^!i;li!iifil!!l;J(l

THE SENATE
OF THE UNITED STATES

BY HENRY CABOT LODGE
THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
THE DEMOOBACT OP THB CONSTITU
TION, AND OTHEB ESSAYS
EABLY MEMOBIES
XHE STORY OP THE BBVOLtTTION
A PBONTIEE TO'WN, AND OTHEB ESSAYS
A FIGHTING FBIGATE, AND OTHEB ES
SAYS AND ADDBESSES
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

THE SENATE
OF THE UNITED STATES
AND OTHER ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
HISTORICAL AND LITERARY

BY
HENRY CABOT LODGE

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1921

COPTEIGHT, 1921, BT
CHAELES SCEIBNEE'S SONS

TO THE
NOBLE MEMORY
OF
AUGUSTUS PEABODY GARDNER.
STATESMAN IN THE TEARS OF PEAOE;
SOLDIEE IN THE TEAKS OF WAE -WITH
SPAIN AND GERMANT;
HE QAYE HIS LIFE TO HIS OOUNTBT
JANUAEY 14, 1918.

CONTENTS
PAQB
• The Senate of the United States ....'... 1
< New Lamps fob Old  32
<. A Gbeat Library  43
'- Value of the Classics  58
—Familiae Quotations  92
• Theodore Roosevelt  113
•^-Peospeeo's Island  159
¦ After the Victory  181
. The Pilgrims of Plymouth  195

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES ^
On the thirtieth day of May, 1913, Mr. Bryan as
Secretary of State made proclamation that the requi
site number of States had ratified the amendment to
the Constitution of the United States providing that
henceforth United States Senators should be elected
by direct popular vote and not by the legislatures of
the different States as established by the Constitution
of 1787. This amendment, strictly speaking, is only
a change in the mechanism of election and does not
either increase or diminish the powers or essential
attributes of the Senate, although it will undoubtedly
have ultimately a more or less marked effect upon the
quality and character of the membership of that body.
It is, none the less, a memorable amendment because,
while it is the seventeenth which has been adopted
since the Constitution went into operation, it is the
first which in any way touches or affects the Senate
of the United States.
With the single exception of the House of Lords,
the United States Senate is the oldest upper or second
chamber in any great national legislature now in exist
ence. Under the provisions of the Constitution
framed in 1787 the Senate met for the first time on
the fourth day of March, 1789. The quorum required
^ Reprinted, with additions, from the Political Quarterl-y, Oxford,
1914. 1

2 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
by the Constitution was not obtained until the Gth of
April, when the Senate was organized by the election
of John Langdon of New Hampshire as President pro
tempore and by the appointment of a Secretary and
other subordinate ofl&cers. From that day to this the
Senate has never been, legally speaking, reorganized.
It has been in continuous and organized existence for
one hundred and thirty-two years because, two-thirds
of the Senate being always in office, there never has
been such a thing as a Senate requiring reorganization,
as is the case with each newly elected House. When,
at intervals of four years, a new President comes into
office, the first act at twelve o'clock noon on that day
is for the outgoing Vice-President or for the President
pro tempore of the Senate to administer the oath to the
new Vice-President and hand him the gavel, the sym
bol of the presiding officer in a body then and there
ready to transact business. There is no break in the
_existence of the Senate^>aiid before the President elect
can be inaugurated or the members elect of the House.
ofRepresentatives can meet anH^ cho^^I^_Speaker,
the Senate of the United States has transferred the
^.t^nt5z-.-fi%>mr-0ne~presi4ins.-X)fficer-_to^ goes forward with its organization unchanged and in
full possession of all the qualifications necessary to the
performance of its duties. There may be no House of
Representatives, but merely an unorganized body of
members elect; there may be no President duly
installed in office, but there^ is _always tiie organized
Senate of the United States. This fact, universaUy

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 3
known and yet generally wholly unremarked, is not
without an important significance which wUl be
explained later. I allude to it here merely to show
that any constitutional change affecting the Senate,
no matter how slight, and even when confined to the
mechanism of election, has much meaning if we reflect
that it is the first which has occurred in one hundred
and thirty-two years. It is significant also because it
happens to be almost coincident with certain vital
changes already effected and which seem to be pre
cursors of even more fundamental alterations in the
House of Lords; the one upper chamber which is older,
far older of course, than the Senate of the United
States. It will not be amiss, therefore, at this particular
time, which has witnessed the first constitutional
change aflfecting the Senate of the United States, and in
view of the proposed reform or re-constitution of the
House of Lords, to consider briefly the construction of
the Senate, the principles upon which it was based, the
purposes for which it was established and, in a general
way, its history as an integral part of the Government
of the United States since 1789. The Senate it may
be premised is a remarkable body in its origin, in the
powers with which it was invested by the framers of
the Constitution, and in the use which it has made of
these powers. We cannot, however, understand the
Senate, the purpose of its makers or the powers which
it possesses, without a full realization of the manner in
which it was created and of the character of its creators.

4 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
When the delegates from the various States gathered
at Philadelphia in May, 1787, for the purpose of fram
ing a new and better general govemment for the Union
of States, it must never be forgotten, if we would under
stand all which followed, that these delegates repre
sented States and not people. FoUowing the example
of the Continental Congress and of the imbecile Con
federation, which can hardly be said to have succeeded
it, for it never had any genuine vitality, the vote of
the Constitutional Convention was by States and not
by individual membership. Virginia, Massachusetts,
and Pennsylvania each had one vote, and so did the
smaU States of Delaware and New Hampshire. Alex
ander Hamilton personaUy signed the Constitution,
but New York did not because his two associates from
that State were opposed to it and therefore, as a
majority of the delegation, they controlled the Vote of
the State.
The impossibiUty of securing an effective central
government when that government was obliged to
depend upon the States as such, both for its revenues
and the enforcement of its laws, had been demon
strated by painful experience under the Continental
Congress and the Confederation -yyhich followed it.
Dire necessity alone had forced upon the thirteen
States the attempt to establish a better and stronger
central government, one which should act upon the
people directly and not be left helpless and ineffective
at the mercy of the States. Hence the Convention
which met at Philadelphia in May, 1787. But it was

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 5
only dire necessity which brought these delegates
together. Local feeling and local jealousies were still
predominant. The States entered upon the work of
making a new Constitution with great reluctance, and
determined to confine the powers of the central govem
ment, which the harsh realities of disorder, confusion
and national bankruptcy had extorted from them,
within the narrowest bounds. The sentiment in the
larger States was generally favorable to the idea of a
new Constitution, ' but the smaller States, which were
in the majority when the vote was by States, regarded
aU changes with profound suspicion. They feared, and
not wholly without reason, that if too much power was
given to the central government, acting directly upon
the people and deriving its power from the people at
large, three or four of the largest States would be able
practically to control the government of the Union.
This apparently irreconcUable difference of opinion
came very near wrecking the efforts of the Convention
of 1787, which contained only a few men who, like
Washington and Hamilton in the phrase of that day,
"thought continentally."
It is not necessary to trace the long struggle between
these opposing forces which ended in the most famous
compromise of the Constitution of which the Senate
was the vital element and which finaUy enabled the
Convention to bring its work to a successful conclu
sion. It is sufficient here to point out that as the Con
stitution was necessarily made by the States alone,
they yielded with the utmost reluctance to the grants

6 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
of power to the people of the United States as a whole,
and sought in every way to protect the rights of the
several States against invasion by the National author
ity. The States, it must be remembered, as they then
stood were all sovereign States. Each one possessed all
the rights and attributes of sovereignty, and the Con
stitution could only be made by surrendering to the
general govemment a portion of these sovereign
powers. It was conceded that the House of Repre
sentatives must be chosen on the basis of population.
There was a protracted contest over the powers to be
granted to the Executive and especially over the
method by which the Chief Executive should be
selected, the States Rights Party endeavoring to keep
the Executive within the control of the States. FinaUy,
it was arranged that the Executive should be chosen
by electoral coUeges, one for each State, these colleges
having a membership equal to the membership of the
several States in both Houses of Congress. Theoreti
cally each elector was to vote for the man whom he
beUeved to be best fitted for the office of President,
and a majority of the electors in all the coUeges voting
by States determined the result. In practise, however,
the system thus devised by the framers of the Consti
tution became a dead letter, and the vote of each State
for President was determined by the popular majority
cast in that State for a group of electors who were aU
pledged beforehand to vote for the same person. This
arrangement made the Executive the choice of the
people at large in each State. But he was not neces-

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 7
sarUy the choice of a majority of all the people of the
country, because the people in voting for electors voted
by States. The President is chosen by a majority of
the electors, who may not, and often do not, represent
a majority of the people of the entire country, so that
the final choice of the Chief Executive still remains as
an enduring manifestation of the power of the States
when the Constitution was framed.
By these provisions for the House and the Executive
the Senate, the upper House, was left as the one place
where the States could find complete protection for
the sovereign rights which they felt were being sacri
ficed in order to obtain an efficient central government.
In the Senate accordingly the States endeavored to
secure every possible power which would protect them
and their rights. They even tried to give to the Senate
the power to select judges and ambassadors, and
although they failed in this and in other similar direc
tions, they nevertheless conferred upon the Senate""
powers which, it is safe to say, have never been else-
' where accumulated in a single upper chamber. They
ordained that each State should have two Senators,
without reference to population, thus securing equality
of representation among the States. They then pro
vided in Article V of the Constitution that "no State
without its consent should be deprived of its equal
suffrage in the Senate." In the same article they wisely
made amendment to the Constitution difficult by pro
viding that an amendment must receive a vote of two-
thirds of both Houses before submission to the States

8 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
and, this vote being obtained, the proposed amend
ment could not become a part of the Constitution
unless ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of
the States. But the equal suffrage of the States in the
Senate cannot be changed except by the assent of every
State. In other words, the equal representation of the
States cannot be modified in any way unless the whole
Constitution is set aside. This clause, it will be noted,
is the only provision of the Constitution which requires
the assent of every State for amendment or change.
Having made the Senate in this way as immovable in
its representation as possible, and having provided
that its members should be chosen by the legislatures
of the States, thus securing it, as they believed, from
the sudden changes incident to popular voting, they
proceeded so far as they could to invest it with the most
important of the sovereign powers which they them
selves possessed.
They gave to the Senate, which was simply one
branch of the legislature, not only legislative but execu
tive and judicial powers. There is only one Umitation
upon the legislative power of the Senate. Bills to raise
revenue must originate in the House of Representa
tives, but the Senate can propose or concur with
amendments as on other bills. This unlimited power
of amendment has made the power of originating bUls
to raise revenue reserved to the House of compara
tively Uttle moment. In 1883 the Senate struck out all
after the enacting clause of the Tariff Bill and sent over
to the House their own bill which was adopted by the

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 9
House. In 1894 the Senate changed fundamentally
the Tariff BUl of that year which had come from the
House, and the House accepted the bill as amended
by the Senate without any alteration. In 1909 the
Tariff Bill, when retumed from the Senate, carried
eight hundred and forty-seven amendments. These
instances will show that even on Revenue Bills, which
must originate in the House, the powers of the Senate
have been practically unlimited. In practise, the
Senate, although possessing the power to originate
bills appropriating money, has ceded to the House this
right in the case of the great Appropriation BiUs. The
Senate stiU originates biUs containing an appropria
tion of money for a single object, but on the great
Supply Bills it is content with its right of unlimited
amendment, which it always exercises without re
straint. In all other respects, so far as legislation is
concemed the Senate is on an absolute equality with
the House and during the one hundred and thirty-two
years of its existence has originated more important
legislation than the popular branch.
The Senate shares with the President the executiv^
functions. No treaty can be made without the assent \
of two-thirds of the Senate. The President can enter |
upon any negotiations that he pleases, but no treaty I
which he may make can become the supreme law of |
the land without the consent of the Senate. The j
President can nominate, but without the advice and i
consent of the Senate he cannot appomt "Ambassadors, i
other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the ,i

10 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United
States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise
provided for, and which shall be established by law."
As provided in the same section of the Constitution,
the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such
inferior officers, as they may think proper, in the Presi
dent alone, in the Courts of Law, or the Heads of
Departments. Thus the Senate has a controUing voice
in the appointment of all important officers, and this
right of control cannot be taken from them in the case
of even inferior officers except by their own consent.
The judicial functions of the Senate consist in its
being the court before which all impeachments must
be tried. They can even try the President of the
United States upon articles presented by the House,
as was done in one instance, and in that event the Chief
Justice presides over their deUberations, but in all other
cases of impeachment the Senate selects its own pre
siding officer.
To Congress is given the power to declare war. To
the President and the Senate alone is given the power
to make a treaty of peace, as is the case with all other
Intreaties. Thus it will be observed that the assent of
I the Senate is necessary both to peace and war. War
can be declared without the assent of the Executive,
and peace can be made without the assent of the
House, but neither war nor peace can be made without
the assent of the Senate.
The makers of the Constitution also gave to the
Senate the longst tenure conceded to any of the politi-

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 11
cal branches of the govemment — six years — and thia
term enabled the Convention to arrange the election
of Senators in such a way that only one-third of the
Senate goes out at each biennial national election. It
is perhaps well to repeat in this connection that the
inevitable result of such an arrangement was that two-
thirds of the Senators were always in organized exist
ence, and therefore the Senate has never required
reorganization since the beginning of the govemment.
The manner in which, on a change of the Chief Execu
tive, the Presidency of the Senate passes first without
a break from one hand to another, the ceremony
amounting to no more than the presiding officer calUng
some one else to the chair, is a symbol not only of the
permanency with which the framers of the Constitu
tion wished to invest the Senate but of the great
powers which they garnered up in that body, composed
according to their conceptions not of representatives of
popular constituencies but of the ambassadors of
sovereign States.
The amendment changing the method of electing
Senators which has been adopted, as I have said,
affects in no way the powers, the tenure of office, or the
permanency of existence conferred upon the Senate by
the makers of the Constitution. They provided that
Senators should be elected by the legislatures because
they wished in every possible manner to impress upon
the office of Senator the State characteristic and to
make it as clear as possible that a Senator represented
a State and not a constituency.

12 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
They also believed that legislatures would choose
better men to fill the senatorial office than could be
expected from a popular vote. Despite some flagrant
cases where corrupt means have been used in legisla
tures to secure the election of a Senator and some other
cases where poUtical factions have prevented elections
by the legislatures, the anticipations of the framers of
the Constitution have been fuffiUed. Those senatorial
elections which have been open to reprobation and
which have necessarily attracted great attention are
but a small fraction in the mass of senatorial elections
effected by legislatures which have passed unnoticed
and without criticism because there was no occasion for
either. It is also true that legislatures, as a rule,
although not always, have had a strong sense of the
importance of retaining in the public service men of
distinguished ability, high character, and long experi
ence. This inclination on the part of many legislatures
has resulted, throughout the history of the United
States since 1789, in the continued presence in the
Senate of a body of Senators, made up from different
parties, who were retained in office by the legislatures
of their States. These Senators had terms of service
ranging from twelve to more than thirty years. They
formed a group of men who understood thoroughly the
mechanism of government and administration, who
had a large knowledge of aU departments as well as of
the government policy, both foreign and domestic.
These Senators of long service, no matter how much
they might be divided on purely political issues, in

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 13
deaUng with that wide range of questions which are
not necessarUy connected with party were all animated
with an earnest desire that the Govemment of the
United States should be properly carried on. They
have constituted a most important element in our past
history and have exercised a very great influence in
forming the traditions and guiding the operations of
the Govemment of the United States. If at times\
these men of long service in the Senate have erred on \
the side of too much conservatism, they have been on j
the whole of great value to the United States by giving !
strength and continuity to her administration and to ;
her policies in every direction. It was generaUy pre- i
dieted that under the system of popular elections this
group of long-service Senators, which has hitherto
played so large a part in our political life, would pass
away. Now that the new system has gone into opera
tion, while it is stUl too soon to declare just how it wiU
work, the indications are that it is by no means certain
that the old group of experienced Senators may not in
the main be retained by the popular will which seems
so far by no means carried away by an unbridled desire
for constant and unreasoning change. On the other
hand it seems weU-nigh certain that a chief result of the
new system, speaking broadly, will be, in the long run,
to add very greatly to the expense and labor of a
senatorial election, which wUl thus become something
much more serious to encounter than it was before, and
wUl, therefore, not only shut out a good many men
who might be avaUable for a legislative choice, but

14 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
will force those who are actuaUy in the Senate to
choose between attending to their duties at Washington
and passing a large part of their time, when they ought
to be in the Senate, in defeating the operations of
rivals who take advantage of the necessary absence of
the Senator in office to undermine him with the con
stituency while he, if he does his duty, is compeUed to
be elsewhere. Thus it will be seen that while the new
amendment is very Ukely to affect in some respects the
character and the elections of the membership of
the Senate, it has in no wise diminished or impaired or
indeed in any way modified the powers of the body
itself. I reiterate this statement because there has been
much misunderstanding on the subject, and there has
been a failure in many quarters to comprehend the
fundamental truth that the change in the manner of
electing Senators, however important in its extra-
constitutional results, is stUl only a change in the
machinery which brings the Senate into existence.
The dominant motive in constituting an upper
chamber clothed with such powers as have just been
described was to be found in the determination of the
States to have one essential part of the new govem
ment whoUy in the hands of the States as political
entities. But there was also another, larger motive
which pervaded the provisions creating the Senate as
it did many other clauses of the Constitution and
was concerned with the general character of the new
government which was to be estabUshed. Democ
racy is to-day so generally triumphant throughout

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 15
the world of Westem civiUzation that it is not easy
to conceive the distrust which was felt in regard to it
in the eighteenth century, even among the people of
the American Colonies, who were probably the most
democratic and the freest people then extant in the
world. The makers of the Constitution, who were
nearly all of English or of Scotch descent, had been
bred in the belief which had become ingrained in the
English-speaking people during many years of conflict,
that the power of the sovereign ought to be limited.
They were all familiar with the history of the long
struggle which had resulted in placing Umitations upon
the power of the Crown. The men who met at PhUa
delphia understood thoroughly that in the new
government which they were about to estabUsh
sovereignty would be transferred from the Crown to
the people. They were under no misapprehension
whatever as to the fact that they were founding a pop
ular government; that is, that they were estabUshing
a democracy. But this change in the character of the
sovereignty in no wise altered their belief that all
sovereignty should be exercised under limitations.
They knew, of course, that in the last resort the popu
lar will would control and ought to control absolutely,
but upon the democracy for which they were forming
a govemment they wished to put limitations. They
desired to give ample space for deliberation, and for
this reason they sought for checks and balances, gave
the federal judges a life tenure, raised the courts above
the dusty atmosphere of the hustings, and strove to

16 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
make the operation of the popular wiU depend for its
final expression upon the cahn second thought of the
community and not be govemed by the passions of the
moment. It was with this purpose in view that they
established their judicial system, a very remarkable
achievement, which it is not necessary to consider here,
but they still further tried to secure limitations by
making amendment to the Constitution difficult, by
separating the judicial executive and legislative powers
into three coordinate and independent branches, and
by the pecuUar power and authority with which they
invested the Senate of the United States. The govern
ment which they thus created can best be defined as a
limited democracy and nothing describes it so well as
these words of Lord Acton :
"American independence was the beginning of a new
era, not merely as a revival of the Revolution, but because
no other revolution ever proceeded from so slight a cause
or was ever conducted with so much moderation. The
European Monarchies supported it. The greatest states
man in England averred that it was just. It established
a pure democracy, but it was democracy in its highest
perfection, armed and vigilant, less against aristocracy and
monarchy than against its own weakness and excess. Whilst
England was admired for the safeguards with which, in the
course of many centuries, it had fortified liberty against
the power of the crown, America appeared still more worthy
of admiration for the safeguards which, in the deliberations
of a single memorable year, it had set up against the power
of its own sovereign people. It resembled no other known
democracy, for it respected freedom, authority and law.

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 17
It resembled no other constitution, for it was contained
in half a dozen intelligible articles. Ancient Europe opened
its mind to two new ideas — that revolution with very little
provocation may be just and that democracy in very large
dimensions may be safe."
In the government thus described by Lord Acton the
Senate has played a large part in carrying out the
intentions of its framers and in maintaining the limita
tions which had been so carefully established. Except
_on some rare occasions the Senate has been the con--
servative part of the legislative branch of the govem
ment. The closure and other drastic rules for prevent
ing delay and compelling action which it has been
found necessary to adopt and apply in the House of
Representatives have never except in a most restricted
form been admitted in the Senate. Debate in the
Senate has remained practicaUy unlimited, and despite
the impatience wUich unrestricted debate often cre
ates, there can be no doubt that in the long run it has
been most important and indeed very essential to free
and democratic government to have pne body where
every great question could be fully and deUberately
discussed. Undoubtedly there are evils in unlimited
debate, but experience shows that these evils are far
outweighed by the benefit of having one body in the
govemment where debate cannot be shut off arbitrarily
at the will of a partizan majority. The Senate, I
believe, has never failed to act in any case of impor
tance where a majority of the body really and genu
inely desired to have action, and the full opportunity

18 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
for deliberation and discussion, characteristic of the
Senate, has prevented much rash legislation born of
the passion of au election struggle, and has perfected
still more that which ultimately found its way to the
statute books.
To trace the history of the Senate would be to write
the history of the United States, which would require
volumes and is, of course, impossible here. Through
out the history of the United States it may be said
generally that the Senate has played a very large and
determining part. It has at all times possessed great
influence, not only in legislation, but in determining
executive appointments and settUng executive poli
cies. There have been periods when the Senate has
been the dominant force in the Govemment of the
United States and has concentrated upon itself the
attention of the people. During the decade between
1840 and 1850, for example, it is not too much to say
that the fate of the country was largely settled in the
Senate. That was the period when Clay, Webster, and
Calhoun, who had aU been presidential candidates,
were members of the Senate. The Presidents of that
period were unimportant, inferior in ability and in
weight of influence before the country, when compared
with the great Senators. Tyler, Polk and Fihnore were
not men who could lead pubUc opinion in rivalry with
Clay and Webster and Calhoun. After the deaths of
these three distinguished Senators, which aU occurred
about the same time, the same condition continued in
large measure, and the country looked for leadership to

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 19
Douglas, Seward, and Sumner during the decade pre
ceding the war much more than to a president like
FrankUn Pierce or James Buchanan, of whom one was
insignificant and the other pitifully weak in character.
With the exception of Sumner, all the Senators who
have just been mentioned were the true candidates and
leaders of their respective parties, but they never
attained to the presidency, being set aside, except of
course in the case of Seward, for inferior but more
available men. It is a curious fact and not without
significance that until the present year (1920-1921) no
man has ever gone from the Senate, where the party
chiefs have been so largely assembled, to the presi
dency. There have been presidents who had served
in the Senate at some period in their careers, but none
before 1921 who has ever passed from the Senate to
the White House. This is no doubt owing to the fact
that Senators have played so conspicuous a part in
framing the policies and legislation of the country that
judicious politicians in looking for candidates were
afraid to take men who were so identified with one side
or the other of the questions upon which the country
was divided. The enthusiasm which they excited and)
their unquestioned ability were more than offset by the
hostilities they had inevitably aroused in contests
which had fixed the attention of the entire country.
After the death of Lincoln the Senate represented one
side in the conflict which arose with President Johnson,
and Congress, led by the Senate, was successful in that

20 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
struggle, although the impeachment of the President
fortunately failed.
These periods which I have mentioned, although
covering many years, do not accurately represent the
general position of the Senate, because the Senate as a
rule has been in harmony with the administration of
the time. Its power has been very great, but Senate
and President generally have acted together, the
Senate exercising a due influence on the course of the
executive. At various periods it has been charged that
the Senate was usurping power from the other branches
of the government, and sometimes this charge has been
urged and agitated with great vehemence. Looking
back dispassionately over the century, it is not easy to"
see just where the Senate has usurped power. In the
matter of appropriations, for example, it has yielded
voluntarily in giving the House the right to originate
"the great Supply BiUs. The truth is that the powers
conferred upon the Senate by the framers of the Con
stitution were so great that there has been no occasion
for that body to usurp the powers of pther branches.
The senatorial powers have at times been exercised
with more vigor than at others, but it is not apparent
that the Senate has ever invaded the province of other
departments, although there have been instances where
it has sought to push too far some of its executive
4)owers in questions of appointments. If any branch
of the govemment has grown at the expense of the
other departments, it is the executive, and this growth
of executive power has been greatly stimulated by the

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 21
reform movements of the last few years, which have
all auned at weakening if not at breaking down the
legislative and judicial branches, and thus bringing the
government as nearly as possible to one which consists
of the executive and the voters, the sunplest and most
rudimentary form of human government which history
can show.
Where the question of the powers and the constitu
tion of an upper chamber is under consideration, as it
is to-day in England, the history of the Senate of the
United States, the powers granted to it, and the foun
dations upon which it was buUt up, seem to have a real
and instructive value. In the general agitation which
has gone on in the United States during the last ten
years the object to be attained seems to be a retum to
the direct democracy famiUar to the cities of Greece
and to the Roman RepubUc. Not only do those who
carry on this agitation seek to weaken and break down
the legislative and judicial branches of the government,
but they desire to quicken as far as possible the action
of govemment in aU directions. To rapidity of action
in carrying out what is supposed at the moment to
be the popular will, the presence of a second chamber
is clearly an obstacle, and within recent years this
point of attack has begun to make its appearance in
our poUtics. In one or two States suggestions have
been made that the upper chamber should be abolished
and that we ought to return to the government of a
single chamber corresponding to the Convention of the
French Revolution. There can be no question that this

22 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
would greatly accelerate legislative action and remove
one of the important restrictions which the framers of
the Constitution beUeved to be essential in order to
avoid the peril of action springing from the passion of
the moment and deprive the people of that opportu
nity for dehberation and second thought which they
deemed vital if we were to be ruled by the popular will
in its best sense. One or two of the colonies, notably
Pennsylvania under the leadership of Franklin prior to
1789, had undertaken to estabUsh govemments with
only one chamber. These attempts had been failures,
and the makers of the Constitution, without any doubt
or hesitation, adopted the bicameral system, which had
been in use in all the colonies before the Revolution.
They had no question that two chambers were essen
tial to orderly government and well-considered legisla
tion. They also felt that if there were to be two cham
bers, the upper chamber should be vested with large
powers, and, for the particular reasons which I have
given as well as on this account, they conferred upon
the Senate, as I have pointed out, powers of unusual
extent. The weakness of upper chambers in modem
constitutional governments has largely arisen from the
fact that so far as they were elected they were chosen
by the same constituencies as those which elected the
lower house. They therefore possessed no independent
basis of representation and were moved by the same
impulses as the lower branch. One great secret of the
strength and influence of the Senate has been the fact
that it did not represent the same constituencies as the

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 23
House of Representatives. The Senate represented
States and not a majority of voters set off in arbitrary
districts. The history of the United States, speaking
broadly, seems to vindicate the wisdom of a strong
upper chamber, and the first step toward the attain
ment of that object is to make the upper chamber rep
resent some political entity as different as possible
from the ordinary constituency of a congressional or
parliamentary district. The members of the upper
house should also have a longer term than is accorded
to the lower or popular branch. The question of the
powers to be conferred upon an upper chamber is one
which must be settled according to the best judgment
of those who frame the law or constitution which gives
it existence; but, speaking broadly, and in view of the
experience of the United States, it may be laid down as
a general principle that the upper house ought to have
substantially the same powers as the lower branch.
The limited democracy established by the framers
of the Constitution and so highly praised by Lord
Acton is now an object of attack in the United States.
How far this attack will succeed it is impossible to
say, but it is certain that this effort to remove the
limitations of the Constitution is an attempt to retum
to methods of govemment of a more primitive kind and
which have been familiar to the world for more than
two thousand years. It may be that it is well to aban
don the principle of representation, which on a large
scale we owe to England — the independence of the
judiciary, which has been regarded as one of the tri-

24 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
umphs of the EngUsh-speaking race, and aU those
limitations upon the sovereign democracy devised by
the framers of the Constitution of the United States,
which have been thought hitherto to be a triumph of
a high and intelligent civilization, and return to
simpler forms which have failed in the past. What
ever else may happen, it is certain that when this is
done we shall be going backward and not forward.
We shaU be returning from a highly developed
organism to a lower, simpler, and more primitive one.
In the progress of this movement toward direct and
unlimited democracy the Senate of the United States
has not escaped. Although its powers have been in no
wise diminished, the change in the mechanism of its
election will draw attention to the basis of representa
tion in the Senate, and may well lead to other changes,
which wUl be fundamental in their character and which
will not only alter the machinery but revolutionize the
principles that have hitherto made the Senate of the
United States one of the most powerful and, as many
believe, one of the most useful and effective legislative
chambers to be found in the history of the world.
.--'This article, written nearly eight years ago, was pub
¬Ushed in an English quai-terly in 1914. Intended for
English readers, it naturally contains much which
theoretically at least is famUiar to Americans, not so
familiar, however, as to suffer by repetition. The pur
pose of the article as originally written was to point
out what seemed to me at that time the real if not

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 25
very obvious tendency to modify the carefully limited
democracy of the Constitution m such a way as to
bring it measurably nearer to the simpler, more rudi
mentary and more dangerous form of an autocracy
resting on a plebiscite, with a suppression of aU the
intervening legislative provisions which were the
essence of the system for a limited democracy devised
by the framers of the Constitution.
Since I called attention to these dangerous tenden
cies, as I considered them, events have moved under
the pressure of a war of unparalleled magnitude with
a rapidity which could not possibly have been esti
mated from any normal conditions. The war itself
made a rapid and immediate, although temporary,
growth in executive power both necessary and inevi
table. This manifestation of the development of ex
ecutive power was, however, in its nature acute, and
was certain to decline and retreat within its proper
boundaries, as was the case after the Civil War when
war itself ceased. Side by side, however, with what
may be caUed the normal expansion of the war power
during war, there went on another movement which
contained within itself permanent quaUties affecting
the very fabric of government, and for the disappear
ance of which with the end of actual war there was
no assurance.
It is not necessary here to enter upon the many insid
ious forms assumed by this tendency to break do-wn
permanently the constitutional Umitations of our gov
ernment under cover of war necessities. Fortunately,

26 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
I am incUned to think, not only for the true compre
hension of the issues at stake but for the country itself
a_direct_ati£mpl-_ffias_madg.to break once for_aU per-
hapa the mnst important of the powers of the_Senate
in regard to one of the greatest if not the greatest. of
its constitutional functions. As I have_pointed out,
the States in their determination to keep their sover

eignty unimpaired so far as was possible in the cog;-
struction of the new govemment reserved to thej^
selves an absolute veto upon any attempt by the^ecu-
tiye to make treaties without their assent Under the

Constitution no treaty could be made binding upon the
United States which had not received the assent of
two-thirds of the Senate. It would seem oi the face of
it as if nothing could be more explicit or less susceptible
of evasion than this provision, and yet an attemp', had
been made, no doubt with the highest and best of
motives, some years before the war v/ith Germany,
seriously to diminish and limit this very obvious and
vital Senate power.
In 1905 Mr. Hay, with the approval of President
Roosevelt, brought before the Senate seven general
arbitration treaties. This was an effort to advance .the

cause of international arbitration by the formation of
a series of treaties under which certain classes of inter
national differences or disputes should go before an
arbitral tribunal without the necessity of a separate
agreement to take them before such a tribunal in each
case. jrhe_genei:aL,pur-pos&-jy.a&. one with which not
only the Senate- but-aJl-iriends of arbitration were in

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 27
thorough accord. But Mr. Hay had so framed these'^
generaT^tt'natiBs that any specific treaty of arbitration!
made under them would be not only negotiated but!
ratified and put in operation without any action on the!
part of the Senate. An arbitration treaty which pro^
vides for the terms, subject and conditions of the ques
tion to be arbitrated had, of course, up to this time al
ways been submitted to the Senate like every other
treaty. Mr. Hay's seven treaties provided simply that
certain classes of subjects should be arbitrated without
further negotiation, and tiius did__awav with
the necessity of a treaty to settle the terms and con
ditions necessary in each arbitration. The Senate '
was not of opinion that this power which was un
doubtedly theirs ought to be taken from them in this ,
way by a general treaty which in no respect affected
the terms of arbitration to be agreed to in each par
ticular case. The Senate. tb^'refe're-amatded-the- word.
Joy -which the^su^^ treaties were described^-
changing it from "agreement"to "treaty." which of
"^m^g~1srwiflrlr1;lrgse"instrumM^ at once within the
Constitution and made the advice and consent of the
Senate necessary. There would probably have been no
practical effect from this change, but a question of '
constitutional principle was involved and the Presi- \
dent and Mr. Hay stood firmly by their position and !
in favor of transferring to the Executive all powers |
relating to the secondary treaties made under the seven '
general instruments. The Senate having adopted the j
amendments, the treaties were not sent back by the

28 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
President for ratification to the different signatory
powers and therefore failed.
When Mr. Root became Secretary of State he took
up the question of these arbitration treaties which Mr.
Hay had declined to carry through with the Senate
amendments, and examined the question with great
thoroughness. He came to the conclusion that legally
and constitutionaUy the position of the Senate was
sound and convinced President Roosevelt of the cor-
rectness of his view. Accepting therefore the position
of the Senate, he proceeded in 1907 to make the thirty
and more general arbitration treaties which bear his
name and which are stiU upon the law of the land.
When the constitutional power of the Senate in
regard to treaties was again caUed in question it was
under very different and much more serious conditions.
In his work upon "Congressional Government," pub
lished in 1900, page 233, President Wilson said: "The
President reaUy has no voice at aU in the conclusions
of tne Senate with reference to his diplomatic trans
actions. . . . His only power of compelUng compli
ance on the part of the Senate lies in his initiative in
negotiation, which affords him a chance to get the
country into such scrapes, so pledged in the view of
the world to certain courses of action, that the Senate
hesitates to bring about the appearance of dishonor
which would follow its refusal to ratify the rash prom
ises or to support the indiscreet threats of the Departs
ment of State." It will be observed that President
Wilson does not attempt to deny or even diminish the

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 29
power of the Senate in regard to the ratification of
treaties. If more than one-third of the Senate are
opposed to a treaty he acknowledges that such a treaty
cannot be accepted by the United States. Then with
most interesting and engaging frankness he states that
the only way in which this power of the Senate can be
overcome or divided is by the Executive, with his
power of initiating negotiations, involving the country '•
in such "scrapes" or "so pledging it in the view of the
world" that its constitutional powers cannot be exer
cised. Without in any way discussing the ethical
aspect of this method of procedure there can be no
doubt that it might be made very eff'ective in the hands
of a President who was thus wiUing either to break or
evade the Constitution. In any event this is precisely
the question, constitutionaUy speaking, which was
forced upon the Senate when the treaty of VersaiUes,
carrying with it the covenant of the League of Nations,
was laid before them.
"Wliatever objections there may have been to 'the
treaty of peace with Germany as signed at "\'ersaUles
on the 28th of June, 1919, it was in ^ehighest de^ee-~
improbable that any SATTatg^wpliTd rftfusf; fn rfitijj[__a.
trpafy of peace concemed with pp.ace alone^ But the
question presented by the covenant of the League of
Nations, which was in reaUty whoUy distinct
from a treaty of peace and involved nothing less
than an aUiance. for an indefinite period among
more than thirty nations, was a whoUy different
one. Mr. Wilson had foUowed the Une suggested in his

30 THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
"Congressional Govemment." With the principal treaty
he had interwoven a second and more important treaty,
']bo which he felt there would be opposition, in such a
nianner as to make it extremely difficult for the Senate
to exercise its constitutional power and reject that one
qf the two treaties to which it had profound objection.
I am not concemed here with the great questions
involved in the covenant of the League of Nations, but
solely with the constitutional question raised by Mr.
WUson in his effort to secure by what was in effect a
breach of the Constitution the ratification of an instru
ment to which the Senate was opposed. On the deci
sion of this question was staked not merely the consti
tutional authority of the Senate but the existence of
the constitutional govemment and the limited democ
racy established by the framers of the Constitution.
That the powers engaged with us in the war against
Germany or the world of western civiUzation generally
should understand the constitutional question involved
in the contest over the League of Nations and so vital
to the United States was not to be expected. Now,
however, after Mr. WUson's effort to force the treaty
through the Senate against the wiU of the Senate has
failed both in the Senate and before the people it seems
not amiss to caU attention to the question at stake.
That question was nothing more nor less than whether
constitutional government in the United States which
has been successfully maintained for one hundred and
thirty years should be broken down by a single weU
directed attack and replaced by the old and simple

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 31
method of the autocracy and the jplebiscite, which i
would mean not only the loss of free govemment but a -
distinct retrogression to a government system of a/
lower type and more purely tyrannical in operation and,
results. It is sufficient here to say that this attempt\
to change thei constitution failed.

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD^
Just a year ago, speaking as president of the Har
vard alumni, I quoted Lowell's famous definition of a
university as a place "where nothing useful is taught."
I fear that this pregnant sentence would now be gen
erally regarded as little more than an amusing paradox
and that even here in Cambridge its wit and humor
and deep underlying truth are somewhat dimmed. So
I quote it once more because I would fain say a word
in behalf of the "useless" things which were once the
main if not the sole object of all university education
but which have now been pushed aside and which in
these enlightened days are treated with kindly con
tempt as little better than the harmless pleasures of
lovers of futile leaming.
More and more rigidly has the stern practical test
of utility been appUed to all university teaching.
More and more has the question been asked in regard
to every branch of leaming, "What use will this be to
a student when he or she goes out into the world and
is called upon to deal with the business of life?" The
first test and the simplest was how far the education of
a university would aid its graduates in earning a living;
in other words, the money test was applied. This, so
^ Address delivered at RadcMe College Commencement, June
23, 1915. 32

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 33
far as it approached the precincts of the university at
all, had hitherto been considered in connection with the
work of the professional schools alone, but now the uni
versity has gone to the point of trying at least to teach
its students directly how to make money in purely
money-making pursuits with no trace of general or
even of professional learning about them. This repre
sents the extreme to whicU the utilitarian theory of the
highest education has proceeded. But long before this
point was reached the sciences had not only entered
upon the field in old times consecrated to the classics,
as they are familiarly described, but had taken the
lion's share of the domain. That there was good
reason for some change every one must admit, nor can
it be denied that the ancient and long-continued
monopoly of Greek and Latin in the higher education
had become, in a measure certainly, an anachronism.
But it seems as if the pendulum had now swung too
far in the new direction.
Men cannot live by bread alone nor, in the highest
sense, can education be restricted to methods of money
getting or be of the finest quality and temper if the
"humanities," as they used to be pleasantly caUed, are
wholly thrust aside and neglected. It was not by acci
dent that the literature and learning of Rome and
Greece bore uncontested sway for centuries in all the
universities, old and new, of Western civilization. Con
sider for a moment the facts upon which the classical
education so long rested in unquestioned supremacy.
There was a strong and brilUant movement as early as

34 NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
the twelfth century to scatter the darkness which had
settled down upon Europe after the downfall of the
Roman Empire and in which men had been groping
about for eight hundred years. This movement did
not then culminate, but it opened the way for what has
ever since been known as the Renaissance of the fif
teenth and sixteenth centuries, the point at which
modem history is said to begin. That period is not
inaptly named a rebirth, for men felt indeed as if they
had been bom again when they drew up froih the dark
ness and released from the prison of the palimpsests the
manuscripts which brought them face to face with the
history, the art, the literature, the thought and the
civilization of Greece and Rome. But there was much
more than this. That was the time when the human
mind suddenly broke forth into light and freedom.
Men began to question everything and knowledge
started on a new career. They sought to estabUsh the
place of the earth in the universe and set out to dis
cover the size, the shape and the motion of the planet
upon which they lived. The doors of science were flung
open and inquiry entered in. The material conditions
of life were once more considered after long neglect.
The drainage, the water supply, the baths of ancient
Rome began to suggest that it was, perhaps, unwise
to discard them, as Greek art had been discarded,
merely because they were the work of pagans, and the
idea dawned that plague-ridden cities and filthy habits
were not essential to eternal well-being, and that the

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 35
salvation of the soul was not incompatible with whole
some bodies and with public health.
AU these things and many others were but outward
manifestations of the liberation of the human intellect
which made that era forever memorable, and which
was felt in a thousand ways. The world identified this
liberation of the mind with the revival of learning, as it
was called, which was in effect the discovery and reha
bilitation of Greek and Roman literature and art. How
far this bringing the classics again to light, accom
panied by the resurrection of long-buried statues, was
the cause of the great intellectual movement of the
Renaissance, and how far it was merely one result of
the movement itself, we need not now inquire. That
the revival of the classics was coincident with the
Renaissance and had an enormous influence upon the
thought of the tune is beyond doubt. To classical
learning, therefore, men felt themselves so deeply
indebted that it took possession of aU the seats of the
higher education and was in fact the higher education
itself. The classical writers became the touchstone
by which men were tested not only inteUectuaUy
but socially. The education of a gentleman meant
that a man had at least been brought mto the
presence of the classics, even if he remembered
nothing of the pages which had passed before his eyes.
A man ignorant of the "humanities," the literce
humaniores, no matter what his other accomplish
ments, was considered hopelessly uneducated. The
classics in fact became a fetish which led to many

36 NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
absurdities among their devotees, like that which has
required successive generations of English boys to write
Latin verses. The verses thus composed in meters
painfully acquired and quickly forgotten could never
be otherwise than more or less bad, and the exercise
was of no more value than teaching them to manufac
ture poems in Choctaw would have been. Whereas, if
they had been taught by ear to speak Latin, even in the
medieval form, it would have been of value always and
everywhere. But in getting rid of absurdities let us beware of
losing the substance. It is not well whoUy to forget the
vast debt which mankind owes to the recovery of the
literature and art of Greece and Rome. It was by no
means without reason that a classical was known and
is still known as a Uberal education. The mind of the
Renaissance was liberalized by the study of the classics
and what was true then is true now, for the classical
education liberalizes in the only right way by making
its beneficiaries respect genuine learning and knowledge
of any sort wherever found, and no matter how far
removed it may be from their own. There is no form
of education which teaches this respect for the learning
and acquirements of other men in any direction, as
far as my experience goes, so surely as the classical.
It is also to be remembered that the knowledge of
Greek and Latin is necessary not only in the learned
professions but in at least two great subjects which
I believe are admitted within the pale of the scientific
domain — philology and anthropology. Neither of these

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 37
is strictly utiUtarian nor in any way pecuniarUy profit
able, but the language of man and his origin and life
upon earth are thought not unworthy of scientific con
sideration. This, however,^is only incidental. To judge
r-ightly the importance heretofore given to the study
of Greek and Latin as weU as the reasons for not al
lowing them to remain in the cold shade of retirement,
to which in recent years they have been relegated, we
must in justice consider what a knowledge of the
classics necessarily implies. Without that knowledge
any real mastery and thorough comprehension of mod
ern languages and Uterature is, in the highest sense,
impossible. In fact, Greek and Latin are the founda
tions of the literature of Western civilization. Is litera
ture then to be pushed aside because it is not ob
viously utilitarian and practically valuable in science,
in business, or in money-making?
Literature and art are the fine flowers of the highest
civilization. As Shakespeare has it:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
In literature are garnered up the thoughts which have
moved the world and guided, aU unseen, the history
of m.a,n.J Worth more than all the money ever piled up
are the happiness, the delights, the help, which litera
ture has brought to the children of men. A purely
material existence, a whoUy material civiUzation, are
joyless, for it is only the things of beauty that are
joys forever. In literature, in the creations of human

38 NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
imagination, are to be found the men and women,
outside the Uttle immediate world of each one of us,
whom we know and love best, whom we hate most,
whom we constantly discuss. Real men and women
die, but the men and women created by the imagina
tion of those who "body forth the forms of things un
known" Uve always. Ulysses and Hector, Don Quixote
and Hamlet, are more real, are better known to us
than any men who Uved and walked the earth and
whose deeds and words fiU the pages of history. Think
of the friends and companions Uterature has brought
to us, with whom we love to Uve and wander and dream
the hours away. They come in an almost endless
procession, bringing with them every emotion — sorrow
and anger, love and hate, laughter, humor, adventure.
These are the gifts of the imagination of men
of genius endowed with the creative power, from
Shakespeare with his world of men and women out
and on through aU the great Uterature of civUized man.
Turn it as we wiU, proclaim the superior merits of
science, which no one reverences and admires more
than I, with aU its vast gifts of knowledge, with aU
that it has devised and invented so beneficent and
also so destructive to man, as strongly as you please;
vaunt not only the necessity of mechanical industry
but the advantages of money-getting as loudly as you
can, and stUl even now the world admits that those
to whom we award the honor of scholarship, whom
we describe as cultivated and accompUshed, must be
men and women who know something, at least, of

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 39
history and art and literature. And history, art and
literature, so far as we are concerned, spring from, are
related to or contrast with the great civilizations of
Greece and Rome. Perhaps I can put my meaning
best, and most broadly, by quoting what Walter Pater
wrote of Pico della Mirandola, a true humanist as
he was one of the earliest:
The essence of humanism is the belief that nothing which
has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose
its vitality — no language they have spoken, nor oracle
beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which
has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing
about which they have ever been passionate, or expended
time and zeal.
Here, perhaps, we may learn why it is that no man
who has not come in contact at least, even if the
contact was only that of a schoolboy, with those great
literatures, and with that history through whose por
tals we must pass in order to reach the wonderful
civilizations of Egypt and Asia Minor, would ever be
called a scholar, using the word in its loosest sense, or
a cultivated man in the world's acceptance of the
phrase. Thus much power the now decried classics
still retain, but it is easier to proceed by negatives
in fixing their degree of importance than to give an
exact definition of the educated man who is expected,
at least, to know them by name. Mere classical eru
dition is now clearly inadequate; a knowledge, how
ever superficial, of the humanities, which was once re-

40 NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
garded as aU-sufficient, wUl no longer serve. I wUl
not attempt this task, but wiU content myself with
quoting a definition which I lately heard from one
of the wisest, most leamed and most widely accom
pUshed men I have ever known. You will observe
that it is only a limitation, a statement, if you please,
of the irreducible minimum of cultivation. He said :
No one can be called a cultivated man who does not know,
in addition to his own literature, Homer, Cervantes and the
Arabian Nights, and comparatively few persons fulfil this
condition. These requirements may seem unusual and very
Umited. But we must consider their impUcations be
fore we hastily dismiss them. Homer impUes a knowl
edge of Greek, and therefore of Latin. Cervantes
created the greatest single figure of Uterature out
side the world of Shakespeare and surpassed by very
few within it. Men first perceived the comic side of
the adventures, the homely sayings of Sancho, the
humorous contrast between the knight and the squire.
But as the years have passed by we have come to see
in Don Quixote one of the rare cosmic characters
which touch aU human kind. Dr. Johnson names Don
Quixote as one of the three books written by mere
men which any reader ever wished were longer. The
reason for this great compliment is not far to seek, for
in Don Quixote we behold the aspirations of humanity
with aU their delusions and mistakes, their infinite
pathos, their nobUity and their tragic disappointments.
But we are concerned, just now, with implications

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 41
rather than the work itself. A knowledge of Don
Quixote and Cervantes implies a knowledge of the
Renaissance in Europe and of the conditions which
brought to life and beauty the greatest work of Span
ish genius.
The last requirement of my friend, the Arabian
Nights, may seem odd. We are all brought up to
think of them as fairy stories admirably suited to
the entertainment of children. If, however, we ex
amine the originals, not only expurgated but enor
mously curtaUed for the benefit of the nursery, we find
these rambling tales filled with poems and philosoph
ical discussions. Just here, however, my friend has
high authority with him. Gibbon says: "I soon tasted
the Arabian Nights — a book of aU ages, since in my
present maturity I can revolve, without contempt, that
pleasant medley of Oriental manners and supernatural
fictions." As Thackeray once remarked: "There can
be no gainsaying the sentence of that great judge.
To have your name mentioned by Gibbon is like having
it written on the Dome of St. Peter's. Pilgrims from
all the world admire and behold it." To be versed in
the Arabian Nights, thus approved by Gibbon, implies
also some knowledge of the philosophy, the poetry
and the manners of the East, opening in many direc
tions vistas over which we must not Unger. I will
only pause long enough to find my conclusion in one
of these Oriental tales.
Although it is not included in the accepted canon
of the "Thousand and One Nights," perhaps tho most

42 NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
famous and most famUiar of the Arabian tales is the
story of Aladdin. You aU remember how, after he
had buUt his palace and married his princess, the
wicked magician came along and persuaded Aladdin's
wife to change the old lamp for a new one. As a
child, being behind the scenes and knowing the prop
erties of the old lamp, I used to think the poor princess
a very silly woman. In later years I have seen rea
son to revise that judgment about the princess, and to
find palUating explanations for her unhappy mistake.
If we take the trouble to consider and reflect, we shall
find much wisdom concealed in these fairy tales. The
wicked magician was an astute person, with large
knowledge of the world, and of both man and woman-
' kind. When he offered the new lamp for the old
he appealed to two of the strongest of human emo-
' tions, the earnest desire we aU have to get something
ifor nothing, and the passion for novelty. He knew
his princess, and he obtained the old, battered, rusty
lamp. We need not foUow the story further. In
the end virtue triumphed, and vice was defeated, as
ought to be the case in every good fairy story. But
in the little transaction which I have just described,
there is, I think, one of those morals which the Arabian
tale teUers were also fond of hiding here and there
I in their narratives. It is a very simple lesson, and
, teaches us that it is, perhaps, weU to deliberate before
i we throw away an old lamp, for that very one may
I possess a magic which is not to be found in its new
i and glittering successor.

A GREAT LIBRARY ^
This noble gift to leaming comes to us with the
shadow of a tragic sorrow - resting upon it. Unbidden
there rises in our minds the tiiought of Lycidas, with
all the glory of youth about him, the victim of
. . - that fatal and perfidious bark
Built in th' eclipse. :\nd ri^ed with curses dark,
That sank so low tiiat sacred head of thine.
But with the march of the 37ears, which have devoured
past generations, and to whicii we too shaU succmnb,
the sliadow of grief wiU pass, whUe the great memorial
will remain. It is a monument to a lover of books,
and in what more gracious guise than this can a man's
memory go down to a remote posterity? He is the
benefactor and the exemplar of a great host, for within
that ample phrase aU gather who have deep in their
hearts the abiding love of books and Utrarature. They
meet there upon common ground and with a like
loyalty, from the bibliomaniac with his measured
leaves, to the homo utims libri; /rom the great coUec
tor with the spoUs of the world-famous printers and
binders spread around him, to the poor student, who
^ An address .^t the presentation of tlie Widener Memcaial Library
to Harvard University, June 2-1. 1915.
"Hany Elkins -W'idener, in memory of whom this librarj' was
given, -was drowned tm the Titonic. 43

44 A GREAT LIBRARY
appeals most to our hearts, with all the immortalities
of genius enclosed in some battered, shiUing volumes
crowded together upon a few shabby shelves.
But the true lovers of books are a goodly company
one and all. No one is excluded except he who heaps
up volumes of large cost with no love in his heart but
only a cold desire to gratify a whim of fashion, or
those others who deal in the books of the past as if
they were postage stamps or bric-a-brac, as if they
were soulless, senseless things; who speculate in them,
build up artificial prices for great authors and small
alike, and make the articles in which they traffic mere
subjects of greed while they trade on the human weak
ness for the unique, even when the unique is destitute
of any other value. Such as these last might weU
find a place among the enemies of books described
by Mr. Blades. This commercialism which sees in
books nothing but money, and prizes them solely by
the fantastic heights to which the prices can be pushed
in the auction room, whether the object be worthy or
worthless, has of late not a little discredited one very
beautiful and attractive side in the collection of books,
the side which concems the form rather than the con
tents, but which has nevertheless an enduring charm.
Yet because we recoil from seeing a fortune paid for
a mere speciraen of printing, of slight intrinsic value
and of no literary value at aU in that precise form,
it does not follow that we should therefore reject aU
gathering in of first editions as a trivial and uselessly
expensive amusement.

A GREAT LIBRARY 45
No lover of books, to take the most salient example
possible, can fail to long for the first folio as well
as the quartos of Shakespeare's plays. Besides the senti
ment which any one, not wholly insensible, must feel,
these most rare volumes are full of interest and instruc
tion, for they tell us much of the greatest genius in
literature. The first edition as a rule, although not
in Shakespeare's case, brings with it the pleasant
thought that just in this form and in no other did it
come from the press to him who created it. There is
a happy satisfaction, too, in knowing that we have in
our hand the volume which some weU-loved author
has held in his, if only to write his name upon the
fly-leaf, for in this way there vibrates across the dead
years a deUcate sense of personal contact with its ap
pealing touch of human sympathy. Then, far beyond
the reach of most of us, are the books of hours and
devotion, so beautiful in their illuminations, and the
marvels of the old binders, dear to us not only as
examples of an artistic craft, but because they are
charged with historical associations which go deeper
and carry us further away from every-day Ufe than
aU the fine-drawn tracery of the master workman who
wrought the manifold devices. Of these rarities and
wonders in the world of books, these first editions,
these specimens of a lovely and bygone art, these
worn and shabby volumes with their priceless notes
on the margin and their weU-remembered names
penned or penciled upon the fly-leaves, there comes
to us a coUection which is the most intimate and per-

46 A GREAT LIBRARY
sonal part of this great gift. They speak to us most
directly, as they wiU to succeeding generations, of
the young lover of books so untimely taken, to whose
memory this library, which encloses them, has been
erected. The University is fortunate indeed when it
receives at the same moment this stately building
and such a collection of rare and precious volumes
to grace its inner shrine.
But this library, where aU the accumulations of the
University will have a dweUing-place, has a significance
which goes beyond that of which I have spoken. No
other university and scarcely any state or nation pos
sesses a Ubrary building so elaborately arranged as this,
so fitted with every device which science and ingenuity
can invent for the use of books by scholars and stu
dents. This is preeminently a student's library. It
is not forced, as the Library of Congress has been until
very lately, to absorb two copies of every pamphlet
and of every book which obtains a copyright, a vast
torrent of the ephemeral and the valueless upon which
rari nantes in gurgite vasto, are borne the comparatively
smaU number of books worthy of preservation. It is
not bound by tradition, like the British Museum, to
find house room for every printed thing which myriads
of presses pour out upon a wearied world. No gen
eral public with its insatiable demand for what are
so charmingly described as "Juveniles and Fiction"
can compel it to purchase "best seUers," which flutter
their brief hour in gaudy paper wrappers upon the
news-stands and book-stalls, and then are seen no

A GREAT LIBRARY 47
more. In a tune when Job's supplication that his
adversary would write a book has no longer any mean
ing, because not only all adversaries but aU friends
write books, the library of the university has the fine
freedom which permits it to devote itself to only two
kinds of books— the Uterature of knowledge and the
literature of imagination.
, Within the wide, far-stretching boundaries of the
first much is included. We begin with the books of
simple information, repositories of facts, like statistics,
newspapers and official records, destitute of literary
quality, but all-important as the material in which the
investigator makes his discoveries and from which the
thinker and the philosopher draw their deductions.
The true literature of knowledge is very different. Its
scope is vast, and we find within it aU the sciences and
all the arts, history, philosophy in every form, meta
physics and certain kinds of criticism. Literature here
is the handmaid of knowledge; too often a very
neglected, dim and attenuated handmaiden, but some
times quite as important as the instruction which she
brings with her to the minds of men. The scale
ranges from a scientific work, perhaps of high im
portance, in which words are treated merely as a neces
sary vehicle for the transmission of thought, to writings
like those of Thucydides, Tacitus or Gibbon, which are
monuments of literature even more than they are
histories of man's doings upon earth. Indeed, as we
approach the highest examples in the literature of

48 A GREAT LIBRARY
knowledge, we are graduaUy merged in the achieve
ments of pure Uterature.
When we read Plato we pass insensibly from the
philosophy, the social and economic speculations to
the realm of poetry, and few passages in aU litera
ture have greater beauty, are more imaginative than
the famous description of the Cave or the dream of
the lost Atlantis. Then there are the great auto
biographies, like St. Augustine, Rousseau, Franklin,
Pepys, Casanova and Benvenuto CeUini, which almost
alone have succeeded in making men who have Uved as
real to us as those created by the poet or the noveUst,
and in addition there is that other autobiography
named Lavengro, where we wander to and fro upon the
earth in happy uncertainty as to whether what we read
is fact or fancy. Hovering in the debatable ground be
tween the two great divisions of Uterature, we meet
the essayists as they are inadequately called, as few
in number as they are charming and attractive. Mon
taigne, La Bruyere, Addison, Charles Lamb and Dr.
Holmes are there to greet us. Wit and wisdom, knowl
edge and reflection mingle with the creations of imag
ination and defy classffication. We only know that we
love them, these friends of the sleepless and the watch
ers, who wiU deUght us for hours, and never be offended
or less fascinating if we give them only scattered and
unregarded minutes. By such pleasant paths as these
we pass easily, smoothly, unconsciously aUnost, from
the literature of knowledge to the literature of imag-

A GREAT LIBRARY 49
ination, to the beautiful region where knowledge is not
imposed upon us, but subtly conveyed, where facts
are in tmth wholly "unconceming" and where litera
ture in its finest sense is aU in all.
Here one stops, hesitates, feels helpless. What profit
is there in an effort to describe in minutes what we find
in this vast, enchanted land, when lifetimes are all
too short to tell its wonders? We cannot cover Utera
ture with a phrase or define it in a sentence. The pas
sage in a great writer which comes nearest to doing this
is one which I met for the first time nearly fifty years'
since. Twenty-five years ago I should have hesitated
to quote it because it was familiar to every schoolboy.
I hesitate to quote it now because I fear it wiU appeal
only to elderly persons whose early education was
misdirected. I must confess that it is -written in one
of the languages which are conventionally described
as ^'dead," because convention has no sense of humor.
Strangely enough it appears in a legal argument made
in behalf of a Greek man of letters whose citizenship
was contested, and no court in history has ever listened
to a plea which was at once so noble in eloquence and
so fine as literature. I am old-fashioned enough to
think that it possesses quaUties far beyond the reach of
any utilitarian touchstone and well worthy of fresh
remembrance. The words I am about to quote have
that combination of splendor and concision in which
Latin surpasses all other tongues.
Thus then Cicero spoke in behalf of Archias, sum-

50 A GREAT LIBRARY
moning books and hbraries, Uterature and leaming,
to the support of his client:
Hsec studia adolescentiam aiunt, senectutem oblectant,
secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solatium prse-
bent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pemoctant
nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.
How fine and full it is. So fine that it seems as if
addition were impossible and yet we know that there
is still something more, for to no one of us can Utera
ture be summed up in a sentence. Like Cleopatra the
infinite variety is always there touching in each heart
and mind some different chord. Yet as we follow the
definitions through the generations we meet those
which bring new thoughts and help us to the finaUty
which the lovers of books are always seeking when
they strive to set forth what libraries reaUy mean
to them and to the world. Come do-wn across the
centuries past the Ciceronian period, past the decUne
into the deep covering darkness where the literature of
Greece and Rome disappeared and Virgil almost alone
survived because in that pit of ignorance he was
thought to be a magician. Then we can watch the com
ing of the dawn, the rebirth of the learning and the
poetry and drama lost in the dark ages. Here is the way
the returning Ught affected one of the remarkable
minds of the Renaissance, a man set down by his
own and later generations as the embodiment of evil,
and yet it was in this way that books spoke to him.

A /GREAT LIBRARY 51
"When evening has arrived," says MachiavelU, "I re
turn home and go into my study. I pass into the
antique courts of ancient men, where, welcomed lov
ingly by them, I feed upon the food which is my own,
and for which I was born. Here, I can speak with
them without show, and can ask of them the motives
of their actions; and they respond to me by virtue of
their humanity. For hours together, the miseries of
Ufe no longer annoy me; I forget every vexation; I
do not fear poverty; and death itself does not dismay
me, for I have altogether transferred myself to those
with whom I hold converse."
Let us pass on from the cold and fine Italian mind
of the age of the Borgias to the days when the great
movement of the Renaissance had taken possession
of England, when her navigators took continents and
her phUosophers all learning, to be their provinces.
What says the greatest of their scholars and students,
when he stands in the presence of books?
"We see then how far the monuments of wit and
learnjng are more durable than the monuments of
power or of the hands. For have not the verses of
Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more,
without the loss of a syUable, or letter; during which
time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been
decayed and demolished? . . . But the images of men's
wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from
the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation'.
Neither are they fitly to be caUed images, because
they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds

52 A GREAT LIBRARY
of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and
opinions in succeeding ages. So that if the invention of
the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches
and commodities from place to place, and consociateth
the most remote regions in participation of their fruits,
how much more are letters to be magnffied, which as
ships pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages
so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations,
and inventions, the one of the other?"
How the contemplation of books and leaming seem
to lift up even the mind of Bacon, as they do whenever
we stop to consider the utterances of great inteUects
while we cross the centuries. Come now to that cen
tury nearest but one to our own and listen to the voices
there. Dr. Johnson, who is described by Boswell's uncle
as "a robust genius bom to grapple with whole libra
ries," and who said perhaps as many good things about
literature as ahnost any one in history, asked once in
his emphatic way, "What should books teach but the
art of living?" This does not differ in essence from
Matthew Arnold's famous dictum that poetry, the
highest form of Uterature, must be a criticism of Ufe.
Both are admirable, both, I venture to think, like the
rest not quite complete, and how indeed could it be
otherwise? When we enter the wide domain of the literature
of imagination we find ourselves among the greatest
minds which humanity has produced, so great, so dif
ferent from all others that we are fain to give them

A GREAT LIBRARY 53
a name we cannot define, and caU them geniuses.
There we are in the company of the poets, the makers,
the singers. AU are there from the author of the book
of Job and the writers of the Psalms and the Song of
Songs, onward to the glory that was Greece; onward
still to Lucretius and Horace and Catullus and Virgil ;
onward still to him whom Virgil led, who covered aU
Italy with his hood; onward to the "chief of organic
numbers," and still onward to the poets of the last
century and of our own time, for although poetry
waxes and wanes it can never pass whoUy away. There,
too, we find the great poets who were also dramatists,
who created the men and women who never Uved and
wiU never die, whom we know better than any men
or women of history who once had their troubles here
upon earth. There we meet and know so weU Hector
and Achilles, Helen and Andromache upon the plains
of Troy, where, alas! men are fighting savagely to-day.
We wander over the wine-dark sea with Ulysses and
listen to some of the greatest stories ever written.
We come down the ages and find ourselves in the
time of Shakespeare, of whom it may be said as the
great Roman critic said of Menander, "Omnem vitse
imaginem expressit," and then we can go forth in the
company of Cervantes' knight and squire, with the
humor and sadness, the laughter and tears of humanity
traveUng with them. Nearly two centuries more go
by and we are in the company of Faust, tasting the>
temptations of the world, the flesh and the devU, touch
ing the whole of humanity in its lusts, its passions

54 A GREAT LIBRARY
and its weaknesses, and if well-breathed we can joumey
on into the realm of speculation and phUosophy and
mysticism, and gaze once more upon
The face that launched a thousand ships.
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.
So we come to the era of the novelists and there are
made free of another world of people among whom
we find the friends and companions of our Uves. They
are always with us, ready at our call, and we can
never lose them.
These are some of the aspects, some of the inevitable
suggestions of a Ubrary, of a great collection of books.
In this place, in this spacious building, they offer one
of the best assurances a university can have of strength
and fame and numbers, for a great Ubrary draws men
and women in search of education as a garden of
flowers draws the bees. Carlyle indeed went even
further when he said, "The true university of these
days is a coUection of books." Such a library as this
is not only a pUlar of support to leaming but it is a
university in itself.
I have spoken of it thus far as it appears here
in its primary capacity, in its first great function as a
student's library, to which not only students old and
young wiU come, but to which the historian and the
man of science, the scholar, the teacher and the pro
fessor, the poet, the noveUst and the philosopher wUl
repair. A splendid service this to render to mankind.
But there is still something more, an attribute of the

A GREAT LIBRARY 65
library which is as wide as humanity, for books are
the records of all that we know of human deeds and
thoughts, of the failures, the successes, the hopes, the
aspirations of mankind. "Books," said Dr. Johnson,
"help us to enjoy life or teach us to endure it."
Here, as to all great coUections of books, as to aU
books anywhere which have meaning and quality, come
those who never write, who have no songs to sing,
no theories with which they hope to move or enlighten
the world, men and women who love knowledge and
Uterature for their own sakes and are content. Here
those who toil, those who are weary and heavy-laden
come for rest. Here among the books we can pass out
of this work-a-day world, never more tormented, more
in anguish than now, and find,^for a brief hour at least,
happiness, perchance consolation, certainly another
world and a blessed forgetfulness of the din and the
sorrows which surround us. Here, for the asking, the
greatest geniuses will speak to us and we can rise into
a purer atmosphere and become close neighbors to
the stars. As an English poet writes of Shakespeare
in these troubled days:
0, let me leave the plains behind,
And let me leave the vales below !
Into the highlands of the mind,
Into the mountains let me go.
Here are the heights, crest beyond crest.
With Himalayan dews impearled;
And I will watch from Everest
The long heave of the surging world.

56 A GREAT LIBRARY
It is a great, a noble gift, which brings us all this
in such ample measure and lays it at the feet of our
beloved University. The gratitude of all who love
Harvard, of all who love books, goes out from their
hearts unstinted to the giver.
They mean so much, these books, so much more
than I in these halting sentences have been able to
express. For there is to books a human side inherent
in the silent leaves which even Cicero omitted and
which Dr. Johnson and Matthew Amold wholly passed
by. We find that single thought in the mind of Whit
man, when he wrote of a book:
Camarado, this is no book.
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms — decease calls me
forth.
Rightly considered in this aspect, the books mean so
much, just now, when freedom of speech, and freedom
of thought, when liberty and democracy are in jeopardy
every hour, that I must tum at last if I would find
fit utterance to the great champion of all these things,
and repeat to you the famous sentences of Milton :
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain
a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose
progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the
purest efiicacy and extraction of that living intellect that
bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously

A GREAT LIBRARY 57
productive as those fabulous Dragon's teeth ; and being sown
up and down may chance to spring up armed men. And
yet, on the other hand, unless wariness is used as good
almost kill a man as kill a good book ; who kills a man kills
a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a
good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it
were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth ;
but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit,
embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS ^
For more than five hundred years scholars and men
of education have been discussing the poetry, the
drama, the philosophy, the Uterature of Greece and
Rome which we are wont to include in the word
"classics." When any one therefore attempts to give
utterance to his thoughts upon that vast subject the
line of Terence, "Nullum est jam dictum, quod non
dictum sit prius," stares him in the face with aU the
relentless warning of Dante's inscription over the gates
of Hell. We can only console ourselves with the witty
comment of Aelius Donatus, which comes to us oddly
enough through Saint Jerome,
"Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt,"
and go forward with our repetitions and reiterations
of what wiser and better men have said before. There
is only one difference to be noted between us and our
predecessors and that is in the present mode of treat
ment. Until within fifty years, broadly speaking, the
acceptance of the classics as the foundation and essen
tial condition of the higher education was unques
tioned and the note of aU discussion was that of praise
and admiration. Now the position of those who up-
*An address at the Conference on Classical Studies in Liberal
Education, held at Princeton University, June 2, 1917.
68

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 59
hold classical education is defensive; the friends of
the classics are contending for the very existence of
the learning which they love. There has come a vast
change in the attitude toward the "humanities" of
those who guide education. Is this change and is the
consequent assault upon the classics justified? Is it
not being carried to a most injurious extreme?
We cannot answer these questions without a glance
at the past, without recalling for a moment the com
monplaces of modern history, because modem history
begins with the revival of learning and the revival of
learning was the resurrection of the literature and the
civiUzation of Greece and Rome. From the days of
the Italian humanists when the discovery of a Greek
or Latin manuscript, a palimpsest perhaps hidden in
some remote convent, was equal almost to a patent of
nobility, for some five hundred years the classics were
not only regarded as the symbol and test of the high
est education but as the highest education itself. Some
few classical authors were familiar to Europe long
before the age of Petrarch, but the great discoveries
of classical literature were coincident with what is
known as the Renaissance. It matters not whether
the resurrection of this great and long-buried literature
was the cause of the Renaissance, or was a powerful
influence or was merely a manifestation, a product of
the time. In the minds of men the revival of learning
— that is, of the classics — was indissolubly associated
witii tho rebirth of inteUectual freedom, with the break
ing of the fetters of the age of faith, with the liberation

60 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
of the human mind, with the dispersion of the dark
clouds which had obscured the vision of men and which
had made this world for the mass of the people a
foul and cruel place, reeking with filth and disease and
steeped in ignorance, on the theory that only in this
manner could eternal tortures be avoided and eternal
joys in the next world be secured. When Fox founded
Corpus Christi CoUege at Oxford early in the sixteenth
century he estabUshed two chairs for Greek and Latin
"to extirpate barbarism." Even so men in those days
looked upon the two great languages as bringing them
from darkness to light, from barbarism to civiUzation.
It is not to be wondered at therefore that men felt
a profound gratitude to the studies to which they at
tributed the new birth of intellectual freedom or that
they made those studies the touchstone of the highest
education, the badge of scholarship without which,
even if the acquaintance was only nominal, no one
could assert that he was educated either liberally or as
a gentleman. This natural gratitude with'' its pro
found and lasting effect upon the minds of men was
very far from being purely sentimental. In the litera
ture of Greece and Rome, thus disclosed anew to the
world, was preserved the noblest poetry, lyric, epic
and dramatic which the imagination of man had
brought forth — unrivaled then, never surpassed since.
In the surviving ruins of temples and palaces, in the
statues taken from the earth, there met the eyes of
the eager searchers an art and an architecture of ex
traordinary perfection both in proportion and in form

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 61
which then regained possession of the world and which
has never ceased to influence profoundly aU that the
architect and the artist have since produced for the
instruction, the deUght or the use of their fellow men
from that day to this. As the manuscripts graduaUy
came forth into the light there was disclosed the his
tory of antiquity from Herodotus to Tacitus and
models were thus given to the world of what history
and biography might be. Philosophy and metaphysics,
culminating in Plato and Aristotle and in the discourses
of Socrates, put at the service of mankind the specu
lations of some of the most remarkable minds the world
has ever known, ranging over every field of human
thought and affecting and advancing knowledge and
civilization with a force which must always be reckoned
with and which Ues at the very roots of all that has
been since accompUshed. There too, in this Uterature
of the past, were uncovered the foundations of the very
sciences which would now consign the classics to ob
livion. In Euclid were found the system and problems
of geometry; the science of numbers and arithmetic
had engaged the acute Greek inteUigence; Lucretius
embodied the atomic theory of the Epicureans in one
of the world's great poems, and the essays, orations and
letters of Cicero gave style to the prose of modem
Europe. In the appliances which improve the condi
tions of daily existence the men of the Renaissance
found ample lessons in the work of the Roman engi
neers which had covered Europe with roads and
bridges; in systems of drainage as old as Babylon, a

62 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
marvelous contrast to the filth of the medieval cities
which used their streets as open sewers and bred disease
and plagues and the black 'death among the people.
They contemplated at last with considerate eyes the
ruins of the baths and gymnasiums and slowly leamed
that personal cleanlines promoted health and comfort
and that dirt was not really essential to sanctity.
So it came to pass that Greek and Latin, with Mathe
matics as a companion, took possession of education
and held it well down into the second half of the nine
teenth century. During this uncontested reign came
not only such events as the discovery of America and
the Reformation but a vast development of art and
Uterature, the gi'eat modem Uterature of the world,
sculpture inspired by Greece but touched with the
imagination of Christianity, and such frescoes and
paintings as the world had never seen before. Nor
did the devotion to classical scholarship narrow the
field of intellectual activity. Invention was at work
and the bounds of knowledge were widened beyond aU
that men had ever imagined to be possible. Science,
which in certain lower forms has of late grown so
hostile to the classics, could hardly be said to have been
impeded or retarded by their supremacy during a
period which began with Copernicus and GalUeo, which
included Bacon and Newton and closed with Charles
Darwin and Pasteur, to take at random only a few
of the greatest among many great names. The classical
system supplemented by mathematics was known as
a liberal education in contradistinction to an educa-

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 63
tion devoid of classical studies or confined to special and
technical training. The phrase was just, because what
ever the defects of the classical education it may truly
be said that it has always instilled into all those sub
jected to it a respect for knowledge and leaming in any
form and in any direction, possessing a really liberal
izing influence which seems at times sadly lacking in
purely scientific or technical training.
Despite the fact, however, that the classical educa
tion was essentiaUy liberal tn its attitude toward all
education and all learning, the opposition to it which
began, roughly speaking, some fifty years ago, was
directed against its exclusiveness, and sought to over
throw its monopoly of studies which rested on the
doctrine that whatever else a student might acquire
he could never be deemed a thoroughly educated man
unless he had at least passed through a certain course
of classics. The movement against this exclusiveness
was based no doubt upon sound reasons. It was
entirely successful and the doors of our universities
were opened to those who offered scientific courses or
modem languages in place of one at least of the clas
sical requirements. But the movement has not stopped
at this point. It is now pressing on toward the prac
tical exclusion of the classics, toward a complete re
versal of the old system, and there are many prepara
tory schools supposed to fit boys for the higher edu
cation where Greek at least is substantiaUy aban
doned. In the universities themselves the tendency is
more and more in the direction of giving up the classics

64 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
and making the entire essential curriculum consist of
scientific and economic studies united in some measure
with modern languages.
This comparatively recent and very extreme hostiUty
to the classics, to the studies which Ufted modem
civilization out of the darkness that followed the faU
of the Roman Empire and which for nearly five hun
dred years was the foundation and the test of the
higher education, seems to deserve examination. Be
fore the classics are relegated to a few scholars, philolo
gists and lovers of literature, let us inquire whether
it is wise thus to sentence them to banishment. In
making this inquiry it is well to begin with the funda
mental question as to what education is in the last
analysis. The first aud dominant object of all education is
to teach the child, the boy or girl, to use his or her
mind; that is, in other words, to teach them so to
control their minds that they can apply them to any
subject of study and especiaUy to a subject which
it is a duty and not a pleasure to master and under
stand. When this power to use and control the mind
is once thoroughly attained the boy or girl can then
leam anything which his or her mind is capable of
receiving and acquiring. Very few minds can master
every branch of leaming. The man who can leam
languages may be wholly unable to go beyond the rudi
ments of mathematics. Some minds again are much
more powerful than others, just as some bodies are
more muscular than others, and are able to go further

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 65
in any direction than the average inteUigence. We all
have our mental limitations. But it is none the less
profoundly true that those who have been taught to
use and control their mmds can apply them to any
subject and go as far as their individual Umitations
permit. So^ far all, I beUeve, who have reflected upon
the subject will agree. I thmk we may also agree that
as any form of exercise wUl develop some muscles
and some forms wiU develop aU, so any kind of study
properly pursued, whether it is arithmetic or Sanscrit
roots, wiU develop the muscles of the mind and give
it the, power of continuous application by a mere ex
ercise .of the wUl. It is equaUy true, however, that
the use of dumb-bells on the one hand and walking
on the other wiU not develop the same set of muscles,
although both contribute generally to health and
strength. In attaining to the command of the mind,
to the power of controUing its appUcation by wUl,
the same rule holds good, but there is a wide choice
of method, because while any study can be used to
develop strength and vigor, some wiU narrow and others
broaden ; some wiU cease to have any value beyond the
simple production of strength, while others equally
efficient in this direction wUl lead to results which
bring Ufelong uses and pleasures.
It is at this point that the division of opinion be
gins. The old and long established curriculum which
was confined to the classics and to mathematics was
quite as efficient as any other system tn teaching a boy,
if the teaching was good, to apply and control his

66 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
mind. This also might be said in its behalf, that •\^rhen
a boy was capable of learning and also of retaining
anything which he had been taught, the two capabiU
ties being by no means inseparable, he went from
school to college or into the world reaUy knowing
something about one or two subjects, instead of know
ing little or nothing of a great many subjects upon
which his time had been dispersed, a result which seems
to be preferred at the present day by educational ex
perts no doubt far wiser than those of the past. If
I may be permitted, let me take an iUustration fjom
my own experience. There was ascertain boy, whom
I knew very intimately, brought up as we aU were fifty
years since under the old curriculum. When he went
to coUege he knew thoroughly the Greek and Latin
grammars in which he had been painfully and reluc
tantly drilled. He knew both the syntax and prosody
and was fully possessed of the idea that a false quan
tity in Latin was Uttle short of a crime; his feelings
on this point were Uke those of Browning's Spanish
monk as to the "great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations.
One sure, if another fails."
He could write Latin prose. It was far from classical,
but it was grammatical and comprehensible. He could
read Latin and Greek at sight; that is, Greek no more
difficult than the Crito and Gorgias which h© studied

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 67
in his sophomore year. He was able to leam enough
arithmetic, algebra, plane and solid geometry and trig
onometry to pass all his examinations with rather high
percentages, but he was whoUy unable to retain them
and they fled after the examinations and left "not
a rack behind." In all that concemed mathematics his
limitations were hopeless. In the middle of his college
course, tempted by the attractions and greater ease of
the elective system, he deserted his Latin and Greek,
which he has regretted all his Ufe since, for although
he has retained his Latin so that he can read it with
pleasure, his Greek, neglected, has become laborious
and would require to regain it in proper measure time
which a much occupied life could not spare. Since
those far-off days the boy has had sons and grandsons
who in turn have been blessed by all the most modern
advantages and latest improvements in education.- He
has observed them closely and he has failed to see that
they were better taught than he was or knew more or
could use their minds better than he could at the same
age. Of course after schools ended his sons came to
know far more than their father because they had finer
intelligences. But the boy of whom I speak has re
mained so unregenerate that he is trying even now to
make sure that his grandsons are taught Greek at
school, so that in the days he will not see they may
at least know what resulted from, the wrath of Achilles
and why people speak of bending the bow of Odysseus.
I can hear the wise educator of to-day, as I indulge
in this reminiscence, exclaim at such an education as I

68 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
have described and rejoice that it has been done away
with. Perhaps he is right. I should not think of set
ting my opinion against his. Yet I cannot but feel
some doubt of his absolute correctness creep over me
when I consider the events of the last three years,
as to the perfection of our most modern civilization
which is so largely the work of our most advanced
methods of education. I have become very sceptical
as to the wisdom which would cast the Uterature of
Greece and Rome upon the dust heaps, when I have
contemplated the performances of the most diversely
and most thoroughly educated people in the world,
from whom we have so largely borrowed in the way of
education ; when I have seen that people develop to the
highest point the science of destroying human lives,
as perhaps was to have been expected; when I have
seen them produce an organized barbarism far surpass
ing in its savage efficiency any that has ever afflicted
the world; when I have witnessed the deeds -wrought
by the products of the most modem and improved
methods of education which surpass in wanton destruc
tion, in equally wanton cruelty, in sheer naked horror,
anything which history can show ; when I have beheld
aU this I have seriously doubted whether the most
modem education has been quite such a complete
success as its advocates assert. In the centuries of
classical education which followed the Renaissance and
the revival of learning there were wars in abundance —
generally needless, sometimes desolating, often cruel,
always destructive and sad. But in all that long period

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 69
there was never anything so whoUy hideous as that
which we have seen in this war now raging in Europe.
"Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate" and I think
that it is easy to show that to detect a connection be
tween methods of education and the events of the
present world-wide war is not whoUy fanciful. Mean
time let me ask pardon for the long digression to which
my little illustration has given rise and let us retum to
the main question.
Admitting »that any form of leaming can if properly
administered teach the use and the control of the
mind; admitting that there is a wide choice in the
forms to be adopted for this purpose and that it is
well that the classical exclusiveness or monopoly has
been ended, let us consider if it is not also weU to
resist the attempt now on foot to drive the classics
from the preparatory schools and treat them with a
cold and almost deadly indifference in the universities.
The reasons given for this treatment of the classics
are various in form but eventuaUy the same in sub
stance. They may all practically be reduced to the
objection made to me very lately, when I was urging
that the classics ought to be taught in every school
which prepares for the higher education, to the effect
that they were of no use in after life. I have often
quoted in this connection LoweU's definition of a uni
versity, as a place where nothing useful was taught,
and beneath the wit lies a sound philosophy demon
strating that there must be places where learning,
scholarship and knowledge can be pursued and acquired

70 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
for their own sake, because if their fate is to be de
cided simply by the money test they will soon wither
away, and thought and civUization and the higher life
of the intellect will die with them. I haye used the
words "money test," and when people say the classics
are of no use they mean very frequently, if not very
generally, that they will not help a man to make
money. If this was appUed to the pursuits which
have no purpose except to enable a man to earn his
own living, a high and primary duty, it would be cer
tainly sound; but the higher education, which multi
tudes desire and many in varying degrees attain, goes
beyond the manual occupations and aims at least to
develop the purely inteUectual faculties. Here the
mere money test seems unsatisfactory; in fact many
persons regard it as a very sordid test indeed.. The
apostles and teachers of religion, the moralists, the
poets, the dramatists, the artists, the philosophers, the
students of science and of nature, the men whose
thought has moved the world and led humanity in its
groping, stumbling march across the centuries, have
rarely been money seekers or money getters. Without
such men and such minds it is highly probable that we
should still be running naked in the woods and the
opportunities even for making money would be very
small. Tried by the money test alone everything
but reading, writing and arithmetic would properly be
excluded and therefore I think we may discard money
making as a wholly worthless test for the exclusion of
the classics or of any other study which should engage

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 71
the attention of those who seek in any degree the
higher education.
The larger objection that the classics are neither
necessary nor useful in after life to those who have
studied them in school or coUege is so vague that it
can only be dealt with in general terms. As to the
question of the necessity I can only reply in the words
of the greatest of geniuses who made a Uttle leaming
go a very long way and gathered a smaU fortune at
the same time. When Regan says "What need one?"
Lear replies: "0! Reason not the need; our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's."
When we come to the question of utility the field is a
wide one and the tests must be comparative and cannot
be absolute, but a little inquiry and consideration are
not out of place before we accept the dogma of the
votaries of applied science and of the mechanic arts as
well as of so-called practical men. Take the leamed
professions. Surely it is well that the clergy should
have some knowledge of the language of the New
Testament and of that other in which a large part of
the Christian world repeat their prayers and read their
Bibles. It cannot be whoUy without value to physi
cians and surgeons to be acquainted with the language
and the literature of the race among whom their noble
and beneficent profession finds its birthplace or of the

72 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
language in which they stiU write their prescriptions, or
of both these languages from which they bring forth for
their new drugs and new diseases names which not
infrequently they mispronounce. Lawyers no doubt
can make a living, and often a very good one, knowing
only the statutes and the more obvious rules of plead
ing and practise. But it can hardly be questioned that
if they go beyond this Umited region a familiarity with
the language which enshrines the maxims they quote,
and in which is written that great system of jurispru
dence bequeathed to us by the Romans and stUl fol
lowed in most countries of Western civiUzation, is not
only useful but desirable. If we tum to the higher
sciences we find a Uke condition. The astronomer
cannot explore the heavens without seeing the beauti
ful mythology of Greece forever written in the stars.
The Greek alphabet figures in his catalogues and calcu
lations and some of his greatest forerunners wrote in
Latin. The naturalists, the botanists, the geologists,
the biologists, not only owe their very names to the
classics which some of them despise, but it would not
come amiss if they knew, as no doubt many of them do,
something of the languages from which they take their
nomenclatures and of the literatures where appear the
first guesses at scientffic truths and the first and often
very briUiant speculations as to the secrets of the
Universe. In philology, anthropology and archeology
a knowledge of Latin and Greek is of course essential.
As to literature it is needless to argue. A literary man
should know something of literature, and Uterature

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 73
includes the writmgs of Greece and Rome. In aU these
instances which I have cited it is difficult to find justffi-
cation for asserting that the study of the classics is a
waste of time because they are useless in after life.
It will, I know, be objected that I have mentioned
only learned professions, the higher sciences and litera
ture and have omitted that supremely important per
son whom certain people desire most especially to pro
tect against the ravages of the time-wasting classics —
"the average man." I am as far ag possible from
forgetting him. Lincoln told John Hay one morning
how he had dreamed the night before that he entered
a crowded haU to make a speech. As he passed down
the aisle he heard some one say, "What a common-look
ing man," and in his dream he tumed to the man who
had spoken and said, "My friend, God loves common-
looking men. That's why He makes so many of them."
The "average man" is the central figure in our problem.
Repeatedly have I been told that there was no use in
teaching the classics to boys in school or coUege because
the "average man" never used them or recurred to them
in after Ufe. One feels inclined to say "AU the worse
for the 'average man' " and to feel sorry for his loss of
so much that is elevating and deUghtful. But admit
ting the truth of the objection, how much real force is
there in it when one appUes the comparative test? How
large a part do mathematics and science in various
forms play in the daily Ufe and current interests of
the "average man"? How many "average men" amuse
their leisure by solving algebraic problems, or by trying

74 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
to conceive the fourth dimension; how many can
explain to you — I take an obvious illustration — the
MendeUan theory of the dominant and recessive quaU
ties, or the Linnaean system, or tgU you of the move
ments and appearances of the faun^ of Europe during
the glacial periods and intervals, or even name to you
all the great consteUations of stars which look down
upon them nightly in silent splendor? My occupation's
have brought me into contact with very many average
men and also with men above and below the average,
and far more have referred to the history and Uterature
of Greece and Rome than to any of the well-known
scientffic subjects to which I have at randojn aUuded.
The fact is that not to know who Mendel was or what
the fossils show as to aniinal Ufe is not necessarUy
esteemed a mark of ignorance, but never to have heard
of Socrates, or Pericles, of Hannibal, or Caesar or
Cicero, is held to indicate a Very defective education to
say the least. And yet no one would think of arguing
that boys should not be made acquainted with the
simpler forms of mathematics and geometry because in
after years the "average man" as a rule finds Uttle use
and less pleasure from them in daily life.
While it is tme that the strongest and most intoler
ant hostiUty to the classics comes in the name of
science, sometimes assumed without warrant by the
persons who employ it, there is another movement
against the languages and literature of Greece and
Rome conducted by those who urge that they be
displaced and replaced by modem languages which

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 75
are either their chUdren or their debtors. No one,
I think, can feel more keenly than I the importance
of modem languages. The man who can read, stiU
more the man who can speak one or more languages
other than his own, doubles, trebles, multipUes almost
indefinitely his capacity, his usefulness, his efficiency
and, his enjoyments. I am, as I have said, an unre
generate person and I am glad that I had a classical
education but I have always regretted that I was not
taught Latin and Greek by ear first, taught to speak
them in the way all languages, spoken or unspoken,
modern or ancient, should be taught. No one wiU go
further than I in advocating the study of modem lan
guages but I am utterly unable to see why it should
be considered a prerequisite to their study to displace
the classics. They are complementary, not opposed,
and in the higher education certainly the classics and
the modern languages ought to go hand in hand. It
was said that Von Moltke was able to keep silent in six
languages, a marvelous feat even in one. But the
power to speak after a 'fashion two or three languages
is as common as Von Moltke's many-tongued sUence is
rare and is not incompatible with ignorance or
iUiteracy. There are also many persons like Thack
eray's couriers who spoke, every one of them, several
languages "indifferently iU." It is a peculiarly profit
able accomplishment in such cases and usually leads
to success as a courier, a concierge, a hotelkeeper, and
the like, all exceUent occupations but not concemed
with the higher education. It is quite certain that a

76 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
man may speak one or more modem languages very
well and know and enjoy their Uteratures without hav
ing studied the classics, but that is no argument against
possessing also a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Such
knowledge cannot but help any man in the modem
languages of Europe, for they have aU borrowed or
have sprung from Latin and Greek. A man may easily
speak a modem language other than his own almost
faultlessly but unless he has some acquaintance with
Greek and Latin he can never hope for real scholarship
in the spoken tongue which he has acquired or for a
thorough comprehension of it. The study and acquisi
tion of modem languages instead of being a reason
for the expulsion of the classics from our schools and
universities are in reaUty the strongest argument in
favor of their retention. The teaching of the one
should always imply instruction in the other.
It is also urged sometimes that it is a waste of time
to spend it upon the classics because translations serve
every purpose. The great authority of Emerson is
cited always in support of this contention and there is
no doubt that he gave high if undue value to the trans
lation. I am a lover of Emerson and there are very few
who haye -written either prose or poetry who have
meant more to me than he. But in that marvelous
and splendid inteUect the critical faculty was not the
strongest and there seem to be blind spots in the intel
lectual vision as there are in the eye. Emerson, for
instance, spoke of Poe to Mr. HoweUs as "that jingle-
nian." One may like or dislike Poe, admire him or

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 77
contemn him, but his place in the long annals of Eng
Ush poetry cannot be denied nor can his extraordinary
mastery of metrics and of rhyme, of melody and
cadence and rhythm be omitted from the history or
from the glories of English verse. To call him a
"jingle-man" simply shows that Emerson was in those
respects what the musicians call tone-deaf. In a less
degree the same may be said of his opinion of transla
tions. A man far inferior to Emerson in all ways but
a highly trained and more discriminating critic takes
a very different view. BoUeau said: "Do you know
why the ancients have so few admirers? It is because
at least three-quarters of those who jjave translated
them are either ignorant or duU. Madame de
Lafayette, who had the finest intelligence of any
woman in France and who wrote the best, compared a
poor translator to a lackey whom his mistress sends to
convey a compliment to some one. That which his
mistress has said to him in most polished phrase he
will render most coarsely and will cripple and mutilate
it; the greater the deUcacy of the compliment the worse
wiU be the lackey's version: there in a word is the
most perfect image of a bad translator." The same
just thought is expressed more tersely by Macaulay,
when, describing Mrs. Thrale's anecdotes after they'
had passed through Mr. Croker's hands, he says that
they become "as flat as champagne in decanters or
Herodotus in Beloe's version."
These judgments on a larg^ class of translations are
much nearer the truth than Emerson's paradox. We

78 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
are aU deeply indebted to translators and translations,
for very few of us command many languages and no
one aU the languages from which we desire to obtain
either information or the gratification of our tastes in
literature. Yet it cannot be denied that in the change
from the original to a new medium spmething, how
ever impalpable, is always lost in the process. In the
Uteratures of knowledge or mere information the loss
is so slight that it may be disregarded, but in the
case of great prose writers like Herodotus, Thucydides
or Demosthenes, like Tacitus or Cicero, it becomes
very serious indeed. In poetry the loss in translation is
not only much greater than in prose but it is so far-
reachuig that many good judges regard the adequate
translation of poetry as an almost impossible feat.
Without going to this extreme it may be fairly said
that many of the beauties of poetry, and much of the
deUcate effect of versification disappear in the passage
from one language to another and we can only accept
the poem in its changed form as a last resource, which
is no doubt far better than nothing. It must of course
be understood that what has just been said does not
apply to those great books founded on the ideas
expressed in the poetry of anotiier language which are
miscalled translation but which are in reality new,
creative and splendid works of imagination and style,
quite independent in the adopted language, like the
English Bible and FitzGerald's rendering of Omar
Khayyam. Moreover the assertion that translations
demonstrate the needlessness of studying Greek and

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 79
Latin proves too much. For if it is sound it would
make equally futUe the study of any language, native
or foreign, except for the purposes of very restricted
conversation. I have endeavored within the inexorable limits which
time imposes to make repUcation of a general charac
ter to the objections most usuaUy made agamst classi
cal studies in our schools and universities. Let me
now with aU possible brevity try to give some of the
affirmative arguments which can be made in their
behalf. I will begin by quoting the plea made recently
by certain distinguished men in England in behalf of
the maintenance of classical studies, for in England
there is the same movement against them as in the
United States. I take it from an admirable article by
Professor Moore, published in the Harvard Graduates
Magazine last December. Speaking of the signers of
this public letter Professor Moore says:
"The list includes Lord Bryce, Lord Cromer, Lord
Curzon, Walter Leaf, Sir William Osier, H. A. L. Fisher,
Sir G. 0. Trevelyan, Sir Archibald Geikie, the Bishop of
Oxford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, all known to
Americans. Every lover of the classics will be glad to take
as his creed their statement, a portion of which is here
quoted: " 'It is our conviction that the nation requires scientific
method and a belief in mental training, even more than
physical science, and that~the former is by no means identi
cal with the latter. We might enthrone physical science
in all our schools without acquiring as a nation what we
most need, the persuasion that knowledge is essential to

80 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
progress, and that it has to be acquired by the cultivation
of the faculty of independent reflection, which implies the
power of selecting, combining and testing the essential
facts of the subject in hand. This scientific method is not
the peculiar property of physical science: all good work
in all studies is based upon it; it is indispensable to law,
history, classics, politics, and all branches of knowledge
rightly understood. What we want is scientific method in
all the branches of an education which will develop human
faculty and the power of thinking clearly to the highest
possible degree.
" 'In this education we believe that the study of Greece
and Rome must always have a large part, because our
whole civilization is rooted in the history of these peoples,
and v/ithout knowledge of them cannot be properly under
stood. The small city communities of Greece created the
intellectual life of Europe. In their literature we find
models of thought and expression, and meet the subtle and
powerful personalities who originated for Europe all forms
of poetry, history and philosophy, and even physical
science itself, no less than the ideal of freedom and the
conception of a self-governing democracy ; while the student
is introduced to the great problems of thought and life at
their springs, before he follows them through the wider but
more confused currents of the modern world. Nor can it
be right that the educated citizens of a great empire should
remain ignorant of the first state that met the problem of
uniting in a contented and prosperous commonwealth
nations differing in race, temper, and culture, and which has
left so deep a mark on the language, law and political con
ceptions of Europe. Some knowledge of Latin is indis
pensable for the intelligent study of any one of these things,
and even for the intelligent use of our own language.
Greece and Rome afford us unique instances, the one of

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 81
creative and critical intelligence, the other of constructive
statesmanship. Nor can we afford to neglect the noble
precepts and shining examples of patriotism with which
their history abounds.' "
The signers of this letter lay emphasis on the effort
to "enthrone physical science" in aU the schools, and
that is the precise effort which is being made here.
Should this plan succeed there would be no brother
suffered near that throne, whereas the classics ask only
their place in the sun and would never exclude any
other study which leads to leaming and knowledge.
No one can have a deeper or more reverential respect
for the higher sciences in aU forms than I. No one can
more admire than I the unseffish devotion to the
research which, unglorified and almost unrewarded,
slowly amasses the obscure facts from which the hand
of genius wiU one day pluck forth the briUiant dis
covery which will help and serve and protect man
kind. And yet, notwithstanding that all this is true, I
cannot but believe that to the average boy — mark, the
"average" boy — it is as profitable to have i;ead Virgil
and at least caught a glimpse of the battles on the
Trojan Plain and of the wanderings of Odysseus as to
be instructed in the "Hereditary Hair Lengths in
Guinea Pigs" or in the "Anatomy and Development of
the Posterior Lymph Hearts of the Turtle."
But it is tp be remembered that the higher sciences
are not what the average man thinks of when he speaks
of science. Nothing can be nobler, more elevating,
more spirituaUy enlarging than astronomy, the contem-

82 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
plation of the stars and interstellar spaces or even of
our own Uttle satellite, "The moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan Artist views
At ev'ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno to descry new lands.
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe."
Here we have the first classical scholar of his time in
words of imperishable beauty acclaiming the labors of
one of the pioneers of science. Milton at least saw no
reason for shutting up one field of leaming because
another lay beside it. As of astronomy, so the like may
be said of geology, of biology, of the studies of plants
and animals whence Darwin and his predecessors and
successors drew the doctrines and theories of evolution,
which have so served and enlightened mankind. But
these are not the sciences which are thought of when
the classics are decried. It is applied science which is
in the minds of most men when they use the word.
To the mass of mankind science means the steam
engine and the telegraph, the telephone, the dynamo
and the motor car, wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes.
It also means the submarine, the poisonous gas, the
high explosives and all the new devices for the sudden
obliteration of human lives. No one would think of
belittling the value and helpfulness of these wonderful
inventions which have beneficent purposes. But they
all minister to physical comfort. They leave the soul
of man untouched. The spirit of man, that which is

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 83
highest in him, is not Ufted up and strengthened by an
automobUe, or a traction engine, or even by an incan
descent electric lamp. But the thoughts of men, of the
philosophers, the moralists and the preachers of relig
ion, of artists and architects, of the dramatists, the
singers and the poets, whether conveyed to us in paint
ings, statues and buildings, or in books, are the real
forces which have moved the world. Applied science
and ingenious invention can change and have changed
environment and have altered the scale of living and
modes of life. But it is human thought and human
imagination which have led men to the heights of
intellectual and spiritual achievement. As Napoleon
said, it is imagination which mles the world in the end,
not the inventive faculty or the abUity to make money.
Rome developed every comfort, every luxury, every
physical advantage which the wit of man at that time
could devise aud which the wealth of the world could
purchase. But none the less literature faded, art
declined, the lofty aspirations vanished, barbarian mer
cenaries filled the legions and the great empire fell and
carried civilization down with it into hopeless ruin.
Physical luxury and piled-up wealth had reached the
highest point ever attained, but they could not save
Rome because the Roman spirit was dead. In our
mania for quickening the work and pleasures of Ufe
and rendering it more comfortable and luxurious let us
not forget that the vital principle without which all
these things are dust and ashes is to be found else
where, in the books where the thought, the soaring

84 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
aspirations, the imaginings of men are stored up for
the guidance and the hope of succeeding generations.
In the old classical curriculum, to take a concrete
illustration, boys at a very early period and at the most
impressionable age heard the story of Leonidas and
Thermopylae; they knew what was done at Marathon
and Salamis; they had read of the death of Epaminon-
das; they realized that Greeks had died to save their
civilization from the tyranny of the Orient. Passing
from Greece to Rome they came to that larger patriot
ism, that devotion to the "Patria," to the country,
which has been the inheritance of all Westem civiliza
tion. It mattered not whether the old legends were
true or false, the boys of the elder day before they had
reached their teens were famUiar with Curtius jumping
into the gulf, Scaevola thrusting his hand into the
flame, Regulus retuming to Carthage; most admired of
all, Horatius at the bridge, and they recited vigorously
the words which Macaulay put into the hero's mouth :
"And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his Gods."
Some boys whom I knew read a little Herodotus in the
volume of selections in which they were prepared for
college and there they found this sentence:
" 'H/ieas (TTaai&^etv xp^iv eari, 'iv re ri^ aWcf Kaipcj) Kal 5i) Kal kv
T^5e Treplrov bK6rtpos -fiiikwv TrXeco d.'ya.Oa.T'fiv %aTplbakpykatTai."
These are the words of Aristides to his especial enemy

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 85
Themistocles on the eve of the battle of Salamis.
Roughly translated they mean : "It is more becoming at
any time and more particularly now that we should
show which one of us shaU best serve our country."
Within the last three months this simple sentence has
seemed to me not inappUcable as a rule of conduct.
I look with wonder and admiration at the filaments of
the radio station climbing up toward the skies and
take great satisfaction in the comfort of an automobUe,
but I find in neither the inspiration which breathes
from this passage written down by a Greek historian
bom nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. To the
boys who had all these stories and sentences drilled
into them the result can be summed up in Addison's
line — '"Thy life is not thine own when Rome demands it."
With this idea the minds of the boys became thor
oughly familiar. That the individual life was to be
sacrificed to that of the nation, that it was ev^ry man's
duty to offer his life for his country if the need came,
was regarded as a truism and a commonplace, as a
matter of course. It is well to have this conception of
duty and patriotism looked upon as a matter of course,
as something not to be disputed, and there can be no
doubt that the early saturation of the boyish mind
with the classics had much to do with this outcome.
They knew of course that ihe Romans were in constant
wars, that they brought home prisoners taken ui battle

86 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
and conquest and turned them into slaves as the
Germans are doing now. They understood that Roman
rule was always efficient, often harsh, sometimes cor
rupt, although it was not guilty of systematic, organ
ized and wholly wanton cruelty and barbarism. These
things might all be true but the final and deep impres
sion left by the classics on a boy's mind was of courage,
fighting ability, a capacity for magnanimous deeds, and
above all and more profound than aU others was the
classical conception of a patriotism ready always to
sacrifice self and life for the country. Hence comes
my reason for saying at the beginning that the con
nection between modes of education and the concep
tions of maturity and the conduct of Ufe is neither fan
ciful nor strained. This boyish experience is merely an
illustration in a smaU way of the manner tn which the
classics have acted and reacted upon character and
impulses at an early age. The proposition holds true
on a far larger field. From the days of Plato and
Aristotle, whose influence has been deeply felt for
more than two thousand years, the philosophers, the
historians, the poets, the orators, the dramatists, the
jurists and lawmakers of Greece and Rome have moved
and often guided the highest inteUigences of civiliza
tion and have impressed themselves profoundly upon
the thought and imagination of the world.
That word imagination brings me to my last and,
it seems to me, to the one aU-sufficient argument for
giving to the classics an ample space in any scheme of
education, especially if the education thus given ven-

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 87
tures to prefix to itself the word "higher." We may or
may not agree with the Christian pessimist that "The
world is very evil," but there can be no doubt that it
would be wholly intolerable if man was destitute of
imagination, unable to enjoy aught but the satisfaction
of animal needs and appetites and utterly incapable
of the creation of other worlds tn which to find refuge
from this one. For a race so cursed there would be no
beauties in nature, none in the sun and moon and stars
or in earth and ocean. There would be no beauties of
art, for there would be no art. There would be no
laughter, for humor cannot exist without imagination,
and there would be no tears except those extorted by
physical anguish.
The earliest craving of man as -vve catch sight of him
at the dawn of history or among the tribes surviving tn
primitive condition is for something which will appeal
to his imagination. He hungers for the fictitious and
the unreal and for the promise of a happiness after
death which this world apparently can never give. He
listens to the story-teller, he constructs intricate super
stitions, he weaves from natural phenomena a mythol
ogy and a theology which suit his longings and his
fancy, while his spoken, his only Uterature is poetry
and not prose. As the imagination is keenest in a
child, SQ is it strongest in the primitive man. Reason
comes later and dulls imagination, brings it fortunately
within bounds, but imagination never dies and it cries
out for gratffication from the newsboy spelling over
the story of crime and detectives in the newspaper to

88 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
the lover of poetry borne away by a few golden lines
of Sappho to "The sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily that o'erlace the sea,"
or shivering with Villon in medieval Paris over lost
hopes and the miseries of a misspent Ufe.
The works of imagination, upon which the soul
depends and which sustain the spiritual life of man,
are found in aU the forms of art that have survived,
in the temple and the cathedral, in the statue and the
picture. But the great mass of the treasures of the
imagination are the creations of the poet, the maker
and singer ; of the dramatist and the teUer of tales, and
these are all stored in books and are caUed literature.
A very large part of the Uterature of the world is com
posed of that which we have inherited from Greece
and Rome. Mr. Watts-Dunton divides poetic imagi
nation into two classes: that of absolute dramatic
vision unconditioned by the personal or lyrical im
pulses of the poet, and that of relative dramatic vision
which is more or less conditioned by the poet's personal
or lyrical impulse. In the first class he puts .lEschylus,
Sophocles, Shakespeare and Homer, and gives as exam
ples of the second class Pindar, Dante and MUton;
Sappho, Heine and Shelley. I cite this passage from
a distinguished critic merely to show that to whatever
heights you ascend in literature the Greeks are always
there. Literature is one of the greatest forces in the
world and always has been and always wiU be so.

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 89
It comes to us with open hand, offering us knowledge,
spu-itual inspiration, the vast world created by human
imagination, laughter and tears, happiness, sympathy,
enjdyment, forgetfulness. Over a large part of this
spacious kingdom of the mind rule Greece and Rome.
Are we to shut that fair region off and refuse to boys
and girls even the opportunity to enter it? Is it not
wiser, as well as more just to them, at least to put into
their hands the key which opens the gates of the
enchanted garden to use or not in later days as they
may see fit?
Even as I make the inquiry I hear the eternal ques
tion in reply, What is the use of it? What indeed is
the use of poetry at aU? If poetry must have a use
in order to live I might reply:
"The song that nerves a nation's heart
Is in itself a deed,"
and that the verses of Rouget de Lisle have meant
more to France in the past hundred years than many
useful scientffic devices. But this is too narrow a
ground. Poetry, the drama, Uterature in aU its forms,
true art of every kind, cannot be discarded or belittled
unless you are prepared to say that beauty is useless,
that there is no utUity or profit to be found m the
words of the founders of religions, of saints or apostles,
of philosophers or moraUsts; in the marvelous crea
tions of the poet, the dramatist or the tale-teller. Such
an attitude seems mcredible and few people dare to

90 VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
take it openly, although many whose eyes are fixed
solely on money-making secretly believe in it. But an
education whoUy destitute of literature and of instruc
tion in the contents and meaning of literature is of
course no education at aU. It could not reaUy exist
because the most ordinary human mind conceivable
would refuse to be deprived of all imaginative pleasures
and would teach itself. If then we are to have litera
ture and art as a part of our education it seems a grave
mistake to exclude from instruction the languages of
the two nations which have so largely contributed to
both. If we love knowledge for its own sake, if we would
have scholarship and cultivation and refined learning
among us to give a savor and a perfume to Ufe, we can
hardly omit the classics. After all it was the retum to
the civilization and Uterature of Greece and Rome
which opened to us the treasure-house of modem
knowledge, and it is weU to be grateful if nothing else.
But I am one of those who think that there is some
thing just here which should ever maintain the classics
among us when we think of what they are and of what
they did for us of the modern dispensation. When I
watch the attempt to drive Homer and Virgil out of
the schools and universities I cannot but recall the
old, old story of the plant, or grain, or flower, which
opens the rock to their lucky possessor and discloses the
high piled treasure and glittering jewels. It was a
widely diffused tale. It is found in the Bible, in the
Smiris; in the Orient as the Schamir or stone of knowl-

VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 91
edge; tn Latin as the Saxifraga, and in the Arabian
Nights as the sesame of the Forty Thieves. In the
Middle Ages the shepherd strikes the staff, in which is
the magic flower, against the hUlside and the rocks
open. He enters and finds the Princess who bids him
take gold to his fill. He does so and as he turns to go
the Princess says, "Forget not the best." She means
his staff. He merely takes more gold and as he goes
the mountatn walls close upon htm and cmsh hira.
Usually the charm is a flower, a pale blue flower —
"The blue flower, which Bramins say —
Blooms nowhere but in Paradise,"
and when the treasure-finder turns away, loaded with
gold, the flower cries, "Forget-me-not."
In the plentitude of our present knowledge, so slight
compared to the vast unknown, so ample if contrasted
only with what has gone before in our brief history,
when we leave the treasure-house, where aU these riches
of the mind are heaped up before us, let us not forget
the noble languages to which we owe not only aU the
learning of the ancients and the reopening of the road
which has brought us to where we are to-day, but so
much of the poetry and the beauty by which we are
enabled to see visions and to dream dreams.
Then let us recall the words of another great poet of
another race, who says to us,
"Where there is no vision the people perish."

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS^
Not long since I received a copy of a magazine of
which I had never heard before — a reflection, no doubt,
upon me and not upon the magazine. It seemed to be
a serious and weU-edited pubUcation, and turning over
the pages I came upon a critical notice of a book,
entitled "War Addresses," which I had lately published.
The notice was very kindly tn tone, and when for
nearly forty years one has been exposed to criticisms
in large numbers, both Uterary and poUtical, one
becomes very grateful for kindness, even when it is
condescending and too indifferent to its subject to
avoid mispresenting the author. My copy of the mag
azine has gone the way of the endless printed pages
which come to a man tn public life, but there was one
sentence in the notice which secured a place in my
memory and subsequently suggested a train of thought
which finally finds expression here.
The critic disposed in wholesale fashion of some of
the addresses, which may be sufficiently defined as
"occasional," by saying that they were of the usual
kind, very weU in their way, with skilfuUy distributed
"familiar quotations." These last words in quotation
*This essay appeared in Scribner's Magazine for January,
1919. It was written in March, 1918, at the time of the great
German attack whioh forced the British line back almost to Amiens.
I mention this to explain the allusion in the second paragraph
92

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 93
marks were those which arrested my attention and, as
they recurred to me later, lifted from my mind for a
moment the burden of sad and anxious thoughts
absorbed by the distress of the hour, by the perUs and
trials besetting my country which threatened those
principles of freedom and civilization that alone make
life worth having. It was evident that the critic in
using the words I have quoted proceeded upon the not
uncommon assumption that men in public Ufe or those
who are often called upon to speak in public are in the
habit of taking down their Bartlett, or some similar
collection, and searching through its pages for quota
tions with which to ornament their utterances, thus
violating a fundamental rule of architecture, which
applies equally to speech, that you may ornament your
construction but must never construct your ornament.
A universal negative is not only dangerous but is gen
erally impossible, and yet, practicaUy speaking, I doubt
if this method of putting quotations into speeches or
writings is ever followed by any one. Of course, in
saying this I exclude the citation of authorities as in
a legal argument or in histories, as weU as extracts from
an author whose books are the subject of a critical
study and examination. My statement is confined to
quotations used by a writer or speaker to point a moral
or to adorn the expression of his own thought in better
words than he can furnish himself. Naturally the
thought suggests the quotation, and its rarity or famU
iarity depends upon the memory and the range of read
ing of the speaker or writer. As the most famiUar

94 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
words are the most easily remembered and come within
the narrowest vocabulary, so the most famiUar quota
tions, as their very name implies, are those most com
monly used. But they are not sought for, although
they are frequently verified, as they ought always to be,
because the old Scotchman was quite right when on
his death-bed he whispered to his son : "Always verify
your quotations."
My first impression when I read my critic's censure
was of the erroneous theory upon which it was obvi
ously based, that men searched a dictionary of quota
tions to find suitable adornments for their writing or
their speech. My next was as to how far the implied
criticism that I indulged in too many famUiar quota
tions was justffied. I rather wondered that my critic,
so avowedly an expert in the familiarity of quotations,
did not remind me of Steele's remark that "There is
nothing so pedantic as many quotations." I assume
that he knew the sentence, but he probably shrank
from it as too "familiar," and also, perhaps, because he
was aware that Steele himself, or Addison as the case
might be, put some famtUar classical quotation at the
head of every Tatler and did not hesitate to sprinkle
other quotations here and there in the text.
Let me say in answer to the implied criticism that I
confess to a fondness, perhaps it is a weakness, for an
apt quotation. It seems to me to adorn or Ught up a
sentence provided it is wise or beautiful or humorous
as well as fitting. It is a buttress to an argument, it
sharpens a point, it adds luster to a page. If I can

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 95
express a thought of mine in the language of Shake
speare, the supreme master of English, how much bet
ter for my reader or my hearer than to leave him alone
with my words, so poor and dim compared to the radi
ance of the great poet and thinker. Perhaps I too far
give way to my fancy in this respect, but I know how
much I like the art of quotation in others, and I also
feel that if I err I at least sin tn good company. There
is first of all Sir Walter Scott, unrivaled in quotations
which he dearly loved to use. I think he surpassed all
others in the art, because when even his wide and curi
ous reading and his tenacious memory failed to give
what he desired he made his quotations himself. As
Labouchere said of his stories: "They might not be
true but they were certainly new, for I made them all
myself." There you can find them written at the head
of Sir Walter's chapters, appropriate, of course, because
devised for that especial purpose and attributed to an
"Old Play," an "Old Ballad," or to that fertUe and
charming author "Anonymous." Think of a novelist
who, lacking a quotation to introduce a chapter, scrib
bled on his manuscript such lines as these:
"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
— ^"Anonymous."
("Old Mortality," chapter XXVI.)^
'The numbering of the chapters in "Old Mortality" varies in
different editions. In some editions the quotation cited precedes
chapter XXI. See note, p. 110.

96 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
Is it any the worse because it became what Scott pre
tended it to be, a "famiUar" quotation, so famiUar that
hundreds have repeated the splendid words without
even knowing their origin? I looked back to the earliest
chapters of the novel, and found the first five gamished
with quotations from Burns, Prior, Swift, and Shake
speare, and then memory remaining mute tnvention
steps in and we have lines from our deceptive friend
an "Old BaUad." What lover of Uterature would quar
rel with either the real or the invented quotations —
they aU gleam upon the page and open the coming
chapter with a strain of music. Think, too, for a
moment of some of the writers who stiU deUght the
world and who were much given to quotation, apt,
ingenious, and suggestive. Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt,
Matthew Amold, Macaulay, Augustine BirreU, LoweU,
Emerson, great masters aU in the delicate and charming
art of quotation, occur at once to one's mind. I do not
extend the list, for these are enough to show what a
goodly company are those who aptly quote, nor do I
include Burton because his book is largely made up of
far-fetched and curious extracts from unread foUos;
nor Steme because he simply robbed Burton and thus
helped himself to produce one of the great books of
EngUsh Uterature.
These comforting reflections upon my fellow sinners
in a love for quotations led me to the book in which
my faiUng had not escaped my keen-eyed critic, and I
determined to see just how serious the failing was in
that particular case. I found that in the volume of

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 97
three hundred and three pages there were thirty-four
quotations — very few in the ten speeches, nearly all ir.
the eight occasional addresses. They were divided in
origin as foUows: Tennyson, four; Shakespeare,
Emerson, and Horace, three each; Macaulay, LoweU,
Byron, and Wordsworth, two each; Cicero, FrankUn,
Drinkwater, Keats, the Bible, Patrick Henry, Addison,
Rabelais, Whittier, Dickens, Lincoln, Landor, and
Browning, one each. To my surprise I also found on
examination that only eleven of these quotations were
in Bartlett, the largest and best dictionary of quota
tions I know. This fact indicates that this valuable
work of reference was not searched very thoroughly
for striking passages which might at various points be
worked into my discourse. But the distribution of my
quotations shows conclusively the unsoundness of the
perhaps common notion that any one who speaks in
public or writes for publication thumbs over a diction
ary in order to pluck out some quotable and oft-quoted
phrase which he can use to advantage. Had I worked
in this way there would not have been four quotations
from Tennyson. Not only are Shakespeare and the
Bible the books which all EngUsh-speaking people
quote most readily and naturaUy, often -without know
ing that they are quoting, but there are many poets
who to me mean far more and are more famUiar than
Tennyson. There are four quotations from Tennyson
simply because memory found in his poems the lines
which fitted and Ughted up the thought I was trying
to express. And that is the way that quotations for

98 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
decorative or Uluminatuig purposes find their way into
speech or -writing. As a proof of the same truth it wiU
be noticed that there is no research visible, for my
quotations were aU from famous or famiUar authors
except possibly the stanzas by Mr. Drinkwater, a young
EngUsh poet not yet as weU known as he deserves to
be. StUl less can they be accused of pedantry, which
impUes a needless display of leaming as weU as
unsuitabiUty to the time, the place, the subject, or the
company. Whatever else may be said of them, the
quotations made in my Uttle volume were aU appro
priate to the subject and all, I think, sufficiently apt.
They are certainly not recondite. They are from books
which all educated persons may be supposed to have
read. Yet I confess I should have Uked to have had my
critic place the nameless ones for me when he read
them, without looking them up, using only his mem
ory for identffication. I should be particularly pleased
if he would place for me the sentence from Rabelais
which was imbedded in my remembrance but which
I had not the patience to delve for so as to be able to
give chapter and verse.
I have used myself too long as an Ulustration of my
theme which is in the nature of a protest against the
patronizing, down-looking manner in which superior
persons and perhaps other and better people are wont
to refer in print and in speech to "famUiar quotations,"
with an emphasis upon the adjective as if familiarity in
literature was the equivalent of inferiority. I feel
incUned to begin by repeating to those who hold such

/
FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 99
opinions Armado's words to Moth: "Define, define,
weU-educated mfant."
Do you mean by "famUiar" anythmg to be found in
the dictionaries of quotations which bear that name,
Bartlett, for example, with its thousand and fifty-four
pages? It is an mvaluable work for the task of verifi
cation, very precious in disclosing the authors and
origins of verse and of sentences which drift about m
our memories but which have parted their moorings.
FuU of information, too, are such patient compilations.
There, for instance, you wiU leam who wrote the
lines —
"The aspiring youth, that fired the Ephesian dome.
Outlives in fame the pious fool that rais'd it,"
which I have heard wrongly attributed oftener than
any equally famiUar verses. Bartlett fails to give us
the name of the "aspiring youth," and I should like
to hear one of those who scorn the "familiar" quotation
tell us without examination of authorities who the
aspiring youth was and whether the architect and the
"pious fool" were one and the same person. This, by
way of digression, merely illustrates the value of such
books as the work of Bartlett and points to the grati
tude we ought to feel to those whose industry and
scholarship have produced them. But with all their
virtues their title is misleading. I will venture the as
sertion that, whUe some of the quotations in the col
lections are known to every one and aU probably to

100 ' FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
some one, and while most of them are occasionaUy met
with, perhaps, in speech or -nTiting, the majority of
extracts are whoUy unfamiliar to most of those, even
if weU-read persons, who use the book for reference.
It is best that it should be so and could not well be
otherwise, for the poet or writer who is the close friend
of one man may have only a bowing acquaintance
with another, and both must be able to find their
.favorite in the dictionary. There is a certain body
of quotations, chiefly BibUcal and Shakespearian,
many of them now integral parts of the language, and
some simple and widely popular poems which may
be said undoubtedly to be famiUar to everybody. But
compared to the total number contained in the dic
tionary they form but a smaU percentage. Therefore
"familiar," as used by the book of reference, is rela
tive, and to say that a quotation which is to be found
in such a work is to be deemed absolutely familiar is
an assertion not to be sustained.
I fear that I must quote in order to give the best
definition I know if I attempt to estabUsh a tme stand
ard of familiarity. It is to be found in "Henry V,"
where the King says: "Then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words."
There we have an admirable definition covering aU the
reaUy popular and familiar quotations of the dictionary
and nothing else, and testing famUiarity by the Uttle

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 101
phrases and jests which are pecuUar to the family
where they have been born and grown up, but which
never travel beyond the household limits. If this
Shakespearian definition gives a good standard, and
there can be no doubt of the extreme famiUarity which
it implies, the question arises whether it also means
that familiarity connotes inferiority and leaves a mark
upon an author's verse or prose which directs avoid
ance. Some persons — many, perhaps, like my friendly
critic— appear to think so. 'tet broadly speaking I
believe the very reverse to be the truth. The books
which have lasted through the centuries and are most
famUiar are, on the whole, the best books and the great
est literature. Not only do they command the admira
tion and the study of all educated men and women, but
their words, their characters, their stories have passed
into the popular consciousness, into the current
thought and daily language of countless millions who
have never read, perhaps never heard of, the books.
The tale of the "Odyssey," the names of Hector and
Achilles, the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,
the characters of Christian and Valiant-for-Truth, of
Pantagruel and Panurge, of Hamlet and Faust, the
visions of Dante, are household words in homes where
perhaps the books themselves have never entered.
They have a steadier and stronger Ufe than even the
folk-tales, the folk-songs, or the stories of fairies and
giants. Nothing else is so familiar, and yet Homer and
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bunyan, Rabelais, Goethe,
and Dante are, on the whole, the greatest, or among

102 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
the very greatest, names in the world's literature.
There is much in some famiUar Uterature which is com
monplace, mediocre, and even worthless, but let the
winnowing winds of time blow upon it and the chaff
will vanish. Such things never become household
words in any enduring sense. The greatest and best-
known authors in recorded history are, on the whole,
the best, and the same is true of the poems which are
to be found in aU anthologies. They vary in merit,
no doubt, but among them are many of the best poems
and verses in literature. No matter how hackneyed,
to use the most depreciating word, no matter how
familiar, great Uterature remains great. "What began
best can't end worst."
Let us take two or three examples in our own lan
guage. Hamlet's solUoquy beginning, "To be or not to
be," is probably as famUiar as is possible for any words
not in the Bible, and has certainly been declaimed and
recited oftener than any others, from the boy at school
to the great actor on the stage. Has its power, its phi
losophy, its fineness of thought and diction, its soaring
imagination been thereby in any degree impaired?
Where could one turn more surely at the chosen
moment for a noble quotation? Again, no lines in
Shakespeare are probably more universaUy familiar
than Portia's speech beginning : "The quality of mercy
is not strained." Has use at all lessened its exquisite
beauty? Descend in the scale of genius. Like Wolfe on the
eve of the battle upon the plains of Abraham, boys and

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 103
girls, men and women, have been repeating for more
than a century the "Elegy in a Country Church Yard."
It might be described in the words of the young man,
overheard by Mrs. Kemble at the theater, who
remarked of "Hamlet" "that it seemed made up of
quotations." Does all this familiarity in any way affect
its beauties, the charm of the verse, the perfection in
the choice of words, the soft twUight of the picture and
the thoughts? There is but one possible answer to such
a question. Or take a bit of prose, the parting of Mr. Valiant-for-
Truth : "My sword I give to him that shall succeed me
in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skiU to him that
can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be
a witness for me that I have fought his battles who now
wiU be my rewarder. When the day that he must go
hence was come, many accompanied him to the river
side, into which, as he went he said : 'Death, where is
thy sting?' And as he went down deeper, he said:
'Grave, where is thy victory?' So he passed over, and
aU the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."
Examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but do
not these four most familiar quotations, which I have
taken haphazard as they came into my mind, prove
sufficiently that to make familiarity the equivalent of
inferiority and an objection to the use of such quota
tions is an absurdity on its face. Is it not rather true
that even if one were to repeat every morning the vari
ous lines I have quoted, so doing would improve one's
taste and one's EngUsh, fill the mind with noble and

104 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
gracious images, and cast a pleasant Ught across a
clouded, dusty, or uneventful day?
In his essay entitled "The Study of Poetry,"
Matthew Amold says that there can be no more useful
help in determining what is the best poetry than to
have always in mind lines or expressions of the great
masters. They may be very dissimilar from the poetry
we are considering at the moment, "but if we have any
tact we shall find them ... an infaUible touchstone
for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic
qualities." He then gives quotations from Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, and MUton, any one of which
-wiU fumish the test of which he has been speaking.
The supreme qualities which makes the lines Amold
quotes true touchstones of poetic exceUence do not
concern us here. The single point to which I wish to
call attention is that with one or two exceptions these
lines of supreme exceUence are aU famiUar, most of
them extremely so.
For example, from Homer he takes a line from the
words of AchUles to Priam, known to every one who
reads the "Iliad" either in the original or in a trans
lation :
" Kal ae yepov, to trplv jxev aKovonev oX^lov eivat." *
From Dante "that incomparable line and a half,
Ugolino's tremendous words" in the Tower of Famme:
'"Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days wast as we hear,
ha,ppy."— Iliad XXIV, 543.

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 105
"Io no piangeva; si dentro impietrai.
Piangevan elli . . ." ^
And again "the simple, but perfect, single line" :
"In la sua voluntade e nostra pace." ^
From Shakespeare, three oft-repeated lines from Henry
IV's wonderful soliloquy about sleep, and then Ham
let's dying words to Horatio, unsurpassed in beauty in
any language:
"If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart.
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story . . ."
From Milton four lines from the great description of
the fallen archangel, ending, "and care sat on his faded
cheek," and then these two lines:
"And courage never to submit or yield
And wl;iat is else not to be overcome . . ."
More than once Arnold quotes again as a final test the
single Unes —
"In la sua voluntade e nostra pace"
and "Absent thee from felicity awhile."
'"I wailed not, so of stone I grew within; they wailed." — Inferno,
XXXIII, 39, 40.
' "In his will is our peace." — Paradise, III, 85.

106 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
These are aU lines and passages chosen by a great critic,
himself a poet, as touchstones of the highest pqetic
quality, and they are aU famUiar, some, as I have said,
very famUiar indeed. Matthew Arnold, then, finds
his examples of the noblest verse among the famiUar
quotations. Does this famUiarity diminish their value
or lessen their perfection of form or their beauty of
thought? Surely not. If Matthew Amold could use
famiUar quotations in this way and find in them the
very highest quaUties of the greatest poetry, it is, per
haps, weU for critics and other persons also to pause
before they speak contemptuously of a quotation
because it is "fknUiar."
Here as in most cases there must, of course, be dis
crimination, and it is always perUous to regard any
adjective as absolute and treat it as if it were a mathe
matical formula. There are the famUiar quotations of
the day, for example, the current slang, the poUtical
catchword, the refrain of the music-haU song which
every one knows, from the boy in the street upward.
They "strut and fret their hour upon the stage and
then are heard no more." These are for the moment
weU-kno-wn quotations, but not famiUar in the true
sense because they have famiUarity only for the day
that is passing over them. A few years elapse and they
are as lost as if they had never been. The same may
be said of those taken from some verse-maker, some
poet, perhaps, who caught the ear of his contempo
raries and fumished them with quotations which are
strangers to their chUdren. Such quotations as these

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 107
have the life of a generation of men and then disappear,
never attainmg to the dignity of being reaUy famiUar
in the large sense. One has but to look over some old
anthologies to learn this truth by observing the sparse
relics of minor poets, once weU known to then- little
groups of admhers and perhaps even beyond, now
mown down by the scythe of time and lying side by
side quite lifeless, remembered only by the old who
will soon follow them to oblivion.
The quotation worthy of the high title of "famiUar"
must have stood the test of time and passed unhurt
through the shifting tastes and fashions of centuries.
In its lofty or in its humble way it must show that, like
Shakespeare, it "was not for an age, but for all time."
I use the word "humble" because the rhymes of child
hood, of the nursery, fulfil the requirement of age in a
quotation worthy to be called familiar. Their intrin
sic, their abstract merits may appear slight, they may
even seem to be sheer nonsense, but they are passed on
by mothers and nurses and by the chUdren themselves
from generation to generation. We may be assured
that they would not thus have lived and prospered if
they had not possessed some quaUty, however slender,
of genuine worth, of real humor or imagination, which
gave them permanence.
Then there are the popular sayings, the folk-tales
and ballads and the songs of the people with an ances
try lost in the mists of antiquity, which, stored only ui
the human memory and kept alive only by human lips,
have come down across the centuries with their endless

108 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
variants untU at last they have been gathered up by the
collector and the antiquarian and made safe from
oblivion by print and paper. These tales and ballads
and proverbs are often rude in form and expression,
but no curious inquiry is needed to explain their long
life and lasting familiarity. In them you find wit and
wisdom, sparks struck from the hard flints of experi
ence by men and women struggling unknown through
what we call life. In this literature of humanity from
primitive man onward you come upon the visions of
the race, the imagination which takes man out of him
self, which brings him laughter and tears, which makes
him forget for a moment the trials he encounters and
the sorrows he must bear. There we read the first
efforts of the race to explain the universe, there we find
the embodiment of the natural phenomena in myths
and fables, the personffication of the planets and the
stars and behind them aU the force and energy of the
simplest emotions set forth by unsophisticated minds
with imaginations unfettered by science and neither
dulled nor made timid by the knowledge yet to come.
Is it any wonder that the Uterature reaching back to
the infancy of humanity is dear to the hearts of men
and is familiar tn their mouths as household words?
Would we have it otherwise? Are the quotations from
folk-lore and baUads and songs in any degree harmed
by the famUiarity which is the badge at once of their
worth and their pedigree?
FinaUy we come to the famiUar quotations which are
the work of the great masters, the poets or njakers, the

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS 109
tale-tellers, the creators, the orators, and the essayists
and philosophers whose thought has built up civiUza
tion and ruled mankind. Their famiUarity is due to
their power, their depth of meaning, to their beauty
or their loveliness, to their wit and wisdom and humor,
and in very large measure to their perfection of form.
That they are familiar in the thoughts and speech of
men is not only a proof of their high excellence but is
an element of hope for the future of the race which has
looked dark enough in these later years. Far from
being a mark of inferiority, familiarity is here the sure
proof of great quaUties, so sure that there is no gain
saying the proposition that the oftener the celebrated
passages from the great masters of thought and litera
ture are quoted the better it is for aU men and for the
preservation of the social fabric which they have pain
fuUy built up.
FamiUar quotations from the three sources which
furnish them and which I have tried to indicate vary as
widely as possible tn thought, in intrinsic value, in
imagery, and tn ideas. They range from the apparent
triviality and even nonsense of the nursery jingles
through the folk-tales and baUads up to the "flamman-
tia mcenia mundi" of Lucretius and the "fixed fate,
free-wiU, foreknowledge absolute" of Milton. The very
large majority are in verse, and they all have form,
however rudimentary. The formless never appeals to
the popular mind or the popular ear. The people at
large know nothing of quantities or pauses or caesuras,
of feet or of meters, but they demand a metered line

110 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
and also the other great exterior qualities of poetry in
the true sense, rhythm, melody, harmony, and rhyme
where rhyme is used. The popular instinct is never
misled by printing prose to look like verse. They may
not know why the chopped and changing lines are not
verse, but they know very weU that they have no music
in them, and they forget them as easily as the adver
tisements which daily flow unheeded past our jaded
eyes. It is a curious fact that the popular instinct and the
judgment of the trained critics and of the greatest
poets alike demand form. The verse form may be
simple or complex, but form there must be and also
rhythmic movement and melody in order to charm
widely and lastingly the children of men. Moreover,
when we pass beyond the nursery rhymes we find that
again the people and the poets, the critics and the
students of Uterature agree in liking what on the whole
is best, and so it comes to pass that many of the most
familiar quotations are from the best literature of all
languages. We shall do well, therefore, in this connec
tion to pay little heed to the popular fallacy that
"Familiarity breeds contempt."
While this volume was in the press my attention
was caUed to the doubts which had been thrown upon
the authorship of the famous Unes begmning "Sound,
sound the clarion" which appear at the head of a
chapter in "Old Mortality." I also leamed that the
question had been discussed at some length in the

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS HI
London Times of a year ago. We know from Lock
hart (vol. 5, ed. 1839, p. 145) that Scott was in the
habit of writing mottos for his chapters himself and
crediting tiiein to "Old Play" or "Old Ballad."
"Anonymous" was also another of his words for sign
ing his own productions when he used them as a
quotation. I cannot better state the case than by
quotmg from a letter written to my friend, the Honor
able James M. Beck, who kindly permits me to use
it, by Sir Edmund Gosse, who says:
The line about "One crowded hour" was discussed very
fully last summer in (not the Spectator but) the Times Lit
erary Siipplcvi.ciit, in suoocssivc numbers. It was shown
that the quatrain occurs in a piece published by a very
obscure writer (I forgot his uamo) earlier than Scott's quo
tation appeared. The retit of the poem appeared to be
beneath eoutenipt. So far as I remember, the author was
knowu to Seott, and it seoined to mo probable, or at least
possible, that Soolt had thrown off the stanza and given
it to thc author. But I did not take mueh interest in the
discussion and for me Scolt reniains tho author of these
four noble lines.
I am in thorough accord with all Sir Edmund Gosse
says and also with Mr. Andrew Lang, who, in his
"Lyrics and BaUads," not only credits Scott unques
tionably with tiie luies, but says of them (on page
21): "These four lines contain the very essence of
Scott's poetry." However they may have strayed into

112 FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
the verses of some obscure and forgotten poet there
is to my thinking no more doubt that they were writ
ten by Scott than that he was the author of "Marmion"
and "The Lay of the Last Mmstrel."

THEODORE ROOSEVELT^
A tower is fallen, a star is set! Alas! Alas! for Celin.
The words of lamentation from the old Moorish
baUad, which in boyhood we used to recite, must, I
think, have risen to many Ups when the -world was
told that Theodore Roosevelt was dead. But whatever
the phrase the thought was instant and everywhere.
Variously expressed, you heard it in the crowds about
the bulletin boards, from the man tn the street and the
man on the railroads, from the farmer in the fields, the
women in the shops, in the factories, and in the homes.
The pulpit found in his life a text for sermons. The
judge on the bench, the child at school, alike paused for
a moment, conscious of a loss. The cry of sorrow came
from men and women of aU conditions, high and low,
rich and poor, from the learned and the ignorant, from
the multitude who had loved and followed him, and
from those who had opposed and resisted hun. The
newspapers pushed aside the absorbing reports of the
events of these fateful days and gave pages to the
man who had died. Flashed beneath the ocean and
through the air went the announcement of his death,
and back came a world-wide response from courts
*An address delivered before the Congress of the United States,
Sunday, February 9, 1919. 113

114 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
and cabinets, from press and people, in other and far-
distant lands. Through it all ran a golden thread of
personal feeling which gleams so rarely in the somber
formaUsm of pubUc grief. Everywhere the people felt
in their hearts that:
A power was passing from the Earth
To breathless Nature's dark abyss.
It would seem that here was a man, a private citizen,
conspicuous by no office, with no glitter of power
about htm, no abUity to reward or punish, gone from
the earthly Ufe, who must have been unusual even
among the leaders of men, and who thus demands our
serious consideration.
This is a thought to be borne tn mind to-day. We
meet to render honor to the dead, to the great American
whom we mourn. But there is something more to be
done. We must remember that when History, with
steady hand and calm eyes, free from the passions of
the past, comes to make up the final account, she wiU
call as her principal witnesses the contemporaries of
the man or the event awaiting her verdict. Here and
elsewhere the men and women who knew Theodore
Roosevelt or who belong to his period wiU give pubUc
utterance to their emotions and to their judgments tn
regard to him. This wUl be part of the record to which
the historian wUl turn when our Uving present has
become the past, of which it is his duty to write. Thus
is there a responsibiUty placed upon each one of us
who wiU clearly realize that here, too, is a duty to pos-

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 115
terity, whom we would fain guide to the truth as we
see it, and to whose hands we commit our share in
the history of our beloved country — that history so
much of which was made under his leadership.
We can not approach Theodore Roosevelt along the
beaten paths of eulogy or satisfy ourselves with the
empty civilities of commonplace funereal tributes, for
he did not make his life joumey over main-traveled
roads, nor was he ever commonplace. Cold and
pompous formaUties would be unsuited to him who
was devoid of affectation, who was never self-conscious,
and to whom posturing to draw the public gaze
seemed not only repellent but vulgar. He had that
entire simplicity of manners and modes of life which
is the crowning result of the highest culture and the
finest nature. Like Cromwell, he would always have
said : "Paint me as I am." In that spurit, tn his spirit
of devotion to truth's simplicity, I shall try to speak
of him to-day in the presence of the representatives of
the great Government of which he was for seven years
the head.
The rise of any man from humble or still more from
sordid beginnings to the heights of success always ahd~~
naturally appeals strongly to the imagination. It
fumishes a vivid contrast which is as much admired as
it is readUy understood. It still retains the wonder
which such success awaltened in the days of hereditary
lawgivers and high privileges of birth. Birth and for
tune, however, mean much less now than two cen
turies ago. To climb from the place of a printer's boy

116 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
to the highest rank in science, politics, and diplomacy
would be far easier to-day than in the eighteenth cen
tury, given a genius Uke Franklin to do it. Moreover
the real marvel is in the soaring achievement itself, no
matter what the origin of the man who comes by "the
people's unbought grace to rule his native land" and
who on descending from the official pinnacle still leads
and influences thousands upon thousands of his feUow
men. Theodore Roosevelt had the good fortune to be born
of a weU-known, long-estabUshed family, with every
faciUty for education and with an atmosphere of
patriotism and disinterested service both to country
and humanity aU about htm. In his father he had
before him an example of lofty public spirit, from
which it would have been difficult to depart. But if the
work of his ancestors reUeved him from the hard
struggle which meets an unaided man at the outset, he
also lacked the spur of necessity to prick the sides of
his intent, in itself no small loss. As a balance to the
opportunity which was his without labor, he had not
only the later difficulties which come to him to whom
fate has been kind at the start; he had also spread
before him the temptations inseparable from such
inherited advantages as fell to his lot — temptations
to a life of sports and pleasure, to lettered ease, to an
amateur's career in one of the fine arts, perhaps to a
money-making business, Ukewise an inheritance, none
of them easily to be set aside in obedience to the stern

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 117
rule that the larger and more facUe the opportunity
the greater and more insistent the responsibility.
How he refused to tread the pleasant paths that opened
to him on aU sides and took the instant way which
led over the rough road of toU and action his Ufe
discloses. At the beginning, moreover, he had physical diffi
culties not lightly to be overcome. He was a delicate
child, suffering acutely from attacks of asthma. He
was not a strong boy, was retiring, fond of books, and
with an intense but solitary devotion to natural his
tory. As his health gradually improved he became
possessed by the belief, although he perhaps did not
then formulate it, that in the fields of active life a man
could do that which he wiUed to do ; and this faith was
with him to the end. It became very evident when he
went to Harvard. He made himself an athlete by sheer
hard work. Hampered by extreme near-sightedness,
he became none the less a formidable boxer and an
excellent shot. He stood high in scholarship, but as
he worked hard, so he played hard, and was popular
in the university and beloved by his friends. For a
shy and delicate boy all this meant soUd achievement,
as well as unusual determination and force of wUl.
Apparently he took early to heart and carried out to
fulfilment the noble lines of Clough's Dipsychus:
In light things
Prove thou the arms thou long'st to glorify,
Nor fear to work up from the lowest ranks

118 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Whence come great Nature's Captains. And high deeds
Haunt not the fringy edges of the fight.
But the pell-mell of men.
When a young man comes out of coUege he descends
suddenly from the highest place in a Uttle world to a
very obscure comer in a great one. It is something of
a shock, and there is apt to be a chUl in the air. Unless
the young man's life has been planned beforehand and
a place provided for him by others, which is excep
tional, or unless he is fortunate in a strong and domi
nating purpose or talent which drives him to science or
art or some particular profession, he finds himself at
this period pausing and wondering where he can get a
grip upon the vast and confused world into which he
has been plunged.
It is a trying and only too frequently a disheartening
experience, this looking for a career, this effort to find
employment in a huge and hurrying crowd which
appears to have no use for the newcomer. Roosevelt,
thus cast forth on his own resources — ^his father, so
beloved by htm, having died two years before — fell to
work at once, turning to the study of the law, which he
did not like, and to the completion of a history of the
War of 1812 which he had begun while stUl in coUege.
With few exceptions, young beginners in the difficult
art of writing are either too exuberant or too dry.
Roosevelt said that his book was as dry as an encyclo
pedia, thus erring in precisely the direction one would
not have expected. The book, be it said, was by no

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 119
means so dry as he thought it, and it had some other
admu-able qualities. It was clear and thorough, and
the battles by sea and land, especiaUy the former,
which involved the armaments and crews, the size and
speed of the ships engaged in the famous frigate and
sloop actions, of which we wo^ eleven out of thu-teen,
were given with a minute accuracy never before
attempted in the accounts of this war, and which made
the book an authority, a positiori it holds to this day.
This was a good deal of sound work for a boy's first
year out of college. But it did not content Roosevelt.
Inherited influences and inborn desires made him
earnest and eager to render some pubUc service. In
pursuit of this aspiration he joined the Twenty-first
Assembly District RepubUcan Association of the city
of New York, for by such machinery all poUtics were
carried on in those days. It was not an association
composed of his normal friends; tn fact, the members
were not only eminently practical persons but they
were incUned to be rough in their methods. They
were not dreamers, nor were they laboring under many
illusions. Roosevelt went among them a complete
stranger. He differed from them with entire frank
ness, concealed nothing, and by his strong and simple
democratic ways, his intense Americanism, and the
magical personal attraction which went with hun to the
end, made some devoted friends. One of the younger
leaders, "Joe" Murray,- beUeved in him, became espe
ciaUy attached to htm, and so continued until death
separated them. Through Murray's efforts he was

120 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
elected to the New York Assembly in 1881, and thus
only one year after leaA'ing coUege his pubUc career
began. He was just twenty-three.
Very few men make an effective State reputation in
their first year in the lower branch of the State legis
lature. I never happened to hear of one who made a
national reputation tn such a body. Roosevelt did
both. When he left the assembly after three years'
service he was a national figure, weU kno-wn, and of
real importance, and also a delegate at large from the
great State of New York to the RepubUcan national
convention of 1884, where he played a leading part.
Energy, abtUty, and the most entire courage were the
secret of his extraordinary success. It was a ttme of
fiagrant corporate infiuence in the New York Legis
lature, of the "Black Horse Cavalry," of a group of
members who made money by sustaining corporation
measures or by le-vying on corporations and capital
through the famUiar artffice of "strike btUs." Roose
velt attacked them aU openly and aggressively and
never sUently or quietly. He fought for the impeach
ment of a judge solely because he beUeved the judge
corrupt, which surprised some of his poUtical asso
ciates of both parties, there being, as one practical
thinker observed, "no poUtics in poUtics." He failed
to secure the impeachment, but the fight did not fail,
nor did the people forget it; and despite — ^perhaps
because of — the enemies he made, he was twice re
elected. He became at the same ttme a distinct, well-
defined figure to the American people. He had touched

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 121
the popular imagination. In this way he performed
the unexampled feat of leaving the New York Assem
bly, which he had entered three years before an
unknown boy, with a national reputation and with his
name at least known throughout the United States.
He was twenty-six years old.
When he left Chicago at the close of the national
convention in June, 1884, he did not return to New
York, but went West to the Bad Lands of the Little
Missouri VaUey, where he had purchased a ranch in
the previous year. The early love of natural history
which never abated had developed into a passion for
hunting and for life tn the open. He had begun tn the
wilds of Maine and then turned to the West and to a
cattle ranch to gratify both tastes. The life appealed
to him and he came to love it. He herded and rounded
up his cattle, he worked as a cow-puncher, only rather
harder than any of them, and in the intervals he
hunted and shot big game. He also came ui contact
with men of a new type, rough, sometimes dangerous,
but always vigorous and often picturesque. With
them he had the same success as with the practical
pohticians of the Twenty-first Assembly District,
although they were widely different specunens of man
kind. But all alike were human at bottom and so was
Roosevelt. He argued with them, rode with them,
camped with them, played and joked with them, but
was always master of his outfit. They respected hun
and also liked him, because he was at aU times sUnple,
straightforward, outspoken, and smcere. He became

122 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
a popular and weU-known figure in that westem
country and was regarded as a good feUow, a "white
man," entirely fearless, thoroughly good-natured and
kind, never quarrelsome, and never safe to trifle with,
buUy, or threaten. The Ufe and experiences of that
tune found then- way into a book, "The Hunting
Trips of a Ranchman," interesting tn description and
adventure and also showing a marked Uterarv' quality.
In 1886 he ran as RepubUcan candidate for mayor
of New York and might have been elected had his own
party stood by htm. But many exceUent men of
RepubUcan faith — the "timid good," as he caUed them
— ^panic-stricken by the formidable candidacy of Henry
George, flocked to the support of Mr. Abram Hewitt,
the Democratic candidate, as the man most certain to
defeat the menacing champion of single taxation.
Roosevelt was beaten, but his campaign, which was
. entirely his o-wn and the precursor of many others, his
speeches with their striking quaUty then visible to the
country for the first ttme, aU combined to fix the atten
tion of the people upon the losing candidate. Roose
velt was the one of the candidates who was most inter
esting, and again he had touched the imagination of
the people and cut a Uttle deeper into the popular
consciousness and memory.
Two years more of private Ufe, devoted to his home,
where his greatest happiness was always found, to
his ranch, to reading and writing books, and then came
an active part tn the campaign of 1888, resulting in
the election of President Harrison, who made htm

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 123
civil-service commissioner in the spring of 1889. He
was in his thirty-first year. Civil-service reform as a
practical question was then in its initial stages. The
law establishing it, limited in extent and forced
through by a few leaders of both parties in the Senate,
was only six years old. The promoters of the reform,
strong in quality, but weak in numbers, had compelled
a reluctant acceptance of the law by exercising a
balance-of-power vote in certain States and districts.
It had few eamest supporters tn Congress, some luke
warm friends, and many strong opponents. All the
active politicians were practically against it. Mr.
Conkling had said that when Dr. Johnson told BosweU
"that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel"
he was ignorant of the possibilities of the word
"reform," and this witticism met with a large response.
Civil-service reform, meaning the estabUshment of a
classffied service and the removal of routine adminis
trative offices from politics, had not reached the masses
of the people at all. The average voter knew and cared
nothing about it. When six years later Roosevelt
resigned from the commission the great body of the
people knew weU what civil-service reform meant,
large bodies of voters cared a great deal about it, and
it was established and spreading its control. We have
had many excellent men who have done good work in
the Civil Service Commission, although that work is
neither adventurous nor exciting and rarely attracts
public attention, but no one has ever forgotten that

124 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Theodore Roosevelt was once civil-service commis
sioner. He found the law struggling for existence, laughed
at, sneered at, surrounded by enemies in Congress, and
with but few fighting friends. He threw himself into
the fray. Congress investigated the commission about
once a year, which was exactly what Roosevelt desired.
Annually, too, the opponents of the reform would try
to defeat the appropriation for the commission, and
this again was playing into Roosevelt's hands, for it led
to debates, and the newspapers as a rule sustained the
reform. Senator Gorman moumed in the Senate over
the cruel fate of a "bright young man" who was unable
to tell on examination the distance of Baltimore from
China, and thus was deprived of his inaUenable right
to serve his country in the post office. Roosevelt
proved that no such question had ever been asked and
requested the name of the "bright young man." The
name was not forthcoming, and the victim of a ques
tion never asked goes down nameless to posterity tn
the Congressional Record as merely a "bright young
man." Then General Grosvenor, a leading Republican
of the House, denounced the commissioner for credit
ing his district with an appointee named Rufus
Putnam who was not a resident of the district, and
Roosevelt produced a letter from the general recom
mending Rufus Putnam as a resident of his district
and a constituent. AU this was unusual. Hitherto it
had been a safe amusement to ridicule and jeer at civU-
service reform, and here was a commissioner who dared

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 125
to reply vigorously to attacks, and even to prove
Senators and Congressmen to be wrong in their facts.
The amusement of baiting the Civil Service Commis
sion seemed to be less inviting than before, and, worse
stUl, the entertaining features seemed to have passed
to the public, who enjoyed and approved the commis
sioner who disregarded etiquette and fought hard for
the law he was appointed to enforce. The law sud
denly took on new meaning and became clearly visible
in the public mind, a great service to the cause of good
govemment. After six years' service tn the Civil Service Commis
sion Roosevelt left Washington to accept the position
of president of the Board of PoUce Commissioners of
the city of New York, which had been offered to him
by Mayor Strong. It is speaknig withhi bounds to say
that the history of the police force of New York has
been a checkered one in which the black squares have
tended to predominate. The task which Roosevelt
confronted was then, as always, difficult, and the
machinery of four commissioners and a practically
irremovable chief made action extremely slow and
uncertain. Roosevelt set himself to expel politics and
favoritism tn appointments and promotions and to
crush corruption everywhere. In some way he drove
through the obstacles and effected great improvements,
although permanent betterment was perhaps impos
sible. Good men were appointed and meritorious men
promoted as never before, while the corrupt and dan
gerous officers were punished in a number of instances

126 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
supicient, at least, to check and discourage evUdoers.
Disciplme was improved, and the force became very
loyal to the chief commissioner, because they leamed
to realize that he was fighting for right and justice
without fear or favor. The results were also shown in
the marked decrease of crime, which judges pointed
out from the bench. Then, too, it was to be observed
that a New York police commissioner suddenly
attracted the attention of the country. The work
which was being done by Roosevelt in New York, his
midnight walks through the worst quarters of the great
city, to see whether the guardians of the peace did their
duty, which made the newspapers compare him to
Haroun Al Raschid, all appealed to the popular imagi
nation. A purely local office became national in his
hands, and his picture appeared in the shops of Euro
pean cities. There was something more than vigor and
picturesqueness necessary to explain these phenomena.
The truth is that Roosevelt was reaUy laboring through
a welter of details to carry out certain general prin
ciples which went to the very roots of society and gov
ernment. He wished the municipal administration to
be something far greater than a business man's admin
istration, which was the demand that had triumphed at
the polls. He wanted to make it an administration
of the workingmen, of the dwellers in the tenements, of
the poverty and suffering which haunted the back
streets and hidden purlieus of the huge city. The peo
ple did not formulate these purposes as they watched
what he was doing, but they felt them and understood

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 127
them by that instinct which is often so keen in vast
bodies of men. The man who was toiUng in the seem
ing obscurity of the New York police commission again
became very distinct to his fellow countrymen and
deepened their consciousness of his existence and their
comprehension of his purposes and aspirations.
Striking as was the effect of this police work, it only
lasted for two years. In 1897 he was offered by Presi
dent McKinley, whom he had energetically supported
in the preceding campaign, the position of Assistant
Secretary of the Navy. He accepted at once, for the
place and the work both appealed to him most
strongly. The opportunity did not come without
resistance. The President, an old friend, liked him
and believed in him, but the Secretary of the Navy had
doubts, and also fears that Roosevelt might be a dis
turbing and restless assistant. There were many poli
ticians, too, especially tn his own State, whom his
activities as civU-service and police commissioner did
not delight, and these men opposed htm. But his
friends were powerful and devoted, and the President
appointed him.
His new place had to him a peculiar attraction. He
loved the Navy. He had written its brilliant history in
the War of 1812. He had done all in his power to
stimulate public opinion in support of the "new Navy"
we were just then beginning to build. That war was
coming with Spain he had no doubt. We were unpre
pared, of course, even for such a war as this, but
Roosevelt set himself to do what could be done. The

128 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
best and most farseeing officers raUied round htm, yet
the opportunities were limited. There was much in
detail accomplished which can not be described here,
but two acts of his which had very distinct effect upon
the fortunes of the war must be noted. He saw very
plainly — although most people never perceived it at
all — that the Philippines would be a vital point in any
war with Spain. For this reason it was highly impor
tant to have the right man in command of the Asiatic
Squadron. Roosevelt was satisfied that Dewey was
the right man, and that his coinpetitor for the post was
not. He set to work to secure the place for Dewey.
Through the aid of the Senators from Dewey's native
State and others, he succeeded. Dewey was ordered to
the Asiatic Squadron. Our relations with Spain grew
worse and worse. On February 25, 1898, war was
drawing very near, and that Saturday afternoon Roose
velt happened to be Acting Secretary, and sent out the
foUowing cablegram:
Dewey — Hongkong.
Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hongkong.
Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war, Spain,
your duty will be to see that the Spanish Squadron does not
leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in the
Philippine Islands. Keep Ol'ympia until further orders.
ROOSE-VELT.
I believe he was never again permitted to be Acting
Secretary. But the deed was done. The wise word of
readiness had been spoken and was not recaUed. War

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 129
came, and as April closed Dewey, aU prepared, sUpped
out of Hongkong and on May 1st fought the battle of
Manila Bay.
Roosevelt, however, did not continue long in the
Navy Department. Many of his friends felt that he
was doing such admirable work there that he ought to
remain, but as soon as war was declared he determined
to go, and his resolution was not to be shaken. Noth
ing could prevent his fighting for his country when
the country was at war. Congress had authorized three
volunteer regiments of Cavalry, and the President and
the Secretary of War gave to Leonard Wood — then a
surgeon in the Regular Army — as colonel, and to Theo
dore Roosevelt, as lieutenant colonel, authority to raise
one of these regiments, known officially as the First
United States Volunteer Cavalry, and to aU the coun
try as the "Rough Riders." The regiment was raised
chiefly in the Southwest and West, where Roosevelt's
popularity and reputation among the cowboys and the
ranchmen brought many eager recruits to serve with
him. After the regiment had been organized and
equipped they had some difficulty in getting to Cuba,
but Roosevelt as usual broke through aU obstacles, and
finaUy succeeded, with Colonel Wood, in getting away
with two battalions, leaving one battalion and the
horses behind.
The regiment got into action immediately on landing
and forced its way, after soine sharp fighting in the
jungle, to the high ground on which were placed the
fortffications which defended the approach to Santiago.

130 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Colonel Wood was ahnost immediately given command
of a brigade, and this left Roosevelt colonel of the regi
ment. In the battle which ensued and which resulted
in the capture of the positions commanding Santiago
and the bay, the Rough Riders took a leading part,
storming one of the San Juan heights, which* they
christened Kettle Hill, with Roosevelt leading the men
in person. It was a dashing, gaUant assault, well led
and thoroughly successful. Santiago fell after the
defeat of the fleet, and then foUowed a period of sick
ness and suffering — the latter due to unreadiness —
where Roosevelt did everything with his usual driving
energy to save his men, whose loyalty to their colonel
went with them through life. The war was soon over,
but brief as it had been Roosevelt and his men had
highly distinguished themselves, and he stood out in
the popular imagination as one of the conspicuous
figures of the conflict. He brought his regiment back
to the United States, where they were mustered out,
and almost immediately afterwards he was nominated
by the Republicans as their candidate for govemor of
the State of New York. The situation in New York
was unfavorable for the RepubUcans, and the younger
men told Senator Platt, who dominated the organiza
tion and who had no desire for Roosevelt, that unless
he was nominated they could not win. Thus forced,
the organization accepted him, and it was weU for the
party that they did so. The campaign was a sharp
one and very doubtful, but Roosevelt was elected by

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 131
a narrow margin and assumed office at the beginning
of the new year of 1889. He was then in his forty-first
year. Many problems faced him and none were evaded.
He was well aware that the "organization" under
Senator Platt would not like many things he was sure
to do, but he determined that he would have neither
personal quarrels nor faction fights. He knew, being
blessed with strong common sense, that the Republican
Party, his own party, was the instrument by which
alone he could attain his ends, and he did not intend
that it should be blunted and made useless by intemal
strife. And yet he meant to have his own way. It
was a difficult role which he undertook to play, but he
succeeded. He had many differences with the organ
ization managers, but he declined to lose his temper
or to have a break, and he also refused to yield when
he felt he was standing for the right and a principle
was at stake. Thus he prevailed. He won on the canal
question, changed the insurance commissioner, and
carried the insurance legislation he desired. As tn these
cases, so it was tn lesser things. In the police commis
sion he had been strongly impressed by the dangers as
he saw them of the undue and often sinister influence
of business, finance, and great money interests upon
govemment and politics. These feelings were deepened
and broadened by his experience and observation on
the larger stage of State administration. The belief
that political equaUty must be strengthened and sus
tained by industrial equaUty and a larger economic

132 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
opportunity was constantly in his thoughts untU it
became a governing and guiding principle.
Meantime he grew steadily stronger among the
people, not only of his own State but of the country,
for he was well known throughout the West, and there
they were watching eagerly to see how the ranchman
and colonel of Rough Riders, who had touched both
their hearts and their imagination, was faring as
govemor of New York. The office he held is always
regarded as related to the Presidency, and this, joined
to his striking success as govemor, brought him into
the presidential field wherever men speculated about
the poUtical future. It was universaUy agreed that
McKinley was to be renominated, and so the talk
tumed to making Roosevelt Vice President. A friend
wrote to him tn the summer of 1899 as to this drift of
opinion, then assuming serious proportions. "Do not
attempt," he said, "to thwart the popular desire. You
are not a man nor are your close friends men who can
plan, arrange, and manage you into office. You must
accept the popular wish, whatever it is, follow your
star, and let the future care for itself. It is the tradi
tion of our poUtics, and a very poor tradition, that the
\ ice Presidency is a shelf. It ought to be, and there
is no reason why it should not be, a stepping-stone.
Put there by the popular desire, it would be so to you."
This view, quite naturally, did not commend itself to
Govemor Roosevelt at the moment. He was doing
valuable work tn New York; he was deeply engaged
in important reforms which he had much at heart and

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 133
which he wished to carry through; and the Vice Presi
dency did not attract htm. A year later he was at
Philadelphia, a delegate at large from his State, with
his mind unchanged as to the Vice Presidency, whUe
his New York friends, anxious to have hun continue
his work at Albany, were urging hun to refuse.' Sen
ator Platt, for obvious reasons, wished to make him
Vice President, another obstacle to his taking it.
Roosevelt forced the New York delegation to agree on
some one else for Vice President, but he could not hold
the convention, nor could Senator Hanna, who wisely
accepted the situation. Govemor Roosevelt was nomi
nated on the first ballot, all other candidates with
drawing. He accepted the nomination, Uttle as he
Uked it.
Thus when it came to the point he instinctively
foUowed his star and grasped the unvaciUating hand
of destiny. Little did he think that destiny would lead
htm to the White House through a tragedy which cut
him to the heart. He was on a mountain tn the
Adirondacks when a guide made his way to htm across
the forest with a telegram telling him that McKinley,
the wise, the kind, the gentle, with nothing in his heart
but good wiU to all men, was dying from a wound
inflicted by an anarchist murderer, and that the Vice
President must come to Buffalo at once. A rapid night
drive through the woods and a special train brought
him to Buffalo. McKinley was dead before he arrived,
and that evening Govemor Roosevelt was sworn in as
President of the United States.

134 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Within the narrow limits of an address it is impos
sible to give an account of an administration of seven
years which will occupy hundreds of pages when the
history of the United States during that period is
written. It was a memorable administration, mem
orable in itself and not by the accident of events,
and large in its accompUshment. It began with a
surprise. There were persons in the United States
who had carefuUy cultivated, and many people who
had accepted without thought, the idea that Roosevelt
was in some way a dangerous man. They gloomily
predicted that there would be a violent change in the
policies and in the officers of the McKinley admin
istration. But Roosevelt had not studied the history
of his country in vain. He knew that tn three of the
four cases where Vice Presidents had succeeded to the
Presidency through the death of the elected President
their coming had resulted in a violent shifting of
policies and men, and, as a consequence, in most in
jurious dissensions, which in two cases at least proved
fatal to the party in power. In all four instances the
final obliteration of the Vice President who had come
into power through the death of his chief was complete.
President Roosevelt did not intend to permit any
of these results. As soon as he came into office he
announced that he intended to retain President Mc
Kinley's Cabinet and to carry out his policies, which
had been sustained at the poUs. To those overzealous
friends who suggested that he could not trust the ap
pointees of President McKinley and that he would

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 135
be but a pallid imitation of his predecessor he replied
that he thought, in any event, the administration
would be his, and that if new occasions required new
policies he felt that he could meet them, and that no
one would suspect him of being a paUid imitation of
anybody. His decision, however, gratified and satis
fied the country, and it was not apparent that Roose
velt was hampered in any way in carrying out his
own policies by this wise refusal to make sudden
and violent changes.
Those who were alarmed about what he might do
had also suggested that with his combative propensities
he was likely to involve the country in war. Yet
there never has been an administration, as afterwards
appeared, when we were more perfectly at peace with
all the world, nor were our foreign relations ever in
danger of producing hostilities. But this was not due
in the least to the adoption of a timid or yielding for
eign policy; on the contrary, it was owing to the
firmness of the President tn all foreign questions and
the knowledge which other nations soon acquired that
President Roosevelt was a man who never threatened
unless he meant to carry out his threat, the result be
ing that he was not obliged to threaten at all. One of
his earliest successes was forcing the settlement of the
Alaskan boundary question, which was the single open
question with Great Britain that was really dangerous
and contained within itself possibilities of war. The
accomplishment of this settlement was followed later,
while Mr. Root was Secretary of State, by the arrange-

136 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
ment of aU our outstanding differences with Canada,
and during Mr. Root's tenure of office over thirty
treaties were made with different nations, including
a number of practical and valuable treaties of arbitra
tion. When Germany started to take advantage of
the difficulties in Venezuela the affair culminated in
the dispatch of Dewey and the fleet to the Caribbean,
the withdrawal of England at once, and the agreement
of Germany to the reference of aU subjects of difference
to arbitration. It was President Roosevelt whose good
offices brought Russia and Japan together in a nego
tiation which closed the war between those two pow
ers. It was Roosevelt's influence which contributed
powerfuUy to settling the threatening controversy be
tween Germany, France, and England in regard to
Morocco, by the Algectras conference. It was Roose
velt who sent the American fleet of battleships round
the world, one of the most convincing peace move
ments over made on behalf of the United States. Thus
it came about that this President, dreaded at the
beginning on account of his combative spirit, rfeceived
the Nobel prize in 1906 as the person who had con
tributed most to the peace of the world in the pre
ceding years, and his contribution was the result of
strength and knowledge and not of weakness.
At home he recommended to Congress legislation
which was directed toward a larger control of the raU
roads and to removing the privileges and curbing the
power of great business combinations obtained through
rebates and preferential freight rates. This legislation

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 137
led to opposition in Congress and to much resistance
by those affected. As we look back, this legislation,
so much contested at the time, seems very moderate,
but it was none the less momentous. President Roose
velt never believed in Govemment o-wnership, but he
was thoroughly in favor of strong and effective Gov
ernment supervision and regulation of what are now
known generally as pubUc utUities. He had a deep
conviction that the political influence of financial
and business interests and of great combinations of
capital had become so powerful that the American
people were beginning to distrust their own Govern
ment, than which there could be no greater peril to
the Republic. By his measures and by his general at
titude toward capital and labor both he sought to re
store and maintain the confidence of the people in the
Government they had themselves created.
In the Panama Cahal he left the most enduring, as
it was the most visible, monument of his adminis
tration. Much criticized at the moment for his action
in regard to it, which ttme since then has justffied and
which history wiU praise, the great fact remains that
the canal is there. He said himself that he made up his
mind that it was his duty to establish the canal and
have the debate about it afterwards, which seemed to
htm better than to begin with indefinite debate and
have no canal at aU. This is a, view which posterity
both at home and abroad will accept and approve.
These, passing over as we must in sUence many other
beneficent acts, are only a few of the most saUent fea-

138 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
tures of his administration, stripped of all detaU and
all enlargement. Despite the conflicts which some
of his domestic policies had produced not only with
hid poUtical opponents but -within the Republican
ranks, he was overwhelmingly reelected in 1904, and
when the seven years had closed the country gave a
like majority to his chosen successor, taken from his
own Cabinet. On the 4th of March, 1909, he retumed
to private life at the age of fifty, having been the
youngest President known to our history.
During the brief vacations which he had been able
to secure in the midst of the intense activities of his
public life after the Spanish War he had tumed for
enjoyment to expeditions in pursuit of big game in the
wildest and most unsettled regions of the country.
Open-air life and all its accompaniments of riding and
hunting were to him the one thing that brought him
the most rest and relaxation. Now, having left the
Presidency, he was able to give full scope to the love
of adventure, which had been strong with htm from
boyhood. Soon after his retirement from office he
went to Africa, accompanied by a scientific expedition
sent out by the Smithsonian Institution. He landed
m East Africa, made his way uito the interior, and
thence to the sources of the NUe, after a trip in every
way successful, both in exploration and in pursuit of
big game. He then came down the NUe through
Egypt and thence to Europe, and no private citizen
of the United States — probably no private man of any

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 139
country — ^was ever received in a manner comparable
to that which met Roosevelt in every country in Eu
rope which he visited. Everywhere it was the same —
in Italy, in Germany, in France, in England. Every
honor was paid to him that authority could devise,
accompanied by every mark of affection and admira
tion which the people of those countries were able to
show. He made few speeches while tn Europe, but tn
those few he did not faU to give to the questions and
thought of the time real and genuine contributions, set
forth in plain language, always vigorous and often elo
quent. He returned in the summer of 1910 to the
United States and was greeted with a reception on his
V landing in New York quite equaling in interest and
enthusiasm that which had been given to htm tn
Europe. For two years afterwards he devoted himself to
writing, not only articles as contributing editor of the
Outlook, but books of his own and addresses and
speeches which he was constantly called upon to make.
No man in private life probably ever had such an audi
ence as he addressed, whether with tongue or pen,
upon the questions of the day, with a constant refrain
as to the qualities necessary to make men both good
citizens and good Americans. In the spring of 1912
he decided to become a candidate for the Republican
nomination for the Presidency, and a very heated
struggle followed between himself and President Taft
for delegations to the convention. The convention

140 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
when it assembled in Chicago was the storrniest ever
known in our history. President Taft was renomi
nated, most of the Roosevelt delegates refusing to
vote, and a large body of RepubUcans thereupon
formed a new party caUed the "Progressive" and nomi
nated Mr. Roosevelt as their candidate. This division
into two nearly equal parts of the Republican Party,
which had elected Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft in suc
cession by the largest majorities ever known, made
the victory of the Democratic candidate absolutely
certain. Colonel Roosevelt, however, stood second in
the poll, receiving 4,119,507 votes, carrying six States
and winning eighty-eight electoral votes. There never
has been in political history, when aU conditions are
considered, such an exhibition of extraordinary per
sonal strength. To have secured eighty-eight electoral
votes when his own party was hopelessly divided, with
no great historic party name and tradition behind him,
with an organization which had to be hastily brought
together tn a few weeks, seems almost incredible, and
in all his career there is no display of the strength of
his hold upon the people equal to this.
In the following year he yielded again to the long
ing for adventure and exploration. Going to South
America, he made his way up through Paraguay and
western Brazil, and then across a trackless wUderness
of jungle and down an unknown river into the VaUey
of the Amazon. It was a remarkable expedition and
carried him through what is probably the most deadly
climate in the world. He suffered severely from the

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 141
fever, the poison of which never left him and which
finally shortened his life.
In the next year the great war began, and Colonel
Roosevelt threw himself into it with all the energy
of his nature. With Major Augustus Gardner he led
the great fight for preparedness in a country utterly
unprepared. He saw very plainly that in all human
probability it would be impossible for us to keep out of
the war. Therefore in season and out of season he
demanded that we should make ready. He and Major
Gardner, with the others who joined them, roused a
widespread and powerful sentiment in the country,
but there was no practical effect on the Army. The
Navy was the single place where anything was really
done, and that only in the biU of 1916, so that war
finally came upon us as unready as Roosevelt had
feared we should be. Yet the campaign he made was
not in vain, for tn addition to the question of prepara
tion he spoke earnestly of other things, other burning
questions, and he always spoke to an enormous body
of listeners everywhere. He would have had us protest
and take action at the very beginning, in 1914, when
Belgium was invaded. He would have had us go to
war when the murders of the I/usitania were perpe
trated. He tried to stir the soul and rouse the spirit
of the American people, and despite every obstacle
he did awaken them, so that when the hour came, in
AprU, 1917, a large proportion of the American people
were even then ready in spirit and in hope. How
telling his work had been was proved by the confession

142 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
of his country's enemies, for when he died the only dis
cordant note, the only harsh words, came from the
German press. Germany knew whose voice it was
that more powerfuUy than any other had called Amer
icans to the battle in behalf of freedom and civUiza
tion, where the advent of the armies of the United
States gave victory to the cause of justice and right
eousness. When the United States went to war Colonel Roose
velt's one desire was to be allowed to go to the fighting
line. There if fate had laid its hand upon him it
would have found him glad to fall tn the trenches or
in a charge at the head of his men, but it was not per
mitted to him to go, and thus he was denied the re
ward which he would have ranked above aU others,
"the great prize of death in battle." But he was a
patriot in every fiber of his being, and personal dis
appointment in no manner slackened or cooled his
zeal. Everything that he could do to forward the
war, to quicken preparation, to stimulate patriotism,
to urge on efficient action, was done. Day and night,
in season and out of season, he never ceased his labors.
Although prevented from going to France himself, he
gave to the great conflict that which was far dearer to
him than his own life. I can not say that he sent his
four sons, because they all went at once, as every one
knew that their father's sons would go. Two were
badly wounded; one was kiUed. He met the blow
with the most splendid and unflinching courage, met

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 143
it as Siward, the Earl of Northumberland, receives
in the play the news of his son's death :
Siw. Had he his hurts before?
Ross. Ay, on the front.
Si-W. Why, then, God's soldier be he!
Had I as many sons as I have hairs,
I would not wish them to a fairer death:
And so his knell is knoll'd.
Among the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and there
are none greater in all the literature of man, Macbeth
was Colonel Roosevelt's favorite, and the moving
words which I have just quoted I am sure were in his
heart and on his lips when he faced with stem resolve
and self-control the anguish brought to him by the
death of his youngest boy, killed tn the glory of a
brave and brilUant youth.
He lived to see the right prevail; he Uved to see civ
ilization triumph over organized barbarism; and there
was great joy in his heart. In aU his last days the
thoughts which fiUed his mind were to secure a peace
which should render Germany forever harmless and
advance the cause of ordered freedom in every land
and among every race. This occupied him to the
exclusion of everything else, except what he called and
what we like to call Americanism. There was no hour
down to the end when he would not turn aside from
everything else to preach the doctrine of Americanism,
of the principles and the faith upon which American
government rested, and which all true Americans

144 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
should wear tn their heart of hearts. He was a great
patriot, a great man ; above all, a great American. His
country was the ruling, mastering passion of his life
from the beginning even unto the end.
So closes the inadequate, most incomplete account
of a life full of work done and crowded with achieve
ment, brief in years and prematurely ended. The
recitation of the offices which he held and of some of
the deeds that he did is but a bare, imperfect catalogue
into which history when we are gone wiU breathe a
lasting life. Here to-day it is only a background, and
that which most concerns us now is what the man
was of whose deeds done it is possible to make such
a list. What a man was is ever more important than
what he did, because it is upon what he was that aU
his achievement depends and his value and meaning
to his fellow men must finaUy rest.
Theodore Roosevelt always beUeved that character
was of greater worth and moment than anything else.
He possessed abiUties of the first order, which he was
disposed to underrate, because he set so much greater
store upon the moral qualities which we bring together
under the single word "character."
Let me speak first of his abUities. He had a power
ful, well-trained, ever-active mind. He thought clearly,
independently, and with originality and imagination.
These priceless gifts were sustained by an extraordi
nary power of acquisition, joined to a greater quick
ness of apprehension, a greater swiftness in seizing
upon the essence of a question, than I have ever hap-

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 145
pened to see in any other man. His reading began
with natural history, then went to general history,
and thence to the whole field of Uterature. He had a
capacity for concentration which enabled him to read
with remarkable rapidity anything which he took up,
if only for a moment, and which separated him for the
time being from everything going on about him. The
subjects upon which he was weU and widely informed
would, if enumerated, fill a large space, and to this
power of acquisition was united not only a tenacious
but an extraordinarily accurate memory. It was never
safe to contest with him on any question of fact or
figures, whether they related to the ancient Assyrians
or to the present-day conditions of the tribes of cen
tral Africa, to the Syracusan Expedition, as told by
Thucydides, or to protective coloring in birds and ani
mals. He knew and held details always at command,
but he was not mastered by them. He never failed
to see the forest on account of the trees or the city on
account of the houses.
He made himself a writer, r^ot only of occasional
addresses and essays, but of books. He had the trained
thoroughness of the historian, as he showed in his
history of the War of 1812 and of the "Winning of the
West," and nature had endowed him with that most
enviable of gifts, the faculty of narrative and the art
of the teUer of tales. He knew how to weigh evidence
in the historical scales and how to depict character.
He leamed to write with great ease and fluency. He
was always vigorous, always energetic, always clear and

146 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
forcible in everything he wrote — nobody could ever
misunderstand him — and when he aUowed himself time
and his feelings were deeply engaged he gave to the
world many pages of beauty as well as power, not only
in thought but in form and style. At the same ttme
he made himself a public speaker, and here again,
through a practise probably unequaled in amount, he
became one of the most effective in all our history. In
speaking, as in writing, he was always fuU of force and
energy; he drove home his arguments and never was
misunderstood. In many of his more carefuUy pre
pared addresses are to be found passages of impressive
eloquence, touched with imagination and instinct with
grace and feeling.
He had a large capacity for administration, clearness
of vision, promptness tn decision, and a thorough
apprehension of what constituted efficient organization.
AU the vast and varied work which he accomplished
could not have been done unless he had had most
exceptional natural abilities, but behind them, most
important of aU, was the driving force of an intense
energy and the ever-present behef that a man could do
what he willed to do. As he made himself an athlete,
a horseman, a good shot, a bold explorer, so he made
himself an exceptionally successful writer and speaker.
Only a most abnormal energy would have enabled him
to enter and conquer tn so many fields of inteUectual
achievement. But something more than energy and
determination is needed for the largest success, espe
cially in the world's high places. The first requisite of

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 147
leadership is abiUty to lead, and that abiUty Theodore
Roosevelt possessed in full measure. Whether in a
game or in the hunting field, tn a fight or in politics,
he sought the front, where, as Webster once remarked,
there is always plenty of room for those who can get
there. His instinct was always to say "come" rather
than "go," and he had the talent of command.
His also was the rare gift of arresting attention
sharply and suddenly, a very precious attribute, and
one easier to illustrate than to describe. This arrest
ing power is Uke a common experience, which we have
aU had on entering a picture gallery, of seeing at once
and before aU others a single picture among the many
on the walls. For a moment you see nothing else,
although you may be surrounded with masterpieces.
In that particular picture lurks a strange, capturing,
gripping fascination as impalpable as it is unmistak
able. Roosevelt had this same arresting, fascinating
quality. Whether in the legislature at Albany, the
Civil Service Commission at Washington, or the police
commission in New York, whether tn the Spanish War
or on the plains among the cowboys, he was always
vivid, at times startling, never to be overlooked. Nor
did this power stop here. He not only without effort
or intention drew the eager attention of the people to
himself, he could also engage and fix their thoughts
upon anything which happened to interest him. It
might be a man or a book, reformed spelling or some
large historical question, his traveUng Ubrary or the
military preparation of the United States, he had but

148 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
to say, "See how interesting, how important, is this
man or this event," and thousands, even millions, of
people would reply, "We never thought of this before,
but it certainly is one of the most interesting, most
absorbing things in the world." He touched a subject
and it suddenly began to glow as when the high-power
electric current touches the metal and the white Ught
starts forth and dazzles the onlooking eyes. We know
the air played by the Pied Piper of HameUn no better
than we know why Theodore Roosevelt thus drew the
interest of men after him. We only know they fol
lowed wherever his insatiable activity of mind invited
them. Men follow also most readUy a leader who is always
there before them, clearly visible and just where they
expect him. They are especiaUy eager to go forward
with a man who never sounds a retreat. Roosevelt
was always advancing, always struggUng to make
things better, to carry some much-needed reform, and
help humanity to a larger chance, to a fairer condition,
to a happier life. Moreover, he looked always for an
ethical question. He was at his best when he was
fightmg the battle of right against wrong. He thought
soundly and wisely upon questions of expediency or
of political economy, but they did not rouse htm or
bruig him the absorbed interest of the eternal conflict
between good and evU. Yet he was never impractical,
never blinded by counsels of perfection, never seeking
to make the better the enemy of the good. He wished
to get the best, but he would strive for aU that was

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 149
possible even if it fell short of the highest at which he
aimed. He studied the lessons of history, and did not
think the past bad simply because it was the past, or
the new good solely because it was new. He sought
to try all questions on their intrinsic merits, and that
was why he succeeded tn advancing, tn making govem
ment and society better, where others, who would be
content with nothmg less than an abstract perfection,
failed. He would never compromise a principle, but
he was eminently tolerant of honest differences of
opinion. He never hesitated to give generous credit
where credit seemed due, whether to friend or oppo
nent, and in this way he gathered recruits and yet
never lost adherents.
The criticism most commonly made upon Theodore
Roosevelt was that he was impulsive and impetuous;
that he acted without thinking. He would have been
the last to claim infalUbUity. His head did not tum
when fame came to him and choruses of admiration
sounded tn his ears, for he was neither vain nor credu
lous. He knew that he made mistakes, and never hesi
tated to admit them to be mistakes and to correct them
or put them behind htm when satisfied that they were
such. But he wasted no ttme in mouming, explaining^
or vainly regretting them. It is also true that the
middle way did not attract him. He was apt to go far,
both in praise and censure, although nobody could
analyze qualities and balance them justly in judging
men better than he. He felt strongly, and as he had
no concealments of any kind, he expressed himself in

150 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Uke manner. But vehemence is not violence, nor is
earnestness anger, which a very wise man defined as a
brief madness. It was aU according to his nature, just
as his eager cordiality in meeting men and women, his
keen interest in other people's care or joys, was not
assumed, as some persons thought who did not know
him. It was all profoundly natural, it was aU real,
and in that way and in no other was he able to meet
and greet his feUow men. He spoke out with the most
unrestrained frankness at all times and in all com
panies. Not a day passed in the Presidency when he
was not guilty of what the trained diplomatist would
call indiscretions. But the frankness had its own
reward. There never was a President whose confidence
was so respected or with whom the barriers of honor
which surround private conversation were more scru
pulously observed. At the same ttme, when the pubUc
interest required, no man could be more wisely reti
cent. He was apt, it is true, to act suddenly and
decisively, but it was a complete mistake to suppose
that he therefore acted without thought or merely on
a momentary impulse. When he had made up his
mind he was resolute and unchanging, but he made up
his mind only after much reflection, and there never
was a President tn the White House who consulted not
only friends but political opponents and men of all
kinds and conditions more than Theodore Roosevelt.
When he had reached his conclusion he acted quickly
and drove hard at his object, and this it was, probably,
which gave an impression that he acted sometimes

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 151
hastily and thoughtlessly, which was a complete mis
apprehension of the man. His action was emphatic,
but emphasis implies reflection not thoughtlessness.
One can not even emphasize a word without a process,
however sUght, of mental differentiation.
The feeling that he was impetuous and impulsive
was also due to the fact that in a sudden, seemingly
unexpected crisis he would act with great rapidity.
This happened when he had been for weeks, perhaps
for months, considering what he should do if such a
crisis arose. He always beUeved that one of the most
important elements of success, whether in public or
in private life, was to know what one meant to do
under given circumstances. If he saw the possibility
of perilous questions arising, it was his practise to
think over carefully just how he would act under cer
tain contingencies. Many of the contingencies never
arose. Now and then a contingency became an
actuality, and then he was ready. He knew what he
meant to do, he acted at once, and some critics con
sidered him impetuous, unpulsive, and therefore dan
gerous, because they did not know that he had thought
the question all out beforehand.
Very many people, powerful elements in the com
munity, regarded him at one time as a dangerous
radical, bent upon overthrowing all the safeguards of
society and planning to tear out the foundations of an
ordered Uberty. As a matter of fact, what Theodore
Roosevelt was trying to do was to strengthen American
society and American Govemment by demonstrating to

152 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
the American people that he was aiming at a larger
economic equality and a more generous industrial
opportunity for all men, and that any combination of
capital or of business, which threatened the control of
the Govemment by the people who made it, was to be
curbed and resisted, just as he would have resisted an
enemy who tried to take pbssession of the city of
Washington. He had no hostUity to a man because he
had been successful in business or because he had accu
mulated a fortune. If the man had been honestly
successful and used his fortune wisely and beneficently,
he was regarded by Theodore Roosevelt as a good citi
zen. The vulgar hatred of wealth found no place in
his heart. He had but one standard, one test, and that
was whether a man, rich or poor, was an honest man, a
good citizen, and a good American. He tried men,
whether they were men of "big business" or members
of a labor union, by their deeds, and in no other way.
The tyranny of anarchy and disorder, such as is now
desolating Russia, was as hateful to him as any other
tyranny, whether it came from an autocratic system
like that of Germany or from the misuse of organized
capital. PersonaUy he beUeved in every man earning
his own living, and he earned money and was glad to
do so ; but he had no desire or taste for making money,
and he was entirely indifferent to it. The simplest of
men in his own habits, the only thing he reaUy would
have liked to have done with ample wealth would have
been to give freely to the many good objects which
continuaUy interested htm.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 153
Theodore Roosevelt's power, however, and the main
source of all his achievement, was not in the offices
which he held, for those offices were to him only oppor
tunities, but in the extraordinary hold which he estab
lished and retained over great bodies of men. He had
the largest personal foUowing ever attained by any
man in our history. I do not mean by this the foUow
ing which comes from great poUtical office or from
party candidacy. There have been many men who
have held the highest offices in our history by the votes
of their fellow countrymen who have never had any
thing more than a very small personal foUowing. By
personal following is meant here that which supports
and sustains and goes with a man simply because he
is himself; a foUowing which does not care whether
their leader and chief is in office or out of office, which
is with htm and behind him because they, one and all,
beUeve in him and love htm and are ready to stand by
htm for the sole and simple reason that they have per
fect faith that he wiU lead them where they wish and
where they ought to go. This foUowing Theodore
Roosevelt had, as I have said, in a larger degree than
any one in our history, and the fact that he had it and
what he did with it for the welfare of his feUow men
have given him his great place and his lasting fame.
' This is not mere assertion; it was demonstrated, as
I have ah-eady pointed out, by the vote of 1912, and at
aU times, from the day of his accession to the Presi
dency onward, there were miUions of people in this
country ready to foUow Theodore Roosevelt and vote

154 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
for him, or do anything else that he wanted, whenever
he demanded their support or raised his standard. It
was this great mass of support among the people, and
which probably was never larger than in these last
years, that gave him his immense influence upon pub
lic opinion, and pubUc opinion was the weapon which
he used to carry out all the policies which he wished to
bring to fulfilment and to consolidate all the achieve
ments upon which he had set his heart. This extraor
dinary popular strength was not given to htm solely
because the people knew him to be honest and brave,
because they were certain that physical fear was an
emotion unknown to him, and that his moral courage
equaled the physical. It was not merely because they
thoroughly believed him to be sincere. All this knowl
edge and belief, of course, went to making his popular
leadership secure; but there was much more tn it than
that, something that went deeper, basic elements which
were not upon the surface which were due to quaUties
of temperament interwoven with his very being,
inseparable from him and yet subtle rather than obvi
ous in their effects.
AU men admire courage, and that he possessed in
the highest degree. But he had also something larger
and rarer than courage, in the ordinary acceptation
of the word. When an assassin shot htm at Milwau
kee he was severely wounded; how severely he could
not teU, but it might well have been mortal. He went
on to the great meeting awaiting him and there, bleed
ing, suffering, ignorant of his fate, but still uncon-

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 155
quered, made his speech and went from the stage to the
hospital. What bore htm up was the dauntless spirit
which could rise victorious over pain and darkness and
the unknown and meet the duty of the hour as if aU
were weU. A spirit like this awakens in aU men more
than admiration, it kindles affection and appeals to
every generous impulse.
Very different, but equaUy compellmg, was another
quality. There is nothing in human beings at once so
sane and so sympathetic as a sense of humor. This
great gift the good fairies conferred upon Theodore
Roosevelt at his birth in unstinted measure. No man
ever had a more abundant sense of humor — joyous,
irrepressible humor — and it never deserted him. Even
at the most serious and even perUous moments if there
was a gleam of humor anywhere he saw it and rejoiced
and helped himself with it over the rough places and
in the dark hour. He loved fun, loved to joke and
chaff, and, what is more uncommon, greatly enjoyed
being chaffed himself. His ready smile and contagious
laugh made countless friends and saved him from many
an enmity. Even more generally effective than his
humor, and yet allied to it, was the universal knowl
edge that Roosevelt had no secrets from the American
people. Yet another quality — perhaps the most, engaging of
all — was his homely, generous humanity which en
abled him to speak directly to the primitive instincts
of man.

156 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
He dwelt with the tribes of the marsh and moor.
He sate at the board of kings ;
He tasted the toil of the burdened slave
And the joy that triumph brings.
But whether to jungle or palace hall
Or white-walled tent he came.
He was brother to king and soldier and slave
His welcome was the same.
He was very human and intensely American, and
this knit a bond between him and the American people
which nothing could ever break. And then he had yet
one more attraction, not so impressive, perhaps, as the
others, but none the less very important and very
captivating. He never by any chance bored the Ameri
can people. They might laugh at htm or laugh with
htm, they might like what he said or dislike it, they
might agree with him or disagree with him, but they
were never wearied by him, and he never failed to
interest them. He was never heavy, laborious, 6r dull.
If he had made any effort to be always interesting and
entertaining he would have failed and been tiresome.
He was unfailingly attractive, because he was always
perfectly natural and his own unconscious self. And
so aU these things combined to give him his hold upon
the American people, not only upon their minds, but
upon their hearts and their instincts, which nothing
could ever weaken, and which made him one of the
most remarkable, as he was one of the strongest, char
acters that the history of popular govemment can
show. He was also — and this is very revealing and

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 157
explanatory, too, of his vast popularity— a man of
ideals. He did not expose them daily on the roadside
with language fluttering about them like the Thibetan
who ties his slip of paper to the prayer wheel whirling
in the wmd. He kept his ideals to himself until the
hour of fulfilment arrived.. Some of them were the
dreams of boyhood, from which he never departed, and
which I have seen him carry out shyly and yet thor
oughly and with intense personal satisfaction.
He had a touch of the knight errant in his daUy life,
although he would never have admitted it; but it was
there. It was not visible in the medieval form of
shining armor and dazzUng tournaments, but in the
never-ceasing effort to help the poor and the oppressed,
to def end, and protect women and children, to right the
wronged and succor the downtrodden. Passing by on
the other side was not a mode of travel through Ufe
ever possible to him; and yet he was as far distant
from the professional phUanthropist as could weU be
imagined, for all he tried to do to help his fellow men
he regarded as part of the day's work to be done and
not talked about. No man ever prized sentiment or
hated sentimentality more than he. He preached
unceasingly the familiar morals which Ue at the bottom
of both family and public Ufe. The blood of some
ancestral Scotch covenanter or of some Dutch reformed
preacher facing the tyranny of PhUip of Spain was in
his veins, and with his large opportunities and his vast
audiences he was always ready to appeal for justice and
righteousness. But his own personal ideals he never

158 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
attempted to thmst upon the world until the day came
when they were to be translated into realities of action.
When the future historian traces Theodore Roose
velt's extraordinary cai'eer he wUl find these embodied
ideals planted Uke milestones along the road over
which he marched. They never left him. His ideal
of pubUc service was to be found in his life, and as his
Ufe drew to its close he had to meet his ideal of sacri
fice face to face. AU his sons went from him to the war,
and one was killed upon the field of honor. Of all the
ideals that Uft men up, the hardest to fuffil is the
ideal of sacrifice. Theodore Roosevelt met it as he
had aU others and fulfiUed it to the last jot of its terri
ble demands. His country asked the sacrifice and he
gave it with solemn pride and uncomplaining Ups.
This is not the place to speak of his private life,
but within that sacred circle no man was ever more
blessed in the utter devotion of a noble wife and the
passionate love of his children. The absolute purity
and beauty of his family life teU us why. the pride and
interest which his fellow countrymen felt in htm were
always touched with the warm light of love. In the
home so dear to him, in his sleep, death came, and —
So Valiant-for-Truth passed over and all the trumpets
sounded for him on the other side.

PROSPERO'S ISLAND^
During the last three centuries there has grown up
an immense literature solely concemed with the play
and the character of "Hamlet." It is not merely that
this "Hamlet" literature makes of itself a respectable
library; it has been stated by Professor Lounsbury, I
think, that there is a larger Uterature devoted to
"Hamlet" than to any other man, whether fictitious
or historical, excepting of course the founders of reli
gions. Brandes says that the Uterature of Hamlet is
larger than that of some of the smaUer nationalities of
Europe, the Slovak for example. Before such evidence
as this of the creative power of a great imagination one
can only marvel silently and hold one's peace. And
yet "Hamlet" is only one item in the vast Shake
spearian literature. In varying degrees all the plays
have gathered a literature about them, each one its
own, ever growing larger as the years pass by. Among
these plays other than "Hamlet" the "Tempest" is
conspicuous tn commentary and annotation. Mr.
Furness, than whom there can be no higher authority,
in his preface to the "Tempest" says that despite the
unusual excellence of the text "there is scarcely one of
' Reprinted, by the kind permission of Professor Brander Mathews,
from the Dramatic Miiseum of Columbia University, New York,
1919. 159

160 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
its five acts which does not contain a word or a phrase
that has given rise to eager discussion ; tn one instance,
the controversy assumes such extended proportions
that in its presence even JuUet's 'runawaye's eyes may
wink' and veil their lids in abashed inferiority." Mr.
Furness then adds that "certain it is that with the
exception of 'Hamlet' and 'Julius Caesar' no play, has
been more liberaUy annotated than the 'Tempest.' "
I confess that I was surprised to find that "Julius
Caesar" came next to "Hamlet" in the amount of criti
cism, commentary and speculation which it had caUed
forth. But it is entirely natural that notwithstanding
its unusuaUy excellent text the "Tempest" should be
third on the list. For this there are abundant rea
sons. In the first place it is now generaUy accepted
by those most competent to judge; indeed it may
be said that it is now proved that the "Tempest"
was Shakespeare's last play and in this final creation
the genius of the master shone with undiminished
luster. It also contains allusions, Uke Prospero's break
ing his wand, which the lovers of Shakespeare have
been pleased to fancy were related to the writer him
self. In the "Tempest," moreover, the unities, of which it
was the fashion to say at one time that Shakespeare
knew nothing, are observed with the most extreme
care. More than once the ttme supposed to be occu
pied by the events upon the stage is pressed upon our
attention so that we are compelled to reaUze that the
action of the play occurs within Umits of time but Uttle

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 161
more extensive than that actually consumed in its rep
resentation. The unity of place is assured by the fact
that the scene is on an island and is confined largely
to the immediate neighborhood of Prospero's ceU.
The unity of action is obvious, for the story and the
plot are sunple and du-ect, unbroken by digression or
underplots ui a most remarkable degree. It seems as if
we could hear Shakespeare saying "before I retire to
sUence I wUl show the world and the champions of the
unities that although I have deliberately discarded the
rules which Trissino and the French and Ben Jonson
have developed far beyond Aristotle to whom they
attribute them, I can write a play in which these same
unities shall be better and more clearly observed than
in any other drama kno-wn to us." This at aU events
is what he did.
Then there is Caliban, one of the strangest of con
ceptions, unlike any creation of character in the other
plays, or, indeed, in all literature. In no respect super
natural, distinctly human and yet whoUy unlike the
humanity we know, the theories and explanations of
Caliban are weU-nigh as varied and as numerous as
those pertaining to "Hamlet." The strong suggestion
in the "monster's" character that here we find Shake
speare's intimation of the evolution of man and of the
missing link is enough of itself to fascinate inquiry and
breed unending speculation.
Then there is the question of the plot. AU efforts to
show where Shakespeare took or whence, in the lan
guage of the wise, he "conveyed" the plot of the "Tem-

162 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
pest" have failed. This is a cause of very great discon
tent. Deep hidden always in many hearts is the desire
to bring do-wn to the general average of the common
place the man who has soared high above his fellows.
It is frequently manifested tn the popular preference
for the amateur as against the expert. The amateur
may be the veriest charlatan and Uar imaginable, but
without proof or reason he is to be beUeved and
crowned while the prize is refused or grudgingly given
to the man who has earned it by the toU and training
of a lifetime. There are always voices to whisper
or to cry out that the great inventor or the bold dis
coverer robbed the obscure failure, that the victorious
commander owed everything to his chief of staff, that
the great painter filched his art from his unknown
student. The mass of mankind however are fortu
nately ready for hero worship and eager to foUow the
heroes. Not infrequently they are mistaken and de
ceived in their hero, but none the less it is well that
they should have the capacity for devotion to an ideal.
"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have
loved at aU." It is far better to have the generous
emotion even if it leads astray now and then than to be
incapable of it. This longing among minds of a certain
t3^e, however, to lower greatness to the '-"-—oon level
is especiaUy marked in literature. In a little study of
Le Sage, Sir Walter Scott says: "Le Sage's claim to
origtnaUty, in this deUghtful work ['Gil Bias'] has been
idly, I had almost said ungratefully, contested by those
critics, who conceive they detect the plagiarist when-

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 163
ever they see a resemblance in the general subject of a
work, to one which has been before treated by an infe
rior artist. It is a favorite theme of laborious dulness,
to trace out such conicidences; because they appear to
reduce genius of the highest order to the usual standard
of humanity, and, of course, to bring the author nearer
a level with his critics.''
The results of this law, laid down by Scott, have
naturally attained, in the case of Shakespeare, gigantic
proportions. Every word he wrote has been scanned,
every aUusion, every sentiment, every thought has been
harried and twisted in the hope of finding evidence of
plagiarism not only in books which he doubtless read
but in the darkest and most obscure corners and mazes
of literature where he never could have wandered. The
levelers could not see that, tn regard to the plots of
the plays, for example, except as a gratffication of curi
osity it was of no earthly consequence where Shake
speare found, or borrowed, or took, or stole them. The
one thing which mattered was that after his sign man
ual had been imposed upon the plots no man since has
dared to touch them and the Duke of Marlborough
could truthfuUy say that the only history of England
known to most English-speaking people was that writ
ten by William Shakespeare. In the case of the creator
of "Hamlet" and "Falstaff," however, the hostiUty to
all superiority common to minds of a certain cast has
gone so far that a group of persons has arisen, small
but vocal, which has undertaken wholly to deny his
authorship and transfer it without one scintilla of his-

164 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
torical evidence to a great man of brilUant abilities
who was as incapable of writing the plays as he was
of being a true friend, an upright poUtician or an incor
ruptible judge. The miracle of Shakespeare's genius is
so unbearable to certain natures that they find comfort
in the Baconian theory because they can understand
Bacon's abUity, although far beyond their own, while
they cannot comprehend the pure, inexplicable genius
of Shakespeare. Others have sought to substitute
Marlowe, others a multiple authorship, still others
some member of the peerage who was known to be
able to read, for that of Shakespeare. The object is
not to aggrandize Bacon or Marlowe or the incorpo
rated authors or the unknown member of the peerage,
but to destroy Shakespeare. It is an odd manifestation
of the power of envy, which passes under many names,
but which lies deep-rooted in some human hearts.
Apart from this the manifestation is only a ripple
in the great current of Shakespearian fame and wUl,
in due time, become, like Voltaire's criticism, a mere
curiosity in the history and literature of the plays as
they keep their course along the high road of time.
Each successive century, each period comes and goes,
brings its contribution toward a better understanding
of the master, and also its theories and its luna^cies.
What is worthy of life lives, that which is worthless and
born of envy and detraction or of mere fantasy per
ishes, but the creations of the mighty imagination pass
on Uke the "imperial votaress in maiden meditation
fancy free" to Uft up and delight the world.

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 165
Like the plots and the text, Uke the phrases and the
very words, the scenes of the plays have been swept up
tn the all-embracing dragnet of critical examination and
inquiry, and among them all none perhaps has excited
more interest and speculation than Prospero's Island.
The^ leaming on this subject is all gathered up by Mr.
Furness in the note which begins on the first page of his •
Variomm edition of the "Tempest." There we are told
that Hunter in his "Disquisition" (1839) elaborately
argued that Lampedusa, lying south of Sicily and west
of Malta, was Prospero's Island. Then came Theodor
Elze, who agreed with Hunter that Shakespeare had a
real island in mind but that it was not Lampedusa but
Pantalaria in the same region, a little further to the
north. In both cases much erudition and great inge
nuity are expended to prove the case, but there is not
the slightest real evidence to indicate that Shakespeare
had heard of either island or that they had even
attracted any attention in the Elizabethan period.
Malone wrote a long essay to show — and he had good
evidence to support his theory — that the early accounts
of the Bermudas ahd especially the shipwreck of Sir
George Somers had much to do with Shakespeare's con
struction of the scene of the "Tempest" and with the
storm which opens the play. This view was wholly
reasonable and it was put forward with the moderation
and sense of a sound critic and trained Shakespearian
scholar. But others less informed were not content to
stop with Malone at the suggestion that Shakespeare
found material for his storm and his island in the

166 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
Bermuda voyages. Chalmers declares that the Bermu
das were the scene of the "Tempest." So does Thomas
Moore, who visited the Bermudas but obviously had
not studied the play. So does Mrs. Jamieson, and so
also in these later days does Mr. Kipling, all alike not
sufficiently mindful that a thorough knowledge of the
play is quite as important as an acquaintance with the
Bermudas when one engages tn the perUous task of
identifying Prospero's Island. Swift says: "What they
do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do
we are told expressly, that they neither marry nor are
given in marriage." So we may say that we are igno
rant of where on the face of the waters Prospero's
Island may have been, but we know where it was not
situated. It was not one of the Bermudas, for Ariel
says (Act I, Scene 2) :
Safely in harbor
Is the King's ship; in the deep nook, where once
Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still vex'd Bermoothes, —
Ariel would hardly have brought dew jrom the Ber
mudas to the Bermudas and we may take the passage
as Shakespeare's distinct declaration that his readers
were to understand that the island of the "Tempest"
was not one of the Bermudas.
The famous allusion to the "still vex'd Bermoothes
has, however, a very real importance in quite another
way for it is one of the evidences of the date of the
play. The Bermudas had long been known. In the

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 167
"Legatio Babylonica" of Peter Martyr, published in
1511, the island of "La Bermuda" is shown on a map
and the name is apparently taken from a certain Juan
de Bermudez, who discovered them on one of his earlier
voyages. The first account of them is that of Gonzales
Ferdinando de Oviedo tn 1515. In 1527 the Portuguese
had a plan for colonizing them which came to nothing.
They appear on Sebastian Cabot's Mappa Mundi tn
1544 with the description of "De Demonios," which
clung to them for many years. In 1593 an English sea
man, Henry May, was wrecked there and wrote an
account of the islands for the benefit of his country
men. The Bermudas did not, however, become vivid
to Englishmen or arrest their attention untU the ship
wreck of Sir George Somers, who set out with nine ves
sels tn 1609 to carry men and supplies and support in
every form to the struggling colony of Jamestown tn
Virginia. It was an expedition of large size and much
importance, destined to sustain England's first totter
ing foothold in the great new world of America and it
attracted a corresponding amount of interest in that
period of adventure by land and sea as weU as in the
realms of thought and imagination. The fleet encoun
tered a severe storm. Sir George Somers, "Admu-aU,"
with Sir Thomas Gates, the Governor and Captain
Newport, in their vessel the Sea Venture, were driven
from their course and wrecked on the Bermudas. The
rest of the fleet, some eight vessels in all, kept on to
Virginia and were of much concem to American history
but whoUy beyond the ken of Prospero's Island. The

168 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
casting away of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George
Somers on the Bermudas, whence they ultimately made
their way to Virginia, attracted widespread attention in
England and we have no less than four accounts of it.
There is first Sir George Somers' own brief letter to
the Earl of Salisbury of June 20, 1610; ^ second, a
tract of twenty-eight pages pubUshed tn 1610 entitled
"A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonies in
Virginia"; ^ third, a tract pubUshed tn 1610 entitled,
"A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the
'He of Divels,' by Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Som
mers and Captayne Newport, with divers others, set
forth for the love of my country and also for the Good
of the Plantation tn Virginia by Sil Jourdan" ^ and
finally, there appeared "A true reporte of the wrack
and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight; upon
and from the Islands of the Bermudas; his Comming
to Virginia, and the estate of that Colonie there, and
after, under the govemment of the Lord La Warre July
15, 1610. Written by Wil. Strachy, Esq." * In the last
three of these tracts there were abundant details and
ample material for the storm with which the "Tem
pest" opens and for a description of the islands. There
was no necessity whatever nor any reason to compel
or induce Shakespeare on the eve of his retirement to
seek out as Mr. KipUng suggests in the pit of the thea-
'Lefroy's "Discovery and Settlement of the Bermudas." Vol. 1,
page 10.
"Force's "Historical Tracts." Vol. Ill, No. 1.
'Under another title this tract is given as No. Ill in Force's
"Historical Tracts." Vol. III.
" "Purchas his Pilgrimes." MacLehose edition. Vol. XIX, page 5.

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 169
ter or elsewhere drunken sailors in order to extract from
them information to aid him in making his play. He
had all his accounts of shipwreck and of his island
ready to his hand in the printed narratives of intelli
gent eye-witnesses. Still less was it needful that in
order to create Stephano and Trinculo he should con
verse with and incite to drunkenness sailors who
strayed into his theater. During his many years in
London in the great period covering the Armada and
the widest and wildest sea adventures, sailors com
bined with intoxication had probably not escaped an
observation which it may be safely said was neither
languid nor dull.
However this may be there is certainly no escape
from a recognition of the strong family likeness be
tween the storms pictured in the three tracts and that
which with such complete vividness opens the "Tem
pest." In his admirable and most iUuminating essay
on the "English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century" ^
Sir Walter Raleigh says: "The tales of these adven
turers, brought by word of mouth, or published in the
'Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the lie of
Divels' a tract by Silvester Jourdan, one of Sir George
Somer's company, gave the finest and subtlest wit in
the world a theme for a play. The 'Tempest' is a
fantasy of the New World. It is too full of the ether
of poetry and too many-sided to be caUed a satire, yet
Shakespeare, almost alone, saw the problem of Ameri-
'- MacLehose edition of Hakluyt. Vol. XII.

170 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
can settlement in a detached light; and a spirit of
humorous criticism runs riot tn the Ughter scenes. The
drunken butler, accepting the worship and allegiance of
Caliban and swearing him in by making him kiss the
bottle, is a fair representative of the idle and dissolute
men who were shipped to the Virginia Colony. The
situation of Miranda was perhaps suggested by the
story of Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Captain John
White, the first child bom in America of English par
ents. She was bom in 1587 and christened along with
Manteo, one of the Indians who had visited England
with Captains Amadas and Barlow. That same year
she was abandoned, along with the other colonists. In
1607 when the settlement was next renewed it was
reported that there were stiU seven of the EngUsh alive
among the Indians (four men, two boys and one maid).
The strange girlhood of this one maid, if she were
Virginia Dare, may well have set Shakespeare's fancy
working. And the portrait of CaUban, with his affec
tionate loyalty to the drunkard, his adoration of valor,
his love of natural beauty and feeUng for music and
poetry, his hatred and superstitious fear of his task
master, and the simple cunning and savagery of his
attempts at revenge and escape — all this is a compo
sition wrought from fragments of travelers' tales, and
shows a wonderfully accurate and sympathetic under
standing of uncivilized man."
It is a little surprising that Sir Walter Raleigh should
have selected Jourdan's narrative alone as a source of
Shakespeare's material, even though the title words

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 171
"lie of Divels" suggests the cry of Ferdinand when he
leaps overboard, Hell is empty.
And all the devils are here.
Like the other two tracts it contains an excellent
account of the storm, too long for quotation, and a good
account of the island. But Strachy is more elaborate
and contains one passage not found in the other narra
tives which comes much closer to the "Tempest" than
anything to be found elsewhere. Strachy says: "Dur
ing all this time, the heavens look'd so blacke upon us,
that it was not possible the elevation of the Pole might
be observed: nor a starre by night, not sunne beame
by day was to be seene. Onely upon the Thursday
night Sir George Sommers being upon the watch had
an apparition of a little round light, like a faint starre,
trembling, and streaming along with a sparkeling blaze,
halfe the height upon the Maine Mast and shooting
sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle
as it were upon any foure shrouds; and for three or
foure houres together, or rather more, halfe the night
it kept with us; running sometimes along the Maine
yard; to the very end, and then retuming." Strachy
goes on with much leaming to explain the manifesta
tion and says, "the Spaniards call it Saint Ehno, and
have an authentique and miraculous Legend for it."
This is the way Shakespeare describes it:
Prospero — Hast thou spirit,
Performed to every point the tempest that I bade thee?
Ariel — ^To every article.

172 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
I boarded the King's ship ; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flam'd amazement: Sometimes I'd divide.
And burn in many places; on the topmast.
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors
0' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not: the fire, and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble.
Yes, his dread trident shake.
Conjecture is not strainfed if we conclude that
Shakespeare must have read the narratives of the
wreck of the Sea Venture, for taken in connection -with
the description of the storm, the appearance of Ariel
as the St. Elmo's fire actually seems to put such a
belief almost beyond the range of possible coincidence.
We can readily admit also that there is much ground
for Sir Walter Raleigh's opinion that "the 'Tempest'
is a fantasy of the New World," a fitting close to the
long series of plays which had found in the old world
both their plots and their scenery.
As has been already pointed out, the connection of
the "Tempest" with the shipwreck of Sir George
Somers and hence, in the popular mind at least, with
the Bermudas was fully shown by Malone, in an elabo
rate discussion of the subject more than a century ago.
Malone's view as to the meteorological, marine and
geographical sources of the "Tempest," tf such unpo
etical words may be permitted, was in fact generaUy
accepted and unquestioned down to 1902. In that year

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 173
Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in a short paper which he
read before the American Antiquarian Society, sug
gested another model or original for the picture of
Prospero's Island set before us m the "Tempest."
This new candidate for the honor of furnishing
poetic material to Shakespeare is an island known by
the singularly unmelodious name of Cuttyhunk, which
lies off the southem coast of Massachusetts, one of a
chain of islands at the mouth of Buzzards Bay. Both
name and place seem incredibly remote from Shake
speare and sixteenth century London. When we find,
however, that the group of islands which includes Cut
tyhunk bears the name of Elizabeth and the little town
existent upon it is caUed Gosnold we begin, as the chil
dren say, to get warm. EUzabeth requires no comment.
Gosnold the town is named for Bartholomew Gosnold,
an early explorer and navigator who came to the coast
of New England in May, 1602, and finally lighted down
on the island which stUl commemorates his existence.
The adventurers liked the island and the captain
planned to winter there with part of his company.
They went so far indeed as to buUd a house, the cellar
walls of which were stiU extant not many years ago.
The men, however, became dissatisfied, those who had
volunteered to stay lost heart, the plan of wintering on
the island was given up and on the 18th of June they
set saU and reached Exmouth on the 23d of July, a
"bare five weeks," which was a voyage of extraordmary
celerity for a smaU sailing vessel. There were three
accounts of the voyage written and two of them were

174 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
published in 1602. The first document is a letter from
Gosnold himself to his father; the second an account of
the voyage by Gabriel Archer, and the third a "Brief
and Trae relation of the Discovery of the North Part
of Virginia," by John Brereton.^ It will be observed at
once that the storm, the St. Elmo's Fire and the date,^
which connect the Somers' shipwreck so closely with
the "Tempest," are all lacking in the Gosnold Voyage.
But in the case of the latter there is a personal connec
tion with Shakespeare which may be said to assure us
of Shakespeare's knowledge of Gosnold and his island.
Brereton's narration is addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh
as the head of the movement to Virginia but the finan
cial backer of Gosnold was the Earl of Southampton,
for in his "History of Travails into Virginia," ^ Strachy
says "He (Southampton) lardgley contributed to the
furnishing out of a Shipp to be commanded by Captain
Bartholomew Gosnold and Captain Bartholomew
Gilbert"; this "shipp" was the Concord which made
the voyage to the South Coast of New England in 1602.
Southampton was Shakespeare's friend and in that
period of intense interest in voyages and discoveries
we may be sure that Shakespeare was especially famil
iar with those which were supported by his patron.
The storm, as has been said, belongs wholly to Somers'
shipwreck but when we come to the island and its natu-
^ All these may be conveniently found in the Collections of the
Massachusetts Historical Society. Vol. VIII, Third Series, page 68
and S.
'Dr. Hale assigns the "Tempest" to 1603, which is untenable and
of course an error.
'Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1849, page 163.

PIIOSPKRO'S ISLAND 175
rol productions, the case is quite different. The vege
table and animal Ufe whicli we find mentioned in
allusions by the personages of the "Tempest" agree
with thos(» described by Gosnold and not with tl;i08e of
tho Bermudas.
The foUowing table gives, I believe, a list of the birds
and animals luul vegetable Ul'o alluded to in the
"Tempest":
Act I—Soono 2—
Syconix oonlinod Ariol in "a cloven pine"
ProHporo: "will rend nn oak"
Ctilibfui; "Wfttor with Berries in't"
"Tho fresh springs, brine pits"
Ariol: "Yollow sands"
Prospero: "The frcvsh brook muscles, withered roots
and husks whore tho acorn cradled"
A(;t II— Soone 1 —
GoQBalo: "How lush und lusty the grass looks! how
green I"
AiiT II— Soone 2 —
Springs, Berries
Cdlibiin: "Where crabs grow"
Hodgoliogs
PignutsAdders Jiiy'fl nest
Marmoset Filborts "Young seamels from tho rooks"
A (IT in — Seen© 2 —
Ferduifuid: "Som© tiiousnnds of tiiese lop" (Logs
eotistantly referred to for burning)

176 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
Caliban: "I'll not show him where the qmck freshes
are" (Springs again)
Act rv — Scene 1 —
Iris: "Here on this grass plot"
Ceres: "This short-grass'd green"
Act V — Scene 1 —
Prospero: "Jove's stout oak"
The Pine and Cedar
By analyzing this list we reach very easUy a com
parison between the sources of 1602 and those of 1610.
The famous "yeUow sands" of Ariel's song teU us
nothing, for they exist both in the Bermudas and the
Elizabeth Islands. They are weU known tn the former
and nothing can be more brilUant than the sand dunes
of Cape Cod and the adjacent islands, glittering
beneath the noontide sun, which greeted Gosnold and
his companions as they greet our eyes to-day unchang
ing and unchanged. "Young scamels" have given
birth to many pages of discussion, all fruitless. No one
knows what is referred to and the Oxford Dictionary
declares the meaning of "scamel" to be uncertain. The
"jay" although of wide range is a bird characteristic
of New England. The "Marmoset" ("Marmazet," as
the folio has it) is found solely in tropical America, is
not an inhabitant of either group of islands and prob
ably appears in the play because Shakespeare hap
pened to think of the word and Uked it. "Hedgehogs
and adders" are EngUsh and although common to New
England yield no clear indication of place. "Pignuts,"
or ground-nuts, are mentioned specifically by Gosnold.

PROSPERO'S ISLAND 177
So also are fruit and hazelnut trees, which cover
"Crabs," or apples, a Northern fruit, and "filberts" of
the hazel family.
It is when we come to the larger features of the natu
ral growths of the islands that the resemblance with
the descriptions of Cuttyhunk in 1602 grow most strik
ing. "Logs" are referred to repeatedly in the "Tem
pest," and the principal occupation of Gosnold's men
was cutting sassafras logs, which formed the chief part
of their cargo when they retumed. The oak and pine
are mentioned more than once, as the table shows.
Both are distinctly Northem trees, not indigenous to
the Bermudas. But Brereton says: "This island is full
of high timbered oaks their leaves thrice so broad as
ours; cedars, straight & taU; beech, ehn, holly &c."
Cedars are mentioned in the play and in the accounts
of both groups of islands but the cedar has many varie
ties and flourishes in a wide range of climate. The
principal trees of the Bermudas are cedars and palmet
tos. In all the narratives of 1610 the pahnetto figures
very largely, and if the Bermudas had been tn Shake
speare's mind when describing Prospero's Island it is
difficult to understand how he could have omitted the
palmetto which was the strongest bit of local color at
his disposal.
There are two features of the landscape which
Shakespeare makes conspicuous to us in Prospero's
Island, the grass and the springs, CaUban's "quick
freshes." Gonzalo says, "How lush and lusty the grass
looks! how green!" In Act IV, in the Masque, Iris

178 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
says, "Here on this grass plot" — and Ceres, "This
short-grass'd green." If we turn now to the narratives
which Shakespeare read we find that Strachy in his
description of the Bermudas says the soil "is dark, old,
dry and incapable of any of our commodities & fruits."
He also says that there are "no rivers or running springs
of fresh water to be found in any of them" (the Ber
mudas). Turn now to Brereton : "Also many springs
of excellent sweet water and a great standing lake of
fresh water near the sea-side, which is maintained with
the springs running exceedingly pleasantly through the
woody grounds which are very rocky," — very like the
swamps and standing pools into which Ariel led
Sebastian and Trinculo. Again Brereton refers to
"many plain places of grass" and "to meadows very
large and full of green grass," and he also mentions the
successful planting of EngUsh seeds. All this is in
direct contrast with the dry, semitropical character of
the Bermudas and in entire harmony with Prospero's
Island. All the Somers' narratives emphasize the
enormous number of wild hogs found in the Bermudas
upon which the shipwrecked company chiefly lived.
There is no mention of a hog in the "Tempest."
Remembering then that aU Shakespeare's informa
tion about these various islands must have come from
the contemporary tracts, it is clear that in general
character of soil, climate and production Prospero's
Island corresponds with Gosnold's island much better
than with the Bermudas, which were so attracting pub
lic attention at the time of the composition of the

PROSPERO'S ISIAXD 179
"Tempest." It may be fairly said that while it is cer
tain tiiat the natural productions of Prospero's Island
disiinetly are not consonant with any description or
even possibUin- of the Bermudas, they might weU be
merely English trees and grass and flowers civen to the
a?ene of the ¦"Tempest" becaase Shakespeare Uked to
have it so adorned. Yet as he evidently had the New
World in his mind and was using the narratives of ad
venturers for material, the coincidence of the attributes
of the island of Prospero with those mentioned by Gos
nold. in whom Shakespeare had a peculiar tie owing to
his connection with tiie Earl of Southampton, is too
marked to be overlooked. The flowers, grass, trees and
firing? alluded to in the 'Tempest" are in the main
English in character, but ihey cover very well, very
exactly even, the diief eleanents of ArchOT's and Brere
ton's narratives. It is not th»efore going very far to
suppose or to infer that while Shakeg)eare found his
material for the storm, the wrett and the St. Elmos
fire in Stradiy and Jourdan. he reverted to Brereton
and Gosnold, the friends of his patron Southampton,
for suggestions as to the island itself because bener
suited TO the scene and the purposes he had in mind.
The inquiries and the thetaies of Malone and of Dr.
Hale i>ossess the unfailing intenest whidi attaches to
any probable or jx^ssible discoverk- of the sources firom
which Shakespeare drew the material whidi imder his
magic toudi was eonverted into poetrj-, into imagin
ings whidi would forever ddi^t the world. "Whereva-
he may have passed the ol^cure and the lost come baek

180 PROSPERO'S ISLAND
to the light. Unremembered men live again and
dusty pamphlets telUng of forgotten deeds assume a
vivid inter-as' ¦ ae; 3ly because his eyes may perhaps
have rested upon t) em. We must admit that it is after
aU merely speculation and guesswork but possessed
none the less ofan unfailing fascination. Search and
reason and conjecture as we wUl, however, the mystery
of genius is stiU unexplained and fortunately must
always remain so. Yet I am personally quite sure that
I know well where Prospero's Island was, where it is
indeed at this moment. It lies off the seacoast of
Bohemia, not far from Illyria where Viola met Mal-
volio and Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek
and where Feste is still singing in the moonlit garden :
the Athens known to Oberon and Titania is within easy
reach and hard by is the Forest of Arden. It is part
of that beautiful land where we can /escape from the
cares that infest the day, where sorrows for an hour
cease to weigh us down, where we forget ourselves,
where we can sit by Miranda and with hearts fuU of
gratitude to the greatest and most beneficent of
geniuses can join with her in crying out:
0 brave new world that has such people in't.

AFTER THE VICTORY ^
With the simple ceremonies hallowed by time and
custom we close to-day our college year. Very different
this one, be it always remembered, from other years
which in slow procession have passed by here for nearly
three centuries. It has been the year of a great victory
over the forces of tyranny and organized barbarism
strong in perfected and worshiped materialism and tn
the evil power of science misapplied. To those sons of
the University who went forth to win this victory and
tum the wavering scale of battle we would fain do
honor on this commencement day.
Pirst we salute the Dead. To them the right of the
line; to them the place of honor. To them we repeat
Mrs. Wharton's noble lines:
0 silent and secretly moving throng.
In your fifty thousand strong.
Coming at dusk when the wreaths have dropt.
And streets are empty and music stopt,
Silently coming to hearts that wait
Dumb in the door and dumb at the gate,
And hear your step and fly to your call —
Every one of you won the war,
But you, you Dead most of all!
'Address at Harvard Commencement, June 19, 1919.
181

182 AFTER THE VICTORY
To you tn the fulness of time we shall raise here within
the precincts of the coUege you loved a fitting monu
ment. It wUl record your names and no others for the
glory of sacrificed youth is yours and the high test is
not that you feU in battle but that you died on the
field, in the trench, in the hospital, for a great and
righteous cause at your country's caU and for your
country's sake.
Next we greet and welcome those who retum and try
in imperfect fashion to express to the world our pride
in them, our gratitude to them, and our deep thank
fulness that they have come back to us laureled with
service rendered and with victory achieved.
Deeply grateful are we also to those who, not per
mitted by age or disabiUty to serve in the field or on
the ships, have given aU tn their power by labor of
every kind, and by untiring generosity, to help our
country win the war. From the great leader so recently
lost,^ whose clear, commanding tones roused the people
to fight for the right as could no other voice, down to
the humblest student or graduate who gave his best,
we offer praise and honor and grateful remembrance.
Last for the University herself we have in our heart of
hearts a more ardent love and deeper pride than ever
before. Under the leadership of its President, unrest
ing, devoted, as able as it was energetic. Harvard has
played again a great part in a great period, one tn aU
ways worthy of her storied past. That which is true
of Harvard is true of aU our coU^es and universities
^Theodore Roosevelt, H. U., 1880.

AFTER THE VICTORY 183
with hardly an exception. There is no body of men in
our great American community which offered sacrifice
and service in larger measure or in greater proportion
ate numbers than those who sought or had obtained a
place in the goodly fellowship of scholars and of edu
cated men, a fact fuU of auspicious omen to the coun
try's future. Yet were they after all but a small part
of the mighty force which took up arms and to all that
great army alike belongs the future. It is theirs to
mold and guide. In that future a great responsibility
falls upon them all, rich and poor, educated and un
taught, for all were alike in service and sacrifice. Those
who gave of their best to help win the war and above
all those who went overseas and fought will be the
dominant influence in the years to come. They who
have offered youth and life to save human freedom lay
down their arms only to take up the unescapable bur
den of responsibility for the country they have de
fended and~ the civilization they have fought to pre
serve. Theirs is the leadership, theirs the duty to the
younger generations which will foUow them because it
is they who have done most for the country in the dark
hour. That they wiU fulfil their great obligation I have
no doubt. In what ways they shall fulfil it it is not for
those who are passing from the stage of life to say. All
we can do is to bid them godspeed and teU them what
little we have leamed in the hope that in our experi
ence they may find some light and help as they move
along the unknown and untrodden paths which lie
before them.

184 AFTER THE VICTORY
I know that this is venturing on dangerous ground,
that to suggest that we can learn from the past is just
now to expose oneself not merely to derision but to a
shower of names of which "reactionary" is one of the
mUdest. Yet such are my limitations that I can leam
nothing from a future which is non-existent. I have
been thrUled many times by a weU-told ghost story.
But the ghost has always been that of some one who
had lived and died. The ghost of a future child as yet
unbegotten, unconceived and unborn, except as a vision
of what the present generates, seems to present diffi
culties and is not as a rule calculated to make any one
shiver. There remains the past then as a teacher for
there is, strictly speaking, no present. As I utter these
words the fast flitting moment has dropped into the
abyss of time and is as far beyond recall as the days of
Egypt's predynastic kings. Whether you seek your
lesson from your own experience or from the recorded
history of mankind you are stiU tuming to the past.
I see no way to avoid it when we are planning for the
future, which we hope to make better than what has
gone before. "For at my back I always hear
Time's winged Chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity."
A few days since I read a letter written 4000 years ago
in Babylon by which it appeared that they had then a
system of profit-sharing. You can find it in Number

AFTER THE VICTORY 185
92 of the Yale collection of translated clay tablets. I
have strong hopes that tn profit-sharing we have a
beneficent solution of some at least of the gravest social
and economic problems which confront and perplex us.
Such, however, is my weakn^s and my curiosity that
I admit that I should like to know how the system
worked tn Babylon for it might throw some Ught on
what to cherish and what to avoid. I mention this,
since confession is good for the soul, merely to say that
what troubles me most about the books and articles
and speeches by our most advanced thinkers setting
forth new panaceas and corrective systems for all the
evils to which flesh is heir, is that they are generaUy so
very old, a fact apparently disregarded by their
authors, who quite properly despise a past which only
rises up to be troublesome. I am such a heretic in
regard to what is said to be our best modern thought
that I think we can leam much from the art and litera
ture of Greece and Rome; something of great moral
systems from the Old Testament, from the thoughts of
Buddha, from the teachings of Confucius and from the
Greek philosophers. I even believe that there is much
good and much wisdom to be found in Aristotle and
Plato and in all the great writers upon govemment as
well as from the statesmen who put theories into prac
tise from the days of Perides to those of Washuigton
and Lincoln. But I have no intention of entering upon
those dim and dusty corridors of days long dead. I
merely wish to suggest to the men who fought this war
and to their contemporaries, in whose hands the future

186 AFTER THE VICTORY
lies, what seems to me would be a wise course in dealing
with that future.
• Let me illustrate my meaning by reminding you of
a story which is only a fairy tale but which has for its
plot the improvement of the life and conduct of one
very evil old man. It was written by Charles Dickens,
antiquated I know as a noveUst. He had the misfor
tune to be a great romancer and also what is generaUy
overlooked a great reaUst. He possessed nothing more
than a marvelous imagination, a boundless humor and
an almost Shakespearian power of creating characters,
men and women and children. He introduced us to a
world of people whom we came to know much better
than the living, who were all about us and who had the
additional advantage of never dying. He carried
laughter and joy and deUght into the lives of miUions
of human beings; he took them out of themselves and
brought, for a ttme at least, surcease of pain and sorrow
to those who suffered. So I forgive Dickens, steeped
as he was in nineteenth century optimism, for not
living up to the most modern canons of correct novel
writing and go to him for my illustration. In the
"Christmas Carol" the purpose is to reform a griping,
cruel, hardened miser and usurer. It is "a ghostly Uttle
book" as the author called it. The reform is effected
by showing Scrooge, as you aU remember, a series of
visions: "Christmas Past"; "Christmas Present"; and
"Christmas Yet to Come." The logical outcome of
Scrooge's career which is shown to him is set aside by
his total change of nature and conduct. It is all very

AFTER THE VICTORY 187
fanciful and quite impossible and yet every character
in it is uitensely real. But you observe that the
improvement sought is based entirely upon a vivid
presentation of the past, which teaches the hero wha
to do in the days yet to come and what to avoid.
This thought I would commend to those to whom the
future of our country belongs. I fervently hope that
you, young and coming rulers of the country, will see
visions and dream dreams; but do not forget that see
ing visions is one thing, while being a visionary, espe
cially a visionary whose visions and ideals are stage
properties, is quite another and one much to be
shunned. It is weU to remember also that wonderful as we of
this passing hour are, all wisdom is not possessed by
us any more than it was by past generations or than it
wiU be by those of the future. We are an evolution
from those who preceded us and heredity and tradi
tion, habits and history sway us despite ourselves. The
dead rule the living in many ways just as we shall
influence posterity by the operation of natural laws.
Human nature, impalpable as it is, remains one of the
most constant of the conditions with which we have
to deal. Read the Babylonian letters of which I have
spoken, those relating to business and family affairs,
and you wiU find the same emotions, passions and
desires, the same weaknesses and irritations 4,000 years
ago which are familiar to every one of us to-day. We
are prone to think that we are superior to those who
have gone before because we are the heirs of the ages.

]

188 AFTER THE VICTORY
We are apt to confuse knowledge, the slow accumula
tions of past centuries, with original thought. They
are two widely different things. Knowledge is not only
power but beyond words valuable, yet it is not original
thought although it may help and lead to it. There
is nothing to indicate the slightest inborn inteUectual
superiority on our part over the men who were earliest
in recorded history. The skuUs of the Cro-Magnon
men twenty thousand years ago were as large, then-
brains as heavy, as those of our own time. In art and
architecture, in the spacious realms of abstract thought,
in literature and poetry no one would dare to say that
we surpassed the Greeks, for we follow, study and imi
tate them in all these great fields of inteUectual activ
ity. In science we have made immense advances,
building always on the ever-accumulating store of those
who preceded us and with mechanical advantages
constantly improving and aiding our work. But tn
pure intellectual force we do not surpass the men who
first evolved the science of numbers and by mere intel
lectual strength devised the system of geometry which
every schoolboy knows to-day, or those other men who
by unassisted thought, with no knowledge except that
which they could gain with their own eyes, developed
the atomic theory. We take a natural pride tn our
extraordinary inventions, but as evidences of mere men
tal power are they not more than rivaled by the wan
dering prehistoric men who at a period beyond our ken
learned to produce and control fire, or by those who
within the range of recorded history invented the

AFTER THE VICTORY 189
wheel, the hollow boat, and, mosf; marvelous of all, sym
bols and signs for language starting with pictures and
cuhntnating in the arbitrary signs for individual letters?
Think for a moment where the whole fabric of society,
the world of man would be without fire, the wheel or
written language; the first the application of a natural
force, the last two pure human inventions. In the
region of mental achievement let us not be overconfi
dent or overboastful of our innate superiority to these
unknown men who knew nothing of what we know but
unaided and alone thought more and with such mighty
results, for they had only thought to depend upon.
The greatest advances originated and made by mod
em, civilized man, as we are pleased to call htm, are, we
hope and believe, in moral standards, in altruism, in
sympathy with each other, tn the effort to diminish
man's inhumanity to man, for the cahn, cold, often
cruel, indifference of nature and natural processes is
too often beyond the reach even of modification. In
these moral directions much has been accompUshed
and yet the accomplishment is only too easily over
rated as we know from our recent terrible experience.
At the close of the last century there was a quite gen
eral belief that serious wars would not come again.
Some doubted and for their skepticism were caUed
"jingoes," "war lovers" and "pessimists." But almost
every one felt sure that if war should again break upon
us its horrors would be reduced to the lowest point
and that by the conventions of Geneva and The Hague,
the sufferings and cruelties of past wars would be

190 AFTER THE VICTORY
largely eliminated. Suddenly the great war came.
Germany, esteemed by all a highly civilized nation,
entered deliberately upon a course of savage cruelty
worse than any ever imagined because it was carefuUy
organized. The world had known barbarism before,
human history was fuU of it, but never had anything
fallen upon men comparable to the scientific, wholesale
atrocities carried on by Germany by which not merely
individuals but entire communities were subjected to
the most hideous sufferings and the most utter ruin
which highly trained minds entirely destitute of
humanity could devise. It was appaUtng to see how
thin was the varnish of civiUzation in one of the great
western nations, how close the woLf in man was to the
surface which looked so fair. We were nearer in reality
to primitive man than any one had imagined. As for
treaties and laws, they went in the fierce flame of war
as quickly as the dry leaves of autumn when a spark
. falls among them and were of as little worth. The
1 (beautiful scheme of making mankind suddenly virtu-
i j ous by a statute or a written convention was once more
exhibited in all its weakness. It is a melancholy reflec
tion that the best assurance of the future peace of the
world lies in the destruction of the German war power,
which is worth aU it cost.
Once again comes the harsh lesson that all the
advances of man in morals and in altruism, in charity
and gentler manners and purer laws, aU that really
remain with us come slowly, never in a moment or in a
watch in the night. The recognition of this truth is

AFTER THE VICTORY 191
the secret of those who have done most to help their
feUow men. An English poet of the Ught-hearted,
easy-going, pleasure-loving eighteenth century wrote:
"Who breathes, must suffer; and who thinks ihust mourn;
And he alone is blessed, who ne'er was born."
We must face courageously the truth of the first Une
but the second is a black and helpless pessimism which
simply spells utter ruin. For we must be here on earth
and if we can not wholly avoid or prevent human suf
fering we can at least strive to reduce its vast aggregate
during the brief life which is our portion. If now at
last I tum to the past for a practical suggestion I shall
try to palliate my doing so by going but a very short
distance within its precincts.
The object to which you soldiers of the war, masters
of the future, must address yourselves, to which all
right-thinking men and women ought to address them
selves, is to reduce so far as possible the sum total of
human suffering and unhappiness. There is much that
can be done. It is possible for us by steady effort to
secure, in large measure at least, to all men and women
equality of opportunity; but we must not forget that
while men are born into the world differing in muscles
and in mind, there is no form of statute or convention
which can secure to them equaUty of results in their Ufe
joumey. Let us not endanger the possible with its
chance of hope and help by vainly striving for a glitter
ing impossibility. We can do much, I say, and it is to /

192 AFTER THE VICTORY
you, you coming generations, led by the men who
fought the war, to make these advances. But you must
ever remember that the only advances which have been
maintained and kept secure are those which were made
slowly. Before your very eyes, you have the warning.
It is there in Russia. In Russia is exhibited at this
moment, not in the musty volumes of history, but there
even as you look the awful results of a scheme which
its authors pretended and their dupes beUeved would
make aU men happy in a moment. Designing adven
turers, men without a country, convinced an ignorant
people that if they were allowed to aboUsh aU property,
to take from men the right to own what they had
earned and saved, and to wreck civiUzation, aU would
be weU. They have appUed their panacea. Instead
of diminishing human suffering they have caused
greater misery to more human beings than the war
itself. They have vastly increased the sum of human
suffering. AU tyrannies are evil things, but the tyr
anny of disorder and anarchy is the worst of aU possible
tyrannies. The leaders support themselves and Uve
in comfort and maintain an army by plundering not
merely the rich but the whole community down to the
farmer who has been a Uttle more successful than his
neighbor. I need not enlarge upon the result. The
greatest contemner of the past could not charge me
here with bringing forward examples which are no
longer appUcable to our purified and improved human
nature and to our greater wisdom. These things are
happening now, at this moment, even as I speak. No

AFTER THE VICTORY 193
ono knows, no one will ever know how many thousands
of farrnofs, workers, shopkeepens, innocent people have
perished by murder, by pestilence and famine, since the
present Bol^evik rule was established in Russia. In
letters of fir© this Russian iscene says to us wbo are
passing from the stage and to you who are stepping
forward to talce control of the American destinies,
"This way at least lies ruin," Let us labor then in
every way to help to improve the distribution of the
eamings of mankind, to lift up the poor and suffering,
to make life better and happier for all the children of
men. But what is happening in Russia must convince
every one that the inethod of Lenine and Trotzky, of
murder and pillage, is not the way to reach the noble
and human© results we all desire. Turn your eyes then
from that strickon country and let them rest upon your
own. Does it not say to you in tones which can not be
misunderstood, "Whatever our shortcomings, whatever
our mistakes, the principles of ordered liberty which
our fathers founded and which we maintained have
brought a greater degree of happiness to the average
man and woman in the United States than in any other
country," and if we advance along those lines, ever
progressing and broadening, as we come to understand
the situation better we shall lessen ever more and more
th© grca.t sum of hunian poverty, unhappiness and suf
fering? Docs not this contrast between the United
States and Russia at this moment tell every man and
woman, old and young, in tiiis country that here under
our methods the best initigation and solution, yet

194 AFTER THE VICTORY
attained, of the suffering and sorrow of humanity are
to be found? It comes slowly no doubt, but it comes.
Does not the United States tell us trumpet-tongued
that the country for which this younger generation has
died and for which they are going to live and rule is
still the best hope for mankind and that it must be pre
served by them as their fathers preserved and saved
it in the days that are gone? If you would be as you
have been of the largest service to mankind, be Ameri
cans first, Americans last, Americans always. From
that firm foundation you can march on. Abandon it
and chaos wiU come as when the civiUzation of Rome
crashed down in irremediable ruin.

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH ^
We meet here to-day because the calendar tells us
that three hundred years have elapsed since a small
band of English men and women landed at this spot
and set themselves to work to conquer the wUdemess
and found a state. Three centuries are but an indis
tinguishable point tn the vast tracts of time dimly
marked by geologic periods in the history of our planet.
They are a negligible space in the thousands of years
which have passed since man first appeared on the
earth. Even within the narrow limits of recorded his
tory they fill but a trifiing place if we are concemed
only with chronology. We live, however, in a compara
tive world. Geologically and even racially three cen
turies are not worth computing, but to the men and
nations who have been concemed in the making of
what is called modem history, dating from the begin
ning of the Renaissance in Italy, they extend very
nearly to the visible horizon. If we go a step further
and measure by man's own life and by the brief exist
ence of the doers of the historic deed as well as of those
who now try to recall the great event, our three centu
ries as we glance backward, like Shelley's "lone and
level sands," stretch far away. In the famUiar fable
* Address at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the Three Hundredth
Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims, December 21, 1920.
195

196 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
of the insects, whose term of Ufe is but a day and whose
most aged members are those who totter on to sunset,
twelve hours is the test of tune, and to them three hun
dred years would seem like the seons through which the
earth has passed during its unrestmg journey tn steUar
space. After aU, our only measure must be the Uves
of the men who acted and of the men who celebrate,
and to us the Pilgrims seem remote indeed. The sol
emn dignity of th© past is as much theirs as if they had
been those of the human race who drew the pictures in
the caves of the Dordogne, or laid deep the foundations
of the Pyramids. In any event, whether the three hun
dred years are absolutely a short period or relatively a
long one the number of the centuries is not alone suffi
cient to determine their right to make men pause and
consider them for a few moments at the date which
marks their end.
There is no more reason to celebrate the mere pas
sage of ttme than to rejoice over the precession of the
equinoxes. The value and meaning to be found in
the ending of any artificial, calendar-made period exist
only in the deed or the event which in some fashion
has lived on in the minds of men through one or
thre© or ten centuries. The act of commemoration
or celebration must be justified by its subject. In
the waters which wash these shores is found a crus
tacean famUiar to us all as the horseshoe — or horsefoot
— crab. He is the only one of his famUy who survives,
although they are by no means a short-lived race.
He and his are found as fossils tn the coal measures

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 197
and ar© closely related to the trilobites who apparently
swarmed tn the Paleozoic period. His anniversaries
m,ust be reckoned by the mUlion but no on© celebrates
them. He is a curious instance of th© survival of the
fittest to survive and makes one doubt a Uttle the moral
value of that great law. But we consign htm to science
and do not commemorate him despite the enormous
tract of time over which he has passed. He has merely
lived. Scott's principle of the "crowded hour of glori
ous life" which is worth "an age without a name" is,
I always think, the touchstone which will teU us
whether a trilobite or a man, -a deed or an event is
current gold indeed. Thus shall we discover the real
character of the event for the sake of which we tum
aside from the noisy traffic of the moment in order that
we may look upon it and meditate upon its meaning.
In this way we shall learn whether we celebrate some
thing of world effect or an incident of the past which
merely touches the memories or the pride of a
neighborhood. Can there be any question that th© landing of those
whom we affectionately call "PUgrims" upon the edge
of the North American wUdemess meets th© test of
Scott's famous Unes? I believe that, among those who
take the trouble to think, there can be but one answer
to this inquiry. Let us, however, go a step furtiier and
apply certain other tests.
Seventy years ago a distinguished English historian
published a book entitled "Fifteen Decisive Battles of
the World," a work of authority which stiU holds its

198 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
place in literatur©. If Sir Edward Creasy had lived
untu 1920 h© would undoubtedly hav© slightly in
creased the number of his battlos, but that would in
no wise affect the leading impression suggested by his
book. The first thought awakened by th© title as weU
as by the book itself is one of astonishment that an
expert student and historian, surveying the long story
of the weU-nigh perpetual fighting which has darkened
and reddened the movement of mankind across the
centuries, could in 1851 find only fifteen battles to
which he felt, after much consideration and weighing
of testimony, that he could properly apply the word
"decisive." Only fifteen battles out of th© thousands,
alas, which have been fought by men were selected by
a competent judge as having by their result settied the
fate of nations or permanently affected the history of
the world.
As with battles so it is with other events great and
smaU, the creatures of each succeeding day which, ever
since man has attempted to make any record of him
self and his doings, have gone whirling past in countless
swarms only to be engulfed in the relentless ocean bf
time. At th© moment they aU, even the most minute,
were of meaning and concem to some one, perhaps to
many more than one among the children of men, and
they are, nearly all, as dead and forgotten as those
whom they grieved or gladdened at the instant when
they flitted by. Almost infinitely small is th© propor
tion which hav© even found a record, whether carved
on ston© or s©t down in books and manuscripts. Of

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 199
those thus preserved, how few, how very few, stand out
clearly to us across the ages or the centuries as decisive,
unforgetable, because they determined the course of
history and gave a lasting direction to th© fortunes of
mankind. They rise before us as we try to look back
over the dim, receding past Uke distant mountain peaks
where the rose of sunset Ungers, or solitary light-towers
set above reefs and shoals in lonely seas.
When we approach an anniversary the first question
which confronts us then is whether it holds a place
among the rare events which may be caUed decisive, or
is memorable only to those who celebrate it. The
inquiry, as a rule, is easUy answered by a littie reflec
tion, and the great and decisive events of history are
usually beyond dispute. No one, for example, can
question that Greek thought has profoundly influenced
all western civilization for twenty-five hundred years,
and therefore the repulse of the Persians, the spread of
the Greek colonies to the westward, the conquests of
Alexander reaching to the borders of India, which gave
opportunity and scope to Greek culture, were tn the
largest sense decisive events in the history of the world.
Ther© can be no doubt that the battle of Chalons,
which saved western Europ© from th© savage hordes
of Asia, and the battle of Tours, which arrested the
advance of Islam, were in the highest degree "decisive"
events. Seven hundred years ago John of England
signed at Runnymede a certain document known as the
Magna Carta. The last anniversary came m June,
1915, in the midst of the war with Germany, when

200 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
men had no time to give to the celebration of past
events, and yet the signing of the great charter was
quietly but duly and fittingly noticed and commemo
rated, both in England and the United States. Even
tn that hour of perU and confusion people did not for
get what had happened seven hundred years before,
because on that June day a deed was done which has
affected the development of the EngUsh-speaking peo
ple down to the present moment, and thus has been
decisive in world history. The endless and fruitless
wars of England tn her attempt to conquer France,
which fiU the old chronicles, have faded away, and the
signing of a document remains stUl vivid to men. It is
equaUy certain that the voyage of Columbus was an
event, momentous alike to the Old World and the New,
and the great adventurer has two continents as his
monument. I can hear, as I give these few Ulustrations of the
principle I seek to estabUsh, the peevish, meaningless
objection that if MUtiades had not won Marathon, if
Alexander had never existed, if Aetius had faUed at
Chalons and Charles Martel at Tours, if the Barons of
England had not controlled King John, if Columbus
had never reached America, somebody else would have
done aU these things, for the ttme was ripe and they
would surely have come to pass. Envy and jealousy
are not confined to the present. In one form or another
thoy reach across the abysm of time, and no honored
grave is safe from their creeping attack. Moreover, the
hypotheses of history attractive to certain minds are

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 201
often ingenious, occasionally amusing and suggestive,
almost invariably profitless and unremunerative. The
"might hav© beens" have no claim to celebration.
That which alone is entitled to this high honor is "what
was." The actual deed and the men who did the deed
which "breaks the horizon's level Une," not those who
did not do it, even if they thought about it, alone
deserve honor, reverence and commemoration.
Can we, then, justly place what happened here at
Plymouth, and the men and women to whom we owe
the great act, in the smaU, high class of "decisive"
events due to the actual doers of great deeds? Clearly,
I think we can. Jamestown and Plymouth were the
cornerstones of the foundations upon which the great
fabric of the United States has been built up, and the
United States is to-day one of the dominant factors in
the history and in the future of the world of men. The
nation thus brought into being has affected the entire
course of westem civUization, and largely helped to
determine its fate, which, shaken and clouded by the
most desolating of wars, is now trembling in the bal
ance. Saratoga stands with Marathon and Waterloo in
Sir Edward Creasy's book as one of the decisive battles
of the world. There is no need to go further to find
th© meaning in history of what the PUgrims did.
I shall not attempt to rehearse the story of the little
band of men and women who landed here on a Decem
ber day three hundred years ago. It is as familiar to
our ears as a twice-told tale, as ready on our lips as
household words. It has awakened the imagination of

202 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
poet and painter and novelist. It has engaged th©
attention and the research of antiquarians and writers
of history. Societies have been formed to trace out the
descendants of the Pilgrims, and those who can claim
them as ancestors would not change their lineage for
any that could be fumished by th© compilers of
peerages. They were humble folk, for the most part, these
passengers of the Ma-yflower — ^handicraftsmen, fishers,
plowmen, with some wise leaders possessed of educa
tion and who had held established position in their
native land. But the fact is too often overlooked that
these same humble folk were the offspring of a great
period fiUed with the exuberant, adventurous spirit of
youth, moving and stirring in every field of human
thought and human activity. They wer© the contem
poraries of Raleigh, of Shakespeare and of Bacon, and
were the true chUdren of their wonderful age, with aU
its hopes and daring courage strong within thom. W©
know how they started, imbued and upUfted by the
deep resolve to worship God in their own way, which to
them meant more than all th© world beside could offer.
We see them leaving the villages of Yorkshire and East
Anglia, driven back from the shore, arrested, harried by
soldiers, finaUy making their way to HoUand, settling
in Amsterdam and then tn Leyden. A few years pass
in peace and quiet, but the thought that they are losing
their nationality and their language preys upon them,
and they prayerfully and very solemnly determine that
they will preserve these precious possessions by seeking

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 203
a home in the New World, and still keep secure the
opportunity to worship God in the way that is theu-
own. It is a terrifying adventure. Some wiU not face
it, stay behind, ar© absorbed in the population of
Holland, and disappear from history. But others have
a finer courage, and go forth determined henceforth to
fill a place not to be forgotten by coming generations.
Through many difficulties they procure two ships, the
Speedivell at Delftshaven, the famous Mai/flower at
Southampton, and slowly make their way down the
channel to Plymouth. Further delays and obstacles
surround them. The Speedwell is forced to return, and
it is not until September 16, on our reckoning, that the
Ma'y flower sets out alone upon her long journey. Mor©
than two months are occupied by the voyage across the
stormy waters of the North Atlantic and in searching
the coast for a landing. It is the 21st of November
when they disembark at Provincetown. Then comes a
month of exploring the neighboring coast, the signing
of the compact, and the landing which we have elected
to celebrate on December 21. During the shortest days,
at the worst season, on the edge of the unbroken wU
demess they planted themselves by the seaside, and the
great experiment began. Famine and disease met them
at the threshold. Half the people died during that
cruel winter. But they held on, clinguig desperately to
the land which they- had chosen, and the grip then
taken was never broken. Never after that first awful
winter, marked forever by th© clust©ring graves on
Cole's HiU, did they go backward. There was stUl

204 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
much suffering to be endured, many dangers to be
faced, perils from th© Indians, failure of support,
betrayals, even, by those in England who should have
sustained them. But they held on and advanced. It
was a painfuUy slow advance, but always the move
ment was forward. As told in Bradford's truly won
derful journal and in "Winslow's Relation" it is an epic
poem written in seventeenth century English, in the
language of Shakespeare and Milton, because the
authors had no other. For ten years they were' the
only English settlement north of the Ch^apeake, — th^
only settlement in that vast northern region which rose
high above the level of a trading post or fishing sta
tion. They farmed their lands, plowed and fished and
traded; but they also established their church and
worshiped God tn their own fashion, founded a state
and organized an efficient govemment. They were
masters of their fate; they had begun the conquest of
the wildemess; their march was ever onward and their
hold was never relaxed. Ten years passed, and then
in 1629 and 1630 came Endicott and Winthrop to
Salem and Boston. The powerful Puritan organization
with its twenty thousand immigrants in the next
decade had arrived. The perils of Plymouth were over.
Henceforth they were sheltered and overshadowed by
their strong neighbors and friends on Massachusetts
Bay. In 1643 they joined the New England Confed
eration, and their history was merged in that of the
other larger colonies. Before the century closed, the
existing fact was embodied in law, and Pljonouth

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 205
became part of Massachusetts. But what the Pilgruns
had achieved tn those first ten years could never be
absorbed in the work of other men. The deed they
did, the victory they had won alone upon the shores
of New England, stand out monumentally upon the
highway of history for after ages to admire and rever
ence, and it was all their own. I shall say no more at
this point of the Pilgrim of Plymouth as he lived on
earth. I shall not now or later indulge in needless
eulogy, stUl less shaU I seek to draw his frailties from
their dread abode. My only purpose is to try to deter
mine what his history has been since the grave closed
over htm; what he has accomplished among the gen
erations which have followed him.
That which now concerns us most, as it seems to me,
is first, to know what has come from th© work of the
PUgrims who thus influenced history and affected the
fate of western civUization as they fought for life and
struggled forward and suffered and died on the spot we
call Plymouth. Next, and more important, we must
consider just what they were, these Pilgrims, and what
meaning they had for our predecessors and now have
for us. Above aU, let us find out if possible what les
sons they teach which will help us tn the present and
aid us to meet the unperious future ever knocking at
the door. Nations which neglect their past are not
worthy of a future, and those which live exclusively
upon their past have the marks of decadence stamped
upon them. We must look before and after, and from
the doers of high deeds, from the makers of the rare

206 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
events decisive in history, we must seek for Ught and
leading, for help ui facing the known and in shaping
as best we may the forces which govem the unknown.
Before we undertak© to summarize the PUgrims
themselves, and try rightly to judge their qualities of
mind and character, I think we can best open the way
to them and to their meaning to-day by considering
the movement of opinion in regard to them and what
they did. In this way alone, I think, shall we be able
to see them in proper perspective and with a due sense
of proportion.
Th© r©aUzation of the importance of th© PUgrims'
work and of their place in history came but slowly tn
England ; not, in fact, untU Macaulay and Carlyle put
the Puritans into their true "position in the period they
so largely controUed. Yet the Plymouth settlers them
selves had deep down in their hearts a sense of the
magnitude of what they were doing, which is at once
strange and impressive. I must tum as usual to the
imagination of the poet to find fit expression of what
I mean. When Lowell makes Concord Bridge "break
forth and prophesy" he speaks first of the earUest time,
ofthe— Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby bed
Was prowled roun' by the Injun's cracklin' tread.
An' who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants an' pains,
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains.
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain
With each hard hand a vassal ocean's mane.

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 207
There we have in a few noble and echoing words an
arresting impression which seizes upon the attention of
any one who studies carefully the joumals and corre
spondence of the founders of Plymouth. Gradually as
we read there comes sharply outlined before us visible
through the mist of details conceming supplies and
ships, money difficulties and trading ventures, Indians
and the farms and fortunes of the little colony from
day to day, a vivid picture of the "stern men with
empires in their brains." It is not set down in black
and white, but it is clearer than anything else, to thos©
who look into it with considerate eyes, that these men,
the leaders especially, had a profound consciousness
that they were engaged in a vastly greater task than
establishing a colony. They felt in the depths of their
being that they were laying the foundation of an
empire — of a mighty nation. The outlines were all
dim, the detaUs did not exist, but the great, luminous
vision of a picture they would never see was there, and
they beheld it as they gazed upward, looking far
beyond the dark forest, th© unbroken solitude and the
wastes of ocean at their gates. We cannot escape the
beUef that these PUgruns in theu- hearts were confi
dent that, as expressed m the verse of a tme poet ^ of
our own time, what they said and did would yet be
heard "Uke a new song that waits for distant years."
We seem, in the words of their great contemporary
then so recently dead, to catch a glUnpse, in these poor
struggling people of the Mayflower, of—
^ Edwin Arlington Robinson.

208 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
The prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming of things to come.
The vision faded when the pioneers passed away —
the eponymous and autochthonous heroes, as the
Greeks would have called them if they had come up out
of the darkness where myths are bom and history never
written. And there is something besides this dream of empire
which, as we study the ancient faded records, leaps out
like Shakespeare's "golden word" and sinks deep into
our consciousness. This was the quick and strong
attachment of these men and women to the untamed
land which had greeted them so harshly and which
made to them no glittering promises. Why did this
happen? Whence came this feeling for this New
World, as unknown to them as to their ancestors, des
titute alike of traditions and of the tender associations
which bind men to the country of their birth? They
wer© loyal to their race, to their language, to England
and to England's King. But from the first their love
and hope were fastened here in America. The leason
is not, I think, far to seek. They had crossed the ocean
primarily that they might be able to worship God as
seemed best tn their own eyes, but they also meant to
free themselves from the Old World where oppression
had been their portion, and henceforth know no home
but America. They meant to be. Americans, although
they never probably used the word, and to have their
home here and make this country first in their thoughts

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 209
as in their affections. However much they suffered
they seem never to have repined. They meant to leave
England which they loved, and Holland which had so
kindly treated them, and they cast no longing, lingering
look behind. In them we can see that even in those
first bleak years the passion for America had cast out
the passion for Europe, and tn th© process of th© years
grew ever stronger, more compelling, more overmaster
ing, as colonies became states and states a nation, rising
unhelped but surely to the perUous heights of world
power. These deep but unspoken and undefined emotions
and aspirations of the Pilgrims did not sweep on
through the succeeding years with ever-gathering
strength. The waves sank and rose; the halts came in
the onward march as is common in the progress of
forces which must travel far before they ultimately
move the world. This was apparent even in the days
which followed the gradual passing away of th© Pil
grims. Success and security enlarged the daily inter
ests of life, hard and simple as it was; worldly
hopes grew stronger; the children ceased to dream the
dreams or see clearly the visions vouchsafed to their
fathers, — to those who had made existence in America
possible, — but the spirit of the first comers was never
lost, and deep down in their very being guided and led
the succeeding generations.
The hundredth anniversary of the landing came and
went, so far as we can leam, quit© unnoticed and
unmarked. The far-flung aspirations of the beginners

/
210 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
had gone; the backward, penetrating glance of history,
of the seekers of the buried treasures of jihe past, had
not yet come. Half a century more was to elapse
before the fact that here hi Plymouth something had
once happened which merited celebration and made
such demand for the outward signs of remembrance as
to insist upon a visible manifestation. In January,
1769, a club was started by twelve young men of
Plymouth, and in the foUowing Dec©mb©r th©y decided
to have a dinner on December 22 in commemoration
of the landing of the Pilgrims. Accordingly, upon that
day there was a procession, and then a dinner was
eaten and toasts were given tn honor of the leaders
among the founders of the settlement. The following
year, on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the
people here again held a celebration, and this time they
had an oration described in the record as "words spoken
with modesty and firmness" by Edward Winslow, and
there was also a poem by Alexander ScammeU. Thes©
commemorations went on through the years of the
Revolution, until 1780, and then came an unexplained
gap of twelve years until 1793, when the celebration of
the anniversary was again renewed, and continued
thereafter with the omission only of 1799. The cere
monies expanded with th© y©ars, and a discours© by th©
clergyman and an address by some outsider of distinc
tion became recognized accompaniments of the pro
ceedings. Politics entered into the speech making, and
the toasts and the partakers in them made it very clear

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 211
that while they celebrated as Americans they did not
forget that they were also Federalists.
In Boston the commemorations of the Pilgrims sug
gested in 1774 began with a formal and public celebra
tion in 1798. There were an elaborate dinner, a very
long list of toasts, including many which were both
contemporary and political, much speech making, and
an "Elegant and Patriotic Ode" by Mr. Thomas Paine
was duly sung, doubtless with ardent enthusiasm.
From these modest beginnings in Plymouth and
Boston the celebrations of what came to be called
"Forefathers' Day" multiplied beyond enumeration,
following the migrations of the Mayflower descendants
and of the chUdren of New England across the conti
nent, until now tn ever-increasing numbers the anni
versary of the landing in 1620 is marked and celebrated
with each recurring year from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. The deeds of the little band of hunted men
and women who fled from England to HoUand and
thence to the New World have come into their own.
They are, tn the words of Henry V on the eve of Agin
court, "freshly remembered," and have taken a place in
the thoughts of uncounted thousands in a manner per
mitted only to an event decisive in the world's history.
It would be quite impossible to trace or even to count
these endless acts of commemoration, interesting as it
would be to show in this way the development of public
opinion about the results of the Plymouth landing as
the accumulating years made the scattered little settle
ments of the Atlantic coast into a great nation, and

212 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
ever threw into higher relief the achievement of the
followers and companions of Bradford and Winslow.
It would be hardly less impossible to review the
addresses made by well-known men upon the coming
of the Mayflower, and analyze and consider the criti
cal conclusions and the thoughts thus expressed. In
the roll of those who have spoken gravely and seriousjy
about the foundation of Plymouth is included a very
large representation of the men who in our history have
attained high distinction in the pulpit, at the bar, in
literature and in pubUc Ufe. You wUl find there ora
tors and poets, philosophers and historians. Presidents,
Governors of states. Senators and leaders of the House
of Representatives. It is an imposing list not without
significance. Limited by time and space I shall call up
to remembrance only one past celebration and only one
speaker who made that particular day famous, and who
was at once interpreter of the past and prophet of the
future. That occasion and the man who then spoke
stand out very distinctly and very radiantly against
the background of the dead years, charged with much
deep meaning to all who consider them and above all
competitors however eminent.
In 1820, on the two hundredth anniversary of the
landing, Daniel Webster delivered what has always
been known as the "Plymouth Oration." We are apt,
unconsciously I beUeve, in looking backward to the
days which are gone, to think of a century as a whole,
and if we are trying to picture to ourselves at a given
moment a certain man, we are prone to treat him as if

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 213
his life was at that instant complete as we now know
it. If we are to judge rightly and really draw forth the
lesson we perchance are seeking w© must force our
selves to remember just what sort of a world it was at
the historic moment which is in our thoughts, and not
confuse the actors or the occasion with after years
familiar in history to us but an unknown future to
them. The year 1820 began with the death of George III,
an old man, blind, . demented, almost forgotten, a
pathetic figure not without suggestion to the moralist.
He had come to the throne in 1760; he was the King of
the elder and younger Pitt, of the Foxes, father and
son, of Burke and Johnson, of Reynolds and Garrick
and Goldsmith. He was an eighteenth century King.
George IV, of unsavory memory, a child of the
eighteenth century, was King of England when
Webster spoke at Plymouth, and a Bourbon was reign
ing in France as Louis XVIII. Europe just then had
gone back to the old days and the old systems, and the
French Revolution seemed to those in power like an
evil dream. Metternich, at least, and many others
were convinced that the Revolution was a nightmare
which had passed as a watch in the night, and that
everything was henceforth to go on in the good old
way. The successful revolt of the American colonies
had been enacted before their eyes and taught them
nothing. From the uprising of France and from the
Napoleonic wars they had leamed little more, fright
ful as the shock had been, for had they not finally

214 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
defeated Napoleon and crushed democracy at Water
loo? They were unable to see that the faUure of the
French Revolution was only apparent. The force of
the Revolution had passed into the hands of a great
military genius who betrayed its principles and sought
merely to erect on the ruins of the old autocracies a
worldwide despotism of his own. France under
Napoleon went to defeat at Waterloo, but the revolu
tion which France had wrought was not conquered ; the
work the French had done a quarter of a century
earlier could not be undone any more than the Ameri
can colonies could be returned to England. The
Democratic movement was not crushed on the plains
of Waterloo, but was only freed from its most danger
ous foe, bom and equipped in its own household. In
fact, it was the uprising of the people in the countries
conquered by Napoleon which alone enabled banded
Europe to defeat him. Mettemich and his emperors
and kings mistook a luU in the storm for a lasting calm.
They did not realize that they were in the center of
the cyclone, and that the other side must yet be trav
ersed. They found it out in 1830 and 1848, but m 1820
they believed that all was well, and that the old system
would go on better than ever and for an indefinite
period. Had they not established their Holy Alliance
to control aU nations and put an end to every attempt
to assert the rights of the people? They did not under
stand the portents even then to be seen in the world
about them. England in those very years was begin
ning to awaken to the perUs of the AlUance called Holy,

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 215
and was preparing to leave it. Far-away states tn
South America were insisting that they would not
return to the domination of Spain, and presently a
voice was to be heard from the northem continent of
the New World declaring, with England tn fuU sympa
thy, that the Old World was not to control the New.
Very shocking all this to Metternich and PoUgnac and
the Czar of Russia and other right-thinking persons,
and y©t not to b© gainsaid. Still nothing was learned,
and in 1820 th© worst quaUties of the eighteenth cen
tury seemed to have returned to power.
In that same year, moreover, no alterations of deep
effect upon the daily affairs of men had yet arrived. A
little steamboat had made its way up the Hudson ; oth
ers were appearing, but sails stiU carried the world's
traffic over the wide oceans. The first operating steam
railroad was stUl ten years in th© future, and twenty
years were to elapse before the coming of the telegraph,
— the two discoveries which were to make a greater
change in human environment than anything which
had happened since the wheel, the hollow boat and the
alphabetical signs for language had broken upon the
world of men. People still relied upon horses and upon
the winds for travel, and upon written letters for com
munication when separated. The modes and habits of
life were still substantially the same as in the colonial
days, and change is finally brought home to men only
when it actually touches the routine and habits of
their daily lives. As its restorers conceived it, the
eighteenth century was reaUy dead, but the outside

216 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
manifestations which belonged to it were as yet unal
tered, and it was with an eighteenth century atmos
phere about him that Webster rose to speak at
Plymouth, as much so as the coach which had brought
him to his destination was a vehicle of the same period.
Stage coach and atmosphere were aUke on the very
verge of disappearance; only ten years separated them
from George Stephenson's raUroad and from certain
July days of 1830 in Paris, which Sir Walter Besant
declared marked the real ending of the previous cen
tury, although the calendar had disposed of it long
before. But calendars are arbitrary things and do not always
register all the facts correctly. It is with the real, the
underlying conditions that we are concemed when we
try to revive the bygone scene witnessed in Plymouth
in 1820 in order that we may see with the eyes of
imagination the man who made that particular anni
versary memorable.
The people who gathered here to listen to the orator
of the day did not look upon the Webster so famUiar
to us, who looms so large during the succeeding thirty
years of the country's history. In 1820 Webster was
only thirty-eight years old. He stood before his audi
ence tn the very prime of his early manhood. The
imposing presence, the massive head, th© wonderful
voice, the dark, deep-set eyes buming, as Carlyle said,
with a light like duU anthracite furnaces, the mouth
"accurately closed," were then as they were to the end
arresting, and held the attention of aU who looked and

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 217
listened. But the face was still smooth, the deep lines
and tragic aspect of the latest portraits were lacking.
The hope of unaccomplished years
Seemed large and lucid round his brow.
But they were "unaccomplished years," and one
can not help wondering how many then present ©ven
dimly guessed what he who spoke to them was to be,
and to what heights he was destined to climb. In 1820
his public life had consisted of four years' service as
member of Congress from New Hampshh-e, service dis
tinguished but iiot extraordinary. He had removed to
Boston and there begun his practise at the bar of
Massachusetts. His second period in the House, his
long years tn the Senate, his service as Secretary of
State were aU in the future. Ten years were to pass
before he reached his zenith in the reply to Hayne, —
one of those rare speeches which has become an insep
arable part of a nation's history. The speech to the
jury in the White murder case was yet to be made, and
that which he was to deliver at Plymouth was the first
of the occasional addresses which so added to his fame,
and which generations of schoolboys were fated to
recite. In his profession alone had he already given
absolute proof of his future eminence. His argument
in the Dartmouth College case had put him in th© front
rank at the American bar, but the world at large prob
ably had Uttle knowledge of the closing sentences of
that argument, which must have revealed to those who
heard htm and to th© few outsiders of penetrating and

218 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
critical judgment that a great orator as well as a great
lawyer was before them. If the Pljnnouth audi©nc© did
not understand, and it was hardly possible that they
should, that they were about to hear one of the great
orators of aU time they must have suspected, when
Mr. Webster closed, that they had Ustened to an
unusual man making a speech quite beyond anything
they had ever heard before..
We do not need to criticize or analyze the speech, —
the Plymouth oration, to use the old-fashioned and
more sonorous words. All that concems us is to learn,
if we can, Webster's attitude of mind in 1820, and what
meaning the anniversary had to him, representing as he
did th© best thought of the tim©. L©t m© quot© to you
without any apology the fine and stately sentences
with which he closed, for they ar© addressed directiy
to us, and it is for us to mak© reply. Her© is his
peroration: —
The hours of this day are rapidly flying, and this occasion
will soon be passed. Neither we nor our children can expect
to behold its return. They are in the distant regions of
futurity; they exist only in the all-creating power of God,
who shall stand here a hundred years hence to trace, through
us, their descent from the Pilgrims, and to survey, as we
have now surveyed, the progress of their country during the
lapse of a century. We would anticipate their concurrence
with us in our sentiments of deep regard for our common
ancestors. We would anticipate and partake the pleasure
with which they will then recount the steps of New Eng
land's advancement. On the morning of that day, although
it will not disturb us in our repose, the voice of acclamation

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 219
and gratitude, commencing on the Rock of Plymouth, shall
be transmitted through millions of the sons of the Pilgrims,
till it lose itself in the murmurs of the Pacific seas.
We would leave for the consideration of those who shall
then occupy our places some proof that we hold the blessings
transmitted from our fathers in just estimation; some proof
of our attachment to the cause of good govemment, and
of civil and religious liberty; some proof of a sincere and
ardent desire to promote everything which may enlarge the
understandings and improve the hearts of men. And when,
from the long distance of a hundred years, they shall look
back upon us, they shall know, at least, that we possessed
affections, which, running backward and warming with
gratitude for what our ancestors have done for our happi
ness, run forward also to our posterity, and meet them with
cordial salutation ere yet they have arrived on the shore
of being.
Advance, then, ye future generations! We would hail
you, as you rise in your long succession, to fill the places
which we now fill, and to taste the blessings of existence
where we are passing, and soon shall have passed, our own
human duration. We bid you welcome to this pleasant land
of the fathers. We bid you welcome to the healthful skies
and the verdant fields of New England. We greet your
accession to the great inheritance which we have enjoyed.
We welcome you to the blessings of good govemment and
religious liberty. We welcome you to the treasures of
science and the delights of learmng. We welcome you to
the transcendent sweets of domestic life, to the happiness of
kindred, and parents, and chUdren. We welcome you to the
immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal
hope of Christianity, and the light of everlasting truth!
Across the century comes to us the voice which so
moved and charmed those who heard it. The appeal is

220 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
to us, to the Americans who are now here upon the
earth, and to no others. What have we to say in
answer? What message do Webst©r's words convey to
us? What meaning did he find tn th© work of the Pil
grims, and how did he interpret their simple and mo
mentous story? How far do w© go with him, wh©r© do
our tim© and belief agree, and wher© do they contrast
with his? What message does the Mayflower with its
precious freight bring to us, and what help can it give
us when, like Webster, we bequeath th© n©xt century
to those who come after us? Let us in our own way
try as best we may to make reply.
That which strikes us most forcibly is that Webster
standing here in the still lingering atmosphere of the
eighteenth century, and with an eighteenth century
background, speaks throughout with the voice of the
nineteenth century. The dominant note of th© whol©
address is of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth
century spirit pervades aU he said, and the great char
acteristic of that spirit was in varying forms the belief
in progress, in the perfectibUity of man. With all he
says of the Pilgrims we are in full accord. We can add
nothing to the splendor of his praise, we assuredly
would take nothing from it. But tn the very beginning
of the sentences I have quoted he speaks of surveying
the progress of the country as the uppermost thought.
We must not forget that the idea of the continuous
progress of man was then very recent, and we must
carefuUy remember to draw the distinction which
Webster failed to draw between th© gen©ral recognition

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 221
of th© historic fact of progross famiUar to antiquity and
th© idea of progress as a law governing humanity and
constantly operatmg until the race should have van
ished and the earth grown cold. The fact of progress
is one thing, the law of progress is quit© anoth©r and
very different. A volume would be needed to set fortii
the arguments and subtle distinctions of the specula
tive thinkers, philosophers and men of science tn th©
eight©©nth century who graduaUy developed the idea
of progress as a law. Not untU the latter part of that
century were the conception and the law reaUy formu
lated, and even then they were by no means perfected.
The most striking point in Webster's peroration was his
appeal to posterity, because the care for posterity was
one of the last propositions added to the law of prog
ress, and yet it was the capstone of the edifice, since
the law if it existed was inevitably altruistic, and was
chiefly and necessarUy concemed with future genera
tions. This in itself shows how completely the idea of
a law of progress and a beUef tn the evolution of man
kind had either consciously or unconsciously taken pos
session of Webster's mind and heart. Not historic
progress, nor material progress, nor progress in knowl
edg© alone, but political, moral, spiritual and inteUec
tual progress, aU thes© and more, were included tn the
idea of human progress which did not perish at Water
loo, but was fated to be th© ruling principi© of the ntne-
te©nth century, the spirit of th© century just ended,
and of which we must give an account as Webster
demand©d. We can see now the beautiful vision

222 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
gleammg through the red mists of the French Revolu
tion, and behold it shining forth in the poems of
SheUey. An exUed victim of poUtical intolerance, h©
wrote: —
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return.
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
SheUey was influenced, no doubt, by the Greek the
ory of retuming cycles of civiUzations rising to great
heights only to decay and fall. But non© th© less noble
is the expression he here gives to the spirit which
neither the English reaction, nor the genius of Napo
leon, nor the battle of Waterloo could crush or extin
guish. By its very nature it was able to survive defeat
because it inevitably carried optimism with it, and it
could not fail to appeal to masses of men who knew
nothing of detaUs, but who were moved by a doctrine
which awakened hope for better things in a none too
cheerful world.
Webster's Plymouth oration is optimistic through
out. It is instinct with the spirit of the nineteenth
century; with the conception of progress as it was
finaUy perfected in the coming years. The only cloud
that Webster sees on the horizon is slavery, which is
described with aU the power of his eloquence in the
most famous passage of his speech. He saw plainly
and with statesmanlike prevision th© p©ril involved in

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 223
slavery which threatened the futur© of his country, and
h© app©al©d to th© spirit of th© ag© agamst it. Even
he could not guess that the spu-it of the age would
finally remove this curse from the land tn a way which
above all others he dreaded, and which darkly over
shadowed his,closmg years. But this was th© only black
spot in th© pictur©, and it is not surprising that, as he
portrayed the early days of privation, suffering and
struggle, reviewed the growth of the colonies, depicted
the glory of the war for indep©ndenc©, and drew the
contrast with the young nation before him advancing
over the continent with leaps and bounds, his pride as
an American should hav© ris©n and his confidence in
the future have become unrestrained. For thirty mem
orable years he was to play a larg© part in th© history
of his time, and we to whom he appealed in 1820 can
look back not only upon those years, but upon many
more which have come and gone since he died at
Marshfield. We can judg© how far his hopes have beeii
fulfilled, and inquire, befor© we attempt to bring the
Plymouth landing into relation with our own pr©s©nt
and futur©, what th© spirit of th© ag© with which Web
ster was imbued has achieved as it has passed on across
th© hundred years which separate us from him when tn
1820 h© spok© here at Plymouth.
Every century, apparently, has a poor opinion of its
immediate predecessor. The generations which began
with the nineteenth century and those which came up
in it, growing with its growth and strengthening with
its strength, were unsparing in condemnation of all

224 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
things pertaining to the eighteenth. To the Uberal and
the reformer the century which gave us our independ
ence seemed a period of oppression and wrong, of tiie
government of kings and oligarchies. It was a time
when there were no popular ri^ts, and when men per
secuted in the name of a religion in which many of the
persecutors had themselves ceased to believe. Its heirs
declared that it was an immoral age sociaUy and poUti
cally, and the altruists that it was heartier and selfish.
Carlyle held a protracted commination service avec its
remains, although he was anything but a worship^" of
his own ttme. He set the fadiion for many lesser msi,
and the poor eighteenth century had no fri^ids. The
romantic movement swept the eifteenth century litCT-
ature into the dust heaps, and treated its architecture
with the same contempt which the eifteenth century
itself had shown to Hie Gothic buildings which they
spoke of as the work of barbarians. Horace Walpole,
eighteenth centuiy to the backbone, was looked upon
tn his own day as a mere eccentric because he admired
and imitated Gothic architecture, and wrote Hie first
fantastic and wildly romantic story whidi obtained a
wide celebrity. Even the fumiture of our great-gnaid-
fathers was broken up or hidden in garrets and kitdi-
ens, and if kept in use at aU it was only with an apology
on account of sentiment.
Yet even before a himdred years had passed men
began to see that as in other portions of human his
tory there was something to be said for this decried and
much abused period whidi had ^ven to the world,

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 225
among others, George Washington and Benjamin
FrankUn. Was it not, after aU, the century of the
successful revolt of the American colonies which began
the democratic movement; of the thinkers and philoso
phers who were graduaUy evolving and formulating the
law of progress which was to rule in the approaching
years ; of the French Revolution which set nations free
and broke beyond repair th© despotisms large and small
which held Europe in their grasp? Was it not the era
of Voltaire and Rousseau and the encyclopedists, who,
whatever we may think of them individuaUy or of their
characters and methods, fought against intolerance and
for the freedom of thought and conscience? Eighteenth
century literature is now reassuming its proper place.
Its art is once more prized and valued, its furniture is
tr©asur©d; fine examples of it ar© almost pricetess, and,
without sacrificing our profound admiration of th©
wondrous art of th© medieval buUders of cathedrals, we
have readopted the architecture of the Louis and the
Georges with all its classic forms as that best suited in
taste and construction to the needs and desu-es of mod
ern Ufe.
Now, mdeed, are the tables tumed. The nineteenth
century at this moment appears to be sadly out of
fashion. There seems to be non© so poor as to do it
roverence. It does not even awaken th© vigorous hos
tility which our grandfathers and fathers show©d to th©
eighteenth century; it is satirized, laughed at and
d©rid©d. Its furniture, the exponent of domestic taste,
is absolutely scorned, quite justly, no doubt, for a wider

226 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
knowledge condemns it on general principles, and even
sentiment cannot defend it. Its art is likewise banned
as entirely beyond excuse, although it is not weU to be
too wholesale and to forget the Barbizon school and
some of the romantics and pre-Raphaehtes. The nine
teenth century Uterature fares Uttle better. Its hold
upon the people and upon the affections of the great
mass of those who read can not be shaken, but that is
set down by advanced persons as a proof of popular
ignorance. The critics who dread above all things not
to be thought modem, and who are quick to mistake
the chirp of the cricket for the song of the birds, those
who can not hear —
. . . the bards sublime;
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of time
have only a sneer, or words of pity or patronage, for a
century which began with Coleridge and Wordsworth,
BjTon and Shelley and Keats, and included in its
course Victor Hugo, Emerson and Clough, Tennyson,
Browning and Swinburne, Poe and Whitman. They
are disposed to spare the last two because they are
pleased to think one decadent and the other amor
phous, but there is Uttle mercy for the rest. They
remember very vividly the deplorable ultra Victorian
Une at the end of Enoch Arden —
. . . the little port
Had never seen a costlier funeral.

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 227
and forget that the same great poet wrote "Ulysses"
and "The Lotus Eaters" and "In Memoriam" and
"Maud," which wiU remain in aU then- beauty whUe
EngUsh poetry exists. And some of the poetasters of
the day foUow suit and joni the cry. They despise
form, for, if they accept the forms and standards con
secrated by the genius of men from the beginning of
literature, they would not write at all, and formless
ness is their chief reliance, because in this way they
can best startle, shock or amaze, and thereby draw an
attention otherwise lacking. It is not that they pro
duce new forms, ever to be welcomed and studied, but
that they reject aU forms, and this it is which makes
them such severe judges. If we turn to the realm of
fiction it must be remembered that the nineteenth cen
tury was the age of Jane Austen and the Waverley
Novels, of Dickens and Thackeray and Hawthorne, to
mention only a few of those who stand out as most
purely and conspicuously the representatives of then-
time. They had theu- defects easily to be discovered
and pointed out, but they added to the world of
imagination a host of men and women, the creations of
their genius, who wiU ever be the undying companions
of men, and keep their place with those whom Shake
speare and Cervantes gav© th© world to help and to
rejoice humanity. In France it was the age of Balzac,
and it is difficult to conceive what modem French Uter
ature would have been in the field of fiction without
that mighty genius, or what a deduction there would

228 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
have been made from human happiness if we had
been deprived of Chicot and the Three Musketeers.
I do not say this word in defense of the century in
which a large part of the Uves of many of us have been
passed because I desire to be laudator temporis acti,
a role pecuUarly distasteful to me. On the contrary, i
I eamestly wish to —
Keep the young generations in hail.
And bequeath them no tumbled house.
The first step for those who come after us, and who
wiU, I trust, do better than we have done in our ttme,
with the coming century which wUl be theirs, is to
appraise with justice and discrimination the preceding
period to which they are the heirs. To consider the
near past without prejudice is essential to the success
of those who Uve in the immediate present and are to
be the trustees and guardians of the closely approach
ing future.
I have used Uterature and art in their varied forms
merely for iUustration and as a plea for moderation
when the preceding centuiy is led out for execution.
But there are more serious questions and also far
deeper meanings in the great century which has so
recently gone. We may reject at once the idols of that
period, apparent respectabihty and the steadfast ignor
ing of anything which by any stretch of the imagina
tion could be caUed improper or coarse or indeUcate.
These Umitations upon art and literature were both
regarded as fetishes, and they often injured great work

THE Pil.GRJMS OF PLYMOUTH 229
and laid tho time open to thc charg© of being given to
cant, an accusation unhappily not witiiout foundation.
But none of thoHo things affect mainrially or even
touch the deep underlying principio which dominated
the nineteenth contury and which still has a command
ing influence upon the minds of men, especially and
naturally in America. The spirit of the nineteenth
century was belief in progress. "Always toward per
fection is the mighty movement," said Herbert
Spencer, who asserted that progress was a universal
law, and the Darwinian theory was held to be the scien
tific demonstration of its immutabiUty. As th© cen
tury passed on the perpetual progress of man was con
fused with tho material dovclopment of th© time.
Material progress has in truth gono far beyond any
thing which Webstor predicted or even dreamed to be
possible. Steam, electricity and th© unresting labors
of applied and mechanical science have utterly changed
tho conditions of man's lifo on eartii. In the last fifty
years there has been a more profound alteration in
human environ mont, a greater difference created, than
in all the centuries which elapsed between Marathon
and Gettysburg. Wealth was torn from the earth with
a speed which was stupefying; industty marvelously
expanded; transport and communication well-nigh
annihilated distance; and fortunes were piled up which
went fnr beyond tiio wildest dreams of avarice. The
teachings of tiio Manchester school discovered the reign
of universal peace in a trade formula, and the fevered
search for quick profits and unlimited money all

230 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
pressed the spirit of progress down toward a cash basis.
But these were but the regioii clouds passing over
the essential spu-it of the age, which was th© beUef that
the movement of mankind was ever upwards and on
wards; that men would continuaUy rise "on stepping
stones of their dead selves to higher things." This
was the spirit which both in England and the United
States turned the thoughts of men and women to the
conditions of labor and of the poor, and started the
movement for their improvement with the factory acts,
— a movement of altruism which has gone on with
gathering force from that day to this, and the benefi
cence of which is even yet far from exhausted. It was
the spirit which convinced men that human slavery
was a hideous anachronism, and which inspired the
great conflict that tn the Civil War in the United
States preserved the Union, removed the darkest stain
upon western civilization, and widened the area of free
dom. It was the spirit which brought the resurrection
and liberation of Italy, and forced the establishment
of constitutional govemment in many countries where
the rights of the people wer© as yet unknown. The
men of 1848 believed that if you could give every man
a vote, an opportunity for education, set men free, and
call the government a repubUc, aU would be right with
the world. We know now that there is no such panacea
for human ills. We are well aware that the Uberation
of political development was only a limited phase of
advance toward a better world. The sciences of
anthropology and of archeology, th© study in all forms

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 231
of man as distinguished from men, the relentless
research of history, have revealed the astonishing per
manence of human nature and human desires. There
have been made painfuUy clear to us the racial and
climatic, anatomical and physical differences among
men, thus demonstrating the existence of conditions
which make social development seem as slow, ahnost,
as the operation of geologic changes in the earth's sur
face. We have leamed in a measure that the reforms
and advances which laws can bring to pass are so smaU
that we can only with difficulty realize that they all
help, and that every little rivulet goes to sweU the
mighty stream, even as the slow processes of time and
nature wear down the primeval rocks and transform
the outlines of continents. The theories of Buckle
have faded even from the memories of men, and no
one now imagines that by environment and education
a Hottentot can be turned into an Englishman. We
are graduaUy learning not to confuse knowledge with
original thought. That we vastly surpass our ances
tors, near or remote, in knowledge is beyond question,
but there is no evidence that we have better brains or
greater unassisted inteUectual power. We need take
but one famous example from recorded history to
prove this. No one would be bold enough to assert
that we have ever produced men of greater intellect, or
with a larger native strength in origuial thought, than
the race who gav© us Democritus of Abdera, originator
of the atomic theory; Thales, who laid the foundations
of geometry upon which EucUd built; Plato and Aris-

232 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
totle, who have influenced the thought of western
civilization and permeated the theology of both Chris
tianity and Islam. All was the result of their own
original thought unaided by accumulated knowledge,
unhelped by any instruments or mechanical devices, —
all the work of pure reflection and sheer mental
strength. These men I have mentioned are only four
in the great group of Greeks who, , especiaUy in the
Periclean age, carried every form of pur© thought as
w©U as all the arts, painting, sculpture, poetry aud the
drama to a point that, it may fairly be said, has not
been surpassed in aU the triumphs of the centuries since
the Renaissance. Thus history has shown that in the
power and native strength of the human mind there
has been no advance, although heaped-up knowledge,
greatest of instruments, which has gone beyond all
imaginings, is so often wrongly intermingled with our
estimates of the unassisted human inteUect. And yet
all this did not touch the heart of the question or the
faith in progress which inspired Webster. He beUeved
that he found in the PUgrims of Plymouth as he
recounted their history a complet© harmony with the
spirit which he represented, and which was to govern
and direct the century which lay before him. History
has shown, indeed, that he expected too much; that
the men of the nineteenth century thought they could
at once effect changes which reaUy might require ages
for their fulfilment; that they neither completely
understood the lessons of th© past nor perceived the
limitations which the laws of nature set to the possible

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 233
accomplishment of their own brief Uves. But the cen
tral point was not reached. If it became clear that
proof of a law of progress was lacking, it seemed to
them equaUy obvious that there was no evidence of
the negativen— nothing to show that the progress of
mankind in aU directions might not continue. What
ever criticisms might be made, whatever limitations
discovered, deep down at the very bottom was the fact
that they were the exponents of a noble ideal which
was in its essence nothing less than faith in the destiny
of man.
So the century swept on and we are its chUdren.
It brought us to the point where the extended appli
cation of international arbitration, the conventions of
Geneva and of The Hague, mad© strong the hope that
there could be no more great wars, and seemed at least
to assure us that if any wa^ unhappily should come,
then such limitations had been estabUshed and such
agreements made that the worst horrors of war would
be either avoided or mitigated. These hopes, these
dreams, if you wUl, filled the minds of men. Then
suddenly, without waming, there broke upon the West
ern World the greatest and the worst war ever known
in a recorded history of six thousand years which had
been fiUed with wars. Not only was it the greatest of
wars, but when it came the powerful conventions of
society, the comfortable fictions of daUy existence, were
rent and flung aside, and primitive man, even the sav
age of the Neanderthal period, began to show himself
lurking behind the demure figure of nineteenth cen-

234 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
tury respectability. The difference was that the primi
tive instincts and passions were now equipped with aU
the methods of destruction which the latest and most
advanced science could fumish. Germany had carried
her purely materiaUstic conception of organization at
home and dominion abroad to the highest point of per
fection. How near sh© came to victory we know only
too weU. She feU upon a world which, except for the
British Navy and the French Army, was unprepared.
Reckless in her strength she finaUy did not hesitate to
invade and trample on the rights of the United States
until she forced us into the field. Her preparation was
marvelously complete, her efficiency unrivaled — and
she failed. AU the nations arrayed against her were
largely under the materiaUstic influences which were
so powerful in that phase of nineteenth century prog
ress, and which had forgotten the real and informing
spirit of the time; confounded material progress with
that of intellect and character, and made the cash basis
loom large upon man's horizon. As DisraeU said,
"The European talks of progress because by the aid of
a few scientific discoveries he has estabUshed a society
which has mistaken comfort for civilization." The
mistake was not confined to Europe, and the confusion
of thought which it impUes both as to science and civU
ization was world-wide. Fortunately, none of the other
nations which fought against Germany was whoUy
under material control. When in presence of a dire
peril their love of independence, of Uberty, of freedom
of thought and of humanity between men and nations

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 235
rose supreme. They preferred to suffer and die rather
than lose these precious possessions, or sink into slavery
and vassalage before a seeker of world dominion. So
inspired they won, and the German scheme of world
conquest went down in ruin.
Now as a result we face an exhausted and ahnost
prostrate world, with suggestions in Asia of world con
quest, while in another region a savage despotism
which has replaced the autocracy of the Czars is threat
ening the destruction of aU civilization. But that
which most concems us here are not th© economic con
ditions, formidable and difficult as those are, or even
the physical dangers which so darken and overcloud
the future. It is in the reahn of ideas that the most
significant manifestations are always to be found as
weU as the solution of the problems, if there be one,
for in the end ideas reign and thought wiU govem the
world. The inaUenable companion of the spirit of progress
— of the law of progress, if there is one, as the nine
teenth century beUeved — ^is optimism, which is not a
system of philosophy, but a state of mind. The hope
for continuous moral and inteUectual progress could
not otherwise exist, but now, bom of the great war and
its legacies, the mental and emotional condition known
as pessimism is rising up, looking us in the eyes and
calling upon us to face the hard facts of history and of
the world about us. Read the books and articles which
are appearing daily in France and Germany and Italy
and you wiU hear tiie note of pessimism ever waxing

236 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
louder and more distiict. If it is said that it could
hardly be otherwise ainong people who have just
emerged from such an awful experience as theirs, one
can only reply that this is their view, and their personal
equation does not alter the fact of their opinion being
as it is.
Turn to Spain, a neutral countrj'^ not ravaged by
war. Recently I read an article by Senor Baldomero
Argente from the Heraldo of Madrid. It begins in this
way: "Faith tn indefinite progress is merely another
way of expressing our Umited vision. We see that the
world has been going forward during our lifetime, and
assume that it wUl continue to do so. But I am con
vinced that our present civiUzation is about to perish
the way earUer civiUzations have perished. Men may
say that then we shaU have a new civiUzation better
and grander than the previous one. But are they sure
that the present civilization is better than the civUiza^
tion which preceded it?" He then goes on to trace the
earUer civiUzations which have risen, flourished and
decayed ; points to the wave of gross materialism now
flooding the world, the restiessness and extravagance
of a civilization rotten to the core; and condudes, after
admitting that a new civUization may arise and fall,
"But the time wUl com© when the people wUl no longer
have the strength to revolt, and the nations of Europe
wUl disappear one after another, never to revive until
after a long night of barbarism." Here is not only a
complete denial of the nineteenth century beUef, but
a profound skepticism as to whether there has been

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 237
any real progress in the past, or that the civiUzation
now tottering is the best. Go to England. There has
recently been published a book by Mr. J. B. Bury,
Regius professor of modem history at Cambridge, one
of the ablest, most learned and most eminent of Eng
lish historians, entitled the "Idea of Progress." At
about the same time and with th© same title appeared
the Romanes lecture by Dean Inge, a briUiant writer
and one of th© most distinguished leaders among the
clergy of the Church of England. Each in his own
way comes to like conclusions. Professor Bury declares
that the search for a law of progress has faUed, and that
the existence of such a law is whoUy unproved; and
Dr. Ing© thinks that the laws of nature neither prom
ise progress nor forbid it, but that assured belief in it
is a nearly outworn form of optimism. Her© from
these two eminent men is a flat negation of what the
nineteenth century devoutly helieved. In our own
country there is a stronger hope in th© popular con
ception of progress, and better apparent grounds for it,
perhaps, than in any other; but as th© months hav©
sUpped by since the war no observant man can deny
that tiiere is a growing doubt, a rising tide of pessi
mism, among those who think and who are th© first
to see and to weigh th© chances of the future. This
situation, showing so strongly this tendency of thought
in westem civUization, is a very solemn one, not to be
disregarded or lightly brushed aside. Webster tumed
to the great landmark set up by the exUes from Eng
land on this spot in 1620, and as he studied and

238 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
depicted them and thetr deeds he saw nothing but stim
ulation and encouragement, and naught but harmony
with the spirit of progress, — the spirit of his own time
which he so largely embodied and illustrated in after
years. This was the message of the Pilgrims to him and to
his age as they read it. What do they say to us, not
in the dawn of a young hope everywhere for a new
and better world, not in the heydey of the idea of
continuous progress, but after six years of trial marked
by an intensity and severity hitherto unknown, in an
hour of darkness and doubt beset with perUs which no
man can measure or foresee? What meaning have the
Pilgruns to us who have one and all been bred up in
the nineteenth century spirit, who, carried away by
the vast material progress of the past century, for the
most part looking no further than the physical effects
and thinking too Uttle of the higher meanings, now
find ourselves beset by doubts, surrounded by dangers,
and with the theory of life which seemed so fixed and
permanent trembling tn the balance? What has the
foundation of the new Plymouth, so full of the inspira
tion of hope to Webster and his time, to say to us as
we look about us in this troubled and desolated world?
As the little group of men and women who gathered
here tn 1620 stand out before us very luminous in the
pages of history they have a stem, an auster©, look,
du© perhaps in a measure to our own consciousness of
what they believed and what they suffered and did.
No doubt they .lived and toiled and loved and married

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 239
and were given in marriage and met the Uttle events,
hurrying on from day to day, much as human nature in
all ages has commanded. But it is to be feared that
they did not face aU these daily incidents of Ufe with
a smile. To them Ufe was very serious, perhaps a
safer conception than the other extreme, which finds
money and amusement and restless movement the
most desirable objects of existence. But whether light-
hearted or grave, the Pilgrims encountered the de
mands of life with unfailing courage, a quaUty always
essential, never more so than when th© clouds hang
low and th© minds of men are fiU©d with apprehension.
They had a very strong and active sense of pubUc duty.
It is possible that by their example they can on this
point teach us something. Just at present there seems
a great deal of concern about rights, and a tendency
to forget the duties which rights must always bring
with them, and without which rights become worth
less and can not be maintained. They were never so
absorbed in their personal affairs as to forget those
which concerned the public, — the pubUc meaning to
them the entire body of men and women who had come
to the New World together. In this spu-it, before they
founded and established thetr little state, they drew up
and signed the famous compact of the Mayflower —
a very memorable deed, this voluntary act. They com
bined themselves into "a civU body politick," and
agreed to make laws in accordance therewith, and to
those laws and "offices" they promised "all due sub
mission and obedience." It was a very simple Uttie

240 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
statement expressed in very few words. It is quit©
true that all that is vital in the compact may be found
in Robinson's fareweU letter received at Southampton,
or in til© patent itself. The Pilgrims may not have
originated either the words or the principles of the
compact, although the principles embodied were few
and the words not many. But the fact remains that
they had thought enough about govanment to agree
upon these principles and be guided by them. It was
only an agreement, if you please, but they made it.
The act was theirs. They gave Ufe to th© thought.
After aU deductions made, here was a Constitution of
government which is in its essence an agreement among
those who accept it, made by the people themselves, —
an idea which has traveled far and wide, even to the
ends of the earth and around the habitable globe since
the Mayflower lay at anchor off Provincetown. Here,
too, written in this same smaU paper was the proclama
tion of democracy, something which had quite faded
away in Europe, and had never before been declared
in the American hemisphere. The election of munici
pal officers was common enough in England, famiUar
no doubt to all the signers of th© compact. What was
of vital importance and entire novelty was that the
signers of the compact arranged for their rulers and rep
resentatives in a new and unoccupied country. In an
unknown land, with no surrounding pressure from an
established society and an old civiUzation, when each
man could easily have broken away and sought for
Ucense and opportunity to do his own will, especially as

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 241
they had foimded their settlement outside the territo
rial Umits of the patent, they promised to obey the laws
made and accepted by the community. Each and every
man of them sacrificed a part of his own Uberty that all
inight be free. "Liberty," said Georges Clemenceau, a
great man of our own time, "Uberty is the power to dis
cipline oneself," and this was th© spirit which inspired
the Englishmen who signed the Mayflower compact.
No greater principle than this could have been estab
lished, for it is the comer stone of democracy and civUi
zation. They knew that there could be no organized
society unless laws made by the state were obeyed by
all, and this mighty principle they planted definitely tn
the soU of their new country, where it has found its
latest champion tn a successor of Bradford and
Winslow, the present Govemor of Massachusetts.^ It
was their palladium and it must be ours, also, for when
it is reft fixnn any state or nation the end of civilization
tn any form conceivable by us is at hand. The men of
Plymouth thought and thought connectedly about gov
ernment. In their new home they seem to have had,
and very naturaUy, an impulse toward a larger action
by society as a whole, and they tried communism in
regard to land and its development. Their native
caution led them to limit the period of experiment, and
when the time expired they abandoned it. You can
find the storj- told in Bradford. Economically and
socially they decided it to be a failure, an obstacle to
advancement and in conflict with human nature, and
' The Honorable Calvin Coolidge.

242 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
they let it go without a pang. They decided that the
right of man to private property honestly obtained was
essential to social stability and to civilization. As in
very adverse circumstances they managed to succeed,
there is something here worthy of consideration in
these days filled with the noise of destmctive, clamor
ous and ancient remedies for all human iUs.
Some twenty years later they joined the group of
adjacent colonies and formed the New England Con
federation, the first effort in the direction of that Union
of States which was to make the United States and
create a nation continent-wide tn its scope. To have
been the first to proclaim democracy, and one of the
first to engage in the opening attempt to unite scat
tered states in a nation, is an impressive record for
the handful of men and women who landed from the
Mayflower three hundred years ago. The underlying
and the lasting causes which made the action of the
Pilgrims a decisive event in history seem to me as I
enumerate them more than ever to be not what they
did with their ships and farms, their trade and their
fisheries, but with their minds and with their thoughts.
In these days of celebration, when public attention
is strongly drawn to the PUgrims, the voice of detrac
tion is not stilled. There are always people, few hap
pily in number, but very vocal, who cannot bear to
acknowledge greatness, and to whom genius seems an
offense. They seek in Uterature and in history to bring
those whom men reverence and celebrate down to their
own level. They search for the flaws, the errors, the

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 243
shortcomings, and forget that those are not what con
cern us. No one regards the PUgrims as perfect. They
themselves had no such conception. They had a very
deep and intimate conviction of sin. But what mat
ters is thetr greatiiess not their Uttleness. They did a
great deed; there it stands, ineffaceable and beyond
forgetfulness. They fought a good fight; they made
mistakes and some other things besides. They had
strong characters and unyielding courage. They had
deep convictions. They were close kin to Macaulay's
Puritan. "He prostrated himself in the dust before his
Malcer; but he set his foot upon the neck of his king."
Whatever their faUings, however simple, uneducated
and undistinguished the mass of them may have been,
they did a mighty work, and their work Uves after
them. Th© conquerors of untrodden continents, the
founders of great nations, are not so common as unduly
to crowd the highways of history, and when w© meet
with them it is wiser, more wholesome, to venerate
them for what they did than to belittle them because
they were not perfect in aU the detaUs of Ufe demanded
by their critics in the much-abused name of the truth
of history which the Pilgrims would have been the last
to fear.
Yet the greatest of all still remains behind. The
founders of the new Plymouth came here to find free
dom to worship God in then- own way. They sought
to preserve their race, their allegiance to their native
country and their language, but theu- religious freedom
was the primary object to which all material purposes,

244 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
all hope of bettering their worldly condition, were
entirely subordinate. In 1597 some of their forerun
ners petitioned to be aUowed to settle in Canada, and
wished to go because there "we may not onUe worship
God as we are in conscience persuaded by his word but
also doe unto her majestie and our country great good
service." So comes the voice of a quarter of a century
before. Listen now to what Bradford says on the eve
of the final landing, and you feel in every line the great
aspiration of their souls: —
May and ought not the children of these fathers rightly
say: Our faithers ivere Englishmen ivhich caine over this
great ocean, and were ready to perish in this ivilldemess, but
they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voyce, and
looked on their adversitie, etc. Let them therefor praise
the Lord because he is good and his mercies endure forever.
Whatever our beUefs or disbeUefs, here is a very
noble and beautiful spirit, a very fine and lofty courage,
to be reverentially admired of aU men, and which can
never be out of fashion. It matters not whether we
agree with their theology or with thetr forms of Chris
tian worship. That which counted then and has
counted ever since was that they set the spiritual above
the material, the possessions of the mtnd and heart
above those which ministered to the body and made
life easier and more comfortable. They builded herein
better than they knew. The object immediately before
them was freedom to worship God tn their own way
which had been denied to them in their native country.

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 245
That of which they were not conscious was the corol
lary of their great aspiration, when once fulfiUed, that
aU other men must also be free to worship God in their
own several ways. Their powerful neighbors of
Massachusetts Bay, coming with a Uke purpose,
resisted for half a centuiy the inevitable result with all
the fierce energy of eamest men strong both tn charac- '
ter and tnteU©ct, and failed. When the PUgrims
achieved their purpose through much sacrifice and suf
fering they opened the door to the coming of freedom
of conscience, and freedom of conscience meant free
dom of thought upon eveiything within the mental
rang© of humanity. Of aU the possessions painfuUy
won by the race of men throughout the centuries noth
ing approaches either in value or meaning the right of
each and every man and woman to think their own
thoughts in their own way. Can we longer wonder that
the coming of the PUgrims to these shores towers ever
higher as a decisive event tn history, for the battles won
in the fields of thought make aU other battles look
small indeed, as the procession of the centuries moves
slowly by.
Webster saw the greatness of the Plymouth achieve
ment; he saw the progress of the historic world in
things material as weU as in knowledge, and, above all,
he saw the progress which had come in his own land
from the labors, the deeds and the prindples of the PU
grims who set fortii from Leyden. Apparentiy, as I
have already pointed out, he did not see, or if he saw he
did not draw, the distinction between historic progress

246 THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
in arts, science and knowledge and a law of progress
which was to be the fine flower and the overruling influ
ence in the century which he represented and wherein
he was to play so distinguished a part. To the Pilgrims
the very idea of a law of progress was unknown. Even
thetr great contemporary, Francis Bacon, who prepared
the way for it, never accepted or formulated it. But
they faced the world as they found it and did their
best. The sustaining power of th© nineteenth century
which was faith in the continuous progress of mankind
on the earth was not theirs. But whether there is a
law of progress or not these PUgrims of Plymouth
stand forth exemplars of certain great principles which
never can grow old and which can never be of better
service than in days of doubt and trouble such as now
beset the world. On one great point they made then-
meaning clear. They never confused moral and eco
nomic values; they never set material advance above
the higher qualities of heart and mind. They never
for a moment thought that Ufe and its mysteries could
be expressed in economic terms, which seems, if not
actuaUy avowed, to be the tendency among all classes
to-day. They set character first. They reverenced
leaming and did homage to intellectual achievement.
They succeeded marvelously. As w© look at the world
to-day, at what it seeks and what it apparently longs
to be, is there not a great lesson to be leamed and fol
lowed by us as it shines forth in the aspirations and
deeds of these plain people whom here we celebrate?
The wild new land, the unconquered wUdemess which

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH 247
gave them the freedom they sought, seized with sur
prising quickness upon the deepest affections of then-
heart. It seems as if they said that here and not else
where will w© live and strive —
Until at last this love of earth reveals
A soul beside our own, to quicken, quell.
Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift. '
A noble aspiration always, and when the "minous
floods" came, as they did, these Pilgrims stiU pressed
on, won through, and lifted up the cause for which they
came, in the land they had made their own.
In all probability they stiU held to the beUef of the
Ancient World and of the Middle Ages that our minute
planet was the center of the universe, to which, if I
am not mistaken, Francis Bacon, regardless of Coper
nicus, Kepler and GalUeo, stiU adhered. The earth
was all they had, and brief life was here their portion
as it is with us. Yet they did not Uve in vain. They
strove to do their best on earth and to make it, so far
as they could in their short existence, a better place for
their feUow men. They were not slothful in business,
working hard and toUing in their fields and on the
stormy northem seas. They sought to give men free
dom both in body and mind. They tried to reduce the
sum of human misery, the suffering inseparable from
human existence. Whatever our faith, whatever our
beUef in progress, there can be no nobler purposes for
man than thus to deal with the only earth he knows
and the fragment of time awarded him for his exist-

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