Chapter V: Part 5

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.