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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75294 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
+notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
+
+PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+
+
+  AFRICAN GAME TRAILS. An account of the African Wanderings of an
+    American Hunter-Naturalist.
+    Illustrated. Large 8vo                             $4.00 _net_
+
+  OUTDOOR PASTIMES OF AN AMERICAN HUNTER.
+    New Edition. Illustrated. 8vo                      $3.00 _net_
+
+  HISTORY AS LITERATURE and Other Essays.
+    12mo                                               $1.50 _net_
+
+  OLIVER CROMWELL. Illustrated. 8vo                    $2.00 _net_
+
+  THE ROUGH RIDERS. Illustrated. 8vo                   $1.50 _net_
+
+  THE ROOSEVELT BOOK. Selections from the Writings of Theodore
+    Roosevelt. 16mo                                 50 cents _net_
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+  THE ELKHORN EDITION. Complete Works of Theodore Roosevelt. 26 volumes.
+    Illustrated. 8vo. Sold by subscription.
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY AS LITERATURE
+
+AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+
+
+
+                         HISTORY AS LITERATURE
+                            AND OTHER ESSAYS
+
+                                   BY
+                           THEODORE ROOSEVELT
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+                                  1913
+
+
+
+
+                          Copyright, 1913, by
+                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+
+
+                       Published September, 1913
+                      Reprinted in December, 1913
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In this volume I have gathered certain addresses I made before the
+American Historical Association, the University of Oxford, the
+University of Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together with six
+essays I wrote for _The Outlook_, and one that I wrote for _The
+Century_.
+
+In these addresses and essays I have discussed not merely literary but
+also historical and scientific subjects, for my thesis is that the
+domain of literature must be ever more widely extended over the domains
+of history and science. There is nothing which in this preface I can
+say to elaborate or emphasize what I have said on this subject in the
+essays themselves.
+
+                                                     THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
+
+  SAGAMORE HILL,
+  _July 4, 1913_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                PAGE
+  HISTORY AS LITERATURE                            1
+
+  BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY                 37
+
+  THE WORLD MOVEMENT                              95
+
+  CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC                      135
+
+  THE THRALDOM OF NAMES                          175
+
+  PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP                         195
+
+  DANTE AND THE BOWERY                           217
+
+  THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY      231
+
+  THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT      245
+
+  THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS                        275
+
+  AN ART EXHIBITION                              301
+
+    ⁂ Three chapters, “Biological Analogies in History,” “The World
+    Movement,” and “Citizenship in a Republic,” were included in the
+    volume entitled “African and European Addresses.”
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY AS LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY AS LITERATURE[1]
+
+
+There has been much discussion as to whether history should not
+henceforth be treated as a branch of science rather than of literature.
+As with most such discussions, much of the matter in dispute has
+referred merely to terminology. Moreover, as regards part of the
+discussion, the minds of the contestants have not met, the propositions
+advanced by the two sides being neither mutually incompatible nor
+mutually relevant. There is, however, a real basis for conflict in so
+far as science claims exclusive possession of the field.
+
+    [1] Annual address of the president of the American Historical
+        Association delivered at Boston, December 27, 1912.
+
+There was a time--we see it in the marvellous dawn of Hellenic
+life--when history was distinguished neither from poetry, from
+mythology, nor from the first dim beginnings of science. There was a
+more recent time, at the opening of Rome’s brief period of literary
+splendor, when poetry was accepted by a great scientific philosopher
+as the appropriate vehicle for teaching the lessons of science and
+philosophy. There was a more recent time still--the time of Holland’s
+leadership in arms and arts--when one of the two or three greatest
+world painters put his genius at the service of anatomists.
+
+In each case the steady growth of specialization has rendered such
+combination now impossible. Virgil left history to Livy; and when
+Tacitus had become possible Lucan was a rather absurd anachronism. The
+elder Darwin, when he endeavored to combine the functions of scientist
+and poet, may have thought of Lucretius as a model; but the great
+Darwin was incapable of such a mistake. The surgeons of to-day would
+prefer the services of a good photographer to those of Rembrandt--even
+were those of Rembrandt available. No one would now dream of combining
+the history of the Trojan War with a poem on the wrath of Achilles.
+Beowulf’s feats against the witch who dwelt under the water would not
+now be mentioned in the same matter-of-fact way that a Frisian or
+Frankish raid is mentioned. We are long past the stage when we would
+accept as parts of the same epic Siegfried’s triumphs over dwarf and
+dragon, and even a distorted memory of the historic Hunnish king in
+whose feast-hall the Burgundian heroes held their last revel and made
+their death fight. We read of the loves of the Hound of Muirthemne and
+Emer the Fair without attributing to the chariot-riding heroes who
+“fought over the ears of their horses” and to their fierce lady-loves
+more than a symbolic reality. The Roland of the Norman trouvères, the
+Roland who blew the ivory horn at Roncesvalles, is to our minds wholly
+distinct from the actual Warden of the Marches who fell in a rear-guard
+skirmish with the Pyrenean Basques.
+
+As regards philosophy, as distinguished from material science and from
+history, the specialization has been incomplete. Poetry is still used
+as a vehicle for the teaching of philosophy. Goethe was as profound
+a thinker as Kant. He has influenced the thought of mankind far more
+deeply than Kant because he was also a great poet. Robert Browning
+was a real philosopher, and his writings have had a hundredfold the
+circulation and the effect of those of any similar philosopher who
+wrote in prose, just because, and only because, what he wrote was not
+merely philosophy but literature. The form in which he wrote challenged
+attention and provoked admiration. That part of his work which some of
+us--which I myself, for instance--most care for is merely poetry. But
+in that part of his work which has exercised most attraction and has
+given him the widest reputation, the poetry, the form of expression,
+bears to the thought expressed much the same relation that the
+expression of Lucretius bears to the thought of Lucretius. As regards
+this, the great mass of his product, he is primarily a philosopher,
+whose writings surpass in value those of other similar philosophers
+precisely because they are not only philosophy but literature. In other
+words, Browning the philosopher is read by countless thousands to whom
+otherwise philosophy would be a sealed book, for exactly the same
+reason that Macaulay the historian is read by countless thousands to
+whom otherwise history would be a sealed book; because both Browning’s
+works and Macaulay’s works are material additions to the great sum
+of English literature. Philosophy is a science just as history is
+a science. There is need in one case as in the other for vivid and
+powerful presentation of scientific matter in literary form.
+
+This does not mean that there is the like need in the two cases.
+History can never be truthfully presented if the presentation is purely
+emotional. It can never be truthfully or usefully presented unless
+profound research, patient, laborious, painstaking, has preceded the
+presentation. No amount of self-communion and of pondering on the soul
+of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of
+cool, serious, widely extended study. The vision of the great historian
+must be both wide and lofty. But it must be sane, clear, and based on
+full knowledge of the facts and of their interrelations. Otherwise
+we get merely a splendid bit of serious romance-writing, like
+Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Many hard-working students, alive to the
+deficiencies of this kind of romance-writing, have grown to distrust
+not only all historical writing that is romantic, but all historical
+writing that is vivid. They feel that complete truthfulness must never
+be sacrificed to color. In this they are right. They also feel that
+complete truthfulness is incompatible with color. In this they are
+wrong. The immense importance of full knowledge of a mass of dry facts
+and gray details has so impressed them as to make them feel that the
+dryness and the grayness are in themselves meritorious.
+
+These students have rendered invaluable service to history. They are
+right in many of their contentions. They see how literature and science
+have specialized. They realize that scientific methods are as necessary
+to the proper study of history as to the proper study of astronomy
+or zoology. They know that in many, perhaps in most, of its forms,
+literary ability is divorced from the restrained devotion to the actual
+fact which is as essential to the historian as to the scientist. They
+know that nowadays science ostentatiously disclaims any connection with
+literature. They feel that if this is essential for science, it is no
+less essential for history.
+
+There is much truth in all these contentions. Nevertheless, taking them
+all together, they do not indicate what these hard-working students
+believed that they indicate. Because history, science, and literature
+have all become specialized, the theory now is that science is
+definitely severed from literature and that history must follow suit.
+Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history, but I do not
+even accept it as true for science.
+
+Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because
+both of its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical
+value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For a great
+work of literature there is the same demand now that there always
+has been; and in any great work of literature the first element is
+great imaginative power. The imaginative power demanded for a great
+historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is
+no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with
+minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real and vivid,
+presentation of the past can come only from one in whom the imaginative
+gift is strong. The industrious collector of dead facts bears to such
+a man precisely the relation that a photographer bears to Rembrandt.
+There are innumerable books, that is, innumerable volumes of printed
+matter between covers, which are excellent for their own purposes, but
+in which imagination would be as wholly out of place as in the blue
+prints of a sewer system or in the photographs taken to illustrate a
+work on comparative osteology. But the vitally necessary sewer system
+does not take the place of the cathedral of Rheims or of the Parthenon;
+no quantity of photographs will ever be equivalent to one Rembrandt;
+and the greatest mass of data, although indispensable to the work of a
+great historian, is in no shape or way a substitute for that work.
+
+History, taught for a directly and immediately useful purpose to pupils
+and the teachers of pupils, is one of the necessary features of a sound
+education in democratic citizenship. A book containing such sound
+teaching, even if without any literary quality, may be as useful to the
+student and as creditable to the writer as a similar book on medicine.
+I am not slighting such a book when I say that, once it has achieved
+its worthy purpose, it can be permitted to lapse from human memory as a
+good book on medicine, which has outlived its usefulness, lapses from
+memory. But the historical work which does possess literary quality may
+be a permanent contribution to the sum of man’s wisdom, enjoyment, and
+inspiration. The writer of such a book must add wisdom to knowledge,
+and the gift of expression to the gift of imagination.
+
+It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagination tends to
+inaccuracy. Only a distorted imagination tends to inaccuracy. Vast and
+fundamental truths can be discerned and interpreted only by one whose
+imagination is as lofty as the soul of a Hebrew prophet. When we say
+that the great historian must be a man of imagination, we use the word
+as we use it when we say that the great statesman must be a man of
+imagination. Moreover, together with imagination must go the power of
+expression. The great speeches of statesmen and the great writings of
+historians can live only if they possess the deathless quality that
+inheres in all great literature. The greatest literary historian must
+of necessity be a master of the science of history, a man who has at
+his finger-tips all the accumulated facts from the treasure-houses of
+the dead past. But he must also possess the power to marshal what is
+dead so that before our eyes it lives again.
+
+Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness in a
+book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned people
+seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting is proof that it
+is shallow. This is particularly apt to be the attitude of scientific
+men. Very few great scientists have written interestingly, and these
+few have usually felt apologetic about it. Yet sooner or later the time
+will come when the mighty sweep of modern scientific discovery will be
+placed, by scientific men with the gift of expression, at the service
+of intelligent and cultivated laymen. Such service will be inestimable.
+Another writer of “Canterbury Tales,” another singer of “Paradise
+Lost,” could not add more to the sum of literary achievement than the
+man who may picture to us the phases of the age-long history of life on
+this globe, or make vivid before our eyes the tremendous march of the
+worlds through space.
+
+Indeed, I believe that already science has owed more than it suspects
+to the unconscious literary power of some of its representatives.
+Scientific writers of note had grasped the fact of evolution long
+before Darwin and Huxley; and the theories advanced by these men
+to explain evolution were not much more unsatisfactory, as full
+explanations, than the theory of natural selection itself. Yet, where
+their predecessors had created hardly a ripple, Darwin and Huxley
+succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of the age,
+a revolution as great as that caused by the discovery of the truth
+about the solar system. I believe that the chief explanation of the
+difference was the very simple one that what Darwin and Huxley wrote
+was interesting to read. Every cultivated man soon had their volumes
+in his library, and they still keep their places on our book-shelves.
+But Lamarck and Cope are only to be found in the libraries of a few
+special students. If they had possessed a gift of expression akin to
+Darwin’s, the doctrine of evolution would not in the popular mind have
+been confounded with the doctrine of natural selection and a juster
+estimate than at present would obtain as to the relative merits of
+the explanations of evolution championed by the different scientific
+schools.
+
+Do not misunderstand me. In the field of historical research an
+immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power whatever.
+Moreover, the most painstaking and laborious research, covering long
+periods of years, is necessary in order to accumulate the material
+for any history worth writing at all. There are important by-paths of
+history, moreover, which hardly admit of treatment that would make
+them of interest to any but specialists. All this I fully admit. In
+particular I pay high honor to the patient and truthful investigator.
+He does an indispensable work. My claim is merely that such work should
+not exclude the work of the great master who can use the materials
+gathered, who has the gift of vision, the quality of the seer, the
+power himself to see what has happened and to make what he has seen
+clear to the vision of others. My only protest is against those who
+believe that the extension of the activities of the most competent
+mason and most energetic contractor will supply the lack of great
+architects. If, as in the Middle Ages, the journeymen builders are
+themselves artists, why this is the best possible solution of the
+problem. But if they are not artists, then their work, however much it
+represents of praiseworthy industry, and of positive usefulness, does
+not take the place of the work of a great artist.
+
+Take a concrete example. It is only of recent years that the importance
+of inscriptions has been realized. To the present-day scholar they
+are invaluable. Even to the layman, some of them turn the past into
+the present with startling clearness. The least imaginative is moved
+by the simple inscription on the Etruscan sarcophagus: “I, the great
+lady”; a lady so haughty that no other human being was allowed to rest
+near her; and yet now nothing remains but this proof of the pride of
+the nameless one. Or the inscription in which Queen Hatshepsu recounts
+her feats and her magnificence, and ends by adjuring the onlooker,
+when overcome by the recital, not to say “how wonderful” but “how like
+her!”--could any picture of a living queen be more intimately vivid?
+With such inscriptions before us the wonder is that it took us so long
+to realize their worth. Not unnaturally this realization, when it did
+come, was followed by the belief that inscriptions would enable us to
+dispense with the great historians of antiquity. This error is worse
+than the former. Where the inscriptions give us light on what would
+otherwise be darkness, we must be profoundly grateful; but we must not
+confound the lesser light with the greater. We could better afford to
+lose every Greek inscription that has ever been found than the chapter
+in which Thucydides tells of the Athenian failure before Syracuse.
+Indeed, few inscriptions teach us as much history as certain forms of
+literature that do not consciously aim at teaching history at all. The
+inscriptions of Hellenistic Greece in the third century before our era
+do not, all told, give us so lifelike a view of the ordinary life of
+the ordinary men and women who dwelt in the great Hellenistic cities of
+the time, as does the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus.
+
+This does not mean that good history can be unscientific. So far from
+ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do nothing
+unless he is steeped in science. He can never equal what has been done
+by the great historians of the past unless he writes not merely with
+full knowledge, but with an intensely vivid consciousness, of all that
+of which they were necessarily ignorant. He must accept what we now
+know to be man’s place in nature. He must realize that man has been
+on this earth for a period of such incalculable length that, from the
+standpoint of the student of his development through time, what our
+ancestors used to call “antiquity” is almost indistinguishable from the
+present day. If our conception of history takes in the beast-like man
+whose sole tool and weapon was the stone fist-hatchet, and his advanced
+successors, the man who etched on bone pictures of the mammoth, the
+reindeer, and the wild horse, in what is now France, and the man who
+painted pictures of bison in the burial caves of what is now Spain;
+if we also conceive in their true position our “contemporaneous
+ancestors,” the savages who are now no more advanced than the
+cave-dwellers of a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years
+back, then we shall accept Thothmes and Cæsar, Alfred and Washington,
+Timoleon and Lincoln, Homer and Shakespeare, Pythagoras and Emerson, as
+all nearly contemporaneous in time and in culture.
+
+The great historian of the future will have easy access to innumerable
+facts patiently gathered by tens of thousands of investigators, whereas
+the great historian of the past had very few facts, and often had to
+gather most of these himself. The great historian of the future can not
+be excused if he fails to draw on the vast storehouses of knowledge
+that have been accumulated, if he fails to profit by the wisdom and
+work of other men, which are now the common property of all intelligent
+men. He must use the instruments which the historians of the past did
+not have ready to hand. Yet even with these instruments he can not do
+as good work as the best of the elder historians unless he has vision
+and imagination, the power to grasp what is essential and to reject the
+infinitely more numerous non-essentials, the power to embody ghosts, to
+put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men living before our
+eyes. In short, he must have the power to take the science of history
+and turn it into literature.
+
+Those who wish history to be treated as a purely utilitarian science
+often decry the recital of the mighty deeds of the past, the deeds
+which always have aroused, and for a long period to come are likely
+to arouse, most interest. These men say that we should study not the
+unusual but the usual. They say that we profit most by laborious
+research into the drab monotony of the ordinary, rather than by
+fixing our eyes on the purple patches that break it. Beyond all
+question the great historian of the future must keep ever in mind
+the relative importance of the usual and the unusual. If he is a
+really great historian, if he possesses the highest imaginative and
+literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of
+the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting
+peaks. It is even more essential to have such quality in writing of the
+commonplace than in writing of the exceptional. Otherwise no profit
+will come from study of the ordinary; for writings are useless unless
+they are read, and they can not be read unless they are readable.
+Furthermore, while doing full justice to the importance of the usual,
+of the commonplace, the great historian will not lose sight of the
+importance of the heroic.
+
+It is hard to tell just what it is that is most important to know. The
+wisdom of one generation may seem the folly of the next. This is just
+as true of the wisdom of the dry-as-dusts as of the wisdom of those who
+write interestingly. Moreover, while the value of the by-products of
+knowledge does not readily yield itself to quantitative expression, it
+is none the less real. A utilitarian education should undoubtedly be
+the foundation of all education. But it is far from advisable, it is
+far from wise, to have it the end of all education. Technical training
+will more and more be accepted as the prime factor in our educational
+system, a factor as essential for the farmer, the blacksmith, the
+seamstress, and the cook, as for the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer,
+and the stenographer. For similar reasons the purely practical and
+technical lessons of history, the lessons that help us to grapple
+with our immediate social and industrial problems, will also receive
+greater emphasis than ever before. But if we are wise we will no
+more permit this practical training to exclude knowledge of that
+part of literature which is history than of that part of literature
+which is poetry. Side by side with the need for the perfection of the
+individual in the technic of his special calling goes the need of broad
+human sympathy, and the need of lofty and generous emotion in that
+individual. Only thus can the citizenship of the modern state rise
+level to the complex modern social needs.
+
+No technical training, no narrowly utilitarian study of any kind will
+meet this second class of needs. In part they can best be met by a
+training that will fit men and women to appreciate, and therefore to
+profit by, great poetry and those great expressions of the historian
+and the statesman which rivet our interest and stir our souls. Great
+thoughts match and inspire heroic deeds. The same reasons that make the
+Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural impress themselves on men’s
+minds far more deeply than technical treatises on the constitutional
+justification of slavery or of secession, apply to fitting descriptions
+of the great battle and the great contest which occasioned the two
+speeches. The tense epic of the Gettysburg fight, the larger epic of
+the whole Civil War, when truthfully and vividly portrayed, will always
+have, and ought always to have, an attraction, an interest, that can
+not be roused by the description of the same number of hours or years
+of ordinary existence. There are supreme moments in which intensity
+and not duration is the all-important element. History which is not
+professedly utilitarian, history which is didactic only as great
+poetry is unconsciously didactic, may yet possess that highest form
+of usefulness, the power to thrill the souls of men with stories of
+strength and craft and daring, and to lift them out of their common
+selves to the heights of high endeavor.
+
+The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no
+proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness as on the
+same level. But of course the obsession of purposeful moral teaching
+may utterly defeat its own aim. Moreover, unfortunately, the avowed
+teacher of morality, when he writes history, sometimes goes very far
+wrong indeed. It often happens that the man who can be of real help in
+inspiring others by his utterances on abstract principles is wholly
+unable to apply his own principles to concrete cases. Carlyle offers
+an instance in point. Very few men have ever been a greater source of
+inspiration to other ardent souls than was Carlyle when he confined
+himself to preaching morality in the abstract. Moreover, his theory
+bade him treat history as offering material to support that theory.
+But not only was he utterly unable to distinguish either great virtues
+or great vices when he looked abroad on contemporary life--as witness
+his attitude toward our own Civil War--but he was utterly unable to
+apply his own principles concretely in history. His “Frederick the
+Great” is literature of a high order. It may, with reservations, even
+be accepted as history. But the “morality” therein jubilantly upheld
+is shocking to any man who takes seriously Carlyle’s other writings
+in which he lays down principles of conduct. In his “Frederick the
+Great” he was not content to tell the facts. He was not content to
+announce his admiration. He wished to square himself with his theories,
+and to reconcile what he admired, both with the actual fact and with
+his previously expressed convictions on morality. He could only do so
+by refusing to face the facts and by using words with meanings that
+shifted to meet his own mental emergencies. He pretended to discern
+morality where no vestige of it existed. He tortured the facts to
+support his views. The “morality” he praised had no connection with
+morality as understood in the New Testament. It was the kind of archaic
+morality observed by the Danites in their dealings with the people of
+Laish. The sermon of the Mormon bishop in Owen Wister’s “Pilgrim on
+the Gila” sets forth the only moral lessons which it was possible for
+Carlyle truthfully to draw from the successes he described.
+
+History must not be treated as something set off by itself. It should
+not be treated as a branch of learning bound to the past by the
+shackles of an iron conservatism. It is neither necessary rigidly to
+mark the limits of the province of history, nor to treat of all that is
+within that province, nor to exclude any subject within that province
+from treatment, nor yet to treat different methods of dealing with the
+same subject as mutually exclusive. Every writer and every reader has
+his own needs, to meet himself or to be met by others. Among a great
+multitude of thoughtful people there is room for the widest possible
+variety of appeals. Let each man fearlessly choose what is of real
+importance and interest to him personally, reverencing authority, but
+not in a superstitious spirit, because he must needs reverence liberty
+even more.
+
+There is an infinite variety of subjects to treat, and no need to
+estimate their relative importance. Because one man is interested in
+the history of finance, it does not mean that another is wrong in being
+interested in the history of war. One man’s need is met by exhaustive
+tables of statistics; another’s by the study of the influence exerted
+on national life by the great orators, the Websters and Burkes, or
+by the poets, the Tyrtæuses and Körners, who in crises utter what is
+in the nation’s heart. There is need of the study of the historical
+workings of representative government. There is no less need of the
+study of the economic changes produced by the factory system. Because
+we study with profit what Thorold Rogers wrote of prices we are not
+debarred from also profiting by Mahan’s studies of naval strategy.
+One man finds what is of most importance to his own mind and heart
+in tracing the effect upon humanity of the spread of malaria along
+the shores of the Ægean; or the effect of the Black Death on the
+labor-market of mediæval Europe; or the profound influence upon the
+development of the African continent of the fatal diseases borne by
+the bites of insects, which close some districts to human life and
+others to the beasts without which humanity rests at the lowest stage
+of savagery. One man sees the events from one view-point, one from
+another. Yet another can combine both. We can be stirred by Thayer’s
+study of Cavour without abating our pleasure in the younger Trevelyan’s
+volumes on Garibaldi. Because we revel in Froissart, or Joinville, or
+Villehardouin, there is no need that we should lack interest in the
+books that attempt the more difficult task of tracing the economic
+changes in the status of peasant, mechanic, and burgher during the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
+
+History must welcome the entrance upon its domain of every science. As
+James Harvey Robinson in his “New History” has said:
+
+“The bounds of all departments of human research and speculation
+are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating; moreover,
+the lines of demarcation are hopelessly interlaced, for real men
+and the real universe in which they live are so intricate as to
+defy all attempts even of the most patient and subtle German to
+establish satisfactorily and permanently the _Begriff und Wesen_ of
+any artificially delimited set of natural phenomena, whether words,
+thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, plants, or stars. Each so-called
+science or discipline is ever and always dependent on other sciences
+and disciplines. It draws its life from them, and to them it owes,
+consciously or unconsciously, a great part of its chances of progress.”
+
+Elsewhere this writer dwells on the need of understanding the genetic
+side of history, if we are to grasp the real meaning of, and grapple
+most effectively with, the phenomena of our present-day lives; for that
+which is can be dealt with best if we realize at least in part from
+what a tangled web of causation it has sprung.
+
+The work of the archæologist, the work of the anthropologist, the work
+of the palæo-ethnologist--out of all these a great literary historian
+may gather material indispensable for his use. He, and we, ought fully
+to acknowledge our debt to the collectors of these indispensable
+facts. The investigator in any line may do work which puts us all
+under lasting obligations to him, even though he be totally deficient
+in the art of literary expression, that is, totally deficient in the
+ability to convey vivid and lifelike pictures to others of the past
+whose secrets he has laid bare. I would give no scanty or grudging
+acknowledgment to the deeds of such a man. He does a lasting service;
+whereas the man who tries to make literary expression cover his
+ignorance or misreading of facts renders less than no service. But the
+service done is immeasurably increased in value when the man arises who
+from his study of a myriad dead fragments is able to paint some living
+picture of the past.
+
+This is why the record as great writers preserve it has a value
+immeasurably beyond what is merely lifeless. Such a record pulses with
+immortal life. It may recount the deed or the thought of a hero at some
+supreme moment. It may be merely the portrayal of homely every-day
+life. This matters not, so long as in either event the genius of the
+historian enables him to paint in colors that do not fade. The cry of
+the Ten Thousand when they first saw the sea still stirs the hearts
+of men. The ruthless death scene between Jehu and Jezebel; wicked
+Ahab, smitten by the chance arrow, and propped in his chariot until
+he died at sundown; Josiah, losing his life because he would not heed
+the Pharaoh’s solemn warning, and mourned by all the singing men and
+all the singing women--the fates of these kings and of this king’s
+daughter, are part of the common stock of knowledge of mankind. They
+were petty rulers of petty principalities; yet, compared with them,
+mighty conquerors, who added empire to empire, Shalmaneser and Sargon,
+Amenhotep and Rameses, are but shadows; for the deeds and the deaths
+of the kings of Judah and Israel are written in words that, once read,
+can not be forgotten. The Peloponnesian War bulks of unreal size to-day
+because it once seemed thus to bulk to a master mind. Only a great
+historian can fittingly deal with a very great subject; yet because the
+qualities of chief interest in human history can be shown on a small
+field no less than on a large one, some of the greatest historians have
+treated subjects that only their own genius rendered great.
+
+So true is this that if great events lack a great historian, and a
+great poet writes about them, it is the poet who fixes them in the mind
+of mankind, so that in after-time importance the real has become the
+shadow and the shadow the reality. Shakespeare has definitely fixed
+the character of the Richard III of whom ordinary men think and speak.
+Keats forgot even the right name of the man who first saw the Pacific
+Ocean; yet it is his lines which leap to our minds when we think of the
+“wild surmise” felt by the indomitable explorer-conqueror from Spain
+when the vast new sea burst on his vision.
+
+When, however, the great historian has spoken, his work will never be
+undone. No poet can ever supersede what Napier wrote of the storming
+of Badajoz, of the British infantry at Albuera, and of the light
+artillery at Fuentes d’Oñoro. After Parkman had written of Montcalm and
+Wolfe there was left for other writers only what Fitzgerald left for
+other translators of Omar Khayyam. Much new light has been thrown on
+the history of the Byzantine Empire by the many men who have studied
+it of recent years; we read each new writer with pleasure and profit;
+and after reading each we take down a volume of Gibbon, with renewed
+thankfulness that a great writer was moved to do a great task.
+
+The greatest of future archæologists will be the great historian who
+instead of being a mere antiquarian delver in dust-heaps has the genius
+to reconstruct for us the immense panorama of the past. He must possess
+knowledge. He must possess that without which knowledge is of so little
+use, wisdom. What he brings from the charnel-house he must use with
+such potent wizardry that we shall see the life that was and not the
+death that is. For remember that the past was life just as much as the
+present is life. Whether it be Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or Scandinavia
+with which he deals, the great historian, if the facts permit him,
+will put before us the men and women as they actually lived so that
+we shall recognize them for what they were, living beings. Men like
+Maspero, Breasted, and Weigall have already begun this work for the
+countries of the Nile and the Euphrates. For Scandinavia the groundwork
+was laid long ago in the “Heimskringla” and in such sagas as those of
+Burnt Njal and Gisli Soursop. Minute descriptions of mummies and of
+the furniture of tombs help us as little to understand the Egypt of
+the mighty days, as to sit inside the tomb of Mount Vernon would help
+us to see Washington the soldier leading to battle his scarred and
+tattered veterans, or Washington the statesman, by his serene strength
+of character, rendering it possible for his countrymen to establish
+themselves as one great nation.
+
+The great historian must be able to paint for us the life of the plain
+people, the ordinary men and women, of the time of which he writes.
+He can do this only if he possesses the highest kind of imagination.
+Collections of figures no more give us a picture of the past than the
+reading of a tariff report on hides or woollens gives us an idea of
+the actual lives of the men and women who live on ranches or work in
+factories. The great historian will in as full measure as possible
+present to us the every-day life of the men and women of the age which
+he describes. Nothing that tells of this life will come amiss to him.
+The instruments of their labor and the weapons of their warfare, the
+wills that they wrote, the bargains that they made, and the songs that
+they sang when they feasted and made love: he must use them all. He
+must tell us of the toil of the ordinary man in ordinary times, and of
+the play by which that ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget
+that no event stands out entirely isolated. He must trace from its
+obscure and humble beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of
+triumph has shaken the world.
+
+Yet he must not forget that the times that are extraordinary
+need especial portrayal. In the revolt against the old tendency
+of historians to deal exclusively with the spectacular and the
+exceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and government, many
+modern writers have gone to the opposite extreme. They fail to realize
+that in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there are hours so
+fraught with weighty achievement, with triumph or defeat, with joy or
+sorrow, that each such hour may determine all the years that are to
+come thereafter, or may outweigh all the years that have gone before.
+In the writings of our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary
+citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it is the ordinary
+every-day life which counts most; nor yet that seasons come when
+ordinary qualities count for but little in the face of great contending
+forces of good and of evil, the outcome of whose strife determines
+whether the nation shall walk in the glory of the morning or in the
+gloom of spiritual death.
+
+The historian must deal with the days of common things, and deal with
+them so that they shall interest us in reading of them as our own
+common things interest us as we live among them. He must trace the
+changes that come almost unseen, the slow and gradual growth that
+transforms for good or for evil the children and grandchildren so that
+they stand high above or far below the level on which their forefathers
+stood. He must also trace the great cataclysms that interrupt and
+divert this gradual development. He can no more afford to be blind to
+one class of phenomena than to the other. He must ever remember that
+while the worst offence of which he can be guilty is to write vividly
+and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he can not write
+truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as
+the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.
+
+There can be no better illustration of what I mean than is afforded by
+the history of Russia during the last thousand years. The historian
+must trace the growth of the earliest Slav communities of the forest
+and the steppe, the infiltration of Scandinavian invaders who gave them
+their first power of mass action, and the slow, chaotic development
+of the little communes into barbarous cities and savage princedoms.
+In later Russian history he must show us priest and noble, merchant
+and serf, changing slowly from the days when Ivan the Terrible warred
+against Bátory, the Magyar king of Poland, until the present moment,
+when with half-suspicious eyes the people of the Czar watch their
+remote Bulgarian kinsmen standing before the last European stronghold
+of the Turk. During all these centuries there were multitudes of
+wars, foreign and domestic, any or all of which were of little moment
+compared to the slow working of the various forces that wrought in
+the times of peace. But there was one period of storm and overthrow
+so terrible that it affected profoundly for all time the whole growth
+of the Russian people, in inmost character no less than in external
+dominion. Early in the thirteenth century the genius of Jenghiz Khan
+stirred the Mongol horsemen of the mid-Asian pastures to a movement as
+terrible to civilization as the lava flow of a volcano to the lands
+around the volcano’s foot. When that century opened, the Mongols were
+of no more weight in the world than the Touaregs of the Sahara are
+to-day. Long before the century had closed they had ridden from the
+Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. They had crushed
+Christian and Moslem and Buddhist alike beneath the iron cruelty of
+their sway. They had conquered China as their successors conquered
+India. They sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In mid-Europe their
+presence for a moment caused the same horror to fall on the warring
+adherents of the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they were a scourge so
+frightful, so irresistible, that the people cowered before them as if
+they had been demons. No European army of that day, of any nation, was
+able to look them in the face on a stricken field. Bestial in their
+lives, irresistible in battle, merciless in victory, they trampled the
+lands over which they rode into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their
+horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny horse-bowmen drew a red furrow
+across Hungary, devastated Poland, and in Silesia overthrew the banded
+chivalry of Germany. But it was in Russia that they did their worst.
+They not merely conquered Russia, but held the Russians as cowering
+and abject serfs for two centuries. Every feeble effort at resistance
+was visited with such bloodthirsty vengeance that finally no Russian
+ventured ever to oppose them at all. But the princes of the cities soon
+found that the beast-like fury of the conquerors when their own desires
+were thwarted, was only equalled by their beast-like indifference to
+all that was done among the conquered people themselves, and that they
+were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid each Russian against his
+brother. Under this régime the Russian who rose was the Russian who
+with cringing servility to his Tartar overlords combined ferocious and
+conscienceless greed in the treatment of his fellow Russians. Moscow
+came to the front by using the Tartar to help conquer the other Russian
+cities, paying as a price abject obedience to all Tartar demands. In
+the long run the fierce and pliant cunning of the conquered people
+proved too much for the short-sighted and arrogant brutality of the
+conquerors. The Tartar power, the Mongolian power, waned. Russia became
+united, threw off the yoke, and herself began a career of aggression
+at the expense of her former conquerors. But the reconquest of racial
+independence, vitally necessary though it was to Russia, had been paid
+for by the establishment of a despotism Asiatic rather than European in
+its spirit and working.
+
+The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were
+the present. He will make us see as living men the hard-faced archers
+of Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who followed Alexander down
+beyond the rim of the known world. We shall hear grate on the coast
+of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves whose children’s
+children were to inherit unknown continents. We shall thrill to the
+triumphs of Hannibal. Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor
+of dead cities, and the might of the elder empires of which the very
+ruins crumbled to dust ages ago. Along ancient trade-routes, across
+the world’s waste spaces, the caravans shall move; and the admirals of
+uncharted seas shall furrow the oceans with their lonely prows. Beyond
+the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We
+shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the
+course of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of forgotten seers.
+Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly, who saw in
+their vision peaks so lofty that never yet have they been reached by
+the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds
+of men of might and the love and the beauty of women. We shall see
+the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of the flowers in the Hanging
+Gardens of Babylon will be heavy to our senses. We shall sit at feast
+with the kings of Nineveh when they drink from ivory and gold. With
+Queen Maeve in her sun-parlor we shall watch the nearing chariots of
+the champions. For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the
+flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The
+frowning strongholds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and
+the white palace-castles from whose windows Syrian princes once looked
+across the blue Ægean. We shall know the valor of the two-sworded
+Samurai. Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and the strange, crooked folly
+of the immemorial civilizations which tottered to a living death in
+India and in China. We shall see the terrible horsemen of Timur the
+Lame ride over the roof of the world; we shall hear the drums beat as
+the armies of Gustavus and Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to
+victory. Ours shall be the woe of burgher and peasant, and ours the
+stern joy when freemen triumph and justice comes to her own. The agony
+of the galley-slaves shall be ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked
+are brought low and the men of evil days have their reward. We shall
+see the glory of triumphant violence, and the revel of those who do
+wrong in high places; and the broken-hearted despair that lies beneath
+the glory and the revel. We shall also see the supreme righteousness
+of the wars for freedom and justice, and know that the men who fell in
+these wars made all mankind their debtors.
+
+Some day the historians will tell us of these things. Some day, too,
+they will tell our children of the age and the land in which we now
+live. They will portray the conquest of the continent. They will show
+the slow beginnings of settlement, the growth of the fishing and
+trading towns on the seacoast, the hesitating early ventures into the
+Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show the backwoodsmen, with their
+long rifles and their light axes, making their way with labor and peril
+through the wooded wilderness to the Mississippi; and then the endless
+march of the white-topped wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the
+coast of the greatest of the five great oceans. They will show how the
+land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was
+filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western
+and central Europe. The portentous growth of the cities will be shown,
+and the change from a nation of farmers to a nation of business men and
+artisans, and all the far-reaching consequences of the rise of the new
+industrialism. The formation of a new ethnic type in this melting-pot
+of the nations will be told. The hard materialism of our age will
+appear, and also the strange capacity for lofty idealism which must
+be reckoned with by all who would understand the American character.
+A people whose heroes are Washington and Lincoln, a peaceful people
+who fought to a finish one of the bloodiest of wars, waged solely for
+the sake of a great principle and a noble idea, surely possess an
+emergency-standard far above mere money-getting.
+
+Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of
+to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much that is
+unpleasant. This is but saying that they will describe the arch-typical
+civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is finally told,
+I believe that it will show that the forces working for good in our
+national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that, with many
+blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and turning aside from the
+path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in
+our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation.
+
+
+
+
+BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
+
+
+
+
+BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[2]
+
+
+An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received,
+speaks in this university of ancient renown, can not but feel with
+peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught
+as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and
+all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the
+minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who
+dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations
+are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are
+not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one
+thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of
+the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who
+came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our
+people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become
+more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are
+of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that,
+as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among
+the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my
+ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come
+to Oxford in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth,” would have felt
+far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in
+the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in
+the things of the body.
+
+    [2] Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910. This was the Romanes
+        Lecture for 1910, and has been published by the Oxford
+        University Press, with whose permission it is included in
+        this volume.
+
+More than ever before in the world’s history we of to-day seek to
+penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind
+but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we
+see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we
+look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages,
+from the immemorial past when in “cramp elf and saurian forms” the
+creative forces “swathed their too-much power,” down to the yesterday,
+a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man became
+the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet; and
+studying we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death,
+of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal
+life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly
+complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we
+speak of nations and civilizations.
+
+It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence.
+In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the
+history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in
+scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by the
+men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits. I
+am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for instance,
+which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and the
+water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the science
+that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements as the
+telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so accelerated
+the velocity of movement in social and industrial conditions--for
+the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary life during the
+last three generations have been greater than in all the preceding
+generations since history dawned. I speak of the science which has
+no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our every-day life than
+literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A
+hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know something
+of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather against his
+having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present
+all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific
+discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and the
+rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most
+advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in
+the popular mind.
+
+Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of
+science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect
+naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain
+tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This
+is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have
+scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history
+of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what biology
+shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen
+a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both
+positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position, the
+more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an
+attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter
+of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely
+as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree
+that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative
+worth and interrelationship are just as necessary in historical
+study as in any other kind of study. The fact that a book, though
+interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at once from the category
+of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the
+always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction.
+But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to
+insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which
+is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth
+seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific
+historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book
+is directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as
+a painful duty. Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a
+branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch
+of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science
+encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding
+encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the
+great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is
+broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of
+books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which
+shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great
+historians, the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay,
+we need merely that the future writers of history, without losing the
+qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the
+new facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal.
+Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No “scientific” treatise
+about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that
+Joinville’s place is in both history and literature; no minute study
+of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot--and Marbot is
+as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the
+branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art of
+presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than the
+layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics which
+can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of realization,
+it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the future must
+essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great historians
+of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an honorable,
+but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian who produces
+books which are not literature must rest content with the honor,
+substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who
+gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to use.
+
+Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of
+literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in the
+scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He who
+would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology, of
+the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of
+that science of evolution which is inseparably connected with the great
+name of Darwin. Of course, there is no exact parallelism between the
+birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, and the birth,
+growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there is a
+certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there
+are homologies.
+
+How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are
+more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the
+interpretation of human history, we can not at present say. The
+historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man
+is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance
+is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is
+advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and,
+moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts of
+vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full significance,
+are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The research which
+enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge stands first;
+but second only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly
+to pose the problem, also requires us to say that with our present
+knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
+
+Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of
+the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the
+higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.
+
+Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time
+necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many
+hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed
+by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we
+find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian
+life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as
+we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of
+man substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him,
+we also find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind,
+though widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day.
+Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type,
+in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
+development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most
+imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned
+into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed
+clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these
+lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The
+scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the
+relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation,
+by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their
+writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which
+our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case
+the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such
+partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that we
+have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the development
+of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some
+facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes
+for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts
+as to which we grope in the dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes,
+of which we can give no adequate explanation.
+
+Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of
+terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of species
+we must remember that such expressions as “a new species,” or as “a
+species becoming extinct,” are each commonly and indiscriminately
+used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course
+the “new” species is not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared
+later on the globe’s surface than those of any old species tottering to
+extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now living must necessarily
+trace its ancestral descent back through countless generations, through
+eons of time, to the early stages of the appearance of life on the
+globe. All that we mean by a “new” species is that from some cause, or
+set of causes, one of these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops
+into a form unlike any that has preceded it; so that, while in one form
+of life the ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species
+continues to exist, in another form of life there is a deviation from
+the ancestral type and a new species appears.
+
+Similarly, “extinction of species” is a term which has two entirely
+different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and
+leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the generations
+go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced.
+Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the other case it
+changes into something different. The huge titanothere, and the small
+three-toed horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the same
+period of the world’s history, back in the middle of the mammalian age.
+Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely disappeared
+and that nothing like either is to be found in the world to-day. But
+whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no
+descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave descendants,
+and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages went by, finally
+developed into the highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and
+zebras of to-day.
+
+The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in
+the development of human societies is striking. A further analogy
+is supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of
+intense and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes
+highly specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization,
+triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great
+development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so extreme
+that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely guess, it
+disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly come from the
+less specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant, and striking
+types, of the preceding era.
+
+When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide one
+period of paleontological history from another, we can sometimes assign
+causes, and again we can not even guess at them. In the case of single
+species, or of faunas of very restricted localities, the explanation
+is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change in the amount
+of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in vegetation,
+might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge herbivores with
+a bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity of food, and with
+teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants could
+furnish this food. Again, we now know that the most deadly foes of the
+higher forms of life are various lower forms of life, such as insects,
+or microscopic creatures conveyed into the blood by insects. There
+are districts in South America where many large animals, wild and
+domestic, can not live because of the presence either of certain ticks
+or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there is a terrible genus of
+poison fly, each species acting as the host of microscopic creatures
+which are deadly to certain of the higher vertebrates. One of these
+species, though harmless to man, is fatal to all domestic animals,
+and this although harmless to the closely related wild kinsfolk of
+these animals. Another is fatal to man himself, being the cause of
+the “sleeping-sickness” which in many large districts has killed out
+the entire population. Of course the development or the extension
+of the range of any such insects, and any one of many other causes
+which we see actually at work around us, would readily account for
+the destruction of some given species or even for the destruction of
+several species in a limited area of country.
+
+When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is
+different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the
+knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctogæal continent, for
+instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the glacial
+period made a complete, but of course explicable, change in the faunal
+life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied
+fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna
+succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is obvious.
+
+But in many other cases we can not so much as hazard a guess at why
+a given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of these
+inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South America
+toward the close of the tertiary period. For ages South America had
+been an island by itself, cut off from North America at the very
+time that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication
+with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South
+America, some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while
+others are recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths,
+and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian
+fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
+representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar
+during his career on this earth.
+
+Toward the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land
+between this old South American island and North America, near what
+is now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge across which
+the teeming animal life of the northern continent had access to this
+queer southern continent. There followed an inrush of huge, or swift,
+or formidable creatures which had attained their development in the
+fierce competition of the arctogæal realm. Elephants, camels, horses,
+tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer,
+crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers
+and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not
+only was the character of the South American fauna totally changed by
+the invasion of these creatures from the north, which soon swarmed over
+the continent, but it was also changed through the development wrought
+in the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they were
+exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types died out. Others
+developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and thereby saved
+themselves from the new beasts. In consequence, South America soon
+became populated with various new species of mastodons, sabre-toothed
+tigers, camels, horses, deer, cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange
+shapes, and some of them of giant size, all of these being descended
+from the immigrant types; and side by side with them there grew up
+large autochthonous ungulates, giant ground-sloths well-nigh as large
+as elephants, and armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally
+of the armadillo or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only
+held their own, but actually in their turn wandered north over the
+isthmus and invaded North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa
+to-day, as abundant in species and individuals, even more noteworthy,
+because of its huge size or odd type, and because of the terrific
+prowess of the more formidable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in
+South America, and flourished for a period which human history would
+call very long indeed, but which geologically was short.
+
+Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this
+fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate
+befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous fauna
+and the descendants of the migrants that had come down from the north.
+Ground-sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all
+the associated animals of large size vanished, and South America,
+though still retaining its connection with North America, once again
+became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that
+of North America and the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for
+instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like
+wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of
+small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes
+diminutive representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both
+of the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants
+among the new and intrusive kinds. The change was wide-spread and
+extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is wholly
+inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine any cause
+which would account for the extinction of so many species of huge
+or moderate size, while smaller representatives, and here and there
+medium-sized representatives, of many of them were left.
+
+Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there
+are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history
+of human societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, of the
+development and change, of the temporary dominance, and death or
+transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form races or
+nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind that we
+use each of the words “birth” and “death,” “youth” and “age,” often
+very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally
+different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing
+as an “old” or a “young” nation, any more than there is an “old” or
+“young” family. Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral descent must be
+of exactly the same length for every existing individual, and for every
+group of individuals, whether forming a family or a nation. All that
+can properly be meant by the terms “new” and “young” is that in a given
+line of descent there has suddenly come a period of rapid change. This
+change may arise either from a new development or transformation of the
+old elements, or else from a new grouping of these elements with other
+and varied elements; so that the words “new” nation or “young” nation
+may have a real difference of significance in one case from what they
+have in another.
+
+As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the
+specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing,
+generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, occurs when
+a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more
+complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for
+instance, in western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and,
+later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the
+modern countries of western Europe are descended from the states
+created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be
+called “new” or “young” states in the sense that part or all of the
+people composing them were descended from races that hitherto had not
+been civilized, and that therefore, for the first time, entered on
+the career of civilized communities. In the southern part of western
+Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants
+already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the
+new kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence
+then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders had
+come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities
+with essentially the same civilization as their southern neighbors;
+though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there
+was no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which
+gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same races
+which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly
+changing barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the Slavonized
+Finns of eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian leaders
+from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine culture from the
+south, joined to produce the changes which have gradually, out of the
+little Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, formed the
+mighty Russian Empire of to-day.
+
+Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a
+long-established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this
+case the nation is usually spoken of as a “young,” and is correctly
+spoken of as a “new,” nation; but the term should always be used with a
+clear sense of the difference between what is described in such case,
+and what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized
+nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new
+cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phœnician race
+was in every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old
+city. So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared
+with England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and
+culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean
+for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that
+the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
+again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished
+many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean
+that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly use
+the phrase “a new people,” in speaking of Canadians or Australians,
+Americans or Africanders. But we use it in an entirely different sense
+from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those
+founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of
+astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves
+conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use
+it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when
+speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod,
+and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy forests
+struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities
+and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred
+were “new,” compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also
+in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing
+in common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the
+Cæsars of Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history were
+totally different. This is not true of those “new” nations which spring
+direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United States,
+are all “new” nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but, with
+whatever changes in detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the
+general European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The
+differences between these “new” American and these “old” European
+nations are not as great as those which separate the “new” nations
+one from another, and the “old” nations one from another. There are in
+each case very real differences between the new and the old nation;
+differences both for good and for evil; but in each case there is the
+same ancestral history to reckon with, the same type of civilization,
+with its attendant benefits and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer
+stages are passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of superficial
+differences, are in their essence the same; they are those that
+confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront only peoples
+struggling from barbarism into civilization.
+
+So, when we speak of the “death” of a tribe, a nation, or a
+civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally
+different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological
+history being complete. Certain tribes of savages--the Tasmanians, for
+instance, and various little clans of American Indians--have within
+the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals
+have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared.
+Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are
+now disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the
+veins of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those
+white intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed
+into something absolutely different from what they were. In the
+United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees,
+Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes are in process of absorption
+into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a
+couple of years ago, one of the two senators, and three of the five
+representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a
+few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as
+those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by
+absorption and transformation into the mass of the American population.
+
+A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that
+a civilization has “died out.” The nationality and culture of
+the wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have
+completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences dating
+therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and hidden form
+as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the Roman Empire
+was of no such character. There was complete change, far-reaching
+transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation; but it would
+not be correct to speak either of the blood or the culture of Old
+Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to the
+permanence or evanescence of the various strains of blood that go to
+make up every civilized nationality; but it is reasonably certain
+that the blood of the old Roman still flows through the veins of the
+modern Italian; and though there has been much intermixture, from
+many different foreign sources--from foreign conquerors and from
+foreign slaves--yet it is probable that the Italian type of to-day
+finds its dominant ancestral type in the ancient Latin. As for the
+culture, the civilization of Rome, this is even more true. It has
+suffered a complete transformation, partly by natural growth, partly
+by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic religion,
+and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs; but the process
+was not one of extinction, but one of growth and transformation, both
+from within and by the accretion of outside elements. In France and
+Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture
+which was forced on those countries has been tenaciously retained by
+them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes,
+as the basis on which their civilizations have been built. Moreover,
+the permanent spreading of Roman influence was not limited to Europe.
+It has extended to and over half of that New World which was not even
+dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant life between the
+birth and the death of pagan Rome. This New World was discovered by
+one Italian, and its mainland first reached and named by another;
+and in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan’s empire,
+the Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the
+Saint Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of the Andes, and in
+the shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande
+to the Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing
+apace, which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in
+their blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization.
+When we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient
+Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to
+describe totally different phenomena.
+
+The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more clearly
+than their predecessors of a couple of generations back, how artificial
+most great nationalities are, and how loose is the terminology usually
+employed to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and
+rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which
+spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as
+if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something
+ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and
+faith in their own and their fellow countrymen’s purity of descent
+from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a
+few generations earlier by the various noble families who traced
+their lineage direct to Odin, Æneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course,
+all students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the
+slightest connection between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue. In
+America we find three races, white, red, and black, and three tongues,
+English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such a way that the lines
+of cleavage of race continually run at right angles to the lines of
+cleavage of speech; there being communities practically of pure blood
+of each race found speaking each language. Aryan and Teutonic are
+terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; but whether they have
+any such ethnical meanings as were formerly attributed to them is so
+doubtful, that we can not even be sure whether the ancestors of most
+of those we call Teutons originally spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The
+term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when used linguistically; but
+when used to describe a race it means almost nothing until we find out
+which one of several totally different terminologies the writer or
+speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is used to designate
+the short-headed, medium-sized type common throughout middle Europe,
+from east to west, it denotes something entirely different from what
+is meant when the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents
+of the Romans and the later Greeks; while, if used to designate any
+modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as the
+term Anglo-Saxon itself.
+
+Most of the great societies which have developed a high civilization
+and have played a dominant part in the world have been--and
+are--artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the sense of
+including totally different race types. A great nation rarely belongs
+to any one race, though its citizens generally have one essentially
+national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great
+artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the
+parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward
+or go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very
+powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is
+far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed
+we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from
+one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when they
+become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and creed
+sink into littleness.
+
+An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided
+according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as
+stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance
+whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities,
+of Europe; while, on the contrary, a linguistic map would show a
+general correspondence between speech and nationality. The northern
+Frenchman is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to his
+German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean
+seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than
+to the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of
+the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that
+tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen
+feel keenly that they are one, and are different from all outsiders,
+their differences dwindling into insignificance compared with the
+extraordinary, artificially produced resemblances which bring them
+together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true
+when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the
+Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German
+of the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and
+Yorkshireman in England.
+
+In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and primitive
+relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized, civilized, or
+semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution in drawing
+analogies with what has occurred in the development of the animal
+world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of the
+phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these complex, artificial
+groups of human beings resemble what has happened in myriads of
+instances in the history of life on this planet.
+
+Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are knit by a bond of
+speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood, show periods of
+extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering decay? In some
+cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases we can not as yet
+even guess what the proper answer should be. If in any such case the
+centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal, the nation will of course
+fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure to become a dominant
+force is patent to every one. The minute that the spirit which finds
+its healthy development in local self-government, and is the antidote
+to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into mere
+particularism, into inability to combine effectively for achievement of
+a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland and
+certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the standard examples
+of failure of this kind; and the United States would have ranked with
+them, and her name would have become a byword of derision, if the
+forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of
+soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a national
+danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the vision of a
+seer to foretell what must happen in any community if the average woman
+ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy children, if the
+average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to
+fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die
+out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if
+the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material
+prosperity can offset.
+
+But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially
+inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great
+slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a countryside of
+peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like
+acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the
+citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the
+state, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But this does not
+explain why the forward movement stopped at different times, so far as
+different matters were concerned; at one time as regards literature,
+at another time as regards architecture, at another time as regards
+city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome’s dissolution
+at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the impoverishment
+and depopulation of the empire, its fall would be quite sufficiently
+explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had lost the
+fighting edge--an essential even under a despotism, and therefore far
+more essential in free, self-governing communities, such as those of
+the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is rather that out
+of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during the last days of
+the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an empire able to
+hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or four centuries. But
+why, for instance, should the higher kinds of literary productiveness
+have ceased about the beginning of the second century, whereas the
+following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in the shape
+of city-building in the provinces, not only in western Europe, but in
+Africa? We can not even guess why the springs of one kind of energy
+dried up, while there was yet no cessation of another kind.
+
+Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period
+covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some
+of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the dangerous
+heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior in
+territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later
+she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which she
+had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it could
+not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker than it
+needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great
+Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed. Her government
+was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to
+permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to
+rob the central authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But
+the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies,
+where men hate to think of war as possible, and try to justify their
+own reluctance to face it either by high-sounding moral platitudes,
+or else by a philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were
+very wealthy. They grew to believe that they could hire others to do
+their fighting for them on land; and on sea, where they did their own
+fighting, and fought very well, they refused in time of peace to make
+ready fleets so efficient as either to insure them against the peace
+being broken or else to give them the victory when war came. To be
+opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost
+certain cost of disaster in the future.
+
+It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position
+among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the
+same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position in
+the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burnt itself
+out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of great
+warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the great
+Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed
+the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.
+
+In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it
+was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy
+teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the
+Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no
+decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so
+many countries: no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no
+general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first
+a flowering time, in which the country’s men of action and men of
+thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day;
+then this period of command passed, and the state revolved in an eddy,
+aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the
+people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially
+unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves
+and play again a leading part.
+
+In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course
+of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really
+Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries
+when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and
+frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating
+self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as
+most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work throughout
+Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism. It had
+ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring forth
+men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people cowered
+in helpless misery among the horsehoofs of the barbarians, as the wild
+northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities for
+a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but in the end
+it was seen that what came had been in part change and growth. It was
+not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of
+language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but the people
+of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins. In a
+few centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy. Then for four or
+five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states which,
+in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent life,
+in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and in their
+utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among themselves or
+to repel outside invasion, can not unfairly be compared with classic
+Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or
+Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, there came
+for the third time a wonderful new birth.
+
+Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in
+certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance
+in certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one
+time seemed as firmly established as in Italy--certainly as in Spain
+or Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of
+a national type can be found than in the case of the Greco-Roman
+dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over
+nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the
+time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins
+of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must
+once have been. The overshadowing and far-reaching importance of what
+occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New
+Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North
+Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the valley of the Po.
+The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a
+period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage
+of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then
+they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion,
+and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they
+vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside
+them a new type, the Arab.
+
+Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main facts.
+We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the greatness
+of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood remains in Italy,
+whether to a greater or less extent; and that the Latin culture has
+died out in the African realm it once won, while it has lasted in Spain
+and France, and thence has extended itself to continents beyond the
+ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts, save partially; but
+the facts themselves we do know. But there are other cases in which
+we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we do not know what the
+changes really were, still less the hidden causes and meaning of these
+changes. Much remains to be found out before we can speak with any
+certainty as to whether some changes mean the actual dying out or the
+mere transformation of types. It is, for instance, astonishing how
+little permanent change in the physical make-up of the people seems to
+have been worked in Europe by the migrations of the races in historic
+times. A tall, fair-haired, long-skulled race penetrates to some
+southern country and establishes a commonwealth. The generations pass.
+There is no violent revolution, no break in continuity of history,
+nothing in the written records to indicate an epoch-making change at
+any given moment; and yet after a time we find that the old type has
+reappeared and that the people of the locality do not substantially
+differ in physical form from the people of other localities that did
+not suffer such an invasion. Does this mean that gradually the children
+of the invaders have dwindled and died out; or, as the blood is mixed
+with the ancient blood, has there been a change, part reversion and
+part assimilation, to the ancient type in its old surroundings? Do
+tint of skin, eyes and hair, shape of skull, and stature change in the
+new environment, so as to be like those of the older people who dwelt
+in this environment? Do the intrusive races, without change of blood,
+tend under the pressure of their new surroundings to change in type
+so as to resemble the ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the strains
+mingled, has the new strain dwindled and vanished, from causes as yet
+obscure? Has the blood of the Lombard practically disappeared from
+Italy, and of the Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow in large
+populations where the old physical type has once more become dominant?
+Here in England, the long-skulled men of the long barrows, the
+short-skulled men of the round barrows--have they blended, or has one
+or the other type actually died out; or are they merged in some older
+race which they seemingly supplanted, or have they adopted the tongue
+and civilization of some later race which seemingly destroyed them?
+We can not say. We do not know which of the widely different stocks
+now speaking Aryan tongues represents in physical characteristics the
+ancient Aryan type, nor where the type originated, nor how or why it
+imposed its language on other types, nor how much or how little mixture
+of blood accompanied the change of tongue.
+
+The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of those which can
+and those which can not be explained, have been peculiarly in evidence
+during the four centuries that have gone by since the discovery of
+America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These have been the
+four centuries of by far the most intense and constantly accelerating
+rapidity of movement and development that the world has yet seen. The
+movement has covered all the fields of human activity. It has witnessed
+an altogether unexampled spread of civilized mankind over the world, as
+well as an altogether unexampled advance in man’s dominion over nature;
+and this together with a literary and artistic activity to be matched
+in but one previous epoch. This period of extension and development
+has been that of one race, the so-called white race, or, to speak more
+accurately, the group of peoples living in Europe, who undoubtedly have
+a certain kinship of blood, who profess the Christian religion, and
+trace back their culture to Greece and Rome.
+
+The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief is
+this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race.
+It is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years which went
+before the opening of this era of European supremacy, the attitude of
+Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and Moor, had
+on the whole been that of successful aggression against Europe. More
+than a century went by after the voyages of Columbus before the mastery
+in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During that time
+Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand comparison with
+Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European advance gathered
+momentum; until at the present time peoples of European blood hold
+dominion over all America and Australia and the islands of the sea,
+over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia. Much of this world
+conquest is merely political, and such a conquest is always likely in
+the long run to vanish. But very much of it represents not a merely
+political, but an ethnic conquest; the intrusive people having either
+exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples, or else having
+imposed upon them its tongue, law, culture, and religion, together
+with a strain of its blood. During this period substantially all of
+the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the
+people of European descent. The first exception of any consequence is
+the wonderful rise of Japan within the last generation--a phenomenon
+unexampled in history; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese
+line of ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours; and yet
+Japan, while hitherto keeping most of what was strongest in her ancient
+character and traditions, has assimilated with curious completeness
+most of the characteristics that have given power and leadership to the
+West.
+
+During this period of intense and feverish activity among the peoples
+of European stock, first one and then another has taken the lead.
+The movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their flowering-time was
+as brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of their annals are
+illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, poets,
+and painters. Then their days of greatness ceased. Many partial
+explanations can be given, but something remains behind, some hidden
+force for evil, some hidden source of weakness upon which we can not
+lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after
+centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese
+stock are entering upon another era of development, and there are other
+signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.
+
+About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of the
+Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of Europe, in
+the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav turned in
+his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp leadership and
+dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has at one time or
+another sought a place in the movement of expansion; but for the last
+three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has been the growth of
+the English-speaking peoples and their spread over the world’s waste
+spaces.
+
+Comparison is often made between the empire of Britain and the
+empire of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all modern
+civilization, the empire of Rome is of course the more important,
+simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other
+continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by
+the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The empire of Rome
+is the most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time
+can be compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying
+that the nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection
+of the stream’s current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one
+with the other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the
+immensely increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the
+older empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand
+years, there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and
+abounding interest and importance of their careers.
+
+In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its predecessor
+had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed large over the
+horizon of history, there were left for her to contend with only
+decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus,
+she strove against the strength of but one of the many fragments into
+which Alexander’s kingdom had fallen. When she conquered Carthage,
+she overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single Greek
+city of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy
+armies of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of the
+House of Barca, which rendered the struggle forever memorable. It was
+the distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen,
+that set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was
+curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the
+tall barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her
+greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the
+Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened
+her but to die.
+
+On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the great
+empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that have
+also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the continent
+of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the empire she
+won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had at the same
+time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of
+Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and Macedon in the red
+flush of their warrior-dawn. The empire of Britain is vaster in space,
+in population, in wealth, in wide variety of possession, in a history
+of multiplied and manifold achievement of every kind, than even the
+glorious empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome, Britain has won dominion in
+every clime, has carried her flag by conquest and settlement to the
+uttermost ends of the earth, at the very time that haughty and powerful
+rivals, in their abounding youth or strong maturity, were eager to
+set bounds to her greatness, and to tear from her what she had won
+afar. England has peopled continents with her children, has swayed
+the destinies of teeming myriads of alien race, has ruled ancient
+monarchies, and wrested from all corners the right to the world’s waste
+spaces, while at home she has held her own before nations, each of
+military power comparable to Rome’s at her zenith.
+
+Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own
+borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country, my hearers,
+is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from
+without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard
+ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these
+enemies are our own passions and follies. Free peoples can escape
+being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves. We
+Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep
+in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of
+a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty,
+of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my
+hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think
+me a very radical democrat--as, for the matter of that, I am--and my
+theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as
+little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist.
+But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think
+soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is
+the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have
+a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool.
+No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that
+wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman;
+but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the
+all-important factor in national greatness is national character.
+
+There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever
+tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to an
+end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law
+of death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can
+tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that
+can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for good
+and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for
+vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The
+most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of
+natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of
+the civilized nations of central and western Europe, of America and
+Australia--a diminution so great that, if it continues for the next
+century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years,
+all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else
+have begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have
+already gone very far backward.
+
+There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there
+is much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be
+mistaken than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in
+1830 Niebuhr hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go
+down with a crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third-
+and fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked,
+comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to
+the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the civilized
+portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at Carlyle’s
+prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the teeming
+life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and of noble
+effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two generations
+since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been told and
+all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth doing had been
+done. I believe with all my heart that a great future remains for us;
+but whether it does or does not, our duty is not altered. However the
+battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost vigor
+do his allotted task, and bear himself as valiantly in defeat as in
+victory. Come what will, we belong to peoples who have not yielded
+to the craven fear of being great. In the ages that have gone by, the
+great nations, the nations that have expanded and that have played a
+mighty part in the world, have in the end grown old and weakened and
+vanished; but so have the nations whose only thought was to avoid all
+danger, all effort, who would risk nothing, and who therefore gained
+nothing. In the end, the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the
+memory of the one type perishes with it, while the other leaves its
+mark deep on the history of all the future of mankind.
+
+A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in
+the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of
+heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence
+the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has
+done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time to
+see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to take up
+the task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth.
+But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours to
+remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers were
+before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation, from
+civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from the
+dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of this
+teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward and
+the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man
+whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept alight
+only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they
+worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than
+how they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the realm of the
+body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was of substance,
+then high success was really theirs.
+
+In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between what
+has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession of the ages
+on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring to the great
+artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the world’s
+surface during the thousands of years that have elapsed since cities
+of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the Euphrates,
+and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of the Ægean
+craft. But of course the parallel is true only in the roughest and most
+general way. Moreover, even between the civilizations of to-day and
+the civilizations of ancient times there are differences so profound
+that we must be cautious in drawing any conclusions for the present
+based on what has happened in the past. While freely admitting all
+of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it is yet mere perversity to
+refuse to realize the incredible advance that has been made in ethical
+standards. I do not believe that there is the slightest necessary
+connection between any weakening of virile force and this advance in
+the moral standard, this growth of the sense of obligation to one’s
+neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor wrong. We need have
+scant patience with that silly cynicism which insists that kindliness
+of character only accompanies weakness of character. On the contrary,
+just as in private life many of the men of strongest character are
+the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so I believe that
+in national life, as the ages go by, we shall find that the permanent
+national types will more and more tend to become those in which,
+though intellect stands high, character stands higher; in which rugged
+strength and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful aggression
+by others, will go hand in hand with a lofty scorn of doing wrong
+to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of Hampden, of Washington,
+and Lincoln. These were as good men, as disinterested and unselfish
+men, as ever served a state; and they were also as strong men as ever
+founded or saved a state. Surely such examples prove that there is
+nothing Utopian in our effort to combine justice and strength in the
+same nation. The really high civilizations must themselves supply the
+antidote to the self-indulgence and love of ease which they tend to
+produce.
+
+Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to
+solve within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from
+juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the
+self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must deal
+with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the
+problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must
+be a spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance
+of responsibility, one for each and each for all, and at the same
+time a spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and
+sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong
+to the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil
+affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the
+lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted a reward which
+is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned.
+The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself;
+and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently
+helped at the expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to
+best advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially
+of minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to
+the advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage
+of a majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom
+of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the
+body politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires
+of an impossible--and incidentally of a highly undesirable--social
+revolution which, in destroying individual rights--including property
+rights--and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the
+advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance
+or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a
+dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our
+duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions.
+But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment
+by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to
+better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate
+relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use,
+with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that,
+though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than
+softness of head.
+
+But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important
+of all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern
+nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded,
+that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien
+races, have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong
+to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has
+ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying, on a scale hitherto
+unexampled, to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the
+people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great
+Power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve,
+and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the
+man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and
+the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with
+utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our
+own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism
+which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that arise are
+of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They can not be solved by the
+foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little patent
+recipes and those cut-and-dried theories of the political nursery which
+have such limited applicability amid the crash of elemental forces.
+Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality of the men who, whether
+at home or on the rough frontier of civilization, adopt might as the
+only standard of right in dealing with other men, and treat alien races
+only as subjects for exploitation.
+
+No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races,
+because they differ from one another far more widely than some of
+them differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not
+be forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for
+one race managing or controlling another unless the management and
+control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that
+other race. This is what our peoples have in the main done, and must
+continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt,
+and the Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race,
+everywhere, at home or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from the
+great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth
+as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a
+given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted
+to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied
+to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the other hand, where he
+acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was
+one of our own stock, he is just as entitled to that respect and reward
+if he comes of another stock, even though that other stock produces a
+much smaller proportion of men of his type than does our own. This has
+nothing to do with social intermingling, with what is called social
+equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing to each man
+and each woman that elementary justice which will permit him or her
+to gain from life the reward which should always accompany thrift,
+sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights of others, and hard
+and intelligent work to a given end. To more than such just treatment
+no man is entitled, and less than such just treatment no man should
+receive.
+
+The other type of duty is the international duty, the duty owed by
+one nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which should
+govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are just
+as binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the other.
+The application of the moral law must be different in the two cases,
+because in one case it has, and in the other it has not, the sanction
+of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can depend for his
+rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their force from the
+police power of the state. The nation can depend upon nothing of the
+kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest duty of the
+most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves in such a state
+of readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the hope of
+arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that
+lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the
+unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples
+who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible
+foe. But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and
+the peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and
+iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate
+lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong;
+and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous
+fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country
+should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence
+upon one’s own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that
+marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his
+fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience.
+For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged
+especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those
+years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face
+of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an
+individual in dealing with other individuals.
+
+I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a
+right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several
+countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of
+doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily
+for success, even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer
+souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. Let us
+hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children
+and children’s children to endless generations shall arise to take our
+places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether
+this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least
+the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch
+in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close,
+and we go out into the darkness, and others’ hands grasp the torch, at
+least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD MOVEMENT
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD MOVEMENT[3]
+
+
+I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of
+Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence.
+It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the
+feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a
+country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the
+case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks
+with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all
+the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany.
+More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the
+West became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the
+Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history
+of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise
+of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore
+ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society
+and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders,
+city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the
+seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat
+back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.
+
+    [3] Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910.
+
+After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman
+Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working
+for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was round the
+Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great,
+the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab
+and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old
+heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild
+horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion
+in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the
+Karling empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery:
+Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders
+from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany proper who quelled
+these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became
+Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began
+to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the
+centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now
+well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and
+in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted
+hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern
+rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding
+position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.
+
+To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to
+this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young
+nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of
+the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has inherited
+or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every
+inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German
+strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has
+been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers
+whose children’s children have been and are being fused into the
+American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low
+Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we
+have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our
+veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations
+American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to
+the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the
+intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in
+every way closer than it has ever been before.
+
+Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of
+to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life
+of this university covers the period during which that movement has
+spread until it is felt throughout every continent, while its velocity
+has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has
+changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and
+appropriate here to speak on this subject.
+
+When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this
+planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight.
+Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal
+degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general
+law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature,
+changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life
+of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups
+of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary
+beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call
+civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far
+the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living
+world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something
+totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been
+before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the
+development of life generally and what has gone on in the development
+of human society. [These I have discussed in the preceding chapter.]
+But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.
+
+Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for,
+properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were
+local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along
+but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages
+we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary
+discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and
+the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at
+the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the
+half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them
+except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not
+the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which
+separated man from brute.
+
+Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high
+position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to
+violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric
+or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given
+localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that
+was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what,
+if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we
+have developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly
+how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many
+cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered
+the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed
+the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact.
+In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at
+the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over
+the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a
+certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at
+the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage
+souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that
+had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves
+of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak
+definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years
+that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in
+prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as
+to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to
+the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which
+Stonehenge is the type.
+
+The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in
+that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate
+present--and which is but a span’s length from the present, even when
+compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this
+planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia
+and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far
+as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural
+development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us
+to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern
+Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese
+civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.
+
+Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the
+striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were
+the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness.
+The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates
+are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds,
+leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of
+centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action
+and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the
+movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual,
+was much faster than anything that had occurred during the eons of
+mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement
+was very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it was strongly
+localized, while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain
+conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the
+domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread
+the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a
+“world movement” at all, for by far the greater part of the habitable
+globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as
+peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.
+
+With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into
+prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be
+said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can
+consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to
+be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man,
+when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically
+these three peoples--although, judged even by the history of which we
+have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.
+
+The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of
+little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus,
+until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under
+the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died.
+In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the
+most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of
+mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies
+left us by the Greek and the Roman.
+
+The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more
+varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that
+affected a far larger share of the world’s surface. For the first
+time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a “world
+movement” in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of
+the world’s surface and that it represented what was incomparably
+the most important of all that was happening in world history at the
+time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had
+greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by
+the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization
+affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there
+was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind
+from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to
+the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas.
+Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences
+which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to
+affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the forms of science,
+in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition
+to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose
+concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life.
+Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and
+understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we
+come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers,
+whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose
+writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there
+were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like
+Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the
+centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were
+so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for
+them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge.
+The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by
+the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement;
+and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming
+destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the
+reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed
+between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later
+which fully avenged it.
+
+This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In
+its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among
+those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace our
+descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far more
+thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both conquests
+were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest which in its
+ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.
+
+With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and
+it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years
+passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European
+civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned.
+During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation
+of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing
+back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the
+Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted
+with qualifications. There is no hard-and-fast line between one age or
+period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression
+universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle
+Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed
+the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some
+points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below
+the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry,
+of architecture--especially cathedral architecture--and of serene
+spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of
+violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded
+that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its
+scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.
+
+During this period there were several very important extra-European
+movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose,
+and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races
+into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able
+to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing
+European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and
+here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the
+civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured
+peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered
+development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any
+European influence.
+
+Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the
+unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and
+terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction--Hun
+and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes
+of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and
+destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in
+no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.
+
+At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement toward
+a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning
+of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with
+the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures
+which culminated in the discovery of America; and, after these two
+epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material
+and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should
+thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that
+had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco
+da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of
+intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names
+of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man
+was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time
+experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization.
+Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity
+and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects
+during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or
+two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of
+the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations.
+From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than
+anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there
+has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of
+organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural
+resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an
+immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as
+varied as it is striking.
+
+In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their
+conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically
+vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in
+organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of
+military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these
+two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time
+there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a
+world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of
+Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every
+sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been
+ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and
+new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely
+or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate
+and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in
+portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the
+conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for
+the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators,
+as in most of tropical Asia and Africa, and in much of tropical
+America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has
+been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and
+radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most
+extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth
+and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the
+most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past
+history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet
+with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient
+ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized
+nations of mankind.
+
+There are, of course, many grades between these different types of
+influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last
+four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises
+a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There
+are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is
+at present no large space of territory in which the general movement
+of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This
+represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been
+seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was
+felt over only a relatively small portion of the world’s surface. Over
+much the larger part of the world the process of change and development
+was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman
+Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in
+action and reaction, and in interaction, among themselves, were grouped
+immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is
+bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred
+rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.
+
+Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought
+or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The
+student of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Petersburg, Rome or
+London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres;
+but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men
+who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor
+problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insurance
+for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and
+we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is
+doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most
+dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which
+the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of
+study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is
+accomplished in the laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the
+details of that practical application of science which has changed
+the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health
+resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western
+methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European
+and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of
+European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact
+that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem
+conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question
+in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European
+or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the
+form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to
+what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of
+any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or
+political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every
+continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating
+or applying socialism, there is no movement of note which can take
+place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of
+people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal
+or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than
+ever before.
+
+So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern
+civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of
+modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The
+movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces,
+in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.
+
+The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase
+in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an
+extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature.
+In both directions the advance has been very great during the past
+four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with
+ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great
+age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in
+many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain
+was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year
+150 A. D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central
+Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate
+than any which we had as late as 1850 A. D. More was known of physical
+science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed
+at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern
+movement began. The case was the same as regards military science. At
+the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always
+been--sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more
+than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the
+science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal
+and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this university was founded,
+the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from
+what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity.
+Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on
+beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars;
+and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements
+there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some
+respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There
+were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than
+the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance,
+was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam
+and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting
+immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely
+changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt
+to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as
+in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were
+not materially improved. A graduate of your university to-day can go
+to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a
+feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a
+student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and
+use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution
+in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here
+again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not
+merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern
+city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed
+one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one
+of the most formidable problems of modern life.
+
+Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and
+water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air
+is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so
+the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they
+annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without
+regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced
+each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with
+the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the
+farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained
+intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the
+effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific
+development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind
+that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation
+on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at
+the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing
+output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when
+our children’s children, or their children’s children, shall dwell in
+an ironless age--and, later on, in an age without coal--and will have
+to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and
+use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific
+civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of
+field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century,
+more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power
+that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine,
+the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been
+literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been
+over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of
+the human race.
+
+The advances in the realm of pure intellect have been of equal note,
+and they have been both intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields of
+learning and wisdom have been discovered by the few, and at the same
+time knowledge has spread among the many to a degree never dreamed of
+before. Old men among us have seen in their own generation the rise of
+the first rational science of the evolution of life. The astronomer and
+the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, and all their brethren
+in many different fields of wide endeavor, work with a training and
+knowledge and method which are in effect instruments of precision,
+differentiating their labors from the labors of their predecessors as
+the rifle is differentiated from the bow.
+
+The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world
+as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces
+for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a
+thousandfold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the
+whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the
+mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole
+world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
+
+In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The machinery
+is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort
+and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread
+the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown,
+and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the
+machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern
+civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Greco-Roman
+civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the
+Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were
+then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement,
+wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast
+scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in
+applied science--all these mark our civilization as they marked the
+wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands
+twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older
+civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are
+quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old
+civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the
+two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in
+the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that
+it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.
+
+One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency
+to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge.
+When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is
+always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness
+of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life,
+is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man
+of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand,
+merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now, I will not assert that
+in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly overcome;
+but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome them than
+was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously shown by the
+military history of the Greco-Roman period as compared with the history
+of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and among nations of
+European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military history the change
+was steadily from a citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the days
+of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when
+the Roman republic conquered what world it knew, the armies were filled
+with citizen soldiers. But gradually the citizens refused to serve in
+the armies, or became unable to render good service. The Greek states
+described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, hired others to do
+their fighting for them. The Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly
+ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any
+infantry, to the legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to
+an end, there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers.
+The change from the citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been
+completed.
+
+Now the exact reverse has been the case with us in modern times. A few
+centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the principal figure in most
+armies, and in great numbers of cases the mercenary soldier was an
+alien. In the wars of religion in France, in the Thirty Years’ War in
+Germany, in the wars that immediately thereafter marked the beginning
+of the break-up of the great Polish kingdom, the regiments and brigades
+of foreign soldiers formed a striking and leading feature in every
+army. Too often the men of the country in which the fighting took place
+played merely the ignoble part of victims, the burghers and peasants
+appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary armies by which they
+were plundered. Gradually this has all changed, until now practically
+every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary has almost disappeared,
+while the army exists on a vaster scale than ever before in history.
+This is so among the military monarchies of Europe. In our own Civil
+War of the United States the same thing occurred, peaceful people as
+we are. At that time more than two generations had passed since the
+war of independence. During the whole of that period the people had
+been engaged in no life-and-death struggle; and yet, when the Civil War
+broke out, and after some costly and bitter lessons at the beginning,
+the fighting spirit of the people was shown to better advantage than
+ever before. The war was peculiarly a war for a principle, a war
+waged by each side for an ideal, and while faults and shortcomings
+were plentiful among the combatants, there was comparatively little
+sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant struggle, where across
+the warp of so many interests is shot the woof of so many purposes,
+dark strands and bright, strands sombre and brilliant, are always
+intertwined; inevitably there was corruption here and there in the
+Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides and the great majority of
+the enormous masses of fighting men wholly disregarded, and were wholly
+uninfluenced by, pecuniary considerations. There were, of course,
+foreigners who came over to serve as soldiers of fortune for money or
+for love of adventure; but the foreign-born citizens served in much
+the same proportion, and from the same motives, as the native-born.
+Taken as a whole, it was, even more than the Revolutionary War, a true
+citizens’ fight, and the armies of Grant and Lee were as emphatically
+citizen armies as the Athenian, Theban, or Spartan armies in the great
+age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the days of the republic.
+
+Another striking contrast in the course of modern civilization
+as compared with the later stages of the Greco-Roman or classic
+civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and politics.
+In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its zenith,
+politics became a recognized means of accumulating great wealth. Cæsar
+was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he spent an enormous
+fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which he made out of his
+political-military career. Augustus established imperial Rome on firm
+foundations by the use he made of the huge fortune he had acquired
+by plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of Washington
+and Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the
+immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their civilizations
+culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as one of the
+incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is in sharp
+contrast to what has happened within the last two or three centuries.
+During this time there has been a steady growth away from the theory
+that money-making is permissible in an honorable public career. In this
+respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and things which
+statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or two centuries
+ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career even a century
+ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still exercise a large,
+and sometimes an improper, influence in politics, but it is apt to be
+an indirect influence; and in the advanced states the mere suspicion
+that the wealth of public men is obtained or added to as an incident
+of their public careers will bar them from public life. Speaking
+generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern political life,
+but it is not acquired in political life. The colonial administrators,
+German or American, French or English, of this generation lead careers
+which, as compared with the careers of other men of like ability,
+show too little rather than too much regard for money-making; and
+literally a world scandal would be caused by conduct which a Roman
+proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and which would not have
+been especially uncommon even in the administration of England a
+century and a half ago. On the whole, the great statesmen of the last
+few generations have been either men of moderate means or, if men of
+wealth, men whose wealth was diminished rather than increased by their
+public services.
+
+I have dwelt on these points merely because it is well to emphasize
+in the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many respects there is
+a complete lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day and
+the only other civilization in any way comparable to it, that of the
+ancient Greco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many points in which
+the analogy is close, and in some of these points the resemblances
+are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of all is the
+fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of interest,
+and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization can be
+compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now literally a
+world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid and is
+ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at
+one point is certain to be felt with greater or less effect at almost
+every other point. Every path of activity open to the human intellect
+is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto dreamed of. We
+have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in consequence,
+a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and daring souls have
+before them a well-nigh limitless opening for endeavor of any kind.
+
+Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been able to develop
+only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field of endeavor has
+been limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, of course,
+been great movements, but they were of practically only one form of
+activity; and, although usually this set in motion other kinds of
+activities, such was not always the case. The great religious movements
+have been the preeminent examples of this type. But they are not the
+only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the Phœnicians, at almost
+opposite poles of cultivation, have represented movements in which one
+element, military or commercial, so overshadowed all other elements
+that the movement died out chiefly because it was one-sided. The
+extraordinary outburst of activity among the Mongols of the thirteenth
+century was almost purely a military movement, without even any great
+administrative side; and it was therefore well-nigh purely a movement
+of destruction. The individual prowess and hardihood of the Mongols,
+and the perfection of their military organization rendered their
+armies incomparably superior to those of any European, or any other
+Asiatic, power of that day. They conquered from the Yellow Sea to the
+Persian Gulf and the Adriatic; they seized the imperial throne of
+China; they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India.
+The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism
+were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting
+men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into
+bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows
+of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease
+any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they
+had no root of permanence; their work was mere evil while it lasted,
+and it did not last long; and when they vanished they left hardly a
+trace behind them. So the extraordinary Phœnician civilization was
+almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization, and though it
+left an impress on the life that came after, this impress was faint
+indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks with their
+many-sided development. Yet the Greek civilization itself fell because
+this many-sided development became too exclusively one of intellect, at
+the expense of character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities
+which fit men to govern both themselves and others. When the Greek lost
+the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his
+statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and
+pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not
+all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic
+development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the
+Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
+
+What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older
+civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity
+to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world’s surface;
+the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities;
+the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement--are all
+these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and
+terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be
+in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go
+down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity
+for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we
+have the wit and the courage and the honesty.
+
+Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think
+that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on
+the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has
+held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not
+come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty
+deeds we make them come true. We can not afford to develop any one set
+of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others,
+equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency of the
+Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phœnician, nor the
+subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.
+
+We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we
+are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of
+all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family
+life, the fundamental and essential qualities--the homely, every-day,
+all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not
+in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the
+average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy
+children, then the state will topple, will go down, no matter what may
+be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But
+these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be that
+power of organization, that power of working in common for a common
+end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion during
+the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even
+more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the
+hard intolerance and arid intellectual barrenness of what was worst in
+the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater
+need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So,
+while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern
+philosophy in its various branches, it would be worse than folly on
+our part to ignore our need of intellectual leadership. Your own great
+Frederick once said that if he wished to punish a province he would
+leave it to be governed by philosophers; the sneer had in it an element
+of justice; and yet no one better than the great Frederick knew the
+value of philosophers, the value of men of science, men of letters,
+men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed to accept Tolstoi as a
+guide in social and moral matters; but it would also be a bad thing
+not to have Tolstoi, not to profit by the lofty side of his teachings.
+There are plenty of scientific men whose hard arrogance, whose cynical
+materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put them on a level with the
+bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they denounce. Yet our debt to
+scientific men is incalculable, and our civilization of to-day would
+have reft from it all that which most highly distinguishes it if the
+work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries
+were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism,
+seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the
+folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the
+believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with
+his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must
+remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by
+the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure
+of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of
+well-being than was ever attained by any preceding civilization. Unjust
+war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready
+to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe
+thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting
+edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should
+arise!
+
+It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which morality,
+ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike
+be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil
+passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of
+sentimental attachment to the rights of man; in which a high material
+development in the things of the body shall be achieved without
+subordination of the things of the soul; in which there shall be a
+genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of those virile
+qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall avail any
+race; in which the fullest development of scientific research, the
+great distinguishing feature of our present civilization, shall
+yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever take the place of
+character--for, from the standpoint of the nation as of the individual,
+it is character that is the one vital possession.
+
+Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which
+is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the
+nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love
+of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of
+the world’s progress is essential to the world’s well-being. You, my
+hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under
+modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to
+our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and
+do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each
+people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but
+each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it
+first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be
+a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage
+be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you
+and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness
+and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different
+fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the
+less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the
+people of my own land.
+
+
+
+
+CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
+
+
+
+
+CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC[4]
+
+
+Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from
+the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient
+institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty
+kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through
+the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that
+tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he
+sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship
+meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the
+dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
+
+    [4] Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.
+
+This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when
+no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services
+to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the
+remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago,
+were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers,
+and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of
+the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has
+now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent,
+to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare;
+and the generations engaged in it can not keep, still less add to,
+the stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are
+still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To
+conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile
+forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our
+race. The primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which
+are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully
+acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward
+civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive
+culture. At first only the rudest schools can be established, for no
+others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust
+forward the frontier in the teeth of savage man and savage nature; and
+many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of
+higher learning and broader culture.
+
+The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast
+stretches of fertile farmland; the stockaded clusters of log cabins
+change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude
+frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their
+lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an
+oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for
+which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and
+supplanters, and then their children and children’s children, change
+and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate
+vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities
+and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant,
+self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and
+blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier
+days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more
+intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these
+themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and
+predominantly industrial civilization.
+
+As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many
+lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the
+spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to
+wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
+The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new
+life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the
+life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of
+value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift
+that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought
+can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New
+World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon
+the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in
+the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak
+to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it
+is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation,
+not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt
+that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and
+productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of
+the Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can
+show that Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
+
+To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship,
+the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to
+me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great
+democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours--an
+effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for
+the people--represents the most gigantic of all possible social
+experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good
+and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means
+the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for
+us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme.
+Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or of a very
+few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such
+governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nation
+may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to
+the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the
+average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible
+quantity in working out the final results of that type of national
+greatness.
+
+But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and
+with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be
+conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman,
+does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life,
+and next in those great occasional crises which call for the heroic
+virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics
+are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than
+the main source; and the main source of national power and national
+greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore
+it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average
+citizen is kept high; and the average can not be kept high unless the
+standard of the leaders is very much higher.
+
+It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in
+any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes
+represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those
+classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of
+devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special
+advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental
+training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance
+for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of
+your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you
+much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which
+it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated
+intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should especially
+guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable;
+and if yielded to, their--your--chances of useful service are at an end.
+
+Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that
+queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the
+cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to
+whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face
+it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride
+in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of
+the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There
+is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he
+who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering
+disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement
+or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to
+achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to
+criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an
+intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s
+realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think,
+of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear
+their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the
+affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from
+others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there
+is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both
+criticism and performance.
+
+It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the
+strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done
+them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the
+arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
+valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is
+no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive
+to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
+who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end
+the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails,
+at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
+with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
+Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop
+into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a
+workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is
+but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who
+shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for
+those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the
+brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they
+would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what
+they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure
+in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.
+There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the
+great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the
+lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
+Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if
+they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth
+all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard
+fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory
+we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for
+the vile guns would have been a soldier.”
+
+France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the
+most important is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high
+artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership
+in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier
+has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries
+at every court in Europe the “freemasons of fashion” have treated the
+French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of
+letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvellous
+instrument of precision, French prose, has turned toward France for aid
+and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted
+is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a
+modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland’s doom
+and the vengeance of Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish host
+were stricken at Roncesvalles.
+
+Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a
+high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that
+these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound
+body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above
+body stands character--the sum of those qualities which we mean when
+we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of
+honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we
+keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I
+believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But
+the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be
+really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of
+intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack
+of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common
+sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of
+acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution--these are
+the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can
+control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.
+I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which
+represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay
+all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training
+of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of
+you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace,
+every-day qualities and virtues.
+
+Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to
+work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The
+need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant
+insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they
+can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make
+it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most
+valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative
+in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in
+large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of
+indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He
+should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he
+occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not
+an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale
+he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision.
+
+In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave
+man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve
+his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning
+philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are
+right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness.
+War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity.
+But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war. The
+choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this whether the
+alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The question
+must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be,
+Is the right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more
+to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must
+be, “Yes,” whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be
+made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be
+made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep
+out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting
+nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
+
+Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important
+than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of
+blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit
+the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is
+the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of
+sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited
+upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that
+the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children,
+so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so,
+if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it
+is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful
+fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of
+ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk,
+which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If
+we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have
+emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down
+on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it
+will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to
+boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy
+of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no
+sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate
+for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great
+fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the
+race.
+
+Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty
+he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man’s foremost
+duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by
+earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being;
+it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher
+superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this
+has been done that he can help in movements for the general well-being.
+He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus
+strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that
+bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel
+for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a
+burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity
+in the abstract, but who can not keep his wife in comfort or educate
+his children.
+
+Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely
+acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of
+material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with
+equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing
+but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable,
+is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher
+life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire,
+the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and
+especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses
+his wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of real use--and
+such is often the case--why, then he does become an asset of worth.
+But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the
+mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need
+in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great
+guiding intelligences. Their places can not be supplied by any number
+of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample
+recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to
+the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the
+reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration
+will come only from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that,
+after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has
+been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly
+less importance compared to other things that can be done in life. It
+is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard
+of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the
+deification of material well-being in and for itself. The man who, for
+any cause for which he is himself accountable, has failed to support
+himself and those for whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he
+has fallen lamentably short in his prime duty. But the man who, having
+far surpassed the limit of providing for the wants, both of body and
+mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a
+great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns
+no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be
+made to feel that, so far from being a desirable, he is an unworthy,
+citizen of the community; that he is to be neither admired nor envied;
+that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of
+citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those
+whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
+
+My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few
+words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully
+safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human
+rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run
+identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict
+between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property
+belongs to man and not man to property.
+
+In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that
+there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire
+in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged admirable
+or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them.
+Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts--the
+gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the money
+touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate
+degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great
+degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and
+without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the
+least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it
+is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in
+a democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly.
+But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is to enable
+the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to persuade
+his hearers to put false values on things, it merely makes him a
+power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not the gift
+at all, and must rely upon their deeds to speak for them; and unless
+the oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common
+sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the
+better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives.
+Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth
+if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend
+to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for
+which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger,
+the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make
+for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious
+element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he
+has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard
+to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
+
+Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater
+force to the orator’s latter-day and more influential brother, the
+journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled
+neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is
+used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and
+he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for
+the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their
+profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit
+it. Offences against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a
+private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for
+debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander,
+sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for
+the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced
+for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand
+must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by
+the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.
+
+In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that he ought
+to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the
+other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and
+he must also have those qualities which direct the efficiency into
+channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There
+is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be
+said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a sluggish
+circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life
+for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust
+wickedness is likewise rendered immune from the robuster virtues. The
+good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own.
+He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him
+work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen
+is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.
+
+But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense,
+then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to
+the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities,
+serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely for that
+man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of
+others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these
+qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether
+the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to
+the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no
+difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in
+the career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist
+or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful
+he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and
+farseeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong;
+and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to
+condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their
+inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions
+rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of
+evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.
+
+The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues
+which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make
+the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at
+need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many others must
+be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good
+citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in the home.
+There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the state, and
+these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where
+the effort is made to carry on free government in a complex, industrial
+civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen,
+and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in
+political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closet
+philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library
+tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use
+in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more
+the mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises
+what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but
+noxious.
+
+The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve
+them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so
+lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and
+indeed undesirable to realize. The impracticable visionary is far less
+often the guide and precursor than he is the imbittered foe of the real
+reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in
+some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires
+of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker,
+to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the
+man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him as
+he does the work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how
+sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the
+damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive
+measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him
+remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined
+by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should
+abhor the so-called “practical” men whose practicality assumes the
+shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief
+in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and
+conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But
+only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally,
+the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the
+enemy of the possible good.
+
+We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
+individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
+initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated;
+and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more
+complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to
+leave to individual initiative can, under the changed conditions, be
+performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible,
+and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which
+shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not
+cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will
+only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena.
+For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets,
+each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water supply;
+but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new
+problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not
+only in degree but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage
+and water supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It
+is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point
+is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment.
+Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely
+pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. It is not good
+to be the slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal
+habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common
+sense to recognize that the state, the community, the citizens acting
+together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to
+individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in
+the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of
+civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle
+or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning,
+which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality.
+We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and
+the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into
+the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably
+borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical
+and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell
+sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler
+immorality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we
+may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed
+by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to
+be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
+
+But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a
+lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor
+proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not
+exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at
+least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force
+or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their
+blood and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and
+suffered for them, and at the end died for them, who always strove
+to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them,
+spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism
+and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local
+significance):
+
+“I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to
+include all men, but that they did not mean to declare all men equal
+_in all respects_. They did not mean to say all men were equal in
+color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They
+defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men
+created equal--equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are
+life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this
+they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all
+were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about
+to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard
+maxim for free society which should be familiar to all--constantly
+looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly
+attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and
+deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life
+to all people, everywhere.”
+
+We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make
+us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means
+injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege. We
+are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far
+as is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each
+man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by
+the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible,
+be equality of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there
+is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward.
+We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artist, the worker in
+any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault
+it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who
+does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of
+privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege
+is injustice, whatever form it takes.
+
+To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable,
+ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable,
+and upright, is to say what is not true and can not be true. Let us
+try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of levelling down. If
+a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one
+of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is
+a waste of time to try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for
+every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those
+who shirk their work and to those who do it.
+
+Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be
+misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for
+re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded
+examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal
+merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is
+proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard
+formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If
+it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject
+it. There are plenty of men calling themselves Socialists with whom,
+up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step
+is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it,
+without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may
+differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it
+has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least mean
+that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just
+as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire
+at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these
+absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the
+extremists were wise.
+
+The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of
+pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus
+claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in
+any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country.
+Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and
+opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he
+desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.
+Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to
+which side happens at the moment to be the persecutor and which the
+persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without any
+regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a
+class for loyalty to the nation, or substitutes hatred of men because
+they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded
+them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure
+of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look
+down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to the envy and
+hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing
+brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful
+malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely
+different manifestations of the same quality, merely the two sides of
+the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits
+and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the
+greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to
+plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted
+by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen
+divide primarily on the line that separates class from class,
+occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth,
+instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges
+each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or poor, without
+regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only
+true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied
+in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what
+we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and
+the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to
+divide along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no
+difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether
+the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob.
+In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for
+loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is
+no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that
+the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad
+citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines
+of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation.
+Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of
+judging him by his conduct in that position.
+
+In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity
+of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction.
+Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and
+social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not
+to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter
+internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of
+earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious
+or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a
+manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in
+the downfall of so many, many nations.
+
+Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic
+should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support
+him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic,
+that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another,
+profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no
+difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to
+religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal
+should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own
+interest. The very last thing that an intelligent and self-respecting
+member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man
+because that public man says he will get the private citizen something
+to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some
+emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.
+Let me illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience. A number
+of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of
+the western United States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered
+free, the ownership of each being determined by the brand; the calves
+were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on the
+round-up an animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as
+an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom
+of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man
+on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a
+newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it;
+then we built a little fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it at the
+fire; and the cowboy started to put on the brand. I said to him, “It
+is So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose range we happened to be.
+He answered: “That’s all right, boss; I know my business.” In another
+moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!” To which
+he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s brand.” I
+answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and
+get what is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.” He jumped up
+and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.” And
+I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal _for_ me you will
+steal _from_ me.”
+
+Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in
+public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that
+he will do something wrong _in_ your interest, you can be absolutely
+certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something
+wrong _against_ your interest.
+
+So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to
+his family, to his neighbor, to the state. There remain duties of
+citizenship which the state, the aggregation of all the individuals,
+owes in connection with other states, with other nations. Let me say at
+once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that
+a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible
+way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that
+the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his
+national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he
+cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of
+mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of
+any one country, because he is a citizen of the world, is in very fact
+usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the
+world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral
+needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can
+view his own country and all other countries from the same level with
+tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to
+distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife
+and his mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however
+intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped
+by love of his native land.
+
+Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do
+good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that
+the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than
+the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the
+family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from
+patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of
+other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the
+national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful
+to see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a
+gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong
+him. I do not for one moment admit that political morality is different
+from private morality, that a promise made on the stump differs from a
+promise made in private life. I do not for one moment admit that a man
+should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealings with other
+nations, any more than that he should act deceitfully in his dealings
+as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one
+moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different
+spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.
+
+In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there
+is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account.
+We speak of international law; but international law is something
+wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital
+difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for
+the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to
+obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience
+as regards the other. International law will, I believe, as the
+generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other
+there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only
+in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of
+necessity obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital importance
+between it and its neighbors, and actions must of necessity, where this
+is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private
+citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and
+must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise
+statesmen, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage
+and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute
+some other agency for force in the settlement of international
+disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the
+nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the
+great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to
+the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep ever in mind that
+in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to
+resent wrong-doing from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty
+morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether
+among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals
+should be high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to
+realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace
+and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice
+though the whole world came in arms against him.
+
+And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two
+republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship
+between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere
+and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to
+us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the
+history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar
+power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom or strength,
+which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever
+with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her
+to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of
+brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any
+of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it
+was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through
+the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing
+of a time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so
+stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for
+it. You have had a great past. I believe that you will have a great
+future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation
+which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
+
+
+
+
+THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
+
+
+It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names,
+and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the
+reverence for, or antipathy toward, a given name in order to achieve
+some alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the
+history of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The
+rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the
+rule of a single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and
+the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a
+bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn
+be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the
+apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the
+tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually state that all
+that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of
+“liberty,” while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended
+upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary
+so as to secure “order.” Many excellent people are taken in by the
+use of the word “liberty” at the one time, and the use of the word
+“order” at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is
+despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed
+by one individual or by many individuals, by a state or by a private
+corporation.
+
+Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt
+in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very
+class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of
+the second republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil
+tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as
+to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a
+dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances
+in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until
+there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny
+and all public order have disappeared together. The second empire in
+France led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows
+how far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government
+as the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered
+it imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did
+not produce another violent reaction, but left the French republic
+standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be
+ruled by a king as by a mob.
+
+Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much
+people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their
+unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at
+Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a
+century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured, or
+sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set of
+acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the name
+of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the other
+was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by the
+direction of the great monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny and
+cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as much when
+those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used another. All
+forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by honest men.
+
+We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching
+and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the
+men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin
+gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger
+from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore
+be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social
+problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought
+lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved
+democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle
+course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We
+shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar
+middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist,
+between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong
+done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the
+apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement
+of the eighth commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”
+
+First and foremost, we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound
+ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient
+reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stem exposure
+of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked
+man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved
+in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to
+prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into
+a terror-struck defence of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon
+those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above
+all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone
+homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin
+because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no
+crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and
+unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential
+that we should wrest the control of the government out of the hands of
+rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of
+their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means
+adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern
+business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because
+of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors
+in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to
+put the control of the government into the hands of demagogues and
+visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing
+thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with,
+as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny
+of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant
+people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of
+big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it
+would make no more difference that one was called individualism and the
+other collectivism than it made in French history whether tyranny was
+exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a committee
+of national safety, or of a king.
+
+The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical,
+are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of
+the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his
+own devices he will make such an exhibition of brutal and selfish
+greed as to utterly discredit the entire system of government by
+individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will
+he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by
+the state that any abuses connected with the untrammelled control of
+all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We
+can not afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits.
+It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual
+initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that
+we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our
+complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the
+functions of the state. It has been shown beyond power of refutation
+that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction
+of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism” can
+not be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see
+that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy
+buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted
+and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may
+be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private
+monopoly, if the state does not interfere at all, as it would be
+crushed out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with
+everything else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets
+of the extreme Socialists.
+
+In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very
+reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they
+combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing
+with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own
+which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade
+the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential
+both to the material and moral progress of the country that these
+forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the
+genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly
+materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as
+exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the
+refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth.
+What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an
+English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr.
+Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex
+American character; it would have been marvellous if a stranger of his
+slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to
+put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately
+after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):
+
+“In the United States legal organization of industry has been left
+wholly wanting. Little is done by the state. All is left to the
+initiative of the individual. The apparent negligence is explained
+partly by the American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and
+partly by their reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the
+law as the safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves
+under the protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust
+in its exacter acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It
+is certain that commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and
+successful combinations to override the public interest. All such
+corporations are left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears
+almost a return to savagery. The defencelessness of individual liberty
+against the encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies,
+nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than
+horrible. Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to
+oppose them; where such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to
+ignore them. When they want any act for themselves, it can always be
+bought for cash. [This is of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion
+should have been made to the violent and demagogic attacks upon
+corporations, which are even more common than and are quite as noxious
+as acts of oppression by corporations.] They maintain their own members
+in the legislative bodies--pocket assemblymen, pocket representatives,
+pocket senators. In the name of individual freedom and industrial
+progress they have become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless
+greed on one side and lawless brutality on the other--the outlook
+frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or
+imbittering these antagonisms--still more, on the fortune of the people
+in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get
+dollars is the one end of life--it depends whether the future of the
+United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster.
+It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may
+become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will
+furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.”
+
+Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to
+recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as
+a modern business condition the curious result will follow that all
+power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average
+man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the state took
+absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big
+corporations each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all
+competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as
+dependent upon it as if the government had assumed complete charge of
+the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for
+the government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more
+unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple
+truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness
+in the business world are either insincere or blind to the facts when
+they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and
+individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism,
+save in a very few able and powerful men who tend to become dictators
+in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American
+president tended to become a dictator in the political world.
+
+Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, absolute failure by the
+state to control or supervise these great corporations, the inevitable
+result is to favor, among these very able men of business, the man who
+is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets complete
+control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways which
+alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination with his
+fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out in the
+great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite as much
+as it would be crushed out by state control. The very reason why we
+object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative
+and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the
+reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control
+in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an
+antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total
+lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business
+world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be
+the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.
+
+There must be law to control the big men, and therefore especially
+the big corporations, in the industrial world in the interest of
+our industrial democracy of to-day. This law must be efficient, and
+therefore it must be administered by executive officers and not by
+lawsuits in the courts. If this is not done the agitation to increase
+out of all measure the share of the government in this work will
+receive an enormous impetus. The movement for government control of the
+great business corporations is no more a movement against liberty than
+a movement to put a stop to violence is a movement against liberty.
+On the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement for liberty; in
+the one case a movement on behalf of the hard-working man of small
+means, just as in the other case it is a movement on behalf of the
+peaceable citizen who does not wish a “liberty” which puts him at the
+mercy of any rowdy who is stronger than he is. The huge, irresponsible
+corporation which demands liberty from the supervision of government
+agents stands on the same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the
+streets who wishes liberty from police interference.
+
+But there is an even more important lesson for us Americans to learn,
+and this also is touched upon in what I have quoted above. It is
+not true, as Mr. Steevens says, that Americans feel that the one
+end of life is to get dollars; but the statement contains a very
+unpleasant element of truth. The hard materialism of greed is just as
+objectionable as the hard materialism of brutality, and the greed of
+the “haves” is just as objectionable as the greed of the “have-nots,”
+and no more so. The envious and sinister creature who declaims against
+a great corporation because he really desires himself to enjoy what
+in hard, selfish, brutal fashion the head of that great corporation
+enjoys, offers a spectacle which is both sad and repellent. The brutal
+arrogance and grasping greed of the one man are in reality the same
+thing as the bitter envy and hatred and grasping greed of the other.
+That kind of “have” and that kind of “have-not” stand on the same
+eminence of infamy. It is as important for the one as for the other
+to learn the lesson of the true relations of life. Of course, the
+first duty of any man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his
+own livelihood, to support himself and his wife and his children and
+those dependent upon him. He must be able to give those for whom it is
+his duty to care food and clothing, shelter, medicine, an education,
+a legitimate chance for reasonable and healthy amusements, and the
+opportunity to acquire the knowledge and power which will fit them in
+their turn to do good work in the world. When once a man has reached
+this point, which, of course, will vary greatly under different
+conditions, then he has reached the point where other things become
+immensely more important than adding to his wealth. It is emphatically
+right, indeed, I am tempted to say, it is emphatically the first duty
+of each American, “to get dollars,” as Mr. Steevens contemptuously
+phrased it; for this is only another way of saying that it is his first
+duty to earn his own living. But it is not his only duty, by a great
+deal; and after the living has been earned getting dollars should come
+far behind many other duties.
+
+Yet another thing. No movement ever has done or ever will do good in
+this country, where assault is made, not upon evil wherever found,
+but simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a particular class.
+The big newspaper, owned or controlled in Wall Street, which is
+everlastingly preaching about the iniquity of laboring men, which is
+quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which with
+raving fury defends all the malefactors of great wealth, stands on an
+exact level with, and neither above nor below, that other newspaper
+whose whole attack is upon men of wealth, which declines to condemn,
+or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and wholly inefficient
+manner, outrages committed by labor. This is the kind of paper which
+by torrents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class hatred
+against every man of means simply because he is a man of means, against
+every man of wealth, whether he is an honest man who by industry and
+ability has honorably won his wealth, and who honorably spends it, or
+a man whose wealth represents robbery and whose life represents either
+profligacy or at best an inane, useless, and tasteless extravagance.
+This country can not afford to let its conscience grow warped and
+twisted, as it must grow if it takes either one of these two positions.
+We must draw the line, not on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We
+must stand for the good citizen because he is a good citizen, whether
+he be rich or whether he be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the
+man who does evil, wholly without regard to whether the evil is done
+in high or low places, whether it takes the form of homicidal violence
+among members of a federation of miners, or of unscrupulous craft and
+greed in the head of some great Wall Street corporation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent
+cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man
+who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the
+evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst
+an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted
+individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium.
+Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not
+as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of
+a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A
+healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very
+many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force
+must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these
+many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the
+individual men and women who make up the nation. No individual man
+could be kept healthy by living in accordance with a plan which took
+cognizance only of one set of muscles or set of organs; his health must
+depend upon his general bodily vigor, that is, upon the general care
+which affects hundreds of different organs according to their hundreds
+of needs. Society is, of course, infinitely more complex than the human
+body. The influences that tell upon it are countless; they are closely
+interwoven, interdependent, and each is acted upon by many others.
+It is pathetically absurd, when such are the conditions, to believe
+that some one simple panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with
+infinite difficulty, with bitter disappointments, with stumblings and
+haltings, we are working our way upward and onward. In this progress
+something can be done by continually striving to improve the social
+system, now here, now there. Something more can be done by the resolute
+effort for a many-sided higher life. This life must largely come
+to each individual from within, by his own effort, but toward the
+attainment of it each of us can help many others. Such a life must
+represent the struggle for a higher and broader humanity, to be shown
+not merely in the dealings of each of us within the realm of the
+state, but even more by the dealings of each of us in the more intimate
+realm of the family; for the life of the state rests and must ever rest
+upon the life of the family.
+
+In one of Lowell’s biting satires he holds up to special scorn the
+smug, conscienceless creature who refuses to consider the morality
+of any question of social ethics by remarking that “they didn’t know
+everything down in Judee.” It is to be wished that some of those
+who preach and practise a gospel of mere materialism and greed, and
+who speak as if the heaping up of wealth by the community or by the
+individual were in itself the be-all and end-all of life, would learn
+from the most widely read and oldest of books that true wisdom which
+teaches that it is well to have neither great poverty nor great riches.
+Worst of all is it to have great poverty and great riches side by side
+in constant contrast. Nevertheless, even this contrast can be accepted
+if men are convinced that the riches are accumulated as the result of
+great service rendered to the people as a whole, and if their use is
+regulated in the interest of the whole community.
+
+The movement for social and industrial reform has for two of its prime
+objects the prevention of the accumulation of wealth save by honest
+service to the country, and the supervision and regulation of its
+business use, and the determination of how it shall be taxed, and
+on what terms inherited, even when acquired and used honestly. This
+movement is a healthy movement. It aims to replace sullen discontent,
+restless pessimism, and evil preparation for revolution, by an
+aggressive, healthy determination to get to the bottom of our troubles
+and remedy them. To halt in the movement, as those blinded men wish
+who care only for the immediate relief from all obstacles which would
+thwart their getting what is not theirs, would work wide-reaching
+damage. Such a halt would turn away the energies of the energetic and
+forceful men who desire to reform matters from a legitimate object into
+the channel of bitter and destructive agitation.
+
+
+
+
+PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
+
+
+
+
+PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP[5]
+
+
+What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation
+can do, but what he or it actually does. Scholarship that consists
+in mere learning, but finds no expression in production, may be of
+interest and value to the individual, just as ability to shoot well
+at clay pigeons may be of interest and value to him, but it ranks no
+higher unless it finds expression in achievement. From the standpoint
+of the nation, and from the broader standpoint of mankind, scholarship
+is of worth chiefly when it is productive, when the scholar not merely
+receives or acquires, but gives.
+
+    [5] “The Mediæval Mind.” By Henry Osborn Taylor.
+
+        “The Life and Times of Cavour.” By William Roscoe Thayer.
+
+Of course there is much production by scholarly men which is not,
+strictly speaking, scholarship; any more than the men themselves,
+despite their scholarly tastes and attributes, would claim to be
+scholars in the technical or purely erudite sense. The exceedingly
+valuable and extensive work of Edward Cope comes under the head of
+science, and represents original investigation and original thought
+concerning what that investigation showed; yet if the word scholarship
+is used broadly, his work must certainly be called productive
+scientific scholarship. General Alexander’s capital “Memoirs of a
+Confederate” show that a man who is a first-class citizen as well as
+a first-class fighting man may also combine the true scholar’s power
+of research and passion for truth with the ability to see clearly and
+to state clearly what he has seen. Mr. Hannis Taylor’s history of “The
+Origin and Growth of the American Constitution” and General Francis V.
+Greene’s history of the American Revolution could have been written
+only by scholars. Such altogether delightful volumes of essays as Mr.
+Crothers’s “Gentle Reader,” “Pardoner’s Wallet,” and “Among Friends”
+may not, in the strictest sense of the word, represent scholarship
+any more than the “Essays of Elia” represent scholarship; but they
+represent more than scholarship, and they could have been written
+only by a man of scholarly attributes. The same thing is true of Mr.
+Maurice Egan, now our Minister to Denmark--who so well upholds the
+tradition which has always identified American men of letters with
+American diplomacy--in his essays in Comparative Literature, named, as
+I think not altogether happily, from the first essay, “The Ghost in
+Hamlet.” Mr. Egan writes not merely with charm but as no one but a man
+of scholarly attributes could write--and, by the way, his dedication
+to Archbishop John Lancaster Spalding is a dedication to a man whose
+lofty spiritual teachings have been expressed in singularly beautiful
+English. In its most perfect expression scholarship must utter itself
+with literary charm and distinction; although, I am sorry to say, the
+professional scholars sometimes actually distrust scholarship which is
+able thus to bring forth wisdom divorced from pedantry and dryness.
+As an example, Gilbert Murray’s “Rise of the Greek Epic” not only
+shows profound scholarship and the profound scholarly instinct which
+can alone profit by the mere erudition of scholarship, but is also so
+delightfully written as to be as interesting as the most interesting
+novel; and, curiously enough, this very fact, coupled with the fact
+that Mr. Murray’s translations of Euripides and Aristophanes are so
+attractive, has tended to excite distrust of him in the minds of
+worthy scholars whose productions are themselves free from all taint
+of interest, from all taint of literary charm. Professor Lounsbury’s
+extraordinary scholarship has been fully appreciated only by the best
+scholars; and this partly because of the very fact of his many-sided
+development in the field of intellectual endeavor.
+
+But I speak now of works of scholarship in the more conventional sense,
+of works which show scholarship such as Lea showed in his history of
+the Inquisition, such as Child showed in his studies of English ballad
+poetry.
+
+Mr. Taylor’s study of “The Mediæval Mind” is a noteworthy
+contribution--I am tempted to say the most noteworthy of recent
+contributions--to the best kind of productive scholarship. His
+erudition is extraordinary in breadth and depth, his grasp of the
+subject no less marked than his power of conveying to others what
+he has thus grasped. He is not only faithful to the truth in large
+things, he is accurate in small matters also; and where he makes use
+of any statement he always shows that there is justification for it;
+although, by the way, I can only guess at his reason for calling Attila
+a “Turanian”--a word which carries a pleasant flavor of pre-Victorian
+ethnology, and might just about as appropriately be applied to
+Tecumseh. As he expressly states, Mr. Taylor is not concerned with the
+brutalities of mediæval life, nor with the lower grades of ignorance
+and superstition which abounded in the Middle Ages, but with the more
+informed and constructive spirit of the mediæval time. There is, of
+course, no hard and sharp line to be drawn between mediæval time and,
+on the one hand, what is “ancient” and, on the other hand, what is
+“modern”; but for his purposes he treats the twelfth and thirteenth
+centuries as showing the culmination of the mediæval spirit in its
+most characteristic form; although he also incidentally touches on
+things that occurred in the fourteenth century, and of course covers
+the slow upward movement through the Dark Ages (as to which he does
+rather less than justice to the Carolingian revival of learning), when
+men were groping in the black abyss into which civilization so rapidly
+slid after the close of the second century. His mastery of the facts
+is well-nigh perfect, and he handles them with singular sympathy. In
+such chapters as “The Spotted Actuality” he makes it evident that he
+has constantly before his own mind the whole picture. The ordinary
+reader, however, needs to remember that it is no part of Mr. Taylor’s
+purpose to present this whole picture, but merely to make a study
+somewhat analogous to what a study of the intellect of the nineteenth
+century would be if it dealt exclusively with the thought of the
+various universities of Europe and America and of circles like that of
+Emerson at Concord and Goethe at Weimar. Indeed, this comparison is
+hardly accurate, for the universities of the nineteenth century had a
+far closer connection with the living thought of the day than was true
+of the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The latter
+(like their feeble survivals in the Spanish-speaking countries) much
+more closely resembled the ordinary type of Mohammedan university of
+the present day, such a university as the big Mohammedan university at
+Cairo, than they resembled any modern university worth calling such,
+or, indeed, any ancient university of living and creative force.
+
+The schoolmen of the Middle Ages and the universities in which they
+flourished are well worth such study as that which Mr. Taylor gives
+them, if only because they represented what regarded itself as the
+highest spiritual and intellectual teaching of the time, and because
+they symbolized the forces which manifested themselves with infinitely
+more permanent value in that wonderful cathedral architecture which was
+one of the two culminating architectural movements of all time--the
+other, of course, being the classical Greek. But the greatest
+mediæval effect upon the thought of after time was produced, not by
+the schoolmen, but by works which they would hardly have treated as
+serious at all--by the Roland Song, the “Nibelungenlied,” the Norse
+and Irish sagas, the Arthurian Cycle, including “Parsifal”; and modern
+literature, on its historical side, may be said to have begun with
+Villehardouin and Joinville. None of the leaders of the schools are
+to-day living forces in the sense that is true of the nameless writers
+who built up the stories of the immortal death fights in the Pyrenean
+pass and in the hall of Etzel, or of the search for the Holy Grail.
+There are keen intellects still influenced by Thomas Aquinas; but
+all the writings of all the most famous doctors of the schools taken
+together had no such influence on the religious thought of mankind
+as two books produced long afterward, with no conception of their
+far-reaching importance, by the obscure and humble authors of the
+“Imitation of Christ” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” In the thirteenth
+century the spiritual life in action, as apart from dogma, and as lived
+with the earnest desire to follow in the footsteps of the Christ,
+reached, in the person of Saint Francis of Assisi, as lofty a pinnacle
+of realized idealism as humanity has ever attained. But among those
+who, instead of trying simply to live up to their spiritual impulses,
+endeavored to deal authoritatively in the schools with spiritual and
+intellectual interests, the complementary tyranny and servility in all
+such spiritual and intellectual matters were such as we can now hardly
+imagine to ourselves. The one really great scientific investigator,
+Roger Bacon, who actually did put as an ideal before himself the honest
+search for truth, was imprisoned for years in consequence; and this in
+spite of the fact that his avowals of abject submission to theological
+authority and unquestioning adherence to dogma were such as we of
+to-day can with difficulty understand.
+
+At first sight such an attitude in the intellectual world seems
+incompatible with the turbulent and lawless insistence on the right of
+each individual to do whatever he saw fit in the political and social
+world which characterized the seething life of the time. But, as Mr.
+Taylor points out, the minute that a man in the Middle Ages began to be
+free in any real sense he tended to become an outlaw; and, moreover,
+the men who were most intolerant of restraint in matters physical
+and material made no demands whatever for intellectual or spiritual
+freedom. The ordinary knight or nobleman, the typical “man of action”
+of the period, promptly resented any attempt to interfere with his
+brutal passions or coarse appetites; but, as he had neither special
+interest nor deep conviction in merely intellectual matters, he was
+entirely willing to submit to guidance concerning them. The attitude
+of the great baron of the highest class is amusingly shown by a
+conversation that Joinville records as having occurred between himself
+and King Louis the Saint. Among the questions which King Louis one
+day propounded to Joinville, in the interests of the higher morality,
+was whether Joinville would rather have leprosy or commit a mortal
+sin; to which Joinville responded with cordial frankness that he would
+rather commit thirty mortal sins than have leprosy. Now, in addition
+to being a most delightful chronicler, Joinville was an exceptionally
+well-behaved and religious baron, standing far above the average, and
+he was very careful to perform every obligation laid upon him by those
+whom he regarded as his spiritual advisers. The fact simply was that
+he had no idea of the need for spiritual or intellectual independence
+in the sense that a modern man has need for such independence,
+because he took only a superficial interest in anything concerned
+with intellectual inquiry. To harry a heretic or a Jew was not only
+a duty but a pleasure, and no effort whatever was needed to refrain
+from intellectual inquiry which presented to him not the slightest
+attraction; but leprosy was something tangible, something real, and the
+instant that the real came into collision with even the most insistent
+supposed spiritual obligation the rugged old baron went into immediate
+revolt.
+
+The whole way of looking at life was so different from ours that only a
+thoroughly sympathetic and understanding writer like Mr. Taylor can set
+it forth in a manner that shall be sympathetic and yet not revolt us.
+One of his most delightful chapters is that on “The Heart of Heloise.”
+The qualities that Heloise displayed are those which eternally appeal
+to what is high and fine in human life; as for her lover, Abelard, it
+is possible to pardon the abject creature only by scornfully condemning
+the age which imposed upon him the rules of conduct in accordance with
+which he lived.
+
+Mr. Thayer’s “Life of Cavour” is another first-rate example of
+productive scholarship. It is much more than a mere biography.
+The three greatest and most influential statesmen, in purpose and
+achievement, since the close of the Napoleonic epoch were Lincoln,
+Bismarck, and Cavour; and any account of either of them must
+necessarily be an account of the most vitally important things that
+happened to mankind during the period when each was playing his
+greatest part. An adequate biography of either must therefore be a
+permanent addition to history; such a biography could be written only
+by a scholar and writer of altogether exceptional attainments; and such
+a biography has been furnished by Mr. Thayer. Mr. Thayer is already
+well known as the author of various volumes dealing with Italy, all
+of them representing work worth doing, and all of them leading up to
+and making ready the way for the really notable history which he has
+now written. There are other books which should be read in connection
+with it; the younger Trevelyan’s brilliant studies of Garibaldi and
+the Italian revolutionists of 1848 and the dozen years immediately
+succeeding, and De La Gorce’s profoundly interesting histories of the
+Second Empire and the Second Republic in France, which contain the
+most powerful presentment of the period from the anti-revolutionary
+standpoint. Cavour not only did more than any other one man for
+Italian unity and independence, but he symbolized the movement as
+neither Garibaldi the Paladin, nor Mazzini the Republican, nor even
+King Victor Emmanuel symbolized it. As Mr. Thayer describes Cavour’s
+career it is not only of interest in itself, but it is of interest
+as showing that vast and complex aggregate of contradictory forces
+through whose warring chaos every great leader who fights for the
+well-being of mankind must force his way to triumph. Cavour had to
+contend against foes within just as much as against foes without. He
+had to hold the balance between the unreasoning reactionary and the
+unreasoning revolutionist, just exactly as on a larger or smaller scale
+all leaders in the forward movement of mankind must ever do. Mr. Thayer
+has set forth in masterly fashion the task to which the great statesman
+addressed himself and the manner in which that task was performed; his
+book is absorbingly interesting to the general reader, and should be of
+profit not merely to the special student but to every active politician
+who is in politics for any of the reasons which alone render it really
+worth while to be a politician at all. Mr. Thayer is devoted to his
+hero, as he ought to be; and he is a stanch partisan; but his obvious
+purpose is to be fair, and the principles of liberty to which he pins
+his faith are those upon which American governmental policy must always
+rest--although it is not necessary to follow him in all his views, as
+when he suddenly treats free trade from the fetichistic standpoint
+instead of as an economic expedient to be judged on its merits in any
+given case. Every man interested not only in the realities but in
+the possibilities of political advance should study this book; and,
+in addition to its intrinsic worth and interest, it is an example of
+the kind of productive scholarship which adds to the sum of American
+achievement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anything that Professor Lounsbury writes is certain to be interesting.
+Any collection by him of the writings of others is also certain to be
+interesting. Probably when Mr. Lounsbury is doing what he himself is
+willing to accept as work, it is both so profound and so erudite that
+we laymen can do little but admire it from a distance. Fortunately,
+however, he is also willing to do what he regards as play, such as a
+Life of Fenimore Cooper, or a study of English adapted to the needs of
+those who are not scholars; and all of his writing of this lighter kind
+adds markedly to the sum of enjoyment of laymen who are fond of reading.
+
+The two volumes before me illustrate the good that can be done by
+people of cultivation who at our different universities provide the
+means needed to foster productive scholarship--for, unfortunately,
+productive scholarship in this country is apt to be unremunerative. The
+slender volume on the early literary career of Robert Browning[6] is
+based on four lectures delivered at the University of Virginia under
+the terms of the Barbour-Page Foundation, a foundation due to the
+wisdom and generosity of Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. The “Yale Book of
+American Verse”[7] is published by the Yale University Press under the
+auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, a club founded by
+Mr. Alexander Smith Cochran. It is the kind of club the possession of
+which every real university in the country must envy Yale.
+
+    [6] “The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning.” By Thomas
+        R. Lounsbury.
+
+    [7] “Yale Book of American Verse.” Collected by Thomas R.
+        Lounsbury.
+
+This study of Browning particularly appeals to any man who, although
+devoted to Browning, yet does not care for the pieces that some of the
+Browning clubs especially delight in. Browning’s great poems, those
+which will last as long as English literature lasts, are given their
+full meed of praise by Professor Lounsbury. The other poems, those
+which especially excite the interest of the average Browning society,
+are treated very amusingly and on the whole very justly. Professor
+Lounsbury insists that these “poems” will not permanently last, because
+they are essentially formless, and therefore not poetry at all,
+and indeed not literature. He holds that the attraction such poems
+exercise on certain people is the attraction of the unintelligible. Mr.
+Lounsbury’s writings are always full of delicious touches, and he is
+sometimes at his best in this little volume, as, for instance, where
+he says: “In fact, commentaries on Browning generally bear a close
+resemblance to fog-horns. They proclaim the existence of fog, but they
+do not disperse it.” One of his main contentions is that fundamentally
+the interest in those poems of Browning which are both very long and
+very obscure does not differ in kind from that displayed in guessing
+the answers to riddles or, to use a more dignified comparison, from
+that employed in the solution of difficult mathematical problems.
+
+I think, however, that for the admiration of these rather obscure
+philosophical poems of Browning there is a reason upon which Mr.
+Lounsbury has not touched. He says truly that the men who admire
+Browning are very apt to be men not especially drawn to writers in whom
+lofty speculations have found their fitting counterpart in clearness
+and beauty of expression; and he instances Wordsworth and Tennyson as
+poets to be enjoyed only by men and women who have a certain degree
+of fondness for literature as literature. Now, I think it is true of
+Browning (as it is true of Walt Whitman) that many of the people who
+labor longest and hardest to master his meaning are entirely mistaken
+in thinking that they enjoy him as a poet. But I do not think that Mr.
+Lounsbury’s explanation that they prize him only as a puzzle fully
+accounts for the enjoyment of many of these men or the profit they
+derive from their study. The fact is that Browning does represent
+very deep thought, very real philosophy--mixed, of course, with much
+thought that is not deep at all but only obscure, and much would-be
+philosophy that has no meaning whatsoever. In an instance that came to
+my own knowledge, a class of college boys in a course of literature,
+after carefully studying Browning for a couple of months, and after
+then taking up Tennyson, unanimously abandoned Tennyson and insisted
+on returning to the study of Browning. These hard-working, intelligent
+boys were not all of them merely interested in puzzles. They were not
+all of them blind to poetry as such. They did care to a certain extent
+for form, but primarily they were interested in the great problems of
+life, they were interested in great and noble thoughts. Doubtless many
+of them rather enjoyed having to dig out the thought from involved
+language. But probably a greater number felt a larger enjoyment in
+finding lofty thought expressed in language which was even more lofty
+than obscure.
+
+It is true that as a poet Browning is formless. But the poets who are
+great philosophers are few in number, and great philosophers who have
+any gift of expression whatever or any sense of form, or whose writings
+so much as approach the outer hem of literature, are even fewer in
+number. Browning the philosopher is not more deep than many other
+philosophers, and in form and expression he is inferior to many poets.
+But he is a philosopher, and he has form and expression. The philosophy
+he writes is literature, even though hardly in the highest sense poetic
+literature. Therefore he appeals to men who are primarily interested
+in his writings as philosophy, but who do derive a certain pleasure
+from form or expression; who, without being conscious of it, do like to
+have the writings they read resemble literature. These men are given
+by Browning something that no other poet and no other philosopher can
+give them; and I do not think that these men receive full justice at
+Mr. Lounsbury’s hands. Moreover, as compared to Tennyson or Longfellow,
+or any other of the more conventional poets--and I am extremely fond
+of these conventional poets--there is far more in Browning, even in
+Browning’s simpler and more understandable and formal poems, that
+gives expression to certain deep and complex emotions. There are many
+poets whom we habitually read far more often than Browning, and who
+minister better to our more primitive needs and emotions. There are
+very few whose lines come so naturally to us in certain great crises of
+the soul which are also crises of the intellect.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“The Yale Book of American Verse” is an excellent anthology, and
+the preface is one of the best things about it. In this preface Mr.
+Lounsbury quite unconsciously shows why he appeals to so many men to
+whom a college professor who is nothing more than a college professor
+does not readily appeal. He mentions that on the march to Gettysburg
+he picked up a torn piece of newspaper containing certain verses
+which have always remained in his mind, and which he includes in this
+collection of verse. This is the only hint in Professor Lounsbury’s
+writings that he fought in the Civil War. A professor of English
+literature in a great university who in his youth fought at Gettysburg
+must necessarily have something in him that speaks not only to scholars
+but to men.
+
+This anthology includes hymns as well as secular poems. The collection
+is good in itself, as I have already said, and, moreover, to all real
+lovers of anthologies it will also seem good because each of them will
+take much satisfaction in wondering why certain of his or her favorite
+poems have been left out and why certain other poems have been put in.
+I suppose every man who cares for poetry at all at times wishes that he
+could compile an anthology for his own purposes. I certainly so feel.
+I would like to compile two anthologies, one of hymns and one of those
+poems which our ancestors designated quite ruthlessly as “profane,” in
+opposition to sacred. I should not expect any one else to read either
+of my collections. I should not wish the edition to consist of more
+than one copy. But I would like, purely for my own use, to own that
+copy! In the anthology of hymns, for instance, besides all the great
+hymns, from Bernard of Morlais to Cowper and Wesley and Bishop Heber, I
+would like to put in some hymns as to which I know nothing except that
+I like them. Every Christmas Eve in our own church at Oyster Bay, for
+instance, the children sing a hymn beginning “It’s Christmas Eve on the
+River, it’s Christmas Eve on the Bay.” Of course the hymn has come to
+us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average
+native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our
+own soil--which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the
+nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.
+
+As for the “profane” anthology, I think I should like to make one
+consisting of several volumes. Even Mr. Lounsbury’s volume of American
+verse, though it contains some specimens of verse I would not have
+included, omits others which I certainly should put in. And then, think
+of the many, many volumes that would be needed to include the English
+poems, and the French poems, and the German poems from the Bard of
+the Dimbovitza, and all the other poems which no human being could
+make up his mind to see any anthology leave out! I fear that a perfect
+anthology of the kind that fills my dreams would be as large as the
+various rather dismal series of volumes which contain, as we are told,
+“the world’s best literature”--and doubtless would be as unsatisfactory.
+
+Meanwhile, as all this represents an unattainable dream, we have
+reason to be glad that Mr. Lounsbury’s particular anthology has been
+published.
+
+
+
+
+DANTE AND THE BOWERY
+
+
+
+
+DANTE AND THE BOWERY
+
+
+It is the conventional thing to praise Dante because he of set purpose
+“used the language of the market-place,” so as to be understanded
+of the common people; but we do not in practice either admire or
+understand a man who writes in the language of our own market-place.
+It must be the Florentine market-place of the thirteenth century--not
+Fulton Market of to-day. What infinite use Dante would have made
+of the Bowery! Of course, he could have done it only because not
+merely he himself, the great poet, but his audience also, would have
+accepted it as natural. The nineteenth century was more apt than the
+thirteenth to boast of itself as being the greatest of the centuries;
+but, save as regards purely material objects, ranging from locomotives
+to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its boasting. A
+nineteenth-century poet, when trying to illustrate some point he was
+making, obviously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century
+heroes if he also referred to those of classic times, lest he
+should be suspected of instituting comparisons between them. A
+thirteenth-century poet was not in the least troubled by any such
+misgivings, and quite simply illustrated his point by allusions to any
+character in history or romance, ancient or contemporary, that happened
+to occur to him.
+
+Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was the only
+one who dared use the Bowery--that is, use anything that was striking
+and vividly typical of the humanity around him--as Dante used the
+ordinary humanity of his day; and even Whitman was not quite natural
+in doing so, for he always felt that he was defying the conventions
+and prejudices of his neighbors, and his self-consciousness made him a
+little defiant. Dante was not defiant of conventions: the conventions
+of his day did not forbid him to use human nature just as he saw it,
+no less than human nature as he read about it. The Bowery is one of
+the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied
+interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is
+haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the
+“Inferno.” But no man of Dante’s art and with Dante’s soul would write
+of it nowadays; and he would hardly be understood if he did. Whitman
+wrote of homely things and every-day men, and of their greatness, but
+his art was not equal to his power and his purpose; and, even as it
+was, he, the poet, by set intention, of the democracy, is not known to
+the people as widely as he should be known; and it is only the few--the
+men like Edward FitzGerald, John Burroughs, and W. E. Henley--who prize
+him as he ought to be prized.
+
+Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people
+would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante
+did six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as
+he saw it around him and from human nature as he read of it. I suppose
+that this must be partly because we are so self-conscious as always
+to read a comparison into any illustration, forgetting the fact that
+no comparison is implied between two men, in the sense of estimating
+their relative greatness or importance, when the career of each of them
+is chosen merely to illustrate some given quality that both possess.
+It is also probably due to the fact that an age in which the critical
+faculty is greatly developed often tends to develop a certain querulous
+inability to understand the fundamental truths which less critical ages
+accept as a matter of course. To such critics it seems improper, and
+indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by examples chosen alike
+from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and the Piræus, alike from
+Tammany and from the Roman mob organized by the foes or friends of
+Cæsar. To Dante such feeling itself would have been inexplicable.
+
+Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which
+dwarf all differences in outward and visible form and station, and
+therefore he illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to
+him apt. Only the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and
+so, when he spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to
+illustrate his thesis by an appeal to the past, he could speak only
+of great and prominent characters; but in the present of his day most
+of the men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people of no permanent
+importance--just as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet the
+passions of these men were the same as those of the heroes of old,
+godlike or demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries,
+or his immediate predecessors, to illustrate his points, without
+regard to their prominence or lack of prominence. He was not concerned
+with the differences in their fortunes and careers, with their heroic
+proportions or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic whose
+imagination soared so high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the far
+depths of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the
+eternal mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the
+differences between the careers of the mighty masters of mankind and
+the careers of even very humble people seemed trivial. If we translate
+his comparisons into the terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused
+over this trait of his, until we go a little deeper and understand
+that we are ourselves to blame, because we have lost the faculty simply
+and naturally to recognize that the essential traits of humanity are
+shown alike by big men and by little men, in the lives that are now
+being lived and in those that are long ended.
+
+Probably no two characters in Dante impress the ordinary reader more
+than Farinata and Capaneus: the man who raises himself waist-high from
+out his burning sepulchre, unshaken by torment, and the man who, with
+scornful disdain, refuses to brush from his body the falling flames;
+the great souls--magnanimous, Dante calls them--whom no torture, no
+disaster, no failure of the most absolute kind could force to yield
+or to bow before the dread powers that had mastered them. Dante has
+created these men, has made them permanent additions to the great
+figures of the world; they are imaginary only in the sense that
+Achilles and Ulysses are imaginary--that is, they are now as real as
+the figures of any men that ever lived. One of them was a mythical
+hero in a mythical feat, the other a second-rate faction leader in a
+faction-ridden Italian city of the thirteenth century, whose deeds have
+not the slightest importance aside from what Dante’s mention gives.
+Yet the two men are mentioned as naturally as Alexander and Cæsar are
+mentioned. Evidently they are dwelt upon at length because Dante
+felt it his duty to express a peculiar horror for that fierce pride
+which could defy its overlord, while at the same time, and perhaps
+unwillingly, he could not conceal a certain shuddering admiration for
+the lofty courage on which this evil pride was based.
+
+The point I wish to make is the simplicity with which Dante illustrated
+one of the principles on which he lays most stress, by the example
+of a man who was of consequence only in the history of the parochial
+politics of Florence. Farinata will now live forever as a symbol of
+the soul; yet as an historical figure he is dwarfed beside any one
+of hundreds of the leaders in our own Revolution and Civil War. Tom
+Benton, of Missouri, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, were opposed
+to one another with a bitterness which surpassed that which rived
+asunder Guelph from Ghibellin, or black Guelph from white Guelph. They
+played mighty parts in a tragedy more tremendous than any which any
+mediæval city ever witnessed or could have witnessed. Each possessed an
+iron will and undaunted courage, physical and moral; each led a life of
+varied interest and danger, and exercised a power not possible in the
+career of the Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, fought for
+his principles as unyieldingly as the other fought for what he deemed
+right in trying to break up the Union. Each was a colossal figure.
+Each, when the forces against which he fought overcame him--for in his
+latter years Benton saw the cause of disunion triumph in Missouri,
+just as Jefferson Davis lived to see the cause of union triumph in
+the Nation--fronted an adverse fate with the frowning defiance, the
+high heart, and the stubborn will which Dante has commemorated for all
+time in his hero who “held hell in great scorn.” Yet a modern poet who
+endeavored to illustrate such a point by reference to Benton and Davis
+would be uncomfortably conscious that his audience would laugh at him.
+He would feel ill at ease, and therefore would convey the impression
+of being ill at ease, exactly as he would feel that he was posing, was
+forced and unnatural, if he referred to the deeds of the evil heroes
+of the Paris Commune as he would without hesitation refer to the many
+similar but smaller leaders of riots in the Roman forum.
+
+Dante speaks of a couple of French troubadours, or of a local Sicilian
+poet, just as he speaks of Euripides; and quite properly, for they
+illustrate as well what he has to teach; but we of to-day could not
+possibly speak of a couple of recent French poets or German novelists
+in the same connection without having an uncomfortable feeling that
+we ought to defend ourselves from possible misapprehension; and
+therefore we could not speak of them naturally. When Dante wishes to
+assail those guilty of crimes of violence, he in one stanza speaks
+of the torments inflicted by divine justice on Attila (coupling him
+with Pyrrhus and Sextus Pompey--a sufficiently odd conjunction in
+itself, by the way), and in the next stanza mentions the names of a
+couple of local highwaymen who had made travel unsafe in particular
+neighborhoods. The two highwaymen in question were by no means as
+important as Jesse James and Billy the Kid; doubtless they were far
+less formidable fighting men, and their adventures were less striking
+and varied. Yet think of the way we should feel if a great poet should
+now arise who would incidentally illustrate the ferocity of the human
+heart by allusions both to the terrible Hunnish “scourge of God” and
+to the outlaws who in our own times defied justice in Missouri and New
+Mexico!
+
+When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce passions of the human
+heart, he may speak of Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may speak of two
+local contemporary captains, victor or vanquished in obscure struggles
+between Guelph and Ghibellin; men like Jacopo del Cassero or Buonconte,
+whom he mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus or Rehoboam. He is
+entirely right! What one among our own writers, however, would be able
+simply and naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren, or Custer, or Morgan,
+or Raphael Semmes, or Marion, or Sumter, as illustrating the qualities
+shown by Hannibal, or Rameses, or William the Conqueror, or by Moses or
+Hercules? Yet the Guelph and Ghibellin captains of whom Dante speaks
+were in no way as important as these American soldiers of the second or
+third rank. Dante saw nothing incongruous in treating at length of the
+qualities of all of them; he was not thinking of comparing the genius
+of the unimportant local leader with the genius of the great sovereign
+conquerors of the past--he was thinking only of the qualities of
+courage and daring and of the awful horror of death; and when we deal
+with what is elemental in the human soul it matters but little whose
+soul we take. In the same way he mentions a couple of spendthrifts of
+Padua and Siena, who come to violent ends, just as in the preceding
+canto he had dwelt upon the tortures undergone by Dionysius and Simon
+de Montfort, guarded by Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For some reason
+he hated the spendthrifts in question as the Whigs of Revolutionary
+South Carolina and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint Leger, and De
+Lancey; and to him there was nothing incongruous in drawing a lesson
+from one couple of offenders more than from another. (It would, by the
+way, be outside my present purpose to speak of the rather puzzling
+manner in which Dante confounds his own hatreds with those of heaven,
+and, for instance, shows a vindictive enjoyment in putting his personal
+opponent Filippo Argenti in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.)
+
+When he turns from those whom he is glad to see in hell toward those
+for whom he cares, he shows the same delightful power of penetrating
+through the externals into the essentials. Cato and Manfred illustrate
+his point no better than Belacqua, a contemporary Florentine maker of
+citherns. Alas! what poet to-day would dare to illustrate his argument
+by introducing Steinway in company with Cato and Manfred! Yet again,
+when examples of love are needed, he draws them from the wedding-feast
+at Cana, from the actions of Pylades and Orestes, and from the life
+of a kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who had just died. Could
+we now link together Peter Cooper and Pylades, without feeling a
+sense of incongruity? He couples Priscian with a politician of local
+note who had written an encyclopædia and a lawyer of distinction
+who had lectured at Bologna and Oxford; we could not now with such
+fine unconsciousness bring Evarts and one of the compilers of the
+Encyclopædia Britannica into a like comparison.
+
+When Dante deals with the crimes which he most abhorred, simony and
+barratry, he flails offenders of his age who were of the same type as
+those who in our days flourish by political or commercial corruption;
+and he names his offenders, both those just dead and those still
+living, and puts them, popes and politicians alike, in hell. There have
+been trust magnates and politicians and editors and magazine-writers
+in our own country whose lives and deeds were no more edifying than
+those of the men who lie in the third and the fifth chasm of the eighth
+circle of the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men would be
+condemned as an instance of shocking taste.
+
+One age expresses itself naturally in a form that would be unnatural,
+and therefore undesirable, in another age. We do not express ourselves
+nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the emotions aroused in us by
+what is good or evil in the men of the present in a totally different
+compartment from that which holds our emotions concerning what was
+good or evil in the men of the past. An imitation of the letter of the
+times past, when the spirit has wholly altered, would be worse than
+useless; and the very qualities that help to make Dante’s poem immortal
+would, if copied nowadays, make the copyist ridiculous. Nevertheless,
+it would be a good thing if we could, in some measure, achieve the
+mighty Florentine’s high simplicity of soul, at least to the extent of
+recognizing in those around us the eternal qualities which we admire
+or condemn in the men who wrought good or evil at any stage in the
+world’s previous history. Dante’s masterpiece is one of the supreme
+works of art that the ages have witnessed; but he would have been
+the last to wish that it should be treated only as a work of art, or
+worshipped only for art’s sake, without reference to the dread lessons
+it teaches mankind.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[8]
+
+
+Mr. H. S. Chamberlain’s work on “The Foundations of the Nineteenth
+Century” is a noteworthy book in more ways than one. It is written by
+an Englishman who has been educated on the Continent, and has lived
+there until he is much more German than English. Previously he had
+written a book in French, while this particular book was written in
+German, and has only recently been translated into English. Adequately
+to review the book, or rather to write an adequate essay suggested by
+it, would need the space that would have been taken by an old-time
+Quarterly or Edinburgh Reviewer a century or fourscore years ago. I
+have called the book “noteworthy,” and this it certainly is. It ranks
+with Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” and still more with Gobineau’s
+“Inégalité des Races Humaines,” for its brilliancy and suggestiveness
+and also for its startling inaccuracies and lack of judgment. A
+witty English critic once remarked of Mitford that he had all the
+qualifications of an historian--violent partiality and extreme wrath.
+Mr. Chamberlain certainly possesses these qualifications in excess,
+and, combined with a queer vein of the erratic in his temperament, they
+almost completely offset the value of his extraordinary erudition,
+extending into widely varied fields, and of his occasionally really
+brilliant inspiration. He is, however, always entertaining; which is
+of itself no mean merit, in view of the fact that most serious writers
+seem unable to regard themselves as serious unless they are also dull.
+
+    [8] “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.” By Houston
+        Stewart Chamberlain. A translation from the German, by
+        John Lees. With an introduction by Lord Redesdale. In two
+        volumes.
+
+Mr. Chamberlain’s thesis is that the nineteenth century, and therefore
+the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything in them
+worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan
+race. He holds that there is no such thing as a general progress of
+mankind, that progress is only for those whom he calls the Teutons,
+and that when they mix with or are intruded upon by alien and, as he
+regards them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that he says
+regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general
+progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like,
+is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a
+generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the preceding generations
+were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious
+doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but
+Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of
+those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon
+foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines
+are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain’s hatreds cover a
+wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church,
+the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety
+of literary men and historians.[9] To this sufficiently incongruous
+collection of antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent
+attachments, ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to
+Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy--he
+draws sharp distinctions between all three, and I merely use them to
+indicate his admiration for the Indian habit of thought, an admiration
+which goes hand in hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for
+what most sane people regard as the far nobler thought contained, for
+instance, in the Old Testament. He continually contradicts himself, or
+at least uses words in such diametrically opposite senses as to convey
+the effect of contradiction; and so it would be possible to choose
+phrases of his which contradict what is here said; but I think that I
+give a correct impression of his teaching as a whole.
+
+    [9] Some of his antipathies appeal to the present writer;
+        I much enjoy his irrelevant and hearty denunciation of
+        the folly of treating the comparatively trivial Latin
+        literature as of such peculiar importance as to entitle it
+        to be grouped in grotesque association with the magnificent
+        Greek literature under the unmeaning title of “classic.”
+
+As he touches lightly on an infinitely varied range of subjects, it
+would be possible to choose almost at random passages to justify what
+is said above. Take, for instance, his dogmatic assertions concerning
+faith and works. He frantically condemns the doctrine of salvation
+by works and frantically exalts the doctrine of salvation by faith.
+Much that he says about both doctrines must be taken in so mystical
+and involved a sense that it contains little real meaning to ordinary
+men. Yet he is also capable of expressing, on this very subject, noble
+thought in a lofty manner. In one of his sudden lapses into brilliant
+sanity he emphasizes the fact that Saint Francis of Assisi was faith
+incorporate and yet the special apostle of good works; and that Martin
+Luther, the advocate of redemption by faith, consecrated his life and
+revealed to others the secret of good works--“free works done only to
+please God, not for the sake of piety.”
+
+Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity are fixed in a
+matrix of fairly bedlamite passion and non-sanity. Mr. Chamberlain
+jeers with reason at the Roman Curia because until 1822 it kept on
+the Index all books which taught that the earth went round the sun;
+but really such action is not much worse than that of a man professing
+to write a book like this at the outset of the twentieth century
+who takes the attitude Mr. Chamberlain does toward the teaching of
+Darwin. The acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution are
+quite as necessary to sound scientific thought as the acceptance of
+the fundamental truths concerning the solar system; and the attempt
+that Mr. Chamberlain in one place makes to draw a distinction between
+them is fantastic. Again, take what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and
+Teutons. He bursts the flood-gates of scorn when he deals with persons
+who idealize humanity, or, as he styles it, “so-called humanity”; and
+he says: “For this humanity about which man has philosophized to such
+an extent suffers from the serious defect that it does not exist at
+all. History reveals to us a great number of various human beings, but
+no such thing as humanity”; yet on this very page he attributes the
+history of the growth of our civilization to its “Teutonic” character,
+and he uses the word “Teuton” as well as the word “Aryan” with as utter
+a looseness and vagueness as ever any philanthropist or revolutionist
+used the word “humanity.” All that he says in derision of such a forced
+use of the word “humanity” could with a much greater percentage of
+truthfulness be said as regards the words and ideas symbolized by
+Teutonism and Aryanism as Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. Indeed,
+as he uses them they amount to little more than expressions of his
+personal likes and dislikes. His statement of the raceless chaos into
+which the Roman Empire finally lapsed is, on the whole, just, and, to
+use the words continually coming to one’s mind in dealing with him,
+both brilliant and suggestive. But in his anxiety to claim everything
+good for Aryans and Teutons he finally reduces himself to the position
+of insisting that wherever he sees a man whom he admires he must
+postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, Teutonic blood. He likes
+David, so he promptly makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael
+Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and he instantly says that
+they are Teutons; but he does not like Napoleon, and so he says that
+Napoleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos. The noted
+Italians in question, he states, were all of German origin, descended
+from the Germans who had conquered Italy in the sixth century. Now,
+of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to be serious with himself,
+he must know perfectly well that even by the time of Dante seven or
+eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the other great Italians
+he mentions eight or ten centuries had passed, since the Germanic
+invasion. In other words, these great Italians were separated from
+the days of the Gothic and Lombard invasions by the distance which
+separates modern England from the Norman invasion; and his thesis has
+just about as much substance as would be contained in the statement
+that Wellington, Nelson, Turner, Wordsworth, and Tennyson excelled in
+their several spheres because they were all pure-blood descendants of
+the motley crew that came in with William the Conqueror. The different
+ethnic elements which entered into the Italy of the seventh century
+were in complete solution by the thirteenth, and it would have been
+quite as impossible to trace them to their several original strains
+as nowadays to trace in the average Englishman the various strains of
+blood from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian ancestors. Nor
+does Mr. Chamberlain mind believing two incompatible things in the
+quickest possible succession if they happen to suit his philosophy of
+the moment. Generally, when he speaks of the Teuton he thinks of the
+tall, long-headed man of the north; although, because of some crank
+in his mind, he puts in the proviso that he may have black as well as
+blond hair. The round-skulled man of middle Europe he usually condemns;
+but if his mind happens to run with approbation toward the Tyrolese,
+for instance, he at once forgets what ethnic division of Europeans
+it is to which they belong, and accepts them as typical Teutons. He
+greatly admires the teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he endeavors
+to persuade himself that the Apostle Paul was not really a Jew; but
+he does not like the teachings of the Epistle of James on the subject
+of good works (teachings for which I have a peculiar sympathy, by the
+way), and accordingly he says that James was a pure Jew.
+
+Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamberlain’s ideas are true and
+noble. I admire the morality with which he condemns the intolerance
+of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the intolerance of their
+Roman opponents, and yet his acceptance of the fact that they could not
+have done their great work if there had not been in their characters
+an alloy which made it possible for actual humanity to accept their
+teaching. But even his sense of morality is as curiously capricious
+as that of Carlyle himself, and as little trustworthy. He glories in
+the pointless and wanton barbarity of the destruction of Carthage in
+the Third Punic War as saving Europe from the Afro-Asiatic peril--pure
+nonsense, of course, for Carthage was then no more dangerous to Rome
+than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities stand on a par as
+regards any importance in their after effects. Perhaps his attitude
+toward Byron is more practically mischievous, or at least shows a
+much less desirable trait of character. He says that the personality
+of Byron “has something repulsive in it for every thorough Teuton,
+because we nowhere encounter in it the idea of duty,” which makes him
+“unsympathetic, un-Teutonic”; but he adds that Teutons do not object
+in the least to his licentiousness, and, on the contrary, see in it “a
+proof of genuine race”! Really, this reconciliation of a high ideal
+of duty with gross licentiousness would be infamous if it were not so
+unspeakably comic. On the next page, by the way, Mr. Chamberlain says
+that Louis XIV was anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the Protestants,
+but a thorough Teuton when he defended the liberties of the Gallican
+church against Rome! Now such intellectual antics as these, and the
+haphazard use of any kind of a name (without the least reference to
+its ordinary use, provided Mr. Chamberlain has taken a fancy to it)
+to represent or symbolize any individual or attribute of which he
+approves, makes it very difficult to accept the book as having any
+serious merit whatever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages which
+at best are those of an able man whose mind is not quite sound, and at
+worst lose their brilliancy without their irrationality, there are many
+pages of deep thought and lofty morality based upon wide learning and
+wide literary and even scientific knowledge. There could be no more
+unsafe book to follow implicitly, and few books of such pretensions
+more ludicrously unsound; and yet it is a book which students and
+scholars, and men who, though neither students nor scholars, are yet
+deeply interested in life, must have on their book-shelves. Much
+the same criticism should be passed upon him that he himself passes
+upon John Fiske, to whose great work, “The History of the Discovery
+of America,” he gives deserved and unstinted praise, but at whom he
+rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, with more than Papal
+pretensions to infallibility, setting forth complete patent solutions
+for all the problems connected not merely with the origin but with
+the destiny of man. Mr. Chamberlain differentiates sharply between
+the admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that treating of the
+discovery of America and the work he did when he ventured to dogmatize
+loosely, after the manner of Darwin’s successors in the ’70s and ’80s,
+upon a scanty collection of facts very imperfectly understood. But Mr.
+Chamberlain himself would have done far better if in his book he had
+copied the methods and modesty of Fiske at his best--the methods and
+modesty of such books as Sutherland’s “Origin and Growth of the Moral
+Instinct”--and had refrained from taking an attitude of cock-sureness
+concerning problems which at present no one can more than imperfectly
+understand. He is unwise to follow Brougham’s example and make
+omniscience his foible.
+
+Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful
+and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true acceptance of
+Christ’s teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has done, a man
+who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the fundamental facts of
+the Roman empire in the first three centuries of our era, a man who can
+warn us as clearly as he has warned about some of the pressing dangers
+which threaten our social fabric because of indulgence in a morbid and
+false sentimentality, a man, in short, who has produced in this one
+book materials for half a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse
+subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to
+be taken into account.
+
+
+
+
+THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
+
+
+
+
+THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
+
+
+There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition
+in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering
+from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from
+all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition,
+even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could
+be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in
+morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself,
+than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely
+calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use
+the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves,
+it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend
+gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous
+standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.
+
+This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous
+than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled
+materialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of
+political and clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned
+below[10] is written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under
+the rather fanciful title of “The Death of the Swan” it deals with
+the shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the
+doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and
+draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially
+of our own countrymen, which I, for one, am unwilling to have drawn.
+The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is
+going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn
+governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility
+of its ideals in government, religion, and the whole art of living, a
+futility so wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the
+people from all that makes for real efficiency and success. In his
+revolt against sentimentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypocrisy the
+author advocates frank egotism and brutality as rules of conduct for
+both individuals and nations; and in his revolt against the theological
+tyranny and superstition from which the Spanish peoples in the Old and
+New Worlds have suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit
+obedience to the revolting creed which would treat gold and force as
+the true and only gods for human guidance; and this he does in the
+name of science and enlightenment and of exact and correct thinking.
+He speaks with admiration of certain American qualities, confounding
+in curious fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous traits.
+He fails to see that the line of separation between the school of
+Washington and of Lincoln and the school of the prophets of brutal
+force, as expressed in the deification of either Mars or Mammon, is
+as sharp as that which distinguishes both of these schools from the
+apostles of the silly sentimentalism which he justly condemns. He sees
+that the really great Americans were thoroughly practical men; but
+he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty idealists. It was
+precisely because they were both idealists and practical men that they
+made their mark deep in history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry
+and superstition; he does not see that they were sundered as far from
+the men who attack all religion and all order as from the men who
+uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. It was the fact that
+Washington and Lincoln refused to carry good policies to bad extremes,
+and at the same time refused to be frightened out of supporting good
+policies because they might lead to bad extremes, that made them of
+such far-reaching usefulness.
+
+    [10] “La Mort du Cygne.” By Carlos Reyles. Translation from
+    Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea.
+
+    “Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist.” By Thomas Dwight, M.D.
+
+    “The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.” By Henry Osborn
+    Taylor.
+
+    “Some Neglected Factors in Evolution.” By Henry M. Bernard.
+
+    “The World of Life.” By Alfred Russel Wallace.
+
+    “William James.” By Émile Boutroux.
+
+    “Science et Religion.” By Émile Boutroux.
+
+    “Science and Religion.” By Émile Boutroux. Translation into
+    English by Jonathan Nield.
+
+    “Creative Evolution.” By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation
+    by Arthur Mitchell.
+
+    “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” By William James.
+
+    “Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. L.
+    Pogson.
+
+    “From Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.
+
+    “The Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.
+
+    I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these
+    books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use
+    them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the
+    search for truth; as, for instance, the harm that comes from
+    seeking to apply, universally, truth as apprehended by the
+    mere materialist, the futility of trying to check this harm
+    by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediævalism, and the
+    fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the highest
+    type, both scientific and religious.
+
+Dr. Dwight’s book is very largely a protest against the materialistic
+philosophy which has produced such conceptions of life, and against
+these conceptions of life themselves. With this protest we must all
+heartily sympathize; unfortunately, it is impossible to have such
+sympathy with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest.
+There is much that is true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal
+to show where the leaders of the modern advance have been guilty of
+shortcomings he tends to assume positions which would put an instant
+stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge us back
+into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages. Apparently
+the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man
+of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn Taylor in one of
+his profound and able studies has said: “The mediæval man was not
+spiritually self-reliant, his character was not consciously wrought by
+its own strength of mind and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint,
+he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”
+
+Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines
+of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of
+the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the
+thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the
+Revolution. In speaking of the similarities between them he says:
+
+“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all kinds of company.
+There are the honest men anxious for reform, the protesters against
+what they conceived to be religious oppression, the dreamy idealists
+without definite plan, the ranting orators of the ‘mountain,’ fanatics
+and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a living from the more
+or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary doctrines and who find
+legalized plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or
+for favor prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable
+doctrines without an examination which most of them are incompetent
+to make, and finally the mob of the _sans-culottes_ rejoicing in the
+overthrow of law, order, and decency.”
+
+This is true, although it does not contain by any means the whole
+truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific movement of the
+present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying which Dr.
+Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he
+himself attempts; to destroy the case of one’s opponents and to justify
+one’s own case are two very different things. At present we are in
+greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed
+scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance;
+just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among
+the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is
+vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because
+victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil;
+and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest
+against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the
+evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only
+hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization
+which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious
+expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators
+here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in
+the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which
+it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development
+in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the
+worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny--physical, intellectual,
+spiritual--which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the
+modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there
+is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right
+in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against
+Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism
+which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as
+ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in
+revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us
+that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in
+their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of
+the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and
+intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when
+nominally religious. But in his entirely proper protest against these
+men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than just to Darwin and to many
+another seeker after truth, and he fails to recognize the obligation
+under which he and those like him have been put by the fearless
+pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind to the modern
+scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it
+has been real; but the good has much outweighed the evil. It is only
+the triumph of the movement led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight
+protests that has rendered it possible for books such as Dr. Dwight’s
+to be published with the approval--as in his case--of the orthodox
+thought of the church to which the writer belongs.
+
+The most significant feature of his book is the advance it marks in
+the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the
+doctrine of evolution, although--quite rightly, and in true scientific
+spirit, by the way--he insists most strongly upon the fact that we
+are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or
+show its significance; and he is again quite right in holding up as
+an example to the dogmatists of modern science what Roger Bacon said
+in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in
+knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’” He,
+of course, treats of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and
+the like as every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of
+this represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized
+authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an
+orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to
+print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that
+the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular
+opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that
+extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin
+would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from
+all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held
+to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be
+when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel’s work
+would have been held if Darwin’s far greater work had not distracted
+attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was
+at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of
+what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way
+toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders
+and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with
+those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine
+of evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the freedom
+they do only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific
+innovators of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically
+condemned.
+
+But when Dr. Dwight attacks the loose generalizations, absurd
+dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few
+of the so-called leaders of modern science, he is not only right but
+renders a real service. The claims of certain so-called scientific
+men as to “science overthrowing religion” are as baseless as the
+fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The
+establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more
+justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of
+the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith
+sufficiently robust to stand the--surely very slight--strain of
+admitting that the world is not flat and does move round the sun need
+have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic
+scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of
+evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much
+propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation.
+Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by
+one only as they are affected by the other. Genuine harm has been done
+by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which,
+in its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to
+explain all the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed
+in masterly fashion by such really great thinkers--such masters not
+only of philosophy but of material science--as William James, Émile
+Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. It is worth while to quote the remarks
+of Alfred Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: “With Professor
+Haeckel’s dislike of the dogmas of theologians and their claims as to
+the absolute knowledge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable
+mind that is the power within and behind and around nature many of
+us have the greatest sympathy; but we have none with his unfounded
+dogmatism of combined negation and omniscience, and more especially
+when this assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put forward to
+conceal his real ignorance of the nature of life itself.” Dr. Dwight
+is emphatically right when he denies that science (using the word, as
+he does, as meaning merely the science of material things) has taught
+“a new and sufficient gospel,” or that, to use his own words, there
+is any truth “in the boast of infidel science that she and she alone
+has all that is worth having.” He could go even further than he does
+in refuting the queer optimism of those evolutionists who insist that
+evolution in the human race necessarily means progress; for every true
+evolutionist must admit the possibility of retrogression no less
+than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk after
+having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again
+happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after
+having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight’s view of religion is that it
+is the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically
+right; and surely when the doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to
+mean the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely the performance
+of a barren ceremonial, it must command the respect, and I hope the
+adherence, of all devout men of every creed, and even of those who
+adhere to no creed of recognized orthodoxy.
+
+In the same way I heartily sympathize with his condemnation of the men
+who stridently proclaim that “science has disposed of religion,” and
+with his condemnation of the scientific men who would try to teach
+the community that there is no real meaning to the words “right”
+and “wrong,” and who therefore deny free-will and accountability.
+Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose book is rightly, as he
+calls it, “an essay in constructive biology,” who in his theory of
+group development has opened a new biological and even sociological
+field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the psychical
+accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it, and
+whose final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows
+that he has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist
+can have, yet falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of
+the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence
+can not understand it. Dr. Dwight is right in his attitude toward
+the scientific men who thus assume that there is no freedom of the
+will because on a material basis it is not explicable. Whenever any
+so-called scientific men develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory
+in accordance with which it would be quite impossible to conduct
+the affairs of mankind for so much as twenty-four hours, the wise
+attitude of really scientific men would be to reject that theory,
+instead of following the example of the, I fear not wholly imaginary,
+scientist who, when told that the facts did not fit in with his
+theory, answered: “So much the worse for the facts.” M. Bergson, in
+his “Creative Evolution,” has brought out with convincing clearness
+the great truth that the human brain, so able to deal with purely
+material things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in which thought
+is concerned only with unorganized matter, works under necessarily
+narrow limitations--limitations in reality very, very narrow, and never
+to be made really broad by mere intellect--when it comes to grasping
+any part of the great principle of life. Reason can deal effectively
+only with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to
+allow reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where
+experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly,
+then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience,
+and bid reason be humble--just as under like conditions it would
+bid theology be humble. A certain school of Greek philosophers was
+able to prove logically that there was not, and could not be, any
+such thing as motion, and that, even if there were, it was quite
+impossible logically for a pursuing creature ever to overtake a fleeing
+creature which was going at inferior speed; but all that was really
+accomplished by this teaching was to prove the need of much greater
+intellectual humility on the part of those who believed that they were
+capable of thinking out an explanation for everything. Mr. Bernard
+ought not to have been caught in such a dilemma, because of the very
+fact that he does not cast in his lot with the crass materialists;
+for he admits that there are many things we do not know, that there
+is much which our intelligence--necessarily functioning in material
+fashion--can not understand. It is just as idle for a man to try to
+explain everything in the moral and spiritual world by that which he
+is able to apprehend of the material world as it would be for a polyp
+to try to explain the higher emotions of mankind in terms of polyp
+materialism. Not only would it be quite impossible to conduct even
+the lowest form of civil society without practical acknowledgment of
+free-will and accountability--an acknowledgment always made in practice
+by every single individual of those who deny it in theory--but even
+in their writings the very men who deny free-will and accountability
+inevitably and continually use language which has no meaning except on
+the supposition that both of them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance,
+on the same page on which he denies freedom of the will, makes an
+impatient plea for just laws, and explains that by “just laws” he
+means laws that are in accordance with the highest conceptions of
+human relationships; he complains that the legal idea of justice is
+invariably far behind that of our psychic perceptions; and elsewhere,
+as on page 457, he speaks of the “duties” of man and of his “moral
+perceptions,” and on page 473 he asks for perfection of the community,
+so that “social life worked out by the highest wisdom of mankind will
+at once rise to a newer and higher physical and psychic level.” All
+of this is meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the
+will and accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and
+original thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the
+pure materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson’s pregnant
+saying that “pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense,
+which is an altogether different thing.” A part, and an essential part,
+of the same truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when he paraphrases Saint
+Augustine in insisting that “the truths of love are as valid as the
+truths of reason.”
+
+Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits of thought are similar to his
+perform a real service when they keep people from being led astray by
+the mischievous dogmas of those who would give to each passing and
+evanescent phase of materialistic scientific thought a dogmatic value;
+and our full acknowledgment of this service does not in the least
+hinder us from also realizing and acknowledging that the advance in
+scientific discovery, which has been and will be of such priceless
+worth to mankind, can not be made by men of this type, but only by the
+bolder, more self-reliant spirits, by men whose unfettered freedom of
+soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of
+truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search
+to attain it. A brake is often a useful and sometimes an indispensable
+piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as important as the
+wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard T.
+Ely was tried for economic heresy: “In all lines of investigation the
+investigator must be absolutely free to follow the paths of truth
+wherever they may lead.”
+
+It is always a difficult thing to state a position which has two sides
+with such clearness as to bring it home to the hearers. In the world
+of politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and
+no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but
+difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress
+combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of
+extremists and against progress by another set of extremists. So in
+the world of the intellect it is easy to take the position of the hard
+materialists who rail against religion, and easy also to take the
+position of those whose zeal for orthodoxy makes them distrust all
+action by men of independent mind in the search for scientific truth;
+but it is not so easy to make it understood that we both acknowledge
+our inestimable debt to the great masters of science, and yet are
+keenly alive to their errors and decline to surrender our judgment to
+theirs when they go wrong. It is imperative to realize how very grave
+their errors are, and how foolish we should be to abandon our adherence
+to the old ideals of duty toward God and man without better security
+than the more radical among the new prophets can offer us. The very
+blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose complacency
+is greatest in their belief that the material key is that which
+unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that the finite mind of
+man can, not merely understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon,
+these mysteries. Mr. Wallace stands in honorable contrast to the men
+of this stamp. No one has criticised with greater incisiveness what he
+properly calls “the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions
+of the biologists of the school of Haeckel.” He shows his scientific
+superiority to these men by his entire realization of the limitations
+of the human intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking
+that we have explained what we are simply unable to understand when
+we use such terms as “infinity of time” and “infinity of space” to
+cover our ignorance; and he stands not far away from the school of
+MM. Boutroux and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes near the
+attitude of the more serious among the younger present-day scientific
+investigators--of the stamp of Professor Osborn, of the American
+Museum of Natural History--in his readiness to acknowledge that the
+materialistic and mechanical explanations of the causes of evolution
+have broken down, and that science itself furnishes an overwhelming
+argument for “creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose” in
+the process of evolution.
+
+The law of evolution is as unconditionally accepted by every serious
+man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and it is no more
+and no less foolish to regard one than the other as antagonistic to
+religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands on a par with
+insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science must reconcile
+itself--and astronomy as well--to a universe only six thousand years
+old. The type of theologian who takes such a position occupies much the
+same intellectual level with the strutting materialists of the Haeckel
+type. To all men of this kind I most cordially commend a capital book,
+“Evolution and Dogma,” by the Rev. J. A. Zahm, one-time professor of
+physics at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.
+
+The great distinguishing feature of the centuries immediately past
+has been the extraordinary growth in man’s knowledge of, and power
+to understand and command, his own physical nature and his physical
+surroundings in the universe. It is this growth which so sharply
+distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we may
+roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus’s voyage, from all
+preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased
+man’s power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also
+measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and
+command over things spiritual no less than material. This conquest
+could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow wherever their
+longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of their own
+consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the present. But
+no such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever has taken place,
+or ever will or can take place, without being fraught also with great
+dangers to mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try to remain
+stationary we shall surely go backward; and yet as soon as we leave the
+ground on which we stand in order to advance there is always danger
+that we shall plunge into some abyss.
+
+Naturally, the men who have taken the lead in these extraordinary
+material discoveries have often tended to think that there is nothing
+to discover or to believe in except what is material. Much of the
+growth in our understanding of nature has been due to men whose high
+abilities were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain directions.
+Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that the
+remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate
+and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so
+powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our
+knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet;
+the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment
+of such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolution; in short,
+the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical
+universe and of man’s physical place in that universe, has been due to
+the labor of students whose special tastes and abilities lay in the
+direction of dealing with what is purely material. Their astounding
+success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of
+their achievements, have naturally tended to make those among them
+who possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not
+broad, assume an attitude of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient
+materialism: a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its own
+grievous shortcomings and its inability to perceive anything outside
+the realm of the body. This attitude is as profoundly repellent as
+that of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of
+all progress, against whom these men profess to be in revolt; and,
+moreover, it is an attitude which is itself as profoundly unscientific
+as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The
+universal truth can never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended
+unless we have the widest possible knowledge of our physical
+surroundings, and unless we fearlessly endeavor to find out just
+what the facts and the teachings of these physical surroundings are;
+but neither will it ever be understood if the physical and material
+explanations of life are accepted as all-sufficient. By none is this
+more clearly recognized than by the most acute and far-sighted of the
+investigators into physical conditions. Says Mr. Bernard: “There are
+psychic elements wholly different in kind from the physical elements
+... [they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a new character,
+quality, element--or shall we at once boldly borrow a term from
+mathematics and call it a new ‘dimension’ of our environment, hitherto
+three-dimensional? These various mental conditions lead us to believe
+that at any moment, while being driven through this three-dimensional
+environment, we may also be plunged into a psychic condition which
+hangs like an atmosphere over our particular physical surroundings.”
+
+Not only every truly religious, but every truly scientific, man must
+turn with relief from the narrowness of a shut-in materialism to the
+profound and lofty thought contained in the writings of William James,
+of his biographer, M. Émile Boutroux, and of another philosopher of
+the same school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux’s study of William James
+gives in brief form--and with a charm of style and expression possible
+only for those who work with that delicate instrument of precision,
+French prose--the views which men of this stamp hold; and be it
+remembered that, like James, they are thoroughly scientific men,
+steeped in the teachings of material science, who acknowledge no
+outside limitation upon them in their search for truth. They have a
+far keener understanding of the world of matter than has been attained
+by the purely materialistic scientists, just because, in addition,
+they also understand that outside of the purely physical lies the
+psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the
+purely psychic. M. Boutroux’s book on “Science and Religion” has been
+translated into English--and we owe a real debt of gratitude to Messrs.
+Nield and Mitchell for their excellent translations of MM. Boutroux
+and Bergson. There is much talk of the conflict between science and
+religion. The inherent absurdity of such talk has never been better
+expressed than by M. Boutroux when he says that such opposition “is
+the result of our defining both science and religion in an artificial
+manner by, on the one hand, identifying science with physical science,
+and, on the other hand, assuming that religion consists in the dogmas
+which merely symbolize it.” M. Boutroux’s book, like M. Bergson’s
+“Creative Evolution,” must be read in its entirety; mere extracts and
+condensations can not show the profound philosophical acumen with
+which these men go to the heart of things, and prove that science
+itself, if correctly understood, renders absurd the harsh and futile
+dogmatism of many of those who pride themselves upon being, above all
+things, scientific. For, as these writers point out, the work of the
+scientist is conditioned upon the existence of the free determination
+of a spirit which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes also in
+an æsthetic and moral ideal. They see the material, the physical body,
+in its relation to other physical bodies; and back of and beyond the
+physical they see life itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived
+of as something always dynamic and never static, as a “stream of
+consciousness,” a “becoming.”
+
+As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the individual his
+value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than treating
+him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals. This
+philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of
+the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution
+and of all else that modern science has ever taught; and so those
+who profess it are in a position of impregnable strength when they
+point out that all this in no shape or way interferes with religion
+and with Christianity, because, as they hold, evolution in religion
+has merely tended to disengage it from its own gross and material
+wrapping, and to leave unfettered the spirit which is its essence.
+To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which
+humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches; for, as M.
+Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith
+in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need
+give no other reason, for its existence than “its own incorruptible
+disinterestedness.” The idea thus expressed is at bottom based on
+the same truth to which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he
+says: “The love of God means not despising but honoring self; and for
+Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing
+earth’s duties and living out earth’s full life, and not in abandoning
+all for dreams, though the dreams be of heaven.” To men such as William
+James and these two French philosophers physical science, if properly
+studied, shows conclusively its own limitations, shows conclusively
+that beyond the material world lies a vast series of phenomena which
+all material knowledge is powerless to explain, so that science
+itself teaches that outside of materialism lie the forces of a wholly
+different world, a world ordered by religion--religion which, says M.
+Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work according to its own nature
+as a spiritual activity, striving to transform men from within and not
+from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, by prayer, by the
+communion of souls, not by restraint or policy; and such a religion
+has nothing to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit to
+which it is loyal is the faith in duty, the search for what is for the
+universal good and for the universal love, the secret springs of all
+high and beneficent activity.
+
+It is striking to see how these two gifted Frenchmen, by their own
+road, reach substantially the same conclusion which, by a wholly
+different method, and indeed in treating religion from a wholly
+different standpoint, is also reached by the president of Bowdoin
+College. Mr. Hyde’s short volume combines in high degree a lofty
+nobility of ethical concept with the most practical and straightforward
+common-sense treatment of the ways in which this concept should be
+realized in practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself in these
+matters, and one man’s need will not be wholly met by what does meet
+another’s; personally, this book of President Hyde’s gives me something
+that no other book does, and means to me very, very much.
+
+We must all strive to keep as our most precious heritage the liberty
+each to worship his God as to him seems best, and, as part of this
+liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater
+or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and convictions,
+without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of others. But the
+professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon authority,
+and those who in different measures profess the theory of individual
+liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and with
+self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of
+every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: “The only setting
+for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only
+relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind.”
+Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the
+case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when
+he summed up a notably fine address in defence--as he truly says,
+_friendly_ defence--of his own church by enunciating the plea for
+“true peace founded on justice,” worked out in accordance with what
+he properly calls one of the “dearest blessings that heaven can give,
+the spirit that springs from religious liberty.” However widely
+many earnest and high-minded men of science and many earnest and
+high-minded men of religious convictions may from one side or the other
+disagree with the teachings of the earnest and high-minded students of
+philosophy whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in agreement
+with the fundamentals on which their philosophy is based. Surely we
+must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we
+ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should
+be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with
+humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations
+both of the mind and the soul. We must stand equally against tyranny
+and against irreverence in all things of the spirit, with the firm
+conviction that we can all work together for a higher social and
+individual life if only, whatever form of creed we profess, we make the
+doing of duty and the love of our fellow men two of the prime articles
+in our universal faith. To those who deny the ethical obligation
+implied in such a faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens;
+and we are brothers to all those who do acknowledge it, whatever their
+creed or system of philosophy.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
+
+
+
+
+THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
+
+
+Next to developing original writers in its own time, the most fortunate
+thing, from the literary standpoint, which can befall any people is
+to have revealed to it some new treasure-house of literature. This
+treasure-house may be stored with the writings of another people in
+the present, or else with the writings of a buried past. But a few
+generations ago, in that innocent age when Blackstone could speak of
+the “Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals”--incongruous gathering--as
+“Celtic” tribes, the long-vanished literatures of the ancestors of
+the present European nations, the epics, the sagas, the stories in
+verse or prose, were hardly known to, or regarded by, their educated
+and cultivated descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the nineteenth
+century, these forgotten literatures, or fragments of them, were
+one by one recovered. They are various in merit and interest, in
+antiquity and extent--“Beowulf,” the Norse sagas, the “Kalevala,”
+the “Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” the Arthurian cycle of
+romances. In some there is but one great poem; in some all the
+poems or stories are of one type; in others, as in the case of the
+Norse sagas, a wide range of history, myth, and personal biography
+is covered. In our own day there has at last come about a popular
+revival of interest in the wealth of poems and tales to be found in the
+ancient Celtic, and especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts--the
+whole forming a body of prose and poetry of great and well-nigh unique
+interest from every standpoint, which in some respects can be matched
+only by the Norse sagas, and which has some striking beauties the like
+of which are not to be found even in these Norse sagas.
+
+For many decades German, French, Irish, and English students have
+worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many of the
+more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or
+paraphrased in popular form by writers like Lady Gregory and Miss
+Hull, Lady Gregory showing in her prose something of the charm which
+her countrywoman Emily Lawless shows in her poems “With the Wild
+Geese.” It is greatly to be regretted that America should have done so
+little either in the way of original study and research in connection
+with the early Celtic literature, or in the way of popularizing and
+familiarizing that literature, and it is much to be desired that,
+wherever possible, chairs of Celtic should be established in our
+leading universities. Moreover, in addition to the scholar’s work
+which is especially designed for students, there must ultimately be
+done the additional work which puts the results of the scholarship at
+the disposal of the average layman. This has largely been done for
+the Norse sagas. William Morris has translated the “Heimskringla”
+into language which, while not exactly English, can nevertheless be
+understood without difficulty--which is more than can be said for his
+translation of “Beowulf”--and which has a real, though affectedly
+archaic, beauty. Dasent has translated the “Younger Edda,” the “Njala
+Saga,” and the “Saga of Gisli the Outlaw.” It is pleasant for Americans
+to feel that it was Longfellow who, in his “Saga of King Olaf,”
+rendered one of the most striking of the old Norse tales into a great
+poem.
+
+It is difficult to speak with anything like exactness of the relative
+ages of these primitive literatures. Doubtless in each case the
+earliest manuscripts that have come down to us are themselves based
+upon far earlier ones which have been destroyed, and doubtless, when
+they were first written down, the tales had themselves been recited,
+and during the course of countless recitations had been changed and
+added to and built upon, for a period of centuries. Sometimes, as in
+the “Song of Roland,” we know at least in bare outline the historical
+incident which for some reason impressed the popular imagination
+until around it there grew up a great epic, of which the facts have
+been twisted completely out of shape. In other instances, as in the
+“Nibelungenlied,” a tale, adaptable in its outlines to many different
+peoples, was adapted to the geography of a particular people, and to
+what that people at least thought was history; thus the Rhine becomes
+the great river of the “Nibelungenlied,” and in the second part of
+the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes connected with dim memories
+of Attila’s vast and evanescent empire. The “Song of Roland” and the
+“Nibelungenlied” were much later than the earliest English, Norse, and
+Irish poems. Very roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the earliest
+forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas were produced, or at least
+were in healthy life, at about the time when “Beowulf” was a live saga,
+and two or three centuries or thereabouts before the early Norse sagas
+took a shape which we would recognize as virtually akin to that they
+now have.
+
+These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though somewhat artificially,
+arranged in cycles. In some ways the most interesting of these is the
+Cuchulain cycle, although until very recently it was far less known
+than the Ossianic cycle--the cycle which tells of the deeds of Finn and
+the Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty feats of Cuchulain, and
+of the heroes whose life-threads were interwoven with his, date back
+to a purely pagan Ireland--an Ireland cut off from all connection with
+the splendid and slowly dying civilization of Rome, an Ireland in which
+still obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere vanished even from
+the memory of man.
+
+Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still fought in chariots driven
+each by a charioteer who was also the stanch friend and retainer of
+the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had held the first place in
+the armies of all the powerful empires in the lands adjoining the
+Mediterranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris. Strange
+African tribes had used them north and south of the Atlas Mountains.
+When the mighty, conquering kings of Egypt made their forays into
+Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, the decisive feature in
+each battle was the shock between the hundreds of chariots arrayed on
+each side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine hundred chariots of
+iron. The Homeric heroes were “tamers of horses,” which were not ridden
+in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That mysterious people,
+the Etruscans, of whose race and speech we know nothing, originally
+fought in chariots. But in the period of Greek and Roman splendor
+the war chariot had already passed away. It had seemingly never been
+characteristic of the wild Teuton tribes; but among the western Celts
+it lingered long. Cæsar encountered it among the hostile tribes when he
+made his famous raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later still.
+
+The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of Cuchulain’s time
+were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to battle. The
+sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They show us a
+land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards,
+seers, but, above all, warriors. Erin was a world to herself. Her
+people at times encountered the peoples of Britain or of Continental
+Europe, whether in trade or in piracy; but her chief interest, her
+overwhelming interest, lay in what went on within her own borders.
+There was a high king of shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely
+recognized as extending over the island, but whose practical supremacy
+was challenged on every hand by whatever king or under-king felt the
+fierce whim seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there were halls
+and fortresses; there were huge herds of horses and cattle and sheep
+and swine. The kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, the
+chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore garments crimson and blue and
+green and saffron, plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They had
+rings and clasps and torques of gold and silver, urns and mugs and
+troughs and vessels of iron and silver. They played chess by the fires
+in their great halls, and they feasted and drank and quarrelled within
+them, and the women had sun-parlors of their own.
+
+Among the most striking of the tales are those of the “Fate of the Sons
+of Usnach,” telling of Deirdrè’s life and love and her lamentation for
+her slain lover; of the “Wooing of Emer” by Cuchulain; of the “Feast
+of Bricriu”; and of the famous Cattle-Spoil of Cooley, the most famous
+romance of ancient Ireland, the story of the great raid for the Dun
+Bull of Cooley. But there are many others of almost equal interest;
+such as the story of MacDatho’s pig, with its Gargantuan carouse of the
+quarrelsome champions; and the tale of the siege of Howth.
+
+In these tales, which in so many points are necessarily like the
+similar tales that have come down from the immemorial past of the
+peoples of kindred race, there are also striking peculiarities that
+hedge them apart. The tales are found in many versions, which for the
+most part have been enlarged by pedantic scribes of aftertime, who
+often made them prolix and tedious, and added grotesque and fantastic
+exaggerations of their own to the barbaric exaggerations already in
+them, doing much what Saxo Grammaticus did for the Scandinavian tales.
+They might have been woven into some great epic, or at least have
+taken far more definite and connected shape, if the history of Ireland
+had developed along lines similar to those of the other nations of west
+Europe. But her history was broken by terrible national tragedies and
+calamities. To the scourge of the vikings succeeded the Anglo-Norman
+conquest, with all its ruinous effects on the growth of the national
+life. The early poems of the Erse bards could not develop as those
+other early lays developed which afterward became the romances of
+Arthur and Roland and Siegfried. They remain primitive, as “Beowulf” is
+primitive, as, in less measure, “Gisli the Outlaw” is primitive.
+
+The heroes are much like those of the early folk of kindred
+stock everywhere. They are huge, splendid barbarians, sometimes
+yellow-haired, sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief title
+to glory is found in their feats of bodily prowess. Among the feats
+often enumerated or referred to are the ability to leap like a salmon,
+to run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible distances, to toss
+the wheel, and, like the Norse berserkers, when possessed with the fury
+of battle, to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last feat was
+especially valued, and was recognized as the “heroes’ fury.” As with
+most primitive peoples, the power to shout loudly was much prized, and
+had a distinct place of respect, under the title of “mad roar,” in
+any list of a given hero’s exhibitions of strength or agility; just as
+Stentor’s voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable military
+asset. So, when the slaughter begins in Etzel’s hall, the writer of the
+Nibelung lay dwells with admiration on the vast strength of Diederick,
+as shown by the way in which his voice rang like a bison horn,
+resounding within and without the walls. Many of the feats chronicled
+of the early Erse heroes are now wholly unintelligible to us; we can
+not even be sure what they were, still less why they should have been
+admired.
+
+Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as wisdom was in the early
+world, a vulpine wisdom of craft and cunning and treachery and
+double-dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, witches appear,
+now as friends, now as unfriends, of the men of might. Fiercely the
+heroes fought and wide they wandered; yet their fights and their
+wanderings were not very different from those that we read about in
+many other primitive tales. There is the usual incredible variety of
+incidents and character, and, together with the variety, an endless
+repetition. But these Erse tales differ markedly from the early Norse
+and Teutonic stories in more than one particular. A vein of the
+supernatural and a vein of the romantic run through them and relieve
+their grimness and harshness in a way very different from anything
+to be found in the Teutonic. Of course the supernatural element often
+takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the
+Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes
+from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there
+were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against
+which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales
+an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible; and
+their unearthly creatures could become in aftertime the fairies of the
+moonlight and the greenwood, so different from the trolls and gnomes
+and misshapen giants bequeathed to later generations by the Norse
+mythology.
+
+Still more striking is the difference between the women in the Irish
+sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the
+spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the romances of
+the Middle Ages. In the “Song of Roland”--rather curiously, considering
+that it is the first great piece of French literature--woman plays
+absolutely no part at all; there is not a female figure which is
+more than a name, or which can be placed beside Roland and Oliver,
+Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and Charlemagne, the mighty
+emperor of the “barbe fleurie.” The heroines of the early Norse and
+German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to be the mothers of a
+mighty race, as stern and relentless as their lovers and husbands. But
+it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal
+to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Dierdrè,
+the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and Deirdrè have
+the charm, the power of inspiring and returning romantic love, that
+belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round Table,
+though of course this does not mean that they lacked some very archaic
+tastes and attributes.
+
+Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who was wooed by Cuchulain,
+had the “six gifts of a girl”--beauty, and a soft voice, and sweet
+speech, and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In their wooing the
+hero and heroine spoke to one another in riddles, those delights of the
+childhood of peoples. She set him journeys to go and feats to perform,
+which he did in the manner of later knight errants. After long courting
+and many hardships, he took Emer to wife, and she was true to him and
+loved him and gloried in him and watched over him until the day he went
+out to meet his death. All this was in a spirit which we would find
+natural in a heroine of modern or of mediæval times--a spirit which it
+would be hard to match either among the civilizations of antiquity, or
+in early barbarisms other than the Erse.
+
+So it was with Deirdrè, the beautiful girl who forsook her betrothed,
+the Over-King of Ulster, for the love of Naisi, and fled with him and
+his two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At last they returned
+to Ireland, and there Deirdrè’s lover and his two brothers were slain
+by the treachery of the king whose guests they were. Many versions of
+the Songs of Deirdrè have come down to us, of her farewell to Alba and
+her lament over her slain lover; for during centuries this tragedy
+of Deirdrè, together with the tragical fate of the Children of Lir
+and the tragical fate of the Children of Tuirenn, were known as the
+“Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin.” None has better retained its vitality
+down to the present day. Even to us, reading the songs in an alien
+age and tongue, they are very beautiful. Deirdrè sings wistfully of
+her Scottish abiding-place, with its pleasant, cuckoo-haunted groves,
+and its cliffs, and the white sand on the beaches. She tells of her
+lover’s single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the daughter of a
+Scottish lord, and Deirdrè, broken-hearted, put off to sea in a boat,
+indifferent whether she should live or die; whereupon the two brothers
+of her lover swam after her and brought her back, to find him very
+repentant and swearing a threefold oath that never again would he prove
+false to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. She dwells
+constantly on the unfailing tenderness of the three heroes; for her
+lover’s two brothers cared for her as he did:
+
+      “Much hardship would I take,
+      Along with the three heroes;
+      I would endure without house, without fire,
+      It is not I that would be gloomy.
+
+      “Their three shields and their spears
+      Were often a bed for me.
+      Put their three hard swords
+      Over the grave, O young man!”
+
+For the most part, in her songs, Deirdrè dwells on the glories and
+beauties of the three warriors, the three dragons, the three champions
+of the Red Branch, the three that used to break every onrush, the three
+hawks, the three darlings of the women of Erin, the three heroes who
+were not good at homage. She sings of their splendor in the foray, of
+their nobleness as they returned to their home, to bring fagots for the
+fire, to bear in an ox or a boar for the table; sweet though the pipes
+and flutes and horns were in the house of the king, sweeter yet was it
+to hearken to the songs sung by the sons of Usnach, for “like the sound
+of the wave was the voice of Naisi.”
+
+There were other Irish heroines of a more common barbarian type. Such
+was the famous warrior-queen, Meave, tall and beautiful, with her
+white face and yellow hair, terrible in her battle chariot when she
+drove at full speed into the press of fighting men, and “fought over
+the ears of the horses.” Her virtues were those of a warlike barbarian
+king, and she claimed the like large liberty in morals. Her husband was
+Ailill, the Connaught king, and, as Meave carefully explained to him in
+what the old Erse bards called a “bolster conversation,” their marriage
+was literally a partnership wherein she demanded from her husband an
+exact equality of treatment according to her own views and on her own
+terms; the three essential qualities upon which she insisted being that
+he should be brave, generous, and completely devoid of jealousy!
+
+Fair-haired Queen Meave was a myth, a goddess, and her memory changed
+and dwindled until at last she reappeared as Queen Mab of fairyland.
+But among the ancient Celts her likeness was the likeness of many a
+historic warrior queen. The descriptions given of her by the first
+writers or compilers of the famous romances of the foray for the Dun
+Bull of Cooley almost exactly match the descriptions given by the Latin
+historian of the British Queen Boadicea, tall and terrible-faced, her
+long, yellow hair flowing to her hips, spear in hand, golden collar on
+neck, her brightly colored mantle fastened across her breast with a
+brooch.
+
+Not only were some of Meave’s deeds of a rather startling kind, but
+even Emer and Deirdrè at times showed traits that to a modern reader
+may seem out of place, in view of what has been said of them above.
+But we must remember the surroundings, and think of what even the real
+women of history were, throughout European lands, until a far later
+period. In the “Heimskringla” we read of Queen Sigrid, the wisest of
+women, who grew tired of the small kings who came to ask her hand, a
+request which she did not regard them as warranted to make either by
+position or extent of dominion. So one day when two kings had thus come
+to woo her, she lodged them in a separate wooden house, with all their
+company, and feasted them until they were all very drunk, and fell
+asleep; then in the middle of the night she had her men fall on them
+with fire and sword, burn those who stayed within the hall and slay
+those who broke out. The incident is mentioned in the saga without the
+slightest condemnation; on the contrary, it evidently placed the queen
+on a higher social level than before, for, in concluding the account,
+the saga mentions that Sigrid said “that she would weary these small
+kings of coming from other lands to woo her; so she was called Sigrid
+Haughty thereafter.” Now, Sigrid was an historical character who lived
+many hundred years after the time of Emer and Deirdrè and Meave, and
+the simplicity with which her deed was chronicled at the time, and
+regarded afterward, should reconcile us to some of the feats recorded
+of those shadowy Erse predecessors of hers, who were separated from her
+by an interval of time as great as that which separates her from us.
+
+The story of the “Feast of Bricriu of the Bitter Tongue” is one of the
+most interesting of the tales of the Cuchulain cycle. In all this cycle
+of tales, Bricriu appears as the cunning, malevolent mischief-maker,
+dreaded for his biting satire and his power of setting by the ears the
+boastful, truculent, reckless, and marvellously short-tempered heroes
+among whom he lived. He has points of resemblance to Thersites, to Sir
+Kay, of the Arthurian romances, and to Conan, of the Ossianic cycle of
+Celtic sagas. This story is based upon the custom of the “champion’s
+portion,” which at a feast was allotted to the bravest man. It was a
+custom which lasted far down into historic times, and was recognized
+in the Brehon laws, where a heavy fine was imposed upon any person who
+stole it from the one to whom it belonged. The story in its present
+form, like all of these stories, is doubtless somewhat changed from
+the story as it was originally recited among the pre-Christian Celts
+of Ireland, but it still commemorates customs of the most primitive
+kind, many of them akin to those of all the races of Aryan tongue in
+their earlier days. The queens cause their maids to heat water for
+the warriors’ baths when they return from war, and similarly made
+ready to greet their guests, as did the Homeric heroines. The feasts
+were Homeric feasts. The heroes boasted and sulked and fought as did
+the Greeks before Troy. At their feasts, when the pork and beef, the
+wheaten cakes and honey, had been eaten, and the beer, and sometimes
+the wine of Gaul, had been drunk in huge quantities, the heroes,
+vainglorious and quarrelsome, were always apt to fight. Thus in the
+three houses which together made up the palace of the high king at
+Emain Macha, it was necessary that the arms of the heroes should all
+be kept in one place, so that they could not attack one another at the
+feasts. These three houses of the palace were the Royal House, in which
+the high king himself had his bronzed and jewelled room; the Speckled
+House, where the swords, the shields, and the spears of the heroes were
+kept; and the House of the Red Branch, where not only the weapons, but
+the heads of the beaten enemies were stored; and it was in connection
+with this last grewsome house that the heroes in the train of the High
+King Conchubar took their name of the “Heroes of the Red Branch.”
+
+When Bricriu gave his feast, he prepared for it by building a
+spacious house even handsomer than the House of the Red Branch; and
+it is described in great detail, as fashioned after “Tara’s Mead
+Hall,” and of great strength and magnificence; and it was stocked with
+quilts and blankets and beds and pillows, as well as with abundance
+of meat and drink. Then he invited the high king and all the nobles
+of Ulster to come to the feast. An amusing touch in the saga is the
+frank consternation of the heroes who were thus asked. They felt
+themselves helpless before the wiles of Bricriu, and at first refused
+outright to go, because they were sure that he would contrive to set
+them to fighting with one another; and they went at all only after
+they had taken hostages from Bricriu and had arranged that he should
+himself leave the feast-hall as soon as the feast was spread. But
+their precautions were in vain, and Bricriu had no trouble in bringing
+about a furious dispute among the three leading chiefs, Loigaire the
+Triumphant, Conall the Victorious, and Cuchulain. He promised to each
+the champion’s portion, on condition that each should claim it. Nor
+did he rest here, but produced what the saga calls “the war of words
+of the women of Ulster,” by persuading the three wives of the three
+heroes that each should tread first into the banquet-hall. Each of the
+ladies, in whose minds he thus raised visions of social precedence,
+had walked away from the palace with half a hundred women in her
+train, when they all three met. The saga describes how they started to
+return to the hall together, walking evenly, gracefully, and easily
+at first, and then with quicker steps, until, when they got near the
+house, they raised their robes “to the round of the leg” and ran at
+full speed. When they got to the hall the doors were shut, and, as they
+stood outside, each wife chanted her own perfections, but, above all,
+the valor and ferocious prowess of her husband, scolding one another as
+did Brunhild and Krimhild in the quarrel that led to Siegfried’s death
+at the hands of Hagen. Each husband, as in duty bound, helped his wife
+into the hall, and the bickering which had already taken place about
+the champion’s portion was renewed. At last it was settled that the
+three rivals should drive in their chariots to the home of Ailill and
+Meave, who should adjudge between them; and the judgment given, after
+testing their prowess in many ways, and especially in encounters with
+demons and goblins, was finally in favor of Cuchulain.
+
+One of the striking parts of the tale is that in which the three
+champions, following one another, arrive at the palace of Meave. The
+daughter of Meave goes to the sun-parlor over the high porch of the
+hold, and from there she is told by the queen to describe in turn each
+chariot and the color of the horses and how the hero looks and how the
+chariot courses. The girl obeys, and describes in detail each chariot
+as it comes up, and the queen in each case recognizes the champion from
+the description and speaks words of savage praise of each in turn.
+Loigaire, a fair man, driving two fiery dapple-grays, in a wickerwork
+chariot with silver-mounted yoke, is chanted by the queen as:
+
+      “A fury of war, a fire of judgment,
+      A flame of vengeance; in mien a hero,
+      In face a champion, in heart a dragon;
+      The long knife of proud victories which will hew us to pieces,
+      The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire.”
+
+Conall is described as driving a roan and a bay, in a chariot with two
+bright wheels of bronze, he himself fair, in face white and red, his
+mantle blue and crimson, and Meave describes him as:
+
+      “A wolf among cattle; battle on battle,
+      Exploit on exploit, head upon head he heaps”;
+
+and says that if he is excited to rage he will cut up her people
+
+      “As a trout on red sandstone is cut.”
+
+Then Cuchulain is described, driving at a gallop a dapple-gray and a
+dark-gray, in a chariot with iron wheels and a bright silver pole. The
+hero himself is a dark, melancholy man, the comeliest of the men of
+Erin, in a crimson tunic, with gold-hilted sword, a blood-red spear,
+and over his shoulders a crimson shield rimmed with silver and gold.
+Meave, on hearing the description, chants the hero as:
+
+      “An ocean in fury, a whale that rageth, a fragment of flame and
+          fire;
+      A bear majestic, a grandly moving billow,
+      A beast in maddening ire:
+      In the crash of glorious battle through the hostile foe he leaps,
+      His shout the fury of doom;
+      A terrible bear, he is death to the herd of cattle,
+      Feat upon feat, head upon head he heaps:
+      Laud ye the hearty one, he who is victor fully.”
+
+Bricriu lost his life as a sequel of the great raid for the Dun Bull
+of Cooley. This was undertaken by Queen Meave as the result of the
+“bolster conversation,” the curtain quarrel, between her and Ailill as
+to which of the two, husband or wife, had the more treasure. To settle
+the dispute, they compared their respective treasures, beginning with
+their wooden and iron vessels, going on with their rings and bracelets
+and brooches and fine clothes, and ending with their flocks of sheep,
+and herds of swine, horses, and cattle. The tally was even for both
+sides until they came to the cattle, when it appeared that Ailill had
+a huge, white-horned bull with which there was nothing of Meave’s to
+compare. The chagrined queen learned from a herald that in Cooley there
+was a dun or brown bull which, it was asserted, was even larger and
+more formidable.
+
+Meave announces that by fair means or foul the dun bull shall be hers,
+and she raises her hosts. A great war ensues, in which Cuchulain
+distinguishes himself above all others. All the heroes gather to the
+fight, and a special canto is devoted to the fate of a very old man,
+Iliach, a chief of Ulster, who resolves to attack the foe and avenge
+Ulster’s honor on them. “Whether, then, I fall or come out of it, is
+all one,” he said. The saga tells how his withered and wasted old
+horses, which fed on the shore by his little fort, were harnessed to
+the ancient chariot, which had long lost its cushions. Into it he got,
+mother-naked, with his sword and his pair of blunt, rusty spears, and
+great throwing-stones heaped at his feet; and thus he attacked the
+hosts of Meave and fought till his death. In the Cuchulain sagas the
+heroes frequently fight with stones; and the practice obtained until
+much later days, for in Olaf’s death-battle with the ships of Hakon
+his men were cleared from the decks of the Long Serpent by dexterously
+hurled stones as well as by spears.
+
+Partly by cunning, Meave gets the dun bull upon which she had set her
+heart. Then comes in a thoroughly Erse touch. It appears that the two
+bulls have lived many lives in different forms, and always in hostility
+to each other, since the days when their souls were the souls of two
+swineherds, who quarrelled and fought to the death. Now the two great
+bulls renew their ancient fight. Bricriu is forced out to witness it,
+and is trampled to death by the beasts. At last the white-homed bull is
+slain, and the dun, raging and destroying, goes back to his home, where
+he too dies. And this, says the saga, in ending, is the tale of the Dun
+Bull of Cooley and the Driving of the Cattle-Herd by Meave and Ailill,
+and their war with Ulster.
+
+The Erse tales have suffered from many causes. Taken as a mass, they
+did not develop as the sagas and the epics of certain other nations
+developed; but they possess extraordinary variety and beauty, and in
+their mysticism, their devotion to and appreciation of natural beauty,
+their exaltation of the glorious courage of men and of the charm and
+devotion of women, in all the touches that tell of a long-vanished
+life, they possess a curious attraction of their own. They deserve the
+research which can be given only by the lifelong effort of trained
+scholars; they should be studied for their poetry, as countless
+scholars have studied those early literatures; moreover, they should be
+studied as Victor Bérard has studied the “Odyssey,” for reasons apart
+from their poetical worth; and finally they deserve to be translated
+and adapted so as to become a familiar household part of that
+literature which all the English-speaking peoples possess in common.
+
+
+
+
+AN ART EXHIBITION
+
+
+
+
+AN ART EXHIBITION
+
+
+The recent “International Exhibition of Modern Art” in New York was
+really noteworthy. Messrs. Davies, Kuhn, Gregg, and their fellow
+members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors did a
+work of very real value in securing such an exhibition of the works of
+both foreign and native painters and sculptors. Primarily their purpose
+was to give the public a chance to see what has recently been going on
+abroad. No similar collection of the works of European “moderns” has
+ever been exhibited in this country. The exhibitors were quite right
+as to the need of showing to our people in this manner the art forces
+which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which can not be
+ignored.
+
+This does not mean that I in the least accept the view that these men
+take of the European extremists whose pictures were here exhibited. It
+is true, as the champions of these extremists say, that there can be
+no life without change, no development without change, and that to be
+afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It
+is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and
+retrogression instead of development. Probably we err in treating most
+of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent
+in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly
+lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid.
+There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a
+faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will
+buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent
+from every standpoint.
+
+In some ways it is the work of the American painters and sculptors
+which is of most interest in this collection, and a glance at this
+work must convince any one of the real good that is coming out of the
+new movements, fantastic though many of the developments of these new
+movements are. There was one note entirely absent from the exhibition,
+and that was the note of the commonplace. There was not a touch of
+simpering, self-satisfied conventionality anywhere in the exhibition.
+Any sculptor or painter who had in him something to express and the
+power of expressing it found the field open to him. He did not have
+to be afraid because his work was not along ordinary lines. There was
+no stunting or dwarfing, no requirement that a man whose gift lay in
+new directions should measure up or down to stereotyped and fossilized
+standards.
+
+For all of this there can be only hearty praise. But this does not
+in the least mean that the extremists whose paintings and pictures
+were represented are entitled to any praise, save, perhaps, that they
+have helped to break fetters. Probably in any reform movement, any
+progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding
+the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary
+to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized
+dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact
+that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any
+forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe
+was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists
+and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists. I am not entirely certain
+which of the two latter terms should be used in connection with some
+of the various pictures and representations of plastic art--and,
+frankly, it is not of the least consequence. The Cubists are entitled
+to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored
+puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason
+for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less
+fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most
+formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call
+themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights
+of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so
+desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as
+fatuous as another. Take the picture which for some reason is called
+“A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good
+Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory,
+is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some
+inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of,
+say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the
+facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the
+“Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” From the standpoint of terminology each
+name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining
+after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of
+sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of
+the picture.
+
+As for many of the human figures in the pictures of the Futurists,
+they show that the school would be better entitled to the name of
+the “Past-ists.” I was interested to find that a man of scientific
+attainments who had likewise looked at the pictures had been struck,
+as I was, by their resemblance to the later work of the palæolithic
+artists of the French and Spanish caves. There are interesting samples
+of the strivings for the representation of the human form among
+artists of many different countries and times, all in the same stage
+of palæolithic culture, to be found in a recent number of the “Revue
+d’Ethnographie.” The palæolithic artist was able to portray the bison,
+the mammoth, the reindeer, and the horse with spirit and success,
+while he still stumbled painfully in the effort to portray man. This
+stumbling effort in his case represented progress, and he was entitled
+to great credit for it. Forty thousand years later, when entered into
+artificially and deliberately, it represents only a smirking pose of
+retrogression, and is not praiseworthy. So with much of the sculpture.
+A family group of precisely the merit that inheres in a structure made
+of the wooden blocks in a nursery is not entitled to be reproduced in
+marble. Admirers speak of the kneeling female figure by Lehmbruck--I
+use “female” advisedly, for although obviously mammalian it is not
+especially human--as “full of lyric grace,” as “tremendously sincere,”
+and “of a jewel-like preciousness.” I am not competent to say whether
+these words themselves represent sincerity or merely a conventional
+jargon; it is just as easy to be conventional about the fantastic as
+about the commonplace. In any event one might as well speak of the
+“lyric grace” of a praying mantis, which adopts much the same attitude;
+and why a deformed pelvis should be called “sincere,” or a tibia of
+giraffe-like length “precious,” seems to a reasonably sane view of the
+pictures of Matisse a question of pathological rather than artistic
+significance. This figure and the absurd portrait head of some young
+lady have the merit that inheres in extravagant caricature. It is a
+merit, but it is not a high merit. It entitles these pieces to stand in
+sculpture where nonsense rhymes stand in literature and the sketches of
+Aubrey Beardsley in pictorial art. These modern sculptured caricatures
+in no way approach the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, probably
+because the modern artists are too self-conscious and make themselves
+ridiculous by pretentiousness. The makers of the gargoyles knew very
+well that the gargoyles did not represent what was most important in
+the Gothic cathedrals. They stood for just a little point of grotesque
+reaction against, and relief from, the tremendous elemental vastness
+and grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, sinister and comic,
+grim and yet futile, and they fitted admirably into the framework of
+the theology that found its expression in the towering and wonderful
+piles which they ornamented.
+
+Very little of the work of the extremists among the European “moderns”
+seems to be good in and for itself; nevertheless it has certainly
+helped any number of American artists to do work that is original
+and serious; and this not only in painting but in sculpture. I wish
+the exhibition had contained some of the work of the late Marcius
+Symonds; very few people knew or cared for it while he lived; but
+not since Turner has there been another man on whose canvas glowed
+so much of that unearthly “light that never was on land or sea.” But
+the exhibition contained so much of extraordinary merit that it is
+ungrateful even to mention an omission. To name the pictures one would
+like to possess--and the bronzes and tanagras and plasters--would
+mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. One of the most
+striking pictures was the “Terminal Yards”--the seeing eye was there,
+and the cunning hand. I should like to mention all the pictures of
+the president of the association, Arthur B. Davies. As first-class
+decorative work of an entirely new type, the very unexpected pictures
+of Sheriff Bob Chandler have a merit all their own. The “Arizona
+Desert,” the “Canadian Night,” the group of girls on the roof of a New
+York tenement-house, the studies in the Bronx Zoo, the “Heracles,”
+the studies for the Utah monument, the little group called “Gossip,”
+which has something of the quality of the famous fifteenth idyl of
+Theocritus, the “Pelf,” with its grim suggestiveness--these and a
+hundred others are worthy of study, each of them; I am naming at random
+those which at the moment I happen to recall. I am not speaking of
+the acknowledged masters, of Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet; nor
+of John’s children; nor of Cézanne’s old woman with a rosary; nor of
+Redon’s marvellous color-pieces--a worthy critic should speak of these.
+All I am trying to do is to point out why a layman is grateful to those
+who arranged this exhibition.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
+predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
+were not changed.
+
+Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
+marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
+unbalanced.
+
+The illustration near the front of the book is the publisher’s logo.
+
+Page 219: “understanded” was printed that way.
+
+Page 287: “knight errants” was printed that way.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75294 ***