Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

what is altogether exceptional may not tend to become general. Our political campaigns, in which innumerable speakers proclaim the misdeeds and dishonesties of their opponents, and foretell ruin and disaster if they themselves are not kept or put in office, disturb mental composure and weaken the power of seeing things as they are. And our reform agitators, who are necessarily special pleaders, exaggerate the evil, give excessive prominence to special forms of vice, and though they in the main do good work, they also help to warp the mind of the people and to inspire an unfounded alarm. The preachers, too, as interest in religious doctrines diminishes, are thrown more exclusively upon questions of morality, and especially upon the subject of public morals; and as we soon tire of hearing that all is well, for the reason probably that the evil men do is more interesting than their good deeds, it naturally comes to pass that the pulpit lays too great stress upon our shortcomings and sees danger where none exists. Then the paramount influence of woman gives to our life and style an exclamatory and rhetorical turn. Our private grievances seem to be national wrongs, and what disturbs our domestic peace threatens the life of the republic. Add to this the flow and ebb of commercial and financial elation and depression, now carrying us on the swelling waves of wild speculation, and now leaving us stranded upon the barren beach, and it will hardly be matter for surprise that we should seem to be as ready to fear evil as to hope for good. The commercial habit possibly breeds cowardice; for money, when we own it, makes us timid, and when we owe it, makes us slaves. Something of the miser's servile and fearful temper seems to infect all who live and labor for the idol he adores. And yet we may readily agree with Dr. Johnson that men are seldom so innocently employed as when they are making money; for making money is doing honest work, and work is the law of growth and progress, the begetter and the safeguard of virtue, the friend of innocence, the well-spring of contentment, and the giver of strength without which we are miserable. The fact that we are a nation of workers is reassuring.

It would of course be willful blindness to maintain that our country and its institutions are beyond the reach of harm, or even

to affirm that there are no causes now at work by which they are threatened; but whatever our opinions on this subject may be, whatever our confidence or our misgivings, we must all recognize that the character of a great people cannot be made worthier by a discipline of fear, which is not the best even for a child.

The social and political life of a people constantly growing in knowledge, wealth, and power, is itself constantly changing; but to change need not be to change for the worse. The civilization of China is not superior to ours because it is more permanent and unalterable. Where there is question of men and men's affairs, not to change is not to live; and it is inconceivable that social and political conditions which corresponded well enough with the needs of two or three million farmers a hundred years ago, should be all that is required by the more highly organized and complex society of a great, populous, and wealthy republic, brought face to face with issues and problems unthought of before. Consistency is least difficult to those who act from habit and motives of expediency rather than from the promptings of reason and conscience; and a free and enlightened people will be more concerned to bring their principles and laws into conformity with truth and justice than with what they or their fathers may have decreed.

The notion that there is peril because certain customs and constitutionalities which our ancestors approved of have ceased to commend themselves to our judgment, is primitive and provincial. Not only our own history but that of all the civilized nations has been a history of developments, here and there interrupted or arrested, and consequently a history of alterations.

Popular government, in making the will of the majority the ruling power, not only supposes a certain mutability in society and politics, but makes such provisions for change as to render resort to violent and revolutionary methods inexcusable and criminal. Then our national right and favorite pastime of heaping abuse upon all who exercise authority over us, has a soothing effect, and prevents more dangerous explosions. Does the master not feel better for having soundly scolded his servant? The question we have to consider is not whether we are changing, but whether the changes which are taking place threaten our national

and social life. We are safe in affirming as a general truth that barbarous peoples perish by violence from without, civilized nations decay from within. The most timid could hardly imagine that we shall be overwhelmed by foreign foes, unless the source of the national life first be tainted and corruption waste our strength. It is equally plain that many things which are brought forward as symptomatic of declining moral tone and vitality can hardly deserve serious consideration. The little knot of anarchists in New York and Chicago have really nothing to do with us. They are the birth of social and political conditions other than ours, and the spirit by which they are governed is as foreign to our thought and life as a ward caucus would be to the method of government in the kingdom of Dahomey. The only anarchists who properly belong to us are the lynchers and vigilantes, and they ply their trade in the interest of law and order. The fear of immigration, which the bomb-throwers have intensified, is foolish. Known criminals,

idiots, and paupers are excluded, and that suffices. For the rest, the peasant millions who come hither bring to us the best and purest blood of Europe and of the world; and as the great nations of Christendom are of mixed descent, there is no reason for thinking that the intermingling of different noble races on this continent will lead to degeneracy. Rather is it to be believed that a higher type of manhood will be the result. Let, then, the disinherited of the earth still seek these shores, and if their children prove wiser and stronger than ours, let them inherit the land. Here is a fair field and wide; here are opportunity and invitation to every man to do the best he can.

Of Mormonism, too, as a national danger, much that is superficial and idle is spoken and written. The Mormons are sober, industrious, and thrifty, and their acceptance of polygamy is our only grievance against them. But polygamy, beyond all question, we need not fear at all. Even among the Mormons it exists in comparatively few instances. It is a barbarous institution, and is found only where women are held in the bondage of ignorance and servitude. No man who has regard for his peace or comfort would think of having two wives in a country in which women have become so intelligent and independent that the only

sure way of living happily with even one is to be humble and obedient. Sensuality with us, we may be reasonably certain, will not take the form of polygamy. The problem which will present itself for solution is not whether a man shall have one or several wives, but whether he shall have one or none at all; and whatever the future of Mormonism may be, here in the United States it must cease to be polygamous.

With clamorous and persistent emphasis it is urged from many sides that drunkenness threatens the ruin of our institutions. It not unfrequently happens that men are most vociferous in denouncing abuses when the evil has begun to disappear, just as soldiers often make the greatest show of courage when the enemy have turned their backs. Whether or not Gladstone's dictum that alcohol is a greater scourge than war, pestilence, and famine combined, be mere rhetoric, it cannot be shown that any nation or people has been destroyed by intoxicating drink. The English have been and are a nation of drinkers, and they are the predominant race of the world. I have no knowledge of a population of total abstainers who have ever enjoyed civil and political liberty; and though I will not say, with an English prelate, that it is better to be free than to be sober, yet I will say that the methods of dealing with sin in general are the proper methods for counteracting the evil of drunkenness, and that it is absurd to attempt to persuade the American people that the permanence of their institutions depends on their becoming a nation of total abstainers. It is a law of human nature that excessive pressure brought to bear on any special form of moral evil results in other evils; and now, when various influences are diminishing intemperance in America, there seems to be no sufficient reason for calling upon the state to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquor. The less we bring the government into our private personal and domestic affairs, the freer and the happier shall we be.

But whatever opinions we may hold as to the best means of promoting sobriety, there is no question that the evil of intemperance in this country was much greater in the early part of the century than at present; and the wave continues to subside. Alison the historian has shown that drunkenness is essentially

the vice of savages and barbarians; and it is easy to observe in a cultivated people that those who are least civilized suffer most injury from indulgence in drink. Education, in opening up new sources of pleasure and lending diversity to the interests which rob life of some of its wearying monotony, helps to liberate us from the sway of appetite, and thus makes the attraction of animal indulgence less irresistible. Then the motives to labor, which are greater here than elsewhere, are, at the same time, reasons for sobriety. In no other society are the weak pushed so pitilessly to the wall, do the strong so uniformly succeed; and drink, unless it be pure, which it rarely is, and unless it be used with moderation, which is not to be hoped for, weakens the body, dulls the mind, and deadens the moral sense. Hence, to drink is to be weak, is to have in the race for life an unsteady step, a clouded intellect, and an infirm purpose; and in the growing light of this truth men see more and more plainly that indulgence of this kind is not only wrong but foolish. Hence the voice of public opinion, through whatever organ it utters itself, becomes more and more emphatic in denouncing intemperance. The railway president knows that a glass of whisky may wreck a train, the ship-owner that it may sink a vessel, the bank director that it may rob his vault, the clergyman perceives that the saloon hurts the church, the statesman that it leads to lawbreaking, and the physician that it undermines health; and even those who, feeling most keenly the weight and weariness of modern life, would sacrifice almost anything to bring back the careless lightheartedness of the early pagan Greeks, are driven to confess that Bacchus cannot be a helpful god for us.

But does not the organization of labor forbode evil? In all ages and countries he who earns his bread in the sweat of his brow earns it hardly. Work is good; but to be forced to work at a master's bidding, to be forced to work day by day, or lack shelter and nourishment for one's self and wife and child, this is evil; and the effort and tendency of Christian civilization and popular government, in theory, at least, is to lighten the burden and sweeten the bitter bread of those who toil with their hands. Bossuet declared that the rich are received into the church only on

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »