 and revered throughout the civilised world; and their living 
 example infects him with a noble ambition, and a love for 
 the spirit of work. 
 
 The Germans dominate the intellectual world by virtue of 
 the same simple secret as that which made Napoleon the master 
 of old Europe. They have declared la carriere oiiverte aux 
 talents, and every Bursch marches with a professor's gown in 
 his knapsack. Let him become a great scholar, or man of 
 science, and ministers will compete for his services. In 
 Germany they do not leave the chance of his holding the office 
 he would render illustrious to the tender mercies of a hot 
 canvass, and the final wisdom of a mob of country parsons. 
 
 In short, in Germany, the universities are exactly what the 
 Rector of Lincoln and the Commissioners tell us the English 
 universities are not; that is to say, corporations "of learned 
 men devoting their lives to the cultivation of science, and the 
 direction of academical education." They are not "boarding 
 schools for youths," nor clerical seminaries; but institutions 
 for the higher culture of men, in which the theological faculty 
 is of no more importance or prominence than the rest; and 
 which are truly "universities," since they strive to represent 
 and embody the totality of human knowledge, and to find 
 room for all forms of intellectual activity. 
 
 May zealous and clear-headed reformers like Mr. Pattison
 
 324 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 succeed in their noble endeavours to shape our universities 
 towards some such ideal as this, without losing what is valuable 
 and distinctive in their social tone! But until they have 
 succeeded, a liberal education will be no more obtainable in 
 our Oxford and Cambridge Universities than in our public 
 schools. 
 
 If I am justified in my conception of the ideal of a liberal 
 education; and if what I have said about the existing edu- 
 cational institutions of the country is also true, it is clear that 
 the two have no sort of relation to one another; that the best 
 of our schools and the most complete of our university train- 
 ings give but a narrow, one-sided, and essentially illiberal 
 education — while the worst give what is really next to no 
 education at all. The South London Working-Men's Col- 
 lege could not copy any of these institutions if it would ; I 
 am bold enough to express the conviction that it ought not 
 if it could. 
 
 For what is wanted is the reality and not the mere name of 
 a liberal education; and this college must steadily set before 
 itself the ambition to be able to give that education sooner 
 or later. At present we are but beginning, sharpening our 
 educational tools, as it were, and, except a modicum of physical 
 science, we are not able to offer much more than is to be found 
 in an ordinary school. 
 
 Moral and social science — one of the greatest and most 
 fruitful of our future classes, I hope — at present lacks only 
 one thing in our programme, and that is a teacher. A con- 
 siderable want, no doubt; but it must be recollected that it 
 is much better to want a teacher than to want the desire to 
 learn. 
 
 Further, we need what, for want of a better name, I must 
 call Physical Geography. What I mean is that which the 
 Germans call Erdkunde. It is a description of the earth, of 
 its place and relation to other bodies; of its general structure, 
 and of its great features — winds, tides, mountains, plains;
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 325 
 
 of the chief forms of the vegetable and animal worlds, of the 
 varieties of man. It is the peg upon which the greatest quan- 
 tity of useful and entertaining scientific information can be 
 suspended. 
 
 Literature is not upon the College programme; but I hope 
 some day to see it there. For literature is the greatest of 
 all sources of refined pleasure, and one of the great uses of 
 a liberal education is to enable us to enjoy that pleasure. 
 There is scope enough for the purposes of liberal education 
 in the study of the rich treasures of our own language alone. 
 All that is needed is direction, and the cultivation of a refined 
 taste by attention to sound criticism. But there is no reason 
 why French and German should not be mastered sufficiently 
 to read what is worth reading in those languages with pleasure 
 and with profit. 
 
 And finally, by and by, we must have History; treated 
 not as a succession of battles and dynasties; not as a series 
 of biographies; not as evidence that Providence has always 
 been on the side of either Whigs or Tories; but as the devel- 
 opment of man in times past, and in other conditions than 
 our own. 
 
 But, as it is one of the principles of our College to be self- 
 supporting, the public must lead, and we must follow, in these 
 matters. If my hearers take to heart what I have said about 
 liberal education, they will desire these things, and I doubt 
 not we shall be able to supply them. But we must wait till 
 the demand is made.
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE ^ 
 
 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his 
 absolute ideas; and it is impossible to deny that Plato's ideas 
 do often seem unpractical and impracticable, and especially 
 when one views them in connection with the life of a great 
 workaday world like the United States. The necessary 
 staple of the life of such a world Plato regards with disdain; 
 handicraft and trade and the working professions he regards 
 with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an industrial 
 modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the 
 working professions out of it? The base mechani c arts and 
 handicrafts, says Plato, bring about a natural weakness in 
 the principle of excellence in a man, so that he cannot govern 
 the ignoble growths in him, but nurses them, and cannot 
 understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such 
 arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred 
 by their vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed 
 and broken by them. And if one of these uncomely people 
 has a mind to seek self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares 
 him to a bald little tinker, who has scraped together money, 
 and has got his release from service, and has had a bath, and 
 bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a bridegroom about 
 to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into poor 
 and helpless estate. 
 
 Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade 
 at the hands of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture 
 of the working lawyer, and of his life of bondage; he shows 
 
 ^ From Discourses in America. An address delivered repeatedly during 
 a visit to America in 1883-84.
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 327 
 
 how this bondage from his youth up has stunted and warped 
 him, and made him small and crooked of soul, encompassing 
 him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on 
 justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, 
 for help out of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says 
 Plato, this poor creature is bent and broken, and grows up 
 from boy to man without a particle of soundness in him, 
 although exceedingly smart and clever in his own esteem. 
 
 One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these 
 pictures. But we say to ourselves that his ideas show the 
 influence of a primitive and obsolete order of thing^s, when 
 the warrior cast and the priestly caste were alone in honor, 
 and the humble work of the world was done by slaves. We 
 have now changed all that; the modern majority consists 
 in work, as Emerson declares; and in work, we may add, 
 principally of such plain and dusty kind as the work of cul- 
 tivators of the ground, handicraftsmen, men of trade and 
 business, men of the working professions. Above all is this 
 true in a great industrious community such as that of the 
 United States. 
 
 Now education, many people go on to say, is still mainly 
 governed by the ideas of men like Plato, who lived when the 
 warrior caste and the priestly or philosophical class were alone 
 in honor, and the really useful part of the community were 
 slaves. It is an education fitted for persons of leisttre in such 
 a community. This education passed from Greece and Rome 
 to the feudal communities of Europe, where also the warrior 
 caste and the priestly caste were alone held in honor, and 
 where the really useful and working part of the community, 
 though not nominally slaves as in the pagan world, were prac- 
 tically not much better off than slaves, and not more seriously 
 regarded. And how absurd it is, people end by saying, to 
 inflict this education upon an industrious modern community, 
 where very few indeed are persons of leisure, and the mass 
 to be considered has not leisure, but is bound, for its own great
 
 328 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 good, and for the great good of the world at large, to plain 
 labor and to industrial pursuits, and the education in question 
 tends necessarily to make men dissatisfied with these pursuits 
 and unfitted for them! 
 
 That is what is said. So far I must defend ^ato, as to 
 plead that his view of education and studies is in the general, 
 as it seems to me, sound enough, and fitted for all sorts and 
 conditions of men, whatever their pursuits may be. "An 
 intelligent man," says Plato, "will prize those studies which 
 result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness, and wisdomi, 
 and will less value the others." I cannot consider that a 
 bad description of the aim of education, and of the motives 
 which should govern us in the choice of studies, whether we 
 are preparing ourselves for a hereditary seat in the English 
 House of Lords or for the pork trade in Chicago. 
 
 Still I admit that Plato's world was not ours, that his scorn 
 of trade and handicraft is fantastic, that he had no conception 
 of a great industrial community such as that of the United 
 States, and that such a community must and will shape its 
 education to suit its own needs. If the usual education handed 
 down to it from the past does not suit it, it will certainly 
 before long drop this and try another. The usual education 
 in the past has been mainly literary. The question is whether 
 the studies which were long supposed to be the best for all 
 of us are practically the best now; whether others are not 
 better. The tyranny of the past, many think, weighs on 
 us injuriously in the predominance given to letters in educa- 
 tion. The question is raised whether, to meet the needs of 
 our modern life, the predominance ought not now to gass 
 from letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere 
 raised with more energy than here in the United States. The 
 design of abasing what is called "mere literary instruction 
 and education," and of exalting what is called "sound, exten- 
 sive, and practical scientific knowledge," is, in this intensely 
 modern world of the United States, even more perhaps than
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 329 
 
 in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid 
 progress. 
 
 I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting 
 letters from their old predominance in education, and for 
 transferring the predominance in education to the natural 
 sciences, whether this brisk and flourishing movement ought 
 to prevail, and whether it is likely that in the end it really 
 will prevail. An objection may be raised which I will antic- 
 ipate. My own studies have been almost wholly in letters, 
 and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been 
 very slight and inadequate, although those sciences have 
 always strongly moved my curiosity. A man of letters, it 
 will perhaps be said, is not competent to discuss the compara- 
 tive merits of letters and natural science as means of education. 
 To this objection I reply, first of all, that his incompetence 
 if he attempts the discussion but is really incompetent for it, 
 will be abundantly visible; nobody will be taken in; he will 
 have plenty of sharp observers and critics to save mankind 
 from that danger. But the line I am going to follow is, as 
 you will soon discover, so extremely simple, that perhaps it 
 may be followed without failure even by one who for a more 
 ambitious line of discussion would be quite incompetent. 
 
 Some of you may possibly remember a phrase of mine 
 which has been the object of a good deal of comment; an 
 observation to the effect that in our culture, the aim being 
 to know ourselves and the world, we have, as the means to this 
 end, to know the best which has been thought and said in the 
 world. A man of science, who is also an excellent writer and 
 the very prince of debaters. Professor Huxley, in a discourse 
 at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's College at Birmingham, 
 laying hold of this phrase, expanded it by quoting some more 
 words of mine, which are these: "The civilized world is to 
 be regarded as now being, for intellectual and spiritual pur- 
 poses, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and 
 working to a common result; and whose members have for
 
 330 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 their proper outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern 
 antiquity, and of one another. Special local and temporary 
 advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will 
 in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, 
 which most thoroughly carries out this programme." 
 
 Now on my phrase, thus enlarged. Professor Huxley remarks 
 that when I speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as 
 enabling us to know ourselves and the world, I assert literature 
 to contain the materials which suffice for thus making us 
 know ourselves and the world. But it is not by any means 
 clear, says he, that after having learned all which ancient 
 and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a suffi- 
 ciently broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, 
 that knowledge of ourselves and the world, which constitutes 
 culture. On the contrary. Professor Huxl ey declares that 
 he finds himself "wholly unable to admit that either nations 
 or individuals will really advance, if their outfit draws nothing 
 from the stores of physical science. An army without weapons 
 of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might 
 more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a 
 man, devoid of a knowledge of what physical science has done 
 in the last century, upon a criticism of life." 
 
 This shows how needful it is for those who are to discuss 
 any matter together, to have a common understanding as 
 to the sense of the terms they employ, — how needful, and 
 how difficult. What Professor Huxley says implies just the 
 reproach which is so often brought against the study of belles 
 lettres, as they are called: that the study is an elegant one, 
 but slight and ineffectual; a smattering of Greek and Latin 
 and other ornamental things, of little use for any one whose 
 object is to get at truth, and to be a practical man. So, too, 
 M. Renan talks of the "superficial humanism" of a school 
 course which treats us as if we were all going to be poets, 
 writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes this humanism to 
 positive science, or the critical search after truth. And there
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 331 
 
 is always a tendency in those who are remonstrating against 
 the predominance of letters in education, to understand by 
 letters belles lettres, and by belles lettres a superficial humanism, 
 the opposite of science or true knowledge. 
 
 But when we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, 
 for instance, which is the knowledge people have called the 
 humanities, I for my part mean a knowledge which is some- 
 thing more than a superficial humanism, mainly decorative. 
 "I call all teaching scientific,''^ says Wolf, the critic of Homer,/ 
 "which is systematically laid out and followed up to its orig- 
 inal sources. For example: a knowledge of classical antiq- 
 uity is scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are 
 correctly studied in the original languages." There can be 
 no doubt that Wolf is perfectly right; that all learning is 
 scientific which is systematically laid out and followed up to 
 its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is scientific. 
 
 When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, 
 therefore, as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean 
 more than a knowledge of so much vocabulary, so much 
 grammar, so many portions of authors in the Greek and Latin 
 languages; I mean knowing the G reek s and Romans, and their 
 ]ife and genius, and what they were and did in the world; 
 what we g£t from them, and what is its value. That, at least, 
 is the ideal ; and when we talk of endeavoring to know Greek 
 and Reman antiquity, as a help to knowing ourselves and the 
 world, we mean endeavoring so to know them as to satisfy 
 this ideal, however much we may still fall short of it. 
 
 The same also as to knowing our own and other modern 
 nations, with the like aim of getting to understand ourselves 
 and the world. To know the best that has been thought and 
 said by the modern nations, is to know, says Professor Huxley, 
 "only what modern literatures have to tell us; it is the criti- 
 cism of life contained in modern literature." And yet "the 
 distinctive character of our times," he urges, "lies in the 
 vast and constantly increasing part which is played by natural
 
 332 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 knowledge." And how, therefore, can a man, devoid of knowl- 
 edge of what physical science has done in the last century, 
 enter hopefully upon a criticism of modern life? 
 
 Let us, I say, be agreed about the rneaning of the t^rms 
 we are using. I talk of knowing the best which has been 
 thought and uttered in the world; Professor Huxley says 
 this means knowing literature. Literature is a large word; 
 it may mean everything written with letters or printed in 
 a book. Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia are thus 
 literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is 
 literature. But by literature Professor Huxley means bMh? 
 lettres. He means to make me say, that knowing the best 
 which has been thought and said by the modern nations is 
 knowing their belles lettres and no more. And this is no sufl6- 
 cient equipment, he argues, for a criticism of modern life. 
 But as I do not mean, by knowing ancient Rome, knowing 
 merely more or less of Latin helles lettres, and taking no account 
 of Rome's military, and political, and legal, and administrative 
 work in the world; and as, by knowing ancient Greece, I 
 understand knowing her as the giver of Greek art, and the 
 guide to a free and right use of reason and to scientific method, 
 and the founder of our mathematics and physics and astron- 
 omy and biology, — I understand knowing her as all this, 
 and not merely knowing certain Greek poems, and histories, 
 and treatises, and speeches, — so as to the knowledge of 
 modern nations also. By knowing modern nations, I mean 
 not merely knowing their belles lettres, but knowing also what 
 has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, 
 Darwin. "Our ancestors learned," says Professor Huxley, 
 "that the earth is the center of the visible universe, and that 
 man is the cynosure of things terrestrial; and more especially 
 was it inculcated that the course of nature has no fixed order, 
 but that it could be, and constantly was, altered." But for 
 us now, continues Professor Huxley, "the notions of the begin- 
 ning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 333 
 
 are no longer credible. It is very certain that the earth is 
 not the chief body in the material universe, and that the 
 world is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more 
 certain that nature is the expression of a definite order, 
 with which nothing interferes." "And yet," he cries, "the 
 purely classical education advocated by the representatives 
 of the humanists in our day gives no inkHng of all this!" 
 
 In due place and time I will just touch upon that vexed 
 question of classical education; but at present the question 
 is as to what is meant by knowing the best which modern 
 nations have thought and said. It is not knowing their 
 belles lettres merely which is meant. To know Italian belles 
 lettres is not to know Italy, and to know English belles lettres is 
 not to know England. Into knowing Italy and England 
 there comes a great deal more, Galileo and Newton amongst 
 it. The reproach of being a superficial humanism, a tincture 
 of belles lettres, may attach rightly enough to some other dis- 
 cipHnes; but to the particular discipline recommended when 
 I proposed knowing the best that has been thought and said 
 in the world, it does not apply. In that best I certainly in- 
 clude what in modern times has been thought and said by the 
 great observers and knowers of nature. 
 
 There is, therefore, really no question between Professor 
 Huxley and me as to whether knowing the great results of 
 the modern scientific study of nature is not required as a 
 part of our culture, as well as knowing the products of litera- 
 ture and art. But to follow the processes by which those 
 results are reached, ought, say the friends of physical science, 
 to be made the sj:aple of education for the bulk of mankind. 
 And here there does arise a question between those whom 
 Professor Huxley calls with playful sarcasm "the Levites of 
 culture," and those whom the poor humanist is sometimes 
 apt to regard as its Nebuchadnezzars. 
 
 The great results of the scientific investigation of nature 
 we are agreed upon knowing, but how much of our study are
 
 334 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 we bound to give to the processes by which those results are 
 reached? The results have their visible bearing on human 
 life. But all the processes, too, all the items of fact by which 
 those results are reached and established, are interesting. 
 All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge 
 of nature is interesting to all men. It is very interesting 
 to know, that, from the albuminous white of the egg, the 
 chick in the egg gets the materials for its flesh, bones, blood, 
 and feathers ; while, from the fatty yolk of the egg, it gets 
 the heat and energy which enable it at length to break its 
 shell and begin the world. It is less interesting, perhaps, 
 but still it is interesting, to know that when a taper burns, 
 the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water. More- 
 over, it is quite true that the habit of dealing with facts, 
 which is given by the study of nature, is, as the friends of 
 physical science praise it for being, an excellent discipline. 
 The appeal, in the study of nature, is constantly to observa- 
 tion and experiment; not only is it said that the thing is so, 
 but we can be made to see that it is so. Not only does a man 
 tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted into 
 carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, 
 that Charon is punting his ferryboat on the river Styx, or 
 that Victor Hugo is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone the 
 most admirable of statesmen; but we are made to see that 
 the conversion into carbonic acid and water does actually 
 happen. This reality of natural knowledge it is, which 
 makes the friends of physical science contrast it, as a knowl- 
 edge of things, with the humanist's knowledge, which is, they 
 say, a knowledge of words. And hence Professor Huxley is 
 moved to lay it down that, "for the purpose of attaining real 
 culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as 
 effectual as an exclusively literary education." And a certain 
 President of the Section for Mechanical Science in the British 
 Association is, in Scripture phrase, "very bold," and declares 
 that if a man, in his mental training, "has substituted litera-
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 335 
 
 ture and history for natural science, he has chosen the less 
 useful alternative." But whether we go these lengths or 
 not, we must all admit that in natural science the habit 
 gained of dealing with facts is a most valuable cJiseipirrreT' 
 and that every one should have some experience of it. 
 
 More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers. 
 It is proposed to make the training in natural science the 
 main part of education, for the great majority of mankind at 
 any rate. And here, I confess, I part company with the friends 
 of physical science, with whom up to this point I have been 
 agreeing. In differing from them, however, I wish to proceed 
 with the utmost caution and diffidence. The smallness of 
 my own acquaintance with the disciplines of natural science 
 is ever before my mind, and I am fearful of doing these disci- 
 plines an injustice. The ability and pugnacity of the partisans 
 of natural science make them formidable persons to contradict. 
 The tone of tentative inquiry, which befits a being of dim 
 faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I would wish 
 to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me, 
 that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they 
 call it, the chief place in the education of the majority of 
 mankind, leave one important thing out of their account: 
 the constitution of human nature. But I put this forward on 
 the strength of some facts not at all recondite, very far from 
 it; facts capable of being stated in the simplest possible 
 fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of science 
 will, I am sure, be willing to allow their due weight. 
 
 Deny the facts altogether, I think, he hardly can. He can 
 hardly deny, that when we set ourselves to enumerate the 
 powers which go to the building up of human life, and say 
 that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect 
 and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social 
 life and manners, — he can hardly deny that this scheme, 
 though drawiTin rough and plain lines enough, and not pre- 
 tending to scientific exactness, does yet give a fairly true
 
 336 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 representation of the matter. Human nature is built up by 
 these powers; we have the need for them all. When we 
 have rightly met and adjusted the claims of them all, we 
 shall then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteous- 
 ness, with wisdom. This is evident enough, and the friends 
 of physical science would admit it. 
 
 But perhaps they may not have sufficiently observed 
 another thing: namely, that the several powers just men- 
 tioned are not isolated, but there is, in the generality of 
 mankind, a perpetual tendency to relate them one to another 
 in divers ways. With one such way of relating them I am 
 particularly concerned now. Following our instinct for 
 intellect and knowledge, we acquire pieces of knowledge; 
 and presently, in the generality of men, there arises the desire 
 to relate these pieces of knowledge to our sense for conduct, 
 to our sense for beauty, — and there is weariness and dis- 
 satisfaction if the desire is balked. Now in this desire lies, 
 I think, the strength of that hold which letters have 
 upon us. 
 
 All knowledge is, as I said just now, interesting; and even 
 items of knowledge which from the nature of the case cannot 
 well be related, but must stand isolated in our thoughts, have 
 their interest. Even lists of exceptions have their interest. 
 If we are studying Greek accents, it is interesting to know 
 that pais and pas, and some other monosyllables of the same 
 form of declension, do not take the circumflex upon the last 
 syllable of the genitive plural, but vary, in this respect, from 
 the common rule. If we are studying physiology, it is inter- 
 esting to know that the pulmonary artery carries dark blood 
 and the pulmonary vein carries bright blood, departing in 
 this respect from the common rule for the division of labor 
 between the veins and the arteries. But every one knows 
 how we seek naturally to combine the pieces of our knowledge 
 together, to bring them under general rules, to relate them to 
 principles; and how unsatisfactory and tiresome it would be
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 337 
 
 to go on forever learning lists of exceptions, or accumulating 
 items of fact which must stand isolated. 
 
 Well, that same need of relating our knowledge, which 
 operates here within the sphere of our knowledge itself, we 
 shall find operating, also, outside that sphere. We experi- 
 ence, as we go on learning and knowing, — the vast majority 
 of us experience, — the need of relating what we have learned 
 and known to the sense which we have in us for conduct, to 
 the sense which we have in us for beauty. 
 
 A certain Greek prophetess of Mantineia in Arcadia, 
 Diotima by name, once explained to the philosopher Socrates 
 that love, and impulse, and bent of all kinds, is, in fact, noth- 
 ing else but the desire in men that good should forever be 
 present to them. This desire for good, Diotima assured 
 Socrates, is our fundamental desire, of which fundamental 
 desire every impulse in us is only some one particular form. 
 And therefore this fundamental desire it is, I suppose, — this 
 desire in men that good should be forever present to them, 
 — which acts in us when we feel the impulse for relating 
 our knowledge to our sense for conduct and to our sense for 
 beauty. At any rate, with men in general the instinct 
 exists. Such is human nature. And the instinct, it will 
 be admitted, is innocent, and human nature is preserved 
 by our following the lead of its innocent instincts. There- 
 fore, in seeking to gratify this instinct in question, we are 
 following the instinct of self-preservation in humanity. 
 
 But, no doubt, some kinds of knowledge cannot be made 
 to directly serve the instinct in question, cannot be directly 
 related to the sense for beauty, to the sense for conduct. 
 These are instrument-knowledges; they lead on to other 
 knowledges, which can. A man who passes his life in instru- 
 ment-knowledges is a specialist. They may be invaluable as 
 instruments to something beyond, for those who have the 
 gift thus to employ them; and they may be disciplines in 
 themselves wherein it is useful for every one to have some
 
 338 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 schooling. But it is inconceivable that the generality of 
 men should pass all their mental life with Greek accents or 
 with formal logic. My friend Professor Sylvester, who is 
 one of the first mathematicians in the world, holds tran- 
 scendental doctrines as to the virtue of mathematics, but 
 those doctrines are not for common men. In the very Senate 
 House and heart of our English Cambridge I once ventured, 
 though not without an apology for my profaneness, to hazard 
 the opinion that for the majority of mankind a little of 
 mathematics, even, goes a long way. Of course this is quite 
 consistent with their being of immense importance as an in- 
 trument to something else; but it is the few who have the 
 aptitude for thus using them, not the bulk of mankind. 
 
 The natural sciences do not, however, stand on the same 
 footing with these instrument-knowledges. Experience shows 
 us that the generality of men will find more interest in learning 
 that, when a taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic 
 acid and water, or in learning the explanation of the phe- 
 nomenon of dew, -or in learning how the circulation of the 
 blood is carried on, than they find in learning that the genitive 
 plural of pais and pas does not take the circumflex on the 
 termination. And one piece of natural knowledge is added 
 to another, and others are added to that, and at last we come 
 to propositions so interesting as Mr. Darwin's famous proposi- 
 tion that "our ancestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with 
 a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits." 
 Or we come to propositions of such reach and magnitude as 
 those which Professor Huxley delivers, when he says that the 
 notions of our forefathers about the beginning and the end 
 of the world were all wrong, and that nature is the expression 
 of a definite order with which nothing interferes. 
 
 Interesting, indeed, these results of science are, important 
 they are, and we should all of us be acquainted with them. 
 But what I now wish you to mark is, that we are still, when 
 they are propounded to us and we receive them, we are still
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 339 
 
 in the sphere of intellect and knowledge. And for the gener- 
 ality of men there will be found, I say, to arise, when they 
 have duly taken in the proposition that their ancestor was 
 "a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, 
 probably arboreal in his habits," there will be found to arise 
 an invincible desire to relate this proposition to the sense in 
 us for conduct, and to the sense in us for beauty. But this 
 the men of science will not do for us, and will hardly even 
 profess to do. They will give us other pieces of knowledge, 
 other facts, about other animals and their ancestors, or about 
 plants, or about stones, or about stars; and they may finally 
 bring us to those great "general conceptions of the universe, 
 which are forced upon us all," says Professor Huxley, "by 
 the progress of physical science." But still it will be knowl- 
 edge only which they give us; knowledge not put for us into 
 relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, 
 and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for 
 us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain 
 while, unsatisfying, wearying. 
 
 Not to the born naturalist, I admit. But what do we 
 mean by a born naturalist? We mean a man in whom the 
 zeal for observing nature is so uncommonly strong and emi- 
 nent, that it marks him off from the bulk of mankind. Such 
 a man will pass his life happily in collecting natural knowledge 
 and reasoning upon it, and will ask for nothing, or hardly 
 anything, more. I have heard it said that the sagacious and 
 admirable naturalist whom we lost not very long ago, Mr. 
 Darwin, once owned to a friend that for his part he did not 
 experience the necessity for two things which most men find 
 so necessary to them — religion and poetry; science and 
 the domestic affections, he thought, were enough. To a 
 born naturalist, I can well understand that this should seem 
 so. So absorbing is his occupation with nature, so strong 
 his love for his occupation, that he goes on acquiring natural 
 knowledge and reasoning upon it, and has little time or
 
 340 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 inclination for thinking about getting it related to the desire 
 in man for conduct, the desire in man for beauty. He relates 
 it to them for himself as he goes along, so far as he feels 
 the need; and he draws from the domestic affections all the 
 additional solace necessary. But then Darwins are ex- 
 tremely rare. Another great and admirable master of natural 
 knowledge, Faraday, was a Sandemanian. That is to say, 
 he related his knowledge to his instinct for conduct and to 
 his instinct for beauty, by the aid of that respectable Scottish 
 sectary, Robert Sandeman. And so strong, in general, is the 
 demand of religion and poetry to have their share in a man, 
 to associate themselves with his knowing, and to relieve and 
 rejoice it, that probably, for one man amongst us with the 
 disposition to do as Darwin did in this respect, there are at 
 least fifty with the disposition to do as Faraday. 
 
 Education lays hold upon us, in fact, by satisfying this 
 demand. Professor Huxley holds up to scorn mediaeval 
 education, with its neglect of the knowledge of nature, its 
 poverty even of literary studies, its formal logic devoted to 
 "showing how and why that which the Church said was 
 true must be true." But the great mediaeval universities 
 were not brought into being, we may be sure, by the zeal for 
 giving a jejune and contemptible education. Kings have 
 been their nursing fathers, and queens have been their nursing 
 mothers, but not for this. The mediaeval universities came 
 into being, because the supposed knowledge, delivered by 
 Scripture and the Church, so deeply engaged men's hearts, 
 by so simply, easily, and powerfully relating itself to their 
 desire for conduct, their desire for beauty. All other knowl- 
 edge was dominated by this supposed knowledge and was 
 subordinated to it, because of the surpassing strength of the 
 hold which it gained upon the affections of men, by allying 
 itself profoundly with their sense for conduct, their sense for 
 beauty. 
 
 But now, says Professor Huxley, conceptions of the uni-
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 341 
 
 verse fatal to the notions held by our forefathers have been 
 forced upon us by physical science. Grant to him that they 
 are thus fatal, that the new conceptions must and will soon 
 become current everywhere, and that every one will finally 
 perceive them to be fatal to the beliefs of our forefathers. 
 The need of humane letters, as they are truly called, because 
 they serve the paramount desire in men that good should be 
 forever present to them, — the need of humane letters to 
 establish a relation between the new conceptions, and our 
 instinct for beauty, our instinct for conduct, is only the more 
 visible. The middle age could do without humane letters, 
 as it could do without the study of nature, because its supposed 
 knowledge was made to engage its emotions so powerfully. 
 Grant that the supposed knowledge disappears, its power of 
 being made to engage the emotions will of course disappear 
 along with it, — but the emotions themselves, and their 
 claim to be engaged and satisfied, will remain. Now if we 
 j&nd by experience that humane letters have an undeniable 
 pow er of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane 
 letters in a man's training becomes not less, but greater, in 
 proportion to the success of modern science in extirpating 
 what it calls "mediaeval thinking." 
 
 Have humane letters, then, have poetry and eloquence, 
 the power here attributed to them of engaging the emotions, 
 and do they exercise it? And if they have it and exercise it, 
 how do they exercise it, so as to exert an influence upon man's 
 sense for conduct, his sense for beauty? Finally, even if 
 they both can and do exert an influence upon the senses in 
 question, how are they to relate to them the results, — the 
 modern results, — of natural science? All these questions 
 may be asked. First, have poetry and eloquence the power 
 of calling out the emotions? The appeal is to experience. 
 Experience shows that for the vast majority of men, for 
 mankind in general, they have the power. Next, do they 
 exercise it? They do. But then, how do they exercise it so
 
 342 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 as to affect man's sense for conduct, his sense for beauty? 
 And this is perhaps a case for applying the Preacher's words: 
 "Though a man labor to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; 
 yea, further, though a wise man think to know it, yet shall 
 he not be able to find it." ^ Why should it be one thing, 
 in its effect upon the emotions, to say, "Patience is a virtue," 
 and quite another thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to 
 say with Homer, 
 
 tXtjtov yap Motpai dvfxov dkaav avdpcoiroKXLV — ^ 
 
 "for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the 
 children of men"? Why should it be one thing, in its effect 
 upon the emotions, to say with philosopher Spinoza, Felicitas 
 in eo consistit quod homo suum esse conservare potest — "Man's 
 happiness consists in his being able to preserve his own 
 essence," and quite another thing, in its effect upon the 
 emotions, to say with the Gospel, "What is a man advantaged, 
 if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, forfeit himself?" 
 How does this difference of effect arise? I cannot tell, and 
 I am not much concerned to know; the important thing is 
 that it does arise, and that we can profit by it. But how, 
 finally, are poetry and eloquence to exercise the power of 
 relating the modern results of natural science to man's instinct 
 for conduct, his instinct for beauty? And here again I answer 
 that I do not know how they will exercise it, but that they 
 can and will exercise it I am sure. I do not mean that modern 
 philosophical poets and modern philosophical moralists are 
 to come and relate for us, in express terms, the results of 
 modern scientific research to our instinct for conduct, our 
 instinct for beauty. But I mean that we shall find, as a 
 matter of experience, if we know the best that has been 
 thought and uttered in the world, we shall find that the art 
 and poetry and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps, long 
 
 ^ Ecdesiasles, viii. 17. 
 * Iliad, xxiv. 49.
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 343 
 
 ago, who had the most limited natural knowledge, who had 
 the most erroneous conceptions about many important 
 matters, we shall find that this art, and poetry, and eloquence, 
 have in fact not only the power of refreshing and delighting 
 us, they have also the power, — such is the strength and 
 worth, in essentials, of their authors' criticism of life, — 
 they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and 
 suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to re- 
 late the results of modern science to our need for conduct, 
 our need for beauty. Homer's conceptions of the physical 
 universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the 
 shock of hearing from modern science that "the world is not 
 subordinated to man's use, and that man is not the cynosure 
 of things terrestrial," I could, for my own part, desire no 
 better comfort than Homer's line which I quoted just now, 
 
 T\t]Tbv yap Motpat dvfxbv 6eaav ai'dpuwoLcnv — 
 
 "for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the 
 children of men!" 
 
 And the more that men's minds are cleared, the more that 
 the results of science are frankly accepted, the rnore that 
 poetry and eloquence come to be re££ived and studied as 
 what in truth they really are, — the criticism of life by gifted 
 men, alive and active with extraordinary power at an unusual 
 number of points; — so much the more will the value of 
 humane letters, and of art also, which is an utterance having 
 a like kind of power with theirs, be felt and acknowledged, 
 and their place in education be secured. 
 
 Let us therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible 
 any invidious comparison between the merits of humane 
 letters, as means of education, and the merits of the natural 
 sciences. But when some President of a Section for Mechani- 
 cal Science insists on making the comparison, and tells us 
 that "he who in his training has substituted literature and 
 history for natural science has chosen the less useful alterna-
 
 344 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 tive," let us make answer to him that the student of humane 
 letters only, will, at least, know also the great general con- 
 ceptions brought in by modern physical science; for science, 
 as Professor Huxley says, forces them upon us all. But the 
 student of the natural sciences only, will, by our very hypoth- 
 esis, know nothing of humane letters; not to mention that 
 in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating natural 
 knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in 
 general the gift for doing genially. And so he will probably 
 be unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more 
 incomplete than the student of humane letters only. 
 
 I once mentioned in a school report, how a young man in 
 one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the 
 passage in Macbeth beginning. 
 
 Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? 
 
 turned this line into, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" 
 And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, 
 if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that 
 the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in 
 diameter, and thought at the same time that a good para- 
 phrase for 
 
 Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? 
 
 was, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" If one is driven 
 to choose, I think I would rather have a young person ignorant 
 about the moon's diameter, but aware that "Can you not wait 
 upon the lunatic?" is bad, than a young person whose educa- 
 tion had been such as to manage things the other way. 
 
 Or to go higher than the pupils of our national schools. 
 I have in my mind's eye a member of our British Parliament 
 who comes to travel here in America, who afterwards relates 
 his travels, and who shows a really masterly knowledge of 
 the geology of this great country and of its mining capa- 
 bilities, but who ends by gravely suggesting that the United 
 States should borrow a prince from our Royal Family, and
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 345 
 
 should make him their king, and should create a House of 
 Lords of great landed proprietors after the pattern of ours; 
 and then America, he thinks, would have her future happily 
 and perfectly secured. Surely, in this case, the President of 
 the Section for Mechanical Science would himself hardly say 
 that our member of Parliament, by concentrating himself 
 upon geology and mineralogy, and so on, and not attend- 
 ing to literature and history, had "chosen the more useful 
 alternative." 
 
 If then there is to be separation and option between humane 
 letters on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the 
 other, the great majority of mankind, all who have not ex- 
 ceptional and overpowering aptitudes for the study of nature, 
 would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be educated 
 in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences. Letters 
 will call out their being at more points, will make them live 
 more. 
 
 I said that before I ended I would just touch on the question 
 of classical education, and I will keep my word. Even if 
 literature is to retain a large place in our education, yet 
 Latin and Greek, say the friends of progress, will certainly 
 have to go. Greek is the grand offender in the eyes of these 
 gentlemen. The attackers of the established course of study 
 think that against Greek, at any rate, they have irresistible 
 arguments. Literature may perhaps be needed in education, 
 they say; but why on earth should it be Greek literature? 
 Why not French or German? Nay, "has not an English- 
 man models in his own literature of every kind of excellence?" 
 As before, it is not on any weak pleadings of my own that I 
 rely for convincing the gainsayers; it is qji the constitution 
 of human nature itself, and on the instinct of self-preservation 
 in humanity. The instinct for beauty is set in human nature, 
 as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the 
 instinct for conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by 
 Greek literature and art as it is served by no other literature
 
 346 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 and art, we may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in 
 humanity for keeping Greek as part of our culture. We 
 may trust to it for even making the study of Greek more 
 prevalent than it is now. Greek will come, I hope, some 
 day to be studied more rationally than at present; but it 
 will be increasingly studied as men increasingly feel the 
 need in them for beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and 
 Greek literature can serve this need. Women will again 
 study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey did; I believe in that chain 
 of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are now 
 engirdling our English universities ; I find that here in 
 America, in colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, 
 and Vassar College in the State of New York, and in the 
 happy families of the mixed universities out West, they are 
 studying it already. 
 
 Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca, — "The antique sym- 
 metry was the one thing wanting to me," said Leonardo da 
 Vinci; and he was an Italian. I will not presume to speak 
 for the Americans but I am sure that, in the Englishman, 
 the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a 
 thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian. 
 The results of the want show themselves most glaringly, 
 perhaps, in our architecture, but they show themselves, also, 
 in all our art. Fit details strictly combined, in view of a large 
 general result nobly conceived; that is just the beautiful sym- 
 metria prisca of the Greeks, and it is just where we English 
 fail, where all our art fails. Striking ideas we have, and well- 
 executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, 
 with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we 
 seldom or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis 
 at Athens did not come from single fine things stuck about 
 on that hill, a statue here, a gateway there; — no, it arose 
 from all things being perfectly combined for a supreme total 
 effect. What must not an Englishman feel about our defi- 
 ciencies in this respect, as the sense for beauty, whereof this
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 347 
 
 symmetry is an essential element, awakens and strengthens 
 within him! what will not one day be his respect and desire 
 for Greece and its symmetria prisca, when the scales drop 
 from his eyes as he walks the London streets, and he sees 
 such a lesson in meanness as the Strand, for instance, in its 
 true deformity! But here we are coming to our friend Mr. 
 Ruskin's province, and I will not intrude upon it, for he is 
 its very sufficient guardian. 
 
 And so we at last find, it seems, we find flowing in favor of 
 the humanities the natural and necessary stream of things, 
 which seemed against them when we started. The "hairy 
 quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably 
 arboreal in his habits," this good fellow carried hidden in 
 his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a 
 necessity for humane letters. Nay, more; we seem finally 
 to be even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor 
 carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek. 
 
 And therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that 
 humane letters are in much actual danger of being thrust 
 out from their leading place in education, in spite of the 
 array of authorities against them at this moment. So long 
 as human nature is what it is, their attractions will remain 
 irresistible. As with Greek, so with letters generally: they 
 will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more ra- 
 tionally, but they will not lose their place. What will happen 
 will rather be that there will be crowded into education other 
 matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period 
 of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but 
 letters will not in the end lose their leading place. If they 
 lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall be 
 brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a 
 poor humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither 
 strive nor cry, admit the energy and brilliancy of the partisans 
 of physical science, and their present favor with the public, 
 to be far greater than his own, and still have a happy faith
 
 348 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 that the nature of things works silently on behalf of the 
 studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have to 
 acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern 
 science, and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines 
 as we can conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will 
 always require humane letters; and so much the more, as 
 they have the more and the greater results of science to 
 relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the need in him 
 for beauty.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN 
 AMERICAN HISTORY! 
 
 Frederick J. Turner 
 
 In a bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 
 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 
 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the 
 unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of 
 settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. 
 In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., 
 it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the census 
 reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of 
 a great historic movement. Up to our own day American 
 history has been in a large degree the history of the coloniza- 
 tion of the West. The existence of an area of free land, its 
 continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement 
 westward explain American development. 
 
 Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and 
 modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into 
 life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The 
 peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have 
 been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an 
 expanding people — to the changes involved in crossing a 
 continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at 
 each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and 
 political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of 
 city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly 
 — I was about to say fearfully — growing!" So saying, he 
 
 ^ Reprinted, by courtesy of the author and publisher, from the Fifth 
 Yearbook of the National Herbart Society (University of Chicago Press, 
 1899). First edition printed in Report of American Historical Association 
 for i8p3.
 
 350 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All 
 people show development; the germ theory of politics has 
 been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, 
 however, the development has occurred in a limited area; 
 and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing 
 peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the 
 United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting 
 our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar 
 phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited 
 area, such as the rise of representative government; the 
 differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex 
 organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, with- 
 out division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But 
 we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of 
 evolution in each western area reached in the process of 
 expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not 
 merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive 
 conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a 
 new development for that area. American social develop- 
 ment has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. 
 This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this 
 expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous 
 touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the 
 forces dominating American character. The true point of 
 view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast: 
 it is the great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is 
 made so exclusive an object of attention by some historians, 
 occupies its important place in American history because of 
 its relation to westward expansion. 
 
 In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave, 
 — the meeting-point between savagery and civilization. 
 Much has been written about the frontier from the point of 
 view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the 
 serious study of the economist and the historian it has been 
 neglected.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 351 
 
 The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the 
 European frontier, — a fortified boundary line running through 
 dense populations. The most significant thing about the 
 American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free 
 land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of 
 that settlement which has a density of two or more to the 
 square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes 
 does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole 
 frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer 
 margin of the "settled area" of the census reports. This 
 paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; 
 its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile 
 field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems 
 which arise in connection with it. 
 
 In the settlement of America we have to observe how 
 European life entered the continent, and how America modified 
 and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early 
 history is the history of European germs developing in an 
 American environment. Too exclusive attention has been 
 paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too 
 little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of 
 most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness 
 masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, 
 industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes 
 him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. 
 It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in 
 the hunting shirt and moccasin. It puts him in the log 
 cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade 
 around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian 
 corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry 
 and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, 
 at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the 
 man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or 
 perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and 
 follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the
 
 ^ 
 
 352 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 wilderness, but the outcome is not the oH EuropeTnot simply 
 the development of Germanic germs, any more than the 
 first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic 
 mark. The fact is, that here is a new. product that is Ameri- 
 can. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was 
 the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving west- 
 ward, the frontier became more and more American. As 
 successive terminal moraines result from successive glacia- 
 tions, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it 
 becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier 
 characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant 
 a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a 
 steady growth of independence on American lines. And to 
 study this advance, the men who grew up under these condi- 
 tions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is 
 to study the peculiarly American part of our history. 
 
 Let us then grasp the conception of American society steadily 
 expanding into new areas. How important it becomes to 
 watch the stages, the processes, and the results of this ad- 
 vance! The conception will be found to revolutionize o^r 
 study of American history. /? , cA:^-X/^ 
 
 Stages of Frontier Advance 
 
 In the Report on Population of the United States of the 
 Eleventh Census, Part I, the student will find a series of 
 maps representing the advance of population at each census 
 period since 1790. By a consideration of these maps in 
 connection with a relief map of the United States, and with 
 the Reconnoissance Map of the United States showing the 
 distribution of the geologic system (Fourteenth Annual 
 Report of the United States Geological Survey, plate ii), 
 and with the Contour Map of the United States (in blue and 
 brown only, without culture data, published by the United 
 States Geological Survey), it will become plain that for an 
 adequate comprehension of the course of American history,
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 353 
 
 it is necessary to study the process by which the advancing 
 flood of settlement flowed into the successive physiographic 
 areas. We must observe also how these areas affected the 
 life of the emigrants from the older sections and from Europe. 
 
 When one examines these census maps by the side of Major 
 Powell's map showing the physiographic regions of the United 
 States/ he comprehends the fact that there are American 
 sections, neither defined by state lines, nor by the old divisions 
 of New England, middle region, south, and west; he perceives 
 that, in some respects, the map of the United States may be 
 likened to the map of Europe; that the great physiographic 
 provinces which have been won by civilization are economi- 
 cally and socially comparable to nations of the Old World. 
 The study of the stages of frontier advance thus becomes the 
 fascinating examination of the successive evolution of peculiar 
 economic and social countries, or provinces, each with its own 
 inheritance, its own contributions, and individuality. 
 
 Such a study of the moving frontier will show how, after 
 the tide-water section was settled below the fall line ^ in the 
 seventeenth century, a combined stream along the Great 
 Valley and up the southern rivers that drain into the Atlantic, 
 filled in the Piedmont region. This process occupied the 
 first half of the eighteenth century. In the same period, 
 settlement was ascending the Connecticut and the Housatonic 
 in New England, and the Mohawk in New York. These 
 river valleys, walled by the mountains and enriched with 
 fluvial soils, became the outlet for increasing population, and 
 they directed the flow of settlement. Thus two rival currents 
 of settlement were already started by the middle of the 
 eighteenth century. New England's stream was almost 
 pure native stock. The stream that followed the Great 
 Valley and occupied the Piedmont was dominantly Scotch- 
 Irish and German. 
 
 * Physiography of the United Stales, pp. 98-99. 
 
 * See Powell, Physiography of the United States, pp. 73-74.
 
 354 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 In vain the king attempted to check this advance by his 
 proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlements beyond the 
 sources of the Atlantic rivers. Just before the Revolution 
 settlement reached and followed the "Western Waters" 
 (the streams that, rising near the sources of the Atlantic 
 rivers, cut their way through the mountains to join the Ohio).^ 
 The limestone soils, so welcome to the farmer, were influ- 
 ential in determining this advance. The limestone belt that 
 floors the northern part of the Great Valley in Pennsylvania, 
 Maryland, and Virginia, had tempted settlers along its path 
 and into the Piedmont. The limestone flooring of the Ten- 
 nessee Valley now attracted settlers to eastern Tennessee. 
 Thence, by Cumberland Gap, or down the Ohio from the 
 north, the flood poured into the limestone areas of Kentucky 
 and Tennessee, known as the Blue Grass lands. 
 
 By the close of the Revolution settlement in Kentucky and 
 Tennessee was almost coterminous with the limestone forma- 
 tions, as may be seen by comparing the map of the census of 
 1790 with the map. showing the distribution of the geologic 
 system of the United States. These outlying islands of 
 settlement, separated by wilderness and mountains from the 
 frontier border of the settled area of the coast, had important 
 effects upon American diplomatic, military, and economic 
 history. In the Revolutionary era the frontier communities 
 beyond the mountains attempted to establish states of their 
 own, on democratic lines. ^ The West as a self-conscious 
 section began to evolve,^ and the struggle for the navigation 
 
 ^ On this movement see Roosevelt, Winning of the West; Winsor, Mis- 
 sissippi Basin; and Winsor, Westward Movement. See also accounts of 
 travelers, as cited in Report of American Historical Association for iSgj, 
 p. 203, and in Channing and Hart, Guide to American History, pp. 78-86. 
 
 2 See my paper on Western State-making in the Revolutionary Era 
 (American Historical Revieic, I, 70, 251); Alden, New Governments West; 
 of the Alleghanies before 1780 (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin). 
 
 ' Cf. Atlantic Monthly, September, 1896, Lxxviii, 289.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 355 
 
 of the Mississippi accented this western individualism, and 
 made doubtful the unity of America. 
 
 By diplomacy, and by Indian wars and cessions, gradually 
 the way was opened for the spread of settlement into western 
 New York, and into the country north of the Ohio. New 
 England's Connecticut Valley and Housatonic Valley settlers, 
 overflowing their confines, poured into central and western 
 New York between 1788 and 1820, and New England also 
 began to settle in Ohio. The Middle States and the South 
 sent their current of settlement into the southern part of the 
 Northwest,^ while settlement followed the victories of Andrew 
 Jackson into the Southwest after the War of 1S12. 
 
 By the census of 1820 the settled area included Ohio, south- 
 ern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about 
 one half of Louisiana. This settled area had surrounded 
 Indian areas, and the management of these tribes became an 
 object of political concern. The frontier region of the time 
 lay along the Great Lakes, where Astor's American Fur 
 Company operated in the Indian trade,- and beyond the 
 Mississippi, where Indian traders extended their activity 
 even to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier 
 conditions. The Mississippi River region was the scene of 
 typical frontier settlements.^ The era of internal improve- 
 
 ^ Atlantic Monthly, April, 1897, Ixxix, 433 et seq.; Roosevelt, Winning of 
 the West, vol. iv; Thorpe, Constitutional History of the People of the United 
 Slates; Dwight, Travels (1796-1815) [New Haven, 1821]. 
 
 ^ Turner, Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin 
 {Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series ix), pp. 6i ff. 
 
 3 Monette, History of the Mississippi Valley, vol. ii; Flint, Travels and 
 E.esidence in Mississippi; Flint, Geography and History of the Western States; 
 Abridgment of Debates of Congress, vii, 397, 398, 404; Holmes, Account of 
 the United States; Kingdom, America and the British Colonies [Xondon, 
 1820^; Grund, Americans, II, i, iii, vi (although writing in 1836, he treats 
 of conditions that grew out of western advance from the era of 1820 to 
 tnat time); Peck, Guide for Emigrants [Boston, 1831]; Darby, Etni grants' 
 Guide to Western aiul Soutliiccstcrn States and Territories; Dana, Geographi- 
 cal Sketches in the Western Country; Kinzic, Waubun; Keating, Narrative
 
 356 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 ments and protective tariffs under the home-market idea 
 opened. Its explanation is to be sought in the distribution 
 of settlement. 
 
 The rising steam navigation ^ on western waters, the open- 
 ing of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton ^ 
 culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. 
 Grund, writing in 1836, declares: "It appears then that the 
 universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western 
 wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate 
 nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is 
 inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all 
 classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of 
 the whole population on the extreme confines of the state, in 
 order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new 
 state or territory formed before the same principle manifests 
 itself again and gives rise to a further emigration; and so it 
 is destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally 
 obstruct its progress." ' 
 
 It was in the period between 1820 and 1850 that the forces 
 were at work which differentiated the northwestern frontier 
 and the southwestern frontier. In the Southwest the spread 
 of cotton culture transformed the pioneer farmer into the 
 great planter and slaveholder. In the Northwest, the New 
 England and Middle State stream, followed by German 
 immigration, took possession of the Great Lake basin, and 
 the pioneer farmer type was continued. This section was 
 united to New York by the Erie Canal and by the later rail- 
 
 of Long's Expedition; Schoolcraft, Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi 
 River, Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, and Lead 
 Mines of the Missouri; Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities; McKenney, Tour to 
 the Lakes; Thomas, Travels through the Western Country, etc. [Auburn, 
 N. Y., 1819]. Cf. Turner, Rise of New West, vols, v-viii [New York, 1906]. 
 
 ^ Darby, Emigrants' Guide, pp. 272 £f.; Benton, Abridgment of Debates, 
 vii, 397. 
 
 "^ Turner, Rise of New West, chap. iv. 
 
 ' Grund, Americans, ii, 8.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 357 
 
 roads. New Orleans ceased to be the outlet of the North- 
 west. Thus the physiographic province included in the 
 glaciated area embracing the Great Lake basin and New 
 England plateau was brought, by the flow of frontier settle- 
 ment, into economic, political, and social unity. In the same 
 period the physiographic province of the Gulf plains was 
 settled and unified by extensions of the coastal south, under 
 the temptations of the cotton lands. The struggle for Texas 
 and the Mexican War were later sequences of this movement. 
 
 Prior to this, the Mississippi valley had possessed a con- 
 siderable degree of social and political homogeneity. By the 
 processes just mentioned, however, the sectional division of 
 North and South was carried beyond the AUeghenies, and the 
 western spirit gave to the political and economic antagonisms 
 between the old North and South sections a new rancor and 
 aggressiveness. Both were regions of action, and they fur- 
 nished the radical leaders for their respective sections in the 
 struggle that followed. 
 
 In the middle of this century the line indicated by the 
 present eastern boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and 
 Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country.^ Minne- 
 sota and Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions,^ but 
 
 1 Peck, New Guide to the West, chap, iv [Cincinnati, 1848]; Parkman, 
 Oregon Trail; Hall, The West [Cincinnati, 1848]; Pierce, Incidents of Western 
 Travel; Murray, Travels in North America; Lloyd, Steamboat Directory 
 [Cincinnati, 1856]; "Forty Days in a Western Hotel" (Chicago), in Put- 
 nam's Magazine, December, 1894; Mackay, The Western World, II, ii, iii; 
 Meeker, Life in the West; Bogen, Germans in America [Boston, 1851]; 
 Olmstead, Texas Journey; Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life; Schouler, 
 History of the United States, v, 261-267; Peyton, Over the AUeghenies and 
 Across the Prairies [London, 1870]; Peyton, Suggestions on Railroad Com- 
 munication with the Pacific and the Trade of China and the Indian Islands; 
 Benton, Highway to the Pacific (a speech in the United States Senate, 
 December 16, 1850). Cf. Chittenden, American Fur Trade. 
 
 * A writer in the Home Missionary [1850], p. 239, reporting Wisconsin 
 conditions, exclaims: "Think of this, people of the enlightened East! 
 What an example, to come from the very frontiers of civilization!" But
 
 358 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 the distinctive frontier of the period is found in California, 
 where the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adven- 
 turous miners, in Oregon, and in the settlements in Utah.'^ 
 As the frontier had leaped over the Alleghenies, so now it 
 skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in 
 the same way that the advance of the frontiersman beyond 
 the Alleghenies had caused the rise of important questions of 
 transportation and internal improvement, so now the settlers 
 beyond the Rocky Mountains needed means of communica- 
 tion with the East, and in the furnishing of these arose the 
 settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still 
 another kind of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land 
 grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far 
 West. The United States army ^ fought a series of Indian 
 wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory; cessions 
 made way for settlement. 
 
 By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern 
 Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, 
 and in the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of 
 Kansas and Nebraska.^ The development of mines in Col- 
 orado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that 
 region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The 
 frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of 
 the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 
 reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the 
 West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer 
 be said to be a frontier line 
 
 one of the missionaries writes: "In a few years Wisconsin will no longer 
 be considered as the West, or as an outpost of civilization, any more than 
 western New York, or the Western Reserve." 
 
 1 Bancroft (H. H.), History of the Pacific States; and Popular Tribunals; 
 Hittell, California; Shinn, "Mining Camps"; Shinn, "Story of the Mine": 
 Century Magazine, 1890, 1891. 
 
 2 Rodenbough and Ilaskin, Army of the United States. 
 ^ See Atlantic Monthly, Ixxix, 440.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 359 
 
 It will be noted that the frontier boundaries are physio- 
 graphically significant. The fall line marked the seventeenth- 
 century frontier; the Allegheny Mountains, that of the middle 
 of the eighteenth century; the Mississippi, that of the last 
 decade of the eighteenth century, and, in part, that of the 
 first quarter of the present century. Settlement which had 
 crept up the Missouri, the Platte, etc., by the middle of the 
 nineteenth century stayed while the rush of gold seekers 
 made a new frontier on the Pacific coast and in the Rocky 
 Mountains. The boundary of the arid region (roughly the 
 hundredth meridian) marks the most recent frontier. The 
 conquest of the arid West will be by different processes than 
 that of the other areas of western advance, and a different 
 social type may be looked for in the region. 
 
 Each great western advance, thus outlined, has been 
 accompanied by a diplomatic or military struggle against 
 rival nations, and by a series of Indian wars and cessions. 
 
 The Frontier furnishes a Field for Comparative Study of Social 
 
 Development 
 
 At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of pro- 
 cesses repeated at each successive frontier. We have the com- 
 plex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into 
 the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had 
 to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of 
 the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older 
 settlements, of the extension of political organization, of 
 religious and educational activity. And the settlement of 
 these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide 
 for the next. The American student needs not to go to the 
 "prim little townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law 
 of continuity and development. For example, he may study 
 the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he 
 may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the
 
 36o FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 customs of the successive frontiers.^ He may see how the 
 mining experience in the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois, 
 and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the Rockies,^ 
 and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimenta- 
 tions on successive frontiers. Each tier of new states has 
 found in the older ones material for its constitution.^ Each 
 frontier has made similar contributions to American char- 
 acter, as will be discussed farther on. 
 
 But with all these similarities there are essential differences, 
 due to the place element and the time element. It is evident 
 that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents 
 different conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky 
 Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific railroad, 
 surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States army, 
 and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward 
 in a different way and at a swifter pace than the frontier 
 reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The geologist 
 traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, 
 and compares the older and the newer. It would be a work 
 worth the historian's labors to mark these various frontiers, 
 and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there 
 result a more adequate conception of American development 
 and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made 
 to the history of society. 
 
 Loria,^ the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial 
 life as an aid in understanding the stages of European devel- 
 opment, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic 
 science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light 
 primitive stratifications. "America," he says, ''has the key 
 
 ^ See the suggestive paper by Professor Jesse Macy, "The Institutional 
 Beginnings of a Western State." 
 
 ^ Shinn, "Mining Camps." 
 
 ' Cf. Thorpe, in Annals of American Academy of Political and Social 
 Science, September, 1891; Bryce, American Commonwealth [1888], ii, 689. 
 
 * Loria, Analisi delta Proprietd Capitalista, ii, 15.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 361 
 
 to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries 
 in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously 
 the course of universal history." There is much truth in this. 
 The United States lies like a huge page in the history of 
 society. Line by line, as we read this continental page from 
 west to east, we find the record of social evolution. It begins 
 with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the 
 disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the 
 pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral 
 stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising 
 of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled 
 farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser 
 farm settlement; and finally, the manufacturing organization 
 with city and factory system.^ This page is familiar to the 
 student of census statistics, but how little of it has been used 
 by our historians. Particularly in eastern states this page is 
 a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing state was in an 
 earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet it 
 had been a wheat area, and still earlier the "range" had 
 attracted the cattle herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing 
 manufacture, is a state with varied agricultural interests. 
 But earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain rais- 
 ing, like North Dakota at the present time. 
 
 Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic 
 and political history; the evolution of each into a different 
 industrial stage has worked political transformations.^ Wis- 
 consin, to take an illustration, in the days when it lacked 
 varied agriculture and complex industrial life, was a strong- 
 hold of the granger and greenback movements; but it has 
 
 ^ Cf. Observations on the N. A. Land Company, pp. 15, 144 [London, 
 17963; Logan, History of Upper S. C, i, 149-151; Turner, Indian Trade in 
 Wisconsin, p. 18; Peck, New Gtiide for Emigrants, chap, iv [Boston, 1837]; 
 Compendium, Eleventh Census, xl. 
 
 2 Turner, Introduction to Libby's Ratification of the American Con- 
 stitution [_Bull. of Univ. of Wis., Econ., Pol. Sci., and Ilist. Series, vol. i}.
 
 362 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 undergone an industrial transformation, and in the presi- 
 dential contest of 1896 Mr. Bryan carried but three counties 
 in the state. Again consider the history of Calhoun. His 
 father came with the tide of Scotch-Irish pioneers that built 
 their log cabins in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. 
 The young manhood of Calhoun was thoroughly western in 
 its nationalistic and loose-construction characteristics. But 
 the extension of cotton culture to the Piedmont, following 
 the industrial revolution in England, superseded the pioneer 
 by the slave-holding planter. Calhoun's ideas changed with 
 his section, until he became the chief prophet of southern 
 sectionalism and slavery.^ 
 
 Among isolated coves in the Appalachian Mountains, and 
 in other out-of-the-way places, the frontier has survived, like 
 a fossil, in a more recent social formation. The primitive 
 economic conditions of these mountains of Tennessee, or of 
 Georgia, for instance, enable us to comprehend some of the 
 characteristics of the frontier of earlier days. In the American 
 Journal of Sociology for July, 1898, under the title "A Re- 
 tarded Frontier," Professor Vincent has described such a 
 community. 
 
 The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur 
 trader, miner, cattle raiser, and farmer. Excepting the 
 fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward 
 the west, drawn by an irresistible attraction. Each passed 
 in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumber- 
 land Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching 
 single file — the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, 
 the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the 
 pioneer farmer — and the frontier has passed by. Stand at 
 South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same 
 procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate 
 of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the 
 
 ' Turner, Rise of New West, for other illustrations, and of. Atlantic 
 Montldy, April, 1897, Ixxix, 441-4.43.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 363 
 
 trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, 
 and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow 
 pens were still near the fall line the trader's pack trains were 
 tinkling across the Alleghenies, and the French on the Great 
 Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British 
 trader's birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies 
 the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri. 
 
 ^, 
 
 I ^ ^'   y The Indian Trader^ s Frontier 
 
 Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across 
 the continent? What effects followed from the trader's 
 frontier? The trade was coeval with American discovery. 
 The Norsemen, Vespucius, Verrazani, Hudson, John Smith, 
 all trafficked for furs. The Plymouth pilgrims settled in 
 Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was of beaver 
 and lumber. The records of the various New England 
 colonies show how steadily exploration was carried into the 
 wilderness by this trade. What is true for New England is, as 
 would be expected, even plainer for the rest of the colonies. 
 All along the coast from Maine to Georgia the Indian trade 
 opened up the river courses. Steadily the trader passed 
 westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The 
 Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the 
 Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. 
 They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided 
 Lewis and Clark, ^ Fremont, and Bidwell. The explanation 
 of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects 
 of the trader on the Indian. The trading post left the un- 
 armed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased fire- 
 arms, — a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, 
 and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome 
 to the trader. "The savages," wrote La Salle, "take better 
 care of us French than of their own children; from us only 
 
 1 But Lewis and Clark were the first to explore the route from the Mis- 
 souri to the Columbia.
 
 364 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 can they get guns and goods." This accounts for the trader's 
 power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the disinte- 
 grating forces of civiHzation entered the wilderness. Every 
 river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, 
 and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the 
 pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life 
 had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with 
 guns. The trading frontier, while steadily undermining 
 Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on 
 the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to the Indians 
 increased power of resistance to the farming frontier. French 
 colonization was dominated by its trading frontier, English 
 colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antago- 
 nism between the two frontiers as between the two nations. 
 Said Duquesne to the Iroquois: "Are you ignorant of the 
 difference between the king of England and the king of France? 
 Go see the forts that our king has established and you will 
 see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They 
 have been placed for your advantage in places which you 
 frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in 
 possession of a place than the game is driven away. The 
 forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid 
 bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a 
 shelter for the night." 
 
 And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the 
 trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for 
 civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and 
 this became the trader's "trace"; the trails widened into 
 roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were 
 transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown 
 for important railroads of the South, the Far West, and the 
 Dominion of Canada.^ The trading posts reached by these 
 
 ^ The later railroads frequently deviated in important respects from the 
 exact line of the old trails; but the statement is true in general. See Narra- 
 tive and Critical History of America, viii, 10; Sparks, Washington'' s Works,
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 365 
 
 trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been 
 placed in positions suggested by nature; and these trading 
 posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the 
 country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburg, 
 Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. 
 Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made 
 by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at 
 last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been 
 broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern 
 commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by 
 lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like 
 the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the 
 originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand 
 why we are to-day one nation rather than a collection of 
 isolated states, he must study this economic and social con- 
 solidation of the country. In this progress from savage 
 conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.^ 
 
 The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in 
 our history is important. From the close of the seventeenth 
 century various intercolonial congresses have been called to 
 treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. 
 Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. 
 This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord 
 of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding 
 united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the 
 Albany congress of 1754, called to treat with the Six Nations, 
 and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of 
 the plan proposed by the congress reveals the importance of 
 the frontier. The powers of the general council and the officers 
 were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the 
 Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of 
 
 ix, 303, 327; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, vol. i; McDonald, 
 Life of Kenton, p. 72. 
 
 1 On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of migration, see the 
 author's Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin.
 
 366 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 Indian lands, and the creation and government of new settle- 
 ments as a security against the Indians. It is evident that 
 the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were 
 facilitated by the previous cooperation in the regulation of 
 the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the 
 importance of the Indian frontier in the modification of 
 western institutions and character, and particularly, as a 
 military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance 
 to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities 
 of the frontiersman. If the reader will compare the names of 
 the officers whose exploits at Santiago and at Manila are 
 now in everybody's mouth, with the names of the officers in 
 the Indian fighting of the United States, he will understand 
 better the importance of this aspect of the frontier.^ 
 
 The Rancher's Frontier 
 
 It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace 
 the other frontiers across the continent. At the close of the 
 seventeenth century in Virginia we find vast droves of wild 
 horses and cattle, with typical ranch life and customs. Similar 
 conditions existed in other parts of the coast area.^ Travelers 
 of the eighteenth century found the "cow pens" among the 
 caneb rakes and pea- vine pastures of the South, and the "cow 
 drivers" took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia, and 
 New York.^ Travelers at the close of the War of 1812 met 
 droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the 
 interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Phila- 
 
 1 Colonel Leonard Wood, for example, in the Geronimo campaign under 
 Lawton in 1886, added to his duties as surgeon the command of the in- 
 fantry. Cf. Century Magazine, July, 1891, p. 369, and Scribner's Magazine, 
 January, 1899, pp. 3-20. 
 
 ^ Cf. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, i, 
 473-477, 540; Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, i, 
 100, 128; Doyle, Puritan Colonies, ii, 19-23, 46-47. 
 
 3 Lodge, English Colonies, p. 152 and citations; Logan, History of Upper 
 South Carolina, i, 151.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 367 
 
 delphia market.^ The ranges of the Great Plains, with ranch 
 and cowboy and nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of 
 to-day.- The experience of the Carolina cow pens guided the 
 ranchers of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension 
 of the rancher's frontier is the fact that in a remote country 
 lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small 
 bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser 
 could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these 
 great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the locali- 
 ties in which they existed should be studied. 
 
 The Farmer^ s Frontier 
 
 The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance 
 of the farmer's frontier, with tongues of settlement pushed 
 forward and with indentations of wilderness. In part this 
 is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river 
 valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers 
 of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of 
 attraction may be mentioned the following: fertile and favor- 
 ably situated soils, salt springs, mines, and army posts. 
 
 Army Posts 
 
 The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from 
 the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian 
 country, and has been a nucleus for settlement.^ In this 
 connection mention should also be made of the government 
 military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines 
 of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were 
 greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian 
 
 ^ Flint, Recollections, p. 9. 
 
 2 See Wister, "Evolution of the Cow Puncher," in Harper's Magazine, 
 September, 1895; Hough, Story of tlie Cow Boy; Roosevelt, Ranch Life and 
 the Hunting Trail. 
 
 3 Cf. Hening's Statutes, ii, 433, 448; iii, 204; Benton's View, i, 102; ii, 
 70, 167; Monctte, Mississippi Valley, i, 344.
 
 368 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, 
 who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from 
 the days of Lewis and Clark. Each expedition was an epitome 
 of the previous factors in western advance. 
 
 Salt Springs 
 
 In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn ^ has traced the 
 effect of salt upon early European development, and has 
 pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the 
 form of administration. A similar study might be made for 
 the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were 
 tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could 
 not preserve their meats or live in comfort. Writing in 1752, 
 Bishop Spangenburg says of a colony for which he was seeking 
 lands in North Carolina: "They will require salt & other 
 necessaries which they can neither manufacture nor raise. 
 Either they must go to Charleston, which is 300 miles distant. 
 ... Or else they must go to Boling's Point in V* On a 
 branch of the James & is also 300 miles from here ... Or 
 else they must go down the Roanoke — I know not how many 
 miles — where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear." ^ 
 This may serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrim- 
 age to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks 
 or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack 
 trains after seeding time each year to the coast.^ This proved 
 to be an important educational influence, since it was almost 
 the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going 
 on in the East. But when discovery was made of the salt 
 springs of the Kanawha, and the Holston, and Kentucky,^ 
 
 1 Hehn, Das Salz ["Berlin, 1873]. 
 
 2 Colonial Records of North Carolina, v, 3. 
 
 ^ Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of 
 Pennsylvania in the Year iyg4, p. 35 p'hiladelphia, 1796]. 
 
 * See also McGee's paper on potable springs, as affecting settlement, in 
 the Fourteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, Part ii, 
 p. 9.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 369 
 
 and central New York, the West began to be freed from 
 dependence on the coast. It was in part the effect of find- 
 ing these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the 
 mountains. 
 
 Land 
 
 The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to 
 the West, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher 
 West, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river 
 valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have 
 been the most continuous attraction to the farmer's frontier. 
 When the science of physiography is more completely related 
 to the study of our history it will be seen how dependent that 
 history v/as upon the forces that carved out the limestone 
 valleys and deposited alluvial soils along the river courses. 
 The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers 
 into Carolina, in early colonial days; the pursuit of good soil 
 took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New 
 York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed 
 across them to the West. Daniel Boone, the great back- 
 woodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, 
 cattle raiser, farmer, and surveyor — learning, probably from 
 the traders, of the fertility of the lands on the upper Yadkin, 
 where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way 
 to the Indians — left his Pennsylvania home with his father, 
 and passed down the Great Valley road to that stream. Learn- 
 ing from a trader whose posts were on the Red river in Ken- 
 tucky of its game and rich pastures, he pioneered the way 
 for the farmers to that region. Thence he passed to the 
 frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a land- 
 mark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way 
 for civilization, finding salt licks and trails and land. His 
 son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky 
 mountains, and his party is said to have been the first to camp 
 on the present site of Denver. His grandson, Colonel A. J.
 
 370 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 Boone of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the 
 Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the gov- 
 ernment. Kit Carson's mother was a Boone.^ Thus this 
 family epitomizes the backwoodsman's advance across the 
 continent. 
 
 The farmer's advance came in a distinct series of waves. 
 In Peck's New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, 
 occurs this suggestive passage: 
 
 Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of 
 the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who 
 depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth 
 of vegetation, called the "range," and the proceeds of hunting. His imple- 
 ments of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts 
 directed mainly to a crop of corn. and a "truck patch." The last is a rude 
 garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucimibers, and 
 potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corncrib, and a field 
 of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or "deadened," and fenced, are enough 
 for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the 
 owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and 
 feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and 
 one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, 
 and becomes the founder of a new country, or perhaps state. He builds 
 his cabin, gathers arovmd him a few other families of similar tastes and 
 habits, and occupies until the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a 
 little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors 
 crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow 
 room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and corn- 
 field to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he 
 "breaks for the high timber," "clears out for the New Purchase," or migrates 
 to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over. 
 
 The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear 
 out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log 
 houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant 
 orchards, build mills, schoolhouses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms 
 of plain, frugal, civilized life. 
 
 Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The 
 settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, 
 push farther into the interior, and become, himself, a man of capital and 
 
 ^ Hale, Daniel Boone (pamphlet).
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 371 
 
 enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; 
 substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and 
 churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refine- 
 ments, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus 
 wave after wave is roUing westward; the real Eldorado is still further on. 
 
 A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general 
 movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of 
 society. 
 
 The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. 
 He has lived many years in connection with second grade; and now the 
 third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. 
 Migration has become almost a habit in the West. Hundreds of men can 
 be found, not over fifty years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, 
 or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred 
 miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners.^ 
 
 Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the 
 love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is 
 easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted 
 by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer 
 felt their influence strongly. Year by year the farmers who 
 lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated 
 crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal 
 prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and 
 these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, 
 and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to 
 go West and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new 
 frontier, or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the census of 
 1890 shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there 
 is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These 
 states have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on 
 
 ^ Cf. Baily, Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America, pp. 217-219 
 p^ondon, 1856], where a similar analysis is made for 1796. See also Collot, 
 Journey in North America, p. 109 [Paris, 1826]; Observations on the North 
 American Land Company, pp. xv, 144 [London, 1796]]; Logan, History of 
 Upper South Carolina; Murat, Moral aiid Political Sketch of the United Stales 
 .[London, 1833^ (also under the title America and Americans [New 
 York, 1849]); Dwight, Travels, ii, 459; iv, 32; Roosevelt, Wimiing of the 
 West, iii, 5.
 
 372 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive 
 farming and to manufacture. A decade before this, Ohio 
 had shown the same transition stage. The demand for land 
 and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever 
 onward. The sectional aspects of the agricultural frontier 
 demand historical study. The United States Department of 
 Agriculture has published two bulletins (Nos. lo and ii, of 
 the Division of Biological Survey), which give maps showing 
 the Life Zones and Crop Zones of the United States, and the 
 Geographic Distribution of Cereals in North America. The 
 census volume on agriculture contains other maps showing 
 the distribution of various crops and products. As the 
 farmer's frontier advanced westward it reached and traversed 
 these natural physiographic areas. The history of the farmer's 
 frontier is in part a history of the struggle between these 
 natural conditions and the custom of the farmer to raise the 
 crops and use the methods of the other regions which he has 
 left. The tragedy of the occupation of the arid tract, where 
 the optimism of the pioneer farmer met its first rude rebuff 
 by nature itself, is a case in point. 
 
 Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, 
 and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of viev/ of 
 the frontier itself, we next inquire what were the influences 
 on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration 
 of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have 
 space for. 
 
 Composite Nationality 
 
 First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of 
 a composite nationality for the American people. The coast 
 was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental 
 immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the 
 case from the early colonial days. The Scotch-Irish and the 
 Palatine-Germans, or "Pennsylvania Dutch," furnished the 
 dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. With
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 373 
 
 these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or re- 
 demptioners, who, at the expiration of their time of service, 
 passed to the frontier. Governor Spotswood, of Virginia, 
 writes, in 171 7, "The inhabitants of our frontiers are com- 
 posed generally of such as have been transported hither as 
 servants, and, being out of their time, settle themselves 
 where land is to be taken up and that will produce the neces- 
 sarys of life with little labour." ^ Very generally these re- 
 demptioners were of non-English stock. In the crucible of 
 the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, 
 and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality 
 nor characteristics. The process has gone on from the early 
 days to our own. Burke and other writers in the middle 
 of the eighteenth century believed that Pennsylvania ^ was 
 "threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in lan- 
 guage, manners, and perhaps even inclinations." The German 
 and Scotch-Irish elements in the frontier of the South were 
 only less great. In the middle of the present century the 
 German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable 
 that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German 
 state out of the commonwealth by concentrating their coloni- 
 zation.^ By the census of 1890 South Dakota had a per- 
 centage of persons of foreign parentage to total population 
 of sixty; Wisconsin, seventy- three; Minnesota, seventy-five; 
 and North Dakota, seventy-nine. Such examples teach us 
 to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common 
 English speech in America into a belief that the stock is also 
 English. 
 
 Industrial Independence 
 
 In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our 
 dependence on England. The coast, particularly of the South, 
 
 ^ Spotswood Papers, in Collections of Virginia Historical Society, vols, 
 i, ii. 
 
 ^ Burke, European Selllemenls, etc. [1765 ed.], ii, 200. 
 ^ Everest, in Wisconsin Historical Collections, xii, 7 ff.
 
 374 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England 
 for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a 
 dependence on the northern colonies for articles of food. 
 Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, writes in the middle of 
 the eighteenth century: "Our trade with New York and 
 Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little 
 money and bills we could gather from other places for their 
 bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their 
 produce, all which, except beer, our new townships began to 
 supply us with, which are settled with very industrious and 
 thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number 
 of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from 
 being a detriment to us." ^ Before long the frontier created 
 a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it 
 became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies 
 directly to the consumers' wharves, and carry away staple 
 crops, and staple crops began to give way to diversified agri- 
 culture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier 
 action upon the northern section is perceived when we realize 
 how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like 
 Boston, New York, and Baltimore, to engage in rivalry for 
 what Washington called "the extensive and valuable trade 
 of a rising empire." 
 
 Effects on National Legislation 
 
 The legislation which most developed the powers of the 
 national government, and played the largest part in its activity, 
 was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the 
 subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement as sub- 
 sidiary to the slavery question. But when American history 
 comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery 
 question is an incident. In the period from the end of the 
 first half of the present century to the close of the Civil War 
 slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. 
 
 ^ Weston, Documents connected with History of South Carotina, p. 6i.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 375 
 
 But this does not justify Dr. von Hoist (to take an example) 
 in treating our constitutional history in its formative period 
 down to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly 
 to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title 
 Constitutional History of the United States. The growth of 
 nationalism and the evolution of American political institu- 
 tions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. Even 
 so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his history of the United 
 States sinqe the compromise of 1850, has treated the legislation 
 called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery 
 struggle. 
 
 This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods 
 of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement 
 and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing 
 effects. Over internal improvements occurred great debates, 
 in which grave constitutional questions were discussed. 
 Sectional groupings appear in the votes, profoundly significant 
 for the historian.^ Loose construction increased as the nation 
 marched westward.^ But the West was not content with 
 bringing the farm to the factory. Under the lead of Clay 
 — "Harry of the West" — protective tariffs were passed, 
 with the cry of bringing the factory to the farm. The dis- 
 position of the public lands was a third important subject of 
 national legislation influenced by the frontier. 
 
 Effects on Institutions 
 
 It is hardly necessary to do more than mention the fact 
 that the West was a field in which new political institutions 
 were to be created. It offered a wide opportunity for specu- 
 lative creation and for adjustment of old institutions to new 
 
 ' Cf. Libby, "Plea for the Study of Votes in Congress," in Report of 
 American Historical Association for i8g6, p. 223; Turner, Rise of the New 
 West, Introduction. 
 
 ^ See, for exam[)le, the speech of Clay, in the House of Representatives, 
 January 30, 1824.
 
 376 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 conditions. The study of the evolution of western institu- 
 tions shows how slight was the proportion of actual theoretic 
 invention of institutions; but there is abundance of oppor- 
 tunity for study of the sources of the institutions actually 
 chosen, the causes of the selection, the degree of transformation 
 by the new conditions, and the new institutions actually 
 produced by the new environment. 
 
 The Public Domain 
 
 The public domain has been a force of profound importance 
 in the nationalization and development of the government. 
 The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless states, 
 and of the ordinance of 1787, need no discussion.^ Admin- 
 istratively the frontier called out some of the highest and 
 most vitalizing activities of the general government. The 
 purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning 
 point in the history of the repubhc, inasmuch as it afforded 
 both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of 
 the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the 
 purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and 
 demands. As frontier states accrued to the Union the national 
 power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun 
 monument, Mr. Lamar explained, "In 1789 the states were 
 the creators of the federal government; in i86j the federal 
 government was the creator of a large majority of the states." 
 
 When we consider the public domain from the point of 
 view of the sale and disposal of the pubHc lands,^ we are 
 again brought face to face with the frontier. The policy of 
 the United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast 
 
 1 See the admirable monograph by Professor H. B. Adams, Maryland's 
 Influence on the Land Cessions; and also President Welling, in Papers Ameri- 
 can Historical Association, iii, 411; Barrett, Evolution of the Ordinance of 
 
 1787. 
 
 2 Sanborn, "Congressional Land Grants in Aid of Raikoads," Bulletm 
 
 of the University of Wisconsin ; Donaldson, Public Domain.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 377 
 
 with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts 
 to make this domain a source of revenue, and to withhold 
 it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, 
 were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were 
 powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. 
 John Quincy Adams was obliged to confess: " My own system 
 of administration, which was to make the national domain 
 the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing internal 
 improvement, has failed." The reason is obvious; a system 
 of administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted 
 land. Adams states the situation as foUows: "The slave- 
 holders of the South have bought the cooperation of the 
 western country by the bribe of the western lands, abandon- 
 ing to the new western states their own proportion of the 
 public property and aiding them in the design of grasping all 
 the lands into their own hands. Thomas H. Benton was the 
 author of this system, which he brought forward as a substi- 
 tute for the American system of Mr. Clay, and to supplant 
 him as the leading statesman of the West. Mr. Clay, by 
 his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own 
 American system. At the same time he brought forward a 
 plan for distributing among all the states of the Union the 
 proceeds of the sales of the pubhc lands. His bill for that 
 purpose passed both houses of Congress, but was vetoed by 
 President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December, 
 1832, formally recommended that all public lands should be 
 gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the 
 states in which the lands are situated.^ 
 
 ''No subject," said Henry Clay, "which has presented itself 
 to the present, or perhaps any preceding, Congress, is of greater 
 magnitude than that of the public lands." When we consider 
 the far-reaching effects of the government's land policy upon 
 political, economic, and social aspects of American life, we 
 are disposed to agree with him. But this legislation was 
 1 J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, ix, 247, 248.
 
 378 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 framed under frontier influences, ahd under the lead of west- 
 ern statesmen like Benton and Jackson. Said Senator Scott, 
 of Indiana, in 184 1: "I consider the preemption law merely 
 declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers." 
 
 National Tendencies of the Frontier 
 
 It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, 
 tariff, and internal improvements — the American system of 
 the nationalizing Whig party — was conditioned on frontier 
 ideas and needs. But it was not merely in legislative action 
 that the frontier worked against the sectionalism of the coast. 
 The economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked 
 against sectionalism. The men of the frontier had closer re- 
 semblances to the middle region than to either of the other 
 sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed plot of southern 
 frontier emigration, and although she passed on her settlers 
 along the Great Valley into the west of Virginia and the Caro- 
 linas, yet the industrial society of these southern frontiersmen 
 was always more like that of the middle region than like that 
 of the tide-water portion of the South, which later came to 
 spread its industrial type throughout the South. 
 
 The middle region, entered by New York harbor, was an 
 open door to all Europe. The tide-water part of the South 
 represented typical Englishmen, modified by a warm climate 
 and servile labor, and living in baronial fashion on great 
 plantations; New England stood for a special English move- 
 ment, — Puritanism. The middle region was less English 
 than the other sections. It had a wide mixture of nationaHties, 
 a varied society, the mixed town and county system of local 
 government, a varied economic Hfe, many religious sects. 
 In short, it was a region mediating between New England 
 and the South, and the East and the West. It represented 
 the composite nationaHty which the contemporary United 
 States exhibits, that juxtaposition of non-English groups, 
 occupying a valley or a little settlement, and presenting
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 379 
 
 reflections of the map of Europe in their variety. It was 
 democratic and non-sectional, if not national; "easy, tolerant, 
 and contented"; rooted strongly in material prosperity. 
 It was typical of the modern United States. It was least 
 sectional, not only because it lay between North and South, 
 but also because with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from 
 its settled region, and with a system of connecting water- 
 ways, the middle region mediated between East and West 
 as well as between North and South. Thus it became the 
 typically American region. Even the New Englander, who 
 was shut out from the frontier by the middle region, tarrying 
 in New York or Pennsylvania on his westward march, lost 
 the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way.^ 
 
 Moreover, it must be recalled that the western and central 
 New England settler who furnished the western movement 
 was not the typical tide-water New Englander: he was less 
 conservative and contented, more democratic and restless. 
 
 The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South 
 finally broke down the contrast between the "tide- water" 
 region and the rest of the South, and based southern interests 
 on slavery. Before this process revealed its results, the 
 western portion of the South, which was akin to Pennsyl- 
 vania in stock, society, and industry, showed tendencies to 
 fall away from the faith of the fathers into internal improve- 
 ment legislation and nationalism. In the Virginia convention 
 of 1829-1830, called to revise the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of 
 Chesterfield, one of the tide- water counties, declared: 
 
 One of the main causes of discontent which led to this convention, 
 that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration 
 for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the senti- 
 ments of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our 
 reverence for the constituted authorities of the state, was an over- 
 weening passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect 
 knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West 
 
 1 Author's article in The Mgis [Madison, Wis.], November 4, 1892, and 
 Allanlic MoiUldy, September, 1896, p. 294, and April, 1897, pp. 436, 441, 442.
 
 38o FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle 
 (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal object of those who 
 set this ball of revolution in motion, to overturn the doctrine of state 
 rights, of which Virginia has been the very pillar, and to remove the 
 barrier she has interposed to the interference of the federal govern- 
 ment in that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing 
 the legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the federal car. 
 
 It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that trans- 
 formed the democracy of Jefferson into the national repub- 
 licanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson. 
 The West of the War of 1812, the West of Clay and Benton 
 and Harrison and Andrew Jackson, shut off by the Middle 
 States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a 
 solidarity of its own with national tendencies.^ On the tide 
 of the Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled 
 into a nation. Interstate migration went steadily on, — a 
 process of cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions. The 
 fierce struggle of the sections over slavery on the western 
 frontier does not diminish the truth of this statement; it 
 proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that 
 would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. 
 It was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: "I believe 
 this government cannot endure permanently half slave and 
 half free. It will become all of one thing or all of the other." 
 Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the 
 nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the 
 western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. 
 The effects reached back from the frontier, and affected 
 profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World. 
 
 Growth of Democracy 
 
 But the most important effect of the frontier has been in 
 the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has 
 been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. 
 
 ^ Cf. Roosevelt, Thomas Benton, chap. i.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 381 
 
 Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind 
 of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency 
 is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and par- 
 ticularly to any direct control. The taxgatherer is viewed 
 as a representative of oppression. Professor Osgood, in an 
 able article,^ has pointed out that the frontier conditions 
 prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the expla- 
 nation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty 
 was sometimes confused with absence of all effective govern- 
 ment. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty 
 of instituting a strong government in the period of the Con- 
 federacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning 
 promoted democracy. 
 
 The frontier states that came into the Union in the first 
 quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic 
 suffrage provisions, and had reactive effects of the highest 
 importance upon the older states whose peoples were being 
 attracted there. An extension of the franchise became 
 essential. It was western New York that forced an extension 
 of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that state in 
 1 821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide- 
 water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the 
 constitution framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region 
 a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide- 
 water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as an effective 
 force in the nation came in with western preponderance under 
 Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the 
 triumph of the frontier — with all of its good and with all 
 of its evil element.^ An interesting illustration of the tone of 
 frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in 
 the Virginia convention already referred to. A representative 
 from western Virginia declared: 
 
 'o' 
 
 1 Political Science Quarlcrly, ii, 457; Sumner, Alexander Haniillon, chaps, 
 ii-vii; Turner, in Atlantic Monthly, January, 1903. 
 ^ Cf. Wilson, Division and Reunion, pp. 15, 24.
 
 382 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which this 
 gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze 
 and western habits impart to those emigrants. They are regenerated, 
 poUtically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians; and 
 the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is im- 
 mense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing 
 great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split 
 hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or 
 when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. 
 But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia 
 statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to 
 an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns 
 home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives 
 him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure 
 and uncontaminated. 
 
 So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency 
 exists, and economic power secures political power. But the 
 democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individ- 
 ualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, 
 and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, 
 has its dangers as. well as its benefits. Individualism in 
 America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental 
 affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all 
 the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly devel- 
 oped civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the 
 influence of frontier conditions in permitting inflated paper 
 currency and wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolu- 
 tionary frontier was the region whence emanated many of 
 the worst forms of paper currency.^ The West in the War of 
 1 81 2 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that day, 
 while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of 
 the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next 
 tier of states. Thus each one of the periods of paper-money 
 projects coincides with periods when a new set of frontier 
 communities had arisen, and coincides in area with these 
 
 ' On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation, see 
 Sumner, Alexaiider Hamilton, chap, iii.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 383 
 
 successive frontiers, for the most part. The recent radical 
 Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a state that now 
 declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists 
 itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the develop- 
 ment of the state. A primitive society can hardly be expected 
 to show the appreciation of the complexity of business interests 
 in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these 
 areas of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the 
 frontier can be isolated and studied as a factor in American 
 history of the highest importance. 
 
 Attempts to Check and Regulate the Frontier 
 
 The East has always feared the result of an unregulated 
 advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. 
 The English authorities would have checked settlement at 
 the head waters of the Atlantic tributaries and allowed the 
 "savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade 
 should decrease." This called out Burke's splendid protest: 
 
 If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The 
 people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied 
 in many places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these 
 deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on 
 their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. 
 Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached 
 to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian 
 mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, 
 one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over 
 this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would 
 change their manners with their habits of life; they would soon forget 
 a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes 
 of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers 
 a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors 
 and your counselors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the 
 slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must, 
 be the attempt to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil 
 the command and blessing of Providence, "increase and multiply." 
 Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of
 
 384 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given 
 to the children of men. 
 
 But the English government was not alone in its desire 
 to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. 
 Tide-water Virginia ^ and South Carolina - gerrymandered 
 those colonies to insure the dominance of the coast in their 
 legislatures. Washington desired to settle a state at a time 
 in the Northwest. In the constitutional convention of 1787 
 Gouverneur Morris declared that the western country would 
 not be able to furnish men equally enlightened to share in 
 the administration of our common interests. The busy 
 haunts of men, not the remote wilderness, was the proper 
 school of political talents. "If the western people get power 
 into their hands, they will ruin the Atlantic interest. The 
 back members are always most averse to the best measures." 
 He desired, therefore, to fix such a rule of congressional repre- 
 sentation that the Atlantic States could always outvote the 
 Western.^ Jefferson would reserve from settlement the terri- 
 tory of his Louisiana purchase north of the thirty-second 
 parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in exchange for their 
 settlements east of the Mississippi. "When we shall be full 
 on this side," he writes, "we may lay off a range of states on 
 the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range 
 after range, advancing compactly as we multiply." Madison 
 went so far as to argue to the French minister that the United 
 States had no interest in seeing population extend itself on 
 the right bank of the Mississippi, but should rather fear it. 
 When the Oregon question was under debate, in 1842, Smyth, 
 of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits 
 of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of states 
 
 ^ Debates in the Virginia Constitutional Convention, 1829-1830. 
 
 ^ Calhoun, Works, i, 401-406. 
 
 ^ Elliot's Debates, v, 298. Cf. Josiah Quincy's outburst in the House 
 of Representativ'cs on the admission of Louisiana, January 14, 181 1. See 
 Johnston, American Orations, i, 145.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 385 
 
 beyond the Mississippi, complaining that the seaboard states 
 were being drained of the flower of their population by the 
 bringing of too much land into market. Even Thomas Benton, 
 the man of widest views of the destiny of the West, at this 
 stage of his career declared that along the ridge of the Rocky 
 mountains " the western limits of the republic should be drawn, 
 and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised 
 upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down." ^ But 
 the attempts to limit the boundaries, to restrict land sales 
 and settlement, and to deprive the West of its share of political 
 power were all in vain. Steadily the frontier of settlement 
 advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and 
 nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old 
 World. 
 
 Religious Organization 
 
 The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier 
 came through its educational and religious activity, exerted 
 by interstate migration and by organized societies. Speaking, 
 in 1835, Dr. Lyman Beecher declared: "It is equally plain that 
 the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided 
 in the West," and he pointed out that the population of the 
 West "is assembled from all the states of the Union and from 
 all the nations of Europe, and is rushing in like the waters 
 of the flood, demanding for its moral preservation the imme- 
 diate and universal action of those institutions which dis- 
 cipline the mind and arm, the conscience and the heart. And 
 so various are the opinions and habits, and so recent and 
 imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse are the settle- 
 ments of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment 
 can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite 
 institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in 
 their utmost perfection and power. A nation is being 'born 
 in a day.' . . . But what will become of the West if her 
 
 * Speech in the Senate, March i, 1825; Register of Debates, i, 721.
 
 386 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of power, while those 
 great institutions linger which are necessary to form the mind 
 and the conscience and the heart of that vast world? It 
 must not be permitted. . . . Let no man in the East quiet 
 himself and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the 
 West. . . . Her destiny is our destiny." 
 
 With the appeal to the conscience of Nev/ England, he 
 adds appeals to her fears lest other religious sects anticipate 
 her own. The New England preacher and the school-teacher 
 left their mark on the West. The dread of western emanci- 
 pation from New England's political and economic control 
 was paralleled by her fears lest the West cut loose from her 
 religion. Commenting, in 1850, on reports that settlement 
 was rapidly extending northward in Wisconsin, the editor 
 of the Home Missionary writes: "We scarcely know whether 
 to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our settlements. 
 While we sympathize in whatever tends to increase the phys- 
 ical resources and prosperity of our country, we cannot forget 
 that with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter 
 corners of the land the supply of the means of grace is becom- 
 ing relatively less and less." Acting in accordance with such 
 ideas, home missions were established and western colleges 
 were erected. As seaboard cities like Philadelphia, New York, 
 and Baltimore strove for the mastery of western trade, so 
 the various denominations strove for the possession of the 
 West. Thus an intellectual stream from New England 
 sources fertilized the West. Other sections sent their mis- 
 sionaries; but the real struggle was between sects. The con- 
 test for power and the expansive tendency furnished to the 
 various sects by the existence of a moving frontier had im- 
 portant results on the character of religious organization in 
 the United States. The multiplication of rival churches in 
 the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. 
 The effects of western freedom and newness in producing 
 religious isms is noteworthy. Illustrations of this tendency
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 387 
 
 may be seen in the development of the Millerites, Spiritualists, 
 and Mormons of western New York in its frontier days. In 
 general the religious aspects of the frontier deserved study. 
 
 Intellectual Traits 
 
 From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits 
 of profound importance. The works of travelers along each 
 frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common 
 traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still per- 
 sisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a 
 higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the 
 frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. 
 That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and 
 inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick 
 to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, 
 lacking in the artistic, but powerful to effect great ends; 
 that restless, nervous energy; ^ that dominant individualism, 
 working for good and for evil, and, withal, that buoyancy 
 and exuberance which come with freedom, — these are traits 
 of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the 
 existence of the frontier. We are not easily aware of the deep 
 influence of this individuahstic way of thinking upon our 
 present conditions. It persists in the midst of a society that 
 has passed away from the conditions that occasioned it. It 
 makes it difficult to secure social regulation of business enter- 
 prises that are essentially public; it is a stumbling-block 
 in the way of civil-service reform; it permeates our doctrines 
 
 1 Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics 
 of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people could 
 have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them. 
 Cf. Sumner, Alexander Ilamillon, p. 98, and Adams, History of the United 
 States, i, 60; ix, 240, 241. The transition appears to become marked at 
 the close of the War of 1812, a period when interest centered upon the 
 development of the West, and the West was noted for restless energy.— 
 Grund, Americans, ii, i.
 
 388 FREDERICK J. TURNER 
 
 of education; ^ but with the passing of the free lands a vast 
 extension of the social tendency may be expected in America. 
 Ratzel, the well-known geographer, has pointed out the 
 fact that for centuries the great unoccupied area of America 
 furnished to the American spirit something of its own largeness. 
 It has given a largeness of design and an optimism to American 
 thought.^ Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed 
 into the waters of the New World, America has been another 
 name for opportunity, and the people of the United States 
 have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has 
 not only been open, but has even been forced upon them. He 
 would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive 
 character of American life has now entirely ceased. Move- 
 ment has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training 
 has no effect upon a people, the American energy will contin- 
 ually demand a wider field for its exercise.^ But never again 
 will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, 
 at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint 
 is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn 
 American environment is there with its imperious summons 
 to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are 
 also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of 
 custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of oppor- 
 tunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and 
 freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impa- 
 tience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its 
 lessons have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediter- 
 ranean sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, 
 
 1 See the able paper by Professor De Garmo on "Social Aspects of 
 Moral Education," in the Third Yearbook of the National Herbart Society, 
 
 1897, P- 37- 
 
 ^ See paper on "The West as a Field for Historical Study," in Report of 
 American Historical Association for i8g6, pp. 279-319. 
 
 ' The commentary upon this sentence — written in 1893 — lies in the 
 recent history of Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, and the Isth- 
 mian Canal.
 
 THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 389 
 
 offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and 
 activities, that, and more, the ever-retreating frontier has 
 been to the United States directly, and to the nations of 
 Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the 
 discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life 
 under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its 
 going has closed the first period of American history.
 
 THE FATALISM OF THE MULTITUDE ^ 
 
 James Bryce 
 
 One feature of thought and sentiment in the United States 
 needs a chapter to itself because it has been by most observers 
 of the country either ignored or confounded with a phenomenon 
 which is at bottom quite different. This is a fatalistic atti- 
 tude of mind, which, since it disposes men to acquiesce in 
 the rule of numbers, has been, when perceived, attributed 
 to or identified with what is commonly called the Tyranny of 
 the Majority. The tendency to fatalism is never far from 
 mankind. It is one of the first solutions of the riddle of the 
 earth propounded by metaphysics. It is one of the last 
 propounded by science. It has at all times formed the back- 
 ground to religions. No race is naturally less disposed to 
 a fatalistic view of things than is the Anglo-American, with 
 its restless self-reliant energy, 
 
 Nil actum reputans dum quid restaret agendum, 
 
 its slender taste for introspection or meditation. Never- 
 theless even in this people the conditions of life and politics 
 have bred a sentiment or tendency which seems best described 
 by the name of fatalism. 
 
 In small and rude communities, every free man, or at least 
 every head of a household, feels his own significance and real- 
 izes his own independence. He relies on himself, he is little 
 interfered with by neighbours or rulers. ^ His will and his 
 
 1 From The American Commonwealth (1889 Edition), vol. ii, chap. Ixxxiv, 
 pp. 297-306; cop>Tight. Reprinted by permission of the MacmiUan Com- 
 pany. 
 
 ^ The kind of self-reliant attitude I am seeking to describe is qiute a 
 different thing from the supposed "state of nature" in which a man has
 
 THE FATALISM OF THE MULTITUDE 391 
 
 action count for something in the conduct of the affairs of 
 the community he belongs to, yet common affairs are few 
 compared to those in which he must depend on his own 
 exertions. The most striking pictures of individuahsm that 
 literature has preserved for us are those of the Homeric 
 heroes, and of the even more terrible and self-reliant warriors 
 of the Scandinavian sagas, men like Ragnar Lodbrog and 
 Egil, son of Skallagrim, who did not regard even the gods, 
 but trusted to their own might and main. In more de- 
 veloped states of society organized on an oligarchic basis, 
 such as were the feudal kingdoms of the Middle Ages, or 
 in socially aristocratic countries such as most parts of Europe 
 have remained down to our own time, the bulk of the people 
 are no doubt in a dependent condition, but each person de- 
 rives a certain sense of personal consequence from the strength 
 of his group and of the person or family at the head of it. 
 Moreover, the upper class, being the class which thinks and 
 writes, as well as leads in action, impresses its own type upon 
 the character of the whole nation, and that type is still in- 
 dividualistic, with a strong consciousness of personal free 
 will, and a tendency for each man, if not to think for himself, at 
 least to value and to rely on his own opinion. 
 
 Let us suppose, however, that the aristocratic structure 
 of society has been dissolved, that the old groups have dis- 
 appeared, that men have come to feel themselves members 
 rather of the nation than of classes, or groups, or communities 
 within the nation, that a levelling process has destroyed the 
 ascendency of birth and rank, that large landed estates no 
 longer exist, and that many persons in what was previously 
 the humbler class are found possessed of property. Under 
 such conditions of social equality the habit of intellectual 
 command and individual self-confidence will have vanished 
 
 no legal relations with his fellows. It may exist among the members of 
 a community closely united by legal tics. It was evidently strong among 
 the early Romans, who were united by such tics into family and clan groups.
 
 392 JAMES BRYCE 
 
 from the leading class, which creates the type of national 
 character, and will exist nowhere in the nation. 
 
 Let us suppose, further, that political equality has gone 
 hand in hand with the levelling down of social eminence. 
 Every citizen enjoys the same right of electing the representa- 
 tives and oflficials, the same right of himself becoming a repre- 
 sentative or an official. Every one is equally concerned in 
 the conduct of public affairs, and since no man's opinion, 
 however great his superiority in wealth, knowledge, or personal 
 capacity, is legally entitled to any more weight than another's, 
 no man is entitled to set special value on his own opinion, or 
 to expect others to defer to it; for pretensions to authority 
 will be promptly resented. All disputes are referred to the 
 determination of the majority, there being no legal distinction 
 between the naturally strong and the naturally weak, between 
 the rich and the poor, between the wise and the foolish. In 
 such a state of things the strong man's self-confidence and sense 
 of individual force will inevitably have been lowered, because 
 he will feel that he- is only one of many, that his vote or voice 
 counts for no more than that of his neighbour, that he can 
 prevail, if at all, only by keeping himself on a level with his 
 neighbour and recognizing the latter's personality as being 
 every whit equal to his own. 
 
 Suppose further that all this takes place in an enormously 
 large and populous country, where the governing voters are 
 counted by so many millions that each individual feels himself 
 a mere drop in the ocean, the influence which he can exert 
 privately, whether by his personal gifts or by his wealth, 
 being confined to the small circle of his town or neighbour- 
 hood. On all sides there stretches round him an inimitable 
 horizon; and beneath the blue vault which covers that horizon 
 there is everywhere the same busy multitude with its clamour 
 of mingled voices which he hears close by. In this multitude 
 his own being seems lost. He has the sense of insignificance 
 which overwhelms us when at night we survey the host of
 
 THE FATALISM OF THE MULTITUDE 393 
 
 heaven and know that from even the nearest star this planet 
 of ours is invisible. 
 
 In such a country, where complete political equality is 
 strengthened and perfected by complete social equality, 
 where the will of the majority is absolute, unquestioned, 
 always invoked to decide every question, and where the 
 numbers which decide are so vast that one comes to regard 
 them as one regards the largely working forces of nature, 
 we may expect to find certain feelings and beliefs dominant 
 in the minds of men. 
 
 One of these is that the majority must prevail. All free 
 government rests on this, for there is no other way of work- 
 ing free government. To obey the majority is therefore both 
 a necessity and a duty, a duty because the alternative would 
 be ruin and the breaking-up of laws. 
 
 Out of this dogma there grows up another which is less 
 distinctly admitted, and indeed held rather implicitly than 
 consciously, that the majority is right. And out of both of 
 these there grows again the feeling, still less consciously held, 
 but not less truly operative, that it is vain to oppose or censure 
 the majority. 
 
 It may seem that there is a long step from the first of these 
 propositions to the second and third; and that, in fact, the 
 very existence of a minority striving with a majority implies 
 that there must be many who hold the majority to be wrong, 
 and are prepared to resist it. Men do not at once abandon 
 their views because they have been outvoted; they reiterate 
 their views, they reorganize their party, they hope to prevail, 
 and often do prevail in a subsequent trial of strength. 
 
 All this is doubtless involved in the very methods of popular 
 government. But it is nevertheless true that the belief in 
 the rights of the majority lies very near to the belief that the 
 majority must be right. As self-government is based on the 
 idea that each man is more likely to be right than to be wrong, 
 and that one man's opinion must be treated as equally good
 
 394 JAMES BRYCE 
 
 with another's, there is a presumption that when twenty 
 thousand vote one way and twenty-one thousand another, 
 the view of the greater number is the better view. The habit 
 of deference to a decision actually given strengthens this 
 presumption, and weaves it into the texture of every mind. 
 A conscientious citizen feels that he ought to obey the deter- 
 mination of the majority, and naturally prefers to think that 
 which he obeys to be right. A citizen languidly interested 
 in the question at issue finds it easier to comply with and 
 adopt the view of the majority than to hold out against it. 
 A small number of men with strong convictions or warm 
 party feeling will for a time resist. But even they feel dif- 
 ferently towards their cause after it has been defeated from 
 what they did while it had still a prospect of success. They 
 know that in the same proportion in which their supporters 
 are dismayed the majority is emboldened and confirmed in 
 its views. It will be harder to fight a second battle than it 
 was to fight the first, for there is (so to speak) a steeper slope 
 of popular disapproval to be climbed. This sufficiently 
 appears from the importance attached in self-governing 
 countries to test elections. In England what is called a "by- 
 election," i.e. the election of a member of Parliament to fill 
 a casual vacancy, is not only taken by partisans as an index 
 of their strength in the nation at large, but it if can be regarded 
 as typical, strengthens or weakens a party by turning the 
 minds of waverers. In the United States, when the elections 
 in any State precede by a few weeks a presidential contest, 
 their effect has sometimes been so great as virtually to deter- 
 mine that contest by filling one side with hope and the other 
 with despondency. Those who prefer to swim with the stream 
 are numerous everywhere, and their votes have as much weight 
 as the votes of the keenest partisans. A man of convictions 
 may insist that the arguments on both sides are after the 
 polling just what they were before. But the average man will 
 repeat his arguments with less faith, less zeal, more of a secret
 
 THE FATALISM OF THE MULTITUDE 395 
 
 fear that he may be wrong, than he did while the majority 
 was still doubtful; and after every reassertion by the majority 
 of its judgment, his knees grow feebler till at last they refuse 
 to carry him into the combat. 
 
 The larger the scale on which the majority works, the more 
 potent are these tendencies. When the scene of action is a 
 small commonwealth, the individual voters are many of them 
 personally known to one another, and the causes which de- 
 termine their votes are understood and discounted. When 
 it is a moderately-sized country, the towns or districts which 
 compose it are not too numerous for reckoning to overtake 
 and imagination to picture them, and in many cases their 
 action can be explained by well-known reasons which may be 
 represented as transitory. But when the theatre stretches 
 itself to a continent, the number of voters is counted by many 
 millions, the wings of imagination droop, and the huge voting 
 mass ceases to be thought of as merely so many individual 
 human beings no wiser or better than one's own neighbours. 
 The phenomena seem to pass into the category of the phe- 
 nomena of nature, governed by far-reaching and inexorable 
 laws whose character science has only imperfectly ascertained. 
 They inspire a sort of awe, a sense of individual impotence, 
 like that which man feels when he contemplates the majestic 
 and eternal forces of the inanimate world. 
 
 Such a feeling is still far stronger when it operates, not on 
 a cohesive minority which had lately hoped, or may yet hope, 
 to become a majority, but on a single man or small group of 
 persons cherishing some opinion which the mass disapproves. 
 Thus out of the mingled feelings that the multitude will pre- 
 vail, and that the multitude, because it will prevail, must be 
 right, there grows a self-distrust, a despondency, a disposition 
 to fall into line, to acquiesce in the dominant opinion, to 
 submit thought as well as action to the encompassing power 
 of numbers. Now and then a resolute man will, like Atha- 
 nasius, stand alone against the world. But such a man must
 
 396 JAMES BRYCE 
 
 have, like Athanasius, some special spring of inward strength; 
 and the difficulty of winning over others against the over- 
 whelming weight of the multitude will, even in such a man, 
 dull the edge of hope and enterprise. An individual seeking 
 to make his view prevail, looks forth on his hostile fellow- 
 countrymen as a solitary swimmer, raised high on a billow 
 miles from land, looks over the countless waves that divide 
 him from the shore, and quails to think how small the chance 
 that his strength can bear him thither. 
 
 This tendency to acquiescence and submission, this sense 
 of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the 
 affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement 
 may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to 
 call the Fatalism of the Multitude. It is often confounded 
 with the tyranny of the majority, but is at bottom different, 
 though, of course, its existence makes tyranny by the majority 
 easier and more complete. The tyranny of the majority 
 means, or ought to mean, for it is a phrase apt to be loosely 
 used, the disposition of the greater number to unfairly impose 
 their will on the smaller number. A majority is tyrannical 
 when it cuts short the discussion needed to give the minority 
 a fair chance of convincing it that it is wrong, or when it 
 passes laws restricting individual freedom in matters which 
 law need not touch, or even when it subjects to social penalties 
 persons who disagree with it in matters not essential to the 
 common welfare. But the fatalistic attitude I have been 
 seeking to describe does not imply any exercise of power by 
 the majority at all. It may rather seem to soften and make 
 less odious such an exercise of power, may even dispense with 
 that exercise, because it disposes a minority to submit with- 
 out the need of a command, to spontaneously renounce its 
 own view and fall in with the view which the majority has 
 expressed. In the fatalism of the multitude there is neither 
 legal nor moral compulsion; there is merely a loss of resisting 
 power, a diminished sense of personal responsibility and of the
 
 THE FATALISM OF THE MULTITUDE 397 
 
 duty to battle for one's own opinions, such as has been bred 
 in some peoples by the belief in an overmastering fate. It is 
 true that the force to which the citizen of the vast democracy 
 submits is a moral force, not that of an unapproachable Allah, 
 nor of the unchangeable laws of matter. But it is a moral 
 force acting on so vast a scale, and from causes so often un- 
 predictable, that its effect on the mind of the individual may 
 well be compared with that which religious or scientific fatalism 
 creates. 
 
 No one will suppose that the above sketch is intended to 
 apply literally to the United States, where in some matters 
 legal restrictions check a majority, where local self-govern- 
 ment gives the humblest citizen a sphere for public action, 
 where individualism is still in many forms and directions so 
 vigorous. An American explorer, an American settler in new 
 lands, an American man of business pushing a great enter- 
 prise, is a being as bold and resourceful as the world has ever 
 seen. All I seek to convey is that there are in the United 
 States signs of such a fatalistic temper, signs which one must 
 expect to find wherever a vast population governs itself under 
 a system of complete social and political equality. And 
 there exist in the American Republic several conditions which 
 specially tend to engender such a temper. 
 
 One of these is the unbounded freedom of discussion. Every 
 view, every line of policy, has its fair chance before the people. 
 No one can say that audience has been denied him, and 
 comfort himself with the hope that, when he is heard, the world 
 will come round to him. For the sense of grievance and in- 
 justice, which so often feeds the flame of resistance in the 
 persecuted minority, there is less cause in a country like this, 
 where the freedom of the press, the right of public meeting, 
 the right of association and agitation have been legally ex- 
 tended, and are daily exerted, more widely than anywhere 
 else in the world. He whom the multitude condemns or 
 ignores has no further court of appeal to look to. Rome has
 
 398 JAMES BRYCE 
 
 spoken. His cause has been heard and judgment has gone 
 against him. 
 
 Another is the intense faith which the Americans have in 
 the soundness of their institutions, and in the future of their 
 country. Foreign critics have said that they think themselves 
 the special objects of the protecting care of Providence. If 
 this be so, it is matter neither for surprise nor for sarcasm. 
 They are a religious people. They are trying, and that on the 
 largest scale, the most remarkable experiment in government 
 the world has yet witnessed. They have more than once 
 been surrounded by perils which affrighted the stoutest 
 hearts, and they have escaped from these perils into peace and 
 prosperity. There is among pious persons a deep conviction 
 — I have often heard it expressed in sermons and prayers 
 with evident sincerity — that the nation has been, and is 
 being, more than other nations, guided by the hand of God. 
 And, even when the feeling does not take a theological expres- 
 sion, the belief in what is called the " Mission of the Republic" 
 for all humanity is' scarcely less ardent. But the foundation 
 of the Republic is confidence in the multitude, in its honesty 
 and good sense, in the certainty of its arriving at right con- 
 clusions. Pessimism is the luxury of a handful; optimism 
 is the private delight, as well as public profession, of nine 
 hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, for nowhere 
 does the individual associate himself more constantly and 
 directly with the greatness of his country. 
 
 Now, such a faith in the people, and in the forces that sway 
 them, disposes a man to acquiescence and submission. He 
 cannot long hold that he is right and the multitude wrong. 
 He cannot suppose that the country will ultimately suffer 
 because it refuses to adopt what he urges upon it. As he 
 comes of an energetic stock, he will use all proper means to 
 state his views, and give them every chance of prevailing. 
 But he submits more readily than an Englishman would do, 
 ay, even to what an Englishman would think an injury to
 
 THE FATALISM OF THE MULTITUDE 399 
 
 his private rights. When a man's legal right has been in- 
 fringed, he will conlidently proceed to enforce at law his 
 claim to redress, knowing that even against the government 
 a just cause will prevail. But if he fails at law, the sense of 
 his individual insignificance will still his voice. It may seem 
 a trivial illustration to observe that when a railway train is 
 late, or a waggon drawn up opposite a warehouse door stops 
 the horse-car for five minutes, the passengers take the delay 
 far more coolly and uncomplainingly than Englishmen would 
 do. But the feeling is the same as that which makes good 
 citizens bear with the tyranny of Bosses. It is all in the 
 course of nature. What is an individual that he should make 
 a fuss because he loses a few minutes, or is taxed too highly? 
 The sense of the immense multitude around him presses down 
 the individual; and, after all, he reflects, " things will come out 
 right" in the end. 
 
 It is hard adequately to convey the impression which the 
 vastness of the country, and the swift growth of its population 
 make upon the European visitor. I well remember how it 
 once came on me after climbing a high mountain in an Eastern 
 State. All around was thick forest; but the setting sun 
 lit up peaks sixty or seventy miles away, and flashed here and 
 there on the windings of some river past a town so far off as 
 to seem only a spot of white. I opened my map, a large map, 
 which I had to spread upon the rocks to examine, and tried 
 to make out, as one would have done in England or Scotland, 
 the points in the view. The map however was useless, be- 
 cause the whole area of the landscape beneath me covered 
 only two or three square inches upon it. From such a height 
 in Scotland the eye would have ranged from sea to sea. But 
 here when one tried to reckon how many more equally wide 
 stretches of landscape lay between this peak and the Missis- 
 sippi, which is itself only a third of the way across the con- 
 tinent, the calculation seemed endless and was soon abandoned. 
 Many an Englishman comes by middle hfe to know nearly
 
 400 JAMES BRYCE 
 
 all England like a glove. He has travelled on all the great 
 railroads; there is hardly a large town in which he has not 
 acquaintances, hardly a county whose scenery is not familiar 
 to him. But no American can be familiar with more than 
 a small part of his country, for his country is a continent. 
 And all Americans live their life through under the sense of 
 this prodigious and daily growing multitude around them, 
 which seems vaster the more you travel, and the more you 
 realize its uniformity. 
 
 We need not here inquire whether the fatalistic attitude 
 I have sought to sketch is the source of more good or evil. It 
 seems at any rate inevitable: nor does it fail to produce a 
 sort of pleasure, for what the individual loses as an individ- 
 ual he seems in a measure to regain as one of the multitude. 
 If the individual is not strong, he is at any rate as strong as 
 any one else. His will counts for as much as any other will. 
 He is overborne by no superiority. Most men are fitter 
 to make part of the multitude than to strive against it. 
 Obedience is to most sweeter than independence; the Roman 
 Catholic Church inspires in its children a stronger affection 
 than any form of Protestantism, for she takes their souls in 
 charge, and assures them that, with obedience, all will be well. 
 
 That which we are presently concerned to note is how greatly 
 such a tendency as I have described facilitates the action of 
 opinion as a governing power, enabling it to prevail more 
 swiftly and more completely than in countries where men have 
 not yet learned to regard the voice of the multitude as the 
 voice of fate. Many submit willingly; some unwillingly, 
 yet they submit. Rarely does any one hold out and venture 
 to tell the great majority of his countrymen that they are 
 wrong. 
 
 Moreover public opinion acquires a solidity which strength- 
 ens the whole body politic. Questions on which the masses 
 have made up their minds pass out of the region of practical 
 discussion. Controversy is confined to minor topics, and
 
 THE FATALISM OF THE MULTITUDE 401 
 
 however vehemently it may rage over these, it disturbs the 
 great underlying matters of agreement no more than a tempest 
 stirs the depths of the Atlantic. Public order becomes more 
 easily maintained, because individuals and small groups have 
 learned to submit even when they feel themselves aggrieved. 
 The man who murmurs against the world, who continues to 
 preach a hopeless cause, incurs contempt, and is apt to be 
 treated as a sort of lunatic. He who is too wise to murmur 
 and too proud to go on preaching to unheeding ears, comes 
 to think that if his doctrine is true, yet the time is not ripe 
 for it. He may be in error; but if he is right, the world will 
 ultimately see that he is right even without his effort. One 
 way or another he finds it hard to believe that this vast mass 
 and force of popular thought in which he lives and moves can 
 be ultimately wrong. 
 
 Securus judicat orbis terrarum.
 
 TRAFFIC 1 
 John Ruskin 
 
 My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here among 
 your hills that I might talk to you about this Exchange you 
 are going to build: but earnestly and seriously asking you to 
 pardon me, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I cannot 
 talk, or at least can say very little, about this same Exchange. 
 I must talk of quite other things, though not willingly; — 
 I could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited me to 
 speak on one subject, I wilfully spoke on another. But I 
 cannot speak, to purpose, of anything about which I do not 
 care; and most simply and sorrowfully I have to tell you, 
 in the outset, that I do not care about this Exchange of yours. 
 
 If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had 
 answered, "I won't come, I don't care about the Exchange 
 of Bradford," you would have been justly offended with me, 
 not knowing the reasons of so blunt a carelessness. So I 
 have come down, hoping that you will patiently let me tell 
 you why, on this, and many other such occasions, I now 
 remain silent, when formerly I should have caught at the 
 opportunity of speaking to a gracious audience. 
 
 In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange, — 
 because you don't; and because you know perfectly well I 
 cannot make you. Look at the essential conditions of the 
 case, which you, as business men, know perfectly well, though 
 perhaps you think I forget them. You are going to spend 
 £30,000, which to you, collectively, is nothing; the buying 
 a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more important matter 
 of consideration to me than building a new Exchange is to 
 
 ^ Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford, England.
 
 TRAFFIC 403 
 
 you. But you think you may as well have the right thing 
 for your money. You know there are a great many odd 
 styles of architecture about; you don't want to do anything 
 ridiculous; you hear of me, among others, as a respectable 
 architectural man-milliner; and you send for me, that I may 
 tell you the leading fashion; and what is, in our shops, for 
 the moment, the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles. 
 
 Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have 
 good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occa- 
 sion. All good architecture is the expression of national life 
 and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager 
 national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think 
 a little of the deep significance of this word "taste"; for no 
 statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener con- 
 troverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. 
 "No," say many of my antagonists, "taste is one thing, 
 morality is another. Tell us what is pretty: we shall be 
 glad to know that; but we need no sermons even were you 
 able to preach them, which may be doubted." 
 
 Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine some- 
 v/hat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — 
 it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial 
 question to any living creature is, "What do you like?" 
 Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. Go 
 out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, 
 what their "taste" is, and if they answer candidly, you know 
 them, body and soul. "You, my friend in the rags, with the 
 unsteady gait, what do you like?" "A pipe and a quartern 
 of gin." I know you. "You, good woman, with the quick 
 step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?" "A swept hearth 
 and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a 
 baby at my breast." Good, I know you also. "You, little 
 girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?" 
 "My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths." "You, 
 little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what
 
 404 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 do you like?" "A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch 
 farthing." Good; we know them all now. What more 
 need we ask? 
 
 ''Nay," perhaps you answer: "we need rather to ask what 
 these people and children do, than what they like. If they 
 do right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong; and if 
 they do wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. 
 Doing is the great thing; and it does not matter that the man 
 likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that the little 
 girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn her 
 lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the 
 sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday School." Indeed, for a 
 short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, 
 resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like 
 doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they 
 have come to like doing it; and as long as they don't like it, 
 they are still in a vicious state. The man is not in health 
 of body who is always thinking of the bottle in the cupboard, 
 though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily 
 enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each 
 in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of 
 true education is to make people not merely do the right things, 
 but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to 
 love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge 
 
 — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, 
 but to hunger and thirst after justice. 
 
 But you may answer or think, "Is the liking for outside 
 ornaments, — for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or archi- 
 tecture, — a moral quality?" Yes, most surely, if a rightly 
 set liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not a moral 
 quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have 
 to define the word "good." I don't mean by "good," clever 
 
 — or learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by 
 Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice: it is an entirely 
 clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever
 
 TRAFFIC 405 
 
 been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and 
 evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged 
 contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an "un- 
 mannered," or "immoral" quality. It is "bad taste" in the 
 profoundest sense — it is the taste of the devils. On the 
 other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a 
 Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the 
 perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That 
 is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of the angels. 
 And all delight in fine art, and all love of it, resolve themselves 
 into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving 
 is the quality which we call "loveliness" — (we ought to have 
 an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which 
 deserve to be hated) ; and it is not an indifferent nor optional 
 thing whether we love this or that; but it is just the vital 
 function of all our being. What we like determines what we 
 are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is in- 
 evitably to form character. 
 
 As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the 
 other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in 
 a book-seller's window. It was — "On the necessity of the 
 diffusion of taste among all classes." "Ah," I thought to 
 myself, "my classifying friend, when you have diffused your 
 taste, v/here will your classes be? The man who likes what 
 you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. In- 
 evitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; 
 but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will 
 dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You 
 get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the 
 Newgate Calendar for literature, and 'Pop goes the Weasel' 
 for music. You think you can make him like Dante and 
 Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, 
 you have made a gentleman of him: — he won't like to go 
 back to his costermongering." 
 
 And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if
 
 4o6 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot 
 be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, 
 legibly, and forever, either in bad art, or by want of art; 
 and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is 
 not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances 
 enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take, 
 for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient 
 courage. You have at present in England only one art of 
 any consequence — that is, iron-working. You know thor- 
 oughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now, do you 
 think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones 
 to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos 
 you have created; do you think, on those iron plates, your 
 courage and endurance are not written forever — not merely 
 with an iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take also your 
 great English vice — European vice — vice of all the world 
 — vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven, bearing 
 with them yet the atmosphere of hell — the vice of jealousy, 
 which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into 
 your councils, and dishonor into your wars — that vice which 
 has rendered for you, and for your next neighboring nation, 
 the daily occupations of existence no longer possible, but 
 with the mail upon your breasts and the sword loose in its 
 sheath; so that at last, you have realized for all the multi- 
 tudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called civiliza- 
 tion of the earth, — you have realized for them all, I say, in 
 person and in policy, what was once true only of the rough 
 Border riders of your Cheviot hills — 
 
 They carved at the meal 
 With gloves of steel, 
 And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd; — 
 
 do you think that this national shame and dastardliness of 
 heart are not written as legibly on every rivet of your iron 
 armor as the strength of the right hands that forged it?
 
 TRAFFIC 
 
 407 
 
 Friends, I know not whether this thing be the more ludi- 
 crous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably both. 
 Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been 
 sent for by some private gentleman, living in a surburban 
 house, with his garden separated only by a fruit-wall from 
 his next door neighbor's; and he had called me to consult 
 with him on the furnishing of his drawing-room. I begin 
 looking about me, and find the walls rather bare; I think 
 such and such a paper might be desirable — perhaps a little 
 fresco here and there on the ceiling — a damask curtain or so 
 at the windows. "Ah," says my employer, "damask curtains, 
 indeed! That's all very fine, but you know I can't afford 
 that kind of thing just now!" "Yet the world credits you 
 with a splendid income!" "Ah, yes," says my friend, "but 
 do you know, at present, I arn obliged to spend it nearly all in 
 steel-traps?" "Steel-traps! *for whom?" "Why, for that 
 fellow on the other side the wall, you know: we're very good 
 friends, capital friends; but we are obliged to keep our traps 
 set on both sides of the wall; we could not possibly keep on 
 friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The 
 worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough; and there's 
 never a day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a 
 new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen milHons 
 a year each in our traps, take it all together; and I don't see 
 how we're to do with less." A highly comic state of life for 
 two private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, 
 not wholly comic? Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there 
 were only one madman in it; and your Christmas pantomime 
 is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the 
 whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own 
 heart's blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than 
 comic, I think. 
 
 Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly 
 allow for that. You don't know what to do with yourselves 
 for a sensation: fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry
 
 4o8 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 you through the whole of this unendurably long mortal life: 
 you liked pop-guns when you were school-boys, and rifles 
 and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but 
 then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, 
 was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, 
 is not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the 
 black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, 
 if I mistake not. 
 
 I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe 
 me, without farther instance, I could show you, in all time, 
 that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art: 
 the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; 
 the visionary religion of Tuscany; the splendid human energy 
 and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do this to-night 
 (I have done it elsewhere before now) ; but I proceed to apply 
 the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner. 
 
 I notice that among all the new buildings which cover 
 your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, 
 that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and man- 
 sions; and I notice also that the churches and schools are 
 almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never 
 Gothic. Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of 
 this? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. 
 When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as 
 churches; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, 
 churches were Italian as well as houses. If there is a Gothic 
 spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there is a Gothic belfry to 
 the Hotel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones builds an Italian 
 Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St. Paul's. 
 But now you live under one school of architecture, and wor- 
 ship under another. What do you mean by doing this? Am 
 I to understand that you are thinking of changing your 
 architecture back to Gothic; and that you treat your churches 
 experimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes 
 you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you
 
 TRAFFIC 409 
 
 consider Gothic a preeminently sacred and beautiful mode 
 of building, which you think, like the fine frankincense, 
 should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for your 
 religious services? For if this be the feeling, though it may 
 seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, at the root 
 of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than that you 
 have separated your religion from your life. 
 
 For consider what a wide significance this fact has; and 
 remember that it is not you only, but all the people of Eng- 
 land, who are behaving thus just now. 
 
 You have all got into the habit of calling the church "the 
 
 house of God." I have seen, over the doors of many churches, 
 
 the legend actually carved, "This is the house of God, and 
 
 this is the gate of heaven." Now, note where that legend 
 
 comes from, and of what place it was first spoken. A boy 
 
 leaves his father's house to go on a long journey on foot, to 
 
 visit his uncle; he has to cross a wild hill-desert; just as if 
 
 one of your own boys had to cross the wolds to visit an uncle 
 
 at Carlisle. The second or third day your boy finds himself 
 
 somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the 
 
 moors, at sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy; he cannot 
 
 go one foot farther that night. Down he lies, to sleep, on 
 
 Wharnside, where best he may, gathering a few of the stones 
 
 together to put under his head; — so wild the place is, he 
 
 cannot get anything but stones. And there, lying under the 
 
 broad night, he has a dream; and he sees a ladder set up on 
 
 the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels 
 
 of God are seen ascending and descending upon it. And when 
 
 he wakes out of his sleep, he says, "How dreadful is this 
 
 place; surely, this is none other than the house of God, and 
 
 this is the gate of heaven." This place, observe; not this 
 
 church; not this city; not this stone, even, which he puts up 
 
 for a memorial — the piece of flint on which his head has lain. 
 
 But this place; this windy slope of Wharnside; this moorland 
 
 hollow, torrent-bitten, snow-blighted; this any place where
 
 4IO JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 God lets down the ladder. And how are you to know where 
 that will be? or how are you to determine where it may be, 
 but by being ready for it always? Do you know where the 
 lightning is to fall next? You do know that, partly; you can 
 guide the lightning; but you cannot guide the going forth of 
 the Spirit, which is as that lightning when it shines from the 
 east to the west. 
 
 But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong 
 verse to serve a merely ecclesiastical purpose, is only one of 
 the thousand instances in which we sink back into gross 
 Judaism. We call our churches "temples." Now, you know 
 perfectly well they are not temples. They have never had, 
 never can have, anything whatever to do with temples. 
 They are "synagogues" — "gathering places" — where you 
 gather yourselves together as an assembly; and by not calling 
 them so, you again miss the force of another mighty text — 
 "Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the hypocrites are; 
 for they love to pray standing in the chirches^' [we should 
 translate it], "that they may be seen of men. But thou, 
 when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast 
 shut thy door, pray to thy Father," — which is, not in chancel 
 nor in aisle, but "in secret." 
 
 Now, you feel, as I say this to you — I know you feel — 
 as if I were trying to take away the honor of your churches. 
 Not so; I am trying to prove to you the honor of your houses 
 and your hills; not that the Church is not sacred — but that 
 the whole Earth is. I would have you feel, what careless, 
 what constant, what infectious sin there is in all modes of 
 thought, whereby, in calling your churches only "holy," you 
 call your hearths and homes "profane"; and have separated 
 yourselves from the heathen by casting all your household 
 gods to the ground, instead of recognizing, in the place of 
 their many and feeble Lares, the presence of your One and 
 Mighty Lord and Lar. 
 
 "But what has all this to do with our Exchange?" you
 
 TRAFFIC 411 
 
 ask me, impatiently. My dear friends, it has just every- 
 thing to do with it; on these inner and great questions depend 
 all the outer and little ones; and if you have asked me down 
 here to speak to you, because you had before been interested 
 in anything I have written, you must know that all I have 
 yet said about architecture was to show this. The book I 
 called "The Seven Lamps" was to show that certain right 
 states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by 
 which all good architecture, without exception, had been 
 produced. "The Stones of Venice" had, from beginning 
 to end, no other aim than to show that the Gothic architec- 
 ture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its 
 features, a state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; 
 and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and 
 in all its features indicated, a state of concealed national 
 infidelity, and of domestic corruption. And now, you ask 
 me what style is best to build in; and how can I answer, 
 knowing the meaning of the two styles, but by another ques- 
 tion — do you mean to build as Christians or as Infidels? 
 And still more — do you mean to build as honest Christians 
 or as honest Infidels? as thoroughly and confessedly either 
 one or the other? You don't like to be asked such rude 
 questions. I cannot help it; they are of much more impor- 
 tance than this Exchange business; and if they can be at 
 once answered, the Exchange business settles itself in a 
 moment. But, before I press them farther, I must ask leave 
 to explain one point clearly. 
 
 In all my past work, my endeavor has been to show that 
 good architecture is essentially religious — the production 
 of a faithful and virtuous, not of an infidel and corrupted, 
 people. But in the course of doing this, I have had also to 
 show that good architecture is not ecclesiastical. People are 
 so apt to look upon religion as the business of the clergy, not 
 their own, that the moment they hear of anything depending 
 on "religion," they think it must also have depended on the
 
 412 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 priesthood; and I have had to take what place was to be 
 occupied between these two errors, and fight both, often with 
 seeming contradiction. Good architecture is the work of 
 good and believing men; therefore, you say, at least some 
 people say, "Good architecture must essentially have been 
 the work of the clergy, not of the laity." No — a thousand 
 times no; good architecture^ has always been the work of 
 the commonalty, not of the clergy. What, you say, those 
 glorious cathedrals — the pride of Europe — did their builders 
 not form Gothic architecture? No; they corrupted Gothic 
 architecture. Gothic was formed in the baron's castle, and 
 the burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts, and 
 hands, and powers of free citizens and warrior kings. By 
 the monk it was used as an instrument for the aid of his 
 superstition; when that superstition became a beautiful 
 madness, and the best hearts of Europe vainly dreamed and 
 pined in the cloister, and vainly raged and perished in the 
 crusade — through that fury of perverted faith and wasted 
 war, the Gothic rose also to its loveliest, most fantastic, and, 
 finally, most foolish dreams; and, in those dreams, was lost. 
 
 I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding 
 me when I come to the gist of what I want to say to-night; — 
 when I repeat, that every great national architecture has 
 been the result and exponent of a great national religion. 
 You can't have bits of it here, bits there — you must have 
 it everywhere, or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a 
 clerical company — it is not the exponent of a theological 
 dogma — it is not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated 
 priesthood; it is the manly language of a people inspired by 
 resolute and common purpose, and rendering resolute and 
 common fidelity to the legible laws of an undoubted God. 
 
 Now, there have as yet been three distinct schools of Euro- 
 pean architecture. I say, European, because Asiatic and 
 
 1 And all other arts, for the most part; even of incredulous and secu- 
 larly-minded commonalties. ,
 
 TRAFFIC 413 
 
 African architectures belong so entirely to other races and 
 climates, that there is no question of them here; only, in 
 passing, I will simply assure you that whatever is good or 
 great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good or great for 
 the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus. 
 We Europeans, then, have had three great religions: the Greek, 
 which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; 
 the Mediaeval, which was the Worship of the God of Judg- 
 ment and Consolation; the Renaissance, which was the 
 worship of the God of Pride and Beauty; these three we have 
 had, — they are past, — and now, at last, we English have 
 got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I 
 want to ask you. But I must explain these three old ones 
 first. 
 
 I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God 
 of Wisdom; so that whatever contended against their religion 
 
 — to the Jews a stumbling block — was, to the Greeks, 
 
 — Foolishness. 
 
 The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in the 
 word, of which we keep the remnant in our words "J9i-urnal" 
 and "Z)i-vine" — the god of Day, Jupiter the revealer. 
 Athena is his daughter, but especially daughter of the Intel- 
 lect, springing armed from the head. We are only with the 
 help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth 
 of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols: but I may 
 note rapidly, that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent 
 fringes, in which she often, in the best statues, is represented 
 as folding up her left hand for better guard, and the Gorgon 
 on her shield, are both representative mainly of the chilling 
 horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it were), of the 
 outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge — that knowl- 
 edge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, 
 the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. 
 For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, 
 danger, and disdain; but from perfect knowledge, given by the
 
 414 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which she 
 is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear. 
 
 This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity, and 
 every habit of life, and every form of his art developed them- 
 selves from the seeking this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; 
 and setting himself, as a man, to do things evermore rightly 
 and strongly; ^ not with any ardent affection or ultimate 
 hope; but with a resolute and continent energy of will, as 
 knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for 
 sin there was no remission. And the Greek architecture rose 
 unerring, bright, clearly defined, and self-contained. 
 
 Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which 
 was essentially the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine 
 is the remission of sins; for which cause it happens, too often, 
 in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and sickness them- 
 selves are partly glorified, as if, the more you had to be healed 
 of, the more divine was the healing. The practical result of 
 this doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin and 
 disease, and of imaginary states of purification from them; 
 thus we have an architecture conceived in a mingled sentiment 
 of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly luxuriant, 
 which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every 
 one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are 
 strong or weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the 
 basest, when base people build it — of all, the noblest, when 
 built by the noble. 
 
 1 It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, was chiefly 
 of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded on 
 Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but 
 design: and the Dorian Apollo- worship and Athenian Virgin- worship are 
 both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these 
 great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres, 
 the givers of human strength and Ufe: then, for heroic example, Hercules. 
 There is no Venus- worship among the Greeks in the great times: and the 
 Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of its harmonies. Compare 
 Aralra Pentelici, § 200.
 
 TRAFFIC 415 
 
 And now note that both these religions — Greek and 
 Mediaeval — perished by falsehood in their own main pur- 
 pose. The Greek religion of Wisdom perished in a false 
 philosophy — "Oppositions of science, falsely so called." 
 The Mediaeval religion of Consolation perished in false com- 
 fort; in remission of sins given lyingly. It was the selling 
 of absolution that ended the Mediaeval faith; and I can tell 
 you more, it is the selling of absolution which, to the end of 
 time, will mark false Christianity. Pure Christianity gives 
 her remission of sins only by ending them; but false Christi- 
 anity gets her remission of sins by compounding for them. 
 And there are many ways of compounding for them. We 
 English have beautiful little quiet ways of buying absolution, 
 whether in low Church or high, far more cunning than any of 
 Tetzel's trading. 
 
 Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of Pleasure, in 
 which all Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, 
 hols masques in every saloon, and then guillotines in every 
 square. And all these three worships issue in vast temple 
 building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and built you 
 the Parthenon — the Virgin's temple. The Mediaeval wor- 
 shipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also — 
 but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist worshipped 
 beauty, of a sort, and built you Versailles, and the Vatican. 
 Now, lastly, will you tell me what we worship, and what we 
 build? 
 
 You know we are speaking always of the real, active, 
 continual, national worship; that by which men act while 
 they live; not that which they talk of when they die. Now, 
 we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes 
 of property and sevenths of time; but we have also a practical 
 and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our 
 l)roperty and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a 
 great deal about the nominal religion; but we are all unani- 
 mous about this practical one, of which I think you will
 
 41 6 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally described 
 as the " Goddess of Getting-on," or " Britannia of the Market." 
 The Athenians had an "Athena Agoraia," or Athena of the 
 Market; but she was a subordinate type of their goddess, 
 while our Britannia Agoraia is the principal type of ours. 
 And all your great architectural works, are, of course, built to 
 her. It is long since you built a great cathedral; and how 
 you would laugh at me, if I proposed building a cathedral on 
 the top of one of these hills of yours, to make it an Acropolis! 
 But your railroad mounds, vaster than the walls of Babylon; 
 your railroad stations, vaster than the temple of Ephesus, 
 and innumerable; your chimneys how much more mighty and 
 costly than cathedral spires! your harbor piers; your ware- 
 houses; your exchanges! — all these are built to your great 
 Goddess of "Getting-on"; and she has formed, and will 
 continue to form, your architecture, as long as you worship 
 her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to build to 
 her; you know far better than I. 
 
 There might indeed, on some theories, be a conceivably 
 good architecture for Exchanges — that is to say, if there 
 were any heroism in the fact or deed of exchange, which 
 might be typically carved on the outside of your building. 
 For, you know, all beautiful architecture must be adorned 
 with sculpture or painting; and for sculpture or painting, 
 you must have a subject. And hitherto it has been a received 
 opinion among the nations of the world that the only right 
 subjects for either, were heroisms of some sort. Even on his 
 pots and his flagons, the Greek put a Hercules slaying lions, 
 or an Apollo slaying serpents, or Bacchus slaying melancholy 
 giants, and earth-born despondencies. On his temples, the 
 Greek put contests of great warriors in founding states, or of 
 gods with evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, the 
 Christian put carvings of angels conquering devils; or of hero- 
 martyrs exchanging this world for another; subject inappro- 
 priate, I think, to our direction of exchange here. And the
 
 TRAFFIC 417 
 
 Master of Christians not only left his followers without any 
 orders as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on the outside 
 of buildings, but gave some strong evidence of his dislike of 
 affairs of exchange within them. And yet there might surely 
 be a heroism in such affairs; and all commerce become a kind 
 of selling of doves, not impious. The wonder has always 
 been great to me, that heroism has never been supposed to be 
 in any wise consistent with the practice of supplying people 
 with food, or clothes; but rather with that of quartering one's 
 self upon them for food, and stripping them of their clothes. 
 Spoiling of armor is an heroic deed in all ages; but the selling 
 of clothes, old or new, has never taken any color of mag- 
 nanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding the hungry and 
 clothing the naked should ever become base businesses, even 
 when engaged in on a large scale. If one could contrive to 
 attach the notion of conquest to them anyhow! so that, 
 supposing there were anywhere an obstinate race, who refused 
 to be comforted, one might take some pride in giving them 
 compulsory comfort! ^ and as it were, ^^ occupying a country" 
 with one's gifts, instead of one's armies? If one could only 
 consider it as much a victory to get a barren field sown, as to 
 get an eared field stripped; and contend who should build 
 villages, instead of who should "carry" them! Are not all 
 forms of heroism, conceivable in doing these serviceable deeds? 
 You doubt who is strongest? It might be ascertained by push 
 of spade, as well as push of sword. Who is wisest? There 
 are witty things to be thought of in planning other business 
 than campaigns. Who is bravest? There are always the 
 elements to fight with, stronger than men; and nearly as 
 merciless. 
 
 The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in 
 
 the soldier's work seems to be — that he is paid little for it — 
 
 and regularly: while you traffickers, and exchangers, and 
 
 others occupied in presumably benevolent business, like to 
 
 ^ Quite serious, all this, though it reads like jest.
 
 4i8 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 be paid much for it — and by chance. I never can make 
 out how it is that a knight-errsLUt does not expect to be paid 
 for his trouble, but a pedler-exra.nt always does; — that people 
 are willing to take hard knocks for nothing, but never to sell 
 ribands cheap; — that they are ready to go on fervent crusades 
 to recover the tomb of a buried God, but never on any travels 
 to fulfil the orders of a living one; — that they will go any- 
 where barefoot to preach their faith, but must be well bribed 
 to practise it, and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel 
 gratis, but never the loaves and fishes.^ 
 
 If you chose to take the matter up on any such soldierly 
 principle, to do your commerce, and your feeding of nations, 
 for fixed salaries; and to be as particular about giving people 
 the best food, and the best cloth, as soldiers are about giving 
 them the best gunpowder, I could carve something for you on 
 your exchange worth looking at. But I can only at present 
 suggest decorating its frieze with pendent purses; and making 
 its pillars broad at the base, for the sticking of bills. And in 
 the innermost chambers of it there might be a statue of 
 Britannia of the Market, who may have, perhaps advisably, 
 a partridge for her crest, typical at once of her courage in 
 fighting for noble ideas, and of her interest in game; and 
 round its neck the inscription in golden letters, "Perdix fovit 
 quae non peperit." ^ Then, for her spear, she might have 
 a weaver's beam; and on her shield, instead of St. George's 
 Cross, the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with the town of 
 Gennesaret proper, in the field, and the legend "In the best 
 market," ^ and her corselet, of leather, folded over her heart 
 
 ^ Please think over this paragraph, too briefly and antithetically put, 
 but one of those which I am happiest in having written. 
 
 2 Jerem. xvii. ii (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). "As the partridge, 
 fostering what she brought not forth, so he that getteth riches, not by 
 right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a 
 fool." 
 
 ' Meaning fully, "We have brought our pigs to it."
 
 TRAFFIC 419 
 
 in the shape of a purse, with thirty slits in it for a piece of 
 money to go in at, on each day of the month. And I doubt 
 not but that people would come to see your exchange, and its 
 goddess, with applause. 
 
 Nevertheless, I want to point out to you certain strange 
 characters in this goddess of yours. She differs from the 
 great Greek and Mediaeval deities essentially in two things — 
 first, as to the continuance of her presumed power; secondly, 
 as to the extent of it. 
 
 I St, as to the Continuance. 
 
 The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual increase of 
 wisdom, as the Christian Spirit of Comfort (or Comforter) 
 continual increase of comfort. There was no question, with 
 these, of any limit or cessation of function. But with your 
 Agora Goddess, that is just the most important question. 
 Getting on — but where to? Gathering together — but 
 how much? Do you mean to gather always — never to 
 spend? If so, I wish you joy of your goddess, for I am just 
 as well off as you, without the trouble of worshipping her at 
 all. But if you do not spend, somebody else will — some- 
 body else must. And it is because of this (among many 
 other such errors) that I have fearlessly declared your so- 
 called science of Political Economy to be no science; because, 
 namely, it has omitted the study of exactly the most im- 
 portant branch of the business — the study of spending. 
 For spend you must, and as much as you make, ultimately. 
 You gather corn: — will you bury England under a heap of 
 grain; or will you, when you have gathered, finally eat? 
 You gather gold : — will you make your house-roofs of it, or 
 pave your streets with it? That is still one way of spending 
 it. But if you keep it, that you may get more, I'll give you 
 more; I'll give you all the gold you want — all you can 
 imagine — if you can tell me what you'll do with it. You 
 shall have thousands of gold pieces; — thousands of thou- 
 sands — millions — mountains, of gold: where will you keep
 
 420 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 them? Will you put an Olympus of silver upon a golden 
 Pelion — make Ossa like a wart? Do you think the rain and 
 dew would then come down to you, in the streams from such 
 mountains, more blessedly than they will down the moun- 
 tains which God has made for you, of moss and whinstone? 
 But it is not gold that you want to gather! What is it? 
 greenbacks? No; not those neither. What is it then — 
 is it ciphers after a capital I? Cannot you practise writing 
 ciphers, and write as many as you want? Write ciphers for 
 an hour every morning, in a big book, and say every evening, 
 I am worth all those noughts more than I was yesterday. 
 Won't that do? Well, what in the name of Plutus is it you 
 want? Not gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital 
 I? You will have to answer, after all, "No; we want, some- 
 how or other, money's worth.^' Well, what is that? Let your 
 Goddess of Getting-on discover it, and let her learn to stay 
 therein. 
 
 II. But there is yet another question to be asked respecting 
 this Goddess of Getting-on. The first was of the continuance 
 of her power; the second is of its extent. 
 
 Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the world's 
 Pallas, and all the world's Madonna. They could teach all 
 men, and they could comfort all men. But, look strictly 
 into the nature of the power of your Goddess of Getting-on; 
 and you will find she is the Goddess — not of everybody's 
 getting on — but only of somebody's getting on. This is a 
 vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in your 
 own ideal of the state of national life which this Goddess is 
 to evoke and maintain. I asked you what it was, when I 
 was last here ; ^ — you have never told me. Now, shall I 
 try to tell you? 
 
 Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be 
 passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal 
 
 ^ The Two Paths, p. 115 (small edition), and p. 99 of vol. x. of the 
 Revised Series of the Entire Works.
 
 TRAFFIC 421 
 
 everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this 
 worid is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and 
 stables, and coach-houses; a moderately sized park; a large 
 garden and hot-houses; and pleasant carriage drives through 
 the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favored 
 votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his 
 gracious wife, and his beautiful family; always able to have 
 the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful 
 ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a 
 shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of 
 the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile 
 long, with a steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, 
 and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be 
 in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand 
 workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church 
 on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful 
 language. 
 
 Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of 
 thing you propose to yourselves? It is very pretty indeed, 
 seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below. For, 
 observe, v/hile to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess 
 of Getting-on, to a thousand families she is the Goddess 
 of not Getting-on. "Nay," you say, "they have all their 
 chance." Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must 
 always be the same number of blanks. "Ah! but in a lottery 
 it is not skill and intelligence which take the lead, but blind 
 chance." What then! do you think the old practice, that 
 "they should take who have the power, and they should keep 
 who can," is less iniquitous, when the power has become 
 power of brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not 
 take advantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, we may 
 of a man's foolishness? "Nay, but finally, work must be 
 done, and some one must be at the top, some one at the 
 bottom." Granted, my friends. Work must always be, 
 and captains of work must always be; and if you in the least
 
 422 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 remember the tone of any of my writings, you must know 
 that they are thought unfit for this age, because they are 
 always insisting on need of government, and speaking with 
 scorn of liberty. But I beg you to observe that there is a 
 wide difference between being captains or governors of work, 
 and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you 
 are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, 
 or land, it wins (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, 
 because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all 
 the profits of the nation's work. Real kings, on the contrary, 
 are known invariably by their doing quite the reverse of 
 this, — by their taking the least possible quantity of the na- 
 tion's work for themselves. There is no test of real kinghood 
 so infallible as that. Does the crowned creature live simply, 
 bravely, unostentatiously? probably he is a King. Does he 
 cover his body with jewels, and his table with delicates? in 
 all probability he is not a King. It is possible he may be, as 
 Solomon was; but that is when the nation shares his splendor 
 with him. Solomon made gold, not only to be in his own 
 palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as stones. But 
 even so, for the most part, these splendid kinghoods expire 
 in ruin, and only the true kinghoods live, which are of royal 
 laborers governing loyal laborers; who, both leading rough 
 lives, establish the true dynasties. Conclusively you will 
 find that because you are king of a nation, it does not follow 
 that you are to gather for yourself all the wealth of that 
 nation; neither, because you are king of a small part of the 
 nation, and lord over the means of its maintenance — over 
 field, or mill, or mine — are you to take all the produce of that 
 piece of the foundation of national existence for yourself. 
 
 You will tell me I need not preach against these things, 
 for I cannot mend them. No, good friends, I cannot; but 
 you can, and you will; or something else can and will. Even 
 good things have no abiding power — and shall these evil 
 things persist in victorious evil? All history shows, on the
 
 TRAFFIC 423 
 
 contrary, that to be the exact thing they never can do. Change 
 must come; but it is ours to determine whether change of 
 growth, or change of death. Shall the Parthenon be in ruins 
 on its rock, and Bolton Priory in its meadow, but these mills 
 of yours be the consummation of the buildings of the earth, 
 and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity? Think you 
 that "men may come, and men may go," but — mills — go 
 on forever? Not so; out of these, better or worse shall come; 
 and it is for you to choose which. 
 
 I know that none of this wrong is done with deliberate 
 purpose. I know, on the contrary, that you wish your work- 
 men well; that you do much for them, and that you desire to 
 do more for them, if you saw your way to such benevolence 
 safely. I know that even all this wrong and misery are 
 brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving 
 to do his best; but unhappily, not knowing for whom this 
 best should be done. And all our hearts have been betrayed 
 by the plausible impiety of the modern economist, that "To 
 do the best for yourself, is finally to do the best for others." 
 Friends, our great Master said not so; and most absolutely 
 we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the 
 best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves; but it 
 will not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The Pagans 
 had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter; 
 hear what were, perhaps, the last written words of Plato, 
 — if not the last actually written (for this we cannot know), 
 yet assuredly in fact and power his parting words — in which, 
 endeavoring to give full crowning and harmonious close to 
 all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined 
 sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail 
 him, and the words cease, broken off forever. 
 
 They are at the close of the dialogue called "Critias," in 
 which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal 
 dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and order, 
 and religion of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis
 
 424 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of 
 man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by 
 saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters 
 of men, for he supposes the earliest race to have been indeed 
 the children of God; and to have corrupted themselves, until 
 "their spot was not the spot of his children." And this, he 
 says, was the end; that indeed "through many generations, 
 so long as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were 
 submissive to the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly 
 to all that had kindred with them in divineness; for their 
 uttermost spirit was faithful and true, and in every wise 
 great; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they dealt with each 
 other, and took all the chances of life; and despising all things 
 except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day, 
 and bore lightly the burden of gold and of possessions; for 
 they saw that, if only their common love and virtue increased, 
 all these things would be increased together with them; but to 
 set their esteem and ardent pursuit upon material possession 
 would be to lose that first, and their virtue and affection 
 together with it. And by such reasoning, and what of the 
 divine nature remained in them, they gained all this greatness 
 of which we have already told; but when the God's part of 
 them faded and became extinct, being mixed again and 
 again, and effaced by the prevalent mortality; and the 
 human nature at last exceeded, they then became unable to 
 endure the courses of fortune; and fell into shapelessness of 
 life, and baseness in the sight of him who could see, having 
 lost everything that was fairest of their honor; while to the 
 blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to 
 happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly noble and 
 happy, being filled with all iniquity of inordinate possession 
 and power. Whereupon, the God of gods, whose Kinghood 
 is in laws, beholding a once just nation thus cast into misery, 
 and desiring to lay such punishment upon them as might 
 make them repent into restraining, gathered together all the
 
 TRAFFIC 425 
 
 gods into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre 
 overlooks whatever has part in creation; and having assembled 
 them, he said" — 
 
 The rest is silence. Last words of the chief wisdom of the 
 heathen, spoken of this idol of riches; this idol of yours; 
 this golden image high by measureless cubits, set up where 
 your green fields of England are furnace-burnt into the like- 
 ness of the plain of Dura: this idol, forbidden to us, first of 
 all idols, by our own Master and faith; forbidden to us also 
 by every human lip that has ever, in any age or people, been 
 accounted of as able to speak according to the purposes of 
 God. Continue to make that forbidden deity your principal 
 one, and soon no more art, no more science, no more pleasure 
 will be possible. Catastrophe will come; or worse than catas- 
 trophe, slow mouldering and withering into Hades. But if 
 you can fix some conception of a true human state of life to 
 be striven for — life good for all men as for yourselves — if 
 you can determine some honest and simple order of existence; 
 following those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasant- 
 ness, and seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths, which are 
 peace ^; — then, and so sanctifying wealth into "common- 
 wealth," all your art, your literature, your daily labors, your 
 domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and increase 
 into one magnificent harmony. You will know then how to 
 build, well enough; you will build with stone well, but with 
 flesh better; temples not made with hands, but riveted of 
 hearts; and that kind of marble, crimson- veined, is indeed 
 eternal. 
 
 ^ I imagine the Hebrew chant merely intends passionate repetition, 
 and not a distinction of this somewhat fanciful kind; yet we may profitably 
 make it in reading the Enghsh.
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLARS 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 
 I GREET you on the recommencement of our literary year. 
 Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of 
 labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the 
 recitation of histories, tragedies and odes, like the ancient 
 Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Trouba- 
 dours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contem- 
 poraries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, 
 our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival 
 of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to 
 letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an 
 indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, 
 when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the 
 sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its 
 iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with 
 something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. 
 Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning 
 of other lands, draws to a close. The milHons, that around 
 us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere 
 remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that 
 must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt 
 that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in 
 the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, 
 astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a 
 thousand years? 
 
 In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage, but 
 the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, — 
 
 1 An oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, 
 August 31, 1837.
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 427 
 
 the American Scholar. Year by year we come up hither 
 to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire 
 what Hght new days and events have thrown on his character 
 and his hopes. 
 
 It is one of those fables which, out of an unknown antiquity, 
 convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the begin- 
 ning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful 
 to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the 
 better to answer its end. 
 
 The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; 
 that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only 
 partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the 
 whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or 
 a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and 
 scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the 
 divided or social state these functions are parceled out to indi- 
 viduals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, 
 whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the 
 individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from 
 his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfor- 
 tunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been 
 so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely sub- 
 divided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops and 
 cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which 
 the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and 
 strut about so many walking monsters — a good finger, a 
 neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. 
 
 Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. 
 The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather 
 food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his 
 ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing 
 beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the 
 farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth 
 to his work, but is ridden l:)y the routine of his craft, and 
 the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form;
 
 428 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the 
 sailor, a rope of a ship. 
 
 In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated 
 intellect. In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the 
 degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to 
 become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other 
 men's thinking. 
 
 In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his 
 ofl&ce is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, 
 all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the 
 future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do 
 not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, 
 is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old 
 oracle said, "All things have two handles: beware of the 
 wrong one." In life, too often the scholar errs with mankind 
 and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and 
 consider him in reference to the main influences he receives. 
 
 I. The first in time and the first in importance of the 
 influences upon the mind is that of Nature. Every day, the 
 sun; and, after sunset. Night and her stars. Ever the winds 
 blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, 
 conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of 
 all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle 
 its value in his mind. What is Nature to him? There is 
 never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable 
 continuity of this web of God, but always circular power 
 returning into" itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, 
 whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so 
 entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system 
 on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without 
 centre, without circumference, — in the mass and in the par- 
 ticle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the 
 mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, everything 
 is individual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 429 
 
 join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then 
 three thousand; and so tyrannized over by its own unifying 
 instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anom- 
 alies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby con- 
 trary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one 
 stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there 
 has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. 
 But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects 
 are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which 
 is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers 
 that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the 
 measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions 
 and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is 
 nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most 
 remxOte parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each re- 
 fractory fact; one after another reduces all strange consti- 
 tutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and 
 goes on forever to animate the last fiber of organization, the 
 outskirts of nature, by insight. 
 
 Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of 
 day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one 
 is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every 
 vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his 
 soul? A thought too bold, a dream too wild. Yet when 
 this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly 
 natures, when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see 
 that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first 
 gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever- 
 expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall 
 see that Nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it 
 part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is 
 the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his 
 own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his 
 attainments. So much of Nature as he is ignorant of, so much 
 of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the
 
 430 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, 
 "Study Nature," become at last one maxim. 
 
 II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar 
 is the mind of the Past — in whatever form, whether of 
 literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. 
 Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and 
 perhaps we shall get at the truth — learn the amount of 
 this influence more conveniently — by considering their value 
 alone. 
 
 The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age 
 received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave 
 it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. 
 It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came 
 to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal 
 thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. 
 It was dead fact; now it is quick thought. It can stand and 
 it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now aspires. Pre- 
 cisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, 
 so high does it soar, so long does it sing. 
 
 Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone 
 of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the com- 
 pleteness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperish- 
 ableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As 
 no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so 
 neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the 
 local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure 
 thought that shall be as efficient in all respects to a remote 
 posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. 
 Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, 
 each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an 
 older period will not fit this. 
 
 Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which 
 attaches to the act of creation — the act of thought — is 
 transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 
 
 431 
 
 a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer 
 was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book 
 is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his 
 statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a 
 tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, 
 slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so 
 opened, having once received this book, stands upon it and 
 makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. 
 Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; 
 by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from 
 accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. 
 Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty 
 to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon 
 have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were 
 only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. 
 
 Hence, instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. 
 Hence, the book-learned class who value books as such; not 
 as related to Nature and the human constitution, but as 
 making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. 
 Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the biblio- 
 maniacs of all degrees. 
 
 Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the 
 worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which 
 all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. 
 I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attrac- 
 tion clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead 
 of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active 
 soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains 
 within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed and as 
 yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters 
 truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege 
 of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every 
 man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, 
 the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some 
 past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us
 
 432 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and 
 not forward. But genius looks forward; the eyes of man are 
 set in his forehead, not in his hindhead; man hopes; genius 
 creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, 
 the pure efiflux of the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke 
 there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, 
 there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, 
 actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, 
 but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good 
 and fair. 
 
 On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it 
 receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents 
 of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, 
 and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently 
 the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of 
 every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets 
 have Shakspearized now for two hundred years. 
 
 Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly 
 subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his 
 instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When 
 he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted 
 in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the 
 intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the 
 sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair 
 to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our 
 steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that 
 we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig-tree, look- 
 ing on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful." 
 
 It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive 
 from the best books. They impress us with the conviction 
 that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the 
 verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Mar- 
 veil, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, 
 I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of 
 all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 433 
 
 the joy of our surprise when this poet, who lived in some past 
 world two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies 
 close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought 
 and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philo- 
 sophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should 
 suppose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of 
 souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for 
 their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay 
 up food before death for the young grub they shall never see. 
 
 I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any 
 exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all 
 know that as the human body can be nourished on any food, 
 though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the 
 human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and 
 heroic men have existed who had almost no other information 
 than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a 
 strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to 
 read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home 
 the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the 
 Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative 
 writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, 
 the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with 
 manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and 
 the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then 
 see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is 
 short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, 
 perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will 
 read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, — only 
 the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, 
 were it never so many times Plato's and Shakspeare's. 
 
 Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable 
 to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by 
 laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their 
 indispensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only 
 highly serve us when they aim not to drill, Init to create;
 
 434 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 when they gather from far every ray of various genius to 
 their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the 
 hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are 
 natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. 
 Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, 
 can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. 
 Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their 
 public importance, whilst they grow richer every year. 
 
 III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar 
 should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any 
 handiwork or public labor, as a pen-knife for an axe. The 
 so-called "practical men" sneer at speculative men, as if, 
 because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have 
 heard it said that the clergy — who are always, more univer- 
 sally than any other class, the scholars of their day — are 
 addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversa- 
 tion of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted 
 speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, 
 there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true 
 of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is 
 with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, 
 he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into 
 truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of 
 beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, 
 but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The 
 preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes 
 from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so 
 much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose 
 words are loaded with life, and whose not. 
 
 The world — this shadow of the soul, or other me — lies 
 wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my 
 thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run 
 eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of 
 those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 435 
 
 work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be 
 vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I 
 dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So 
 much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the 
 wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have 
 I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any 
 man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, 
 to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls 
 and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exaspera- 
 tion, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The 
 true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, 
 as a loss of power. 
 
 It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her 
 splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which 
 experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is 
 converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all 
 hours. 
 
 The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now 
 matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in 
 the air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business 
 which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to 
 speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We 
 no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, 
 or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of 
 life, — remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. 
 In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life 
 like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly 
 it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorrup- 
 tion. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its 
 origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of 
 antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot 
 shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, 
 the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of 
 wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history 
 which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form,
 
 436 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. 
 Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, 
 and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and 
 many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone 
 already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and 
 country, nation and world, must also soar and sing. 
 
 Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit 
 actions has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut 
 myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into 
 a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue 
 of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, 
 much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by 
 carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen 
 for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, 
 and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their 
 pine-trees. Authors we have in numbers who have written 
 out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, 
 sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, 
 or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable 
 stock. 
 
 If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covet- 
 ous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent 
 in country labors; in town, in the insight into trades and 
 manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and 
 women; in science; in art, — to the one end of mastering in 
 all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody 
 our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how 
 much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor 
 of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence 
 we get tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of to-day. This 
 is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy 
 the language which the field and the work-yard made. 
 
 But the final value of action, like that of books, and better 
 than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of 
 Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 437 
 
 expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and 
 flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold ; and as 
 yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is 
 known to us under the name of Polarity, — these "fits of easy 
 transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the 
 law of Nature because they are the law of spirit. 
 
 The mind now thinks, now acts; and each fit reproduces 
 the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when 
 the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer 
 apprehended, and books are a weariness, — he has always the 
 resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Think- 
 ing is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream 
 retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as 
 well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to 
 impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental 
 force of living them. This is a total act. Thin king is a 
 partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. 
 Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those "far 
 from fame," who dwell and act with him, will feel the force 
 of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day 
 better than it can be measured by any public and designed 
 display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour 
 which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of 
 his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemli- 
 ness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom sys- 
 tems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the 
 helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of 
 unhandseUed savage nature, out of terrible Druids and ber- 
 serkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakspeare. 
 
 I hear, therefore, with joy whatever is beginning to be said 
 of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There 
 is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well 
 as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; 
 always we are invited to work; only be this limitation ob- 
 served, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity
 
 438 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of 
 action. 
 
 I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by 
 Nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat 
 of his duties. 
 
 They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all 
 be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to 
 cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst 
 appearances. He phes the slow, unhonored, and unpaid 
 task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their 
 glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise 
 of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor 
 is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing 
 obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet 
 no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, 
 sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records, — 
 must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long 
 period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance 
 and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the 
 able, who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in 
 his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, 
 he must accept — how often! — poverty and soUtude. For 
 the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the 
 fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the 
 cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, 
 the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which 
 are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self- 
 relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in 
 which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated 
 society. For all this loss and scorn, what off-set? He is to 
 find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human 
 nature. He is one who raises himself from private considera- 
 tions, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. 
 He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 439 
 
 the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by 
 preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble 
 biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. 
 Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in 
 all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world 
 of actions, — these he shall receive and impart. And whatso- 
 ever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces 
 on the passing men and events of to-day, — this he shall 
 hear and promulgate. 
 
 These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confi- 
 dence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He 
 and he only knows the world. The world of any moment 
 is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish 
 of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is 
 cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, 
 as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds 
 are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought 
 which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. 
 Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though 
 the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the 
 crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstrac- 
 tion, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, 
 patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own 
 time, — happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone, that 
 this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on 
 every right step. For the instinct is sure that prompts him 
 to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in 
 going down into the secrets of his own mind he has de- 
 scended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he 
 who has mastered any law in his private thoughts is 
 master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, 
 and of all into whose language his own can be translated. 
 The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous 
 thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded 
 that which men in crowded cities find true for them also.
 
 440 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confes- 
 sions, — his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, 
 — until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; 
 that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their 
 own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secret- 
 est presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most 
 acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people 
 delight in it; the better part of every man feels. This is my 
 music; this is myself. 
 
 In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should 
 the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition 
 of freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out 
 of his own constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing which a 
 scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always 
 springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tran- 
 quiUity, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption 
 that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if 
 he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts 
 from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an 
 ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and 
 turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. 
 So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike 
 let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search 
 its nature, inspect its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, 
 which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a 
 perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have 
 made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth 
 defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see 
 through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind 
 custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by 
 sufferance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and 
 you have already dealt it its mortal blow. 
 
 Yes, we are the cowed — we the trustless. It is a mis- 
 chievous notion that we are come late into Nature; that the 
 world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 441 
 
 and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his 
 attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. 
 They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion 
 as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows 
 before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who 
 can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. 
 They are the kings of the world who give the color of their 
 present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men 
 by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that 
 this thing which they do is the apple which the ages have 
 desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the 
 harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever 
 Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus 
 makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from 
 the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and 
 Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with 
 serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men 
 crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped 
 waves of the Atlantic follow the moon. 
 
 For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, 
 darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me 
 the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I 
 have already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to 
 the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; 
 he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that 
 can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of 
 no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are 
 bugs, are spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." 
 In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, 
 one or two approximations to the right state of every man. 
 All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green 
 and crude being, — ripened; yes, and are content to be less, 
 so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, full 
 of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own 
 nature by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices
 
 442 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find some 
 amends to their immense moral capacity for their acquiescence 
 in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be 
 brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that 
 justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it 
 is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They 
 sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their 
 own element. They cast the dignity of man from their 
 downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish 
 to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those 
 giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we 
 live in him. 
 
 Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; 
 and power because it is as good as money, — the "spoils," so 
 called, "of office." And why not? for they aspire to the 
 highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. 
 Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to 
 the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. This 
 revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of 
 the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for 
 splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are 
 the materials strewn along the ground. The private life of 
 one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, — more formi- 
 dable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to 
 its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly 
 viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. 
 Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for 
 me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The 
 books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, 
 we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we 
 have come up with the point of view which the universal 
 mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been 
 that man, and have passed on. First one, then another, we 
 drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, 
 we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 443 
 
 never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot 
 be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side 
 to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central 
 fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the 
 capes of Sicily; and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illu- 
 minates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light 
 which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which 
 animates all men. 
 
 But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction 
 of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I 
 have to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country. 
 
 Historically there is thought to be a difference in the ideas 
 which predominate over successive epochs, and there are 
 data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, 
 and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With the 
 views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the 
 mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these 
 differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through 
 all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, 
 reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the 
 leading idea may be distinctly enough traced. 
 
 Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that 
 needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed 
 with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy anything for hanker- 
 ing to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with 
 eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's 
 unhappiness, — 
 
 Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. 
 
 Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would 
 we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee Nature and 
 God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of 
 the literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that 
 they find themselves n'ot in the state of mind of their fathers,
 
 444 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the 
 water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is 
 any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of 
 Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, 
 and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men 
 are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories 
 of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the 
 new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we 
 but know what to do with it. 
 
 I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the 
 coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and 
 art, through philosophy and science, through church and 
 state. 
 
 One of these signs is the fact that the same movement 
 which affected the elevation of what was called the lowest 
 class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as 
 benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, 
 the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. 
 That which had been negligently trodden under foot by 
 those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for 
 long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be 
 richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the 
 feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning 
 of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great 
 stride. It is a sign, is it not? of new vigor, when the ex- 
 tremities are made active, when currents of warm life run 
 into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the 
 remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; 
 what is Greek art or Provenfal minstrelsy; I embrace the 
 common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. 
 Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique 
 and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning 
 of? The meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, the ballad 
 in the street, the news of the boat, the glance of the eye, the 
 form and the gait of the body, — show me the ultimate
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 445 
 
 reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of 
 the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in 
 these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every 
 trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an 
 eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred 
 to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — 
 and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber- 
 room, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no 
 puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinna- 
 cle and the lowest trench. 
 
 This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, 
 Cowper, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and 
 Carlyle. This idea they have differently followed and with 
 various success. In contrast with their writing, the style of 
 Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This 
 writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things 
 near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. 
 The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A 
 man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of 
 the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very 
 thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none 
 ever did, the genius of the ancients. 
 
 There is one man of genius who has done much for this 
 philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been 
 rightly estimated; I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most 
 imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathe- 
 matician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical 
 Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an 
 attempt, of course, must have difficulty which no genius 
 could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection 
 between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced 
 the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, 
 tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover 
 over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the 
 mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material
 
 446 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of 
 beasts, of unclean and fearful things. 
 
 Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous 
 political movement, is the new importance given to the single 
 person. Everything that tends to insulate the individual — 
 to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each 
 man shall feel the world is his and man shall treat with man as 
 a sovereign state with a sovereign state — tends to true union 
 as well as greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy 
 Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either willing 
 or able to help any other man." Help must come from the 
 bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up 
 into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions 
 of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be a uni- 
 versity of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than 
 another which should pierce his ear, it is. The world is nothing, 
 the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you 
 know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slum- 
 bers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for 
 you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confi- 
 dence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, 
 by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. 
 We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. 
 The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be 
 timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make 
 the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, 
 indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. 
 The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats 
 upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and 
 the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who 
 begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, 
 shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not 
 in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the 
 disgust which the principles on which business is managed 
 inspire, and turn drudges or die of disgust — some of them
 
 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 447 
 
 suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and 
 thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the 
 barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man 
 plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, 
 the huge world will come round to him. Patience, patience; 
 with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for 
 solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, 
 the study and the communication of principles, the making 
 those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it 
 not the chief disgrace in the world not to be an unit, not to 
 be reckoned one character — not to yield that peculiar fruit 
 which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in 
 the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, 
 the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted 
 geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers 
 and friends — please God, ours shall not be so. We will 
 walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; 
 we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be 
 no longer a name for pity, for doubt and for sensual indulgence. 
 The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of 
 defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men 
 will for the first time exist, because each believes himself 
 inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
 
 ADVERTISEMENTS
 
 FRESHMAN RHETORIC 
 
 By John E.othwell Slater, Ph. D. 
 
 Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Rochester 
 
 THIS is a fresh, vital, and stimulating treatment of the 
 art of effective composition. It deals with subjects and 
 forms of work that are of immediate value to those whose 
 tastes are not linguistic or literary. The chapters on note- 
 taking, written reports of public addresses, subjects for spe- 
 cial occasions, letter-writing, story telling, story writing, and 
 news writing indicate the closeness of touch between the 
 discussion in the book and the practical interests of young 
 men just entering college. With its 700 original subjects 
 for themes, essays, and written exercises, and the unconven- 
 tional, but thoroughly effective, presentation of the essentials 
 of good composition, the book is likely to render great service 
 to many who would otherwise remain indifferent to the claims 
 of good English. 
 
 Contents 
 
 Chapter i. Simple Exposition of Familiar Subjects 
 
 ii. Oral Report of a Printed Article 
 
 iii. Note-Taking 
 
 iv. Written Report of a Public Address 
 
 V. Textbook Study 
 
 vi. Recitation 
 
 vii. The Use of a Reference Library 
 
 viii. The Structure of Detailed Exposition 
 
 ix. Speeches for Special Occasions 
 
 X. Letter-Writing 
 
 xi. Colloquial English 
 
 xii. Argumentation 
 
 xiii. Words 
 
 xiv. Translation 
 
 XV. The Interpretation of Literature 
 
 xvi. Description 
 
 xvii. Story Telling and Story Writing 
 
 xviii. Historical Narration 
 
 xix. News Writing 
 
 XX. Progress and Prospect 
 
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 THE STUDY OF A NOVEL 
 
 By Selden L. Whit comb 
 
 The chapters discuss External Structure, Consecutive Structure, Plot, 
 The Settings, The Dramatis Personse, Characterization, Subject Mat- 
 ter, Style, The Process of Composition, The Shaping Forces, Influence 
 of a Novel, Comparative Rhetoric, Comparative Esthetics and General 
 ^Esthetic Interest. Cloth, xx +331 pages. Price, $1.25. 
 
 FOUR YEARS OF NOVEL READING 
 
 By Richard G. Moulton 
 
 An account of an experiment to popularize the study of fiction. Pro- 
 fessor Moulton's introduction treats of the Dignity of Fiction, and 
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 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH FICTION 
 
 By W. E. SiMONDs 
 
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 successive epochs. A brief historical outline is presented in six chap- 
 ters, followed by twelve texts, illustrative of the different periods 
 described. Cloth. 240 pages. Price, 80 cents. 
 
 Briefer edition, omitting illustrative texts. Boards, 30 cents. 
 
 STANDARD EDUCATIONAL NOVELS 
 
 Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. Edited with aids to appreciation, 
 by John G. Wight. With maps and illustrations. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. With introduction and notes by 
 Hamilton B. Moore, Indiana University. Illustrated. Price, 60 cents. 
 
 George Eliot's Silas Mamer. With introduction and notes by 
 George A. Wauchope, Professor in the University of South Carolina. 
 Nine full-page illustrations by W. H. Lawrence. Price, 35 cents. 
 
 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. With introduction and notes by 
 William Henry Hudson, Professor in the University of London. Seven- 
 teen full-page illustrations by C. E. Brock. Price, 40 cents. 
 
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 ter L. MacClintock, University of Chicago. Seventeen full-page 
 illustrations by C. E. Brock. Price, 50 cents. 
 
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 Stevenson's Treasure Island. With introduction and notes by 
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 HANDBOOK OF COMPOSITION 
 
 By Edwin C. Woollet 
 
 THIS book is unique. It supplements the formal treatises on good 
 English, grammar, sentence structure, paragraphing, manuscript 
 arrangement, punctuation, spelling, essay writing, and letter writing, 
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 MECHANICS OF WRITING 
 
 By Edwin C. Woolley 
 
 COMPANION volume to Woolley's Handbook of Composition. 
 
 It discusses matters of good English, technically so called, phra- 
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 EXERCISES IN ENGLISH 
 
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 WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
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 THIS new book for first-year classes in secondary schools offers a 
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 this is the first book that has sought primarily to secure formal accu- 
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 THE author has made a new and original arrangement of the 
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 The modern point of view, the accuracy of statement, the clear and 
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 THOMAS'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
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 of the more important contemporaneous events of European history. 
 
 Cloth. 650 pages. Maps and illustrations. $1.50. 
 
 HISTORY SYLLABUS 
 
 PREPARED by a Committee of the New England History Teachers' 
 Association, outlining the four years' course recommended by the 
 Committee of Seven of the American Historical Association. The work 
 is accompanied with full references to text-books and authoritative 
 treatises, and is given in suSicient detail to meet the maximum require- 
 ment of the most liberally equipped schools. 
 
 Cloth. 375 pages. $1.25. 
 
 The Outlines for pupils are also bound separately in paper: Ancient History, 58 pp., 
 20 cents; Mediseval and Modern European History, 67 pp., 20 cents; English History, 
 40 pp., 20 cents; American History, 72 pp., 20 cents. 
 
 OTHER GOOD BOOKS 
 
 Fling's Source Book of Greek History $1.00 
 
 Munro's Source Book of Roman History 1.00 
 
 Hall's Methods of Teaching History 1.50 
 
 Webster's Readings in Ancient History 1.00 
 
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 Higher English 
 
 Beowulf — A metrical translation by J. L. Hall. Cloth... 75 
 
 Paper $ .30 
 
 Bowen's Historical Study of the O- Vowel 1.25 
 
 Bray's History of English Critical Terms 1.00 
 
 A vocabulary of 1400 critical terms used in literature and art, with critical 
 and historical data for their study. 
 
 Bronson's History of American Literature 1.00 
 
 " No other manual of American literature says so much so well in so little 
 space." 
 
 Coleridge's Principles of Criticism. From the Biographia Lit- 
 
 eraria 75 
 
 Cook's The Bible and English Prose Style 45 
 
 Corson's Introduction to Browning, with 33 poems 1.10 
 
 Corson's Introduction to Shakespeare 1.10 
 
 Crawshaw's The Making of English Literature 1.30 
 
 An interpretative and historical guide for students. 
 
 Cynewulf's Juliana, with notes and vocabulary 40 
 
 Davidson's Prolegomena to Tennyson's In Memoriam 60 
 
 A critical analysis with an index of the poem. 
 Duncan, Beck and Graves's Prose Specimens 1.00 
 
 Selections illustrating description, narration, exposition, and argumentation. 
 
 DeQuincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater 50 
 
 Espcnshade's Essentials of Composition and Rhetoric. Revised 1.10 
 
 Hooker's Study Book in English Literature 1.00 
 
 Covering the chief authors from Chaucer to the close of the romantic period. 
 
 Hudson's The Study of Literature 1.25 
 
 Judith. Introduction, notes, and glossary by Cook 40 
 
 Kluge and Lutz's English Etymology 75 
 
 A select glossary for use in the study of historical grammar. 
 
 MacEwan's The Essentials of Argumentation 1.25 
 
 A systematic discussion of principles, with illustrative extracts. 
 
 Meiklejohn's English Language: Grammar, History, Literature. 1.25 
 
 A compendious course of exceptional worth. 
 Moulton's Short Introduction to the Literature of the Bible .... 1.00 
 
 Moulton's Literary Study of the Bible 2.00 
 
 An account of the leading forms of literature represented. 
 
 O'Conor's Rhetoric and Oratory 1.20 
 
 Payne's English in American Universities 75 
 
 Simonds's Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Poems 50 
 
 Slater's Freshman Rhetoric 1.10 
 
 Smith's The Writing of the Short Story 25 
 
 Webster's Speeches: nine of the greatest 80 
 
 Whitcomb's The Study of a Novel 1.25 
 
 Analytic and synthetic work for college classes. 
 Woolley's Mechanics of Writing 1.00 
 
 Treats exhaustively the paragraph and the rationale of punctuation. 
 
 Wordsworth's Prefaces and Essays on Poetry 60 
 
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 Poetry, and the Belles- Lettres Series 
 
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 Dramatic Literature 
 
 iEscHTLUS — The Tragedies, translated by E. H. Plumptre $1.00 
 Beiaumont — The Knight of the Burning Pestle and A King and 
 
 No King, edited by Raymond M. Alden 60 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcheb — The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster, 
 
 edited by Ashley H. Thorndike 60 
 
 Browning — A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, Colombe's Birthday, A 
 
 Soul's Tragedy, and In a Balcony, edited by Arlo Bates .60 
 Chapman — All Fools and The Gentleman Usher, edited by T. M. 
 
 Parrott 60 
 
 Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, 
 
 edited by F. S. Boaa 60 
 
 Davenant — • Love and Honour and The Siege of Rhodes, edited 
 
 by J. W. Tupper 60 
 
 Drtden — All for Love and The Spanish Friar, edited by W. 
 
 Strunk, Jr 60 
 
 Fabquhak — The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem, 
 
 edited by L. A. Strauss 60 
 
 Ford — 'Tis Pity and the Broken Heart, edited by S. P. Sherman .60 
 
 Gascoigne — Supposes and Jocasta, edited by J. W. Cunliffe 60 
 
 Goldsmith — The Good Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer, 
 
 edited by Austin Dobson 60 
 
 JoNSON — Eastward Ho and The Alchemist, edited by F. E. Schel- 
 
 ling 60 
 
 Sejanus, edited by W. D. Briggs 60 
 
 The Poetaster and (Dekker's) Satiromastix, edited by J. 
 
 H. Penniman 60 
 
 liiLLO — The London Merchant and Fatal Curiosity, edited by A. 
 
 W. Ward 60 
 
 Middleton and Rowley — The Spanish Gypsy and All's Lost ' 
 
 by Lust, edited by E. C. Morris 60 
 
 Otwat — 'The Orphan and Venice Preserved, edited by C. F. 
 
 McClumpha 60 
 
 Robertson — Society and Caste, edited by T. E. Pemberton. . . .60 
 Shakespeare — The Arden edition. General editor, C. H. Her- 
 
 ford. Each play 25 
 
 A Mid3ummer Night's Dream Henry VIII Richard III 
 
 As You Like It Julius Caesar Romeo and Juliet 
 
 Coriolanus King John The Merchant of Venice 
 
 Cymbeline King Lear The Tempest 
 
 Hamlet Macbeth Twelfth Night 
 
 Henry IV — Part I Much Ado About Nothing The Winter's Tale 
 
 Henry V Richard II 
 
 Introduction to Shakespeare, by Hiram Corson 1.10 
 
 Shellet — Prometheus Unbound, edited by Vida D. Scudder . . .60 
 
 The Cenci, edited by George E. Woodberry 60 
 
 Sophocles — The Tragedies, translated by E. H. Plumptre. . . 1.00 
 
 Swinburne — Mary Stuart, edited by W. M. Payne 60 
 
 Webster — The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, edited 
 
 by M. W. Sampson 60 
 
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 English Poetry 
 
 Arnold, Matthew — Select Poema, edited by E. E. Hale, Jr. .60 
 Sohrab and Rustum and The Forsaken Merman, edited by 
 
 J. H. Castleman 25 
 
 Browning, Robert — Select Poems, edited by Richard Burton . . .60 
 
 Four Dramas, edited by Arlo Bates 60 
 
 Introduction to Browning, by Hiram Corson 1.10 
 
 BxTRNS, Robert — Select Poems, edited by Andrew J. George . . .80 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey — Selections from The Canterbury Tales, 
 
 etc., edited by C. G. Child 75 
 
 Coleridge, S. T. — 'Select Poems, edited by A. J. George.. .60 
 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, edited by A. J. George .30 
 
 Principles of Criticism, edited by Andrew J. George 75 
 
 Drtden, John — • Palamon and Arcite, edited by W. H. Crawshaw .25 
 All for Love and The Spanish Friar, edited by William 
 
 Strunk, Jr 60 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver — The Traveller and The Deserted Village, 
 
 edited by Rose M. Barton 25 
 
 The Good Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer, edited 
 
 by Austin Dobson 60 
 
 Lyrics — Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, edited by F. M. Pad- 
 elf ord 60 
 
 Macaulat, T. B. — Lays of Ancient Rome, edited by Martha H. 
 
 Shackford 25 
 
 Milton, John — Select Poems, edited by Albert Perry Walker . . .50 
 
 Minor Poems, edited by Albert Perry Walker 25 
 
 Paradise Lost, Books I and II, with portions of later books, 
 
 edited by Albert Perry Walker 45 
 
 Pope, Alexander — Translation of the Iliad, i, vi, xxii, xxiv, 
 
 edited by Paul Shorey 25 
 
 Scott, Walter — The Lady of the Lake, edited by L. D. Syle . .35 
 Shelley, P. B. — Select Poems, edited by George E. Woodberry .60 
 
 Prometheus Unbound, edited by Vida D. Scudder 60 
 
 The Cenci, edited by George E. Woodberry 60 
 
 A Defense of Poetry and Browning's Essay on Shelley . . . .60 
 
 Swinburne, A. C. — Select Poems, edited by W. M. Payne 60 
 
 Mary Stuart, edited by W. M. PajTie 60 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred — • Select Poems, edited by Archibald Mac- 
 
 Mechan 60 
 
 Enoch Arden and the two Locksley Halls, edited by C. S. 
 
 Brown 25 
 
 Idylls of the King (Five Idylls), edited by Arthur Beatty . .25 
 
 Prolegomena to In Memoriam, by Thomas Davidson 60 
 
 The Princess, edited by Andrew J. George 40 
 
 Wordsworth, William — Select Poems, edited by A. J. George .80 
 Prefaces and Essays on Poetry, edited by Andrew J. George .60 
 
 The Prelude, edited by Andrew J. George 80 
 
 Wyatt, Thomas — Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Poems, by W. E. 
 
 Simonds 50 
 
 Sec also our list of Dramatic Literature. 
 
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 Government and Economics 
 
 Boutwell's The Constitution of the United States at the End of 
 
 the First Century $2.50 
 
 Contains the organic laws of the United States, with references to the deci- 
 sions of the Supreme Court from 1789 to 1889, which elucidate the text, and 
 an historical chapter reviewing the steps which led to the adoption of these 
 organic laws. 
 
 Carlton's The History and Problems of Organized Labor 2.00 
 
 Presents the important facts in the history of organized labor in the United 
 States, analyzes the chief problems that affect labor organizations, and 
 attempts to evaluate the functions of organized labor. The object is not to 
 justify or condemn, but to analyze phenomena. 
 
 Flickinger's Civil Government 1.00 
 
 Traces the growth of civil liberty in England, and the development of 
 government in the States and in the United States. An historical and ana- 
 lytic study of civil institutions. 
 
 Gide's History of Economic Doctrines 3.00 
 
 The scope of the work includes the period from the time of the physiocrats 
 to the present day. Especial prominence is given to the development of 
 economic doctrine during the past twenty years. 
 
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 The authorized translation from the third edition (1913) of the Cours 
 d' Economie Politique. The method keeps clearly in view the human element, 
 which is at once the main difficulty and the main interest of the subject. 
 
 Gide's Principles of Political Economy 2.00 
 
 The authorized translation of Principes d' Economie Politique, adapted to 
 the use of American students by the addition of American illustrative mate- 
 rial, by Prof. C. W. A. Veditz. 
 
 Henderson's Introduction to the Study of Dependent, Defective, 
 
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 Adapted for use as a text-book, for personal study, and for clubs of men 
 and women engaged in considering some of the gravest problems of society. 
 
 Johnson's Introduction to Political Economy 1.50 
 
 An introductory course that deals in the clearest and most direct manner 
 with the fundamental facts and principles on which the study of economics is 
 based. 
 
 Lawrence's Documents Illustrative of International Law 2.00 
 
 Eighty-seven important documents upon the development of International 
 Law, the laws of peace, the laws of war, and the laws of neutrality. 
 
 Lawrence's Principles of International Law 3.00 
 
 Embodies the latest results of discussion and research, and traces the 
 development of International Law in such a way as to show its relation to a 
 few great ethical principles as well as its dependence upon the facts of history. 
 
 Wilson's The State 2.00 
 
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