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 GIFT OF 
 
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 Our Annus Mirabilis 
 
 CORNELIUS BEACH BRADLEY 
 
 [Reprinted from The University Chronicle, Vol. IV, No. 3] 
 
 OF 
 
 BERKELEY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1901 
 
OUR ANNUS MIRABILIS.* 
 
 By Cornelius Beach Bradley. 
 
 In 1667 — exactly two and a third centuries ago — John 
 Dry den was a young aspirant for the laurel wreath. Like 
 many another Englishman of that day, he had changed 
 sides at the Restoration, and since then he had been rather 
 anxiously awaiting the arrival of some fit occasion for cele- 
 brating the greatness and goodness of his new master, 
 Charles II. Since Charles was what he was, the fit occasion 
 was slow in coming; and, rather than wait too long, the 
 young poet was fain to content himself with a series of 
 notable occurrences clustering about the year just past, 
 1666,— disasters though most of them were, — and to couple 
 with his account of them such fulsome flattery of the king 
 as the gross taste of the time permitted and encouraged. 
 
 The first in this series of occurrences, and perhaps the 
 most memorable of them all, was the Great Plague of London. 
 The disease was, alas, no new one. From the sixth century 
 on it had moved westward over Europe, like a resistless rising 
 tide, advancing and retreating in a series of tremendous 
 waves, each gaining on its predecessors, until high tide was 
 reached in that awful visitation which in the fourteenth 
 century swept Great Britain, destroying, as is believed, 
 from one-third to one-half of the entire population of the 
 
 *Eead before the Berkeley Club, February 28, 1901. 
 
 156638 
 
island. The deadly tide now ebbed. England, the utmost 
 coast on which its waves could break, was reached less and 
 less frequently, and with less and less violence. But 
 almost the very last wave to reach her shores was a decuman 
 wave, which in 1665 spent its force upon the capital. This 
 visitation was not nearly so widespread, nor in its aggregate 
 so deadly, as that of three hundred years before; yet it was 
 awful enough to have o'erfreighted Dryden's ode with woe, 
 had he included it in his scheme. Fortunately then for his 
 immediate purpose, as well as for England, the plague had 
 pretty well burned itself out in the year preceding the one 
 he chose specially to commemorate, and there was no need 
 to include it. Thus it was left for De Foe, some sixty 
 years later, to take advantage of the interest and terror 
 inspired by the next approaching wave of the plague, and 
 to exploit in genuine modern fashion the greatest portent 
 of all this series. His famous Journal of the Plague Year, 
 though written by one w^ho could have had no personal 
 memory of the events, has all the vividness and convincing 
 reality of the testimony of an eye-witness — which indeed it 
 purports to be, and for which it has been repeatedly mis- 
 taken. 
 
 The next event, and the one upon which Dryden put his 
 chief effort, as lending itself best to panegjTic of England 
 and of her new rulers, was the war with the Dutch. The 
 naval battles, indeed, which he celebrates, though most stub- 
 bornly fought out on both sides, were inconclusive. Neither 
 the palm of bravery nor of energy nor of skill can be con- 
 fidently awarded to the one rather than to the other. Nor 
 was the immediate advantage overwhelmingly on England's 
 side. But it was a strenuous passage at arras, in which the 
 king, his brother, and his cousin, Prince Rupert, had borne 
 themselves not unworthilj^; and that was foundation enough 
 for fulsome panegyric and for depreciating in regular John 
 Bull fashion the equally high spirit of the foe. What gave 
 the matter its real significance and whatever valid title it 
 had to a place in the Annus Mirahilis, was something other 
 
than all this, was something which neither Dry den nor 
 Charles could have really understood: — that this was the 
 second act in that long struggle which Englishmen were to 
 wage with their kinsmen and neighbors for commercial 
 empire; — not merely, as at that moment, in the narrow 
 seas which separated their home-lands, but in America, in 
 India, and in the islands of the sea. Its beginning was the 
 famous Navigation Act of Oliver Cromwell; and its last 
 scene — if indeed it be the last — is now enacting under our 
 eyes in South Africa, But of this more anon. 
 
 The Great Fire of London, Dryden's other portent, was 
 spectacular indeed, and tremendous enough to those who 
 witnessed it. But in the summing up of England's affairs, 
 we see now that it was of no appreciable weight or impor- 
 tance; and even as regards the city itself, it was of lasting 
 good rather than harm. It destroyed the noisome seed- 
 beds of the plague, and made possible a more sanitary 
 rebuilding, to which, no doubt, London largely owed her 
 subsequent immunity. 
 
 Such were the wonders of Dryden's wonderful year — 
 wonders spectacular merely, of no far-reaching importance 
 whether in the physical realm or in the moral, at least so 
 far as he or his times discerned them. One matter of really 
 great moment had come, as we have seen, a little too early 
 to fall within the limits of his year, and moreover had 
 failed to lend itself to his immediate purpose. And, shortly 
 after Dryden's poem appeared, another event occurred, not 
 at all with observation, but of importance greater far than 
 any of these — transcending even all else which happened in 
 Charles' reign — the appearance of the Paradise Lost, It was 
 too late for Dry den; and had it been in time, it would have 
 lent itself still less than the Great Plague to the flatterer's 
 use. Better probably than any other man of that time 
 Dryden could have guessed somewhat of its real power and 
 import as an immortal work of art. But even he could 
 not have foreseen how strongly the thought of that blind 
 poet was to shape the imagination and the convictions of 
 
6 
 
 generations of men; how Milton's imagery should become 
 the almost inevitable imagery in which men of our race 
 must clothe their thought of that existence and of those 
 realms and powers that lie beyond the veil. Thus 
 strangely do realities, as we are pleased to call them, and 
 mere imaginings sometimes change places! 
 
 Since then two and a third centuries have slipped away, 
 and again do we find ourselves in a cycle of wonders which 
 this time we make no doubt are really wonders, and no 
 mere commonplaces tricked out in the hues of our own 
 fancies. In one sense, to be sure, there are no wonders. 
 Each thing which a day brings forth has had its founda- 
 tions laid and its opportunity prepared from of old, before 
 there were suns or stars. But while everything thus enters 
 into the "one increasing purpose" which "through the ages 
 runs," while all things in a sense are equally inevitable and 
 equally necessary, not all things are equally impressive. 
 There are crises in the movement when the agencies emerge 
 from the stream of circumstance, and stand visibly forth. 
 There are dramatic moments which really gather up into 
 themselves ten thousand separate, errant impulses, combine 
 them, and launch the resultant forth portentous, irresisti- 
 ble. And at such moments nothing can avail to cheat the 
 human heart of the joy of wonder. 
 
 Then again, our centuries, as we know, are mere for- 
 tuitous units of measure. We cannot conceive them as 
 having any vital or necessary relation whatever to the great 
 movement and destiny of human affairs. Yet how strange it 
 is that, as we look back over the nineteen hundred years of 
 our era, we find the events of real significance and moment 
 somehow clustering about these milestones which we have 
 set up to keep us from losing our way! There is the first 
 great defeat of the Roman legions under Varus at the very 
 opening of the count — prophetic of long centuries of losing 
 battle for the old world-order, and the passing of the 
 sceptre to a race that should make the world new. There 
 is Constantine and the establishment of Christianity at the 
 
third milestone. There is the deluge of northern invasion, 
 and the sack of Rome at the fourth; Theodoric the Goth, 
 Clovis the Frank, and the faint glimmerings of a new order 
 at the fifth; Mohammed and Gregory the Great at the 
 sixth; Charlemagne at the eighth; King Alfred at the 
 ninth; the first Crusade at the eleventh; King John, Magna 
 Charta, and St. Francis at the twelfth; Dante — the "voice 
 of ten silent centuries" — at the thirteenth; Chaucer at the 
 fourteenth; the discovery of America and the re-discovery 
 of the world of classical thought at the fifteenth; Shake- 
 speare and Queen Elizabeth at the sixteenth; the English 
 Revolution at the seventeenth; the French Revolution at 
 the eighteenth; and, most striking of all, the meeting of 
 innumerable streams of human effort, interest, and tendency 
 within the last few years of our own time. Nor does it 
 seem that this impression of the coincidence of the critical 
 nodes of history with the century periods can be wholly 
 illusory, or the mere result of suggestion from our own 
 sentiment or fancy. The instances are too numerous and 
 too vital, explain them how we will. 
 
 In looking at matters so immediately at hand as these 
 last we have not, of course, the true perspective, and cannot 
 surely discern their importance, absolute or relative. But 
 our interest we cannot withhold, nor can we suspend our 
 judgment altogether. We still must try to read them as we 
 can. Approaching thus the events of recent years, we 
 are aware of a certain increase and heightening in all 
 departments of human affairs. There is an acceleration of 
 movement and a crescendo of volume beginning indeed 
 far back, but rising now with a steepness of curve which 
 speaks a climax at hand. In the realm of science and 
 the industrial arts — to cite but a single example out of 
 scores — there is the advent of the new power of electricity, 
 with its vast range of already demonstrated uses, and its 
 almost infinite possibilities yet in store. So tremendous is 
 our pace that it already seems as if electricity were an old- 
 time servant of man. It takes an effort to recall that, but 
 
a score of years ago, the force which drives our thundering 
 chariots, and the fire which kindles our cities with splendid 
 illumination, and sets them like flashing diadems upon the 
 brow of night, was scarcely known outside the laboratory; 
 that but three or four years ago Roentgen rays and wireless 
 telegraphy were things undreamed of. Within this same 
 short period again what developments have we seen, both 
 sinister and benign, of the far-reaching power of human 
 organization and combination — in trusts and in labor- 
 unions, in the Red Cross society, the political boss, and the 
 sympathetic strike! In our own lives, professional, com- 
 mercial, domestic, what quickening of pace, what fierceness 
 of competition, what accession of splendor, of complexity, 
 of care ; — until the lives we ourselves lived in our boyhood 
 now seem to us as slow and as far-away as the days of 
 Methuselah! There are few of my readers, I imagine, who 
 do not remember when the map of Africa was mostly a great 
 white blank ; when the now truculent German Empire was an 
 infant in swaddling clothes; when Italy and Japan were 
 still in the womb of the feudal ages; when it was supposed 
 that the far-shadowing power of Russia might be effectually 
 "cribbed, cabined, and confined" by turning the key of the 
 door at Constantinople. On the last tragic act of Spain's 
 long struggle for colonial empire, the curtain has but just 
 fallen; and but now our own country, parting company 
 with the traditions and maxims on which was nourished 
 her "youth sublime," steps jauntily forth into the race for 
 the self-same prize. 
 
 But beyond all this general deepening of interest toward 
 the close of the century, there seems to be a special empha- 
 sis laid upon its very last year, so as in some true sort to 
 single it out, and to give it a far better right than Dryden's 
 ever had to the title of Annus Mirabilis. I have no ambi- 
 tion to wear Dryden's laureate wreath, — or even Austin's, 
 his successor longo intervallo; yet in more modest fashion 
 would I venture to set forth the claims of the year 1900 to 
 distinction . 
 
Among these claims I do not include that singular 
 dispute, at once fierce and whimsical, which ushered it in, 
 and which raged all the way from peasant to pope, and 
 mayhap still lives— the dispute as to which century it is to 
 which the year rightfully belongs. Indeed, I should not be 
 at all surprised if some of my readers were ready at this 
 moment to take up the cudgels on one side or the other of this 
 famous controversy . But against all such I record my veto . 
 A truce to all such untimely quarrels ! It is enough that it 
 was a year of stirring movement and world-wide surprise, 
 at the end of— and fit to stand in either enumeration at the 
 end of— a century more surprising and more stirring, per- 
 haps, than any other that can be named. 
 
 In the interest still of peace, though the matter is of 
 graver import, I shall lay no special stress upon a circum- 
 stance which connects our year significantly with Dry den's; 
 namely, the appearance of the plague once more in England 
 and Scotland, to say nothing of places nearer at hand.* 
 The plague had not visited England since Dryden's time, 
 nor any part of western Europe since 1722. Its steadily 
 diminishing area and destructiveness induced the hope that 
 the force of this the deadliest of all epidemics was really 
 spent. But such is found to be by no means the case. 
 And, though we have reason to think that the improved 
 medical skill of our day and improved sanitary science may 
 defend civilized peoples from such horrors as once were 
 common, it is well not to be too confident, and to bear in 
 mind the lessons all too easily forgotten of the plague-scare 
 of the year 1900. 
 
 Among the other things which combine to make the 
 year really memorable there stands out. first of all, the 
 South African war, the main movement and brunt of which 
 fell within the year, although its beginning was earlier and 
 its end is not yet. The chief dramatic and spectacular 
 interest of that war lay, of course, in the heroic and amaz- 
 
 *An angry discussion is still going on (Feb., 1901) as to whether the 
 plague did or did not appear in San Francisco during the year 1900. 
 
10 
 
 ingly effective defense, raaiutained single-handed and for 
 so long, by a few simple, rural folk against the whole 
 available power of the richest and strongest nation in the 
 world. This interest the conflict always will have, no 
 matter what may be thought of the merits of the question 
 at issue. But this is not all. Whatever may be its final 
 outcome, it seems certain that this war is the last and most 
 tremendous act in that long drama of strife for commercial 
 and colonial advantage between English and Dutch, the 
 beginnings of which date back, as we have seen, to Crom- 
 well and Charles — so strangely and indivisibly are things 
 far and near bound up in the same bundle of fate! The 
 last act this surely must be, because at home the Dutch have 
 long since withdrawn from the "swagger set" of Europe, 
 and are there secure in their lowliness and the consequent 
 protection of their stronger neighbors. The few colonial 
 interests they still retain are probablj'^ safe under the same 
 guarantee. And nowhere more in the world can there be 
 found a detached mass of Dutch folk so circumstanced as 
 to tempt or to provoke attack. 
 
 The war is memorable again from yet another point of 
 view. Quite up to within our own life-time Africa has 
 been almost the only remaining exemplar and stronghold of a 
 world-order that dates back far beyond the dawn of history. 
 Throughout the w^hole continent, with the exception of 
 Egypt and an intermittent fringe of areas along her coast, 
 there flourished in all its fierce glory the great Mammalian 
 Age, — in its characters and marks essentially the same as 
 that whose records are elsewhere read in the rocks, and 
 which in Europe, Asia, and America passed away untold 
 centuries ago before the rising power and competition of 
 man. Within the remembrance of the youngest of us the 
 elephant and the rhinoceros roamed over the plains of 
 Africa, or crashed their way through her trackless jungles. 
 The hippopotamus and the crocodile swam her rivers. 
 Apes, baboons, and gorillas peopled the tree-tops. Count- 
 less herds of wild cattle, camelopards, deer, and gazelles 
 
11 
 
 ranged over the veldt or browsed in the thickets, furnishing 
 food to jackals, hyenas, leopards, and to the lion, king and 
 master of them all. In the midst of all this fierce and 
 teeming life, himself a part of it, hunting and hunted, 
 fiercer and wilder than any, lived also man, not yet so far 
 emerged as to master and subdue it, or to subdue and 
 master himself. 
 
 " Dragons of the prime, 
 
 That tare each other in their slime, 
 Were mellow music matched with him ! ' ' 
 
 How much longer this state of affairs might have lasted we 
 know not, had it not everywhere been broken in upon and 
 disturbed by the modern spirit of adventure, by exploitation 
 of all sorts in the interest of commercialism armed with 
 modern resources and weapons, and by the eager competi- 
 tion of European powers. Against this invasion and 
 transformation the Boers deliberately set themselves, when 
 they sullenl}^ harnessed their ox-teams, and turned their 
 backs forever, as they hoped, on the new order of things 
 and on the English as its chief exponents. Profiting by 
 the added power and resource which the touch of civilization 
 had given them, they would preserve that savage age, that 
 old-world order, for themselves intact, or at least no further 
 modified than the conditions of their own life rendered 
 inevitable. Thus they became an effective and organized 
 barrier directly in the way of the march of the new order of 
 things. They became, in fact, the onhj effective barrier; 
 for forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, disease, and savage 
 man himself offer but slight resistance to the determined 
 onset of civilization. But this barrier was quite of another 
 sort, as the event has proved. And now that it too has gone 
 down in ruin before the ever-rising tide, we cannot but 
 lament the destruction of that brave and steadfast, though 
 misguided, folk, who flung themselves thus in the pathway 
 of fate. We cannot but denounce the unholy greed and 
 chicane which at last precipitated the conflict. We cannot 
 but wish that some kindlier way had been found to change 
 
12 
 
 the settled resolution of those men. But as long as the 
 resolution held, sooner or later, with pretext or without it, 
 the conflict was inevitable; and of the conflict there could 
 be but one issue. No human barrier can stand against 
 such an ever-rising tide; — nor ought we to wish it to 
 stand. It was in the order of nature that it should give 
 way. So viewing the matter, I doubt not that the South 
 African war, hateful as indeed it is, will finally take its 
 place as one of the most dramatic and conspicuous crises in 
 the fading away of the old order from the last quarter of 
 the globe, and the incoming of the new. 
 
 Yet "Woe unto the world because of offences," says the 
 good book, "for it must needs be that offences come. But 
 woe to that man by whom the offence eometh!" The war 
 into which England so jauntily entered has proved to be 
 one of the most serious crises in all her recent career. It 
 had not progressed far before it became apparent that her 
 prestige in the face of the world was at stake, and after that 
 her empire itself. With unflinching determination and 
 superb hauteur she addressed herself to meet the emergency. 
 Such a magnificent single exhibition of power I doubt 
 whether the world has ever seen. To wipe out the disasters 
 and blunders of the opening campaign, she sent 270,000 
 fighting men to the antipodes, with the most distinguished 
 of all her soldiers to lead them; and there they are still 
 engaged. Five hundred millions of treasure spent, not 
 counting that which war has destroyed; seventy thousand 
 of her sons killed, wounded, dead of disease, or invalided 
 home; — and all as yet unavailing either to hold in security 
 the territory overrun, or to defend from invasion Cape 
 Colony itself. The tremendous strain of the effort is seen 
 in the nervousness of the English public, its lack of com- 
 posure in the face of trifling reverses, its hysterical welcome 
 of returning troops, its threats of stern reckoning some day 
 with those who have brought England to such a pass; it is 
 seen in the unexampled and anxious alacrity with which 
 England's daughters have hastened to strengthen her 
 
13 
 
 hands. Not victorious yet is she, but never so splendid 
 and so terrible as in this her hour of supreme effort and 
 supreme need. And what if it should turn out, as indeed 
 it may, that this is in very truth her supreme effort? What 
 if, when the subjugation is complete, it should mark the 
 very turning-point in England's career? Outside of her 
 own family England is nowhere beloved in the world . Not 
 merely her pride — her very success has gained her enemies 
 on every hand. She still keeps her place in the lead, but 
 with visibly greater effort and with sharper competition. 
 What if the legacies of bitterness and hate growing out of 
 this very war, the added jealousies and complications on the 
 part of her neighbors, the lasting strain of reorganization 
 and control should together suffice to turn the trembling bal- 
 ance slowly against her? What if Africa should be, as has 
 been prophesied, the grave of the British Empire? Absif 
 omen! Yet such things have been. Should it be so, — 
 should the future historian point to this very year 1900 as 
 the climax of England's power and the beginning of her 
 decline, then would it be an Annus MiraMlis indeed. 
 
 On these last lines the ink was not dry when tidings 
 from across the ocean made it seem as if Death himself had 
 set his seal upon the distinctions of the year by making it 
 the last of the longest and most memorable reign in the 
 annals of England, — perhaps the most memorable in the 
 annals of the world. Though the physical life of the great 
 queen outlasted by some brief days the wonderful century 
 with which she was so signally identified, and the wonder- 
 ful year of its close, yet the century was for her the real 
 terminus. Her last public act was to welcome home, doubt- 
 less from his last campaign, the great soldier who on the 
 stricken fields of two continents had led to victory her "far- 
 flung battle line;" — and so soon it was his duty to lead the 
 solemn funeral pomp which bore her away to the tomb! 
 Fifty years before, while her reign was still young, 
 Wellington was laid to rest — 
 
14 
 
 "in streaming London's central roar, 
 Where the sound of those he wrought for 
 And the feet of tliose he fought for 
 Echo round his tomb forevermore." 
 
 And fifty years before that was Nelson. "O eloquent, just, 
 and mighty Death ! " 
 
 While one ancient order is passing awaj' in Africa, 
 another less ancient to be sure, but of far greater human 
 interest, is passing away in China. In Africa it was the oldest 
 biological order anywhere extant on so grand a scale; in 
 China, the oldest organized civilization that yet survives in 
 the world . In outward features the Chinese Empire belongs 
 to the same old-world order as did AssjTia or Persia or 
 Babylon. It is the same huge aggregation of loosely-coher- 
 ent provinces ruled by great satraps or viceroys in very 
 uncertain dependence upon the central power. There is the 
 same Babel of tongues, even though the tongues be closely 
 related. There is the same absence of national feeling, 
 national ideals, and national loyalty. There is the same 
 eternal dominance of intrigue as the prime motive force in 
 civil life and government. On the other hand, China is 
 singularly unlike all those in its strong unity of stock or 
 race, and in its remarkable identity throughout in traditions, 
 in prepossessions, and especially in literature, in ideals of 
 life and character, and in habits of thought and action. 
 Not only so; this remarkable unity has survived conquests 
 and changes of dynasty, and is, no doubt, in part the cause, 
 and in part the effect of the surprising endurance of the 
 Chinese order, while all others of its type have passed 
 away. China and Africa have thus become, though in 
 different senses, the two remaining strongholds of the past 
 in a world which is elsewhere new. By her vast mass and 
 inertia, as well as by her lodged and settled hatred of inno- 
 vation, China, like Africa, has found herself directly in the 
 way of the modern movement and idea — a huge sand-bank 
 sapped by the waves of an ever-rising tide. Because of the 
 special lines on which early European trade was developed, 
 
15 
 
 because of the higher rank of her productions, and because 
 she was a definite organization, China was brought earlier 
 than Africa into the stress of conflict and struggle. The 
 first note of it was sounded in the advent of the Portuguese 
 nearly tour centuries ago. The acute stage was reached 
 nearly a hundred years ago when an English embassador at 
 Pekin was driven forth with contumely, for refusing to 
 acknowledge that his sovereign was a vassal of the Emperor 
 of China. And now at the century's close has come the 
 catastrophe with a crash that has shaken the world. It 
 seems more than a striking coincidence that here too the 
 precise point of rupture was the right of embassy. It is 
 rather another startling result and token of the profound 
 isolation of the Chinese system from the thoughts and ideas 
 of the great world about it. It is another striking demon- 
 stration of the irrepressible conflict between it and that 
 instinct of modern civilization which everywhere, and as its 
 first condition, demands freedom of intercourse and of 
 movement. 
 
 The appalling events of the great outbreak of 1900, and 
 the yet more appalling events which have followed in its 
 train, there is surely no need to recount here. And of 
 these also the end is not yet, nor can the keenest vision 
 discern what the precise outcome shall be. But that it is 
 the catastrophe which we are contemplating, and not 
 merely some passing accident, few any longer doubt. Few 
 now have any lingering thought that the outcome may be 
 the reestablishment of the old order. Whatever form 
 reconstruction may take, we may be sure that the new order 
 of ideas, and not the old, will rule it. 
 
 In this connection I cannot forbear to speak of a ten- 
 dency of feeling and of utterance in our midst, which has 
 of late been greatly accentuated, and which to some at least 
 is a matter of great surprise, if not of grave concern. "My 
 kingdom is not of this world" said the Nazarene when 
 questioned as to a possible appeal to force in support of his 
 doctrine. "Put up thy sword again into his place," he said 
 
16 
 
 to an overzealous friend who would openly make that 
 appeal; — "all they that take the sword shall perish by the 
 sword." And again, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall 
 inherit the earth; " and "Love your enemies, bless them that 
 curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for 
 them that despitef ully use you and persecute you ; that ye 
 may be the children of your Father which is in heaven." 
 Though the lesson is a hard one, it seemed as though at last 
 the followers of the meek and lowly Jesus were beginning 
 to take it to heart. The church, and especially its 
 ministers, it was felt, w^ere permanently pledged to the 
 cause of peace, and could not consistently be found among 
 those who clamor for vengeance or openly fan the passions 
 which lead to war and bloodshed. Yet in our country, 
 at least, all this seems to have been changed within 
 these last few years. I fear it is not too much to say that 
 the body of our American clergy was prompt and eager to 
 urge on this nation into w^ar with Spain. There were, of 
 course, many and noble exceptions. But so far as my 
 observation and impressions go, that minister was the 
 exception who lifted up his voice in protest; and that 
 religious paper was the exception which did not, and which 
 does not now, defend it. Was it a wave of popular enthusi- 
 asm which swept them from their moorings? Was it specious 
 sentiment? Was it the traditional Puritanic hatred of all 
 things Roman? Or shall we be told that herein is no real 
 paradox at all? I know not. And now throughout all this 
 dreadful business in the Philippines and this more dreadful 
 business in China, almost the only voice we hear, whether 
 from missionaries in the field or from their supporters here 
 at home, is the constant demand for more force, greater 
 severity, harder conditions, more blood. The ease is one 
 which excites wonderment in the onlookers, even among 
 those who are glad to find this unlooked-for support in their 
 schemes of conquest. But are the gentleness and love which 
 Christ preached so long ago now antiquated, and are fierce- 
 ness and vengeance to take their place! Was Mohammed 
 
17 
 
 right after all? I cannot undertake to answer these questions 
 nor to explain this not the least surprise of the century- 
 closing year. 
 
 Yet while the tragic and somber phase of this tremendous 
 drama in China has occupied our chief attention, its exi- 
 gencies have brought into counterplay a movement and 
 tendenc}^ which seems to me prophetic not of downfall and 
 doom, but of hope — a new and larger hope for the world. 
 The great old-time civilizations were all separative, divisive. 
 Each conceived and developed in practical isolation one, 
 single master-idea. The Hebrew idea of righteousness, the 
 Greek idea of intelligence and ordered beauty, the Roman 
 idea of social organization were thus separately worked out. 
 It required the whole lifetime of a great race or nation, and 
 all its genius, to bring one of these ideas to such clearness 
 and perfection as to permit of its being passed on to others, 
 and so becoming part of the inheritance of the ages. Each 
 civilization developed its idea as far as it could be developed 
 alone. Yet each idea was after all but a partial one, in 
 itself insufficient for the basis of a complete and lasting 
 civilization. Each needed the support and help of all the 
 others before there could be a perfect society. Indeed, it 
 was precisely because of the lack of complementary and 
 supporting ideas that each of these old civilizations was 
 doomed to fade away. The problem of the ancient world 
 was therefore the discovery and the development of these 
 master-ideas singly. The problem of the modern world is 
 the combination and adjustment of them to make a com- 
 plete and sufficient basis for a permanent human society. 
 
 The Roman was the last effective civilization of the 
 ancient world — the last one able to impress its idea upon 
 the world that was to be. And its idea, the idea of an 
 effective human organization, was developed in such 
 imposing grandeur that, during the long centuries which 
 followed its downfall, that idea still dominated the hearts 
 and thoughts of men. The efforts of the Middle Age were 
 for the most part pathetically ineffective. They were like 
 
18 
 
 the efforts and struggles of men in dreams. But the 
 dreams of the Middle Age were true to its own nature and 
 character; they were grandiose, romantic. And at the heart 
 of them all was the Roman universality — the conception of 
 an all-embracing unity. During that feverish night and 
 troubled dawn the Middle Age had three such splendid 
 visions. And though they came sadly short of realization 
 in actual practice, those dreams were truly prophetic, and 
 are still to us of these latter days the hope and the promise 
 of the world. The first was the dream of an all-embracing 
 unity and organization of spiritual life — a church of which 
 every man born into the world should be a member — the 
 Holy Catholic Church. Its second was the dream of a world- 
 embracing civil order of which every man should be a 
 citizen, — the Holy Roman Empire. And the third, its 
 dream just before dawn, and so, according to the old belief, 
 destined to a nearer fulfillment, was the dream of a world- 
 wide fraternity of the sons of light — of souls whom the 
 truth had made free — the University. The conception of 
 the University was that of a State — a civitas, as its diplomas 
 still attest; a republic not of this world, but of the world of 
 ideas. Its local institutions were to be but chapters of a 
 universal society. Its members were to be really free as 
 were no other men. By virtue of their common language 
 they were actually free from the heavy curse of Babel. By 
 virtue of their superior illumination which should make 
 them a law unto themselves, they were to be actually free 
 in large measure from the trammels of the civil law, made 
 only for knaves and fools. And, best of all, their spirits 
 were to be free — free to think, to learn, to know. 
 
 But when the modern day at last broke, organization 
 and civilization had to begin on a scale much smaller than 
 that of these dreams. For many centuries the nation was 
 to be the largest whole with which human effort could suc- 
 cessfully grapple. As the modern nationalities one after 
 another emerged from chaos, each was forced to work out 
 its own civilization very much by itself. Each had to make 
 
19 
 
 its own adjustment of these master-ideas under its own 
 peculiar conditions, and in accordance with its own peculiar 
 genius and limitations. And nations differ not merely in 
 natural gifts and advantages, but in age and in experience 
 as well. Germany, Italy, and Japan were born into the 
 family within our remembrance. Furthermore, the very 
 virtues of nationality, — loyalty and patriotism, — operate as 
 barriers to sjTupathy and the free play of ideas quite as 
 much as do the commercial and material discriminations 
 which national competition imposes. It is plain, therefore, 
 that in the present — the national — stage of civilization there 
 still is, and must be, much that is separative, divisive, 
 partial. And yet in spite of the provinciality, the jealousy, 
 the Philistinism of our modern world, one feels that civil- 
 ization, wherever it now exists, is after all one, and not 
 many as was the case in the ancient world. And there 
 have been of late intimations not a few that the growth of 
 the free spirit of man cannot much longer be kept within 
 the limits of the national phase of organization. Such lim- 
 itation was indeed necessary, and has been of immense 
 advantage at the start. The nation was the seed-bed, the 
 nursery; but the field is the world. Beyond the nation on 
 every side stretches humanity itself , transcendent, limitless. 
 Civilization can never be complete or perfect for any until 
 all are partakers. The separate seed-plants must grow to 
 touch and support one another, must cover the whole earth 
 with their shadow before the golden harvest can really 
 ripen or be gathered. 
 
 This it was toward which the dumb heart of the Middle 
 Age so strangely yearned, and which for one group of men 
 it so nearly realized in its University. This it is which for 
 the same group is now realized in the almost absolute com- 
 munity in spirit of the truly cultured and learned through- 
 out the world. This idea was the vital and lasting element 
 in that profound and far-reaching stir of human life which 
 we miscall the French Revolution. This is what prompted 
 the wonderful missionary activity of the century just closed. 
 
20 
 
 This it is which in recent times has caused a constant 
 enlargement of the realm of international law and of inter- 
 national activity and cooperation of all sorts; such as the 
 federation of the Australian Colonies just consummated. 
 This is bringing about the gradual dawn of a world-con- 
 sciousness and a world-conscience, as seen in the Red Cross 
 Society and the Peace Conference at the Hague. But not 
 less significant and impressive than these was the prompt 
 and instinctive rallying of all the great powers of civiliza- 
 tion as one man to meet the emergency in China. That 
 emergency portended no appreciable danger to those great 
 powers as separate nations, for it could not reach them; — 
 much less a danger to their united force. But the Boxer 
 movement, by its determined stand against intercourse and 
 against ideas, far more than by its lawlessness and violence, 
 was a menace and a defiance to the spirit of civilization 
 itself. This, I take it, was the real issue, and this the 
 ground of that unexampled unanimity of impulse which 
 astonished the world. The true significance of that common 
 impulse is not, in my view, altered at all by the greed and 
 violence on the part of civilized nations which goaded into 
 frenzy those unhappy people, and so precipitated the event, 
 nor by the pillaging and wanton cruelty which seem to have 
 disgraced the military operations, nor even by the selfish- 
 ness which now seems certain to determine the immmediate 
 outcome. That the instinct of civilization should so assert 
 itself, — should, though for one brief moment, so over- 
 shadow national jealousies and self-seeking, — is indeed 
 memorable, prophetic. 
 
 Such, all too hastily and meagerly set forth, are some of 
 the thoughts which come surging to mind as one turns to 
 gaze upon the solemn pomp of the great year just past, and 
 listens to its trumpet-note still echoing to remind us that 
 "the old order changeth, yielding place to new." It is 
 much to have lived through such a year with heart and soul 
 at all awake to its true import. It is more to have come, as 
 most of ray readers have done, to such a year as the 
 
21 
 
 climax and crown of a long procession of such years of 
 ever- increasing volume and power; — years watched with 
 eager interest as thej-^ swept grandly by, and still vividly 
 real in memory and imagination. But happiest of all is the 
 lot of those who, having looked with us as from Mt. Pisgah 
 upon the promised land, are also privileged to enter in and 
 possess it. The Century is dead. Long live the Century! 
 Be it for us longer or shorter, from memories and musings 
 such as these we turn with new courage to the hope set 
 before us — the hope of a new world, 
 
 "Clasp, Angel of the backward look 
 
 And folded wings of ashen gray 
 
 And voice of echoes far away, 
 The brazen covers of thy book ; 
 The weird palimpsest old and vast 
 Wherein thou hid'st the spectral past ; 
 Where closely mingling pale and glow 
 The characters of joy or woe ; 
 The monographs of outlived years 
 Or smile-illumed or dim with tears. 
 Even while I look, I can but heed 
 
 The restless sands' incessant fall. 
 Importunate hours that hours suceed, 
 Each clamorous with its own sharp need. 
 
 And duty keeping pace with all. 
 Shut down and clasp the heavy lids ; 
 I hear again the voice that bids 
 
 The dreamer leave his dream midway 
 For larger hopes and graver fears : 
 Life greatens in these later years, 
 
 The century's aloe flowers to-day!" 
 
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