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 RHODE ISLAND'S INFLUENCE 
 
 IN THE 
 
 FORMATION OF AMERICAN 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS BY 
 
 WALTER R ANGELL 
 
 AT 
 RHODE ISLAND STATE COLLEGE 
 
 KINGSTON 
 
 JUNE 19, 1922 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/rhodeislanclsinflOOange 
 
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 by 
 
 WALTER F. ANGELL 
 
 RHODE ISLAND STATE COLLEGE 
 
 JUNE 19, 1922 
 
 As a prologue to the remarks which I am about to address 
 to you, I want to relate an incident in the hfe of Benjamin 
 DisraeU which I recently read in the Memoirs of Chauncey 
 M. Depew. 
 
 A young clergyman had been called upon to preach before 
 the Queen. He went to Disraeli for advice. "If you 
 preach thirty minutes." said DisraeH, "her Majesty will be 
 bored. If you preach fifteen minutes, her Majesty will be 
 pleased. If you preach ten minutes, her Majesty will be 
 delighted." "But," said the clergyman, "what can a man 
 possibly say in only ten minutes?" "That," said Disraeli, 
 "will be a matter of indifference to her Majesty." 
 
 Disraeli evidently thought that what a man says is often 
 of less interest to his audience than the expedition with 
 which he says it. That is the way it always seemed to me, 
 when I was a youngster and had to listen to speeches from 
 my elders. And with that recollection in my mind, and 
 sympathy for youth in my heart, I am going to present to 
 you just two ideas. First, the debt that American De- 
 mocracy owes to two men, one of whom was the founder of 
 this State; and second, the reaction of Europe to the appeal 
 of American Democracy, which we have witnessed in our 
 own time. 
 
If anyone should inquire what were the distinctive char- 
 acteristics of the governmental system which has been 
 developed in the last three hundred years in these United 
 StateSjthe answer would certainly be democracy and religious 
 toleration. And it should further be said that the principle 
 of religious toleration universally prevalent throughout this 
 whole region has brought with it a political toleration 
 unknown in any other part of the world. These two prin- 
 ciples of democracy and toleration were first fully developed 
 and appHed as principles for the government of a civil State 
 in that small stretch of territory in a part of which we now 
 stand, between the western shores of Narragansett Bay and 
 the Connecticut River. 
 
 It is for this reason that I have chosen to devote the few 
 words which I have to say to the young people who are 
 about to leave this Rhode Island institution, to emphasize 
 the part which this State and its founder took in shaping 
 these principles of our American Commonwealth. I want 
 them to go forth with the inspiration that, while they have 
 been pursuing their studies here, they have trod the soil and 
 breathed the air of the spot where the great principles of 
 American democracy first took root and from which they 
 have spread from ocean to ocean. 
 
 To me there has always been a certain picturesque and 
 historic interest in an incident recorded in one of the writings 
 of Roger Williams. He tells of a journey which he made with 
 two companions to and from Sempringham, a Uttle village 
 
in Lincolnshire in old England. The journey took place 
 sometime in the reign of King James the First and a few 
 years after the Pilgrim had first set foot on Plymouth Rock. 
 Sempringham was the seat of the Earl of Lincoln, where 
 was discussed and developed the movement of that great 
 body of EngHshmen of whom Williams and his companions 
 were a part, who were planning to migrate to the shores of 
 North America to escape the religious and political perse- 
 cution which rendered Ufe in their native land intolerable. 
 Williams tells us something of the discussion between him 
 and his companions as they rode along. Those companions 
 were Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and John 
 Cotton, soon to become the leading spirit in the colony of 
 Massachusetts; so that we have here together, on the road 
 down from Sempringham, the three men whose ideas were 
 soon to shape the destinies of New England and, as we shall 
 see later, the whole fabric of our American government. 
 
 John Cotton came to the then recently established colony 
 of Massachusetts and speedily converted its government 
 into a theocracy, of which he was the high priest. No man 
 could be a freeman unless he was a member of the church — 
 an arrangement which very soon disfranchised a great 
 majority of the people. The magistrates were governed by 
 the laws laid down in holy writ — as interpreted by Cotton 
 and his fellow clergymen. No dissent from their inter- 
 pretation was permitted. If a man seeking the truth by the 
 light of his own conscience spoke such dissent, they put a 
 
cleft stick upon his tongue. If he hstened to such dissent, 
 they shaved off his ears. And if he ventured to disagree 
 with them upon the question of whether justification came 
 by faith or works, they tied him to a post and laid a lash 
 upon his naked back. 
 
 This was no soil in which democracy could grow. 
 
 "Democracy," said John Cotton, " I do not conceive that 
 ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church 
 or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall 
 be governed?" And Winthrop, his associate, said, 
 ' 'Democracy amongst civil nations is accounted the 
 meanest and worst of all forms of government." It was 
 all sufficient for Winthrop that there was never such a 
 government in Israel. As to any toleration of other 
 people's opinion, the attitude of the Massachusetts theocracy 
 was what might have been expected, and it could not be 
 better expressed than in the words of Thomas Dudley, 
 another of Cotton's associates, who wrote the grim refrain: 
 
 "Let men of God in courts and churches watch 
 O'er such as do a toleration hatch, 
 Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice, 
 To poison all with heresy and vice." 
 
 Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker followed their 
 companion of the Sempringham road to Massachusetts, but 
 from the rigid and cruel theocracy which they found that 
 Cotton was estabhshing there WiUiams was banished and 
 Hooker fled. In striking contrast to the sentiments of 
 Cotton and his followers above quoted. Hooker declared to 
 
his followers in their new settlement at Hartford that "the 
 choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by 
 God's own allowance" and that "the foundation of au- 
 thority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people." 
 There you have the principle of democracy boldly and 
 clearly declared. And under the guidance of Williams, his 
 followers in Providence agreed to subject themselves "in 
 active or passive obedience to all such orders or agreements 
 as shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly 
 way by the major consent of the present inhabitants, masters 
 of families, incorporated together into a township, and such 
 others whom they shall admit into the same, only in civil 
 thing s.^^ There you have both democracy and toleration 
 put into actual operation as the basis of a civil State. 
 
 If any argument for the desirability or necessity of 
 toleration as a political principle were necessary, it might 
 well be drawn from the lives of these three men themselves. 
 They were all Englishmen. They were all clergymen. 
 They were all educated in the same university — Cambridge 
 in old England. They were all men of the highest character 
 and the purest motives, each giving his best to the cause of 
 mankind as he viewed it; and in the New World to which 
 they came they were all surrounded by the same conditions 
 and confronted with the same problems. Yet their con- 
 clusions as to how those problems should be solved were as 
 wide apart as the poles. This is the story of all mankind. 
 Human minds are no more identical in feature than human 
 
faces. Different minds draw different conclusions from the 
 same facts. If there is to be peace and order and progress 
 among men, they must Usten to the opinions of others and 
 be free to express their own. That is toleration. And if 
 the pyramid of society is to be stable, it must rest upon its 
 base, and not upon its apex; men must ultimately be 
 governed in their conduct towards each other in civil 
 matters by the will of the majority; — that is democracy. 
 
 The freedom of thought and expression which Roger 
 Wilhams made the basic principle of his State brought both 
 its trials and its compensations. It made his colony the 
 refuge of men of contentious spirit, who were unwelcome in 
 communities where stricter views prevailed and who had 
 yet to learn the lesson that liberty and unbridled license are 
 not the same thing. It is said that even in Connecticut an 
 eminent divine used to begin his prayer with the words, 
 "Oh, Lord, thou knowest that by nature we are all Rhode 
 Islanders.'' And Williams himself once described his colony 
 as a mere patch of ground stretching from the Pawcatuck 
 River northward and full of troublesome inhabitants — a 
 description which some of us may sometimes feel is applic- 
 able even to this day. But if his patience was tried, his 
 faith was never shaken, and the whole world knows today 
 that it was justified. Moreoever, the compensations soon 
 made themselves evident. The principle of toleration saved 
 this colony from any participation in the two greatest 
 tragedies which stain the pages of New England's history. 
 
Although the reUgious principles of the Quakers were 
 obnoxious to the founders of our State, they were never 
 persecuted here. No lash was ever laid on a Quaker's back 
 in Rhode Island as he was dragged at a cart's tail from town 
 to town. Nor was any witch ever hanged or branded or 
 even prosecuted here. Freedom to think and to utter their 
 thoughts as they chose kept people both humane and sane. 
 Such a demonology as lay at the basis of witchcraft flourishes 
 only like a fungus in a mind from which light is excluded as 
 from a dark cellar. It has Httle chance to develop in minds 
 which have liberty to search for truth wherever they can 
 find it, and to freely exchange opinions with their fellowmen. 
 When Massachusetts demanded of our Legislature that we 
 cease harboring Quakers and take measures to repress them, 
 the Legislature replied: "We have no law among us 
 whereby to punish any for only declaring by words, &c., 
 theire mindes and understandings concerning the things 
 and ways of God, as to salvation and an eternal condition." 
 And they went on to say that they had found by experience 
 that where the Quakers were let alone they gave little 
 trouble. Here again our forefathers had discovered the 
 important truth that contentious spirits thrive and gain 
 strength by counter-contention and persecution, and are 
 best subdued by toleration and non-resistance. This is a 
 principle of very broad application. If generally recognized 
 and applied in domestic affairs, I think it would materially 
 lessen the evil of divorce. 
 
It is only in recent times that the debt which our whole 
 country owes to Roger Wilhams and Thomas Hooker has 
 been appreciated. Among the humble followers of Williams 
 there were no literary men. Their hard struggle with the 
 wilderness gave them little time, even if they had the 
 ability, to write history, although unwittingly they were 
 making it. But Massachusetts has always been prolific in 
 self appreciative literature. It would seem that nearly all 
 of her leading colonists kept diaries, and that about one in 
 ten of them was a historian. They and their descendants 
 wrote the history of New England for nearly two hundred 
 years, and thereby created the impression that Massachu- 
 setts was New England. It remained for later historians 
 to re-examine the facts and correct the error, and the result 
 is well summed up in the following paragraph from the 
 latest writer on The Founding of New England : 
 
 "The westward movement of New England was to 
 continue until her sons and her institutions were to be 
 found in a continuous chain of communities from 
 Portland on the Atlantic to Portland on the Pacific, and 
 the influence of New England thought upon the life of 
 the nation cannot be over-estimated. In so far as the 
 origins of that thought can be traced back to any 
 definite leaders, or individual colonies, it was evidently 
 the ideas of Williams and Hooker, rather than those of 
 Winthrop, with all his high qualities, which were to 
 dominate the American people, and to be absorbed into 
 their very being." 
 
 8 
 
For this succinct statement of the influence which the 
 founder of our State exerted in shaping the governmental 
 system of this nation, this Rhode Island institution ought 
 someday to give Mr. James Truslow Adams a degree. 
 
 And I may add that, if you seek a confirmation of the 
 statement made a few moments ago that it was from this 
 strip of territory between Narragansett Bay and the Con- 
 necticut River that the principles of our American de- 
 mocracy took their origin and spread throughout our whole 
 American Commonwealth, you have only to read those 
 great public documents which together form the Magna 
 Charta of the liberties of our whole people — the Declaration 
 of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and 
 the Constitutions of the 48 States of the Union. In every 
 one of them you will find enshrined the principle of de- 
 mocracy as established by Hooker, and the principles of 
 democracy and toleration as established and practiced by 
 Williams and his followers. And in none of them does a 
 vestige of the narrow and cruel theocracy which John 
 Cotton established in Massachusetts survive. 
 
 While American democracy, since it vindicated itself in 
 the Civil War, has been much lauded by liberal minds in 
 Europe, its first direct impact upon the political system of 
 that continent has been witnessed in our own day-at the 
 peace conference at Versailles. There a President of the 
 United States met the political leaders of Europe and 
 
endeavored to induce them to recast a world in chaos, and 
 which we had helped them to save from despotism, upon 
 the lines which we had shown could bring peace and pros- 
 perity to a whole continent. We went into the conference 
 with a declaration of American principles, such as freedom 
 of the seas, self determination of nations, disarmament, 
 etc., and our slogan was, "Make the world safe for de- 
 mocracy." Not one of these principles came out of that 
 conference alive. They were either utterly rejected or 
 whittled away to nothing. The very idea of the freedom 
 of the seas was so abhorrent to our EngHsh cousins that we 
 had to abandon it before we sat down at the table, in order 
 to keep peace in the family. For our own sake and the 
 world's, I hope that that peace may always be maintained. 
 But I do think that it is time that we emphasized a little 
 that gentle hint that James Russell Lowell gave more than 
 half a century ago in his poem entitled "Jonathan to John": 
 
 "We own the ocean, tu John: 
 You mus'n' take it hard , 
 Ef we can't think with you, John, 
 It's jest your own back-yard. 
 Ole Uncle S, sez he, ' I guess 
 Ef theVs his claim,' sez he, 
 'The fencin'-stuff'll cost enough 
 To bust up friend J. B. 
 Ez wal ez you an' me!' " 
 
 Our programme for Versailles failed because the 
 European mind, or at least that part of it which is repre- 
 sented in its chancelleries, does not understand what 
 American democracy is, or, when it does understand it, 
 wants none of it. American democracy impHes toleration 
 — letting other people alone, and not seeking to appropriate 
 
 lO 
 
their territories or exploit their resources against their will. 
 This idea of toleration makes no appeal to the European 
 mind. That mind has been too long moulded in the doc- 
 trine of war and conquest to yield readily to the doctrine 
 of peace and toleration. It is still under the influence of 
 the teachings of MachiavelH. It still believes that some 
 one nation must rule the world and dictate the policy of 
 other nations. The conference at Versailles and those 
 which have succeeded it show that Europe cares nothing 
 for the principles of democracy as we understand it, but 
 does care very much about coal and oil and iron and the 
 territories of weaker peoples in Africa and Mesopotamia 
 and Russia where those precious articles may be obtained. 
 What we have been witnessing, ever since the Armistice, is 
 a struggle of the conquering European States over the 
 division of the spoils of the victory which we helped them 
 to win. The old diplomacy is in the saddle. It could not 
 be unhorsed by the spear of our young democracy, however 
 valiantly wielded. It listened cynically, with secret treaties 
 in its pocket, to our plea for open covenants openly arrived 
 at. While it talked peace, it financed wars; and while it 
 professed admiration for our doctrine of self determination, 
 it established a new machinery for extending its control over 
 weak peoples in remote parts of the earth by creating a 
 system of mandates — generously oftering to the United 
 States the mandate for that region where the most trouble 
 was sure to arise and where no reward could by any possi- 
 
 II 
 
bility be expected. With such a diplomatic debauch, the 
 United States wisely decided that it would have nothing 
 to do. That it will bring retribution (as it has often done 
 before) and, if persisted in, ruin upon those who devised it, 
 is a foregone conclusion. The spoilers are already at odds 
 among themselves. 
 
 We Americans firmly believe that the democracy de- 
 veloped upon the lines laid down by Wilhams and Hooker 
 is the best form of government in the world, and we hope to 
 see it become universal, for the good of mankind. How 
 shall we accomplish this? It cannot be done by force. It 
 cannot be done by preaching to the nations around a council 
 table, and, as the President of one of our great universities 
 is said to recommend, bringing our fist down upon the table 
 to emphasize our doctrine. It cannot be done by loaning 
 them money with which to finance new wars. It can only 
 be done by the influence of example — by keeping our own 
 house in order; by a progressive development of our 
 political system upon the principles laid down by its far- 
 seeing and illustrious founders; by constantly exerting the 
 great power which our one hundred millions of energetic 
 people and the boundless resources of our country give us in 
 the interests of peace, against the oppressors of the weak 
 and the aggressions of the strong; by continuing to hold 
 forth what our own charter happily describes as a lively 
 experiment, that it is by adherence to those principles that 
 a civil state may flourish and be best maintained. 
 
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