' '¦•:, : ,

The old and new century. an address ^efor
New York Historical Society. Nov. 1900.
Rev.Marvin R. Vincent.

E"I give tiefe Books
for- the founding of a Co&gi: ingSf £a$.«jp| J

• iLiiiBiBiranr •

Liorary.

THE OLD AND THE NEW CENTURY.

2ln Mbu%%
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
New York Historical Society
ON .ITS ' '
NINETY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY,
Tuesday, November 20, igoo,
BY
The Rev. MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D.

NEW YORK:
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY.
1900.

THE OLD AND THE NEW CENTURY.

An Address

DELIVERED BEFORE THE

New York Historical Society
ON ITS
NINETY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY,
Tuesday, November 20, igoo,
BY
The Rev. MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D.

NEW YORK:
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY.
1900.

Officers of the Society, 1900.

PRESIDENT,
*JOHN ALSOP KING.
FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT,
J. PIERPONT MORGAN.
SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT,
JOHN S. KENNEDY.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY,
REV. EUGENE A. HOFFMAN, D.D
DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY,
NICHOLAS FISH.
RECORDING SECRETARY,
SYDNEY H. CARNEY, Jr., M.D.
ACTING TREASURER,
JOHN J. TUCKER.
LIBRARIAN,
ROBERT H. KELBY.
* Died November 21, 1900.

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.

FIRST CLASS — FOR ONE YEAR, ENDING 190I.
JOHN A. WEEKES, J. PIERPONT MORGAN
JOHN J. TUCKER.
SECOND CLASS  FOR TWO YEARS, ENDING I902.
F. ROBERT SCHELL. DANIEL PARISH, Jr.,
FREDERIC WENDELL JACKSON.
THIRD CLASS  FOR THREE YEARS, ENDING I903.
NICHOLAS FISH, ISAAC J. GREENWOOD,
FRANCIS H. MARKOE, M.D.
FOURTH CLASS  FOR FOUR YEARS, ENDING 1904.
JOHN S. KENNEDY, GEORGE W. VANDERBILT,
CHARLES ISHAM.
JOHN J. TUCKER, Chairman,
DANIEL PARISH, Jr., Secretary.
[The President, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, and Librarian
are members, ex-officio, of the Executive Committee.]

At a meeting of the New York Historical Society, held
in its Hall, on Tuesday evening, November 20, 1900, to cel
ebrate the Ninety-sixth Anniversary of the Founding of the
Society :
The Anniversary Address was delivered by the Reverend
Marvin R. Vincent, D.D., on "The Old and the New
Century." On its conclusion, Mr. A. V. W. Van Vechten, with
remarks, submitted the following resolution which was
adopted unanimously :
Resolved, That the thanks of the Society be presented to
the Reverend Marvin R. Vincent, D.D., for the learned,
eloquent, and instructive address delivered before the So
ciety this evening, and that a copy be requested for pub
lication. Extract from the minutes. Sydney H. Carney, Jr.,
Recording Secretary.

THE OLD AND THE NEW CENTURY

I must claim your indulgent sympathy this
evening. In these days there is a general pro
test against too little liberty : my embarrassment
comes of having too much. I am like the old
Roman, standing at the golden milestone in the
Forum, with the roads striking out in all direc
tions, for Brundisium, Ancona, Cisalpine Gaul,
Macedonia, and Byzantium, and doubtful which to
take. The officers of your society, in their invita
tion to me, have prescribed no theme and have
imposed no limitations. I am simply turned loose
upon the outbranching highways of a century of
history — a century more pregnant with great
movements, great achievements, and great ideas
than any that has preceded it, and the world is all
before me where to choose. There lie ready to
my hand the history of this Society, the history of
our City, the history of our State, the history of
the United States, and the history of the world ;
and what complicates the matter is, that a speaker
can hardly deal with any one of these without step
ping upon the lines of the others. I am reminded
of Charles Lamb's remark on the occasion of his
emancipation from the India House: "It was like

8 The Old and the New Century.
passing out of time into eternity ; for it is a sort of
eternity for a man to have his time all to himself."
Let me take up the first thing which lies directly
in my path ; the pleasant duty of congratulating
the officers and members of this venerable and
j'ustly honoured society on the completion of nearly
a century of life and fruitful work. It would be
superfluous to dilate upon your services to this city
and to the nation at large. It may or may not be
much for a man or an institution to have lived for
ninety-six years. Age, in itself, is not necessarily
respectable. It does not follow that the signifi
cance of years imparts itself to those who have
lived in them. It is quite possible that they may
have let the years run past them like a panorama,
or over them, like a running stream over stones,
with no result but to wear away the stones. But
ninety-six years, to an institution which has been
an integral part of its age, which has addressed
itself to the solution of its problems, knit itself into
its relationships, and helped to direct its currents
of thought and to work out its ideas — have woven
for that institution a crown of honour. The long
list of the notable names which figure in your cata
logue is a warrant that you have not been idle nor
insignificant nor useless. You have been distinctly
a force in the culture of this city. You number
among your names those of men who were active
in the achievement of our national independence
and in the framing of our constitution ; and had

The Old and the New Century. 9
you accomplished nothing else, you would be
entitled to lasting remembrance for a century ot
protest and effort against that state of things so
tersely characterised by Thucydides, where he
says : " So little trouble do men take in the search
after truth : so readily do they accept what first
comes to hand."
Your own archives, so laboriously amassed and
so carefully classified, offer to a speaker a most se
ductive temptation to indulge in gossipy details
and contrasts, with only a small part of which it
would be easy to consume the whole evening.
This temptation I shall resist ; but it will none the
less be helpful if we orient ourselves by noting a
few salient facts.
It is Friday evening, November 20, 1804. Elev
en gentlemen assemble in the picture-room of
the City Hall in Wall Street, and agree to form
themselves into a society, the principal design of
which shall be to collect and preserve whatever
may relate to the natural, civil, or ecclesiastical
history of the United States in general, and of this
State in particular. At an adjourned meeting on
Monday evening, December 10th, the constitution
of the New York Historical Society is reported
and adopted. On January 14, 1805, the first
meeting is held, and the society is fully organised.
Thomas Jefferson is President of the United States
George III. is on the British throne. It is twenty-
eight years since the Declaration of Independence

10 The Old and the New Century.
was signed, and five years since the death of
George Washington. Seventeen States constitute
the United States of America, the population of
which is between four and five millions.
The city of New York has a population of be
tween sixty and seventy thousand. The majority
of the residents live below Cortlandt Street and
Maiden Lane, and the outside line is a little above
Worth Street. It wants yet eight years to the
completion of the present City Hall, the rear of
which is constructed of brown freestone, under the
impression that it is to be exposed to the gaze of
suburbans only. Washington Square is the Pot
ter's Field, and Columbia College is on the original
site of King's College, between what are now
Church, Murray, and Barclay Streets and College
Place ; or, as Dr. Francis puts it, " Proud of her
healthy and beautiful locality, laved, almost up to
the borders of her foundation, by the flowing
stream of the Hudson." Old Trinity is repre
sented by her second church edifice, erected in
1778, with its modest spire, its long gothic win
dows, and its little domed portico over the main
entrance. It wants yet twenty-one years to the
completion of the Erie Canal. There are no pub
lic facilities for getting out of town and travelling
through the country. The adventurous voyager
must take his life in his hand with his carpet-bag,
and intrust himself to stage-coaches, saddle-
horses, and sloops. Of this latter mode of trans-

The Old and the New Century. n
portation one may get a fair idea from the lively
story of "Dolf Heydegger " by Washington Irving,
who, in 1801, was a youth of seventeen, at 128
William Street. It will be three years before Ful
ton's Clermont will make her first passage up the
Hudson, causing the countryman on the Palisades
to tell his wife that he had seen the Devil on his
way to Albany in a sawmill. Forty years are yet
to pass before Morse will give the world the elec
tric telegraph ; seven years before Colonel John
Stevens will start the first steam ferry to Hoboken;
twenty-one years before Stephenson's first trial
with a locomotive, and twenty-four years before the
first steam railway in America. Napoleon is fast
climbing to the pinnacle of his greatness, and
already the elements are fermenting which are to
evolve the war of 1812.
The contrast with to-day — there is no time and
no need for me to elaborate it. The seventeen
States have become forty-five ; the five millions
have swelled to over seventy-six millions, and the
sixty-five thousand of this city to three and a half
millions. We have more than eight hundred thou
sand miles of telegraph ; we go from New York
to San Francisco in four days. To quote another's
words: " With the railroads which have been built,
we could parallel every track in all Europe, and
then have enough over, if we could use the equa
tor for a road-bed, to girdle the earth." The
progress in invention, education, manufactures.

1 2 The Old and the New Century. ,
luxury, art, literature, you must trace for your
selves. We stand on the borders of the new century
with a marvellous equipment. May it not be fairly
assumed that we have, to a great extent, outgrown
that earlier and crude stage in which we were
given to boasting of bigness and smartness, to re
garding older nations with pity or contempt, and
our democracy as a completed and successful exper
iment ? It seems to me that the conviction has
more than dawned that our work is only begun,
and that, while the future may enfold higher devel
opment and larger achievement, it also enfolds
problems, some of which have already given sig
nificant hints of themselves, and which, in their
magnitude, their reach, and the number of new
factors they involve, will tax to the utmost the
wisdom of those in whose hands their solution
shall lie. It seems to me that, at the gate of the
new century, we can hardly fail to realise that we
ourselves, in our own rapid and enormous growth,
have created new necessities which we must meet,
new questions which we must answer, and new and
colossal difficulties with which we must grapple.
It is the best of all auguries for the future if we
have put away our youthful vanity, and have grown
humbler. The Old and the New Century. — Is it possible
to characterise each briefly and comprehensively ?
It is not so easy as is often supposed, to throw

The Old and the New Century. 13
history into clearly defined periods and to draw
sharply the lines of cleavage between them. The
Oxford historian, the late Edward Freeman, was
wont to protest vigorously against the popular di
vision of history into ancient and modern, and to
declare that he had never been able to find out the
difference between the two, nor where ancient his
tory ends and modern history begins ; and Thomas
Arnold was right when he claimed that what is
called ancient history is the most truly modern, the
most truly living, and the most rich in practical
lessons for every succeeding age.
We may indeed throw history roughly into di
visions, in each of which some particular idea
or aggregation of ideas takes definite shape, and is
worked out wholly or in part, and we may denote
the century by the idea ; but the fact remains
that the ideas of successive periods overlap
in their development, and that those ideas which
burst into flower in one period, and which we seize
upon as characteristic, have been fermenting and
germinating in preceding periods, and put forth
new branches and yield new fruit in those which
succeed. It may be correct to say, in a general
and superficial way, that the protest against relig
ious hierarchy and the rise of religious liberty are
characteristic of the sixteenth century, or that the
eighteenth century is the century of social and phil
osophic liberty and illuminism : but the protest
against Hildebrandism began long before the six-

14 The Old and the Neiv Century.
teenth century, and the spirit of Rousseau, Vol
taire, and Diderot was astir in Abelard.
Guarding ourselves at this point, it may suffic
iently serve our present purpose to describe the
old century as a century of demolition and ac
quisition, and to say that, with the new century,
we are entering more definitely upon a period of
construction. As to demolition, we had, in the beginning, for
eign tyranny to break down ; we have had slav
ery to abolish ; we have had to destroy or sur
mount the physical obstacles to free intercourse ;
we have had to overcome the secrecy and obsti
nacy of the rocks, and to make them give up their
gold and silver ; we have had to overcome ignor
ance and the conceited reluctance of a young na
tion to learn from older and riper civilisations ;
we have had to assail, we have not yet demol
ished, the barrier of race-prejudice.
As to acquisition, we have acquired vast wealth,
and at a phenomenal rate. In the thirty years
from i860 to 1890, notwithstanding the enormous
drain created by the civil war, we created and
accumulated forty-nine thousand millions of dol
lars, a thousand millions more than the entire
wealth of Great Britain, and the increase has been
at a larger rate since 1890. From a borrowing
nation we have become a lending nation. In
1898-99 our exports exceeded our imports by five
hundred and thirty millions of dollars, and our

The Old and the New Century. 15
manufactured products have more than doubled in
the last six years. We have travelled extensively,
and have brought back from the old world far
more than an acquaintance with picture galleries
and cathedrals. Our eyes have been opened to
the fact that older civilisations have much to teach
us in the art and economy of living, and that they
had made great and serious experiments in gov
ernment, had profoundly studied political philoso
phy, had elaborated educational systems, had. de
veloped the science of war and achieved lasting
triumphs in art and literature, before Columbus
attempted the Atlantic with his caravels. We
have acquired the arts of luxury, and a large
share of education and literary culture. We go
into the new century with political independence,
with religious liberty, with a vast system of popu
lar education, with an imposing array of churches,
schools, and charitable institutions ; with a re
cognised supremacy in agriculture and in certain
branches of manufacture ; with a prodigious de
velopment of inventive talent ; with an imposing
array of facilities for travel ; with a vast com
mercial system, and with a growing and highly
scientific apparatus for war. We have silenced
the sneering question, "Who reads an American
book ? " In medical science, in chemistry and
physics, in theology and Biblical criticism, the
works of our specialists challenge the attention of
European scholars. We have occupied and culti-

1 6 The Old and the New Century.
vated a vast area of new territory, and have
developed immense mining and agricultural re
sources, and have acquired important dependen
cies in the Pacific and in the Caribbean Sea.
I repeat, we have been principally occupied dur
ing the past century in amassing these things, and
in breaking down the obstacles to acquisition.
We have proved our ability to deal with the obsta
cles and to reap the fruits of energy, enterprise,
and inventive skill. But the significant question
which confronts us at the gate of the new century
is, " What next ? " What are we going to do with
it all ? What are we going to make out of it ?
How are we going to make it all tributary to the
evolution of the ideal commonwealth — the consum
mate embodiment of the principle of constitutional
liberty? It is surely neither invidious, pessimistic,
nor un-American to assume that this consummation
is yet in the future. You recall, perhaps, the
words of Mr. Bryce : "I have seen the latest ex
periment which mankind have tried, and the last
which they can ever hope to try under equally
favouring conditions. A race of unequalled en
ergy and unsurpassed variety of gifts, a race apt
for conquest and for the arts of peace, which has
covered the world with the triumphs of its sword,
and planted its laws in a hundred islands of the
sea, sent the choicest of its children to a new land
rich with the bounties of nature, bidding them in
crease and multiply, with no enemies to fear from

The Old and the New Century. ij
Europe, and few of those evils to eradicate which
Europe inherits from its feudal past. They have
multiplied until the sapling of two centuries ago
overtops the parent trunk ; they have drawn from
their continent a wealth which no one dreamed of;
they have kept themselves aloof from old-world
strife, and have no foe in the world to fear ; they
have destroyed, after a tremendous struggle, the
one root of evil which the mother-country, in an
unhappy hour, planted among them ; and yet the
government and institutions, as well as the indus
trial civilisation of America, are far removed from
that ideal commonwealth which European philoso
phers imagined, and Americans expected to cre
ate." These are the words of an Englishman, of
a cool, keen, and judicial observer, and of a hearty
friend and admirer. We must, of course, discount
the somewhat rose - coloured description of the
paternal and benignant attitude of England in
sending her children forth to these shores, and bid
ding them increase and multiply, with no enemies
to fear from Europe. This last statement is adapt
ed to provoke a smile, when it is remembered
that England herself was our chief European ene
my, that we had two wars with her, and that
she stabbed us in the back in our great civil con
flict. But setting this aside, are not the words
fair, truthful, and discerning ? We have done
much, but doing and making are not synonymous
terms. We started upon the experiment of de-

1 8 The Old and the Nezv Century.
mocracy under singularly favourable conditions,
and yet, as has been truthfully said, " the plan of
throwing the whole responsibility of government
upon the people themselves was a sublime vent
ure of faith on the part of our forefathers." There
were things which they could not foresee, which
we have seen and are seeing ; and even as the
towering, many-tinted iceberg which lifts its huge
bulk high above the waves, tells the practised eye
that there is still more of it beneath than above the
ocean-floor, so the thoughtful observer of our na
tional life and history detects in what is already
apparent, imposing and brilliant though it be, hints
of larger problems and more vital issues which
have not yet emerged. Is our experiment a suc
cess ? Have we successfully vindicated democracy
as the ideal polity for the future and for the world ?
We were not the first to try the democratic experi
ment. The success of those who tried it before
us was not encouraging. There is no historical
record of any other democracy which lasted for a
hundred years. I am not a pessimist. I am not
boding failure or disaster. I am merely suggest
ing a question which wiser men than I have asked
before. I am asking only that Ave stop and think.
There are political theorists, as you all know, who
maintain that democracy is the child of ignorance,
and must inevitably mean the rule of the worst.
Have we furnished anything going to confirm that
conclusion? Are we able to say to-day, in the

rThe Old and the New Century. 19
light of more than a century of history, that Amer
ican democracy proves that democracy means the
rule of the best and the most intelligent ?
This is an immense question, impossible to treat
satisfactorily within my limits. The most that can
be done is to select some salient points of our
political, intellectual, social, and moral development,
and see what hints they furnish which may pro
voke thought, or hope, or apprehension, or caution.
It should be repeated and emphasised, that the
answer to such a question must take into account
many more factors than those which entered into
De Tocqueville's discussion, some few more per
haps than entered into the more recent and very
remarkable work of Mr. Bryce. It did not prove
an altogether simple and easy matter to organise
and compact an infant people of three or four
millions into a working democracy : what then shall
be said of a people of over seventy-six millions, dis
tributed over an area of three and one-half mill
ions of square miles, lying in different climatic
belts, including an enormous foreign element, edu
cated under different political and social conditions
from our own, freely admitted to a share in
government, and with a voice in the shaping of
our institutions ; in a country representing differ
ent material interests in its different sections, and
open to the possibility of sectional prejudice and
of sectional rivalry ? Is the old machinery ade
quate to the new and heavier strain? Can the

20 The Old and the New Century.
elements over the whole area be made homogene
ous, or at least adjusted in a substantial unity ?
How strong a pervasive power resides in the dem
ocratic leaven ? How strong a solvent is it to dis
integrate or modify foreign elements ? This is the
vast constructive problem which is looming up in
the reddening dawn of the new century — how in
dividual liberty, allowed its full legitimate scope, is
to be run into the mould of a commonwealth in
which the liberty of the individual and the interest
of the body politic shall be in perfect equipoise ; in
which, as De Tocqueville puts it, " All men would
feel an equal love and respect for the laws of
which they consider themselves as the authors ; in
which the authority of the government would be
respected as necessary, though not as divine ; and
in which the loyalty of the subject to the chief
magistrate would not be a passion, but a quiet and
rational persuasion ; in which, every individual
being in possession of rights which he is sure to
retain, a kind of manly courtesy would arise be
tween all classes, alike removed from pride and
servility ; in which the people, well acquainted
with their own true interests, would understand
that, in order to profit by the advantages of soci
ety, it is necessary to satisfy its requisitions." I
may add to this, in which religion shall have a
voice along with political authority, yet neither
religion nor political authority trench upon the
other's province ; in which there shall be ren.

The Old and the New Century. 21
dered unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's,
and unto God the things which are God's.
The factor of this problem which, during the
past century, has been pushing to the front, the
factor which includes and covers a multitude of
smaller factors, is the priiiciple of contact. I use
the word "principle" advisedly, because, in the
whole course of the world's history, no principle
has more persistently and irresistibly asserted
itself. No nation has been allowed to live an en
tirely isolated life, or to develop its own institu
tions without reference to the great body of na
tions. There is, at first view, a superficial denial
of this principle in the structure of physical nature,
in the material separations of mountain and forest
and ocean, and in the fact of distance. A second
denial has asserted itself in the radical differences
of national temperament, habit, and language ; a
third in certain national conceits deeply rooted in
religion or culture. The Hebrew fenced himself
off from the rest of mankind with his religion, the
central idea of which was, that he was selected
by God to be separate and alone ; that his God
was a Jewish God, and that everything that was
not Jewish was contemptible. The Greek styled
every one a Barbarian who was not a Greek.
The Basque, claiming that he spoke the lan-
euag-e which Noah received from Adam, with-
drew to his little nook in the western Pyrenees,
withstood the successive irruptions of Phoenician,

22 The Old and the New Century.
Greek, Egyptian, and Carthaginian, and defied the
power of the Roman Augustus. Yet the Hebrew
race became distributed through the Gentile com
munities, and the Hebrew yielded to the seductive
influence of Greek custom and toned his literature
and his religion into partial accommodation with
Gentile society. Despised and ridiculed by Ro
man poets and satirists, the Roman Empire could
not do without him, and conceded to him privi
leges which it refused to native Roman citizens.
Greece could not evade contact with Rome, and
Rome gave herself up to the influence of Greek
art and literature. Sicily became the meeting-
place of the nations, the battle-field of rival races
and of rival creeds, a point of power for Phoeni
cians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and
Lombards. The Basque threw himself into the
Carlist insurrection and was swept, after all his
years of proud isolation, into the Spanish mon
archy, compelled to endure the presence of Span
ish garrisons in his towns, and to substitute the
Spanish language for his own in his schools.
These are only a few of the illustrations of his
tory's emphatic assertion that it is not good for
nations any more than for men to be alone. His
tory is a series of shocks, signalising the rupture
of natural and artificial barriers between men and
races. The idea of the race being more than the
individual, of the individual reaching his real con
summation in the race, expands naturally and nee-

The Old and the New Century. 23
essarily into the idea of the individual state or race
realising its true and highest destiny in the com
munity of races and states. That idea underlies
alike the philosophy of history and Christianity
which is, before all else, a social system. The
educative power of contact and social attrition is
no mere matter of theory. It is illustrated and
enforced, alike in the history of nations and of in
dividuals ; of literary culture and of religion. It is
assumed in the very existence of the science of
international law.
We may not always approve or like the proc
esses by which barriers are torn away, and peo
ples hurled rather than drawn together. Blood
flows in rivers, and force and fraud assert them
selves : none the less the process goes on and
emphasises the eternal decree — it is not good for
nations to be alone. England throws herself into
India, Australia, and Africa; America is pushed,
in the inevitable process of her own expansion,
nearer to the frontiers of Mongol civilisation, and
plants herself in the Pacific Islands and in the
West Indies. The recent sickening horrors in
China are on the same line. Whatever Salis
bury's diplomacy may mean, whatever the under
standing between the Kaiser and the Czar, be
sure that the jealous, self-centred, isolated China
of the past centuries is no more forever. The na
tions will have a highway through her plains and
cities ; the throb of the nineteenth century pulse

24 The Old and the New Century.
will jar the stagnation of her most interior prov
inces, and the hideous brutality of her barbarism
will be stamped out under the heel of a human
ity which is both consciously and unconsciously
Christian. Can we escape being drawn into the deep and
strong- current of this movement? Can Mont Blanc
escape the touch of the rising sun ? Not so. It
enters into our constructive problem. We have
been in the current, possibly, longer than some of
us have suspected. Our experience in Hawaii
and Cuba and the Philippines is by no means our
initial experience. To escape complication by
means of a Monroe doctrine, has not been to es
cape contact. How we may adjust the possible
fact of complication depends on our adjustment of
the actual fact of contact. This fact we have been
confronting for a good part of the past century in
the immense immigration into the United States.
Whatever we may have already accomplished in
the moulding process, has not been upon a mass
wholly American. As early as i860, our foreign
population was over four millions ; the arrivals
from i>6o to 1890 were more than ten millions;
and from 1890 to 1900, over three and a half mill
ions. In the last fiscal year, four hundred and
fifty thousand have arrived at the port of New
York. You know the size of the German element
in the great cities, New York, Chicago, St. Louis,
and others. In this city alone there are upwards

The Old and the New Century. 25
of forty thousand Bohemians. French-Canadians
pour by thousands into New England and are ab
sorbed into its manufacturing towns. In the rail
way station of a large town on the Providence and
Worcester Railroad, I observed, several years ago,
that the public notices were posted in both French
and English. The Italian has largely supplanted
the Irishman in the working gangs on our sewers
and aqueducts. I am sure that some of you re
member how, some time in the forties, a Chinese
junk found its way to New York, and lay at the
Battery, and how it was the town talk, and thou
sands flocked to the pier to get their first sight of a
live Chinaman. It is a common enough sight now.
We have, like other cities, a Chinese quarter, and
it is not a savoury quarter, physically or morally.
It is true that the Mongol, like the most of
the Latin races, does not assimilate with Amer
ican institutions ; but others, and those the more
vigorous races, do assimilate. They come to
stay. They become citizens. They take a hand
in politics, and are elected to office. They have
their own journals in their own languages, and
they control large and very important material in
terests. It is one thing to invite immigration. It is quite
another and a much more serious thing to dispose
of the results of immigration. We have, I sup
pose, gotten past being hoodwinked by the old
oratorical commonplace about America being "the

26 The Old and the New Century.
refuge for the oppressed of every clime," with
out ceasing to recognise whatever modicum of
truth may still be contained in this. While it is
true that we are proud to number among our
most intelligent and valuable citizens many of for
eign birth, it is also true that Europe has used us
freely as a dumping-ground for the very offscour
ings of its populations, and has made over to us
a horde of wretches, who, so far from being op
pressed, have been an oppression to their own
governments, of which they were only too glad to
rid their jails and workhouses. It is true enough
that we afford protection to the emigrant, and give
him opportunities of self-development and better
wages than he could get at home ; also true that
he is employed in political machinery as his spade
and pick are employed on the railroads and aque
ducts ; true that we quickly furbish him into a
government official, to administer our affairs for us
and save us the trouble. The republican ideal is
to make him a citizen in reasonable time and by
wholesome and respectable methods. The reality
is, too frequently, to make him a political tool in
the hands of partisan demagogues.
There is another, and, fortunately, a smaller
class of immigrants who are not ignorant; who
see, or think they see, in our institutions an op
portunity of realising their own idea of liberty, by
which they mean unbridled license. For one, I
frankly suspect the wisdom of the easy tolerance

The Old and the New Century. 27
of the American people, and its sublime and re
poseful confidence that its greatness and strength
are sufficient to let this class have full liberty of
speech and of organisation, even as an amiable ele
phant might tolerate a flea upon his back. It may
be easy to dispose of a troublesome anarchist or of a
troublesome organisation whenever they may have
become obtrusive or dangerous ; but ideas are not
so easily disposed of. They are more elusive,
and they spread and multiply themselves ; and
these people are propagandists, disseminators of
ideas which strike not only at democracy, but at
all government. We have already seen the
power which such men wield, in the actual organi
sation of anarchistic elements for the destruction of
life and property ; and it is a significant fact that it
has proved possible to place an avowed anarchist
in the gubernatorial chair of a State.
This is not merely a question of numbers. It is
a test question, whether the, democratic idea in
itself is centripetal, drawing to itself and identify-
ingf with itself a mass of men trained under other
social and political conditions ; or whether it is
centrifugal, throwing them off from the democratic
ideal into something else — possibly anarchism.
For it does not follow that contact means as
similation and settled relation. Its first result is
often antagonism, and sometimes the antagonism
grows with the continuance of the contact. The
history of the past century has shown us that.

28 The Old and the New Century.
An alien race was brought by compulsion within
the sphere of American institutions, and became a
prime factor in American politics. The working
out of the issue thus created cost the country the
lives of a million of producers, besides leaving a
large section of the United States with a gigantic
practical problem on its hands which still awaits a
decisive solution. The country has found itself
charged with the destinies of a race reared under
loose and low moral ideals, enforced ignorance and
servitude, degradation of manhood and woman
hood, and that race must be adjusted somehow to
an economy of freedom and political independence.
It is the unvarying testimony of history that the
price of slavery is paid to the last farthing, and
with compound interest, by the master class. The
price is not discounted by emancipation. Emanci
pation may change the political status of the slave ;
but it does not change the slave, at least for some
generations. The emancipated slave carries into
his free condition the antecedents, the habits, the
spirit, the moral quality of the slave. The hatchet
is buried, I know. Our children know nothing- of
the civil war save as they hear our stories or read
the history in their books ; but the problem re
mains, and goes with us into the new century ;
the problem whether that alien race can be fairly
and fully incorporated into the working machinery
of democratic institutions. " The gift of suffrage,"
perhaps some one will say. But suppose we grant

The Old and the Nezv Century. 29
that suffrage was wisely given when it was given,
surely it has not solved the difficulty. Freedmen's
bureaus, churches, schools — yes, they all have
helped to abate the first rawness of the issue ;
none the less, the race question is a living and
burning question to-day over the area once occu
pied by the slave system, and hints have not been
wanting of its existence in a more northern sec
tion : an element of political discord, an opportu
nity for political trickery, a pretence for political
injustice, a menace to the true democratic ideal, a
living and acting survival, under the democratic
name, of a political ideal which was essentially
anti-democratic. And now we are confronted with a new set of
questions and a new array of difficulties, through
the events of the last three years, by which we
have come into possession of new territory in the
Caribbean Sea, in the Sandwich Islands, and in
the Western Pacific, which last covers an area four
times as large as that of Great Britain, and twice
as large as that of Spain. Some portions of it
have never been surveyed. It is peopled by
Spaniards, Chinese, Malays, Negroes, Hindoos,
and a variety of native tribes, the whole amount
ing to upwards of eight millions, speaking thirty
languages or dialects, and in religion representing
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and na
tive Paganism. This territory is ours, to organise,
to govern, to civilise. It presents conditions such

30 The Old and the New Century.
as we have never before had to deal with, com
pelling a new and original constructive policy which
will tax to the very utmost the resources of con
summate statesmanship.
I am not here to discuss the wisdom or the error
of the policy which has thrust this task upon us.
Personally, I never believed in the measures which
threw us into the recent war with Spain ; but that
is nothing to the purpose. The war is ended ; the
dead are buried ; the paeans have been sung ; the
triumphal arches have been erected and are disap
pearing ; the processions have defiled, and we have
Porto Rico and the Philippines added to our territory,
and Cuba under our supervision. There is nothing
for us but to accept the situation and to deal with it
as wisely and efficiently as we may. I dismiss the
word " imperialism " and all that it implies as be
neath notice. It is nothing but a party shibboleth
which falsely interprets the intent of that policy
which, justly or unjustly, it condemns. Expansion
is a fact, whether we will or no. We are forced
into the movement of the great civilisations. Iso
lation is no longer possible. As the wealthiest na
tion in the world, as the greatest consumer and
producer in the world, we cannot be economically
isolated. We cannot be geographically isolated
while lines of communication by land and water are
bringing us into contact with the very ends of the
earth. If it be true that the centre of the world's
commerce, wealth, and power is being shifted from

The Old and the New Century. 31
the Atlantic to the Pacific as once it was transferred
from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the open
ing of the Isthmus canal alone will throw us into
the competition for the commercial supremacy of
the Pacific ; and we cannot be politically isolated
so long as political and commercial interests are
so closely intertwined as they are. And if, in the
Pacific and its adjacent territories, the question is
to be settled whether that sea is to be commanded
by the Slav or the Anglo-Saxon, we must have a
voice in the settlement. We cannot be there as a
commercial power merely, and not as a political
and social factor.
For one I am glad that we have been swept into
a position which compels us to play a definite part
in the commonwealth of nations. If we have at
tained to national manhood, our proper place is at
the world's polling-booth and at the world s coun
cil-table. We have been called upon for arbitra
tion, but it is for us to take a hand also in adminis
tration. It is better for us. It is an indispensable
part of our training in fields where European diplo
macy has grown grey, and in which we are as yet,
comparatively, novices. If we are a great nation,
we are to remember that greatness is not an end
unto itself, and that the true and highest destiny
of greatness is service. If God made us a great
nation, it was not in order that we might comfort
ably grow big and rich. There belongs to us, not
only as a right, but as a duty, a distinct and large

32 The Old and the New Century.
share in shaping the civilisation, the commerce, the
intercourse of the world, so as to promote the best
economy of life, the greatest security, and the most
firmly established peace and concord throughout
the world. We belong to the brotherhood of na
tions, and we are our brothers' keeper as they are
ours. We have much to say about the protection
of life and property and the laws of social morality ;
we have much to do on the line of education in
self-government ; we have our part in seeing to it
that the arts and refinements of civilisation shall
have "ample room and verge enough" for large
growth, while their development is regulated by
the broad principles of humanitarianism and Chris
tian charity. It is for us to assist in fostering the
institutions of religion ; to further the development
of natural forces and resources ; to aid in educating
rude populations in personal decency and sanitary
economy. Here is a new and practically boundless
field, not only for statesmanship, but for philan
thropy, for science, for religion, for literary culture.
Troublesome ! Yes, I know it is ; but man is born
unto trouble ; the chief end of man is not to be com
fortable ; and manhood, individual or national, is
fostered in the atmosphere of trouble. It is in dif
ficult situations that great forces are needed, and a
great nation has its greatness recognised by being
set to cope with exceptional difficulties. If our gov
ernmental system does not provide for such prob
lems, it is for us not to give up or shirk the prob-

The Old and the New Century. 33
lems, but to enlarge or adjust the system. What
signifies the conservation of a system in its origi
nal, snug integrity, compared with meeting the
larger demands of the present? God's economy,
the range and sweep of God's plans, are greater
than our little systems :
" They have their day, and cease to be.
They are but broken lights of Thee :
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they."
It is a good thing that we have been lifted to a
point where we must look at more than the United
States, large as that is. Our fathers framed our
polity to meet the conditions of their own day, and
of a future as large as they could divine, and not
to keep us shackled under conditions which they
could by no possibility foresee. Their foresight
was wonderful, as is shown by the fact that the
country, with its vastly extended area, with its
flood of immigration and its corresponding increase
of a new class of voters, with its phenomenal
growth of large cities and its multiplication of
office-holders — has nevertheless held together un
der the old Constitution. Are we prepared to admit
the inflexible rigidity of our polity, and the absence
of all power of expansion or adaptation? We have
had no experience in colonial policy ? Then it is
time that we set ourselves to acquire it. If we do
not know, let us go to school. One of the best
things that can happen to the American nation is

34 The Old and the New Century.
to become convinced that it does not know every
thing. It was said of a distinguished English pro
fessor that his foi&le was omniscience. Moreover,
we are not having our first experience with untried
problems. In one way or another we have been
dealing with them from the first years of our na
tional life, and some of them at least we have
solved successfully. At any rate, the experience
has been good for us, and more is sometimes
learned through failure than through success. We
were a colony ourselves once, and learned by ex
perience the colonial policy of the mother nation,
and were obliged to give her a lesson in return.
A people that has no hard questions on its hands
is in danger of stagnation. If it be true that that
nation is happy which has no history, the truth
places that happy nation in the category of inver
tebrates. Of course we shall make mistakes, and
a good many of them; but the triumph of life for a
nation, as for a man, is not to make no mistakes,
but to learn from mistakes, to mount on mistakes
to success, and, as Frederick Robertson so finely
said, "to organise victory out of mistakes."
My time grows short. Yet a succession of
questions presses forward out of the untried future,
like lines of breakers rolling in from a near hori
zon. You will readily have anticipated certain
topics which even such a desultory discussion as
this could not well evade, but at which it is possi
ble only to hint. Prominent among these is the

The Old and the New Century. 35
problem raised by the rapid and enormous increase
of wealth, and the concentration of vast amounts of
capital in the hands of individuals and corpora
tions ; the relations of labour to capital, and of great
financial combinations to small industries. The
near future will be forced to face these questions
more squarely than they have yet been faced. Up
to this time they have been met with temporary
accommodations and compromises which have sim
ply staved off the radical issue, and have eluded
the grapple with first principles. The present con
ditions hold possible grave elements of menace.
Is the new century going to evolve a sharp and
irritating class-distinction between rich and poor ?
Is capital alone to have a voice in determining the
emoluments of labour ? Is labour to be organised
on the basis of an undiscriminating hatred of capital
as such ? Is capital to be pitted against brains
and culture, and is
"The gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool"
to bring the wise man abjectly to the fool's feet ?
Is capital to control political issues ? Is it going
to be possible (or to continue possible) for capital
to buy up legislation in favour of any scheme which
it may be interested in putting under the protection
of law ? Is that really true which was said, not
long ago, by a politician and capitalist to a learned
and accomplished clergyman : " You have got to
understand that we are masters of the situation.

36 The Old and the Nezv Century.
We pay for the support of your churches and
institutions, and you have got to do as we say."
You may say, and truthfully, " that was only the
brutal vapouring of an unscrupulous bully :" none
the less it proves, if proof were needed, that the
unscrupulous bully is a fact ; that that idea has
acquired in his mind the force of a principle ; that
he is not afraid to formulate and give voice to his
principle, and that he represents a body of senti
ment larger or smaller, more or less threatening.
It would also lie in my track to speak of the
questions raised by the diffusion of education. In
this lie some of our richest sources of hope, as
there also lie possibilities of danger. From the
beginning of our national life, popular education
has been recognised as an integral part of the
democratic idea. In this city the discussion of the
common-school system was contemporaneous with
the founding oi this society, and in 1805 DeWitt
Clinton brought the subject before the Legislature
of the State of New York. You do not need to
be told of the power and fruitfulness of the public-
school system ; but your own eyes have also wit
nessed the attempt to convert it into a political en
gine, and to prostitute it to the purposes of political
demagogues. The history of our higher education, as repre
sented by the colleges and universities, presents
other, different, and not less interesting features.
It is perhaps premature to speak of our system of

The Old and the New Century. 27
higher education. The higher education, as yet,
is represented by individual institutions which are
not ranged on a common line or gauged by a
common standard. None the less, these institu
tions have wrought their own result, which, in the
aggregate, is neither small nor contemptible, and
which appears in what may fairly be called a liter
ary class. Our history has not evolved any great
literary movement, any great creative literary
epoch like the age of Pericles or the Elizabeth
an period. Literary habit and achievement have
oared their way slowly and laboriously up the
stream, against the powerful current of material
development and preoccupation with business.
Literary pursuit has been largely on the line of
collecting and absorbing literary material, and we
have collected and absorbed much. We have
made ourselves familiar with the literary treasures
of the world. The best and latest products of the
European press are swept promptly into our li
braries and are read in their own languages. We
have also produced something — more than could
have been expected within the brief space of a
century and with the predominant direction of our
energies to material pursuits. We have produced
no great poets, dramatists, or novelists, yet the
average of our best has been very high. On the
lines of history, theology, natural science, and
jurisprudence, we have won a high and recognised
place. I was asked some years ago by an English

38 The Old and the New Century.
clergyman if the Americans read the classics. He
evidently did not know that the standard Latin
and English lexicon in use in the English universi
ties was the work of two American scholars.
Such facts might easily be multiplied ; but the
relation of a literary class to the constructive work
of the future cannot be overlooked. If the literary
class shall assert itself as a caste, if it shall shut it
self up in libraries and refuse contact with the peo
ple's life and movement which surge round the
library walls — it may well be suspected. A self-
centred literary aristocracy is little better than a
moneyed or a political aristocracy, and the natural
tendencies of high culture are as aristocratic as
those of old families. On the other hand, there is
power in literary taste and literary avocation, which
often go hand in hand with the pursuit of business,
to purge gain-getting of its sordidness, to leaven
social intercourse and make it more distinctively
an intercourse of minds and less of rival silks
and diamonds. There is a distinct and grand
and salutary possibility of power, if our men of
ripe culture and extensive knowledge shall throw
themselves into popular movements, infuse a better
element into our politics, and impart to our states
manship a finer grain and a richer quality than,
in many instances, now pertain to it. The real
native ability, and the breeziness and raciness
which mark so much of what passes under the
name of statesmanship might, in some cases, be

The Old and the New Century. 39
profitably toned down with a little more knowledge
and a little more culture. The mere ability to ha
rangue does not constitute a statesman. Delicate
questions of arbitration and international comity
such as are fast coming to the front are not to be
adjusted by stump orators, and fortunately it has
been proved that we can furnish better material.
High culture owes a debt to the people, and it is
to be counted one of the most hopeful signs of the
present that so many of the presidents and pro
fessors of our higher literary institutions are giving
their energies to the adjustment of international
questions, and that, in so many of these institutions,
the attention of students is being directed to the
study of political and social science.
There are two things in which one may detect
omens of good for the new century, in spite of
the rough seas into the teeth of which we are
sailing. The one of these, which it is not easy
to analyse or define, is that strange reserve
of energy which lies in the American people.
They are wonderfully tolerant, wonderfully long-
suffering ; they will let gross abuses thrive and
flaunt themselves before their very eyes, and
will pay the cost, and only grumble a little. They
will allow bad and designing men to have their
swing, and ventilate their falsehoods, and assert
their ruffianism without any vigorous or effective
protest. This city of ours, not to go any farther,
has sat quietly under two several regimes of fraud

40 The Old and the New Century.
and ruffianism ; and its citizens daily submit to cer
tain results of corporate greed and indifference to
the public comfort which no great city of Europe
would endure for a month without popular outcry
or revolution. But this tolerance has a limit. There
is a point where the American people as a body
wakes up to the fact of abuse and determines to
put an end to it. And when the sting has thus at
last gone down to the quick of the public sense, the
uprising is portentous, the forward movement re
sistless, and the catastrophe overwhelming. Your
memories will supply more than one illustration ;
and from hopeful signs, I am encouraged to believe
that another and striking illustration will soon be
added to the gallery.
There is often apparent an indifference to prob
able contingencies ; a disposition to despise prophy
lactic measures ; a sort of unreasoning assurance
that an emergency will create the resources to
meet it ; and no doubt this blind confidence and
heedlessness have sometimes entailed temporary
loss and disaster. But one will do well to think
twice before he sets it down solely to ignorant con
ceit, and refuses to allow any value or truthfulness
to a deep-lying national instinct of real power to
meet a crisis, which does not prove false when the
crisis is on. If it were conceit, some of us have
seen more than once that there was a real some
thing behind the conceit. And so, in the new com
plications into which the new century shall introduce

The Old and the New Century. 41
us, shall we not be warranted in a degree of faith
that this reserve of energy and resource will come
to the front as it shall be needed, and that the
American people will prove its capacity to meet
new conditions with new resources ?
And, finally, there lies for the new century a
source of hope in the region of religion and sound
morals. It is to the lasting honour of our fore
fathers that they distinctly recognised and ac
knowledged the hand of God in the evolution ot
their national life, and the dependence of their na
tional prosperity upon his blessing. Puritanism
may have made our New England fathers stern
men, but it made them upright men. Even patri
otism would have been second to religion, had it
been possible to dissociate the two. It made men
of iron, but it was tempered iron, which could hew
for itself a way to empire.
" They were men of present valour, stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the
past's ; "
and though at the domestic and social altars Re-
ligion stood in the guise of a calm Vestal, cold as
the snows of Katahdin, never were those altars
more sacredly guarded, or their fires fed with
sweeter incense.
I will not take upon myself to say that the
religious sentiment has weakened, although it ex
presses itself to-day in new forms. Statistics,

42 The Old and the New Century.
which, in any moral question, are the unsafest of all
guides, may nevertheless be trusted in their attest
ation of at least the formal adherence of a vast
section of the nation to the institutions of religion.
It will be an evil day for us on which the religious
sentiment shall become weaker, and it will mean
disaster if it do not grow stronger. An ungodly
nation, a dissolute nation, a nation which does not
keep faith, a selfish, grasping, and avaricious na
tion, however long it may thrive, and however
brilliant its career of conquest, as surely as the sun
goes to his setting will go over the precipice down
which plunged the empires of the East and of
Rome. The demand that religion should let poli
tics alone is an impudent demand. Religion and
its true teachers have a legitimate and active rela
tion to anything in any region which involves a
moral issue ; and that moral issues are involved in
politics needs no argument.
We are passing through a transition period as
regards religious ideas and religious formulas.
That, in itself, is not a bad thing. It is the road
to clearer light and better definition. The great
principles of religion are eternal, however the
forms may change. And it is well that every
American citizen who fears God and holds by the
moral standards of Christianity should have his
eyes open to one black chasm which yawns at our
feet, in the growing menace to the sanctity of the
marriage relation, and to the consequent integrity

The Old and the New Century. 43
and social influence of the family life. It is a com
monplace, but a commonplace which needs to be
repeated and accentuated in these days, that the
purity of the family life is the very foundation-
stone of national prosperity. That this is men
aced, and menaced seriously by certain conditions
of American civilisation is no anchorite's mor
bid fancy, and no secret to any man who can
read the signs of the times. The looseness of the
marriage bond, the lack of adequate legal safe
guards against the rash or illegal act of marriage,
the practically unlimited facilities for divorce, and
the increasing frequency of divorce, are things
adapted to create the gravest concern in the mind
of every good man and woman. The alarming
fact is that these things are conventionally toler
ated, winked at, toned down and gilded, in not a
few cases, by wealth and social position : that they
do not call out the sturdy protest and the social
ostracism which their essential badness and their
dangerousness demand.
God is in history. God is the God of nations.
God honours and employs for high ends the na
tion which honours Him; and there is hope for
the new century only if the great principles of
divine law underlie our legislation ; only if the
principles of sound morals pervade politics ; only
if the great body of citizens recognise their first
and highest obligation to those divine ordinances
which were from the beginning, and which must

44 The Old and the New Century.
abide, inflexible and unchanging, so long as kings
reign and princes decree judgment.
The old century is well-nigh all behind us. We
are to be congratulated who have lived in this
century, and have witnessed the growth of nations,
the triumph of mind over matter, the evolution of
great ideas, the discovery of nature's secrets, the
triumphs of inventive skill, the advances in social
and domestic comfort, the progress of learning,
the contact of nations, the growing hatred of war,
the inroads into barbarism, the dissemination of
religious truth, the victory of freedom. It is
much to have been touched by forces like these ;
still more if we have responded sympathetically to
the touch ; still more, if, in the smallest degree, we
have been able to contribute to the general ad
vance. We may be permitted to go some short
distance into the new century. It will not be far
at the farthest, and the vast and imposing possi
bilities of that new era will unfold under the hands
of other generations. But we can send forward to
these our best hopes ; cheerfully make over to
them our best achievements, in the assurance that
they will better them and rise on them to higher
things ; give them our best wishes and attach to
them our best expectations for the welfare of the
land which is ours and which we love; and hope
with all our hearts that they may enjoy more, and
know more, and achieve more than has fallen to
our lot. The life of a man, of a generation, of a cen-

The Old and the Neiv Century. 45
tury, can be only fractional ; and that is a thorough
ly and distinctly Christian principle which schools us
to contentment in being mere parts and stages in a
vast development which we cannot compass, and
in doing and giving our best to prepare for the
men who are to come after us the blessings of
which we cannot share the full fruition. As Chris
tian men, as loyal Americans, our outlook must be
forward. " Freedom doth not consist
In musing with our faces toward the past,
While petty cares and crawling interests twist
Their spider threads around us, which, at last,
Grow strong as iron chains to cramp and bind
In formal narrowness heart, soul, and mind.
*******
And, as the finder of some unknown realm,
Mounting a summit whence he thinks to see
On either side of him the imprisoning sea,
Beholds, above the clouds that overwhelm
The valley-land, peak after snowy peak
Stretch out of sight, each like a silver helm
Beneath its plume of smoke, sublime and bleak.
And what he thought an island, finds to be
A continent — to him first oped — so we
Can, from our height of Freedom, look along
A boundless future, ours if we be strong ;
Or, if we shrink, better remount our ships,
And, fleeing God's express design, trace back
The hero-freighted Mayflower's prophet-track."