The Soul of America 9781512818437

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Contents
The Birth of the American Soul
The Baptism of the Soul
The Confirmation of the Soul
America Comes of Age
The Qualities of the American Soul
Retrospect and Prospect
Index

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Tike Soul 4 Arnum H ANTIMI UO$SÜH

6uin H

Copyright

19)2

University of Pennsylvania

Press

Printed in the United States of America

To the many sons who during the of the American the College Office

of Pennsylvania last great test soul came into to say good-bye

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WISH to acknowledge here the invaluable help in reading the proofs rendered me by my friend and colleague, Dr. Clarence G. Child, and by the members of my family. Acknowledgment is due also to the courtesy of Mr. Oliver Sayler and Brentano's for permission to quote from Revolt iri the Arts; of T h e Century Co. for permission to reprint a portion of my essay What's Right with the Colleges, formerly appearing in The Century Magazine; of Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to reprint a passage from Colonel Carter of Cartersville and a portion of my essay on College and Business Efficiency, formerly appearing in Scribner's Magazine; of Mr. Eugene O'Neill for permission to publish a letter to the present writer; of Mr. Philip Barry and Samuel French, Inc., for permission to quote certain lines from Tomorrow and Tomorrow; of Harper and Brothers for permission to use an extract from Mark Twain's Roughing It; of the Macmillan Company to use a passage from James Lane Allen's The Mettle of the Pasture; of Mr. Finley P. Dunne for the right to quote a passage from Mr. Dooley in Peace and War. A. H. Q.

FOREWORD IS an interpretation of America from the point of view of a disillusioned optimist. From the days of childhood, when I dramatized the triumphs of Washington with the aid of a reluctant younger brother who objected to being Lord Cornwallis, the leaders of American thought and action have been real to me. As my study of her social and political institutions, and of her creative art, has deepened, it has seemed to me that it was time that a survey should be made of the progress of the American spirit, from perhaps a new point of view. I have tried, in a brief compass, to paint a constructive picture of those qualities of the American soul which have become integral and permanent and, by their light, to interpret the present condition of the United States. Amid the confusion and pessimism of today, the pendulum is beginning to swing back from the explanation of all things from the point of view of economics, for we found in our extremity that our economists were helpless in the hands of forces too profound for them to control or even to explain. In tracing the racial elements that have contributed to the American soul today, in showing how we grew from an isolated group of States into a permanent Union, how we assumed our place among the nations, and in endeavoring to show how literature, science, and education have played their parts in the development of spiritual values, I have tried to cut through the crust of conventional opinions and clichés already outworn, to discover the more profound causes of our conduct. I believe that under our apparent love of isolation has swept a steady current of liberal thinking which will lead us finally to the new internationalism vii THIS

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that is the only hope of the world. I believe, too, that there is a real and fundamental difference between our two great political parties, and that it can be explained in terms of the racial traits and social thinking of their members rather than upon superficial economic distinctions. After this preliminary interpretation of our past, I have tried to analyze those seven qualities of the American soul which are most characteristic today. Anyone can name others; when I began to choose them, I had a list of twentythree! Finally I have indulged in a few words of cheer. For if we can only realize that the stupid and the timid who would prevent America from assuming her great responsibilities have had their prototypes in every crisis in the country's history, we shall understand that to keep America the land she has always been—neither tory nor radical, but the eternal liberal among the nations—needs only courage and vision. A. H. Q. University of Pennsylvania February 193 2.

CONTENTS

I

II

T H E B I R T H OF T H E A M E R I C A N SOUL The Gifts of the Races

3

T H E BAPTISM OF T H E SOUL Independence—and After

19

III

T H E C O N F I R M A T I O N OF T H E SOUL The Struggle for Union

58

IV

A M E R I C A COMES OF A G E The Nation and the World

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T H E Q U A L I T I E S OF T H E SOUL Democracy Efficiency Liberality Provincialism Individuality Humor Vision

VI

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AMERICAN

153

R E T R O S P E C T AND PROSPECT

248

INDEX

257

What is the soul of a nation? It must be born, like all else that is human, from s u f f e r i n g ; the lives of many men, through long years of history, must give it fragrance. It must draw its strength from a great faith in something, Divine or human. At some time in its history, the nation must have read its fate in that invisible writing which becomes legible only in the fierce light of a great peril. Without beauty there can be no soul for a nation. And while it may draw its beauty from all lands and races, some quality—and that the most precious—must be its own. And last, there must be in a nation's soul a forecast of imcreative mortality. A vision, such as that which kiyidled the spirit that built the pyramids of Egypt, the Parthenon of Athens, the Cathedral of Chartres, must be part of the soul of a nation that is to live, even after its earthly power is gone. But for the merchant fleets of Phoenicia, there is an oblivion so deep that even the alphabet they carried past the pillars of Hercules cannot frame words to record it.

THE BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN SOUL The Gifts of the Races

A M E R I C A N character was born of the spiritual, political, and economic unrest of the seventeenth century. Never before has a country been settled by a people so similar in some respects, so diverse in others. In the achievement of easy generalizations, the settlement of the colonies has been neatly apportioned between the Puritan and the Cavalier. But the first important elements in the settlements of Virginia and Maryland, while alike in their social and political points of view, were quite different in their attitude toward toleration; just as the Puritans and the Pilgrims, while sharing the intolerance of religious zealots and the thrift of the pioneer, were quite different in their social outlook. T h e country gentlemen who settled Massachusetts Bay and the country gentlemen who soon controlled Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina had much in common in their distrust of the populace. And yet next door to the growing oligarchy of Massachusetts, Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams built Connecticut and Rhode Island upon the basis of democracy. In the Middle States there were also cross currents that make generalizations misleading. Economically and socially the Quaker element in Pennsylvania and the Dutch in New York were akin. But the toleration of the Quakers was a more active principle than the passive liberality of the Dutch, just as it was more successful than the Catholic toleration in Maryland, soon to be submerged by the rule of the Established Church of England. When, however, s

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it came to the growth of art in the later Colonial period, the Quaker and the Dutch joined with the Puritan oligarchy and Baptist democracy of New England in bitter opposition to the theatre, which was welcomed by both the Episcopalian and the Catholic of the South. Nothing is more difficult to estimate properly than the different racial elements that have gone into the making of the American soul. And yet nothing is more important. A perusal of the many volumes written upon immigration into the United States is illuminating mainly on account of the ability of the writers to evolve very differing theories from the same statistics, and from their rather superficial analysis of the great variations within the races themselves which have poured into this country since the early seventeenth century. In one thing, however, nearly all authorities agree, and that is the tendency of each new wave of immigration to look upon all those who came after them as "foreigners"! T h e only race which could take this attitude with perfect consistency was the Indian, and he is usually left out of consideration by both the economist and the sociologist. T h e first great wave of immigration was, of course, primarily English and Teutonic. As has already been indicated, it was varied in its qualities. But whatever may have been the differences, either social, economic, or spiritual, of the first settlers, they had certain general traits which had become, through centuries of development, characteristic of the English race. These qualities have deepened in some ways through the three centuries of our existence, and in other respects have been modified. Perhaps the most striking quality of the English race is its solidarity. By the sixteenth century its various elements—British, Anglian, Saxon, Danish, and N o r m a n had become one people. But it must be remembered that, from the fifth century, the Teutonic conquerors of Britain had in them some of the very qualities which made the

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conquest of the continent of America possible. It took over a century for them to conquer Celtic Britain, but, at the end, the Celts had either retired to Wales, Scotland, or Ireland, or had become assimilated with the T e u tonic invaders. It mattered little whether the English conquered or were conquered. T h e Danes ruled for a time; then they became one element of the population. T h e Normans ruled much longer, and added certain vital qualities to the race, but at last their language was forgotten, their provinces in France were lost to them, and they became Englishmen. Centuries of insularity deepened this race consciousness, and when the English came to America they ran true to form. W h i l e the Spaniards became a small aristocracy ruling over large numbers of subject peoples, and the French adventurers remained a comparatively small minority among a people whom they theoretically ruled, the English settlers occupied their lands alone. Since the Indian could not be assimilated, he had to move on. T h e idea of remaining a ruling class among a hostile population, which has built up the British Empire, came later in English history, but there was a marked difference between the settlers of America and the English conquerors of India and of Egypt. T h e latter were finding an outlet for trade and empire. T h e former, whether Puritan or Pilgrim or Cavalier or bond servant, did not look back upon England as a place to return to w h e n their fortunes had been made. T h e y came to stay. Most of them had left England because of dissatisfaction with the r u l i n g class or the existing government. Instead of highly organized civilizations, which the Spaniards found in Peru or Mexico, the English settlers met a thinly scattered race which had, it is true, quite definite ideas about the ownership of its hunting grounds, but which never was able to impress its right to ownership upon the invaders. It was not mere ruthlessness which made the colonist disregard the rights of the Indian. By the English mind, which loved order and respected the holder of

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property above all other beings, the point of view of a tribe of "salvages," moving from place to place in search of game and still continuing to claim large unused areas for their own, could not be understood. And usually, to an Englishman or, it may be added, to an American, what he cannot understand is absurd. T h e Englishman's love for "a bit o' land" of his own accounts for the conquest of the continent. In the colonial days it kept the plantation, the farm, or the small town the unit of social or economic life. In 1790 only three per cent of the population lived in cities, while in 1930, fiftysix per cent was urban. This preference of the English settler for the country preserved and deepened his desire for independence. T h e farmer was a unit. In the early days he depended on no man's favor and he had the natural processes of nature for his ally. This isolation made him self-reliant, often an individualist, and, in the face of Indian hostility, it made courage inevitable. If an Englishman's house is his castle, the farm of an English settler was his little empire. Naturally, the immigrants from England brought with them their own institutions. Their innate respect for law, modified by an equally innate instinct to rebel against its administration if it becomes intolerable, was planted solidly in the colonies. There was not much of the clan feeling in their institutions; it was rather that of a community; but the feudal instinct of the clan developed later in the South, owing to inevitable conditions. T h e English ability to distinguish sharply between the form of a government and those who administer it also shows early in our history. While the Latin or the Slavic races, when they are dissatisfied, go to the root of the matter and have a complete change, the English mind prefers to preserve the institution with which he is familiar, and change the personnel. For to him the ruler or administrator is only incidental. This makes it possible for him to be potentially, at least, with the established order.

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It took but a short time for the clerical aristocracy which Increase and Cotton Mather represented, and which ruled New England thought for a century, to become established. In the Middle States, where the English elements were less homogeneous and where the other racial strains came early, there was more real democracy. But in the South, the organization of life upon a feudal basis was even more rapid than in New England, for both the exiled Cavaliers and the exiled Cromwellians had the same instinct to rule. This instinct for government not only of oneself but of one's neighbors arises from a quality which, while not their exclusive property, is deeply ingrained in the English people—that of self-respect. As Emerson said years later, " I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes." It took firmness not only to win a continent but also to hold it against the French, the Indians, the climate and, finally, against the power of the English crown. Courage, order, self-respect, and respect for law, an instinct for rule, a sense of racial integrity, these were the qualities which the English immigration into a wilderness planted in the American soul. Second only in significance was the Celtic influx. Quite a large number of Irish either came or were sent over during the depopulation of Ulster by Cromwell in the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century this element increased rapidly. According to the Boston News Letter, fifty-three ships landed colonists from Ireland between 1 7 1 4 and 1720. These ships came mostly from the North of Ireland, but some were from Dublin and Cork, and the immigrants came because of the definite policy of suppressing economic rivalry with the industries of England and crushing Presbyterian and Catholic opposition to the Established Church. Even larger was the Irish immigration into Pennsylvania, large bodies of Irish Quakers, Presbyterians, and Catholics seeking the most

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America

liberal of commonwealths. From December 1728 to December 1729, according to Thomas F. Gordon's History of Pennsylvania,l among the immigrants coming into Philadelphia were 1 1 5 5 Irish, 267 English and Welsh, 43 Scotch, and 243 German Palatines, while 4500 Irish, both passengers and servants, came by way of Newcastle, Delaware. Thomas H. Maginniss in his Irish Contribution to America's Independence gives interesting lists of names of refugees, some of whom founded in 1 7 2 1 the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, a benevolent society which still exists, and in which Irishmen from the North and South seemed able to live in amity. Among other significant names on the lists of this society we find that of Robert Meade of Limerick, from whom came the leader of the Union forces at Gettysburg. That there was a martial flavor about this immigration is perhaps not surprising. T h e First City Troop of Philadelphia, organized November 1774, had among its twenty-eight founders ten natives of Ireland. In the other colonies, especially in New York and Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, the records are studded with Irish names and, as is well known, a great wave of migration, largely though not exclusively from Ulster, swept down the Shenandoah Valley and settled in the South. These settlers, whatever their differences were in other respects, were alike in their memories of English oppression, and in the darkest days of the Revolution they filled the gaps in Washington's army and flung back Howe's outposts at Trenton. Quite a large proportion of the immigration from the North of Ireland had come to that country three or four generations before, from Scotland, but the direct colonization from Scotland was not so large. T h e Welsh Quakers, due to religious persecution, came over in considerable numbers, especially to Pennsylvania, shortly after the first settlement of the colony. Although these settlers were early assimilated w.ith the English, the whole district i Pp. 207-8.

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around Philadelphia still reflects in its township and other place names, like Merion, Haverford, Radnor and Gwynedd, the extent of the Welsh settlement. John Morgan, the first Surgeon General of the United States Army, General John Cadwalader, who shot Conway, and many others were Welsh in descent. T h e Celtic influx became even larger in the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars the economic hardships drove thousands of Irish as well as Scotch and English from their homes. T h e figures as given in McMaster's History .of the People of the United States 2 show that they came from all parts of the British Isles and that, as he puts it, "the best came first." They were farmers and mechanics, with a large element of the younger sons of the gentry or the yeomen, and of men who had been engaged in business until the economic barrier of England's laws sent them out of the country. These immigrants were easily assimilated, and in a growing country often rose to positions of trust and profit. They are sharply to be differentiated from the unfortunate immigrants of the later forties, who came after the great potato famine of 1846 and were largely of the peasant class, and of whom over a million came in the years 1845 t o 1 8so. T h e Irish immigration has continued since then, varying with economic conditions, until the recent immigration laws have cut it down. Over 4,000,000 have come in since 1820. What contribution to the American soul has the Celtic element in the population made? In the first place, loyalty. Whether Irish, Scottish, or Welsh, the old clan organization is at the root of their attitude toward life. Driven from their own land by oppression beyond that which any other civilized race has suffered, they transferred to their adopted country a passionate devotion which even the Know Nothing movement of the fifties or the K u K l u x Klan of the twentieth century could not chill. Also from the clan came the devotion to a leader. T o Jefferson, to 2 Vol. I V , 389-392.

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Jackson, to Douglas, to Tilden, to Bryan, to Smith they were devoted. But when the choice came in 1884 between Cleveland and Blaine many switched to the latter, and in 1904 thousands voted for Roosevelt because Judge Parker did not have the same challenging appeal. T h i s quality makes them leaders in state and city. Where the Teutonic instinct of race superiority chills the foreign-born, the Celt knows how to weld them together. As J. R. Commons well says in his Races and Immigrants in America, " T h e Irishman has above all races the mixture of ingenuity, firmness, human sympathy, comradeship and daring that makes him the amalgamator of races." In the solution of the grave problem of the control of races that do not yet understand America, it has often been the Irish nature, embodied in parish priest, labor union leader, or even ward boss, w h o has saved a community from outbreaks of violence. For, put in a position of authority, he becomes a bulwark of order, just as when in Ireland he was placed in an intolerable position, he struck against the government. I wonder if something very primitive in our human development is at the root of this amalgamating power. If his racial tradition has any value, the Celt is the oldest of the Indo-European races, and perhaps this elder brother of the other races knows best how to manage them. T h e quality of imagination is, of course, the property of no race, and the majority of the poets, essayists, and novelists of the period before the Civil W a r were English and therefore Teutonic in their ancestry. But in Irving and Poe the Celtic strain is clear, and after the Civil W a r the Celtic influence becomes more apparent. Howells and James, who led the realistic movement in fiction, were of Welsh and Irish descent; Augustin Daly, James A. H e m e , Augustus Thomas, the pioneers in the realistic drama, were from Celtic stock; and today Eugene O'Neill, the greatest of our symbolic playwrights, Philip Barry, our leading social satirist, and George Kelly, the most pro-

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found exponent of our domestic drama, are Celtic in their whole attitude toward life. Incidentally, they are also most distinctly American. T h e Celt is also easily amalgamated. It would not be correct to say that the descendants of the earlier waves of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh have merged with the American race, since as a matter of fact they are an integral part of that race. T h e i r easy adaptability to circumstances has shown itself in various ways. An agricultural people in Ireland and Scotland because they had little opportunity to be anything else, they became city dwellers here with perfect ease. Deprived of political rights, at least in Ireland, they developed a political genius here that is at times uncanny. But wherever they go they become part of the life. T h e r e is hardly ever an Irish or a Scottish or a Welsh "quarter." In this they differ from all other waves of immigration except the first, the English, and the obvious reason lies in their common language and, to a great extent, common traditions. Nearly as large numerically but not so readily assimilated was the second Teutonic immigration, that from Germany. It began early in the eighteenth century, largely from the German Palatinate, on both banks of the Rhine, and, on account of William Penn's welcome to all men and creeds, most of the settlers came to Pennsylvania, although some went to South Carolina and to New York. Certain general characteristics were shared by the Germans with the British and Irish and Swiss immigrations. Lurid pictures have been painted concerning the destitution of thousands of these immigrants, and of the practice, continued into the nineteenth century, of European communities dumping their criminal classes upon our hospitable shores. A different picture is drawn by historians nearer to the time, like Thomas F. Gordon, 3 who records the varying attitude of the English settlers toward the German immigrants at different periods, due to the 3

History of Pennsylvania

(1829), pp. 207-8, 237, 329.

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differing character of the newcomers, and also to the political views of the government of the colony. T h e increasing power of the German elements and their support of the Assembly in its quarrels with the Proprietary party make generalizations untrustworthy. At least in the nineteenth century they seem to have served a useful purpose in building the railroads, settling the frontier, or filling up the gaps made in the Atlantic seaboard by the movement of earlier settlers westward. T h e best German element probably came after the political reaction subsequent to the revolutions of 1848. This consisted of liberals who found their conditions intolerable at home or had tasted so much liberty that they wanted more. A desire to avoid compulsory military service has also sent thousands to this country, and may have been at the root of their love of peace and dislike of war, which are not the characteristics of the Celtic immigration. T h e contribution of the Germans to the modern American soul is not as easy to analyze as that of the English, the Irish, or the Scotch. In the first place, the language barrier has resulted in the establishment of communities, such as that of the "Pennsylvania Dutch," which still retain their peculiar customs through generations and are, as one of their own race put it, "the hope and the despair of Pennsylvania." T h e Germans have also retained the defense mechanism so characteristic of all the Teutonic races, which has been rendered stronger by their language isolation. Their sense of solidarity has been strengthened by their devotion, at least in sentiment, to the "Fatherland," and, while this is paralleled, of course, by the Irishman's devotion to the "ould counthry" and the Scotchman's to the "auld countree," it is of a somewhat different nature. T h e German left his native land because of oppression by individuals whom he distinguished sharply from the land itself and its government, especially when later changes and Ger-

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man triumphs gave him pride in the Empire. T h e Celt left because of oppression from an alien government and, while his affection for his homeland deepened with her sufferings, there was no pride in the imperial progress of the government of Great Britain to divide his loyalty with that of his adopted country. Any attempt to gauge the loyalty of a racial strain, however, is likely to result in misleading statements. T h e r e can be little doubt, for example, that President Wilson was re-elected in 1 9 1 6 partly through the tremendous German vote in the West against the war, in the belief that he would keep the country neutral. It is quite as true that the same German vote struck in 1920 against the party that had carried on the war. It is equally certain, however, that the German element in Missouri saved the state for the Union in 1861 and that the German vote in Illinois, Missouri, and other Western states was the determining factor in carrying those states for Lincoln in the Republican convention of i860. T o anyone who knows the German on his own soil, generalizations are futile, for the Prussian is more distinct from the Bavarian or the Austrian than the Irishman of the North is from the Irishman of the South, or even than the Scotchman is from the Irishman. T h e aggressive, domineering tone of the Prussian has not to any large degree been transmitted to the American character, because the Prussian has not come in such large numbers. T h e love of the fine arts, especially of music, is probably the strongest contribution the German has made, and it comes from the South German rather than the North. T h e strong sense of family life is of more common German origin, but the friendly, easy-going atmosphere which the German calls "gemütlich" is found rather in Munich than in Berlin. T h e French influence presents even more complicated a problem. T h e earliest French immigration into America, which discovered the Mississippi and settled the West,

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rarely assimilated with the English-speaking colonists. T h e courage of La Salle and the crusading spirit of the missionaries have given inspiration to later American writers of history and romance. But the early French adventurers who came from New France on the North became associated, in the minds of the American pioneers, with their hated Indian allies. Yet the continuity of such towns as St. Louis, founded in 1764, or of St. Paul, which gradually grew from a trading post in 1690 until it received its present name in 1841, show that there must have been more French influence upon the tide of American settlers than is usually supposed. At St. Louis this French influence met the Creole immigration, which, dating from the very beginning of the eighteenth century, in what is now Mississippi and Louisiana, built up around New Orleans a French civilization of a different nature from that of the North or the Mississippi Valley. Here the barriers of race and religion were strengthened by a pride of ancestry which persisted through Spanish and American rule, and is apparent even today in New Orleans and St. Louis. If this French civilization was strong enough, as in the case of Louisiana, it resisted assimilation and retained its own traditions, which looked to Europe rather than to the United States. If the towns were small, the inhabitants frequently moved to the larger centers, as James Hall has shown in his Legends of the West. T h e r e must, however, by the very nature of things, have been some intermarriage and assimilation between the American and the Creole. T h e urbanity, the cosmopolitan spirit of the Creole must consequently have had its effect upon the pioneer. Education, especially for girls, being largely in the hands of the Ursuline sisters or other teaching orders, brought the daughters of both Catholics and Protestants under the influence of women of good breeding, and, since the language of instruction was French, the influence remained real, if difficult to measure with exactness.

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T h e next wave of French influence, since it came into direct contact with the English of the Eastern coast, has been more definitely studied. T h e Huguenot immigration began with individuals who joined the English or Dutch immigrants to New England or New Amsterdam, but it grew in volume after 1685, when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. T h e s e Huguenots spread all along the Eastern coast, especially in New York and South Carolina. T h e y were largely of the French middle class, industrious farmers, merchants, and artisans. Assimilation with the English colonists was more easily accomplished, for, like the latter, they had left France on account of differences with the government, and they did not, like the Creoles, look toward France as their continued cultural home. T h r i f t y and industrious, they generally prospered, and during the Revolution they took the Whig side, both on account of traditional dislike of England and because their commercial instincts keenly resented unjust taxation. T h e i r influence upon the American spirit must have been the intensifying of those qualities of independence, thrift, and industry, already a characteristic of the American colonist. T h e alliance of France and the United States during the Revolution had an effect which again, since the officers who charmed social gatherings at Newport and Philadelphia soon departed, was less permanent than the hero worship of Lafayette in this country. He became the model of gallantry and chivalry, of whom every American boy heard and read. A f t e r the French Revolution, and during the Napoleonic régime, political refugees came in large numbers, usually patrician and Catholic, though there was a Huguenot element also. Many eventually returned to France, but many stayed, like DuPont de Nemours. T h i s wave of emigration brought with it an artistic quality, for Reinagle's orchestra at the Chestnut Street T h e a t r e in Philadelphia was made up largely of French gentlemen who had no other employment. How

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widespread was the French influence on American manners may be indicated by the satire of native imitation of French foppery in James Nelson Barker's play, Tears and Smiles, in 1807, and how appreciative the American audiences of that day were of the French drama may be judged by the discriminating article on " T h e French Comic Opera" in the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine for November, 1827. Since the early nineteenth century, however, the direct French emigration to the United States has been small, compared to the Irish, the German, and the English. T h e principal contribution of French culture as a whole to the American character has probably consisted in an appreciation of good manners, of those graces which make life agreeable, and those arts which entertain. Logic, preeminently a property of the Latin race, and the insistence upon carrying a project to its conclusion, may have also been one of the contributions of the French elements to American civilization. These are the major gifts of the races to America. From the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the Swedes of New Jersey and Delaware, a commercial integrity and a certain stolidity may have affected American character. But such influences were local in the beginning, and the Swedish immigration to the Northwest comes at a much later period in our history. T h e English, the Irish, the Scotch, the German, the French, the Welsh, the Dutch, and the Swedes stand probably in this order so far as their influence upon the American soul is concerned. It is a composite of them all, and it is certain that, upon the whole, the American character at the time of the Civil War was more stable and enduring, more energetic and enterprising, more courageous and adventurous, more alive to new ideas and more generous in its judgments than if it had not been a mixture of the great races of Western Europe, but had, on the

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contrary, preserved exclusively the racial characteristics of its first settlers. Among the qualities which are most characteristic of the American soul today, democracy, individuality, and efficiency were developed by the very nature of pioneer life. Liberality was in the making, but from many aspects it was still to come. Our characteristic humor had many more examples even in print than is usually supposed. More intangible, but clearly to be discerned, is that quality of vision which was born of the necessity of large measures in dealing with a great continent. But of all the traits which the Colonial period developed, perhaps the most general was that of provincialism. Distance separated the colonists from the growing consciousness of empire in the mother country. Distance between the plantations in the South and between the towns in the North and the Middle States fostered the spirit of self-reliance which leads to self-centered vision and the habit of looking at things close around. Distance from the centers of art and culture developed an indifference to them which persists even today. It was only natural that the qualities the pioneer gained were those most essential to the struggle for existence. T h e qualities he lost were those least essential. Here again generalizations are to be distrusted. There was more going and coming in the Middle States and the South than in New England, at least in the seventeenth century. There was the difference between a society in which the planter, the lawyer, or the merchant ruled and that in which the minister was the determining factor. In short, notwithstanding the British foundations, it would seem that, after all, most of what made Colonial America is epitomized in that happy accident of distance from England. If we lost the beauty of tradition, and the constant opportunity to see things that were noble and hallowed by memory, we started afresh without the ac-

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cumulation of spiritual, mental, and moral inertia that made the eighteenth century, with all its keenness of wit, its brilliant social graces, such a waste place in the history of the progress of human happiness. Cruelty there was in America, especially in New England; but if there was a Cotton Mather to persecute witches, there was also a Robert Calef to protest against it, and the grip of privilege could be shaken off the shoulder of the pioneer at will. If he saw land being occupied by a growing aristocracy, there was always room to move. That one fact is the keynote of American civilization—that for nearly three centuries there was room to move. If we are to understand the soul of America, and we can understand it only through our history, we must watch its development through these later centuries. But the very circumstance of its early years made it possible for a race to grow up which had never had the door of opportunity shut in its face. And by the time there grew up those who would have shut that door, the key had been lost and the hinges were rusty. The door had stood ajar too long, and in a real sense the soul of America was born in the open air.

THE BAPTISM OF THE SOUL Independence—and After

of Colonial America is the great fact of independence. Recent historical research may minimize the relative importance of the Revolution in English history, may laugh at the Boston tea party and call in question with meticulous accuracy the legality of the early actions of Patrick Henry and the mental poise of Samuel Adams. But the calmer scrutiny which finds that not every British soldier was bloodthirsty and not every patriot was impeccable in his motives, only brings out in bolder relief the courage and farsightedness of the determined minority which fought the Revolution through. If the leading citizens of Massachusetts and of North Carolina preferred to leave things as they were, and the deadly inertia of the general public was hard to break, it was all the more credit to those who had a vision and risked "their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor" in the cause of independence. If we are to understand the soul of the patriot, we must turn not to the comparisons of economists but to the literature of the time. T h e trenchant satire of Benjamin Franklin or of Francis Hopkinson, the biting invective of Philip Freneau or Mercy Warren, the eloquent phrases of Thomas Paine, tell us what the Colonists were thinking and feeling. They show too how the growth of the Revolution was slow in the beginning, how even those who struck the first blows for freedom often faltered when absolute separation from Great Britain became the issue. T H E CLIMAX

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We can trace each forward step by a great document, or a scene charged with drama. When the members of the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September, 1774, they found ready for their perusal A Pretty Story, by one of their own number, Francis Hopkinson. Here they read and we can read, under the guise of allegory, the recital of the wrongs which the Colonies had suffered, especially "Jack," which meant Boston, until T h e s e harsh and unconstitutional proceedings irritated Jack and the other inhabitants of the N e w F a r m to such a degree that . . . Catera desunt

T h e threat was not so veiled, after all! T h e quality that makes A Pretty Story so readable is its urbanity. This was a flower of the eighteenth century. There is little of the pioneer in Francis Hopkinson, and to understand this new quality, which was never afterwards to leave our national consciousness, we have but to read the many letters which from 1760 down to his death in 1791 flowed from the pen of this typical American of the Middle States. With every reason for being a Tory—for he had been an officer of the Crown and his mother was a cousin of Lady North—he never wavered for an instant. T o feel the fires which were forging the steel of his character, one should read the letters he wrote to his brother-in-law and classmate at the old College of Philadelphia, Jacob Duché, still in the possession of the Hopkinson family. Duché had been the first chaplain of Congress, but his timid soul recanted in the dark days of 1777 and he fled to the British army. From that haven he wrote his notorious letter to Washington urging him to abandon the fight and "negotiate for your country at the head of your army." No history can equal in effect the sight of the letters as they lie together in the old brown volume—first, that of Duché, a copy of course; then a note from Hop-

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kinson to Washington, enclosing a stinging letter to Duché, which he asks Washington to forward. This letter is an outpouring of the spirit of a gentleman to a man who has saved everything but honor. One sentence will illustrate its tone: T h e whole force of the Reasoning contained in your Letter tends to this point; that Virtue and Honour require us to stand by Truth, as long as it can be done with Safety, but that her Cause may be abandoned on the Approach of Danger; or, in other Words, that the Justice of the American Cause ought to be squared by the Success of her Arms. . . .

Then comes Washington's acknowledgement and later, in 1778, his letter from Valley Forge, returning the letter of Hopkinson to Duché, as he had been unable to deliver it. That is the reason why they lie, all four together, the record of a tragedy for Duché, but more important to us, the explanation of the Revolution. For Hopkinson is significant, not only in his deeds, but as a symbol of a force that has not been fully pictured in the growth of American character. He was a lawyer, a poet, an essayist, a musician, a painter. He had traveled in England as a boy and he knew the hopelessness of making the English people in 1776 understand the Colonies. He is only one of hundreds who were truly the new order of Americans; no longer abashed by the glory of the British Empire, unawed by the spectacle of a ministry too stupid for belief, and transferring to a new abstraction, the United States, that sense of royalty which they had formerly visualized in a king. Those who, like Hopkinson and Franklin, had visited England were most urbane in their expression. While Samuel Adams and James Otis were storming in Boston, and Mercy Warren in her dramas, The Adulateur and The Group, was pillorying the plural officeholders of Massachusetts, Hopkinson was laughing at the British manufacturer who went into his parlor, saw a map of

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England four feet square, and a map of North and South America, two feet square, and concluded that the Colonies were not worthy of his attention! In these Letters Written by a Foreigner o?i the Character of the English Nation, Hopkinson helped to undermine that unreasoning respect for all England's institutions, just as his Battle of the Kegs later helped to do away with that awe of the British army which was one of its greatest assets at the beginning of the Revolution. How were the Colonials to resist the trained veterans whose regimental standards recorded victories won before the Colonists were born? But after the pen of Hopkinson had drawn the ridiculous picture of the grenadiers, solemnly shooting at the kegs of powder floating down the Delaware toward the British shipping and had praised them to the skies for their ineptitude, it was another story. Men do not fear that at which they laugh. It is not the purpose of this narrative to record the history of the Revolution, except in so far as it has left its traces upon the American character. One quality that we like to think is ours to a special degree—that is, common sense—was itself the title of the pamphlet which next after A Pretty Story made its appeal to the public mind. When Thomas Paine issued his Common Sense on January 9, 1776, it was the first public document openly to declare that independence was the inevitable result of the struggle. Up to that time the efforts to restore the good feeling between the two peoples were strong and almost universal. Even after Lexington and Concord had been fought, the Continental Congress went on record as wishing "a restoration of the harmony formerly subsisting between our mother country and these Colonies." 1 As late as the fifth of January, 1776, the new constitution of New Hampshire explicitly disavowed any intention of securing separation. Thomas Paine knew his native country, which he had left under none too favorable circumstances, and, armed 1 Journals of the Continental

Congress, ed. by W. C. Ford, Vol. II, 65.

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with letters from Benjamin Franklin, he came to Philadelphia and looked around. He saw that the Colonists needed someone to put into words what many were thinking but no one had dared to say. T h e principles of Common Sense, which soon everyone was reading, have now become so firmly established that no one remembers what they are, but their great appeal lay in the fact that they were concrete, easy to understand, and were written in a style which came to this ex-collector of the excise by some miracle. T h e r e is none of the urbanity which distinguishes the work of Franklin and Hopkinson. T h e blows are delivered with a hammer and they struck home, even, it seems, to the intelligence of the Prince of Wales. Long after the essay and its writer had been forgotten, the nation dimly remembered that the name "Common Sense" had become identified with its history, and as late as 1924 President Coolidge made his appeal for reelection upon his possession of that quality. Paine gave us other phrases, too, often quoted, in ignorance, again, of their author. But if one wishes to gain an insight into the real spirit of the Revolution, he can find it in the thirteen numbers of The Crisis, the first of which begins, "These are the times that try men's souls," and the last, " T h e times that tried men's souls are over." Like other famous utterances, the first has remained as the best brief description of the Revolution; the last, not being true at all, has been forgotten. If A Pretty Story and Common Sense have suffered from the neglect of the descendants of the men who read them, the next and greatest document of all has suffered from too much repetition. T h e best test of the greatness of the Declaration of Independence, both in matter and in expression, lies in the terrific ordeal to which it has been put. For more than a century and a half the Declaration has been read at gatherings of perspiring citizens, preceded by firecrackers and followed by orations often too terrible for words. Yet even under these circumstances,

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when read intelligently, the dignity, the lofty aspiration, and the marvelous style of Thomas Jefferson have triumphed. T h e y have triumphed, too, over the criticism which, beginning with that of John Adams, in the committee which framed it, has been leveled at its originality, its rhetorical structure, and its political philosophy. What has saved the Declaration of Independence has been the realization that in a brief space Jefferson wrote the ritual of a new political faith, the faith in humanity, not as members of a caste, or an order, but as citizens of a republic, and such a republic as had not until then been known. It was in every sense of the word the baptism of the American soul. Representatives of every shade of religious belief were in that assemblage, from the deism of Franklin to the Catholicism of Carroll, but they were all familiar with the symbol of the baptismal sacrament, and they saw vanish before the words of that document the original sin which condemned human beings to inequality, which forbade a man to have his chance. For years afterward inequalities existed, but at once they were placed on the defensive, and even the advocates of negro slavery heard each year the fundamental charter of their own liberty confute the arguments of a losing cause. T h e men who signed that document were in every sense the sponsors of that soul, and a heavier responsibility was never taken. It was no idle phrase with which the document concludes—when they pledged "their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor" they knew that if the soul they had sponsored died, they faced death without mercy. One of the great qualities of the Declaration lies in the fine discrimination of its language. Among the inalienable rights of man are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Life, yes—and liberty—they may lie at the mercy of a tyrant—but happiness—that no one can give but man himself. He has the right only to its "pursuit"—and the happiest choice of words in any great document at once

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sounds to the reader the notes of encouragement and of despair. T h e sponsors at that baptism, like the godmothers in the old fairy tale, brought different gifts,—liberty, equality, humanity, an approach to unity. And not to stretch an analogy too far, perhaps, there was one gift, epitomized in that phrase "pursuit of happiness," which grew into that quality by some called the everlasting restlessness, by others the divine discontent, of the American character, which strewed the plains with the bones of the pioneer and today scatters the wrecks of broken bodies on every highroad, but in the days of its glory established the far-flung borders of the United States. One of the usual mistakes is to consider the patriots of the Revolution as one homogeneous body, fused and animated by a common cause into unity of character. They were, on the contrary, various as the Colonies were different. T h e embattled farmers who "fired the shot heard round the world" at Concord were quite different in their traditions from the volunteers in Pennsylvania whom Mary Morgan, sister of Francis Hopkinson and wife of John Morgan, the first Surgeon General of the United States Army, describes in one of her letters: Last Thursday we had a grand review of all the three Batalions all dressed in their regimentals, the first in brown and buff, the 3rd. brown turned up with white; and the and. in brown and red. You see I have not mentioned them in their order, but it would not be me if I had. Besides these their is four other uniforms, the Light Infantry to the 3rd. Ba tali on are dressed in green 8c with white lappels and white wast coats, breeches 8c stockens, smart caps and feathers—it is as compleat a companey as can be, all gentlemen and most of them young fellows and very handsome, my neighbour Cadwalider capten and my brother George Morgan first lieutenant,—their is another company all young Quakers, their uniform is light blue and turned up with white made exactly like the green, —then there is the rangers, Mr. Francis Capt. Their uniform is tanned shirts with a cape fringed. A belt round their wastes with a T o m m y hawk sticking in it. Some of them paint their faces and stick painted feathers in their heads, in short their aim is to resemble Indians as much as possible. Lastly comes the light horse, Mr.

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Markoe their Captain, there is only five and twenty of them as yet but really they look exceedingly well . . . What did not a little inspire them, was the presence of a great number of the genteelest people of the place among whom was collected the most pretty Girls I have seen this long time. 2

The Hopkinsons, the Morgans, and the Cadwaladers represent the American soul in its baptism of self-respect. They called themselves Whigs to distinguish them from the Tories, and because in one respect at least they were akin to the English Whigs, to Burke and Fox and Rockingham, in their unwillingness to recognize any difference in kind between them and the king, even if there were a difference in degree. But between the English Whigs and the Americans there was already a cleft. Franklin and Hopkinson knew that the English Whigs were using the Colonial cause as an issue upon which they could hope to turn the Tories out of office, but that, well disposed as they might be to the Americans, the latter must make their own fight. They were quite prepared to make it, against their Tory neighbors or the British army. But, as in all struggles, the prime essential is leadership. So the spirit of the Revolution is best understood in the quality of the men who emerged from the chaotic condition of the early years of the struggle and who bore the daily tragedy of ineptitude in Congress, desertions in the army, even corruption in the purchase of supplies, with a persistence and quiet force which never afterward passed out of the American soul. The beginning of the struggle was the field day for vivid personalities, but the final victory was won by the greatness of character. James Otis, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry gave us, in the early struggles, the phrases which still ring in every schoolboy's ears, but the actual fighting in the field and the raising of money to carry on the war 2 MS. letter in Collection of Hopkinson papers, in possession of Mr. Edward Hopkinson, J r .

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were conducted by men of different mould. T w o superlatively great services were rendered to the cause. T h e first came when, apparently without consulting others, John Adams of Massachusetts rose in the Congress and moved that the supreme command of the army should be offered to George Washington, of Virginia. T h e second was the pistol shot of General John Cadwalader, of Philadelphia, which put an end to the Conway Cabal that threatened to substitute Gates for Washington. This duel between Cadwalader and Conway was another one of those dramatic moments in which the life of a nation is determined. For the more the Revolution is studied, the more clearly is established the overshadowing contribution of Washington. Here again, the futile attempts to make literary capital out of a few minor peccadilloes in Washington's career deserve the oblivion into which they will pass. T h e true Washington is revealed in his letters and in his deeds. He was no demigod, but his greatness runs like a bright thread in the hand of a skilful designer, through the involved pattern of the Revolution. Each of the threatening dangers broke upon one of the iron facets of his character. By the sheer force of his example he held together an army which was constantly in danger of disintegration. With a dignity that never undervalued the position of the Commander-in-chief, he wrung from an unwilling foe the recognition of his military status, not for himself, but for the cause he represented. With a will no sudden opposition could break and no pressure could bend, he held to his course in the face of defeat and treason, until there came the victory of which some inspiration had made him certain. And greatest of all his characteristics was the infinite patience with which he encountered the distrust and the incapacity of Congress, the dishonesty of his trusted officers, and the appalling selfishness of the profiteers who stayed at home and made money out of the necessities of their defenders. There was no element of

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weakness in this patience—the curse that leapt from his lips when Lee turned back at Monmouth was only one revelation of the passionate blood over which he had won his first great victory. T h e r e is another quality which shows even more clearly in Washington the statesman than in Washington the soldier—liberality. W e are so often urged by orators on February 22 to "preserve the institutions of Washington" that he has become the epitome of conservatism. He would have been the first to repudiate this name. He led the struggle against the established order, he brushed aside the offer of a crown or a military dictatorship with a lack of consideration all the more creditable since no one knew better than he the inefficiency of representative government by a legislature and the warring interests of colonies who had gained little generosity or fellow feeling by their transit into states. H e was never a radical, but he had that characteristic of the liberal, the middle-of-the-road man, which is constructive and tolerant of both extremes, and which frequently, as in the French and Russian revolutions, becomes the victim of the radical. It rarely excites enthusiasm at the time of its activity, and Washington's administrations were embittered as have been those of no other American statesman, except Lincoln and Wilson, by rabid partisan attacks. These came from the sympathizers with France and with England who urged upon him the claims of gratitude or of insulted national pride. Yet with a wisdom which for that time was supreme, he steered a course which kept us from a war which we might not have survived. T h e r e is a scene in Weir Mitchell's The Red City which better than any biography reveals the reasons of Washington's great success. He comes out of a Cabinet meeting, called to settle the fate of Randolph, the Secretary of State, who has been accused of treasonable correspondence with France. Waiting for Randolph is a young aide, de Courval, whom his chief, a few minutes

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before, had brushed past in his hasty exit. Washington stops, attends to the business which Randolph has neglected, then, with a great weight of care still upon him, speaks charmingly to the group of lads and maidens who, with the Custis children, are being taught the minuet. T h e flexibility which can turn instantly to a necessary detail, and the courtesy to those less important than himself, were traits which bound to him with undying trust and affection the little army at Valley Forge, and later the great body of his fellow citizens. Which of these qualities came to him from America— which of them have passed from him into its soul? His early life as a surveyor in a comparative wilderness taught him, perhaps, his self-reliance. Unconsciously, also, the stoicism of the Indian whom he knew so well may have affected him. But from the roughness and crudity of the pioneer he was saved by the circumstances of his birth and his position as a Virginia gentleman. T h e power to command others grew with his early military career and his planter's estate. T h e romantic story told him by a Kenawha chieftain that at Braddock's defeat the Indian missiles were helpless to hurt him, may have no real foundation, but every element of his upbringing was preparing the Virginia hunting squire for the opportunity that waited for him. No one can estimate the influence of Washington's character upon the Republic. Not only in the printed biographies in which his deeds were recorded, but in the countless stories told by every American to his children, George Washington became a symbol of their faith in their country and their hope for themselves. Even the apocrypha like Weems' cherry tree could not have been so widely accepted if Weems had not revealed a truth about Washington though he invented the incident. Such an ideal was and still is a national asset of inestimable value. Children as they emerged from the years when romance is their natural food, met another form of ro-

The Soul of

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mance, the story of one to whom a lie was an abomination. How many millions of American boys dramatized Washington's career and acted with their friends scenes which made it necessary for them to study his life? T h e psychologist may smile at this method of teaching and the pacifist may object to the glorification of a war hero, but a nation where children have been brought up with a model like this has an advantage which a people whose gods are Napoleon or Frederick the Great can never know. In fiction, too, and especially in drama, Washington was constantly brought before the public mind during the first half of the nineteenth century. While the manuscripts of most of the historical plays of this period have perished, theatrical history is studded with such titles as Washington, or the Saviour of his Country, Washington, or the Retaliation, Washington, or the Hero of Valley Forge, while the few printed dramas like Bannister's Putnam or Burnett's Blanche of Brandywine show how Washington appeared in plays that are not named for him. So frequent indeed were they that theatrical managers were hard put to it to find actors who even remotedly resembled him! Every schoolboy knows how among the few books Abraham Lincoln possessed, was Weems' Life of Washington, and that unconsciously the great president shaped the career of his nearest rival in the affections of the American people. For in the study of his life, not only the honesty of Washington, but also the other qualities—the dignity, the patience, the liberality—must have been studied, too. T h a t we as a people are more truthful, more dignified, more patient than others, may be open to question. But there are various shades of dignity, and one of Washington's great contributions was his conception of a citizen as opposed to that of a subject. There is no evidence that he gave a moment's consideration to any effort to make him a dictator, but there was a strong element in this country

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which wanted such a ruler and looked upon a monarchical form of government, with its attendant ranks and privileges, as something highly to be desired. His great refusal of such a dictatorship was important in this respect —it made it impossible for anyone else to accept it. H e stood so far above any of the military leaders, or even the constructive statesmen, that no one else, even if he had wished, could have embraced such an offer without ridicule. A t once, and forever, the idea of being a subject, no matter to how glorious a ruler, vanished, and the title of a citizen was enriched by the example of the First Citizen of the Republic. H o w real this contribution, rarely if ever emphasized sufficiently, was to our national life, can be appreciated only by a close study of those abortive movements looking toward reunion with Great Britain which darken our early history. H o w powerful every action of Washington's was in setting an example may be realized when even today no one dares to risk the chances of an election for a third term to the Presidency simply because he refused such an honor. So great indeed is his influence still that his Farewell Address is a happy hunting ground for those who wish to win his support for doctrines he expressly renounced. Every anniversary of his birth is made the occasion to attribute to him ideas at which he would have been amazed, and principles he would have scorned. His Farewell Address should indeed be studied by every one of his countrymen, if only that they might refute the erroneous platitudes of the orators of February twentysecond. Recently I heard, for example, a distinguished politician make Washington an advocate of party government, although the Address especially condemns it. T h o s e who wish to avoid the responsibilities which this nation must sooner or later take in world affairs have quoted Washington as opposed to foreign entanglements, but have failed to note a significant phrase—"let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to exist-

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ing engagements." There are thousands of Americans who with their lives made engagements for this nation to keep, but which it has broken in a manner and for a reason which Washington would have despised. Of all the influences which shaped the thought of the early days of the Republic, that of Franklin ran a close second to that of Washington. T h e many editions of his Autobiography, the countless reprints of those pithy sayings from his Almanacs, like " T h e Way to Wealth," reveal the extent to which his philosophy of life affected the thought of the oncoming generations. His scheme of moral perfection, with its thirteen cardinal virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility, had less effect, perhaps, in its entirety, than the record of his own achievements. Frugality, industry, and moderation were the traits most admired and imitated. Probably the great advantage Franklin enjoyed, in his later life, by his skilful use of the printing business to give him that financial independence which made so many things possible for him, has led many an American to the quick amassing of riches. Not all of Franklin's influence was for the good of the American soul. T h e r e is a commercial aspect of his morality, epitomized in the maxim "Honesty is the best policy," or in the many other shrewd sayings of Franklin which have appealed to millions of his fellow countrymen. But our tendency to be just before we are generous, and, especially in international affairs, to pay our debts before we make magnificent gestures, and to expect others to do the same, may owe much to the maxims of Benjamin Franklin. He was one of the earliest of our great executives, and the more intelligent students of his Autobiography have learned how the credit for the establishment of a new idea is very little enhanced by the daily repetition of the service. Franklin taught the lesson that the province of the

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executive is to do the big things and to leave to others the routine of carrying on. And the prevalence of the Poor Richard Clubs renders unnecessary perhaps any reference to his services as the first great publicity man of the modern world. Some of these qualities came from his New England ancestry: some were certainly strengthened by his stay among the Quakers. It was not a mere witticism which led Dr. Mitchell to answer a Bostonian who spoke of Franklin's birth in that city with the reply, "Yes, but he came to life at seventeen, in Philadelphia." One noticeable phase of Franklin's activity was his establishment of institutions—such as the public library, the College of Philadelphia, the lighting system, the American Philosophical Society. He is typical of that American love for founding things which arose in part from the various lacks that they filled, but also from some instinct which persists and has flowered into the great establishments like the General Education Board or the Rockefeller Institute. If he lived today he would undoubtedly be head of one of them, or would start a general welfare drive. From him there evolved the impersonal organization, living after its founder had passed on to other fields, and assuring permanence and stability. This belief in the institution, in impersonal rather than personal leadership, has been one of his most profound influences upon the American spirit. Through Alexander Hamilton, the founder of the United States Bank and one of the earliest advocates of a tariff, it found its expression in a political and financial philosophy, and in the hands of Daniel Webster and Joseph Hopkinson it fought the Dartmouth College Case in 1818, and, in defending an unjust assault upon Webster's college, it established for all time the sanctity of the American corporation. Hamilton and Jefferson have rightly been described as rivals and as founders of different ideals, but their main distinction does not lie, as is usually stated, in the love for centralization on Hamilton's part and the preference

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for state sovereignty on that of Jefferson. T h e r e is something more profound than this merely political distinction. Hamilton preferred the strong central government because he saw in it a power which would preserve the institutions he founded from the criticism and attacks of individuals who differed with him as to their merit. T h e brilliant man, the man who can sway multitudes—even the man who believes in the power of democracy, he distrusted. He knew that the philosophy of Jefferson provided for just such leadership, and he hoped to tie the hands of all such men by a written Constitution which would establish forever the kind of government he loved. T h a t he died by the hand of one of the most brilliant and the most unsafe of all the representatives of the other wing is one of the grim jokes of history. Next to Hamilton's services to his country in securing the adoption of the Constitution, his disciples have usually placed his establishment of the financial system of the United States. He brought order out of chaos, and his determination to pay not only what the nation owed, but also to assume the debts of the States, placed our credit upon a basis which has never since been seriously questioned. Despite all the speculation and the corruption in Congress, when twenty-nine of the members of the House had bought up at low rates the evidences of debt they were voting into full value, Hamilton saw beyond the flurry of the time the great fact that to give the leading citizens of the country a stake in the government was to ensure its life. He knew English history well, and he probably realized that the death knell of the house of Stuart was sounded not by the battle of Culloden but by the establishment of the national debt, which linked the moneyed class forever to the fortunes of William of Orange and his successors. For the preservation of his beloved political institutions Hamilton depended upon social institutions like the Order of the Cincinnati, upon commercial institutions,

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which grew up naturally everywhere, and upon financial organizations which in his dream were all to be feeders to his central bank. He was depending upon the better educated, the natural patrician, for his active support, and upon the passive acquiescence of the middle class, whose interests would attach them to his side. When his task was ended by Burr's pistol, he had to his credit a constructive achievement second to none in his time. He had every reason, too, to believe that his fundamental idea, that of the triumph of institutional government, would have its greatest ally in the inertia of the common people. A large proportion of them were still without the franchise, and they were lacking in that organization which makes for power. T h a t his policies did not triumph was due to causes he could not control. On the whole, Hamilton was surrounded by men abler than his opponents, but the success of his party went to their heads. T h e Alien and Sedition Laws, the disloyalty of New England before and during the War of 1812, are usually brought forward as the reasons for the fall of the Federalists and the rise of Democracy. And yet, but for the existence of two men, Hamilton's ideas might have triumphed. It was an old contest, fought out often in history with varying fortunes—the ancient struggle between "the king and the commons against the rest." Victory has gone as often to one side as to the other—but in this case a great leader, Jefferson, and a great constructive statesman, Madison, happened to believe in the rights of the individual. In ways he could not know, Hamilton was fighting against the future. Joining issue with Hamilton's theory of life, Jefferson believed in a less centralized government because in it he scented danger to that independence from institutional forms which he so greatly prized. He had no antipathy to the Constitution—though he took no part in making it and, when he became President, he broke its implied restrictions and assumed powers not given to him by it,

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when he saw fit. He had vision, and he knew Louisiana was for sale so he bought it, though the Federalists might rage. His party became strict constructionists, not because of their love for the Constitution, but because they could limit its power best in that way. T h e first ten amendments, drafted by Madison, limited the powers of the central government which he had done so much in the pages of the Federalist to establish. This philosophy of individual freedom prompted Jefferson to disestablish the Episcopal Church in Virginia, to do away with the system of primogeniture there, and, generally speaking, to destroy the clutch of the dead hand of law and precedent upon the development of the American soul. His organization of the University of Virginia with as little administrative machinery as possible, and with a freedom in elective studies unheard of in that time, his attempt to found a public-school system in Virginia in 1779, as well as his interest in all forms of science, showed him once more as the type of thinker whose concern is the benefit of humanity rather than of institutions. T o understand the development of the American spirit throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to think clearly and not to be misled by political party names or mere superficial qualities. Political parties are not consistent, and when the Democratic party became entrenched in the national government during the early days of the century, its leaders established a bank and a tariff of their own. But underneath this apparent inconsistency, they still remained the champions of individualism. And, under whatever names parties gave themselves, social and economic laws were at work which kept these two philosophies of life distinct. Generalizations are of course most dangerous and most fascinating, but there was and is still a broad distinction between those who worked and produced, or who depended upon production, and those who trafficked in commodities or who di-

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rected the funds which were the ultimate result of production. T o the first group belonged the farmer, the worker in mills and factories, the man who had little margin of profit and consequently little security of life. T o such men, South or North, leaders like Jefferson and later Jackson appealed strongly. Not understanding the more profound causes which made or unmade their welfare, they preferred to select their leader and, once having trusted him, to follow him through defeat or victory with unwavering loyalty. He must appeal to some primitive instinct, and the qualities that have made that appeal most often have been courage and a sympathy with the man or woman who works either with the hand or the brain. T o the followers of "Old Hickory" it mattered little that he violated every principle of "States' Rights" to keep South Carolina in the Union. He was their hero and that was enough for them. It has puzzled many minds to account for the apparent incongruity of the alliance between the South, founded on the basis of racial aristocracy, and the Democrats of the North, recruited largely from the dwellers in large cities, and absorbing the various racial strains like the Irish, Scottish, and German, which poured into this country during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But from the days when Thomas Jefferson attended the dinners of the Tammany Society in New York and the rafters rang with the cheers that annually greeted his name, this alliance has been an established fact. For at the root of this loyalty is the feeling of the clan, of the feudal spirit, of a large body of individuals who depend for their welfare on the owner of a plantation or the leader of their ward, who in his turn sees that no one injures them. No such feudal instinct developed in industrial organizations or in banking institutions, in the East, and, while we shall return to this phase of our civilization later, it might be noted in passing that, as the Southern states grow more industrial, they become, from a political standpoint, more debatable.

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In determining the influences which, growing up in the early days of the Republic, have affected the American soul of today, it is necessary clearly to distinguish those which were permanent from those which were merely transitory. The contest between the adherents of France and of England which embittered the administrations of Washington and John Adams passed with the ending of the wars which gave rise to it. On the other hand, there were profound social, spiritual, and economic changes which have colored our thought for a century, and which are a part of the eternal struggle between the rights of property and the rights of humanity. Most important was the rise in the position of the common man. Jefferson had stated in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," and it would seem that it became the business of the United States to prove it. From the lofty heights of Transcendental philosophy, where Emerson preached the doctrine of the Oversoul which, permeating everyone, made all men spiritually akin, to the practical politics of the Jacksonian era when, property qualifications being cast aside, the vote of the laborer was of equal value with that of the capitalist, the doctrine of equality was taught. Jacksonian democracy differed from Jeffersonian democracy both in kind and in degree. Jefferson was for the people; Jackson, of the people. Jackson had not much regular education, but, like Lincoln later, what he wrote or said was to the point. Jefferson's political philosophy was speculative and his vision was far seeing. Jackson was analytic; he saw into the heart of a problem, like the nullification issue, and took the most direct method to bring the issue to his own conclusion. Without any apparent training in diplomacy, he and his Cabinet, by simply pursuing a firm yet reasonable foreign policy, opened the West Indian ports to our vessels and secured payment for the French depredations under Napoleon's régime.

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Is it any wonder that his admirers, who saw in him the symbol of their hopes for their children's children, should vote for him and trust in him even when, as in the attack on the United States Bank, he seemed to fly in the face of every established principle of finance? He was a fighter, and the pioneer who had had to fight the Indians and the beasts of the forest, the farmer who had to fight the bitter winters of the Northwest or the blazing summers of the Southwest, the laborer who had to fight for a bare existence from sunrise to sunset, saw in him the means of making their lives more tolerable. Never after his day was the presidency closed to a man simply because of his humble extraction. T h e toiler began to demand not only the right to exist, but to have some amusement in his hours of leisure. Even the theatre, which had been supported by a class which had a wide margin of comfort, began to cater to a working class by lowering its prices. As was natural, improvement in labor conditions was gradual and was won only after continued agitation by labor unions. One characteristic of the American spirit which has persisted is the disinclination to violence, and from 1791, when the Union Society of Carpenters in Philadelphia struck because they had to work from sunrise to sunset for five shillings, the unions were accustomed to submit peaceably to defeat. T h e first recorded violence occurred in 1824, when a group of British weavers from Paterson, New Jersey, broke up a meeting of anti-tariff proclivities and smashed some furniture. It was only much later that foreign importations brought about reigns of terror such as those in the coal regions, and usually the progress of social and economic betterment has come slowly but surely. T h e great growth of industries, of banks, of railroads, turnpikes, and canals, turned thousands of unskilled into skilled workmen, with new wants, which in themselves created new industries. Hard as many of the conditions were, there was a prospect of escape such

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as the European peasant never felt, from the toil that bent the form in hopeless submission to a fate that generations of ancestors before him had suffered. If suffering came— and no one who has read Hamlin Garland's Trail Makers of the Middle Border can remain under any illusions concerning the early days in the West—there remains one great fact which has had much to do with the qualities of the American soul. There has never been a peasant class among the white inhabitants of this country. T h e great distinction between the peasants of Europe and the farmers who worked hard and the farmers' wives who suffered incredible hardships in America, lies in the fact that the pioneer did what he did of his own free will. It is difficult to overestimate the ultimate effect upon the American soul of this freedom of the pioneer from the personal tyranny of the proprietor. T h a t he was obeying larger economic forces which he hardly apprehended and which he certainly did not comprehend, was not so important, at least for the time. T h e main fact remained that he and his family were owners of the soil and that no one else had been its owner, at least no one else whose claim he respected. This gave him an independence which is reflected in every political and social development of the first half of the nineteenth century. From 1828 until 1854 every successful candidate for President was supported either because of his real or supposed identification with the pioneers or because he represented their interests. It was Van Buren's fortune to have Jackson's support, or he could never have been elected in 1836, and when the Whigs turned in their desperation to William Henry Harrison in 1840, they had to paint a picture of a man living in a log cabin, in cheerful defiance of the facts. Polk, who was from Jackson's own state, Tennessee, won in 1844 because he stood definitely for the annexation of Texas and California, which was to give the pioneers more room, and Zachary Taylor won for the Whigs in 1848 because of his title of "Old Rough and

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Ready" and his military glory in winning Texas, for the advocates of expansion. Of these men Jackson and Polk were the only real leaders, although Van Buren was an adept in politics. Polk added more territory to the United States during his administration than any other president, and did it deliberately. T h e methods by which we acquired the new territory which united the Atlantic and the Pacific will not bear the scrutiny of even the most friendly eye. Into that welter of corruption, shared by those who wished more slave territory and those Eastern speculators who had purchased Texas bonds, at a mere trifle, it is perhaps not necessary to go. Despite the stinging satire of the first series of the Biglow Papers, the American people felt the urge of "manifest destiny," and something inherited perhaps from their remote ancestors who harried the shores of early Britain, drove them on. T h e ruthlessness which has been present in the American soul from the earliest days of the pioneers became even more definite during the conquest and settlement of Texas, California, and Oregon. That these pioneers destroyed two civilizations, the Spanish and the Indian, was of little moment, apparently, to the vast mass of the people. With the Teutonic indifference, even contempt for other races, it seemed obvious that the country must be occupied and that they would occupy it. T h e only way, however, in which a nation can forget the wrongs it commits is by creating heroes out of those who commit them, and that has been our method. T h e pioneers who settled California and to a certain extent Texas were, however, of a different calibre from those who pushed on the frontier in Wisconsin and Iowa. T h e former were adventurers, gamblers with fate who staked their lives for gold or an easy fortune in real estate. They did not at first take their families, and this makes a vital distinction between them and the earlier pioneers of the Mississippi Valley. T h e latter brought their own

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people with them and carried on that tradition of occupation which the first colonists had established. Farms might be sold by the pioneers who had planted the first outposts, but someone else occupied them, and life grew upon them. This life grew more and more complicated, and generalizations grow in consequence misleading, though we are never without them. Through the shifting values of our social and political history runs still, however, the broad rift which separated the two fundamentally opposed philosophies of life which made up the American spirit. During the period of the rise of democracy, the day of the pioneer, the era of the frontier, the philosophy which rested its hope on the people was ever on the attack and was usually triumphant. It made little difference what party name was attached to this philosophy. Usually it was the Democratic party, which, beginning with Jackson in 1828 and ending with Buchanan in 1856, rode into power on the platform of expansion of territory, of freedom of trade, of unrestricted coinage, of free immigration, of as little government as possible. It was a policy suited to the needs of the day, apparently, and while it brought with it all the vices of an unsettled system, of a constantly increasing restlessness in the American character, it gave a largeness of conception, a capacity to think in terms of the huge and the crude which, while laughable at times, has its note of greatness. Fighting hard, but almost submerged at times, the opposite philosophy, that which dwells upon the importance of institutions rather than of individuals, bided its time. Jackson had destroyed the United States Bank, but the believers in a centralized currency did not despair. They turned to the Whigs because they were the inheritors of Hamilton's policies, but their methods were altered to suit the times. T h e instructions which Nicholas Biddle, president of the bank, gave to the managers of Harrison's campaign is not only enlightening but also

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amusing: "Let him say not one word about his principles or his creed; let him say nothing—promise nothing." T h e party of institutions was turning to the principle of personality to win its election, and it won, by the creation of a personality baptized in hard cider and enkindled by torchlight processions. Van Buren, the patrician, had no chance in a contest with a log cabin. In the same way, the believers in a tariff and those who longed to spend money on internal waterways to help commerce turned to the Whigs. They looked upon America as a self-sufficient land, which should build up a series of national institutions and preserve them, whether our commerce died on the seas or not. It is interesting to see that when the Whigs dared to make such an issue, as they did with Henry Clay in 1844, they were routed, and they returned in 1848 with Taylor to a nominee whose personality was known but whose opinions were not. They won, but they had lost sight of their fundamental principles. Lowell never said a truer word than when he wrote, in 1849: " T h e Whig party has won a momentary advantage, at the cost of its existence." No Whig entered the White House again, and the party disintegrated. Parties, like everything else, must have a reason for existence, and when the Whig party, torn apart by the slavery issue, became a mere scramble for office, it went into extinction. Meantime, the Democratic party, the party of personality, of local self-government, distrusting the tariff as a wall to raise the cost of living, took the fatal step which carried it out of its traditions. More and more surely it became pledged to the support of an institution, that of slavery. At first dominated by Southern leaders, it won victories against a Whig party which refused to face the issue. But the party of personality can no more afford to become the supporter of a changeless institution than the party of institutions can afford to neglect them and trust to the spell of a military hero. T h e one man who could

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have held the Democratic party together, Stephen A. Douglas, was driven by the shrewd questions of Abraham Lincoln in their great debate in 1858, to take a position on the question of slavery which made it impossible for him to become the head of a united Democratic party in i860. T h e proslavery men walked out of the convention in Charleston and, after Douglas had been nominated at Baltimore, they in turn nominated Breckinridge, split the Democratic party, and Lincoln's election became a certainty. Important as the political and economic developments of this period may be, the real life of the American soul must be traced in its literature. Historians may differ as to the reasons for economic and social changes, but the words of Irving and Cooper, of Poe, of Emerson, and of Longfellow remain. Generally speaking, their testimony, whether it was descriptive of what they saw, or whether it led American thought into new channels, bears witness to the struggle of the American soul for freedom and individuality. T h r o u g h a critical stupidity, long ago crystallized into literary history, the writers of this period are spoken of as echoes of European literary tendencies, and the beginning of American literature is postponed until a later era. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In mere bulk Irving's writings on native themes outweigh his descriptions of English country life or his Spanish romances by far, but in the more significant test of quality, he will be remembered for Rip Van Winkle or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow long after the Conquest of Granada is forgotten. A n d for any student of the growth of the American spirit to miss his Life of Washington, or Astoria, or Captain Bonneville is to fail to understand this whole period of our national life. In the first is the real Washington, and in Astoria the romance of the great attempt to seize the Northwest lives again. It is not only the story of the Northwest; it is the beginning of that great fortune which established a new kind of aristocracy in the

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East, based upon the power of money, more important in its effect upon our national life than the f u r trade of Oregon. Again, in English Writers on America, Irving showed the proper attitude to be taken toward the foreign critics who were seeing this country with the eyes of prejudice. His work has that urbanity which Franklin and Hopkinson had given it, and which made it possible of understanding by foreign nations. Cooper's contribution to our national literature, his creation of the novel of the frontier and of the sea, has been more generally recognized. H o w much his celebration of the primitive man, in Hawkeye as well as in Uncas, led the American of that day to try his fortune in the forest, can never be estimated. But Hawkeye after all was not a settler, but a hunter. Cooper was essentially a democrat but it was of the Jeffersonian not the Jacksonian kind. His conception of life was feudal, for he had grown up in Cooperstown where his father reigned over the rather queer collection of pioneers which included political refugees of all kinds, from T a l l e y r a n d to the exgovernor of Martinique. Cooper's fiction was so widely read that it must have had its influence, and that influence was for good. Ideal some of his creations certainly were, but there was a rich flavor of reality too about them, and there never was a sturdier or more discerning judge of national characteristics than their author. His letters from England or France, which were published in 1837 a n d had their audience, are even today tonics for the American soul. In a letter written to Richard Cooper from London in 1828, he describes a quality which has remained one of our strongest characteristics. It is not easy f o r a n y b u t close observers to estimate the i n f l u e n c e of such places as L o n d o n a n d Paris. T h e y contribute, essentially, to national identity, a n d national tone, a n d n a t i o n a l p o l i c y : in short, to n a t i o n a l i t y , a merit in w h i c h w e are almost entirely w a n t i n g . I do not m e a n n a t i o n a l sensitiveness, w h i c h some f a n c y is p a t r i o t i s m .

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though merely provincial jealousy, but that comprehensive unity of feeling and understanding, that renders a people alive to its true dignity and interests, and prompt to sustain them, as well as independent in their opinions.

This quality of sensitiveness was to turn some of Cooper's latter days to gall, for he never hesitated to say what he thought about any section of the country, especially New England, or any class, especially the commercial one. Much that he says is so true that it is unpalatable, but any American can ponder over this sentence: Alasl it is much easier to declare war, and gain victories in the field, and establish a political independence, than to emancipate the mind.

Another commonplace of criticism is to speak of Poe as an author who has his roots outside his native country. That he chose to work in universal patterns rather than in parochial ones is true, but no one was more keenly aware of what was going on in America than this literary citizen of the world. T h e great part of his criticism, which is larger in bulk than his poetry and fiction combined, does, of course, deal with every imaginable phase of American life, from Transcendentalism to the beauties of the Wissahickon River, of which he seems to have made Philadelphians aware. But in a deeper sense, he was a product of the age. While the pioneers were pushing forward the frontier of the United States, Poe was exploring the frontier of the human soul. All around him the celebrants of freedom were sounding their notes, and even his absurd attempts to identify himself with the Grecian revolution show how his thoughts were tending. Freedom to write of any place, or time, in fact to write "out of space, out of time," was the cardinal principle of his creed. His very refusal to limit his scenes to American soil was akin to the spirit which was carrying the flag of American commerce round the world. Just as England, rising

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to her height as a world power, produced the genius of Shakespeare, who in his greatest plays—Hamlet, Othello, and Julius Caesar—refused to be bound by parochial scenes, so Poe, in the days when the American spirit was preparing to fill in the continent and was making our "manifest destiny" apparent, could work only in those broad confines of the soul where even death itself is but an incident. In Ligeia, in which he called back the soul of beauty from the grave, or in To Helen, in which the wanderer in search of beauty returned to his "native shore," or in The Raven, when he was "dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before," Poe was akin to those other Americans of the thirties and forties who, in defiance of international law, brought Texas and California into the Union and spread our territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Indeed, his last poem, El Dorado, refers evidently to the discovery of gold in 1848. It was not only in the field of the supernatural that Poe was a pioneer. Before his day there was comparatively little in American criticism that is significant. Our early dependence upon European standards still persisted in some quarters and in others an equally objectional shrillness of undiscriminating praise for everything American, just because it was American. Poe was as fearless in his literary opinions as Fremont or Houston in their adventurous explorations in more concrete realms, and his literary fortunes were wrecked by his intrepidity. But never, after his time, was America without a standard of taste, and the influence of our first great critic has never quite faded from our literary standards. It was not only that his short stories and his poems were translated into foreign tongues and were imitated far and wide; Cooper and Irving had been translated, too. But his definition of the short story in his critique of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales established a standard to which every writer on that subject must go back if only to disagree with it. It is one of those landmarks of con-

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structive criticism that occurs rarely in a nation's literary history. T h e effect upon other creators of the short story is impossible even to estimate. Perhaps in no other field of the imagination has America held the unquestioned superiority, and this fact has given to the artists who wrought in it a proper pride of achievement valuable to any national art. Poe did not invent the short story, of course; Irving had done that, and Hawthorne had even antedated Poe by a few months in the writing of his fiction. But owing to the very delicacy of Hawthorne's art, his imitators were not many, while Poe's stories of situation and of ratiocination were more easily imitated, even if Ligeia and The Fall of the House of .Usher were not. While Poe's themes were not native, except in The Gold Bug, there is something essentially American in the form of the short story, which has helped to domesticate it here. Its brevity, its directness, its very recklessness in the use of so much material in so brief a form, have appealed to both the creator and the reader in the United States. It is not straining too fine a point to compare the Western pioneer who farmed by methods that his Eastern ancestor would have looked upon as wasteful extravagance, with the literary artist who gave in one short story enough plot to have furnished Trollope, with a little padding, material for a novel. Just as with the pioneer there was always the spectacle of more land farther west, if his own proved unprofitable, so to the genius of Poe and Hawthorne there was the whole tableland of the spirit which they might explore. Hawthorne had another quality, alien to Poe's nature, which shows clearly in The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun, and may be briefly described as the genius of sympathy. When Hawthorne died, Emerson has recorded in that marvelous passage in his Journal which reveals the souls of these two New Englanders in a vivid flash, how James Freeman Clarke said at the funeral that

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"Hawthorne had done more justice than any other to the shades of life, shown a sympathy with the crime in our nature, and like Jesus was the friend of sinners." Certainly in the work by which Hawthorne has most affected the souls of his countrymen, The Scarlet Letter, he showed his understanding of the loneliness of the sinner, and of the futility of human punishment, building up in his portrait of Hester Prynne an immortal protest against the lack of charity, against the intolerance of that Puritan village which, in his own day, had given him nothing in encouragement or comradeship. T h e lessons of The Scarlet Letter are the stronger for not being uttered, and the countless editions that have come from the press since 1850, can surely not have failed to make their impress upon the American soul. It would be a brave critic who would try to link Hawthorne to any of the movements of his time. He was a Democrat in politics, but he was not active, and he simply went out of office when the Whigs came in. His democracy was not of the Jacksonian variety, and yet his deep sympathy with humanity, while it was entirely spiritual, reveals him as not an alien to his own people. Certainly he liked England less than he liked Salem, and Rome never seems to have touched him. His romanticism was not European, it had nothing of the historic in it, and in "Leamington Spa," one of the sketches of Our Old Home, he says, in speaking of the English churchyard: Better than this is the lot of our restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards "fresh woods and pastures new." R a t h e r than such monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray N o r m a n church, let us welcome whatever change may come,— change of place, social customs, political institutions, modes of worship,—trusting that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe his life in them, and to fling them off in turn.

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Hawthorne's fellow citizen of Concord, Emerson, who almost "conquered a friendship" with him, was closer to the life of his time, although he was really in advance of it. With Emerson, it is true, the doctrine of democracy was largely theoretical. He might say: T h e lord is the peasant that was, T h e peasant, the lord that shall be,

but he voted the Whig ticket regularly and, with that divine faculty of inconsistency which is one of his greatest charms, he separated his notions of equality into neat pigeonholes, social, spiritual, and political, and never put any of his practices into the wrong compartment. As usual, he was correct. Political equality, a natural right, he saw was inevitable, and slavery was to him an abomination. Economic equality he was not so sure about, but he sensed a life-and-death struggle there. Of social equality he was shy, for he knew that social life, being a matter of the individual, was incapable of being ruled by fiat, and bad manners were really worse to him than political corruption, because they might invade his own privacy. Still, even here, he could afford to take risks, for was there not Lydian Emerson, ever ready to guard him against bores and intruders? And even Margaret Fuller's visits to Concord were happily not too frequent. It would be a mistake, however, to think of Emerson as a representative of that era. It took a long while to sell the first edition of Nature, and for many years even the doors of his Alma Mater were shut against him by his Divinity School Address in 1838. His great influence came later, but amid all the whirlpool of the thirties, forties, and fifties, much that was apparently important has vanished while his voice, which few seemed to heed, but which foretold Avar in 1856, when Lincoln was denying its possibility, is now perhaps the greatest heritage that the age has given us. His voice was not the only one lifted in literature for

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the individual in his struggle for his rights. Whittier probably put more fire into his anti-slavery verses than into any others of his poems, but these are fading rapidly, while his "Maud Muller," with its appealing portrait of "what might have been," which preached without violence the doctrine of equality, together with "Amy Wentworth," in which such lines as Nor honored less than he who heirs Is he who founds a line

were read with avidity by thousands who liked to dream that lack of opportunity alone shut them out of fortune. It is the fashion now to smile at Longfellow's early verse, but in any estimate of the influences upon the American soul of that formative period such poems of democracy as " A Psalm of L i f e " or " T h e Village Blacksmith" cannot be disregarded. It is in fact because they have been so interwoven into the fabric of American life that they seem obvious today. Yet during the Great War, I listened to an eloquent tribute to the effect of the lines at which a sophisticated generation pleases to elevate its eyebrows: Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest Was not spoken of the soul.

It came from a Frenchman who told his audience how in the trenches he had heard hundreds of French soldiers repeat, to keep up their courage, these words of an American poet which they had learned in school. If eighty years after they were written, these lines, composed by the man in the Harvard Faculty who could quell a student uprising when everyone else had failed, inspired the souls of the soldiers of our allies, how much must they have taught to the generations for whom they were written?

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T h a t this celebration of democracy was conscious on the part of the greater poets is clear from the lines of Lowell in " A n Incident in a Railroad C a r " : It may be glorious to write T h o u g h t s that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century;— B u t better far it is to speak O n e simple word, which now and then Shall waken their free nature in the weak A n d friendless sons of men.

One of the most interesting developments of this era, because less conscious, perhaps, was the choice of themes for the best dramas of that time. These themes were, it is true, as was the fashion in romantic tragedy, laid in other times and scenes. But it surely was not accident that Robert Montgomery Bird should take as his heroes Spartacus, the gladiator who rebelled against the tyranny of Rome, Pelopidas, the Theban who rebelled against the tyranny of Sparta, and Oralloossa, the Inca who revolted against the tyranny of Spain; that Richard Penn Smith should celebrate Caius Marius, the democratic leader of Rome; that Robert T . Conrad should select Jack Cade, the leader of the peasant revolt against the tyranny of the nobles of England, that John A. Stone should choose Metamora, the Indian chief who fought against the Colonists for the liberty of his race. In the hands of Edwin Forrest all but one of these plays saw the stage. The Gladiator was the first play in the English language to be performed one thousand times in the lifetime of its author, and that was in 1853, when the play had still twenty years of stage life. Democracy was on the stage in many forms, as the plays which ostensibly celebrated Jackson's victory at New Orleans, while really celebrating his election in 1828, will prove, but the tremendous effect of Edwin Forrest's popularity, carrying to the thousands

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that heard him the message of equality, can hardly be overestimated. How popular the common man became on the stage may be illustrated by A Glance at New York, written by Benjamin A. Baker, the prompter of the Olympic Theatre in 1848. Baker here centered attention on the seamy side of life in New York City, especially upon Mose, the "fire boy," a member of one of those volunteer fire companies which were powerful political forces in city life. Mitchell, the manager of the Olympic, at first declined to put on the play, but Baker insisted, and when F. S. Chanfrau, a noted character actor of the day, appeared as Mose, dressed in the red shirt and polished boots, and decorated with the "soap locks" of the fireman, the house rose to him. T h e play was a poor one, but the character was alive, and its tremendous popularity changed the nature of the audiences at the Olympic Theatre. All Mose's friends were there, in the front rows, to see themselves represented, and Mose was taken, in other plays, all over the United States and even to China. T h e audiences East and West, who saw Mose in California, recognized perhaps the essential likeness of the New York fireman and the gold-digger of California. There is perhaps nothing more hurtful to the soul of a nation than an injustice which it seems impossible to cure. Slavery ceased to exist in 1865, but the effects of slavery are still with us. Who that stands even for a few minutes at 125th Street in New York, or on the Grant Boulevard in Chicago, can fail to recognize the problem which those who planted African slavery in the Colonies have passed on to their descendants? T h e question of slavery had been a disturbing element at the formation of the Union, but it was met by the policy which even today rules our conduct in dealing with the negro question—a determined effort to forget it. T h e Northerner, having secured freedom for the slave largely because it was not profitable to possess him, hoped that

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the institution would gradually die out after the importation of slaves would cease in 1808, and the Southerner, faced with a different economic problem, tried to comfort himself with the belief that the slaves were better off than they had been in Africa. If it had not been for the invention of the cotton gin in 1795, and the consequent demand for more slave territory, the matter might have lingered on in a helpless compromise. One fails to understand the American spirit if he believes that the conscience of the North freed the slave. T h e Abolitionists were from the beginning decidedly unfashionable. T h e y were recruited from the unsettled, even the violent-minded, while the wealthy and the well established, tied by commercial relations to the South, wished above everything else to have the discussion stopped. It was not only their pocketbooks that spoke. A reluctance to dispossess the Southern planter of his chief source of wealth, a feeling that the South should be let alone, provided no more slave territory was established, kept the antislavery movement from becoming very active among those who really determined the political action of the North. Such activity as existed was largely confined to the Middle States. In 1826, ninety-five out of the one hundred and one abolition societies were in this region, and of these, seventy-seven were in Delaware. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. T h e r e were none in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, or Connecticut. It was after 1830 that Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips began their attacks. It was only when the slave states became an aggressive political power that the North gradually solidified against slavery. T h e repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which seemed to throw open the West to slavery, made the question one of national control. But even up to the very brink of the Civil War, the Antislavery cause, as such, was not generally embraced by the learned, the

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rich, or the intelligent. As Lowell, who had devoted himself to Abolition in the forties, said in 1864, in his essay on Abraham Lincoln, "Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was the despised heresy of a few earnest persons, without political weight enough to carry the election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the position of slavery was impregnable." We are concerned here not so much with the history or economics of slavery, but with its effect upon the American soul. T h e first effect was that of a menace to free speech. When any subject is by general consent banished from conversation, it hangs like a cloud over the life of the nation. Contemporary writing, especially of foreign visitors, makes this clear to us today. It was banished not only because the merchant of New England as well as the planter of the South wished it to be disregarded, but also because it was hard to see any peaceable way out of the situation. In 1854 Abraham Lincoln, in a speech delivered in answer to one of Stephen A. Douglas, said: "If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do with the existing institution. . . . Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals —my own feelings will not admit of this." This suppression of discussion also led to an irritation which had to have an outlet. This irritation was not rendered less acute by Hawthorne's constant reminders to his compatriots of New England that, while the first trip of the Mayflower had brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, her second trip had brought slaves to Virginia. But Hawthorne had no crusading spirit against African slavery. He was concerned with a more important theme—the universal slavery of the human race to sin and suffering. It was not to be expected, of course, that all would keep silent. From 1693, when George Keith, a Philadelphia Quaker, published a tract against slavery, its opponents were at least spasmodically active. It was characteristic of

56

The

Soul of

America

New England that while she lagged behind the Middle States in the early stages of the struggle, when she began she began in earnest. It is open to question, however, whether the more violent agitators like Lloyd Garrison were really as effective as those who, like Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, and Mrs. Stowe, wrote verse and prose that has survived even the close of the period. Those who wished to forget the great moral issue might neglect to read Garrison's attacks on the Constitution and even Whittier's well considered prose pamphlet, Justice and Expediency, but the lyric sweep of "Massachusetts to Virginia," with its climax, "No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!" stirred the conscience of New England, that potent force, so disturbing to itself and its neighbors. It is noteworthy that the denunciations of the South and the descriptions of slavery by those who knew nothing of it ring falsely when read today. How they must have made the Southerner rage in the forties and fifties it is easy to understand. If Uncle Tom and Legree seem to the present readers of Uncle Tom's Cabin wild caricatures, it is because Mrs. Stowe was representing, by one or two particular examples, classes of human beings who were quite different from the characters of her fiction. What is of permanent value from all the literature of abolition is that which is universal in its application to freedom. There is more of the real American soul in Lowell's " T h e Present Crisis": T r u t h forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.

It is just because these lines make no reference to slavery that they seem best to us. For it was only rarely that the writers engaged in the literary crusade against slavery rise above particularities and treat themes general

Independence—and

After

57

enough to make their work permanently valuable. Yet the movement which gave to us such poetry as Whittier's "Ichabod" and "Massachusetts to Virginia," Lowell's The Biglow Papers and " T h e Present Crisis," and Emerson's "Boston Hymn," cannot be disregarded in any study of the American spirit. These lovers of liberty insisted upon being heard, in season and out of season. Social slights and monetary losses could not deter them from the great American privilege of speaking their minds. When in his old age Whittier was asked by a young girl the reason for his serenity, he replied, "My dear, if you wish to be happy when you are old, attach yourself while you are young to a great but unpopular cause." They knew that it is not always to the sensible and the sane that greatness comes. For they saw a madman like John Brown, in an attempt doomed from the first to failure, become a symbol of something of which even he never dreamed. It is this capacity for making an abstraction the guiding motive of sacrifice, suffering, and ultimate victory which the crusade against slavery deepened in the American soul. Yet it might have stormed for years against the citadel of property if it had not become identified with the struggle for the Union.

THE CONFIRMATION OF THE SOUL The Struggle for Union

could be an American soul there had to be an American nation. Today, when the United States seem to be inevitably and indissolubly bound together, when one may travel from coast to coast in forty-eight hours, it is hard to realize how slow was the growth of a real Union, how strong the efforts made to prevent it. T h e colonial attempts at union were sporadic, and even after the Revolution there was no real sense of popular unity. T h e English tradition of government gave no inspiration toward such an end, for the bitter opposition to the union of England and Scotland in 1707 still lived in men's memories, and the dark methods by which the union between England and Ireland was to be accomplished lay still in the future. Despite the words of the preamble to the Constitution, " W e the people of the United States," men thought of themselves as citizens of Massachusetts, of Pennsylvania, or of Virginia. T h e constructive genius of Madison, of Hamilton, and of James Wilson built up a system all the more remarkable when we realize the prejudices, the passions, and the jealousies of those days. Compromise built the Constitution, compromise alone may preserve it. For we must always remember that upon the only occasion in our history when one section imposed its will upon another in a vital matter, the victory came from the artillery of Grant and of Farragut, and not by the power of reason or by constitutional means. 58 BEFORE THERE

The Struggle for

Union

59

T h e South was beaten in the W a r for the Union, and there can probably be found no one in the South now who regrets that the Union was preserved. Yet the principle for which the South fought still persists, and the fundamental impulse which prompted the secession is by a curious paradox the best guarantee of the preservation of the United States. In i860 the main issue was clouded by the side issue of slavery. But every student of American history knows that the war was not fought merely for the abolition of slavery or for its preservation. T h e r e were two opposing political philosophies in this country which sooner or later had to test their strength in conflict. T h e usual easy generalization which attributes these philosophies to Hamilton and the Federalists on one side and to Jefferson and the Democrats on the other is, of course, superficial. T h e Federalists of New England were ready to secede from the Union in 1803, in the contest between the interests of their section and those who were concerned with the free navigation of the Mississippi; and men like Pickering, Griswold, and others laid plans for a Northern Confederacy, extending down to New Jersey. Again, in 1 8 1 4 , when a war which they believed to be against their interests was in progress, they repeated the threat, and how little the central government meant to any State is proved by the action of Massachusetts, Virginia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky in raising troops for their individual defense. As we watch the gradual growth of the idea of an indissoluble Union, we notice that the arguments for and against it follow the natural tendency already described, by which one type of mind turns to certain leaders for guidance and another type to certain institutions which it wishes to support. T h e theory of local self-government, either state or municipal, is bound u p with individualism, and individualism responds to the challenge of leadership. T h e Southerner carried his feudal ideas right

6o

The

Soul of

America

through his political, social, and economic life. H e sent to the Senate and the House of Representatives better men on the whole than the Northern or Western States, partly because the best brains of the South went into law and politics. H e had no real antipathy to the Union, provided he could control it, but he could see no inherent sanctity in a Union which was to be controlled by the legislative bodies which he believed to represent not their constituents, but certain special interests, of which the tariff was his particular aversion. T h e curious novel, The Partisan Leader, by Beverley T u c k e r , published in 1836, but suppressed until later, prophesies quite accurately the secession of the Southern States, for the reasons which have just been given. T h e Southern leaders like C a l h o u n taught a doctrine which they saw constantly ratified a r o u n d them. T h e sacred duty of rebellion when conditions become intolerable had brought about the Revolution. T h e famous " V i r g i n i a and K e n t u c k y Resolutions" of 1798, to which the names of Madison and J e f ferson gave at least unofficially an authority, made clear that " i n case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers not granted by the said compact, the States w h o are the parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and f o r maintaining within their respective limits the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them." T h e s e Resolutions, passed in protest against the A l i e n and Sedition Laws, which threatened to do away with free speech, were no idle jest. T h e y formed the basis of the doctrine of state sovereignty, and yet they are by no means the expression of disunion sentiments. T h e men who framed them had been responsible for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. T h e belief of this school of thinking, which governed the United States from the accession of Jefferson in 1801 to the end of Madison's administration in 1825, may be epitomized in a

The

Struggle

for

Union

61

brief statement which is of infinite value for their descendants a century later. The best guarantee for the preservation of the Union is to give to each of its constituent parts as much liberty as possible. With a foresight that is truly remarkable, they realized that in a country as diverse in population and setting as the United States, the conflicts of interests, political, social, and economic, would grow greater with time. Moreover, they saw that the fringe of States on the Atlantic seaboard would one day absorb the continent, and the differences would grow rather than diminish. T o absorb the millions that were to come, the form of government must be as flexible as possible, and the power of the central government must be kept strictly within limits. New powers, new functions were to be reserved to the people and to their representatives, the States. So widespread was this feeling that it submerged the Federal Party and, passing on unchecked, produced in its most radical form a doctrine of nullification of Federal action by a sovereign State. For our purpose, which is concerned more with the spiritual than the legal aspects of the union, it is perhaps sufficient to examine the contest in its dramatic moments. One of these was the debate in the Senate between Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts. Webster's second reply in that debate has been often quoted, but Hayne's second speech, which was the occasion for Webster's main oration, has been passed over unjustifiably. For in it Hayne put brilliantly the theory which the South Carolinian believed so devotedly. " S i r , " he said, "there have existed, in every age and country, two distinct orders of men—the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power. . . . T h e people whom I represent, Mr. President, are the descendants of those who brought with them to this country, as the most precious of their possessions, 'an ardent love of liberty,' and while that shall be preserved, they will always

62

The

Soul

of

America

be found manfully struggling against the consolidation of the government AS T H E WORST OF E V I L S . " It was this identification of state sovereignty and liberty which Webster had to combat. Hayne had not lost the opportunity to taunt the senator from Massachusetts with his share in the Hartford Convention in 1 8 1 4 , or at least his sympathy with it, and the consequent inconsistency with Webster's attitude in 1830. With an adroitness that was more frequently shown in defense than in attack, Webster rose to the occasion. He had had the night to prepare, and in fact his whole political career had been a preparation. Daniel Webster was a great orator, a great persuader of men. He was not a constructive statesman like Henry Clay, and his most important speeches were prompted either by the attacks of others as in the case of Hayne, or by his advocacy of a compromise measure such as that of Clay in 1850. He had little inventive power and he was an almost perfect example of the barrister as distinguished from the solicitor in the sense in which that distinction still obtains in English legal practice. In fact, one of the chief charges made by his enemies was that he became a paid attorney for any special interest that engaged him, and his defense of the T a r i f f of 1828, which increased the duties on wool while it injured the shipping interests of New England, certainly lent color to the charge. But Webster's course was perfectly consistent. He was the exact antithesis of Jackson, although they joined forces in their defense of the Union in 1832. Although Webster was a greater man than any candidate nominated by the Whigs, he could not secure even a nomination by his party, much less an election. He never kindled the enthusiastic devotion of a personal following as Jackson or Henry Clay did. T h e reason lay in the instinctive feeling of the people that he represented not them, but certain institutions in which he believed, such as the cen-

The

Struggle

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Union

63

tral bank of the U n i t e d States, or the tariff. H e opposed the W a r of 1812 because, as he said, " i n the commerce of the country the Constitution had its growth: in the extinction of that c o m m e r c e it w i l l find its grave." In the D a r t m o u t h College Case he established for all time the sanctity of the corporation. A n d here, as was usual, the legal work had been done by others; it was in the form of the appeal that his c o n t r i b u t i o n lay. In return for his advocacy, the commercial and b a n k i n g interests of N e w E n g l a n d supported h i m not only politically but financially. His well k n o w n carelessness in money matters left h i m , he thought, no alternative but to accept gifts, just as B u r k e and Fox had d o n e in England, w h i c h made h i m a special advocate, tied his hands, and perhaps prevented h i m f r o m reaching his goal of the Presidency. B u t if ever such practices were justified by events, they were justified in his case. For in his " R e p l y to H a y n e , " a m o n g all the bombast and fustian of that l o n g speech, W e b s t e r rose to a political conception w h i c h turned the current of popular thought into a new channel and gave a rallying-cry to those w h o believed in the preservation of the U n i o n . H a y n e had made his plea for state sovereignty on the g r o u n d that it preserved the liberty of the individual. W e b s t e r accepted the challenge, and in his peroration identified the cause of liberty with the preservation of the Union. I profess, Sir, in my c a r e e r h i t h e r t o , to h a v e k e p t steadily in v i e w the prosperity a n d h o n o r of the w h o l e country, a n d the preservation of o u r Federal U n i o n . It is to that U n i o n w e owe o u r safety at h o m e , a n d o u r c o n s i d e r a t i o n a n d d i g n i t y abroad. It is to t h a t U n i o n that we are chiefly i n d e b t e d for w h a t e v e r makes us m o s t p r o u d of o u r c o u n t r y . T h a t U n i o n w e reached o n l y by the discip l i n e of o u r virtues in the severe school of adversity. I t h a d its o r i g i n in the necessities of disordered finance, prostrate c o m m e r c e , a n d r u i n e d credit. U n d e r its b e n i g n influences, these g r e a t interests i m m e d i a t e l y awoke, as f r o m the d e a d , and s p r a n g forth w i t h newness of life. Every year of its d u r a t i o n has teemed w i t h fresh p r o o f s of its u t i l i t y a n d its blessings; a n d a l t h o u g h o u r territory has

64

The

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stretched out wider and wider, and our population spread farther and farther, they have not outrun its protection or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain of national, social, and personal happiness. I have not allowed myself, Sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union may be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it should be broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first and Union afterwards"; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart,—Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable! It is difficult to overestimate the i m p o r t a n c e of this speech. P r i n t e d and reprinted, studied and recited by nearly every schoolboy in the N o r t h and West, and even in the South, it entered and remained a part of the American soul. T h r o u g h o u t the whole address, he laid his emphasis upon the people as opposed to the States, and in

The Struggle for

Union

65

one sentence, " I t is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people," we see the first form of Lincoln's immortal phrase. It gave to the party of institutions an ideal, something lofty and abstract, and yet presenting the only practical way of preserving the commercial and financial institutions they cherished. Moreover, it was from N e w England, which had muttered treason in 1 8 1 4 and was to utter disunion sentiments again during the Mexican War, that this doctrine came. Webster's " R e p l y " was delivered J a n u a r y 26, 1830. On A p r i l 13 of the same year, in Washington, at a dinner in memory of T h o m a s Jefferson, President Jackson uttered his famous toast, " O u r Federal Union—it must and shall be preserved!" Historical parallels are fascinating, if dangerous, but it is interesting that this combination of the soldier, the orator, and the money power, which from the days of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, has proved irresistible, should have laid aside personal differences to save the Union. As a matter of fact, the compromise which Clay brought about left South Carolina apparently satisfied, but the two ideas of liberty and Union were joined, and a growing national consciousness, intangible but powerful, can be seen in many ways. One of these not usually recorded in history is found in the records of the drama. Over one hundred and fifty plays from 1 8 3 0 to i860 placed on the stage scenes from American history, and the dramatization of contemporary events, which are now historic, is also recorded in the names of plays, most of which have not survived in print or manuscript. T h e victory was, however, by no means won. In fact, it was after the delivery of Webster's speech that the most bitter attacks upon the Union arose. From the Abolitionists in the North and from the advocates of slavery in the South came the assaults upon what Garrison amiably

66

The Soul of

America

called " T h e covenant with death and agreement with hell," otherwise known as the Constitution of the United States. Like all radicals, both sides could see only their own point of view. T o those who believed in local independence the accession of Texas must have given great satisfaction, apart from the extension of slave territory which it implied. For if Texas, which as an independent state had seceded from Mexico, joined an already established Union, of its own free will, why might it not withdraw also of its own initiative? T h e bitter opposition to the admission of Texas, which survives most definitely in the poetry of Whittier and Lowell, was just as radical in its sectional feeling. Lowell's words in The Biglow Papers: Ef I'd my way I hed rather W e should go to work an' part,— T h e y take one way, w e take t'other, Guess it wouldn't break my heart; M a n hed ough' to put asunder T h e m thet G o d has noways jined; A n ' I shouldn't gretly wonder Ef there's thousands o' my m i n d -

put the extreme view of the abolitionist which coincided for different reasons with the extreme view of the Southern slave holder. But because the radicals on both sides, as is their usual custom, made their views most apparent, there is strong evidence that the majority in both sections grew rapidly to want peace and the Union. Among the intelligent, broadminded believers in abolition, Longfellow probably made the most significant contribution to this feeling. He had written during his return voyage from Europe in 1842 several antislavery verses, which are among the weakest of his poems. When a new edition of his poetry appeared in Philadelphia in 1845, these poems were omitted at the request of his publishers, and he was

The Struggle

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Union

67

made a target for abuse by the National Anti-Slavery Standard for cowardice in allowing them to be withdrawn. Of course the charge was absurd, for if there was any fault in Longfellow, it was not cowardice, and his fine critical taste probably told him that his abolition verses were unworthy of him. He restored them, however, in all later editions. I fancy that the incident may have prompted him to the composition of one of his greatest poems, " T h e Building of the Ship," as far above his "Slave in the Dismal Swamp" in merit as the preservation of the Union was above the abolition of slavery in significance. " T h e Building of the Ship" was written during 1849 a n d was finished on September 22. T h e apostrophe to the Union is so well known and has been so often recited that it cannot be judged on its absolute merit, and yet, when one analyzes it critically, everything seems to have been said in that inevitable form which great literature assumes and wears without display: Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O UNION, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years. Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee,—are all with thee!

68

The In

L o n g f e l l o w ' s Journal

Soul

for F e b r u a r y

of 12,

America 1850,

he

notes: In the evening Mrs. K e m b l e read before the M e r c a n t i l e L i b r a r y Association, to an audience of more than three thousand, portions of 'As Y o u L i k e it;' then ' T h e B u i l d i n g of the Ship,' standing o u t u p o n the platform, book in h a n d , t r e m b l i n g , palpitating, a n d weeping, and g i v i n g every w o r d its true w e i g h t and emphasis. She prefaced the recital by a few words, to this effect: that w h e n she first saw the poem, she desired to read it before a Boston audience; a n d she h o p e d she w o u l d be a b l e to m a k e every w o r d a u d i b l e to that great m u l t i t u d e . A f t e r the reading, Barker, her doorkeeper, said to me in great excitement, " I w o n d e r if there was any reporter to take d o w n that little speech. G a d ! w h a t c o m p r e h e n s i o n ! " — m a k i n g a k i n d of bird's-nest w i t h b o t h hands, expressive of his emotion and his idea of compression. T h e effect w h i c h this British actress, carried away herself by the dramatic v a l u e of the p o e m , m a d e u p o n an A m e r i c a n a u d i e n c e is o n l y faintly reflected in L o n g f e l low's words. O n e of the most significant tributes to its power was m a d e by N o a h Brooks, w h o described his readi n g of the p o e m to L i n c o l n and the d e e p impression it m a d e u p o n the President. " I t is a w o n d e r f u l g i f t , " L i n coln said, " t o be able to stir m e n like that." C e r t a i n l y it is hard to overestimate the i m p o r t a n c e of the share L o n g f e l l o w played in the b u i l d i n g u p of an i m a g i n a t i v e picture of the U n i o n . H e was generally recognized as the foremost poet of the nation, and to millions of people the w o r d went forth that in spite of d o u b t s and dangers he had not despaired fluence

of the R e p u b l i c .

Moreover,

his

in-

helped in a n o t h e r way. Historians have often re-

marked how strange it was that in the C i v i l W a r the common

people

of

Great

Britain

sympathized

with

the

U n i o n . W e k n o w h o w widespread was the distribution of L o n g f e l l o w ' s poetry in E n g l a n d . T h e late Professor Grosv e n o r of A m h e r s t relates the t r i b u t e of a British editor w h o remarked to h i m , " A stranger can hardly have an idea h o w familiar m a n y of our w o r k i n g p e o p l e are w i t h

The

Straggle

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69

Longfellow. T h o u s a n d s can repeat his poems who have never read a line of Tennyson and probably never heard of Browning." Can anyone doubt that the apostrophe to the Union was among the poems that Englishmen learned by heart, coming as it did at the end of a poem about the sea? Just a week before Fanny. Kemble stirred the multitude at Boston, H e n r y Clay had proposed his Compromise Bill; designed to satisfy both North and South by leaving to the States to be made out of the territory secured from Mexico, as they were admitted, the right to decide for themselves whether slavery was to exist within their limits, and to provide for a better Fugitive Slave Law. In the course of the speech he declared that if Congress interfered with slavery where it existed, he would justify that State in declaring war. Webster, on the seventh of March, made his last great speech in favor of this bill. H e made clear his dislike of slavery, but he also stated plainly that he would vote against the exclusion of slavery from New Mexico because he believed N a t u r e had already excluded it, and that he believed the South had a Constitutional right to the return of the fugitive slaves. H e even went f u r t h e r and frankly said of the abolition societies, " I think their operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable." And finally he made an eloquent plea for the r e t u r n of good feeling between the North and South and the preservation of the Union. We should be deceived if we should judge by such vigorous denunciations of Webster as are to be found in Whittier's stirring poem of "Ichabod," or the utterances of Lowell, Emerson, and others of the New England group of writers, that he had betrayed the interests of his section. Rather the election of Samuel Eliot to a seat in Congress from a Boston constituency, defeating Charles Sumner, the Free Soil candidate, overwhelmingly, showed that the people followed Webster and Clay in

7°

The Soul of

America

preferring the salvation of the Union to the abolition of slavery. T w o hundred thousand copies of Webster's speech were distributed, and the general feeling was that he had done a wise thing in helping to placate the South. It is worth noting that years later Whittier, in his poem " T h e Lost Occasion," practically took back the harsh things he had said of Webster in 1850. Jackson died in 1845, Webster and Clay in 1852, and the defense of the Union passed on to another generation. T h e two men who took the leading parts in the new phase of the struggle, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, present one of the strange dramatic spectacles which come seldom in the life of a nation. Rivals in love, rivals for the senatorial office from the same state, rivals for the Presidency, they represent in some ways similar ideals and in others vastly different ones. Both were devoted to the Union, both were examples of that political philosophy which rested its hopes upon the people, and both were natural leaders. Moreover, both men rose from very modest circumstances and were products of that pioneer spirit which is distinctly American. Both were ambitious for the Presidency and both planned to achieve it. Both wTere great statesmen and able politicians. Lincoln was the greater statesman and the shrewder politician, and they were rivals through no accident but because of the fundamental difference in their points of view. Douglas was an exponent of the doctrine of local selfgovernment. As Chairman of the Committee on the Territories, he fought hard for Clay's Compromise Bill of 1850, and his Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 contained the same principle. He stood not only at this time but at all times for the right of a locality to determine its own fate. T o him it seemed tyranny for one State to determine the life of another. If Kansas wanted slavery, she should have it, and if she did not want slavery, no power should force it upon her. He had no love for slavery, although he had

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71

married the daughter of a slave owner, and when his father-in-law's estate had been settled, he had refused to accept any slave as his property. His natural sympathies and his great desire to keep the Union together brought him into the position of a leader which his party could not as a whole support. Both the Southern Democrats and the Abolitionists were forcing the issue, and, while the people of the United States had indicated by their choice of Pierce in 1852 and Buchanan in 1856 that the policy of compromise was a winning one, the fates were fighting against Douglas. T h e story of his great debates with Lincoln in 1858 has often been told. T h e immediate result was the re-election of Douglas as Senator from Illinois and the ultimate effect was his defeat in i860 as a candidate for President. His whole philosophy of life was to look at the immediate occasion rather than to take the longer view, and when Lincoln pressed that seemingly innocent question at Freeport, Douglas replied that no matter what the Supreme Court of the United States might decree, the inhabitants of a territory could by "unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of slavery." T h e answer won him the election—for it appealed to the free soil advocates in Illinois, but from that moment the South cooled to him. Never were two more fateful years in the history of the United States than those which followed the election of Douglas. Rapidly it became apparent that the Southern leaders would not accept him as a candidate for President, that they had determined to disrupt the Democratic Party unless they could frame a platform which secured the extension of slavery into the Territories. It was not only slavery they were fighting for, it was for the control of the United States. Many an historian has drawn a picture of the convention at Charleston in i860, of the atmosphere of serious purpose which animated both wings of the Democratic Party, of the dramatic withdrawal of

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most of the Southern delegates, well knowing that this meant the ruin of the party which had, with a few brief intervals, ruled the nation since Jefferson's day. With two candidates for President, Douglas representing the Northern Democrats and Breckenridge the Southern, the ultimate result was certain. A f t e r his defeat by Lincoln in i860, Douglas soon passed out of life. He made his last gesture of chivalry when, at Lincoln's inauguration, seeing the embarrassment the President felt in the manipulation of his silk hat, Douglas stepped forward and held it for his rival during the ceremony. T h e n , returning to Illinois, he spent his last efforts in holding that State safe for the Union. T h e doctrine he represented soon passed also out of favor, but today, from the mouths of men so different as Chief Justice Hughes, Governor Smith, Governor Ritchie, and Governor Franklin Roosevelt, there are sounding doctrines concerning the supreme duty of allowing the States to determine their own concerns, which sound strangely like those which lost Douglas the Presidency of the United States. Between the adjournment of the Democrats at Charleston and the final split at Baltimore, the new Republican Party met at Chicago. If gloom and tragic foreboding ruled at Charleston, all was noise and optimism at the western city, for victory was sensed afar and the trained politicians of the old Whig Party rubbed shoulders with the idealists whose great hope was for abolition. And already the delegation from Pennsylvania was busy framing a plank for an increase in the tariff, the foundation for future triumphs. How the unexpected happened, how Seward, the choice of most of the leaders, was defeated by the enthusiasm of Lincoln's followers and by the shrewd promises of office, is now an old story. T h e Republican managers, with the example of the Democratic victories with Pierce and Buchanan before them, chose to take a comparatively unknown lawyer from Illinois,

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who had made few enemies, instead of the brilliant Governor of New York, who had made many foes by his pronounced opinions on the "irrepressible conflict" between the North and the South. Those who believe in a Divine power can find abundant evidence in the choice by this turbulent gathering with its daily conflict between "Seward's toughs from New York" and "the rail splitter's gang from Illinois," of a candidate who has become in the eyes of the American nation the symbol of their devotion to an ideal of the Union, and the unfading memory of whose lofty character has become one of the most precious spiritual assets of the Republic. It is no mere myth of history which identifies Abraham Lincoln with the salvation of the Union. N o t w i t h s t a n d ing his change of view on the subject of slavery, his devotion to the Union was consistent, and it shaped every important action of his political career. He came of stock that had moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, from New Jersey to Virginia, from Virginia through North Carolina to Kentucky, and from Kentucky through Indiana to Illinois. Just as Douglas represented the principle of local self-government, so Lincoln came to represent the control by the majority of the people in all sections of the country of those who differed with that majority. T o preserve the Union, he believed, the best method was to find out what the people wanted and insist on carrying out their will. His actions were at all times an expression of the community, small or large, in which he lived, and when he became President, he became the mouthpiece of the real feeling of the nation concerning the Union, slavery, or any other problem he faced. It was his great service that in studying the will of the people he really understood them, better than the politicians with whom he was surrounded, better even than the idealists like Lowell and Emerson, for whom he would not go fast enough. His unerring sense of what would prove to be the best policy in the long run rather than for immediate advantage is

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well illustrated in his early tactics in the contests with Douglas in Illinois. In 1854 he stated publicly, " M u c h as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved." But by 1858 when he was nominated for Senator, he had changed his mind. In the speech delivered at Springfield, before the State Convention, he took the position, advanced for that time and against the wishes of his political advisers: If w e c o u l d first k n o w w h e r e w e are, a n d w h i t h e r w e are tending, w e c o u l d better j u d g e w h a t to d o , a n d h o w to d o it. W e are n o w f a r i n t o the fifth y e a r since a p o l i c y w a s initiated w i t h the a v o w e d o b j e c t a n d c o n f i d e n t p r o m i s e of p u t t i n g an e n d to slavery agitation. U n d e r the o p e r a t i o n of that p o l i c y , that a g i t a t i o n has n o t o n l y not ceased, b u t has c o n s t a n t l y a u g m e n t e d . I n m y o p i n i o n , it w i l l n o t cease until a crisis shall h a v e been r e a c h e d a n d passed. " A h o u s e d i v i d e d a g a i n s t itself c a n n o t s t a n d . " I b e l i e v e this governm e n t c a n n o t e n d u r e p e r m a n e n t l y half slave a n d h a l f free. I d o n o t e x p e c t the U n i o n to b e dissolved—I d o n o t e x p e c t the h o u s e to f a l l — b u t I d o e x p e c t it w i l l cease to b e d i v i d e d . It will b e c o m e all o n e thing, or all the other. E i t h e r the o p p o n e n t s of slavery w i l l arrest the f u r t h e r s p r e a d of it, a n d p l a c e it w h e r e the p u b l i c m i n d shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of u l t i m a t e e x t i n c t i o n ; or its advocates w i l l push it f o r w a r d till it shall b e c o m e alike lawf u l in all the States, old as w e l l as n e w , N o r t h as well as S o u t h .

H e was not, of course, the first to express this idea, as it is found in other words in Whittier's Justice and Expediency in 1 8 3 3 , but the force of it lay in the fact that many people knew in their hearts it was true although they did not wish to acknowledge it. His policy of " p l a y i n g the long g a m e " continued through his debates with Douglas. H e was fighting for a high moral issue, the salvation of the Union through the checking of the power of the slave States, and he was determined that the policy of compromise should cease. H e broke therefore with the traditional policy of Webster, Clay, and the great W h i g leaders of an earlier generation. A g a i n he was warned by his friends that if he forced Douglas to take a more advanced position in favor of free

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soil, Douglas would win, as he did. But Lincoln, consistent in his own course, was thinking in larger terms, not of Illinois but of the nation. In his last speech he gave utterance to a few words in which he showed how he realized the real cleavage between the two political philosophies of this country: T h a t is the real issue. T h a t is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. T h e y are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time and will ever continue to struggle. T h e one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.

His election was made the signal for secession. How sincere was the belief of the seceding leaders in their cause can easily be seen in reading the speeches made by men like Jefferson Davis in announcing in the Senate the withdrawal of their States from the Union. Lincoln realized this sincerity, but even he seems not to have understood the inevitability of war. He seemed to many to move too slowly, but if we read his First Inaugural Address carefully, we shall recognize his earnest efforts at conciliation of the South and his consistent standpoint that the Southern States could not secede; that they were still in the Union, and that he proposed to execute the laws of the United States everywhere within its borders. Here again he was planning for the future, and how simple would have been the process of Reconstruction if he had lived! He realized, too, how important it was to have the first blow struck by the South. In the light of events, it is easy now to see his wisdom, but it was not easy then. If he had pursued a more vigorous policy—sent troops into the seceded States at once and seized the leaders, he would not have had the North behind him. But when the guns of Beauregard were fired at the flag of the United States on

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Fort Sumter, the reaction created in the American soul something it had not felt since the Revolution. T h e War of 1 8 1 2 was a war of resentment; the Mexican War, one of aggression. In neither was the sense of imminent danger felt. But at least after Bull Run, Washington lived in constant terror of Stonewall Jackson or of Lee, and through the long struggle the soul of America, both North and South, was tested. As Lowell well said in February 1861, in his essay " E Pluribus Unum," W h e n s u c h a c o n t i n g e n c y arises, it is f o r a m o m e n t difficult to g e t r i d of o u r h a b i t u a l associations, a n d feel that w e are n o t a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by m u t u a l consent or on t h e d e m a n d of o n e or m o r e of its m e m b e r s , b u t a n a t i o n , w h i c h c a n n e v e r a b d i c a t e its right, a n d c a n n e v e r s u r r e n d e r it w h i l e v i r t u e e n o u g h is l e f t in the p e o p l e to m a k e it w o r t h

retaining.

I t w o u l d seem to b e the w i l l of G o d that f r o m t i m e to t i m e the m a n h o o d of nations, like that of i n d i v i d u a l s , s h o u l d b e tried b y g r e a t d a n g e r s or b y great o p p o r t u n i t i e s . If the m a n h o o d b e there, it m a k e s t h e g r e a t o p p o r t u n i t y o u t of the g r e a t d a n g e r ; if it b e n o t there, then the g r e a t d a n g e r o u t of the great

opportunity.

T h e bitter railing, the contemptuous remarks concerning Lincoln's slowness are now forgotten, but they made his path, as they had done that of Washington, a hard one. Another distressing circumstance of Lincoln's career was the gratuitous advice and counsel of his friends. As a characteristic utterance which became literature through its great clarity and fitness of expression to the thought is his reply to Horace Greeley, who had published in the New York Tribune on August 19, 1862, an address to the President which he called the "prayer of 20,000,000 people"—urging complete emancipation. Lincoln's reply is illuminating because it shows clearly the relative importance he placed upon the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the Union. Executive

Mansion

W a s h i n g t o n , A u g u s t 22,

1862

HON. HORACE GREELEY. DEAR SIR: I h a v e j u s t r e a d yours of the 1 9 t h , addressed t o m y -

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self through the New York Tribune. If there be in it any statements or assumptions of fact which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not, now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right. As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing," as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. T h e sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free. Yours, A . LINCOLN

W h e n this reply was sent to Greeley, the rough draft of the E m a n c i p a t i o n Proclamation was in Lincoln's desk. H e was waiting for a U n i o n victory to m a k e a preliminary a n n o u n c e m e n t of the Proclamation. T h a t victory came when McClellan was restored to the c o m m a n d of the A r m y of the P o t o m a c and stopped L e e at A n t i e t a m . It must always be r e m e m b e r e d that L i n c o l n freed the

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slaves only in Confederate territory, not in the States which were loyal to the Union. Perhaps no one has described Lincoln's conduct so well as Lowell did in these lines: T h e cautious, but steady, advance of his policy during the war was like that of a R o m a n army. H e left behind him a firm road on which public confidence could follow; he took America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts became colonies.

Probably of all Lincoln's utterances the "Address at Gettysburg" on November 19, 1863, has had most effect upon the soul of America. Its remarkable cadence, its artistic balance of thought, the unity and variety of its sentences, and its striking climax, which shows Lincoln again as one of the great adapters of other men's thoughts, have all continued to make it a masterpiece. T h e myth of its preparation on the train has marred to a certain degree the dignity of the speech, for Lincoln knew in advance that he was to speak and, according to his secretaries Nicolay and Hay, he always made preparation for important occasions. He was celebrating, too, "those who here gave their lives that the nation might live." It was truly no accident that one of the greatest expressions of belief in the government by the people of the United States rather than by the States, should have been uttered on the battlefield which practically decided the war. When one stands on that field on the spot where the Union center lay, and visualizes the attack on the third day which broke against "the guns of Doubleday," it is Virginia and Tennessee that he thinks of as charging across the wheatfield. Every schoolboy knows that the pick of the infantry of these two States made that gallant charge. How many remember that it was met and broken largely by the Pennsylvania troops? T h o u g h State pride is reflected in the monuments that now stud Cemetery Ridge, they fought then as soldiers of the Union.

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As the time drew near when the people were to decide whether Lincoln was to be re-elected and carry on his work, he was dejected and doubtful of success. There was, however, no doubt in the mind of the nation, and his sweep was overwhelming. Fired perhaps by this tribute, his Second Inaugural Address is one of his finest efforts, ending with the well-known words: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan —to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

It ended with a note of peace and reconciliation, with a hope of a reunited Union, that he was not to see. His death was a great blow to the cause of the Union, but to the South it was an even greater tragedy. For with his prestige Lincoln might have averted some of the horrors of Reconstruction. His belief that the Confederate States had never been out of the Union pointed the natural path of reawakened good will. But it was not to be. In another sense, his death placed a seal of consecration upon his work, and the different facets of his great character began to shine clearly in the light of his martyrdom. Of no one in our history have such lofty and such veracious things been said. Lowell's portrait in his "Harvard Commemoration Ode" and his prose essay "Abraham Lincoln" give the best rounded pictures from among the tributes paid by those who knew him. Both are too long to quote completely, but these lines seem to demand utterance: He knew to bide his time, And can his fame abide, Still patient in his simple faith sublime, Till the wise years decide. Great captains, with their guns and drums, Disturb our judgment for the hour,

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But at last silence comes; T h e s e all are gone, and, standing like a tower, O u r children shall behold his fame. T h e kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, N e w birth of our new soil, the first AmericanI

T h e sincerity, the courage, the humanity of Lincoln have since his death become our national inheritance. Less of an abstraction than Washington, his very weaknesses have endeared him to his race, and his sense of humor has brought him closer to us. Other qualities, not perhaps so apparent, were just as real. T h e essential nobility of his nature was recognized first apparently by George Henry Boker in his Phi Beta Kappa Poem, "Our Heroic Themes," read at Harvard, J u l y 20, 1865. L o r d of himself, an inborn gentleman,

is the way Boker put it, and it is striking that it was the Philadelphia patrician who saw the kinship of Lincoln with those to whom elevation brings no embarrassment. T h e mysticism in Lincoln has never been sufficiently emphasized, but it is one of his salient qualities. One phase of his deeply religious feeling is his constant reference to God. Practically every one of his great public utterances, from his Farewell at Springfield to his last Inaugural refers simply and naturally to his trust and dependence upon a power higher than his own. There is no pietism in this, and the unobtrusive quality of his faith has been one of the sources of the deep hold of his words upon the American people of whatever creed. Another phase of his mysticism, not so apparent in his actions, is mirrored in his countenance. T h e curious lapses into melancholy which came at certain important moments in his life, such as the days immediately before his marriage, mark him as one of those true sons of the northern races, to whom is given an insight into the future, for which they pay in the present. Of all who have

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written of him, perhaps the only one to recognize this with poetic insight has been Edwin Arlington Robinson in his tribute, " T h e Master." Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among T h e mysteries that are untold, T h e face we see was never young N o r could it ever have been old.

It is this haunting melancholy which shines in his eyes and is expressed in the furrows and deep lines of his face. Unconsciously this aspect of Lincoln has won for him the sympathy of all. While his fame lives, his brooding figure will be a disturbing presence to the smug, the complacent, and the selfish elements of the American nation. During the Civil W a r the American soul met the test on the whole supremely well. In spite of profiteering, desertions, and incompetence on both sides, the spirit of the people rose level with the occasion. It was a time of individual and national consecration to an ideal, which left its indelible mark. Many years after the war, I heard J u l i a Ward Howe recite " T h e Battle H y m n of the R e p u b l i c . " As the little old lady in her lace cap gave with dramatic fervor the lines that had come to her in the sleepless night of their creation, we were taken back to the dark moments of 1862 when the fate of the nation was trembling in the balance, and we could almost catch again the inspiration which the lovers of the Union must have felt when they read the hymn on the front page of the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1862, underneath the flag which, throughout the war, appeared on every issue of the magazine. T h e best way to understand what the Civil W a r meant to the soul of America is to read, not the record of battles, but to follow the outpourings of the spirit of both sides, in the lyrics inspired by the conflict. T h e vast mass of the war poetry has of course disappeared, but such noble odes as Henry T i m r o d ' s "Ethnogenesis," in which he cele-

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brated the birth of the Confederacy, such stirring songs as Randall's "Maryland, My Maryland," and Pike's "Dixie," are to be matched only with " T h e Battle H y m n " or "We Are Coming Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More," sung by the troops who marched by Lincoln when the first appeal to arms was over and the grinding care of the contest had begun to show itself. It would be a valuable lesson not only in our history but also in toleration, if every boy and girl in the North were made to read Timrod's "Carolina" and "Charleston," Ticknor's "Little Giffen of Tennessee" and " T h e River," or Father Ryan's " T h e Conquered Banner" and " T h e Sword of Robert Lee." They would understand then that the South was fighting for self-government, not primarily for slavery. And every Southern student should read Boker's "Ode to America," Brownell's " T h e Bay Fight," and, of course, Lowell's great "Ode," the culmination of the war poetry of the North. T h e n the spirit of those who believed in the Union will live again. T h e verses which arise in memory of dead heroes had also their important place in revealing the spirit of the time. But it so happened that some of the best from the artistic point of view, like Boker's "Dirge for a Soldier," written on the death of General Kearny, or Mrs. Preston's "Dirge for Ashby," celebrate minor figures in the struggle. A curious situation develops here. Lincoln's eminence has of course overshadowed that of the other leaders who labored to preserve the Union during the Civil War. But when we read the literature written during that struggle, we see how few personalities evoked enthusiasm on the Northern side. Outside of McClellan and Sheridan, none of the Union generals, even Grant, touched the imagination of the North as did Lee, Jackson, both Albert Sidney and Joseph Johnston, Beauregard, and others of the Southern commanders. They have remained symbols of "the lost cause," the justice of which

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no Southerner has ever doubted, even if he has ceased to regret the outcome of the war. From the Civil War to the close of the nineteenth century, the fibres of the Union were tested in many ways. It was a great period of expansion, geographically and materially. T h a t the American soul grew in a corresponding degree, intellectually, artistically, and spiritually, is not so easily established. T o many it seems as though the crudity and political corruption of the years immediately after the Civil War changed the spirit of America hopelessly for evil. T o the observer, however, who can see the fundamental causes for this period of national extravagance, the review is not so appalling. We are concerned not with a eulogy but with an examination of the American soul in its historic development. T o any impartial American the period of Reconstruction can bring nothing but shame. After a war, in which brain and heart and will are stimulated into heroic action, there comes an inevitable reaction. T h e crudity, the speculation, the breakdown of standards were to be expected. But in the treatment of the great problem of rebuilding the Union came a test of character even more difficult than that of saving it, and the leadership of the North was not able to meet it. Had Lincoln lived, it is probable that his wise and liberal policy would have prevailed, but Andrew Johnson, who tried to carry out that policy, had not that surefooted mind's unfaltering skill, And supple-tempered will T h a t bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.

T h e r e has rarely been so complete a reversal of opinion as in the case of Johnson. He was stubborn, and he talked wildly at times, but in the larger issues of Reconstruction he was right and Congress was wrong. Yet the radicals like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, by political trickery, by misrepresentation of conditions in

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the South, by terrorization of their opponents, and by the capitalization of all the forces of intolerance, carried through Congress measures which turned back the hands of civilization for years. T h e immediate issue was the determination of the terms upon which the Southern States were to be governed. But it soon became a contest between the legislative and executive departments of the national government for control. T h i s was also perhaps inevitable and has been a familiar occurrence in our history. T h e executive has usually been right and the legislature wrong in such contests. But never in our history has a Congress gone to such lengths and threatened so seriously to disrupt the whole fabric of government. Johnson's first message to Congress is an admirable document. He did not write it, but he had the wisdom to ask the help of the historian George Bancroft, who presented a wise, earnest plea for co-operation between the departments of the government, and related the steps Johnson had already taken to help the Southern States to reorganize themselves. Johnson had proceeded upon the principle for which the war had been fought—that no State could secede from the Union, and therefore that the Southern States never had been out of it. H e invited them to set up State governments, provided that they accepted the T h i r t e e n t h Amendment, prohibiting slavery. H e also invited them to send representatives to Congress, but recognized that that body had the right to accept or reject those who had been elected. N o fairer offer was ever made. But the Congress which met in December, 1865, was determined that they and not the President should conduct the reconstruction of the South. T h e Southern States had organized under the control of their best elements, but Congress rejected the representatives who had been elected. Having refused to permit a State to secede, they now took the ground that the States had been out of the Union, and proceeded to

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lay down conditions under which they should be readmitted. These conditions grew harder and more impossible as the power of the radical element strengthened. T h e burning question was, of course, that of negro suffrage. T h e Southern whites naturally objected to giving to millions of untrained persons a vote upon questions of which they knew nothing, but there is good evidence that the negro would have been much more secure in his civil rights and would even have secured suffrage more quickly, if it had not been forced upon the South by the Fourteenth Amendment. T h i s extraordinary measure, whose acceptance was made by Congress a condition of readmission to the Union, stands alone among the provisions of our fundamental law in implying bad faith upon the part of a State and providing penalties in case of such action. It also is alone in dealing with particular groups of individuals who are to be forbidden the franchise, and it expressly takes away the pardoning power from the executive, where it belongs, and transfers it to Congress. Efforts were at once made to have it declared unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court, under the influence apparently of Chief Justice Chase, declared that in a contest between the other two branches of the Government it had no jurisdiction, so that refuge was lost. T o expect the South to accept willingly an amendment which allowed an ignorant negro to vote and at the same time forbade a man like Robert E. Lee to do so, was out of the question. Johnson, in the meantime, was vetoing the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, the Civil Rights Bill, and other measures, on the ground that they were unnecessary and that in any case, with the eleven States most nearly concerned shut out of Congress, he disapproved of them. Congress now took another lamentable step. In time of peace they supplanted the civil government of the South, established military government, and called for

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conventions to draft new constitutions, to which conventions all negroes should be eligible. At the same time, by means of the "iron-clad test oath," they shut out practically every white man of real leadership in the South. T h e party which had stood for personality was in a hopeless minority in Congress, and now it was to be deprived of its leaders in the South. Drunk with power, Congress took from the Supreme Court the right to deal with military suppression of free speech in Mississippi, and seemed all powerful in the nation. But, worried somewhat by Democratic victories in New York and Pennsylvania in 1867, and by the refusal of several Northern States to permit negro suffrage, Thaddeus Stevens secured the passage through the House of Representatives of a bill impeaching the President. T h e immediate charge was his removal of Edwin M. Stanton from the Secretaryship of War and the appointment of Grant and later of others whom the Senate refused to confirm. Congress had passed in 1867 a Tenure of-Office Act which took away from the President the right to remove his Cabinet officers. Johnson believed the law unconstitutional, for every President had exercised the right of removal from office, and his removal of Stanton was simply preparatory to having the Supreme Court decide as to the constitutionality of the Tenure-of Office Act. It was shown at the trial that Stanton himself in a Cabinet meeting had denounced the Tenure-ofOffice Act and declared it unconstitutional. T h e Senate, however, refused to allow this evidence to be admitted. T h e trial of President Johnson was a party measure, designed to punish a man who differed with Congress, but, as it proceeded, it became of infinitely more importance. T h e counsel for the President, Henry Stanbery, Benjamin Curtis, William M. Evarts, William S. Groesbeck and Thomas A. R . Nelson, demolished, from the legal point of view, the arguments that were brought forward by the Managers for the House. T h e question

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remained, however, whether for party purposes the Senate would impeach the President in order to place their President pro tempore, Senator Wade, in the President's chair. In short, it was a double test of democratic institutions, and while only a few recognized it, it was an acid test of the American character. Senator Howard was taken ill on Tuesday, May 12, and as the vote was certain to be close, the Senate adjourned until Saturday. Meanwhile, from all over the country, pressure was brought upon the members. As James Ford Rhodes in his History well puts it, " T h e General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church sitting in Chicago appointed an hour for prayer that Senators might be saved from error, and 'error' meant voting 'not guilty.' " There were fifty-four Senators, and therefore thirtysix votes, from two-thirds of the members, were necessary for conviction. T h e twelve Democrats were certain to vote for acquittal, so that it was necessary for only seven Republicans to vote in the negative to save Johnson, and, incidentally, the country, from the disgrace of an impeachment upon a mere technicality and for the purpose of revenge. Senators Fessenden, Trumbull, and Grimes, the last of whom had been struck with paralysis but who continued to come to the sessions, had declared their intention to vote "no"—Senators Henderson of Missouri, Fowler of Tennessee, Van Winkle of West Virginia, and Ross of Kansas were doubtful. T h e methods by which they were approached, while their political future and, in Ross's case, their lives, were threatened, seem incredible to us, but the result would be less important to us if the situation had not been so acute. On May 16, 1868, the voting began. On the eleventh charge, for there had been plenty of accusations, all depending, however, upon one fact, the vote was 35 to 19 and the motion was lost. All the doubtful ones had voted as their consciences and oaths dictated. Howard and Grimes had to be carried to the Senate Chamber, but

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when the Chief Justice presiding suggested that they remain seated instead of rising as the rest had done, they insisted on making their votes as audible as possible and rose with the assistance of friends. But the ordeal was not over. T h e Chief Justice decided that the votes on the other counts should at once be taken, but the Radicals forced an adjournment in order to coerce the seven members who had defied the power of Thaddeus Stevens' machine. T h e n came something that was even more shameful. Benjamin F. Butler, one of the House Managers, searched private letters and bank accounts to throw suspicion of bribery upon the seven Republicans who had voted for acquittal. For ten days he labored, but he produced nothing. Yet in that time he had smirched his country's name abroad to an extent from which it recovered only after many years. Ross again was made the target for every form of threat, but he stood firm. On May 26 the vote stood the same as on the first three counts—35 to 19—and the Senate adjourned. T h e effect of the acquittal of the President has been far-reaching. It has been misunderstood by foreign historians who, familiar with the dismissal of a ministry by a parliamentary vote, cannot understand the significance of it. But the President is not merely a Prime Minister. It would be a sad day for the United States if the Chief Executive of the United States should become a mere creature of Congress. He stands in the people's eye for something far higher, and the victory of Andrew Johnson has increased the dignity of the office of the Executive, to the advantage of the United States. While the intensity of party prejudice which led honest men to vote for a conviction which their legal training must have told them was absurd can only be regretted, the very bitterness of the strife makes the fact stand out that seven men faced political suicide rather than take the easier way of party loyalty. T h a t they were taking it for the right and not for Andrew Johnson made it all the

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more significant. Finally, the acquiescence in the decision by all sides was another instance of that saving grace in the American character, that acceptance of a decision once made, which is the best hope of democratic institutions. T h e Reconstruction program was in the meantime carried through, at least in part, and constitutions made by the lower elements of the whites, by "carpetbaggers" and negroes were made the basis of readmission of the Southern States, except Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas. T h e States "readmitted" promptly sent Republican members to Congress. T o meet this condition it seemed to thousands of Southerners that since they could hope for nothing under the laws of Congress, they must organize secretly to prevent the negro ascendancy which was otherwise inevitable. In consequence the Ku Klux Klan grew up and served for a time to intimidate the negro and prevent his voting or exercising other civil rights. That this intimidation was not very serious in 1868 is proved by the fact that Grant carried North and South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. But as the orgy of corruption began to grow more violent, as the legislatures of the Southern States doubled their debts or added millions to them, the Ku Klux Klan, which seems at first to have been a defensive measure against the "Loyal Leagues," or groups of negroes and carpetbaggers, became more active. By 1872 the whites had once more secured control, but it was at a terrible price. T h e murders, the midnight raids and lashings, the terrorism which both sides created, were not only bad in themselves, but they were unnatural to the American character and they have left an effect which is felt even today. Looked at even from the Northern point of view, it is difficult to see how the Southern white could have proceeded in any other way to regain his control, and there is no doubt that the outrages were exaggerated for party purposes. Shut out by Congressional tyranny from

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the right to vote and denied access at first to the Supreme Court by similar means, the leaders of Southern thought were driven outside the law to preserve their racial integrity. A vivid picture of the time is presented not only in the K u K l u x Reports, but also more dramatically in Albion W. Tourgee's A Fool's Errand and Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock, novels written from the point of view of a Northern Republican and a Southern Democrat. Even more imaginative is Paul Hamilton Hayne's poetic appeal in his "South Carolina to the States of the North," written especially to those who formed the original thirteen, the only ones from whom South Carolina cared to beg for help. T h e final settlement practically nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This should have taught the American people that a legal measure, even in the Constitution, cannot be enforced if it is against the fundamental principles on which human nature is based. But there is a danger that grew up in consequence of the K u K l u x Klan which is larger even than the question which it solved. T h e success of the Klan showed that a carefully planned and secret attack upon an unpopular law can be successful, and the lesson was an evil one. T h e recent creation of an organization in the South with features of secrecy, and with intolerance as its basis, gained momentum because of its use of the old name and the tradition of its success. T h e principles of the new and the old K u K l u x Klan were, of course, radically different. In 1868 there was a momentous issue. A chivalric people who had fought to the last for a cause they loved and believed in, had accepted the issue of Avar and, with characteristic American acceptance of fate, asked only to be allowed to solve their own problems and to rebuild their civilization upon its ruins. Faced with tyranny, under guise of law, they saw no recourse but to strike back by the establishment of an invisible government, which in their eyes was no more unconstitutional than

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the acts of Congress. T h e modern K u K l u x Klan was founded for no such emergency. It was based on one of the waves of intolerance which sweeps periodically over the country, and it capitalized the love of secret societies and the mummery of office holding that belongs to a low level of our social organization. It seems to have been concerned more with religious than racial intolerance in the South, but it could never have obtained the hold there which it did, had it not been for the romantic traditions of the old name. T h e point is, however, that the establishment of organized lawlessness as an institution is an evil at all times, and it is distinctly un-American. A n d for the creation of this organization Thaddeus Stevens and his group of Radicals were primarily responsible. T h e power of Thaddeus Stevens and his group had rested upon certain natural results of the Civil War. T h e Republican party was identified in the minds of the majority of people in the North with the preservation of the Union. Not only a national pride, but also a concrete bonded indebtedness of about $2,700,000,000, demanded in the minds of that majority a continuation of the Republican party in power. T h e million or more soldiers who had fought for the Union, organized into the Grand Army of the Republic, became a political unit which helped in this perpetuation. Every Republican president elected from 1868 to 1896 had been a soldier. Moreover, the granting of homesteads free to the farmers who settled the vast acres of the public domain broke down, partly, the old alliance of the farmer of the West with the planter of the South which had kept the Democratic party in power so long. W h e n the negro vote in the North was added to this group of potential Republicans, it is no wonder that Stevens felt secure in his hold upon the country. If he had had the wisdom to wait for negro emancipation, he might have built up a white organization in the South upon the remnants of the old W h i g party, which would have at least made that region debat-

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able ground. But instead he and Sumner solidified the white race into a Democratic opposition. Soon the inevitable happened, and the Republican party, which had begun on the basis of free soil, a great moral issue, became once more, like the Federalists and the Whigs, a party devoted to the perpetuation of certain institutions of which the tariff and the railroads were the chief. There was nothing surprising in this. Lincoln himself had been in favor of a high tariff, a central bank, and the homestead law, and had been a railroad attorney. Having things their own way, and having elected Grant, who was personally honest, but was a child in matters of finance, a reign of corruption began which culminated in the exposures of the Whiskey Ring, led to the impeachment of the Secretary of War for flagrant sale of offices for cash, and through the revelations of the complicity of Grant's private secretary, Babcock, shook confidence in the President himself. T h e exposures of corruption in the National Government under Republican rule were matched by those of the municipal government of New York City under the Democratic rule of "Boss" Tweed. In both cases the guilty parties were attacked most vigorously by men of their own political faith, Benjamin H. Bristow, who became Secretary of the Treasury in 1874, leading the attack upon the Whiskey Ring, and Samuel J . Tilden and Charles O'Conor securing the arrest and conviction of Tweed. In the latter case the editorials of the New York Times and the cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly did yeoman service. What effect did this wholesale corruption have upon the American soul? On the whole, a bad one. When corruption is widespread, and especially when a President of the United States interferes, as Grant did, to save a criminal from punishment, the public becomes indifferent to disclosures of dishonesty in high places. Since both parties were tainted, no effective crusade could be made

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by either. In consequence, there began that apathy to the disclosure of dishonesty in public affairs, that tendency on the part of the American to take it more or less for granted, which has lasted until the present day. T h e dishonesty of Blaine in his dealings with the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, brought to light in 1876, is beyond question, yet because his party wished to believe him innocent, he escaped, for the time being, from political disgrace. Yet Blaine waited a long time for the Presidential nomination. T h e party which owed its life to the institutions it cherished preferred to nominate a "safe" yet mediocre man like Hayes or Garfield, rather than a brilliant personality like "the plumed knight." In the Presidential campaign of 1876 the two parties for the first time since the Civil War faced each other on fairly even terms. T h e Southern States were back in the Union and, while they were not in entire control of their own elections, the party of personality had a candidate in Samuel J . Tilden, who, they felt, could carry New York and be elected. T h e ensuing struggle was to test the institutions of democracy to the utmost. Looking back at it now after many years, it seems hard to believe that Tilden and Hendricks could have been defeated. They stood for everything that the country needed—Tilden, as Governor of New York, had challenged successfully the power of Tammany Hall and stood for civil service reform, sound finance, and tariff revision. T h e Republican Convention had declined to nominate Bristow, who stood for the same things in the Republican councils, and had nominated a good but rather colorless man. But Blaine, Edmunds, and other spellbinders "waved the bloody shirt," and the very likelihood of the South's voting solidly for Tilden hurt him in the North. Hayes himself advised his party to keep "the dread of rebel rule" before the people. But with all this claptrap, the Republican managers had a strong candidate in the very fact that Hayes had few

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enemies, was a man of high personal character, and even reformers like Lowell voted for him, just as millions of Republicans voted for Coolidge in 1924 after the disclosures of the corruption of the Harding régime, because they wished to separate their party from the blame of corruption. When, on November 8, 1876, it became clear that Tilden had carried New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Connecticut, his election seemed certain. But while Tilden had 184 electoral votes without dispute, and 185 would elect him, the determination on the part of the party in power to keep in power was soon shown. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina appeared to be in doubt. As James Ford Rhodes, a Republican historian, puts it, 1 " H a d these been Northern states [Florida and Louisiana] the dispute would have ceased forthwith. These two states would have been conceded to Tilden, and his election secured: but under the carpet bag negro régime, the canvassing boards of Florida and Louisiana had the power to throw out votes on the ground of intimidation or fraud, and these boards were under the control of the Republicans." There is no need to narrate in detail the methods by which the returning Board of Louisiana, composed of four Republican members, two of whom were negroes and one of whom was under indictment, changed a majority for Tilden of 8900 to a Hayes majority of 4700. Similar methods were employed in South Carolina and Florida. Tilden had a popular majority of 250,000 and had won the Electoral College. But the Republican leaders who were in control in the Senate insisted that the power of the President of the Senate was limited to counting the votes as returned by the States. This sudden regard for the right of the States to be their own judges of their returns was only equalled by the determination of the Democrats, who controlled the House, to go behind the fraudulent State returns and reverse them. 1 History of the United States, VII, 228.

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T h i s impasse, with the country seething with charges and countercharges, was settled in a characteristic American way, by compromise. Five Senators, five Representatives and five Judges of the Supreme Court were selected as an Electoral Commission. T h a t they heard all the evidence and finally decided that it was not possible for Congress to go behind the returns of the States, and that the vote was eight to seven, in strict accordance with the politics of the Commissioners, must not be taken to mean that they did not seriously consider the evidence. T h a t the Republicans all voted to uphold the right of a State to decide its own elections, and the Democrats all voted for the rights of the national legislature to go behind the State returns, is not hard to understand, as the electors were human. Tilden and Hayes both behaved with propriety during the contest, which was not settled until March 2, two days before the day of inauguration. T i l d e n , of course, occupied the more difficult position. All Hayes had to do was to keep quiet. But Tilden had to keep his supporters quiet, which was more difficult. Offers of various kinds to seat him by force were made, and from military organizations whose past records were quite worthy of attention. But he resolutely waved aside any such offers, and the Democratic members of the Senate and House were equally American in their acquiescence in the decision once it was made. T h e House showed at times a disposition to turbulence, but Samuel J . Randall, the Speaker, won the respect of the country by his firmness in presiding at such a difficult time. What makes the Electoral Commission of such significance in our history is that it was an extra-legal body, not contemplated by the Constitution, which had no validity except by the creation of Congress, and yet its decisions, which practically stated that Congress had no right to question the decisions of the States, were put into effect by the votes of Congress itself!

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One significant result of the election was the restoration of the white supremacy in the South. As soon as Hayes withdrew the United States troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, the best elements in those states swept out of office the men who had been put there by the very election boards which had secured Hayes the Presidency. With magnificent inconsistency he supported the Democrats in their actions, and did it with less friction than would have been possible for a Democratic president. T h e most encouraging phase of this period is the manner in which the evils of democracy tend to cure themselves. When it seemed that the power of Boss Tweed was unshakable, and his administration had been endorsed by reputable citizens like John Jacob Astor and Moses Taylor,—a politician, James O'Brien, walked into the office of the New York Times and, at the risk of his life, gave that paper the evidence which ultimately led to Tweed's downfall. When the corruption of national affairs became intolerable, the formation of the Liberal Republican party in 1872 and the continued protests of men like Lowell and Curtis led eventually to the overthrow of the political oligarchy which is always the most sinister form of government. There has been no finer exposition of the qualities of the American soul than Lowell's address on Democracy in 1884 at Birmingham, England, and on The Place of the Independent in Politics, delivered in New York in 1888. Lowell's democracy may be best epitomized in Theodore Parker's phrase, " Y o u are as good as I am," which is as far removed from the other familiar expression, " I ' m as good as you are," as day is from night. We shall come back to these great public utterances later, for Lowell was a prophet as well as an idealist. His pertinent question, "Is it not the best security for anything to interest the largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its division?" points for-

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ward to the recent "splitting" of stock on the part of large public utility corporations in order to make as many persons as possible interested in their preservation from attack. Curtis, Lowell, and their group were not by any means theorists and idealists. T h e y forced civil service reform through Congress in 1883, and it was put into effect by President Arthur, who had come into office as a practical politician, which was only one more example of the sobering influence of great responsibility. Another great test of democratic institutions came in 1884. Blaine had waited long for his opportunity, and his party, which had been afraid that his earlier financial dealings would make him a vulnerable candidate, risked his nomination on the ground of his personal popularity. In taking him, the party of institutions was stepping out of its course, forgetting the lessons of 1848, when the Whigs won with a "personal" candidate and won for the last time. T h e situation, however, was desperate, for "ref o r m " was in the air, and the party in power was on the defensive. At once the independents in the Republican party organized, and when Grover Cleveland, the reform governor of New York, was nominated, thousands of socalled " M u g w u m p s " bolted the Blaine ticket. Cleveland is one of the justifications of democracy. A man who won his elections as mayor and as governor by his honesty, courage, and firmness of conviction, he presented to the voters in 1884 a perfect antithesis to Blaine. Blaine was a great personality; Cleveland, a great character; and the American people made their choice. In spite of the hostility of T a m m a n y Hall, which he had fought as governor, he was elected by the narrow margin of 1 1 4 9 votes in New York State. T h e campaign descended to the lowest depths of abuse on both sides, but again the inherent justice of the American reacted instantly to Cleveland's telegram to his campaign manager, when charges of immorality were first made against him. " T e l l

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the truth" became, in a sense, the issue of the campaign. He was also the symbol of the hope of the new generation, to whom the Civil War was a closed issue, who looked upon him as the champion of decent things. T h i s aspiration was put brilliantly in the nominating speech of Governor Bragg of Wisconsin: " T h e y love him most for the enemies he has made." It was not, however, entirely a question of a choice between individuals. Cleveland was elected in 1884 by Republican votes, and he embodied to them, probably unconsciously, the ideals which the party of institutions had always cherished. He was safer than Blaine, he stood in 1884 for no attack on any cherished institution, for his views on the tariff had not become definite. And his views on finance were "sounder" than Blaine's. Fundamentally, in their distrust of the brilliant man who already, as Secretary of State under Garfield, had almost embroiled us with Peru and Chile, for political purposes, the voting population ran true to their traditions. In 1888, after Cleveland had sent his message of tariff reform, and that sacred institution was threatened, the same silent but powerful vote defeated him and elected Benjamin Harrison, in the Electoral College, although Cleveland received one hundred thousand more votes than his rival. When the Republican party misunderstood this apparent mandate and, instead of letting things alone, passed the McKinley tariff bill in 1890, raising the cost of living to an abnormal point, Cleveland was re-elected. In 1892 he had become the symbol of positive leadership, in contrast to Harrison's negative qualities, and he justified the popular verdict. In his determination that every dollar coined by the United States should be equal in value, that Hawaii should be protected against American injustice even as Venezuela should be protected against British injustice, he was in keeping with the party principles he represented. In his action during the Pullman strike in Chicago in 1894, he went further than any Democratic presi-

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dent since Jackson had gone in crossing State lines for the preservation of order. T h e j u d g m e n t of his countrymen will p r o b a b l y agree with that of L o w e l l in 1887: I confess that I feel myself strongly attracted to M r . C l e v e l a n d as the best r e p r e s e n t a t i v e of the h i g h e r type of A m e r i c a n i s m that w e h a v e seen since L i n c o l n was snatched f r o m us. . . . W e are n o t here to t h a n k h i m as the h e a d of a party. W e are here to felicitate each other that the presidential chair has a man in it.

T h e greatest accomplishment of G r o v e r Cleveland was to restore to the office of President of the U n i t e d States the dignity w h i c h it had lacked since the death of Lincoln. H e accomplished this by his deeds rather than his words, t h o u g h some of his phrases, like " A public office is a p u b l i c trust," are likely to become classics of our political philosophy. H e was m u c h less of a party leader than L i n c o l n before h i m or Roosevelt and W i l s o n after him. In fact, despite his personal victories, he left the Democratic party divided and on its way to defeat. H e was better than his party, as any great man must be, and he was rewarded as no other man since Lincoln, with the people's confidence. D u r i n g the years from 1884 to 1896, he became the symbol of the growing unity of the nation. He saw the lines between the N o r t h and South gradually grow less definite, and it was one of the great misfortunes of A m e r i c a that the new sectionalism to come and the great foreign issues were to be dealt with by feebler hands. But it seems to be the lot of nations to have one great man at a time. W h i l e the conflict of political and social ideals was taking place in the nation's capital, the pioneer was still engaged in the West with the struggle against the forces of Nature. T h e emigrants to the Far West before and during the C i v i l W a r have been painted by the picturesque brush of Bret Harte and the pointed pen of M a r k T w a i n , both of w h o m belonged to the region and the time. T h e Far West objected to these portraits of its

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life, and there can be little doubt that the days were much less vivid and more law-abiding than " T h e Outcasts of Poker Flat" and Roughing It would suggest. But a portrait is always better than a photograph, and no statistics of emigration or of real estate values can call to life the mining camps and the cities of California and Nevada as do the pages of their fiction. A society made up of the most heterogeneous elements, in which the graduates of Eastern universities or of Oxford rubbed shoulders with the man from Pike Country, Missouri, or the Southern fire eater like Colonel Starbottle, produced contrasts, social and moral, which are the life of literature and which great literature has always sought to find in life. Bret Harte and Mark Twain may have colored too highly the episodes they relate, but one profound truth they did hit upon—that this melting pot of adventurers produced a new set of standards, which refused to accord with those the East had grown to believe were unassailable. T h e effect these standards produced upon the American soul was very great. In the Far West it bred a race who continued the democratic spirit of individual enterprise and individual judgment. Men were taken upon the basis of their own achievement, as the earliest pioneers had been, and not upon those of their ancestors. At first, the rapid growth of the country brought into being the extra-legal justice of the "Vigilantes," but soon the natural American desire for order came into conflict with the equally natural American ability to do without it, and the result was a series of collisions in which the "bad men" gradually disappeared, much earlier than the imitators of Bret Harte, who wrote without his first-hand knowledge, permitted their readers to believe. Probably the philosophy of later Western judgment has been put most accurately by Augustus Thomas in Arizona, when Henry Canby, the ranch owner, in speaking to Denton, a younger man, says:

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W e take a man on here and ask no questions. W e know when he throws his saddle on his horse, whether he understands his business or not. He may be a minister backslidin', or a banker savin' his last lung, or a train robber on his vacation—we don't care. A good many of our most useful men have made their mistakes. All wc care about now is, will they stand the gaff? W i l l they set sixty hours in the saddle, holdin' a herd that's trying to stampede all the time? Now, without makin' you any fine talk, you can give anyone of 'em the fifteen ball. I don't know whether it's somethin' you learned in the school, or whether you just happened to pick the right kind of a grandfather, or what. But your equal has never been in this territory in my time.

T h e American soul Avas tried in this settlement of the Far West by the inevitable conflict with the original holders of the soil. T h e pioneer found the Indian and the Spanish civilizations, and the processes by which he dispossessed them do not make pleasant reading. Broken treaties, "pacifications," like that of General Sheridan's suppression of the Blackfeet Tribe in 1870, Indian reprisals such as took place at the last fight of Custer at the Little Big Horn, in which no quarter was given, marked the steady elimination not so much of the Indian as of his hold on the soil. For gold and for land the American nation has committed or permitted wrongs whose mere recital seems a continued exaggeration. It is, of course, not only in the Far West that these took place, but the earlier aggressions at least left the Indian some place to which to go. As the pressure for land grew greater, the circle closed on the Indian. His actual numbers have shown a steady decrease since 1870, when the first real attempt was made at an estimate, which amounted to 383,712. In 1910 there were 265,683 Indians, according to the United States Census Bureau. In 1920 there were 244,437. ^ ' s a n open question, however, whether there were many more than 400,000 when the settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth were made. In this condition lies one explanation of the insolvable problem. T h e Indian needed vastly

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more room for his method of life than the white man. He did not, like the American, seek to possess and control the land; he adapted himself to it. He killed just enough buffalo for his necessities: when the American hunted buffalo, it was a slaughter. He did not desire land individually, for when the homestead law was made applicable to him in 1875 in Michigan, practically no applications were made. It is difficult to see how any agreement could have been reached between the pioneer and the Indian, because of this fundamental difference. When two races hate each other for their vices, it is bad enough, but when two races dislike each other for their virtues, it is impossible for them to come to a common understanding. T o the gold seeker, or the large ranch owner, the cattleman or the sheep man, the Indian's reverence for the soil and the landscape, his refusal to change it, seemed silly. How could the cowboy understand the subtle influence of the very contour of the country upon the rhythmic utterances of the Indian, when everything the Indian said to the cowboy seemed mere gibberish? On the other hand, the enterprise, the colossal schemes of the race which spanned the continent with railroads and annihilated time and space, seemed to the Indian mere foolishness. T i m e and space were the air he breathed, and while he submitted to domestication within narrowing borders, he degenerated under the process. In the meantime, the American spirit lost something of great beauty by its almost complete failure to understand the race whose land it had taken. T h e general conception of the Indian as a "savage" is, of course, a phase of the American character which comes straight down from its T e u t o n i c ancestry. T h e nobler side of the Indian had received little treatment in colonial literature, although the first tragedy written upon a native theme was Major Robert Rogers' Ponteach, in 1766, in which at least a sympathetic view of the Indian was presented. Dur-

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ing the great vogue of the romantic school in fiction and poetry, there was no lack of sympathetic interpretation of the Indian nature in Cooper and Longfellow, and how accurate the latter's understanding was can be appreciated only when we compare Hiawatha, for example, with Henry Schoolcraft's Algic Researches or Oneota, and see how closely Longfellow has followed the trained observer's narrative. T h e thousands who heard Edwin Forrest represent Metamora, the Last of the Wampanoags, saw also a heroic if somewhat peculiar creature, who spoke a dialect which was as much like any Indian tongue as Ossian's speech was like the original Irish. T h e very fact, however, that the romantic picture of the Indian was so heroic and dealt with past events discounted its effect upon the American mind and, if he sympathized with the sorrows of Metamora, he did nothing about it. Even under the later spur of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, or A Century of Dishonor, he contented himself with polite regret, and for any real understanding of the Indian as a human being in his own tribal relations we had to wait for the twentieth century, for such a play as The Arrow Maker, by Mary Austin, where the tragedy of the Chisera or priestess who is set apart from the tribe and loses human love in consequence, treated the Indian character in and for itself. Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy and Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop also represent this newer interpretation of the Indian nature. But it only needs a reading of Mary Austin's chapter on "Amerind Literature" in the Cambridge History of American Literature to realize how little the imaginative qualities of the American Indian have been understood by his conquerors, and how large a field of inspiration has been untilled by them in consequence. T h e Spanish civilization yielded with a briefer struggle but with more of a compromise. How deep rooted that civilization was is little understood by the average American, though some idea of its strength may be gained by

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witnessing the famous Mission Play, written by the California historian, John S. McGroarty, and performed annually at San Gabriel. T h e Spaniard or the Mexican, confronted with a demand that he register his ancestral acres and prove his title before the officials of an alien civilization, at first paid no attention to the demand. Then, when he found his patrimony seized by the pioneer, he used the methods of warfare familiar to the dispossessed in all lands. If the strangers wanted title deeds they should have them, and forgery met robbery with varying fortunes. Finally absorption on more even terms than was the case with the Indians became the natural consequence. T h e inevitable result to the conqueror of another race, the deepening of the human instinct for ruthlessness toward his own fellows, followed in the wake of the conquest of the Far West. This quality became more evident a little later when, toward the last decade of the century, the last frontier disappeared. With the free land gone, the struggle for possession became more acute. T h e cattle raisers who had looked upon the vast areas as their own were placed in a position similar to that of the Indian by the sheep herders who had more definite titles and who had fenced in their lands. More and more the individual lost out in the conflict with organization. T h e vast irrigation projects, the building of railroads, needed capital, and the natural result was the development, first of leaders like James J . Hill, who built up great organizations, and then the growing impersonality of corporations in place of the old individualism. Willa Cather, in A Lost Lady, has well distinguished between the earlier and later pioneers in railroad building. T h e first risked much and earned even the large rewards which the policy of Lincoln's administration gave them in the shape of land and privileges. T h e n came the manipulators, who took toll of their predecessors' earnings, but had done little themselves. It was this latter

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class which Frank Norris attacked so bitterly in The Octopus, with its fine study of the contest between the wheat growers and the railroad carriers. It is a different story when we turn to the pioneers of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Some of the problems became eventually the same, but the start was far different. It can best be seen by the contrast between such stories as Bret Harte's and those contained in Hamlin Garland's Main Travelled Roads or in his novel, Trail Makers of the Middle Border. There was little romance in the settling of Wisconsin and Iowa. There was no gold ahead or easy wealth of any kind. The pioneers here were more like the early colonists. Their object was a home, and yet the incurable restlessness and adventurous spirit led them to sell out and move further, as the prospect widened, from Wisconsin to Minnesota, then to Iowa and finally to Dakota. Perhaps the most vivid impression made by this chronicle of Garland's and the ones that succeed it, like A Son of the Middle Border, is that of the pioneer's wife, always regretting the change, but bravely meeting the border conditions. The quality of endurance entered the American soul of these pioneers just as the quality of ruthlessness entered those of the Far West. They were taking nothing that belonged to anyone else, for the land was the nation's and a free gift. But the last sentence of Garland's short story, The Return of a Private, remains long in the memory: T h e common soldier of the American volunteer army had returned. His war with the South was over, and his fight, his daily running fight with nature and against the injustice of his fellowmen, was begun again.

Here, too, as in the Far West, there was growing up a problem which the American people would have to face. Between 1870 and 1880 an area equal to that of France was added to the productive farming regions of the nation. By the end of the century this had grown to a do-

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main equal to France, England, and Germany combined. It was not to be expected that these vast possessions could be developed in the old individualistic way. Large combinations grew up and capital was needed to support them. T h e money lender, large and small, came into the picture, and the competition of large-scale production had its profound effect not only in the West, but also in the abandoned farms of New England and the Middle States. It is not necessary to this study of the American spirit to dwell upon all the details which made up the "Gilded Age." Some of its most grim realities have left only their passing mark upon the character of the people. In a sense it was a period of adolescence, which did not appreciate the significance of the changes in its constitution, but was ready for anything, with an optimism which panics, like those of 1873 and 1893, could not check. T h e predominant quality of the period was expansion, not only in land but in wealth of all kinds. Great fortunes were made and lost, extravagance in entertainment, consequent bad manners and crudity, followed as a matter of course. T h e whole period seemed epitomized in the favorite expression of Colonel Mulberry Sellers, " T h e r e ' s millions in it!" T h e old social standards, founded in the South on the possession of real wealth, like land; in the North on the great banking interests or foreign trade, or upon something equally real, the professional ability of the lawyer or the physician, were to some extent submerged by another form of wealth, less real and therefore less secure. T h i s arose from a talent for combination, by which, out of certain natural products like oil and coal, great fortunes could be made by the manipulator rather than the producer. T h e essence of this power was monopoly, since it was essential that the raising of prices to the consumer must not be interfered with by competition. T h e story of the Standard Oil Company, which had secured practical monopoly by 1882, is only

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one of many cases in which the details by which the control was secured are not those of which America can be proud. Nor are the methods by which solvent railroad systems were combined into insolvency especially attractive. Most sinister, perhaps, was the deliberate importation by the mining interests of immigrants from southeastern Europe, whose lower scale of living helped to drive out the English, Irish, and Scottish miners, who were demanding higher wages. Perhaps most important from the point of view of its effect upon the American soul was the instability of much of this wealth. If a few of the leaders like J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie were able enough to hold on to theirs, many others fell by the wayside. For these fortunes were subject to attack not only by the fluctuations of the stock market, but also by unfriendly legislation and by the growing combinations of labor, which learned rapidly the lessons of organization, and toward the end of the century were meeting their opponents upon fairly equal terms. When wre come to analyze finally its effect upon American character, we may find that instability of wealth has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. But during the process of accumulation it led to recklessness and violence, to political corruption and to disregard of private rights. It submerged, too, at least for the time, a society that was growing up in America, a product of generations who had traveled, had read widely and knew other civilizations, but remained content with their own inheritance of culture. They held together, of course, by the magnetism of self-appreciation, and, so far as social life in a narrow sense is concerned, they retained their hold, especially in the larger Eastern cities. But to a certain degree public life and social institutions in a broader sense lost their influence. Yet it would be a mistake to picture this period as so many social historians have done, in the lurid colors of

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corruption and bad taste. T h e parvenu was in the public eye and in the newspapers because he was spectacular, but to assume that every man who rose to wealth in this period did so by unscrupulous means is simply to disregard the facts. It is not in the newspapers that we can find the best picture of the times, but in the more careful contemporary studies of the trained observers, especially those with imagination and sympathy. The Rise of Silas Lapham, in which Howells painted the best picture of the American self-made man, represents life as it really was in the seventies. This portrait of the paint manufacturer who combined shrewdness and hardness in his dealings with rival concerns, who had made the "Persis brand" of paint the best in the market, is no ideal hero of fiction. He has dropped without compunction an incompetent partner, he is ignorant of certain forms of social usage, but in a moral crisis he rises superior to temptation because the very largeness of his success has made it impossible for him to do what he considers to be dishonest. In a way, he substitutes for the noblesse oblige of a far earlier day the canon of a business ethics which rings true even today. Other men who had never had much to lose or gain might turn a sharp corner, but he had been at the top of his world, and he could not cheat. He had lived too long content with himself and his achievements and, even when his fortune had gone, he had still to live with himself. Another of Howells* creations, Basil March, who appears in several of his novels, represents the average American, of education but without wealth, who is unawed by it, and who faces his own ethical problem as editor of a magazine just as calmly as Silas Lapham confronts his business complications. Henry James, many of whose Americans, like Daisy Miller, are caricatures, has given us in The Portrait of a Lady another phase of American character, that of the gentlewoman, Isabel Archer. Anyone who lived in the United States in the seventies

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and eighties says to himself in reading these books, " H e r e is America, in these men and women of character, rather than in the riots of Homestead and Cœur d'Alene, and the manipulations of United States Steel." As Clyde Fitch well said, " T h i s was the Howells Age," and, through his sane and realistic picture of America in her various phases, in his clever farces which were acted by every amateur dramatic society in the country, Howells taught good manners and good taste to millions. He was not just writing books for amusement; he was conducting a crusade for truth in art and truth in life. He could paint a picture of degeneration in Bartley Hubbard, the unscrupulous journalist of A Modern Instance, just as he could draw the moral growth of a Silas Lapham. Howells, Garland, Mary Wilkins, Sara Orne Jewett, Weir Mitchell, and their disciples not only wrote themselves, but, when a sincere artist in drama like James A. H e m e brought upon the stage real people in Margaret Flemiyig and Shore Acres, they flocked to his support, even though no manager would put on the first and only a fortunate clause in the contract kept the latter from being closed at the end of the second week. Shore Acres carried its message of liberality all over the United States, for "the road" was in its heyday, and the unifying effect of the drama was beginning to be felt. When Augustus Thomas's Alabama, whose theme was the reunited country, reached Louisville, Colonel Henry Watterson stated publicly that the play had done more to reconcile the North and the South than his editorials had done in twenty-five years. T h e words of the leading character, Henry Preston, who had fought for the Union, in speaking to his father, an unreconstructed Confederate, who had failed to recognize his son, reveals how Thomas in 1891 understood what had taken place: I respect your feeling in the matter, Colonel Preston, but I can't help thinking that it is your personal view that blinds you. T h i n g s , sometimes, are too personal for a correct appreciation. T h e N o r t h

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and South were two sections when they were a fortnight's journey apart by stages and canals. But now we may see the sun rise in Pennsylvania, and can take supper the same day in Talladega. It is one country. Alabama sends its cotton to Massachusetts—some of it grown very near your graveyards. T h e garment you have on was woven twenty miles from Boston. Every summer Georgia puts her watermelons on the New York docks. Pennsylvania builds her furnaces at Birmingham. T h e North took some of your slaves away —yes—but one freight car is worth a hundred of them at transportation. Our resentment, Colonel Preston, is eighteen hundred years behind the sentiment of the day.

Even although much of the literature during the seventies, eighties, and early nineties was concerned with the depiction of American local color, it was not sectional in its ultimate effect. T h e portrayal by Constance Fenimore Woolson of life in the Northwest and in Florida, by George W. Cable and Grace King of the Creole life in Louisiana, by Thomas Nelson Page and Francis Hopkinson Smith of life in Virginia during and after the Civil War, were contributing to America's knowledge of herself. T h a t these were usually heroic, even idealistic in tone, and had not the stark verity of Howells, Garland, and Mary Wilkins, was due partly to their material. But just as the character of Silas Lapham was a tonic to any American, so the sacrifice of Madame Delphine, the gallantry of "Colonel Carter," the fidelity of "Meh Lady" and of the negro who tells her story, were a challenge to the spirit. It is the fashion of those contemporary critics, who were neither here nor there when these men were writing, to smile at the picture of life that Cable and Page and Smith drew, and to dismiss it as a dream. It was no vision, however, but if it had been, it was at least a noble dream. It will be a good thing for the American soul when it dreams again. It would be difficult to show any corresponding influence of the arts of painting, sculpture, or music during this period upon the American spirit. T h e earliest painters like West, Copley, Stuart, and Allston had gone

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abroad, and even those who returned at times found no great welcome, nor did the men a little later, like Chester Harding and Henry Inman, who learned their art in America, but went to England or to Rome. More appreciation of painting began to develop in the third quarter of the century, and George Inness and F. E. Church gave us national landscapes of value. But the human subjects in general were still foreign, outside of the work of a few men like Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, and George D. F. Brush. Painters seemed unable to find the picturesque elements in American life in the seventies and eighties, so they drew peasants from France or Canada. Speaking generally, American painting during this period seems not to have affected the American spirit to any degree. Yet it was a great day for the illustrators, like Nast and Frost. T h e work of these men had a real influence, and, in the case of Nast, produced remarkable effects in politics. Boss Tweed feared his satiric cartoons in Harper's Weekly more than its editorials. It is to be noticed, however, that the most successful illustrators were caricaturists, not painters of reality like Howells in fiction or Heme in drama. T h e painters defended themselves on the ground that the crudity and transitory nature of the post-war civilization gave them no opportunity, while the illustrators had a rich field for satire. But, considering the achievement in literature, the defense was not adequate. Artists in other fields may have been affected by the character of American architecture during this transition, for certainly the less said of it in any study of the American soul, the better. Forgetting the beauty of the older Colonial structures, it imitated what was new and bad in foreign tastes. Then gradually working back to classic models, American architecture achieved a result in the World's Fair at Chicago in i 893 worthy of any nation. T o Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, John Root, and Charles Attwood belong perhaps the chief credit for the conception, but

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others helped. It was a great opportunity, for in a real sense the World's Fair brought the country together to look at itself. Artistically it has given America something to remember. After the striking exhibits of the Manufactures and Transportation Buildings have long been forgotten, the beauty and the dignity of the Court of Honor will remain. T h a t it remains chiefly in the memory of those who saw it is only one instance of the carelessness, the optimism of the American nature, secure in the belief that it can build something better, no matter what perishes. It was fortunate that the World's Fair comes as a landmark of the closing of an era and the beginning of the next. If one wishes to study the American soul in its continued efforts toward progress, in its capacity for experiment, and yet in its refusal to give up its cherished institutions or its local or particular point of view, no better field can be offered than that of education. T h e r e has always been teaching in America, but the conception of education as the right of everyone, without any implication of charity to the recipient, took a long time to evolve. T h e pious wish of Governor Berkeley of Virginia in 1670, " I thank God there are no free schools nor printing," was personal it is true, but it reflected the attitude of the seventeenth century in the South that education was for those who could pay for it. In New England there was more general distribution of education, but it was recognized as a privilege, not for a social class but for those who believed as the ruling oligarchy dictated. In the Middle Colonies also, the various creeds controlled education as a natural right, and although Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, established by the Society of Friends in 1689, made an effort to found branch schools, some of which were public, it soon gave up the attempt. During the eighteenth century there grew up a conception of the state as responsible for the education of its citizens, but such legislation as was passed under the in-

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spiration of Jefferson in Virginia in 1779 or the still earlier inception of the "University of Georgia" on paper, were hopes rather than actualities. Harvard and Yale were training schools for the Congregational clergy, and, while elementary education had started with bright prospects in the seventeenth century, the growing toleration in religion by a curious paradox resulted for a time in less effective schools. This decline has been attributed by some authorities to an excess of local management and petty authority, which is partly correct, but there was growing up in New England an aristocracy which preferred to send its sons and daughters to private institutions, and the academies and dame's schools provided a form of education which has persisted until today and built up splendid traditions. There was laid also during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the foundations of the Catholic system of education, elementary and advanced, which culminated in the establishment of Georgetown University in 1789. Due to the civil disabilities of Roman Catholics until after the Revolution, the great development of the parochial school came in the nineteenth century, under the leadership of Bishop Hughes of New York City. But in the meantime, the private education, especially of girls, under the guidance of teaching orders, such as the Ursulines, the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, or the Sisters of Charity, had become widely established. In some parts of the country, notably Louisiana, Michigan and Maryland, this form of education anticipated the public school system, for from the beginning at least a portion of the instruction was free. T h e eighteenth-century idea of education in the Middle States can be epitomized by the title of " T h e College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia," the ancestor of the University of Pennsylvania. T h e College and the Academy were founded by one of the greatest democrats of his time, Benjamin Franklin, but he had no con-

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ception of free education except as a charity. Moreover, the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth were class conscious in education. Free education generally was for a working class which was to remain a working class; the modern idea of universal education as a gate of unlimited opportunity was still in the future. T h e next step was to secure free education for the masses as a right, not a privilege. How this was won, largely through the period which roughly corresponds to the rise of Jacksonian democracy, is a story of a crusade by men like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard against bitter opposition. It is not fair to attribute this opposition simply to the disinclination of the well-to-do to pay by taxation for the education of others. T h e very excellence of the academies, together with the fact that they had the active support of a denomination, either Protestant or Catholic, was the principal obstacle in the way of the public school. An even more profound cause, subconscious undoubtedly, was the feeling on the part of the American parent that he should be allowed to choose his children's school, and a vague fear that public education might deprive him ultimately of that privilege. This feeling was stronger, of course, in the East than in the West, where the basis of education was the land grant of the United States. Here the social cleavage between those who attended public and private schools has never been so strong. But any generalization which thinks of the West as a virgin field for the spread of democratic ideals of education simply does not know of the hold which private and denominational institutions, especially of college grade, have upon the people. It has not been many years since a governor of a western State vetoed an appropriation to a great State university because he believed it meant the death of his own college. T h e next step was to remove the stain of pauperism from the public school. Even after the right to free education had been established, it was long before the

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beneficiaries of it were allowed to forget that others were paying for them. In 1867 it is estimated that fifty thousand children in New York State alone had been deprived of all education because their parents were too proud to take the necessary steps to secure free tuition for them. It was not until another step had been taken that this stigma was removed. While the struggle in politics between the State and the Nation had been going on, there had been a corresponding conflict between the local boards of education and those of the State. During the transition period after the War, the responsibility of the State as the source of education was established, but in many places in the East the local sense is still strong. T h e South has its own problem of the negro in addition to all the others, and during the Reconstruction period, with the help of the Peabody Fund, met it with courage and energy. When public education came under the control of the State, instead of the village or town, it became no longer associated with charity. There is hardly anything so impersonal as a tax, and the poor man pays it as well as the rich. T h e test came then in the relative excellence of the teaching, and the support of the public schools, soon measured in millions of dollars, not only eliminated the weaker private schools, but acted as an incentive to the stronger ones to even better activities. It was after the Civil War, too, that the great development of the American college and university came. Notwithstanding the comparatively limited curriculum before the Civil War, the Colonial colleges kept their prestige, and the newer State universities of the West have simply added to the opportunities of their own sections. T h e most far-reaching changes in college education came in a later period, but it was in 1869, when President Eliot began his elective system at Harvard, that the older form of college training began to disappear. There is no doubt that the colleges needed a shaking up. But in the laudable

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desire to admit new subjects, especially the natural sciences, to the college curriculum, Eliot went too far and did away with a discipline that was of real value. Correlation of studies ceased and the age of specialization came in. Universities specialized like everything else. Provost William Pepper at Pennsylvania established the first School of Commerce and Finance in I 88 I , while scientific schools or departments grew up everywhere. T h e r e soon developed two kinds of institutions, the College and the University. Yale, Princeton, and the smaller denominational colleges deliberately prevented the growth of departments that would threaten the supremacy of their colleges of liberal arts. Pennsylvania, Columbia, and the newer institutions like Cornell in the East, and the State universities in the West, took the opposite course and, as soon as a new branch of learning appeared popular, established separate schools to provide for it, with the result that their college departments suffered. T h e y were, however, following their traditions, and the university idea received a new impetus in the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876. Harvard took somewhat of a middle course in this regard, retaining the supremacy of Harvard College on its own campus, and permitting the Lawrence Scientific School to languish, but being too truly a University to check the growth of professional schools. Paralleling this development, the Roman Catholic colleges usually devoted themselves to the teaching of liberal studies, though in the larger cities strong professional departments grew up, as at Georgetown and Fordham. It was quite characteristic of the American spirit that it should develop two types of institution to suit two distinct needs. T h e colleges, many of them still under denominational influence, preserved the English tradition of smaller size, limited courses and individual instruction, with a distinct emphasis upon the social aspects of their life. Owing, however, to the difficulties American students found in admission to Oxford and Cambridge in

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the eighties and nineties, few went there and their possible influence was lost. Expanding more rapidly, offering wider scope of courses and in general attracting to their Faculties more distinguished men, who lectured to large classes and met advanced students in limited seminars, the universities were affected by German influence. Study in Germany, where American students had been going since the days of Ticknor and Longfellow, became more marked in the eighties. It had a pronounced effect, apart from the instruction received, in the broadening educational vision it gave to the men who saw another civilization in its strength and weakness. It also taught thoroughness, the Teutonic virtue of going to the root of the matter and testing every scientific authority. These Americans saw, too, how the German university organization could be applied to a democracy. Ready admission, made easy to Americans, who were well qualified, strengthened their belief in the principles by which our university education has been developed. In contrast to the English system, by which a certain number of the pupils of the secondary schools are admitted to higher education, the American ideal has become the granting of unlimited opportunity. At the same time, we did not adopt the free and easy methods of the German universities where attendance depended upon the free will of the student, and where the responsibility for his conduct of life was entirely his own. T h e classic defense of the German system—"One third drop out—one third go to the devil—but the other third are governing Europe"—never has appealed to the American people as a whole. Even in the university atmosphere, the influence of the smaller college was potent, and the responsibility for the student was not limited to his classroom. It is easy to criticize this attitude, but it resulted in a devotion to the colleges and universities in America on the part of their alumni for which there is no parallel on the continent of Europe.

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Changes in the American soul cannot correspond with the calendar. But it seems now as though about 1895 our civilization was gathering breath for a new epoch, and that the United States of America was more truly a nation than ever before. T h e frontier was closed; over vast areas millions of farmers who had been given free land by the United States looked to the nation as their benefactor to whom they owed an allegiance. T h e new generation in the South had accepted the fact of Union and was grappling with its great and unsettled problem of race control. Mason and Dixon's line seemed to be growing fainter, and the vast network of transportation was making even the West seem near to the East. Yet once more the American soul was to be tried. A new sectionalism, to take the place of the theory of State sovereignty, was to arise, and a foreign war was to open new responsibilities, to test the fabric of the Republic.

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As THE new century approached, it was nauiral that men's minds in America should look upon it with hope. T h e American soul has always been optimistic, and it seemed to the unthinking that we were not only pursuing happiness, but were on the road to securing it. W e had established our currency upon a sound basis and we had won a war. Yet in accomplishing these results we had sown the seeds of two problems which since then have tested our national character and which in various forms are today pressing for solution. In fact they are different phases of the same problem. Dimly but definitely, America felt in the settlement of the silver question and the Spanish-American war that she could no longer concern herself so largely with internal affairs and that she had responsibilities outside the limits of the United States. Even in 1896 there were those who watched with some amusement the throngs upon election night in the great cities of the East and the Middle West, singing " A m e r i c a " as a thanksgiving for the salvation of the country through the election of McKinley. T h e y had voted against Bryan because it seemed impossible, with the other great nations of the world upon a gold basis, to depreciate our own currency. But they knew that the advocacy of free silver was only one attempt to cure a condition in the West which was real and serious. T h e gradual change from the pioneer who owned his free land to the mortgagee or the renter was bringing about a resentment which a mere defeat at the polls could only "9

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increase. Bryan's speech at Chicago in 1896 may seem mere rhetoric, but its most significant sentences were not the flowery figures concerning the "cross of gold" and the "crown of thorns." They were the words, "We beg no longer; we entreat no more: we petition no more. We defy them!" It sounded the note of a new sectionalism, in reality the revival of an older cleavage, that of the West against the East. T o Bryan's followers it was a protest of the sections where the wealth of the country was produced against the sections where it was spent. Though the South generally followed him, it was with a different spirit. No longer was ii a question of the State, but of the section as a whole. It was no longer a question of secession or nullification; it was a contest for control. Three times Bryan led the combination of the West and the South, and lost three times. It is curious now to enumerate the various issues which he raised, such as anti-imperialism, the income tax, prohibition, woman suffrage—all of which have come to pass—but on none of which could he ride into the Presidency. In nominating him the party of personality was running true to form, but the American people as a whole decided that he was a great voice rather than a great mind. With an intuition that seemed based on no carefully acquired knowledge, he could arrive sometimes at startling results, but on the whole the voters distrusted him as a brilliant but unsafe person, and they preferred, as is their usual custom, the type of which McKinley and T a f t are examples. It seems a pity that the comedy of politics never permitted Bryan and Roosevelt to run against each other for the same office, but in 1904 the Democratic party nominated against the latter a conservative and went down to complete defeat. This new sectionalism is with us today, and its basis is still the demand of agriculture for its share of the governmental protection which has been given industry through the tariff and the restriction of immigration. No

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adequate solution of the problem has been found, although many have been presented. T h e laws of supply and demand will operate no matter what legislation may propose, but the stubborn facts remain that through speculation and " h e d g i n g , " for every bushel of wheat grown in this country, four bushels are sold, and that since 1920 two million farmers have abandoned their farms. T h e Granger movement in the sixties, the Populist party in the nineties, the " F a r m Bloc," of today are all the representation of that sectionalism. It is idle to dismiss their claims like Senator Moses or the former Senator Grundy, with a contemptuous phrase, for their well-being determines the well-being of the United States. H o w powerful can be a political combination of the Far West and South with one of the great Midwestern states was shown in 1 9 1 6 when the East, having read in the early morning editions that Hughes was elected President, awoke later to find that an election could be determined without New York and Pennsylvania. Perhaps, as Professor T u r n e r suggests in his stimulating book, The Frontier in American History, the East may be quite as provincial as the West. In 1928 for the first time we elected a President who came from a state west of the Mississippi River. T h i s is only a symptom of a political unity greater than ever before. It was perhaps fortunate that just as the new sectionalism began to show itself so aggressively in 1896, trouble abroad came to distract and solidify the nation. In fact there are some who wonder whether the war with Spain was so much a crusade to free Cuba as it was to distract attention from internal dissensions. Certainly we know now that Spain had agreed to practically all of McKinley's demands. T h e r e can be little doubt that at the end of the century the nation was feeling its oats. T h i s national feeling is reflected in the great vogue of the American historical novel, which began with W e i r Mitchell's Hugh Wynne in 1896 and continued in T h o m a s Nelson Page's

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Red Rock, Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith, Winston Churchill's The Crisis, Maurice Thompson's Alice of Old Vi?icemies, and Ellen Glasgow's The Battleground. All of these, except Hugh Wynne, came after the SpanishAmerican War and are reflections rather than inspirations of this national feeling. But their very existence is significant. T h e details of the Spanish-American War do not concern us in this study. Outside of the naval operations they are not very comforting to read, and the corruption and incompetency of the War Department under General Alger has its only silver lining in a comparison with the way in which an infinitely greater problem was handled by Secretary Baker in 1 9 1 7 . T h e most severe test of the American soul came after the war in our treatment of the colonial possessions of Spain. From 1872, when Grant first interfered in Samoa, there had gradually come about a change of attitude toward America's acquisition of new soil. Up to the purchase of Alaska by Seward in 1867, our territory, no matter how enlarged, had remained a unit, and, more important, it had been occupied by Americans. But hardly had the principle been established that the negro, the Indian, and the Mexican in the West were at least potential citizens, when the "revolutions" in Samoa and Hawaii prepared a set of problems which the acquisition of Porto Rico and the Philippines made insistent. Was the United States to establish two kinds of Americans, citizens and subjects? T o many it seemed as though we were at the parting of the ways, and the lessons of the Roman Empire were obvious—to those who knew them. T h e inconsistency of inviting Aguinaldo and his Philippine insurgents to aid us and then in turn to buy from Spain the land they had helped to win and to conquer them was so apparent that Bryan made anti-imperialism his leading issue in 1900—and was defeated. Under Roosevelt the policy of allowing the conquered peoples merely a shadow

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of power was continued, and it was not until Wilson's administration that the Philippine Upper House as well as the Lower was made elective and the natives admitted to a real share in the government. This policy was again reversed under Harding's appointee, General Leonard Wood, whose methods seemed at least unappreciated by the natives. There can be no question that if the Constitution means anything, it means that there is no provision in our scheme of things for subject races. T h e necessity of a coaling station in the Pacific may be more important in the eyes of "dollar diplomacy" than justice, but the repudiation of any claim to Porto Rico and the Philippines would have called for an altruism to which no country in the world has ever risen. That America did not rise to it is not hard to explain. T h e average citizen was simply not concerned, but if he thought at all, he mingled with a real doubt of the ability of "those foreigners" to govern themselves, a sentimental dislike to haul down the American flag anywhere where it had once been hoisted. T h a t he was assuming the responsibility of defending Hawaii and the Philippines, and that his descendants might one day pay the penalty of his shortsightedness did not, of course, bother him at all. Still less did the decision of the Supreme Court that the "Insular Possessions" were, and at the same time were not, part of the United States, disturb his serenity. So far as guaranteeing the inhabitants "life," the new islands were American soil. " L i b e r t y " was to be theirs only partially, and "the pursuit of happiness" hardly at all. But so far as shutting out the competition of Porto Rican sugar with our own sugar plantations was concerned, the Court left the matter, delightfully, in such a state that we could shut out such competition on the ground that Porto Rico was not part of the United States, while at the same time foreign goods could be made to pay import duties to Porto Rico on the ground that she was! As " M r . Dooley"

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remarked of this famous decision, by a vote of five to four, " T h e Supreme Court follows th' ilection returns." Perhaps, too, American altruism was content with the action of the United States in Cuba. It is doubtful whether any other nation would have resisted the temptation to annex Cuba after having freed her from Spain. That there was hesitation in high places we who lived through that period know. But the bondholders of Cuban securities worked in vain and the United States kept its word— "while the world wondered." How the American soul in its loftier moments felt is reflected best in William Vaughn Moody's magnificent "Ode in T i m e of Hesitation," in which he expressed the fear lest the United States should depart from her high estate by breaking her word to Cuba. It is a sufficient comment upon the Spanish-American War that the best poetry inspired by it was in criticism of its effects rather than glorification of the struggle. Yet there was one brief effort which at the time was the most popular bit of verse in the United States. James Lindsay Gordon's Wheeler at Santiago was not great poetry, but it dramatized the new Union which the Cuban War seemed to bring about. T h e spectacle of General Joseph Wheeler, "the little old ex-Confed," riding to the front, although racked with fever, was an assurance that the Civil War was over. Even more significant was Bryan's salvation of the treaty with Spain when the Democratic minority threatened to repudiate it. Historians seem to be puzzled at this hurried trip of Bryan to Washington. T h e explanation may lie in the fact that Bryan foresaw what a repudiation by the Senate of the President after he had conducted negotiations with a foreign power would mean in all future dealings with the outside world. One of the most significant results of the SpanishAmerican War was the friendly attitude of Great Britain and the unfriendly attitude of Germany. It was our first foreign war, except the skirmish with Mexico, in which

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Great Britain had not been our adversary, and it was a symbol of our changed attitude that everyone felt it natural that our interests should be placed in the hands of representatives of Great Britain when our diplomatic relations with Spain were broken. After all, the ties of race and language are the closest, and the statesmen of Great Britain were not unaware of the inevitable struggle that was coming with the German Empire. In 1898 the instinctive sympathy of the German people with Spain was so marked that it could be felt even in the genial atmosphere of the Café Luitpold in Munich. It was the continent of Europe against the outsider, and to Germany Great Britain was already an outsider too. It was common talk among the German university students in the late nineties that "some day we will conquer England," and when they were asked how it was to be accomplished, their answer was simply that the "High Command at Berlin" had it all thought out. T h e sharp logic of events brought America more and more into the responsibilities of a world power. Her traditional policy of isolation had been broken, of course, more than once, and in the case of the Venezuelan dispute with Great Britain, Cleveland had adhered with vigor to the Monroe Doctrine, as the protector of smaller American states against European aggression. But in 1901 the Boxer uprising in China revealed the United States in a new role, that of a nation which took prompt measures to preserve its official representatives at Peking, yet, when the rebellion had been put down, dealt generously with China in the payment of indemnity. While Great Britain, France, Russia, and Japan seemed interested only in the securing of indemnities far higher than the actual damages incurred, and tried to make the occasion a lever for extorting new trade concessions from China or establishing earlier ones, John Hay, our Secretary of State, struck a new note in international diplomacy in the Orient. It was simply a desire for justice, nothing

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more or less, but it was a policy which has not yet penetrated to the minds of European or Asiatic governments. One of the greatest sources of trouble in China was, of course, the foreign trade concessions and "spheres of influence." Nobody trusted anyone else, and with reason, for the aim of each nation was selfish. Hay's policy of the "open door" of equal opportunities for trade was viewed with cynical eyes by most of the diplomats with whom he dealt. But eventually, the settlement reflected the ideas put forth by the veteran statesman who had received his first training as private secretary to Abraham Lincoln. By the time the next important problem in the Orient arose, McKinley had been assassinated and T h e o d o r e Roosevelt was in the President's chair. But before he offered his services as mediator between J a p a n and Russia he had become the dominant figure of his time so f a r as the American people were concerned. In any analysis of the American soul the reasons for his great popularity are illuminating. In an unusual sense he represented the American people in their strength and their weakness. His virility, his courage, his ability to get things done, his adroitness in dealing with an opponent, his wide interest in nature and sport, all endeared him to his followers. T h e main secret of his popular success lay in the newspaper phrase that " h e was always front page stuff." His real ability as Assistant Secretary of the N a v y in preparing for war counted little as compared with his career as Lieutenant Colonel of the " R o u g h R i d e r s , " as spectacular a combination of troops as were ever gathered together. Luck, too, was with him, for when he was nominated for the Vice-Presidency against his wishes, he thereby became President at forty-three—and he seemed to come to age politically with the nation. His settlement of the coal strike of 1902 was an example of his adroitness in seeing the weak place of his opponent. T h e first conference which he called between the operat-

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ors and the miners was a failure, through the refusal of the operators to treat with J o h n Mitchell as the representative of the union. T h e miners promptly agreed to accept the findings of a commission of arbitration, requesting that a union man be appointed upon it. T o this the operators steadily refused to agree, but they were willing to accept other types of citizens, which they described. Roosevelt suddenly realized that through their naming among the f o u r persons acceptable to them " a man of prominence, eminent as a sociologist," they had played into his hand. He promptly named E. E. Clark, who filled that description, but was also Chief of the Order of Railway Conductors, and therefore acceptable to the miners. It was for clever strokes like this that the American public loved T h e o d o r e Roosevelt, and also because he made clear that the consumer had rights which both operator and miner must respect. His attack upon the "trusts" also kept him constantly before the public. T h e essence of this conflict, which began in February, 1902, with his suit to dissolve the Northern Securities Company on the ground that it was illegal, lay in the assumption by the Northern Securities G r o u p of financial interests that they were above any law, even the Sherman Anti-Trust L a w of 1890, and indeed the Supreme Court had given them reason to believe they were immune. T h e suit was finally won in 1904. Notwithstanding the many indictments instituted by Roosevelt against combinations of capital, they are still with us, and the average American is not seriously disturbed by them. He knows that if the Standard Oil Company is dissolved, it reappears like a worm, split into parts, each of which has apparently as much life as its parent corporation. What he is concerned with is the price of oil. Probably the most far-reaching of Roosevelt's activities was the Panama Canal. His own words, " I took P a n a m a , " epitomize the situation. Against the report of the Isthmian Canal Commission, which preferred Nicaragua but which

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he browbeat into agreement w i t h him, he decided upon the Panama route. T h a t the United States of C o l o m b i a refused to sell the strip of land required made no difference. Probably believing that he was b e i n g "held u p " by the C o l o m b i a n Senate, he arranged that U n i t e d States Marines should be landed just at the appropriate time to aid in a revolution in Panama against a friendly power. O n N o v e m b e r 3 this revolution was engineered, chiefly by persons interested in the old Panama Canal C o m p a n y , descendants of the original French company, but located principally in N e w Y o r k City. T h r e e days later, Roosevelt recognized the new government at Panama, and a little later, by treaty, purchased the necessary strip for $10,000,000, and an a n n u a l payment. N o t h i n g in o u r history since G e n e r a l T a y l o r ' s movement into M e x i c o in 1845 had been done with less regard for international rights, and the effect u p o n o u r relations with South A m e r i c a is felt to this day. Even the later action taken at the instigation of President Wilson, by w h i c h C o l o m b i a was paid $25,000,000, has not made our h o n o r good in South America. B u t another step was still to be taken—and rescinded. By the Hay-Pauncefote treaty of 1900, in w h i c h G r e a t Britain gracefully w i t h d r e w the C l a y t o n - B u l w e r convention of 1850, which w o u l d have prevented the U n i t e d States from b u i l d i n g the canal alone, it was expressly stipulated that the canal should be open to the vessels of all nations u p o n equal terms. B u t again the " d o l l a r diplom a c y " demanded that A m e r i c a n coastwise trade should be admitted free, and in President T a f t ' s administration such a bill was passed, against Great Britain's very natural protest. A g a i n the mischief was undone u n d e r Wilson's administration and our promise tardily kept. O n e great reason for Roosevelt's hold u p o n the p u b l i c was his contest w i t h the forces of obstruction in the Senate and the House. If the President in such contests has the support of the press, as Roosevelt did in the crusade for

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pure food laws, and if he dramatizes his issue, he will usually win. Here, too, he was lucky, for his chief adversaries, the packers, the adulterators of patent medicines, and the liquor dealers, fought stupidly. W h e n their favorite method, the quiet smothering of all bills which threatened to regulate their traffic, became difficult through the publicity given to the crusade, led by Dr. Harvey W . Wiley, of the D e p a r t m e n t of Agriculture, they proceeded to more desperate measures. By a concerted process of intimidation they threatened to p u t on their advertising black list the newspapers and periodicals which were helping in the crusade. T h e fatal mistake in such a policy is that, while it has been applied in local matters with great success, it cannot succeed in one of national concern. T h e r e are too many papers to cover, arid the evidence of such blackmail was spread far and wide by periodicals like Collier's Weekly and The Ladies' Home Journal. Roosevelt did not initiate this crusade, but he pushed it through to victory. H e was helped not only by scientific agencies like the American Medical Association, but also by one of the qualities of the American spirit which has often been criticized, the love of sensation. T h e book which is said to have started Roosevelt thinking, U p t o n Sinclair's The Jungle, is only one example of the queer ways in which justice gets done. As literature it is even below Uncle Tom's Cabin, b u t it made the American people squirm to read his descriptions of the Chicago packing houses. The Juiigle took away the reader's confidence in his dinner, and the long list of chemicals which the suffering citizen was told by the weekly journals were distributed t h r o u g h every article of his diet caused him to look with suspicion u p o n even the most harmless of coloring matter, and to begin his day with distrust of his breakfast. Some of the opposition to the Pure Food Bill came from sincere believers that it was not the business of the Federal Government to interfere in matters which prop-

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erly belonged to the State police power. It is difficult to see how any State could have stirred up the necessary publicity which educated the American people, yet it is true that probably the most dramatic event in the crusade was conceived by the State chemists of twelve States, mostly Western, working together at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. Right next to the section in which the manufacturers of preserved foods had made an elaborate exhibit of their wares, these chemists secured a space and exhibited brilliant pieces of silk and wool. On each of the pieces was a properly certified statement showing the name of the preserved food from which had been taken the dye that was responsible for the brilliant hue. Millions of people felt suddenly that their insides might resemble the rainbow if something was not done to prevent artificial coloring of food. T h e feelings of the manufacturers next door may be imagined. And where but in America could such a method have been conceived? In this field, as in others, Roosevelt performed one of his greatest functions—to be the nation's safety-valve. Through the growing distrust of our social and economic organization in the early years of the twentieth century, this feeling of unrest might have led to disastrous consequences if a mere conservative nonentity had been at the head of affairs. There was a confidence in the general public that if anything were seriously wrong in domestic affairs, "Teddy would look after it." Then, having dictated the nomination of his successor, he waited his turn again. But here he made a mistake. His great popularity led him to believe that the Republican party could not do without him. He seemed not to realize that the party of institutions had taken him as an accident and that he did not belong there. Had he been a member of the other party, that of personality, he could have had anything. But in 1912 the leaders of the Republican State organizations deliberately preferred defeat with T a f t to victory with Roosevelt. T h e i r State or-

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ganizations were to them life or death and their daily bread and butter—they could do without the Presidency. His conviction, amounting almost to megalomania, broke the Republican party to pieces and made secure the election of a man whom Roosevelt came to dislike more than any other living soul. T h e calmest criticism of his later years draws a regretful veil over his attacks upon an adversary who was too proud to reply. But the American people, forgetting his faults, still cherish the Roosevelt of the strenuous life, of the open air, the man who was afraid of no one and who, as Macaulay said of Cromwell, would not let anyone injure his native country but himself. T h e policy of vigorous intervention in the affairs of the nations bordering on the Caribbean Sea stems from Roosevelt's administration and is not one with which America can be quite content. T h e various expeditions to San Domingo, to Haiti, to Nicaragua, in which the flag follows trade and the marines follow the flag, leaves the American citizen in a hopeless maze of perplexity. H e has an instinctive feeling that we do not belong there, and that it is the right of every nation to govern itself. But he knows also that the government in such places is unstable, not to say kaleidoscopic, and that the simple expedient of withdrawing our intervention would leave such countries a prey not only to their own professional bandits, but also to European interference. T h e very nearness of these islands to our coast makes it impossible to neglect them. If we had been an imperial power with a flexible conscience, we should have annexed them long ago and should now, like Great Britain, be having trouble in consequence. T h e American who thinks at all upon the matter probably concludes that we are in much the same position with regard to these nations as the proverbial gentleman with a silk hat, passing by an alley garrisoned by small boys with snowballs. Pursuit, and retreat, are alike hopeless, and when honest officials who

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have spent years in these islands can be induced to bec o m e confidential, they arrive at the same conclusion. T h e only certain fact is that we have furnished the most potent rallying cry for any local political party in these islands w h o happens to be in opposition. W h a t e v e r else the citizens of C e n t r a l A m e r i c a and the C a r i b b e a n islands disagree in, they agree in disliking us. It makes no difference in Nicaragua, for example, that thousands of people are e m p l o y e d by A m e r i c a n industries w h o previously had no w o r k at all. Perhaps they prefer not to work, perhaps o u r inability to put ourselves in their place is the cause of the trouble. B u t of one t h i n g we may be sure. It is not the habit of the A m e r i c a n to a b a n d o n what seems to him a national obligation, and to keep peace in the C a r i b b e a n Sea seems such an obligation to h i m and to the world. W i t h M e x i c o , the p r o b l e m is enlarged by previous history, and by the fact that w e have no responsibility for her conduct except toward o u r o w n citizens. T h e revolution of 1 9 1 1 , by w h i c h Diaz was dethroned and a liberal, Madero, was elected to the Presidency in 1913, was a necessary step toward a democratic g o v e r n m e n t . T h e disturbed state of M e x i c o was left by President T a f t as a heritage to his successor, w h o was faced w i t h this complicated p r o b l e m at the b e g i n n i n g of his administration. If the personality of T h e o d o r e Roosevelt d o m i n a t e d the feeling of A m e r i c a d u r i n g the first decade of the twentieth century, the character of W o o d r o w W i l s o n determined its action d u r i n g the second. B o t h were natural leaders, college-trained men, of great ability in expressing their ideas in terms the A m e r i c a n people w o u l d understand. B o t h were able politicians as w e l l as great statesmen, both were good fighters, and each received his first great o p p o r t u n i t y at the hands of a "boss," w h o m he afterwards repudiated. In a sense, Roosevelt prepared the way for W i l s o n ' s d o m i n a t i o n of Congress by m a k i n g the people accustomed to the figure of a Presi-

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dent who was not only an executive but also an initiator of legislative action. T h e collapse of the T a f t administration, in which a well-intentioned President permitted Congress to attend to its own functions, with the result that the oligarchy headed by Senator Aldrich ruled the country, made the nation welcome once more a leadership from the President's chair. In his inner nature, however, and in his political philosophy, Woodrow Wilson differed radically from Theodore Roosevelt. With a physical organization less robust and with the sight of one eye almost destroyed by a blow received in boyhood, Wilson lived at a nervous tension unknown to his rival. Yet he had a resiliency and a power for sustained mental labor possessed only by those who know how to conserve their strength for important matters. Standing during an educational convention in 1907 in the gymnasium of the College of the City of New York, he turned suddenly to the secretary of the convention and told him his greatest desire at the moment was to swing down the gymnasium on the rings hanging from the ceiling. Yet in spite of this nervous tension, he delivered that evening one of the most brilliant speeches of his career as a college president. T h e description of Woodrow Wilson as a chill or remote person can only amuse those who remember him as one of the best story-tellers of his day. T h e greatest difference between Wilson and Roosevelt lay in the former's devotion to general principles and the latter's preference for concrete measures. Wilson's brain moved like a logical machine and, if his actions at times puzzled even his admirers, we can see now the profound consistency of his conduct. Those who looked merely at the surface of things criticized his handling of Mexican affairs. He saw clearly that the only hope of Mexico lay in the liberal program of Madero. When Madero was assassinated, and Huerta seized the government, it made no difference to the President that European nations, with

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an eye to the oil fields, recognized the new régime. Huerta had not been elected by the people of Mexico, and no one can possibly understand Woodrow Wilson's course unless he realizes that above every other consideration he placed the survival of government by consent of the governed. In his first conflict with James Smith, Jr., the Democratic boss of New Jersey, who had helped him to become Governor and who demanded the senatorship as his reward, Woodrow Wilson based his refusal on the ground that James E. Martine had been elected by the primary as the Democratic candidate, and no one had the right to change this verdict. From that day to the great conflict at Versailles, when he fought almost single handed for the right of any people, however weak or small, to determine their own government, his line of reasoning, like T o m Paine's, was "as straight and clear as a ray of light." T o such a principle, Wilson would sacrifice any friends or supporters, not as Roosevelt did in the Storer case because they failed to accomplish what he desired, but because they were no longer useful in the crusade to which he was dedicated. Far above their personal fortunes or his own, he placed the cause for which he was fighting, and he finally gave his own life for it. It was a lonely struggle at the last, and yet at the outset of his Presidential career perhaps no one came into office with more general popular satisfaction. During his first term Wilson helped secure more progressive legislation than any President before or since his day. He was helped by two factors, a change in the American spirit and a united party. Roosevelt had not had cordial support from his own party in several of his forwardlooking projects, for the party of institutions looked askance upon legislation which threatened the hold certain interests had secured, and it was only with Democratic help that he had been able to push through some of his measures.

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T h e party of personality, however, ran true to its natural bent in following its leader. T h e tariff was revised in the interest of the consumer, the Interstate Commerce Commission was given real power in dealing with the railroads, the Clayton Anti-Trust Law made more difficult the creation of monopoly. Even a child-labor law, whose passage Roosevelt and Beveridge had been unable to secure in 1906, was passed in 1913. In this last instance Wilson showed one element of his greatness. He had opposed the child-labor law in 1906 because he believed it was a matter for State, not Federal action. But like Emerson, whom he so strikingly resembled, he knew that "with consistency a great soul has nothing to do," and his humanitarian instincts triumphed over his Jeffersonian caution. One of the greatest achievements of his administration was the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which was designed to make impossible so great a concentration of capital in a few hands, and which provided for elastic currency without inflation or repudiation. T h e passage of the Sixteenth Amendment made possible an income tax in 1 9 1 3 , and it is hard to conceive how the Great War could have been financed without these last two measures. In dealing with labor disputes, Wilson showed his sympathy even more clearly than Roosevelt with the man whose margin of security is small. A Secretary of Labor was added to the Cabinet in 1913, and the principle of arbitration between labor and capital was strengthened in 1913 by the passage of the Newlands Act, which established a more practical method of conciliation in railroad disputes than before. T h e Workmen's Compensation Act in 1916 put a crown to the long struggle, begun by Roosevelt, to establish the liability of the United States for its own employees. In all these provisions for the betterment of the individual in his struggle for existence, Wilson had the support of a public opinion which had begun to develop during the later nineteenth century. Since the days of

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great material expansion, whose epitome was the phrase " T h e r e ' s millions in it," when great fortunes were being made and a great superstate was being constructed outside the law, but more powerful than the law, a change had come over the American soul. T h i s change consisted largely of an awakened public conscience. America had always been a charitable nation, but the recognition that it was the duty of the State and the Nation to see that the carelessness of one employee could no longer wreck another's life without the employer becoming responsible, or that a like responsibility existed to see that the coming generation did not work too soon, arose only after a campaign of education. Private agencies had helped in this campaign and Roosevelt had led it in many instances, but the very violence of his attacks had at times defeated his object. T h e impersonal but impressive marshaling of the forces of progress under Wilson's first administration were marked by no shaking of the " b i g stick" or denunciations of "the malefactors of great wealth." Wilson's policy was not destructive but constructive, and if he erred at all it was in such cases as the Adamson Railroad Bill in 1916, when he permitted the labor unions to dictate terms under threat of strike, instead of submitting to arbitration their demand for payment of wages at the eight-hour daily rate. Yet the Supreme Court declared the bill constitutional, and there were features in its decision which gave Congress power over labor disputes which may easily work to the disadvantage of the very unions which inspired the Act. T h e greatest test of the American soul came with the war against the Central Powers. T h a t we had in the President's chair a man who dared to wait as well as to strike, who like Lincoln took the country with him when he finally sent millions of men into the last peril, it is easy now to appreciate. In those turbulent days from J u l y 1914 to April 1 9 1 7 , while passion and prejudice beat un-

The Nation and the World availingly against the iron will of Woodrow Wilson, he met the situation with infinite patience, hoping against hope that it would be possible to keep the war from the people for whom he was responsible and yet to preserve the honor of the Republic. T h o s e who had no such responsibility loaded him with insults such as only Washington and Lincoln had had to bear. H e knew that while the East was on the whole for war, the great German element in the Middle West was opposed to it and the Far West was indifferent. H e saw too that when we went in, he must have the entire nation behind him. T h e hardest thing to understand is how anyone who looked at that firm jaw of the descendant of a stock which came from " C o u n t y D o w n " could have doubted his courage. He knew also that America would fight best if a concrete cause could be combined with an abstract principle. He was a practical idealist, and having better than anyone else certain sources of information, he was under no illusions concerning the motives of the contestants upon either side. Asking therefore from his countrymen a neutrality which was difficult to preserve in view of Germany's course of action, he devoted himself to the business of preparing the minds of the nation for sacrifice and at the same time starting preparation for conflict. One of his most impressive speeches was that delivered in Philadelphia on May 10, 1 9 1 5 , primarily to four thousand newly naturalized citizens. T h e r e were about sixteen thousand people present, however, and the utterance that kindled the imagination of those who heard him was the sentence: " I t is fortunate for us that you who have just become Americans believe us better than we are." Much to the surprise of his audience, the sentence which the newspaper men emphasized next day was, " T h e r e is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight." I11 August, 1 9 1 5 Congress adopted a three-year naval program which provided for the sum of $600,000,000 for

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ships, probably the largest amount ever provided by a nation at peace. Nearly everyone believed that if war came, it would be upon the sea that America would make its contribution. But Wilson still hoped for peace, and, as late as December, 1916, sent his famous note of inquiry as to the terms upon which the combatants would probably agree. In the meantime, the election in November, 1916 ratified by a popular plurality of half a million the course which the President had steered. T h e applause which greeted one phrase in the speech of Governor Glynn of New York, who renominated him, " H e has kept us out of war," showed how unready we were for it. That our electoral system came near defeating a President who obviously was the people's choice is another one of the grim jokes in our history. Events moved fast and when, in January, 1917, Count von Bernsdorff, the German Ambassador, announced that neutral ships found in the high seas surrounding the countries with which she was engaged would be sunk by submarines, the war became inevitable. Here was the deliberate act which was needed to concentrate the support of the entire country behind the President when he appeared before Congress on April 2 and asked for half a million men for the service of the United States. At the close of his address, he stated the principles for which we were to fight: It is a f e a r f u l thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible a n d disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. B u t the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight f o r the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,—for democracy, f o r the right of those w h o submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights a n d liberties of small nations, f o r a universal d o m i n i o n of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. T o such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are a n d everything that we have, with the

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pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

Viewed calmly and dispassionately, war is a useless and a terrible thing. And yet when the occasion which brings on a war appears, the very agencies for peace disappear, or are soon discredited. For the one and only virtue of a war shines out in such a time, provided that a great leader dramatizes the struggle into a contest for a principle. There could have been no better phrase than the one Wilson coined—a war "to make the world safe for democracy." In the light of later events, the phrase has suffered at the hands of cynics. But in the strenuous days of 1917 and 1918 there was no doubt of its meaning. T h e truth of his characterization must rest not upon the disstracted days when a partisan attack blasted the hopes of those who saw a world regenerated through his influence. It must rather be judged in the light of what would have occurred had the German Empire triumphed. Anyone who has spent a year in Germany and heard at the break of every day the steady tramp of an Imperial regiment go by his dwelling, knows what would have happened to the world. That the American soul had reached manhood and womanhood was proved by the unity of effort which transformed the country. This unity fused all sections except the most rabid pro-Germans into a nation, in which for the time at least, self was forgotten. It was a good thing to live in those days, notwithstanding the tragedies that struck down friends on every hand, if only to see the way in which a peace-loving people could make war and a democracy could prove its efficiency. It was fortunate that to his other qualities Wilson added the long view of the historian. Knowing how Lincoln and Washington had been hampered by legis-

The Soul of America lative committees, he resolutely insisted upon the Executive being free to act. T h u s instead of the Food Commission proposed by Congress, he placed Herbert Hoover in supreme command of the organization of the food supply of the country. K n o w i n g what he wanted and asking for it, Wilson secured from Congress powers far surpassing those given to any other President, and with them he accepted correspondingly great responsibility. When the majority of the House Committee on Military Affairs favored a voluntary army, he insisted upon the selective draft, and thereby made possible the success of the War. L i k e all real executives, he asked for the advice he thought he needed, made his decision and then passed on to other pressing matters. L i k e Washington and Lincoln, when he struck he could strike hard. T h r e e months after the Declaration of War, 9,586,000 men were enrolled in the selective draft. On November 3, 1 9 1 7 , the first of our soldiers fell in France, while successfully defending an outpost. T h e y were from Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Iowa, and the fact that they were part of a regiment which fought as a national division marks the progress toward unity since the Civil War. In 1861 men fought as members of the "Seventh New Y o r k " ; in 1 9 1 7 , as members of "the 1 1 2 t h A. E. F . " State pride, which had been one of the great driving forces in the Civil War, had given place to a national efficiency. Something was lost but more was gained. T h e story of our share in the War has been told so often, from the point of view of the enthusiast, of the critic, of the pacifist, and of the historian, that it needs no retelling here. Whatever mistakes were made, however distressing were the well-meaning but hysterical efforts of the amateur patriot, one ineffaceable picture remains in the memories of those who lived close to the men who made u p the fighting forces of the United States.

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It fell to my lot, as a college officer, to say goodbye to many boys who began to go even before we entered the War. T h e best went first, of course, and the quiet assumption of duty, the superb optimism which implied that one day they would return, revealed that inner lining of the American soul which, in characteristic fashion, hides its most precious aspect from our view. T h e disillusion which came to those who fought through it, reflected since the War in such realistic novels as James Wharton's Squad or Mary Lee's It's a Great War, or in such a play as What Price Glory, by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, was inevitable. But even in such critical relations, the note of quiet persistence was the most appealing. What lifted What Price Glory to importance was not the burlesque of the general and his staff or the mild echo of the profanity of the sergeants. It was the return of Captain Flagg, worn out with fatigue, and of Sergeant Quirk, flighty with fever, to the duty which for them had long before lost all heroic stimulus. T h e greatest casualty of the War was the defeat of the ideals which President Wilson had expressed, to which Europe at least was willing to assent, but which his own country repudiated. He had stated in January 1 9 1 8 the fourteen points which would serve as a basis for peace —and they were eventually accepted in principle. On September 27, 1918, in opening a campaign for the Fourth Liberty Loan, he proposed a League of Nations to ensure peace. His interpretation of Washington's address caught the attention of the country: W e still read W a s h i n g t o n ' s i m m o r t a l w a r n i n g a g a i n s t " e n t a n gling alliances" with full comprehension and an answering purpose. B u t only special a n d limited alliances e n t a n g l e ; a n d w e recognize a n d accept the d u t y of a n e w d a y in w h i c h w e are perm i t t e d to hope f o r a g e n e r a l a l l i a n c e w h i c h w i l l a v o i d entanglements a n d clear the a i r of the w o r l d f o r c o m m o n u n d e r s t a n d i n g s a n d the m a i n t e n a n c e of c o m m o n rights.

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T h e power of his ideals, conveyed in the Armistice terms of October 23, to the German people—struck down the greatest autocracy of the world, the power of the Kingdom of Prussia. On November 9, William II abdicated, and on November 11 the world was celebrating the end of the War. It was celebrating, too, the triumph of justice and the recognition of the right of America to take a foremost place in the settlement of the terms of peace. T h e welcome given to President Wilson abroad was not only a personal tribute; it was an expression by the people of their gratitude to the nation which had saved them, and of their hope in the man who might make such a war impossible in the future. With the prestige of this reception and with the even more tangible support of the immense war debt to the United States still to be adjusted, President Wilson could have dictated a peace which would have reflected even more adequately than the Versailles Treaty the principles of self-government by every nation, and would have established even more generous terms to the conquered states. But he had almost single-handed to combat two opposing forces, one foreign and one American. T h e representatives of the other Great Powers went to the Peace Conference for the purpose of securing the best terms for their own countries; Wilson went there to secure a just and lasting truce and to found a general league which would solve the many problems of the future that could not at once be adjusted. Lloyd George came, for example, after having been returned to office on the platform of making Germany pay for the whole war, which was not only impossible, but which he knew was impossible. T h e attitude of Clemenceau and his French associates may be summed up in the words of Abbé Dimnet, speaking during the War: M y house was in the hands of the Germans in 1 8 1 4 , again in 1870, and again in 1 9 1 4 . I pray G o d that H e will make it impossible that it shall ever be in their hands again.

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Yet the practical, even at times cynical attitude of the negotiators did not prevent Wilson from writing into the Peace T r e a t y a covenant of the League of Nations, which provided a workable scheme for securing that delay in the declaration of war and consequent arbitration which can alone permit a peaceable adjustment of difficulties between nations. When we read over the address which the President made before the second session of the Peace Conference, January 25, 1919, it seems impossible that such practical idealism should have failed. But already the forces that were to make the "great refusal" were gathering in the United States. A hurried trip to this country in March to submit the League and the Treaty to the Foreign Relations Committees of the House and Senate had resulted in certain criticisms and additions which he had taken back to Paris and all of which had been written into the final Treaty. T h e Monroe Doctrine was especially mentioned; the right of the United States to withdraw from the League was stipulated, and it was made impossible for any nation to interfere in our domestic concerns. Most important, the right of Congress to make or end war was definitely guarded. How the President felt the responsibility of America is shown in his address of May 30, 1919, at Suresnes Cemetery, over the graves of the dead soldiers of the Republic. His closing words were worthy of the great occasion: If I may speak a personal word, I beg you to realize the compulsion that I myself feel that I am under. By the Constitution of our great country I was the commander-in-chief of these men. I advised the Congress to declare that a state of war existed. I sent these lads over here to die. Shall I—can I—ever speak a word of counsel which is inconsistent with the assurances I gave them when they came over? It is inconceivable. T h e r e is something better, if possible, that a man can give than his life, and that is his living spirit to a service that is not easy, to resist counsels that are hard to resist, to stand against purposes that are difficult to stand against, and to say, " H e r e stand I, consecrated in spirit to

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the men who were once my comrades and w h o are now gone, and w h o have left me under eternal bonds of fidelity."

When he brought back the T r e a t y and the League Covenant and submitted them to the Senate on J u l y 10, it had long been evident that he was to face a hostile group. Some of the opposition was based upon a sincere, if narrow-minded, belief that America had no responsibilities beyond her borders. But the organization of the Sixty-ninth Congress leaves no doubt that once more, as in Johnson's day, the Senate was determined that the Upper House and not the President should rule the country. T h e Committee on Foreign Relations was deliberately made representative of only that element in the Republican party which was opposed to the League. In consequence a majority report against it was inevitable. T h e situation was made more difficult by the fact that the reaction against the unity of feeling manifest during the War made the majority vote no longer as Americans but as Republicans, determined to defeat a President who had asked his countrymen in November, 1 9 1 8 to give him a Democratic Congress, and who had been defeated. For this appeal, which seems now to have been a great mistake, Wilson was to pay a terrible penalty. During the War, he had had in general the support of both parties, and the bitter partisan criticism from 1 9 1 4 to 1 9 1 7 had, with some notable exceptions, ceased. Yet there was still an undercurrent of hostility, and the President knew well that he must have the support of two-thirds of the Senate if the Treaty he was to frame could be passed. What made the tragedy of the ultimate refusal of the Senate to ratify the League and the Treaty more bitter was the peculiar constitution of the Senate. There were forty-nine Republican members out of ninety-six. A change of one vote would have made a tie, and with Vice President Marshall in the chair the Democrats would have organized the Senate, and a majority report favor-

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ing the League would have been presented. Anyone who is familiar with the actions of legislative bodies knows what a tremendous advantage that would have given the League and the Treaty. It would have put the advocates of its rejection upon the defensive, and the whole history of the debate would have been changed. But in that Senate, among the forty-nine, sat Senator Newberry of Michigan, whom a later court verdict convicted of having won his seat by bribery and corruption and who notwithstanding the reversal of this verdict by the Supreme Court, felt called upon in 1922 to resign. Upon such curious chances hang the history of the world. Even before the Senate Committee reported the Treaty, with a long list of reservations, the President started on the speaking tour in its defense which ended with his breakdown. Ultimately, while the other nations went on to organize the League without us, they were treated to the spectacle of a struggle for control between the Senate and the President. T h e latter was faced, just as McKinley had been in 1898, with a body determined to have its share in anything that went on. But there was no Republican in 1 9 1 9 who had the influence and the patriotism that Bryan had in 1898, when he saved the Spanish treaty, even against his convictions, for the sake of our national reputation. Henry Cabot Lodge, who since Roosevelt's death early in 1919 was leading the Republican majority in the Senate and in the nation, insisted upon reservations, which seemed to the President to take the meaning out of the League. Moreover, they would have to be submitted to the other nations for approval, and it seemed impossible to secure the necessary unanimous consent to them. Wilson made clear that the Treaty and the League stood together, and the whole great work was finally defeated. He has been criticized for not accepting the reservations of the Senate, thereby saving its vanity, and trusting that the other nations would pay no attention to them. But to a man of Wilson's

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temperament, this was impossible. T h e United States drifted for months still technically in a state of war, which was not ended until J u l y , 1 9 2 1 , by action of Congress. With an attitude characteristic of the new régime, we reserved all the rights we might have had under the Versailles T r e a t y , but accepted no responsibilities. T h e effect of the repudiation of the League upon foreign nations was naturally unfortunate. Unable to understand our political institutions, they had supposed our representatives at Paris had authority to act for us, and the joint responsibility of the President and the Senate was incomprehensible to them. What they saw was a nation which had done a great deed, almost to completion, and then refused to finish it. One illustration of this effect was given by Dr. Alonzo Taylor, Food Commissioner in charge of supplying the starving populations in the Balkan States after the War. In a memorable address after his return he told how one of our relief trains, loaded with food, could proceed in perfect safety through regions in which the people were suffering terrible privations. As long as an American uniform was visible on the train, no one would touch it—but if the train were in charge of a soldier of any other nation, it might be raided at any time. He stated further that it was not feav of the United States which caused this respect, but a sense of the great and generous service which America had rendered. He added, however, in words which sank deep into the memory of those who heard him, that when the news of our repudiation of the League had filtered through into the knowledge of the people of his district, the spell was broken. From that time on, the uniform of the United States was no longer a symbol of chivalry—it was merely a cover for a soldier—like all the rest. Senator Lodge their conduct was which the country League. But that

and his irreconcilables claimed that justified by the election of 1920, in apparently ratified the rejection of the election was determined by so many

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cross currents that no single issue was settled by it. In practically every country, the party which had conducted the war was soon put out of office, because of the enemies it made. Since then we have been endeavoring to benefit by the deliberations of the League and have sent many delegates as "observers," with a careful statement from our presidents that we do not bind ourselves to anything by so doing. How dignified this attitude is goes without saying. Meanwhile, the League has functioned without us, stopping a war in the Balkans, regulating the opium traffic and dealing with the vexed questions of finance which arose from the war. What this growing power of the League means for world peace is incalculable. But it has lost the prestige which it would have gained through our membership, not only because of our peculiar position as a creditor nation, but because we might still have maintained that attitude of seeking the good of the greatest number which contrasts so sharply with the position taken by the constituent nations. While we have remained outside with such companions as Egypt, Turkey, and Costa Rica, the rest of the world has accustomed itself to think in terms of a union complete without us. T h e ultimate effects may be felt some day, when the forces of unrest gathering in the East break down first the barriers of Western Europe and then proceed to cross the Atlantic—or the Pacific. There can be little doubt that the policy of isolation which triumphed during the period immediately after the World War was encouraged by the change in the nature of foreign immigration, which began about 1870 and continued until the recent restrictive laws were passed. T h e causes of the restriction were largely economic, but there was also a deep-seated inability on the part of those who descended from the nations of western and northern Europe to understand or sympathize with the ideals of the later comers from the south and the east.

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Before we could estimate properly the effect of this immigration from southern and western Europe upon American character, it would be necessary to define just what we hope to find in the "melting pot." If we expect to find reproduced the characteristics of the older generations, we shall, of course, be disappointed. If we expect to find the same ready understanding of our institutions, or the same ability to assimilate with the native population, we shall also be disappointed. T h e races of southern Europe are primarily from different stocks, either Latin or Slavic, and the barriers are not merely those of language; they are more profound, reaching back to the most primitive characteristics of the original racial divisions. W e shall never understand them if we confuse, for example, the Italian with the Bohemian, or the Hungarian with the Russian, from the one general attitude of " N o r d i c " self-sufficiency. Professor Boaz of Columbia, in his brilliant article on " T h a t Nordic Nonsense," showed on what an insecure basis that supposed supremacy rested, and it needs only a perusal of the remarkable autobiography of Professor Michael Pupin, the great electrochemist, also at Columbia, who came to us a Serbian boy, to realize how many sides there are to the question. On the other hand, the native-born American has gradually awakened to our absurd system of protecting the employers of labor by a high tariff while we allowed millions of laborers to come in and underbid the man who was producing our goods. No one who studies the composition of the crowds on a New York subway train can view the future of his country with equanimity. One/of the most alarming results of that survey rests upon the lack of vitality which seems to be the lot of the next generation. T h e sturdy German or Swede or Irishman who broke the soil and built the railroads is not coming now, at least in relatively large numbers. However, we must comfort ourselves with the thought that size is not everything and that Napoleon,

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Marconi, and some others like them came of the small dark people who from the beginning have been the foes of the tall, fair enemy from the North. What is absolutely necessary is that we, the descendants of the earlier immigration—for no matter how unmixed our ancestry may be, we are all of that category—should proceed rationally first, to find out what elements in these later racial stocks may add to the American soul qualities of which it may stand in need, and, second, to see to it that in our natural desire to Americanize them as soon as possible, we do not kill those qualities but allow them to aid the development of an understanding in our newer citizens of what our native land should mean to them. First we must get rid of the traditional belief, descending largely from accounts of English travelers, that the Italian, who furnishes the largest element in this immigration, is of a highly complicated state of mind, that his chief amusement is assassination, and that he is fundamentally an Anarchist. The quickest way for an American to understand the Italian is to read Marion Crawford's Saracinesca and his other novels of Italian life, or Edith Wharton's Valley of Decision. The south European is of a much simpler and more direct nature than the north European. Being a Latin, he is more logical, and he goes straight to the conclusion. If he is hurt, he has not the patience with which the Teuton or the Celt will wait until his revenge may be taken with safety and within the law. He strikes at once and takes the risk. Just at present, the risk connected with this method of warfare seems to fall most heartily upon the innocent bystander, and this gang warfare, a variation of the Sicilian vendetta, perhaps, is so utterly repugnant to our ideas that it rightly seems to be our first and most important duty to suppress it. T o attribute it alone to the new immigration is, however, a mistake, for the general lawlessness since the war must bear its share of the blame, and the most persistent illustrations of this vendetta spirit arise among the moun-

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taineers of Kentucky and Tennessee, who are of almost undiluted descent from the earliest English settlers. Perhaps the most serious consequence of this disregard of human life is the effect upon the police. In the natural desire to protect themselves, and in the belief that any "foreigner" will shoot on sight, they are beginning to shoot on sight also. Philadelphia was mildly disturbed recently when an Italian father, coming out of his house to protest against the arrest of his son, who had been mistaken for some one else by the police, was shot instantly, on the ground that he "seemed to be reaching for a gun." T h a t he had no gun was ascertained—after the event. Again, the wholesale raiding of fraternity houses at one of the Eastern universities on account of a student celebration, in which the police shot through the keyholes of the front doors which were not opened promptly enough to suit them, is an instance of the adoption by the guardians of the law of the violent methods which are of comparatively recent origin. T h e fundamental quality of our civilization is respect for law and order, and it needs no effort to prove that the adoption by the representatives of law and order of extra-legal methods is to sap the very foundations of the nation. Yet, somehow, and notwithstanding this abstract principle, we cannot expect the policeman to stand up and be shot! But for one Capone there are millions of peaceable Italians and other Europeans who are industrious and who ask only a chance to make a living which the excessive taxes of their native land make it impossible for them to secure. Moreover, they have brought over with them a sense of the beautiful which is strangely lacking in many an American soul. Down in Hester Street in New York City, for example, there is given nightly a puppet show, in which the heroic deeds of the days of chivalry are portrayed just as they were centuries ago. An Italian family not only recite the sonorous lines of the drama to which the puppets, almost life size, contribute the action, but

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also make the puppets, paint them, and decorate them with an eye for line and color which is truly remarkable. T h e head of the family told me that his audiences knew the stories of Charlemagne and the other paladins by heart, but that made no difference in their interest. What is perhaps of greatest significance was the fact that the younger generation, most actively thrown into contact with American conditions, is beginning to be ashamed of this love of archaic beauty and that the puppet show will one day pass out of existence. Is it necessary to kill everything that does not accord with twentieth-century ideas of progress? Is it desirable that the race which had "the fatal gift of beauty" probably to the greatest degree, should change its character until all traces of that gift are lost? We import the art treasures of the Old World and pay huge sums for them. Why look with indifference upon the human contribution of the same races, just because so many Italians are bootleggers? T h e annual award for the best piece of sculpture produced in America, and exhibited in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, was given in 1930 to a young man whose name, at least, was Italian. Would it not be a good thing to encourage the races who are already here to keep up their folk dances and other native customs instead of making them assume the drab uniformity which is taking the color out of American life? It would be much better to lead them into an understanding of our national standards by some means natural to them. One of these, which is being developed in schools where the foreign-born predominate, is to have the children write little plays and act them. An adroit guidance will turn the themes of these miniature dramas into channels of American history, and the creative spirit will do the rest. I have seen some of these plays performed and have been profoundly impressed by their possibilities in the solution of the problem of race assimilation. As we progress further toward the East of Europe, the

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influence upon the American character becomes less and less easy to estimate. T h e Bohemians have been here for over half a century, and yet they retain a solidarity that is remarkable. Even greater is that of the Russians, the Rumanians, and the Magyars, and it would certainly be too early to dogmatize upon the effect of an immigration which is separatist in its very nature. Even less easily assimilated are the Chinese and Japanese. Our attitude toward these races has been marked by an entire change of front. In 1868 the Chinese were definitely welcomed by the Burlingame Treaty, while by 1880 the danger of economic rivalry led to the repudiation of the treaty, and since then the Chinese have been a banned nation. T h e Japanese do not present such a problem, since their own government discourages emigration. In either case little effect has been produced upon American character, although the exclusion of the Japanese has added an element of grave importance in our international relations. T h e very effort to deal with the questions arising from immigration or our foreign policy shows how difficult it is to write with any historic perspective of the development of the American soul since the Great War. We are so close to the period that we cannot estimate properly the relative importance of events and, politically at least, to a singular degree it has been a period of marking time. It is best, then, to combine a discussion of contemporary events and tendencies with a study of the American soul in those phases which seem today most characteristic and most fruitful of analysis. Of each of them the American has a varying quality, and at first glance they may seem to be contradictory. But only in a sincere attempt to study our national traits in their strength and their weakness may we find that wholesome disquiet and perhaps ultimate hope which will repay us.

THE QUALITIES OF THE AMERICAN SOUL Democracy

H A S probably been no more hardly used word than "democracy." T o some it means a condition of society, to others a political party, to still others a hope, and to many a term of despair. But to the American it means something even if he does not analyze it closely, for he knows that during the last century and a half democracy has had the best opportunity in the history of the world to justify itself. If it cannot succeed under the conditions in which it has existed in the United States, it must fail. T h e confusion concerning democracy has been caused as usual by a lack of clear thinking. Political democracy, economic democracy, social democracy, are different things. They do not necessarily lead to one another, and, even when secured, they do not operate necessarily at all times. For democracy, being based on the recognition of humanity, partakes of its inconsistencies. Yet in all its ramifications, it has as a fundamental function the widening of opportunity. Political democracy, or government by the people, is theoretically complete in the United States. T h a t the people do not usually govern themselves has become so well understood that no one bothers any more about it. It is not true, however, that the average American has little political consciousness. He has a real interest in the discussion of political matters, but his failure to take an active share in the party organization arises from a feeling in some sections that "things are going pretty well," THERE

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and in others that "they are hopeless." Moreover, he has long ago recognized that State and local politics are a business, and he leaves them to the people who have made them a business. W i t h the American's dislike for interfering in another man's business, whose rules he may not quite understand, he lets the politicians alone. He would not be so indifferent, however, if he did not know that in any crisis he can resume the power he has neglected. He knows, too, that the politician is only an agent for those actually in control, and with the American preference for direct action, he is likely, on those occasions when he is concerned, to go to the real sources of power. T h e s e he knows to be, first, the many organizations for purposes of propaganda who keep their publicity offices busy day and night, and who, behind this smoke screen, "keep in touch" with the legislators who actually cast the votes in National or State legislatures. He knows not quite so definitely, perhaps, of the power of certain financial interests who work less openly and are concerned more frequently with the defeat of certain candidates than with the election of others. He hears of the methods by which these interests, having selected the Republican candidate in a certain State, determined to select the Democratic candidate also, and, through an absolute control over the available banking funds in that State, forccd a promising candidate who needed, unfortunately for himself, a rather large loan, to withdraw "on account of his health" from the campaign. But these things do not apparently disturb the voter. For he also realizes the temporary nature of most political offices, and he would not care for them. He recognizes, too, how the very weaknesses of political democracy tend to cure themselves. If a gentleman who has been highly successful as the officer of an organization whose purpose is to keep its members from paying their share of the taxes, becomes too ambitious and desires to b e c o n e in name as well as in effect the leader of his party,

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he may be defeated by other forces equally well provided with funds, whose candidate has not personally offended quite so many people. Or, when Governor Ferguson of Texas, in a fervor which he hoped would appeal to the "masses," attacked the University of Texas some years ago, the graduates of that institution saw to it that he was not re-elected. When in 1930 the nomination of Dean Cross of Yale for Governor of Connecticut was laughed at by the practical politicians, the alumni of that university organized and swept him in by about 5,000 majority; the first Democratic governor for many years. T h e superficial observer of our political institutions thinks that everything is "arranged" by the ward or city committee, and it usually is so arranged. But in 1928 the leaders of several of the wards in Philadelphia, where the Republican leader, Senator Vare, was strongest, reported to the City Committee that their voters would not follow them but insisted on voting for Governor Smith. T h e leaders likewise added that if they were to retain their hold in their wards they had better be allowed to "go along." This placed Senator Vare, who had done as much as any other human being to nominate President Hoover, in a most embarrassing position, but no threats or promises availed, and the voters registered their preference. T h e most amusing feature of the occasion was the consequent election of several surprised and delighted Democrats to the State Legislature, which had not seen a Democrat from Philadelphia for years. There is always this possibility in a democracy—that the people will take things into their own hands. This safety valve, no matter how seldom it is used, is the great asset of political democracy. In an oligarchy, probably the worst form of political organization, where responsibility is divided but authority is more relentless, the hopelessness of change is deadly. Such was Russia, and, to a certain extent, Germany and Austria before the Great War. Monarchy in its absolute sense has disappeared, but

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is less dangerous to liberty than oligarchy because of the natural alliance formed by the king and the commons against their common antagonists, like the English Whigs of the eighteenth century, the German " J u n k e r " of the nineteenth, or the "profiteer aristocracy" of the twentieth. W e often hear the remark that England is more truly a democracy than the United States. T h i s contention is based upon the more speedy response to the will of the electorate, by which a Parliament, elected upon a certain issue, will at once proceed to carry out the mandate of the electors. T h e r e may be an advantage in this respect, of course, but it is an advantage simply of speed. Our own system, which elects a Congress in November that is not to take office until one year from the following December, while in the meantime a Congress, some of whose members have already been defeated, meets and passes laws, should have been changed long ago. It was organized in a day when a member from the outlying districts could not have reached Washington in time for the next session, and it remains an anachronism. But this is only a detail of administration. More fundamental is the difference between the British conception of government as depending entirely upon the legislative branch, on which even the Cabinet is dependent, and our own, in which the Executive and Judicial Departments remain independent. Which is more truly democratic? T o any student of our political institutions who prefers historical facts to theory, it must be apparent that our Executives have more often been right than Congress. In nearly every important contest between the President and Congress, the impartial judgment of the historian must regard it as fortunate that between the people and the supposed representatives of the people there has stood a man who knew what was better for the United States than they. From the days when Washington held us from the war which might

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have wrecked the infant republic, through the terrible times when Andrew Johnson sacrificed himself to save his country from the orgy of revenge and sectional hatred, through the days when Cleveland wrung from unwilling Congresses measures which saved the country from disaster at home and abroad, or when Roosevelt kindled in an apathetic legislature a social conscience, until the last tragic fight of Woodrow Wilson to carry out the pledges he had given as the nation's representative to the soldiers and sailors of the United States who had laid down their lives in its service, our Executives have represented much more often than Congress the highest aspects of the American soul. T h e very fact of his undivided responsibility to the people gives the President a strength unknown to any king or prime minister, and the security of his position permits him to take a breadth of view impossible to men who represent a limited geographical district in the House of Representatives or a special interest in the Senate. Everything they do has one eye to their political fences: the President may look squarely at the issue as it affects the people for, misguided as they often are, they have seen to it that every occupant of the White House who "would rather be right than President" has been able to be right and also to be President once more. In our social relations, theory and practice square no more accurately than in our political life, so far as democracy is concerned. In every form of civilization, those of like tastes will seek each other, and social life in its private and personal aspects presents today no marked differences in America from that of other countries. T h e very essence of social life consists in distinguishing those one wishes to know from those one does not, and it consequently has little relation with democracy. In its public aspects, a great deal of emphasis may be laid upon wealth, and the vulgarity of display has been described so often, especially in the chronicles of the socalled "Gilded Age" of the last portion of the nineteenth

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century, that it has grown into a conventional belief, especially to those foreign visitors who are so often its willing or unwilling victims. Perhaps the essential difference between social life here and in Europe today lies in its being more fluid. T h a t there are social strata is inevitable—there are marked social cleavages even in the negro settlements in Harlem— but to the American there is much more opportunity for the peaceful passage from one stratum to the next, either up or down. T h e possession of wealth alone is no more an open sesame to social opportunity in America than in England or Germany. Long ago Emerson commented upon the absolute homage paid to wealth in England, where it gave that possession of property which is there the basis of social superiority. T h e more rapid gain or loss of wealth in America has made its possession less an integral portion of a man's social consciousness, and its absence has therefore been less of a handicap. Wealth, in America, as anywhere, means a creation of opportunity, and in social life it means more opportunity to entertain, to travel, to enlarge one's acquaintance with things worth knowing. Laments in the magazines over the alleged failure of our leaders in financial, in intellectual, in political, and in artistic life, to mingle in one blissful social unity are only to be met by the reply that they do so meet quite as frequently as in other countries, and it is generally not the fault of those who are blessed with wealth if the meetings are not so frequent as might theoretically be desirable. One difference is noticeable between our situation and that obtaining abroad. T h e more definitive recognition of social classes there makes it more easy for the wealthy patrician to entertain those who, while his equals in culture, have no opportunity to entertain him in return. There is a rather definite independence on the part of our "intellectuals" and artists which leads them to decline invitations which are obviously sent to them in their professional capacity, since they do not care to ac-

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cept hospitality which they have no means of returning. T h i s independence would puzzle most Europeans, but it has its roots in a democracy which has no instinctive social revercncc for anyone, and where the very absence of fixed classifications has made the sense of personal discrimination in social matters more keen. In England, at least up to the Great War, the governing aristocracy, by a careful selection and absorption of those distinguished in financial and commercial life, had kept its position secure. For those selected had usually been quite willing and had often become the most conservative of Tories. In America, where no such highly organized body exists officially, many attempts have been made by self-perpetuating bodies, beginning probably with the Order of the Cincinnati, but enlisting usually the competitive instincts of femininity, to set themselves apart from the other citizens of the Republic on the basis of some social distinction. These societies, semi-public, since they are usually based on ancestry which can now obviously not be selective, have failed to set apart their members in any very significant way. And the much more powerful social organizations of a personally selective nature in the larger cities have remained strictly private in their functions and desires, and are usually formal and occasional. One of the greatest preservatives of social democracy in the United States has been the absence of a leisure class, at least among the masculine inhabitants. A society based upon personal achievement rather than that of one's ancestors, in which even a young man worth millions feels ashamed unless he has some ostensible work to do, is conducive to democracy. He finds in the law firm or banking house to which he goes each morning men whose instructions he has to follow and whose ability he has to recognize, who are worth much less in terms of financial or social position than he. It is a good thing for him. In England or France or Germany he would probably be the heir to an estate in which everything was arranged to suit

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his comfort and was intended to augment his sense of importance. T h e disadvantage of this lack of a leisure class lies in the few men of education and wealth who go into public life as a career. T h e i r wealth could give them that independence which would make them impervious even to the subtler forms of control, and their ability to travel and see other civilizations would give them a broader outlook than that of our usual political leaders. But while there are always a certain number of such men in Congress or in the diplomatic service, their influence is not considerable. What such a man can do Theodore Roosevelt proved, and that he fitted into a democracy both social and political needs no demonstration. By an interesting paradox, one of the few organizations of social life in America which has caste as its basis has become associated with political democracy. T h e old Southern aristocracy has, of course, suffered so many changes through Reconstruction and the growth of industrialism that it now presents at first glance no radical difference from similar groups in the North. But anyone who would be misled by the superficial similarities between two thriving commercial towns like Greenville, South Carolina, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, would be incapable of appreciating the distinction between the latter and its nearest neighbor, Wilkes-Barre. And to appreciate the difference between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton is to understand the social geology of the United States. Political democracy and party Democracy in the South are two distinct things. T h e latter became generally universal among the white race as a protection of its racial purity and dominance. B u t there are still many in the South who will tell you of the reluctance with which their grandfathers gave up their W h i g allegiance, and the same spirit persists today. It is the keynote of the patrician democracy which made Colonel Carter of Carterville, as Hopkinson Smith drew him, such a lovable person:

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W h a t a f r a n k , generous, tender-hearted f e l l o w h e is: h a p p y as a boy: h o s p i t a b l e to the verge of b e g g a r y ; enthusiastic as h e is visionary: s i m p l e as h e is g e n u i n e ! A V i r g i n i a n of g o o d b i r t h , fair e d u c a t i o n , a n d l i m i t e d k n o w l e d g e of the w o r l d a n d of m e n , p r o u d of his ancestry, p r o u d of his State, a n d p r o u d of himself: b e l i e v i n g in States' R i g h t s , slavery a n d the C o n f e d e r a c y , and a w a y d o w n in the b o t t o m of his soul still c l i n g i n g to the belief that p o o r w h i t e trash of the earth includes a b o u t e v e r y b o d y outside of F a i r f a x C o u n t y .

Colonel Carter is democratic because he is so sure that he is of the elect of Fairfax C o u n t y that he can treat everyone with kindness and consideration, b e c o m i n g friendly with them all. A t any m o m e n t , of course, if the necessity arises, he can resume that position of superiority to w h i c h his birth and b r e e d i n g entitle him, and therefore he never thinks a b o u t it and of course never discusses it. A l l other people are e q u a l not because of their own qualities but because they are outside of Fairfax County. If anyone believes C o l o n e l c a r t e r is now extinct, he has only to visit the South. It is unfortunate that o u r recent fictional portraits of democracy have so often been caricatures like " B a b b i t t " or have been associated with the exploitation of the poor whites of Sherwood A n d e r s o n or the drab outcasts of T h e o d o r e Dreiser. Every type they draw is, of course, to be found in the U n i t e d States, but they help in no way to understand the soul of A m e r i c a . It is only another example of our artistic wastefulness to forget such a masterly portrait of an A m e r i c a n self-made man as Silas Lapham, infinitely more true to the spirit of A m e r i c a than Babbitt, and just as real now as the day he was created. T h e r e are many pictures of the real democracy of America, in the pages of James L a n e A l l e n , of Zona Gale, of Ellen Glasgow, of W i l l a Cather, of D o r o t h y Canfield Fisher, in which a m u c h broader view of life is taken than that of Colonel Carter, and there is no insistence u p o n caste in the very denial of it, as there is in him. N e i t h e r is there careful reproduction of dullness and stupidity,

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or sordidness and vulgarity for their own sakes, as in the work of Mr. Dreiser and Mr. Lewis. T h e real philosophy of American democracy is put best by Allen in The Mettle of the Pasture, in his description of a girl who has grown up to spiritual beauty out of humble surroundings: F o r m o r e than a hundred years on this spot the land had lessened a r o u n d them; but the soil h a d worked upward into their veins, as into the stalks of plants, the trunks of trees; and that clean, thrilling sap of the earth, that vitality of the exhaustless m o t h e r which never goes for nothing, had produced one heavenly flower at last—shooting forth with irrepressible energy a soul unspoiled a n d morally sublime. W h e n the top decays, as it always does in the lapse of time, whence shall c o m e regeneration if not from below? It is the plain people w h o are the eternal breeding grounds of high destinies.

There is nothing of the patronizing attitude of an earlier generation in this recognition of the eternal mutation of social strata in America. But Allen also recognized less directly, in the same novel, that other growth which exists in the North and the South alike, the Americans who have not decayed, even in many generations, who have lived by the light of their inherited standards of good breeding and who are clearsighted enough to be unawed by artificial distinction, native or foreign. Without the aid of titles, decorations, or orders, they have maintained their leadership by character through the centuries, constantly recruiting their breadth of outlook by intermarriage with people of like tastes both here and abroad, but retaining unchanged that dependence upon individual attainment rather than upon the tradition of a class, which is the touchstone of a true patrician. They may not be an aristocracy in any European sense, but they, even more than Silas Lapham, remain one of the great justifications of democracy. Economic democracy does not, of course, mean economic equality. While it has been estimated by those

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various guesses with which economists are familiar that at the beginning of the present century one-tenth of the people in the United States owned nine-tenths of the wealth, we arc told by the same authorities that fifty-nine per cent of the wealth is now in the possession of about one per cent of the people—a rather rapid concentration. Without paying too much attention to such figures, which must obviously always remain problematical, it is apparent that the real advance in wages in relation to the cost of living has not solved all problems of economic distribution. No sooner had the violent altercations of capital and labor in the early days of the new century been apparently adjourned by the slow recognition of labor unions on the part of capitalists and, on the part of the labor unions, a growing sense of their own responsibilities, than the consumer began to realize that peace between these old foes meant war for him. As an employer of labor speaking before the Academy of Political and Social Science put it, "I am perfectly willing to pay any amount of wages, if all my competitors pay the same amount. For it is you, ladies and gentlemen, not I, who really pay them." T h e consumer has today made no real solution of his difficulty, because he is unorganized. But while he grumbles, he seems infinitely patient, or inert. His patience is due, in part, to a belief on his part that the economic rewards rest in America usually upon the shoulders of those who have won them. Even when Roosevelt was launching his attacks upon the railroad monopoly, there was little personal animosity on the part of the public toward Morgan, Hill, or Harriman. And today what bitterness is shown toward the heads of corporations is largely of foreign manufacture. T h e reason lies in the fact that many of the richest men have risen from the economic ranks, and the average American either has his dream of rising also, or more often has that dream for his children. He has no desire to change a system which

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leaves the door open theoretically to anyone, irrespective of his social or political affiliations. T o him economic democracy means simply opportunity to make good. Of course he has probably not yet realized that the days when men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Harriman, Frick and others rose entirely by their own abilities and ruthlessness have to a certain degree passed. Even the days when a great financier, like Pierpont Morgan, could raise to the presidency of the United States Steel Company a gifted man who had been once a laborer, do not come so often. T h e student of the personnel of the large corporations who dictate the financial and commercial destinies of the country will find in the lower ranks young men who belong to three classes. First, those who by their ability, fortified by inheritance or connections, are clearly destined for an ultimate share in the control. At the other end of the ladder of opportunity are those who by lack of education or initiative are just as clearly marked for subordinate positions. In the third group are thousands of college graduates, without special influence or preferred position, who must win through by ability alone. Those who rise will do so with less spectacular success than the generation of twenty or thirty years ago. But the greatest corporations are constantly on the outlook for men of promise, and disregard place and condition of birth, even in the East, as indeed the West has usually done. What is insisted upon is a general level of education, usually represented by that most uneven of standards, a college degree. But that is only the qualifying round. T h e personnel officers of these corporations are constantly telling us that they are looking for "personality," and that perfect economic democracy is their ideal. Perhaps it is. Certainly anyone who has been interested in watching the careers of young men during the past thirty years will have noticed that the old cry of "Young man, go West," has been reversed. Today the large houses of all kinds in the East find in responsible positions, to an

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ever increasing degree, men from the West, who prefer the fiercer competition of the larger Eastern cities to the safe future of an already established Western business. By a curious paradox, the very existence of a monopoly may or may not tend toward democracy. Michael Pupin, himself a brilliant example of the opportunity which our democracy offered to a Serbian boy who has many times repaid his adopted country through his inventions and publications, claims that great corporations like the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which employs 450,000 persons, and operates properties representing an investment of $4,000,000,000, which are owned by 500,000 stockholders, are great steps toward economic democracy. If, as the president of that corporation recently stated, its policy recognizes that "its responsibility is threefold—that in fact, if not in law, it is a trustee acting in the joint interest of owners, workers and customers," we are approaching an ideal state. If the consumer who deals with a public service corporation is not always impressed with the perfect harmony which this description implies, he at least recognizes that the widespread distribution of the influence of such a corporation makes a binding force for the units of democracy. T h e final effect, of course, depends upon wisdom in the administration. Another result of our economic democracy has been the establishment of a sense of responsibility on the part of those who have for those who have not. T h e many foundations, large and small, beside the private benefactions, represent not merely, as some cynics have observed, the return of the money to its source, but also a sincere desire to spread education and relieve distress. T h e i r activities replace in a democracy the benefactions given long ago in European countries by royalty or nobility. If a noblesse oblige was responsible for those earlier gifts, is there not a similar spirit at the basis of the great American foundations today? Their source is economic today

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rather than social, perhaps, but in the conduct of certain large public welfare movements the line is not easy to draw between those who work from a broader social consciousness and those who are animated by a sense of economic security which urges them to help those less secure than themselves. If one scans the names of those who led in the efforts to provide remedies for the recent unemployment, he will notice that the heads of great banking houses or of corporations generally directed the movements and guaranteed the funds which churches and charitable organizations needed in their practical efforts. There has always been charity in America and plenty of it. But is there not in the American soul today a sense of social responsibility, not only on the part of those who have great wealth but in all grades of economic prosperity, which was not so keen a generation or two ago? T h e spectacle of hundreds of bank clerks and bond salesmen, at whom the popular magazines are pleased to point the fingers of scorn as the product of "our misguided system of college education," scurrying over the large cities to raise funds to help the unemployed and taking it as a matter of course to give up a portion of their own salaries, 1 did not happen after the panics of 1837, of 1857, 873> or of 1893. Perhaps the War may have taught us the great lesson of giving, but there had been wars before, and great self-sacrifice in them, of individuals and communities. Yet it is certain that this "machine age" has responded to the needs of those who are out of work in a practical way which finds its best expression in a democracy. That the workmen in one branch of industry who are employed should contribute to those who are out of work in another branch is natural. With the sympathy of those whose margin of safety is narrow for others who live on a still smaller margin, they have always given, even out of their own poverty, to their fellows. But fifty years ago the banker would have handed in his check as a charity and thought he was doing his full duty. Now he is

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taking the initiative, and his example fires a great many of his staff to like efforts. T h e most important aspect of the matter is that he does it without that class consciousness of the English landed proprietor or the German baron. He seems to recognize that the possession of wealth that might have been more evenly divided brings great obligations with it. As Mr. Owen Young said at the conclusion of one of the campaigns for funds to help the unemployment in New York City, "We are not dealing with charity but with an equalization of the impact of a disaster." He added, " T h e process is slow because no one is in power and no one ought to be. We want no economic dictatorship in America any more than we want political dictatorship." T h e n , after showing how the only cure for the situation lay in co-operative action by the whole people, which took time, he said, "But whatever the penalties are, they are the price we pay for the retention of power in the hands of the people as a whole. It is worth the price." In those few words, "It is worth the price," lies the real answer which has sounded in the American soul ever since the early days of the Republic. T h e insistent critics of those elements in our life which are responsible for the political corruption, the social crudity, and the economic imbecility inseparable from democracy, lose sight of the fundamental asset which from generation to generation has carried over a spiritual surplus to the credit of the United States. T h e best way to appreciate the benefits of our democracy is to leave it for awhile. T h e first reaction, if the visit is paid to Europe, will be an appreciation of the ordered beauty of its architecture, the wealth of its artistic treasures, the surety of its social standards, the thrifty organization of its economic life. But after some months' stay, the stratification of its life begins to grow more and more oppressive, and although since the Great War there has been in some places a violent disturbance of the layers of privilege and property, it has come in the

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form of a substitution of the money power of today for the money power of the past. W h e n we return to this country, the superficial disorders of democracy no longer disturb us as they did. For w o r t h all the things which E u r o p e has and we have not, is that chance to rise which, notwithstanding all the easy jibes of the journalist, is still a reality in the United States. N o matter how limited opportunity may seem to the individual, the door is never locked by that deadliest e n e m y to spiritual or material progress, the hopelessness springing from content with the very limitation of his opportunity. T h e critics of our democracy tell us sneeringly that o u r freedom is a delusion, that the people are their own tyrants. If we are not free, thank G o d we believe we are, and as long as we believe we are, this experiment of democracy is a success.

Efficiency Probably no quality of the A m e r i c a n is so generally recognized as "efficiency." It has indeed become almost synonymous with America. W h e n native or foreign critics have become breathless in their description of the qualities we lack, they pause a m o m e n t to acknowledge that in mass production, in publicity methods, in highp o w e r salesmanship, we are supreme. T h e y seem to think that these constitute efficiency, and the average A m e r i c a n agrees with them. H e has in fact created a new god out of w h a t he thinks is his own image, and he worships it w i t h a devotion which is one of the chief dangers to the A m e r i c a n soul. It is dangerous because, like all idol worship, it is based on a fine quality, that of reverence, and the evil lies in the fact that the idol itself is often adored instead of the great spirit it symbolizes. If the A m e r i c a n reads somew h e r e that we manufactured one billion dollars' worth of

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goods in 1849, e l e v e n b i l l i o n s in 1899 and sixty-one billions in 1923, he is e n c o u r a g e d to t h i n k in terms of q u a n tity rather than q u a l i t y . It takes a r u d e a w a k e n i n g l i k e that of 1929 to m a k e h i m w o n d e r w h e t h e r q u a n t i t y prod u c t i o n may not b e a curse instead of a blessing. F o r what, after all, is real efficiency? Efficiency, in its truest sense, means the q u a l i t y w h i c h p e r f o r m s a task so as to p r o d u c e the best results a n d to leave the c r e a t i n g force, at the c o m p l e t i o n of the task, better able to prod u c e than before. If the w o r k m a n or the artist o r the l a w y e r o r the b a n k e r is d r a i n e d of his ability by the circumstances of his w o r k , so that h e hates it and goes b a c k to his j o b less a b l e to create than w h e n he left it, w h a t does it matter w h e t h e r he has t u r n e d o u t m o r e cogs, p a i n t e d m o r e pictures, p l e a d e d m o r e cases, o r issued m o r e b o n d s in a g i v e n time? If a w o r k m a n sits all day m a k i n g the same infinitesimal part of a machine, till t h e process becomes l o a t h s o m e to h i m , w h a t d i f f e r e n c e does it m a k e to h i m if five m i l l i o n rather than f o u r are prod u c e d , or if the m a c h i n e does its w o r k m o r e effectively? A n d if his m i n d is s t u n t e d by this k i n d of w o r k , of w h a t use w o u l d be the increased leisure w h i c h w o u l d c o m e f r o m a "five-day w e e k " ? Efficiency, in its highest sense, is n e v e r secured by a system w h i c h makes the j o b a m e r e p o i n t of d e p a r t u r e , s o m e t h i n g to be gotten over as a prel u d e to a m u s e m e n t . F o r the a m u s e m e n t in that case is likely to be of a k i n d w h i c h is as u n r e f r e s h i n g as the j o b itself. It m a y seem a n idle t r u i s m that the only s o l u t i o n of life's m a j o r p r o b l e m lies in c h o o s i n g the j o b that gives one pleasure in the d o i n g . B u t any o t h e r a r r a n g e m e n t of a man's l i f e leads to the despair w h i c h makes the d a w n of each day blacker than the n i g h t w h i c h has g i v e n to t h e m i n d at least f o r g e t f u l n e s s . M u c h of the unrest, the soul sickness even, of t h e present day arises f r o m the a v o i d a n c e of that responsibility w h i c h makes f o r the h i g h e r efficiency. W h e n the A m e r i can m a n and w o m a n , w h o h e l d in their k e e p i n g the fu-

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ture of the race in this country, deliberately chose to limit their families to one or two children, they hardly foresaw the effect it was to have on the spiritual efficiency of the coming generations. Already the unassailable figures of the insurance companies show us that the increase in our population among those below twenty-one years is not keeping pace with the increase of those from twenty-one to fifty years of age—that we are becoming a nation shorn of its preponderance of youth. 1 With the decline in foreign immigration this proportion will grow more and more top-heavy, for whatever their limitations may be in other directions, no lack of efficiency in the matter of birthrate can be charged to the southeastern European. If the limitation of the family had resulted in more care and attention to the children, it might have had some redeeming features, but no one, I fancy, will claim that this desirable consummation has come to pass. T h e experience of the race tells us that the more one has to do, the more one does, and the suburban resident who observes the exodus to town by automobile or any morning train will find there a large portion of the feminine citizenry, bent on filling up the time which her avoidance of her true responsibility has left empty. She cannot plead the servant problem as an excuse, for that is her problem and she has failed to solve it. Probably there is no more pathetic sight than the crowds of women following each new fad, lapping up the lectures on "current events" or on books which they rarely read, in order that they may give to their own consciences the subconscious excuse they refuse to allow to become articulate. They find new duties in paralleling masculine activities, proving often that they can do many things quite as well as men, but/ forgetting that this is no reason why they should do them. i According to Mr. Louis I. Dublin, Vice-President of the Metropolitan Life Insurance of New York, only 29% of the population will be under twenty years of age in 1950. as compared with 52.5% in 1850 and 40.7% in 1920. See The Forum, November 1931.

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For there is at least one thing they can do much better than men, and this opportunity for efficiency they have deliberately put aside. What makes this all the more a tragedy is the high degree of efficiency which has characterized American women in other fields of effort. Many of them might be cited as leaders in education and philanthropy, but where there has been one leader, there have been thousands who have shown almost unlimited capacity for that form of charitable work which requires the daily performance of tasks, irksome in themselves, but vitally necessary to the happiness of others. All over this country women are proving every day in business offices, in teaching, in countless ways, that they have a patience in detail, a tact that is almost uncanny, and a devotion to the interests of the man for whom they are working that needs no emphasis or praise. Anyone who has been privileged to see R u t h Draper's monologue, " T h r e e Women and Mr. Clifford," has felt the extraordinary power of that presentation of the secretary who, never stepping outside of her own province, really directs his daily life. It is because of this fine talent for organization, for persistent and continuous service, that the student of the American soul regrets that when these women marry they do not give the nation more children like them, but so often limit themselves to what has become known as "a gentleman's family." T h i s varies, according to the social and economic stratum, from two children to none. T h a t this state of affairs is most prevalent among those elements which, by breeding, by intelligence, and by continuity of American tradition are or should be the backbone of the United States, has been so often observed that it needs no amplification here. One of the greatest impediments to real efficiency was and is the so-called "efficiency expert." He was more rampant a few years ago than he is now, for many business houses and industrial establishments, having paid heavily

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for his services, paid even more generously to get rid of him. A solemn aspect and a glib tongue were his chief assets, and armed with a few pet phrases and a card system, he could silence if not convince the oldest and most experienced employee. One of the most delightful and characteristic incidents that has come to my attention was that of an "expert" called in to tell a publishing house what was the matter with it. He made, as was inevitable, a "survey," a word which the lexicographer of tomorrow will define as " A preliminary investigation leading to no results." T h e first person he met was the elevator man. Immediately he made a note and reported later that the man was much too heavy for the elevator and must be transferred to the freight elevator in the rear. T h e employee in question had been in the service of the house for twenty years, was a perfect mine of information concerning the personnel, was courtesy itself and was among the chief assets of the place in its dealings with the public. But he was too heavy and he had to go—for a time, till the expert went and his voluminous report found its way to the files. Sometimes the expert stays: then—"chaos and the dark." T h e efficiency expert often failed because he lacked a knowledge of human nature, as in this case, and often because he was the exponent of the modern heresy that a theoretical knowledge of general methods, and a smattering of economics, can be substituted for specific knowledge of the thing to be reorganized. T h e rage for centralization which showed itself in political theory during Roosevelt's period in office found its echo in education, in finance, and in industry. It would be idle to deny the brilliant success in certain fields of this principle, but it is one characteristic of the American to believe in panaceas; and if centralization proves efficient in one industry, like the telephone, he believes that it should prove likewise effective in all industries. He forgets that there are certain industries that are natural monopolies.

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and others that are not. He also forgets that centralization is efficient only in units of a certain size, depending upon the nature of the material, and that once the limits of these units are passed, intensified centralization makes for inefficiency. For there comes in another principle here, that the closer an executive is to his human personnel, the greater is his efficiency. Every step he takes away from them, every sub-executive he places between them and himself, cuts down his usefulness. T h e breadth of vision he obtains by his general sweep over the whole situation and by the elimination of detail is to be gained only by the price he pays in the loss of intimate knowledge of his business. It is the touchstone of an efficient executive to know when to pay and when not to pay this price. It has been the experience of railroads, for example, that it does not pay them to go into the contracting business, because they can have the work done more cheaply by outside firms. T h e same general principle has led the American to distrust government operation of industry, while remaining quite convinced of the necessity of government regulation and control. Here he shows again that instinct for balance and compromise so characteristic of the race. If there is any field in which the expert has done the most damage, it is probably in the sphere of education. Here again he proceeded to hypnotize boards of trustees and State legislatures into the belief that a man could know a great deal about the methods of teaching a subject without knowing anything about the subject itself. He has lasted longer in education than in industry because those who know most about education, the teachers, are not in control of it. With a lobby more powerful than is usually suspected, he has gone to State legislatures and had laws passed requiring all teachers to learn what is called technically "education." T h e n , armed with a Ph.D., won perhaps by making a study of the time re-

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actions of white children (under twelve) in the second school district of Slippery Rock, upon their first introduction to the science of botany (in the rough), he has first become a school principal or a superintendent, and varying numbers of the children who are most truly the soul of America are left to his tender mercies. A little later he has, if he is lucky, become an "expert" and found a chair in some college department of education. It is obvious that there would be little use for the educational expert unless he changed something, so he has proceeded in the last two decades to pull education u p by the roots. Not knowing m u c h about the languages, history, or mathematics—he has gradually eliminated them so far as possible from the public school curriculum. In their places he has put courses in "Social Democracy," in "Civics," in "Vocational Guidance," in anything that has no teeth in it. Pupils who formerly knew something about algebra and geometry are taught now in one year a mixed course in which they are exposed to everything from algebra to conic sections. T h i s is called a "look-in course" and is hailed as a great improvement, except by the frantic boys and girls who are expected to solve problems involving trigonometry without knowing what a cosine or a tangent is. But as a compensation they are given the inestimable opportunity to learn the length of the term of the State Auditor General, which may, of course, change at any time, and they are taught sociology without any fundamental training in history, largely because sociology is a new science and sounds progressive. In some way the school course which used to bring pupils to college in ten or eleven years is now stretched over twelve. Part of the time is filled with extra curricular activities, not bad in themselves, b u t dwelt upon altogether out of proportion to their importance. T h e n , having exhausted the possibilities of disturbance within the old four-year high school, a bright idea suggested itself and the j u n i o r high school came into being.

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Overnight almost, athletic teams, dramatic societies, musical clubs were duplicated—and also administrative jobs. T h e writer of this book has had five children pass through a first-class public school, one of the best administered in the country; but he has noted carefully a continuous decline in the efficiency of the curriculum and an increase in the distractions from study, from the day on which the first of the five entered school. If this is the case in a good school, what must it be in the worst? O n e of the causes of this inefficiency is the constant interference with the teaching to make reports on all colors of papers or cards, on the basis of which further and f u r t h e r studies and surveys of educational methods may be made. Ask any agonized teacher of a great public school system, and he will tell you of the hours that should be spent in his legitimate business that are devoted to gathering materials into reports u p o n which his professional promotion depends. T h e efficiency expert in education, having caught the public schools in his grip, has been moving upon the college. In fact, in the West he is at times in control, although the older universities in the East still maintain their integrity. It has already been proposed, however, by an expert, that all college teachers shall be required to take courses in "Education"! As if any good teacher did not know that he had learned to teach by watching a good teacher in action. T h e American college deserves, therefore, special analysis as an example of the real efficiency of the American spirit, which has developed an institution peculiarly our own, and just now subject to constant attack. T h i s attack upon the college has been preceded, of course, by a barrage of criticism. It is an evidence of public interest in the college that so many articles have been written upon it, and indeed if we were to judge alone by the amount of criticism printed in the last few years, the colleges and universities of this country are in a bad way.

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Much of this criticism has the peculiarly fresh and spirited quality which proceeds from the writer's complete detachment from his subject. One efficiency engineer with a delightful disregard of ventilation complains that the classrooms are not used continuously, and another critic, with more justice, fulminates over the "unit system" which is the root of all evil. But most insistent is the cry that goes u p from those who paint the halls of learning as centers of corruption, which must be passed only at the dire peril of the boy who wishes to be exposed for a time to education. According to these critics, the college student, like a certain family who did not have the advantages of higher education, learns nothing and forgets nothing. Meanwhile some of the colleges, and all of the universities, are crowded to the doors. It is not to be supposed that the influx is due to the lurid pictures of college life, or to the destructive criticism so freely offered. T h e r e has never been a lack of such destructive criticism. Emerson, who was a product of a régime at Harvard which apparently was free from some of our modern problems, was rather bitter about the matter. " T h e Good Spirit," he says, "never cared for the colleges." Earlier still, Cooper felt called upon to express himself about Yale, which had expelled him, and still earlier, Franklin was stirred to write an essay upon the results, disappointing to him, of his trusteeship at Pennsylvania. But cannot we proceed from another point of view? Would it not lead to real efficiency, not only in education but in any form of industry, to see what qualities are fine and permanent? T h e n let us attempt to strengthen the forces which have made and preserved these qualities, for one constructive effort is worth a hundred wails over the by-products of college education. We may find that the material is already at hand, needing reshaping rather than destruction. If there are influences which hinder the full develop-

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ment of these qualities, or if mistakes have been made which must be remedied, let us proceed with a view to fundamentals, and with a conviction that the college is essentially sound. For if it is not essentially sound, it is not worth preserving. A n d to its worth there is one universal testimony, that amid all the criticism, there has not been heard the voice of one graduate of a course in liberal arts who regrets that he had spent four years in college. In the first place, contrary to the view expressed so vociferously, the alumnus feels that he received quite a generous amount of education. If he has any coherent criticism of the system under which he studied, it is usually a regret that he was allowed to choose so freely for himself. N o w this criticism never comes from the alumnus of the eighties or nineties, before the devastating effect of President Eliot's free elective system had become fully apparent throughout the American colleges. In those days the student was taught a group of studies arranged by a n u m b e r of teachers who knew what was good for him, or thought they did, and more important, who taught him their individual subjects with the knowledge of what he was studying in the other classrooms, subjects with which they were familiar. T h i s homogeneity, this interrelation of subjects, was the strength of the oldfashioned curriculum, and not the particular subjects which made it up. T h i s complete homogeneity of the old college course is gone beyond recall. T o o many subjects have forced their way into the curriculum for one student to take them all, and the languages and mathematics have given up the fight for their old pre-eminence. But how can we restore the great object of the old-fashioned college, which was not the teaching of Latin and Greek and mathematics, but the removing of ignorance upon those subjects whose mastery was the touchstone of the education of a gentleman? Its secondary object, as Marion Crawford

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has so well put it, was that thoroughness in a few subjects which has been at the root of social superiority in all ages. How then are we to remove in four years the greatest amount of ignorance? By charting out the great fields of human knowledge and seeing that the boy or girl does not leave college without having been required to have at least a speaking acquaintance with all of them. First, he must know the language and literature of his native tongue, and must learn to express himself clearly in English. Second, he must have some knowledge of the exact sciences—mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Time is too short to force him into all of them, but he must learn the salutary lesson that two and two make four. Third, he must know something of that other group of subjects —history, philosophy, politics, and economics, in which human relations are made clear to him. Fourth, he should be led into the group of the biological sciences—zoology, botany, and psychology—where he will learn another important truth: that two and two do not always make four, but sometimes three or five. Fifth, he must be required to continue his study of languages. But some of you will say, "This is all obvious. Of course he must take these things." How many American colleges makt him take them? At least, how many make him take thf.m in such correlated groupings as to call to his attention the process through which he is going? How often is it called to his attention that there are these great fields of knowledge and that he cannot afford to be entirely ignorant of any one of them? T h e ideal would be to make him take all these subjects, but that is impossible—in four years. But he must know something of each of the groups at least, and there is time left for teaching him enough of some one subject to give him a fairly thorough knowledge of it, and still a few hours left for free electives in other fields. Boys and girls will object to some features of this program, but they will send their sons and daughters back

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to the college that made them take it. T h e point that needs emphasis is that all these subjects are taught now, but that there is still in many quarters an opinion that the undergraduate is competent to select his course for himself. T h e Arts colleges have lost prestige because their Faculties have not made full use of the material at their disposal, not only in itself but in its interrelations. T h e curriculum, of course, is only the framework. What other elements of the American college have filled it with life? Ask any alumnus what he remembers best and he will either recall the names of certain teachers or tell you about the good times he had. T h e r e is a difference between the attitude toward the Faculty in an alumnus of the nineties and one of the new century. T h e older men speak of their teachers with more affection; the younger, with more respect. It is not only because the increasing numbers have prevented that personal intercourse which made for affection; it is really because, on the whole, there is more efficient teaching. Part of the time in the eighties or nineties was spent in keeping order. T h e undergraduate may have loved his preceptors more dearly, but he certainly made life miserable for some of them. Now disorder in the classroom is a thing of the past. T h e teacher can devote his entire energy to presenting his subject in a proper manner. T h a t he often, owing to large classes, has to make it a dramatic spectacle is true, but in order to do that, he must prepare it more carefully than his predecessor did. Every minute of the hour he is alive, giving his best, fixing his eye on the least interested student and determined to capture him, knowing that if he does so, he has given the rest something worth while. T h a t this nice adjustment of a course of study, leading from the elementary or basic subjects to those which demand more maturity, requires at least four years should be apparent. T h e menace of the "junior college" is threatening the very essence of the American college of liberal

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arts. I wish the glib "experts" who advocate this separation of the lower and upper two years could listen to the conversations that go on in the deans' offices all over this country as that much criticized functionary labors to help the boy who has the disease known as "Arts indigestion." It usually comes in sophomore year, and it makes him wonder what this education is all about. If he meets a sympathetic adviser, he is saved, and he is saved because he has two more years in the same place with a continuity that is priceless and which the junior college would destroy. It is just that continuity which is so vitally needed for the cementing of those friendships which are the second great gift of the college to America. Every college man or woman knows what they are worth, that is, if he or she is worth anything. They are formed in days before distrust becomes a duty, and time or separation can only deepen their hold. When President Coolidge wished to have as his representative in Mexico a man whom he could absolutely trust, he chose his classmate at Amherst, Dwight Morrow. It was not long ago that one of the foremost scholars in America died under circumstances of peculiar distress. He had taught in the East, in the Middle West, and in the far West, but among all his friends, those who stood around his coffin and comforted his widow were all members of his college class. Unfortunately as numbers grow, the class is disappearing as a unit in education or in friendship. T h e fraternity or social club has practically taken its place in the larger universities, but the result is much the same. Where from fifteen to forty men are initiated into a fraternity at one time, the class delegation within the fraternity takes the place of the small class of the nineties, in the knitting of friendships. T h e training in responsibility, which was one of the fine things in the earlier college, survives in these later relations. One concrete instance is worth a hundred generalizations. T h e most difficult problem in fraternity

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house management is, of course, the question of liquor. All the great national fraternities forbid their members from bringing it into their houses. But the irresponsible alumni bring it in just the same, especially after football games. At one of the houses at a large Eastern university, several of these alumni continued this practice after warnings from the graduate board of trustees of the fraternity chapter which held title to the property. Before the board could act, the undergraduate seniors met and assumed responsibility for putting their house in order. T h e offending alumni were notified that they could not enter the house again, and two of them, who were lodging there, were given one week to leave. Of course the board of trustees supported the boys in their action, but it need hardly be emphasized that the importance of the occurrence lay not so much in the prohibition of liquor as it did in the assumption by a group of seniors of responsibility. T h e American college has given us nothing more precious than the cultivation of the esprit de corps, and it must be preserved by close co-operation between the college authorities and every undergraduate organization that stands for solidarity and for the natural instinct that leads men to form associations. That such co-operation is a reality is known to every college administrator, but that fraternities, which thirty years ago were indifferent to the scholastic standing of their members, watch now with great care over it, may be news to those who clamor for their abolition. Is it not time that the public conception of so-called "college life" should begin to square with the facts? T h e old idea that a boy went to an isolated spot for four years and then "commenced life" persists still in the minds of those unacquainted with the changes that have been brought about in American education. T h e boy who enters a university has been already in close contact with life and he remains in even more vital relation to it during his residence. Parents are gradually awaking to the

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fact that the most efficient way to prevent their sons from dissipating is to provide them with something else to occupy their minds. T h e undergraduate, of course, is under none of the delusions which agitate the critics of the colleges. He knows he is like any other boy from eighteen to twenty-two except that he is being furnished with standards which are higher than those of his brother who proceeds earlier to the atmosphere of a bank or an insurance company. He is usually kept too busy by his course of study to neglect it, for the room is needed urgently for those who will work. Notwithstanding the current delusion, he does not seek "snap courses," because they are usually hard to find. What he absolutely refuses to suffer is boredom, even at the price of ease. In short, he is a keen young person, who is anxious for the right kind of guidance, and, while he overemphasizes his "activities" and his various societies and "hats" and "keys" —that is only human. Education—friendship—and the devotion to something beside himself. These are what the American college has given and will continue to give if the "expert" is not allowed to crush its first two formative years back into the precocious maturity of the high school and drag its last two, even more precious in their development, up into the professional atmosphere of the graduate school. It may be an illusion that we have been educating men to a point where they can think clearly, can see into the heart of a problem, can preserve the distinction between what is important and what is unimportant, and who can be liberal to all sincere opinions, whether these agree with their own or not. If this be a dream, it is at least a noble dream. But it is not a dream—it is a practical reality. T h e essential qualities of the four-year American college were not built upon the shifting sands of mere temporary utility, nor has it proceeded along the byroads of pedagogical science, whose paths are marked by the milestones of

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mistake. Its progress has been upon the broad highroad of the human understanding, reaching back as it always has done, to the fountains of knowledge, and leading forward, as it must continue to do, into the realities of life. W e believe in the efficiency of this form of education not only because we see the minds of boys and girls kindle every day as they are brought into contact with the mental and spiritual inheritance of the race, but also because the graduates in unending procession tell us of their successes, won with the weapons the college has given them. A n d we believe in it most heartily because we know that when the days come in which a man is his own best companion, he will realize how priceless are those resources which no one can take from him but himself. It is because the American college seems to be one great stronghold of that higher efficiency of the spirit that its destruction from without by public clamor for more material efficiency, or a boring from within by those who are mere theorists in educational methods, are to be combated with every ounce of energy that is at the command of its Faculties, its trustees, and its alumni. In securing efficiency in the commercial sense, the college labors under some disadvantages as compared with business. It is producing and selling something intangible, known as "education," which is hard to measure and whose effects are not at once apparent. Its contracts are for long terms, and if it makes mistakes in the selection of its teachers they are not quickly and easily remedied. It never has enough money to pay its Faculty and its administrative employees what they are worth. And, above all, it can never sacrifice to any temporary efficiency or sense of economy the principle of fair dealing with anyone outside or inside of its walls. One might take refuge, of course, behind the first of these difficulties and say that, owing to the intangible quality of its product, the college could not be expected to compare in efficiency with a business house, but as a

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matter of fact the college usually, when the Faculty have the main control, is better co-ordinated in its departments, is more flexible and develops initiative more readily, than the average business. As the late President T a f t once pointed out, only ten per cent of the business corporations in the country could tell the Federal T r a d e Commission the cost of their own product! Viewed from the point of view of real efficiency, however, there is no comparison. For, from its very nature, a business, which is organized for profit, cannot be conducted as efficiently as an institution in which all idea of profit has been discarded. T h e producing forces in the college are its Faculty, its administrative officers, and its trustees. T h e products are its alumni, its contribution to research, and its influence as an organized body upon the public. T h o s e who have had opportunities to compare our student body and alumni with those of foreign universities and colleges under corresponding conditions know that while they may be surpassed in certain definite branches of knowledge by the foreigners, in a real knowledge of human nature and in an ability to conduct themselves like men and women in relation to others, the American college product need fear no comparison. W e have heard much about the inability of the Rhodes scholars at Oxford to meet the peculiar academic standards for which they had not prepared. But when Mr. Hoover organized the relief commission in Belgium he built upon the Rhodes scholars the most efficient system of organization conceived in modern times and dedicated to the preservation of human life. T h e Belgians were amazed. " H o w does it happen," they asked in wonder, "that these boys have this tact, this instinct for organization, this knowledge of human nature? Our young men can die, but they could not have done this!" In the supreme test of the Great W a r the American college proved for all time its efficiency as the producer of men. W e who knew her were certain of her, for we

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knew that her creating forces lived in that spirit of service which kept her ever a living and a growing thing. Forever renewing herself through contact with youth, the American college takes the best of our life and in times of peace she gives that best back again with something in its character that cannot be measured by the standards of mechanical efficiency, but upon which this R e p u b l i c depends as the most solid fact in its existence. In times of war she gave her best without display, in the confident knowledge that those who have known the most of life can teach the rest how to die. However the everlasting dispute as to o u r mechanical efficiency d u r i n g the Great War may be settled, there can be no question of the higher efficiency which gave the United States for a brief time the moral and spiritual leadership of the world. It was the power of a great idea which President Wilson sent to the G e r m a n people which made victory possible by breaking down the autocracy which had b r o u g h t on the war. W e know now that Germany crumbled when she realized that a nation which she believed to be merely an efficient commercial machine proved itself capable of fighting for an idea. Is it the fault of G e r m a n y or the fault of E u r o p e that o u r conduct since then has led them to believe that they were right in their earlier estimate of us? If they judge us by the shrewdness of an American m a n u f a c t u r e r of automobiles who saves production costs by operating abroad, instead of at home, have not they a perfect right to their misconception of us—if it is one? H o w long will it take the United States to realize that once o u r magnificent effort in the war has had time to be forgotten, the lasting impression of the E u r o p e a n is of the potential energy of this country—in case we should ever be a foe to his native land? Against a tariff to shut out his goods he can retaliate, but the giant strength of the United States he cannot alter. Once that strength was to most of E u r o p e an inspiration; m o r e and m o r e it is becoming a menace. H o w

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can they disarm, even if they make peace within themselves? For we have refused to join them in the only efficient way, and they do not trust our national sincerity. If only once again the higher efficiency, which has shown itself in other phases of our national life, could through a great political leader kindle the idealism which once animated this nation, it would be the solution of unemployment, as well as of all other problems. In our daily lives, as in our national policies, there is no other way to happiness. With all the marvelous multiplication of material efficiency methods, we are not any happier than our ancestors—we are only more active. Activity of itself is not important; it merely complicates matters and leads to restlessness, which is one of the prevailing qualities of the American soul today. T h a t restlessness can only be cured from within, by the possession of resources not usually associated in the mind of the American with efficiency, but which are of the very essence of efficiency in its highest form. A belief in something higher than oneself, a devotion to something that will not pay in dollars, even sacrifice and sorrow, will still that restlessness. It is idle for the older generation to talk about "clamping the lid" upon the restless energy of the younger generation. T h a t energy must find its vent in some way: it calls again for the highest constructive leadership to provide the inspiration for public or private service which will turn the adaptability, the resourcefulness, the inventive power of the coming generations of Americans into the channels which will develop their efficiency in its highest form. But the American parent cannot demand of any leadership the impossible. If the coming generations have not been taught by the one real force, that of example, how to make their lives efficient in the right way, no father or mother can demand of the church, or the school, or the college, that it succeed where he or she has failed. When

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the president of D a r t m o u t h C o l l e g e had presented to h i m a prospective f r e s h m a n by his father w i t h the h o p e f u l r e m a r k , " H e r e is m y son, D o c t o r ; I h o p e y o u ' l l m a k e a m a n of h i m , " the president p r o m p t l y replied, " M y d e a r Sir, he is n i n e t e e n . If y o u have not m a d e a m a n of h i m yet, we can d o n o t h i n g . " T h e r e is n o u n i v e r s a l recipe for the h i g h e r efficiency. It must be b r e d i n t o the soul f r o m the earliest days, a n d each c h i l d presents a separate p r o b l e m . T h e responsibility of seeing that the A m e r i c a n soul of the f u t u r e does n o t w o r s h i p size, instead of spirit, cleverness instead of capacity, speed instead of stamina, rests squarely u p o n the shoulders of those w h o are responsible for its existence.

Liberality By this I d o not m e a n T o l e r a t i o n . In this term there is concealed an i m p l i e d condescension, an assumption of superiority, even a dislike w h i c h has b e e n only partially o v e r c o m e . It is d o u b t f u l w h e t h e r there is any m o r e real toleration in A m e r i c a than in any other c o u n t r y . T h e r e may be m o r e on the surface, b u t that is because toleration is usually based o n indifference. W h e n the person or the party or the institution is not dangerous to o u r property or o u r p r e j u d i c e s , w e are tolerant of them. B u t if they threaten o u r serenity, tolerance vanishes. For toleration is an a t t i t u d e assumed for a particular occasion, b u t liberality is a q u a l i t y of the soul. K n o w l e d g e m a y not always lead to liberality, b u t ignorance is its death. A m e r i c a has been f o r t u n a t e in h a v i n g n o peasant class, the stronghold of deep-seated prejudice, e v e n h a r d e r to c o m b a t than the cynical indifference of the lord of the m a n o r . O u t s i d e of the n e g r o slaves and the b o n d servants, the A m e r i c a n has never had to feel that sense of personal d e p e n d e n c e u p o n the w i l l of another h u m a n b e i n g w h i c h makes liberality impossible. P o p u l a r e d u c a t i o n h a d to come first, for t h r o u g h it m e n

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learned to know each other's opinions, and that is the beginning of understanding. T r u e liberality is not indifference, it must proceed through the recognition of differences to the forgetting of . them. T h e recent meetings in New York City of leading representatives of differing religious beliefs to further the common cause of liberality is encouraging because it is based at least upon the assumption of a belief in something. T h e gathering of an equal number of persons who believed in nothing would have accomplished little—for there is no one so closed to an appeal to liberality as the skeptic. He believes he has found a complete tolerance for all beliefs, by making them unnecessary to himself and, in so doing, has made real liberality impossible. But the essence of liberality lies in the desire to find out the other man's point of view, even if it is not adopted. T o do this one must seek him, if possible, in his own home and surroundings. Here, certainly, America has shown more true liberality than Europe. For a hundred years Americans have studied at European universities, but only recently has the return voyage set in. Even among the most distinctly intellectual class in Europe, the ignorance of what America really has to contribute is still remarkable. Those who were privileged to observe the effect upon the visiting Educational Commission from Oxford and Cambridge during the Great War were struck not so much with the bewilderment of members of the Commission as with the naivete with which they expressed their surprise at what they found here. It was evident they had expected little. A few months later, when Professor Newton of the University of London came over, his point of view was equally provincial. One of his pet ideas was the perennial hope of an interchange between English and American teachers. After he had indicated a number of subjects in which he felt we could be helped by the ministrations of English scholars, one of the group to whom he was talking asked him to suggest branches of

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learning in which he thought the services of American lecturers could be helpful at London. "Why, in American History, of course," he began. T h e n he stopped, and the silence was eloquent. It was not only an instinctive feeling that European scholarship must be better than ours which made him mute. He was really uninformed concerning what America was doing, and he had been sent on a special mission to this country! Very recently, at a meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, a visiting English professor lamented that his colleagues in England were frequently embarrassed by finding that their discoveries, when published, had been anticipated by American scholars of whose publications the Englishmen were blissfully ignorant. American scholarship has been trained for many years to take account of what has been done abroad as a necessary preliminary to work in any field. It must be said for the French, German, and Italian exchange professors that they know more about our accomplishments or at least are more tactful in what they reveal. But even such men as Professor Cestre of the University of Paris, Professor Schoneman of Berlin, or Professor Ferrando of Florence, whose studies of American literature and institutions are causing many Americans to revaluate our native achievements, are comparatively recent phenomena. We have always known more about Europe than Europe has known about us. It was ignorance of America that led Germany to attack us, and if Germans had studied in America as widely and as long as Americans had studied in Germany, there would have been more understanding of the American character, and the history of the War might have been changed. Surely no Registrar of an American university would have betrayed the same ignorance of European geography as that shown by the Registrar of the University of Halle. Upon receiving the application of an American student who had stated that he was

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from Marietta, Ohio, the old gentleman, after some original research, returned the application upon the ground that it was incorrect. " T h e r e is no such place," he said, "as Marietta, Ohio." Upon being assured there was, he fixed his gaze with reproach upon the American. " T h e r e are only three places in Ohio," he insisted, "Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. Here is a geography published in your own country, which proves it." And he produced a tiny school geography, which was naturally somewhat limited as to cities. T h e Registrar of an American university might have had no better geography of Germany at hand, but he would have taken a foreign student's word about his birthplace. If one wishes to obtain quickly a contrast of American liberality with foreign illiberality, he has merely to review the long procession of books written about America by English travelers with those in which American visitors treat Great Britain. On the English side, there is just one great book—Bryce's American Commonwealth. Certainly no Englishman is very proud of Dickens' American Notes, Matthew Arnold's American Civilization, or Kipling's American Notes, while Arnold Bennett's Your United States is just clever journalism, and H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton wrote their impressions upon the basis of a few weeks' travel. From the point of view of solidity of achievement, President Lowell's The Government of England may match Bryce's study. But for profound observations of national characteristics, and for distinction of style, which of the books by English men of letters can compare with Cooper's Gleanings from Europe, Emerson's English Traits, Hawthorne's Our Old Home, or Henry James' English Hours? What English novelist has created out of American materials such an enduring imaginative work as Irving's Bracebridge Hall, Henry James' The Tragic Muse, or such a brilliant international contrast as Miss Sedgwick's Adrienne Toner?

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In studies of our national character the French have a better balance of trade. A century has not made St. J e a n de Crevecceur's Letters of an American Farmer, or DeTocqucville's Democracy in America less significant, and Professor Cestre's An Introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson reveals how well he understands contemporary American poetry. But with Henry James' French Poets and Novelists, Mrs. Wharton's French Ways and thenMeaning, and Miss Sedgwick's A Childhood in Brittany to our credit, we need not fear comparisons. And in imaginative fiction, what French novelist has ever treated with such rare sympathy the soul of an American woman as Mrs. Wharton gave us in Madame de Treymes? And what Italian has ever revealed American life as Marion Crawford portrayed Italian character in Saracinesca or Marzio's Crucifix? It is not sufficient to reply that the American artist in letters has been attracted by European life and has had more chance to observe it. Kipling lived for three years in Vermont, but surely Captains Courageous is not one of his important books. No, this is a heritage of the pioneer adventurers who have poured over to this continent from the beginning—this interest of the American soul in other lands and races, old or young. Without it we could not have had such great imaginative creations as Madame Butterfly or Beyond the Horizon or Lazarus Laughed. Before there can be real liberality there must be security. T h e man whose opinions are founded upon logical reasoning, or profound faith, or wide experience, is likely to be a liberal just as the nation which believes itself secure from attack can afford to be magnanimous. Gibraltar feels no enmity to the waves of the Mediterranean. Against that impregnable rock the waters have broken for a long time, but the fortress smiles on serenely. But to the man or nation that is insecure, liberality is difficult. T h e skilled workman, seeing installed a machine which does his work more easily, is uneasy. T h e economist

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may prove that the additional product will create more demand and thereby provide him with a new job, but he is distrustful. A hundred years ago, he would have smashed the machine, but he has learned that that method is futile. His best security, he believes, is the power of his union, and as long as that is strong, he is willing to trust to it. In matters of religion, liberality is largely a question of security, but is also a matter of breeding. T h e older historical religions are more liberal, in general, because their members are more certain of the authority upon which they rest their beliefs. As the newer faiths, depending more and more upon individual leaders, whose influence fades with time, feel the necessity for stimulation, illiberality grows. T h e easiest way to entertain congregations or to weld growing schisms is to attack some other form of worship. Fortunately for America, there is complete official separation of Church and State. T h a t there is not complete unofficial separation is well known, but such political activities are repudiated by the best men in all creeds, and could not exist except for the cowardice of political leaders. T h e clergyman who uses his church organization for political purposes is always on the defensive in this country, and the practical impossibility of solidifying any creed behind one party or one candidate makes the path of such a person difficult. T h e great hope of liberalism in this country lies in its tendency toward balance and compromise. T h e liberal in politics is the middle-of-the-road man, who is neither T o r y nor Radical, and our greatest public leaders have been liberals. Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Webster, Lincoln, Cleveland, Wilson, whatever their party, were liberals in the true sense, that they could see the other man's point of view, and that they were constructive. Jackson and Roosevelt were more radical and were best in attack.

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T h e philosophy of both Tory and Radical is based upon illiberality. John Galsworthy put it with delicate satire in Strife when he represents the Radical leader shaking his fist at the Tory manufacturer, who has agreed to the compromise proposals of the Liberal Union leader. " I depended upon you," the Radical shouted to the Tory, "to hold out!" In that speech Galsworthy also indirectly revealed the difference between our liberality and that of Europe. Radicalism has become triumphant in more than one European country and, moreover, has usually a permanent political party to represent its doctrines. In England the Liberals have been squeezed almost out of existence between the Tories and the Labor Party. But English liberalism was commercial and industrial, and its leaders have largely been taken over by the Conservatives. In America a third party like the Populists, the Progressives, or the Socialists, has but a temporary life. This is due partly to the fact that the party of personality and the party of institutions satisfy one or other of the most definite of our political ideals, and partly because of our form of government. T h e stability of the political organizations in the several States is based upon the fact that they are business propositions, and the Republican and Democratic machines understand each other perfectly. Their delightful mutual comprehension makes the permanence of a national third party impossible, for between national campaigns it would have little to feed upon. For the cause of liberalism, this is a good thing. T h e greatest foe to liberality is Radicalism, for Toryism yields gradually by the inevitable pressure of events. Radicalism, however, proceeds so fast that it brings about a reaction, sometimes more violent than the first impulse. In America, the progressive ideas find their fruition through one of the established parties as in Roosevelt's or Wilson's day, and because this safety valve is always present, the establishment

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of a really Radical party is unnecessary. Some political philosophers have lamented bitterly over this state of affairs and have attributed it to an inertia, or an unthinking conservatism, or the general comfort in which the American is presumed to live. But it is really due to an innate liberalism, a distaste for violent remedies in which the American mind reveals its English ancestry, even if England itself has become more radical than America. Moreover, the radical elements in the West have been shrewd enough to see that they can accomplish more by waiting until an even distribution of the two major parties gives them the balance of power in Congress, than by the complete possession of responsibility. Perhaps the greatest proof of the existence of a large element of liberality in things political is to be found in a study of the election returns, extending over a series of years. T h e election of Democratic Governors in States like N e w York or Ohio, when the Presidential candidates on the Republican ticket receive tremendous pluralities, or the Democratic victories in 1930 and 1931 after the Republican victory in 1928, prove that the voters in America do think, and that they pass easily from one party to another if a strong personality or a real issue presents itself. Another quality of American liberality lies in its permanence. N o matter how strong was the opposition to the progressive legislation of the first twenty years of the twentieth century, practically none of it has been repealed. N o party would dare to attack the pure food laws, the child labor laws or the Federal Reserve System. If we move slowly at times, we move surely, for the esscnce of our progress has been a consideration for both capital and labor, both the employer and the employed. T h e T o r y may grind his teeth at the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Radical may fume at the callousness of the public to the new combinations of capital, but the Liberal goes on quietly about his own business, knowing well that there are two sides to each question,

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that he would like to hear both, and that he will be presented with large opportunities to hear them. T h e American way of deciding the relative claims of capital and the consumer is illustrated by Chief Justice White's decision in dissolving the Standard Oil Company of N e w Jersey. It was not the size of the corporation, he said, which made it unlawful, it was the fact that it restrained competitive trade because it was a monopoly. He thus recognized the essential discrimination between a decision that would limit natural growth and one that would protect the consumer. T h e growing spirit of liberality is illustrated by the changed attitude of the employer of labor from that of fifty or even twenty-five years ago. During the business depression which set in during 1929, one apparent method of economy was the discharge of employees whose services were no longer needed. Many corporations took this obvious method of saving money. But the important fact is that many did not. On the same day as that upon which a large bank in N e w York dismissed several hundred of its force, the largest bank in Philadelphia decided to retain over two hundred employees who could have been "spared." Even more significant was the announcement by the presidents of such large corporations as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the General Motors Corporation, and the National Association of Flat Rolled Steel Manufacturers, in November, 1930, that they would make no reductions. T h i s action is in sharp contrast to that of the United States Steel Company in November, 1903, when it cut $15,000,000 from its payroll after the panic of that year, notwithstanding the much heralded profit-sharing plan with its employees which it had announced in May of the same year. T h e action of the great corporations was not, of course, entirely altruistic. Indeed, in making the announcement, it was clearly indicated that sound economics was at the basis of the decision. If a large number of workers were

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discharged, that reduced by even greater numbers the purchasers of commodities, and the depression of business would be accelerated. T h i s breadth of view is one form of liberality. How much more effective it is than charity, or any governmental dole like that practised in England, is at once obvious. Such devices are like an artificial stimulant. T h e maintenance of a force of workers, on the other hand, keeps the natural flow of blood through the whole body in a healthy condition. Another evidence of American liberality is the distrust of official censorship for the stage or for literature. Such an extraordinary proceeding as the banning of The Green Pastures by the English censorship, on the ground that it represented the Lord in an undignified position, would have been unthinkable in any large American city, even in Boston, which banned Leaves of Grass and Strange Interlude. T h e fine reverence with which Marc Connelly represented the character of "the Lord" apparently passed through the consciousness of the British censor without making any impression. But since the same censor had banned Young Woodley, so that its English author had to cross the ocean to see it first in Philadelphia, on the ground that it portrayed the head of an English public school in a way calculated to injure such an important institution, the actions of the Lord Chamberlain's office are apparently unpredictable. When we have official censorship it is generally reasonable, and when it errs, it usually errs on the side of liberality. T h e American prefers to let a bad play die, as ninety per cent of them do, knowing that the people who wish to see outrageous productions, after the many warnings they are sure to receive from church organizations or drama leagues, are beyond harm. With the "tabloid" newspapers representing scenes far more lurid than the stage play, it seems almost idle to stop the legitimate drama on the score of indecency. T h e sole test should be the

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probable effect upon the audience. Will a play or a moving picture or a book incite a hearer or reader to immorality? A play like Strange Interlude certainly would not. But a lot of undraped women on the stage might do so, or a novel might, by the ridicule of generally accepted standards, or by the assumption of lower ones, more subtly but more effectively, do harm. T h e censor can make the chorus put on more clothes, but how can it be left to an official, who may have been appointed for political reasons, to decide upon the possible effect of a novel or a play upon the standards of morality of the audience? Every day, every week, and every month tons of printed matter issues from the press which is positively harmful, according to the most liberal definition. T h e American sense of proportion trusts to the transitory nature of all books and plays. T h e "best seller" has, according to the experience of the book trade, a life of from three to six months. T h e average age of a play is shorter, and of a moving picture probably a little longer. But the magazine is thrown away, the book gives place to another, the play goes to the storehouse. We know that an official ban in Boston secures the success of a book or play in New York or San Francisco, and the feeling of the American that the police power must be local and not national makes the whole procedure of censorship infinitely difficult. It is pleasant to record a growing liberality in our foreign policy, under the leadership of the first President since Wilson who has any conception of the real situation in Europe. Having abandoned our political liberality after the defeat of the League of Nations had apparently been ratified by the election of Harding in 1920 and of Coolidge in 1924, we returned for a time to the policy of avoiding responsibility while asking for conferences which cut across the operations and functions of the League. We made a magnificent gesture through Secretary Kellogg's peace plan, but in our disarmament con-

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ferences we have bargained without much success over details while the great fundamental principles which alone can preserve peace are forgotten. W e solemnly fix a 5 - 5 - 3 ratio of naval strength with Great Britain and J a p a n , not seeing that great naval armaments are symptoms of a disease old as the world itself, and to check the symptoms does not cure the basic evil. T h e disarmament conference of the League on military affairs developed early a difference of attitude between Great Britain and America on one hand and the continental allies of France on the other. France desires first of all security and takes the ground that the question of disarmament is primarily political, not technical. She has heard too recently the shells from the German guns roar over Paris to view the question of disarmament simply as a matter of ratios. She knows, too, that it was not Belgium's artillery but Belgium's honor which saved her in 1 9 1 4 . What is needed most at international conferences is that ability to see the others' point of view, to recognize that Great Britain's security lies in her ability to maintain a navy, which will keep the seas open to her people, who cannot feed themselves; that France needs security against a revival of Prussianism and a disturbance of the financial arrangements of the T r e a t y of Versailles; that Poland needs security from the spirit that once partitioned her; that Germany needs security against a combination of forces which would prevent her financial recovery. It is difficult for these nations, each handicapped by some essential insecurity, to take that liberal attitude which the secure alone can assume. More and more the tragedy of our great refusal to join the League bccomes apparent. Valuable as the occasional presence of our Cabinet members at London and Paris may be, or even the more consistent attendance of Ambassador Gibson as observer at Geneva, they do not speak with the authority of a representative of the Council of the League. W e could

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be sowing the seeds of a more durable security for ourselves than any 5 - 5 - 3 ratio can give, for we could once more assume the moral leadership of a League, a league with teeth in it, which our membership would make complete. Meanwhile, while millions of men are idle, the world spends every year $5,000,000,000 in preparation for a war which everyone hopes will not come. And we who could do most to stop it have not yet regained the good will of the world. The London Times, in commenting on July 23, 1931, upon the results of the conference of Prime Ministers in London, speaks of the occasion as "a lost opportunity." " T h e reasons for its failure," it proceeded to say, "are not far to seek. From the very outset the conference was precluded from grappling with the fundamental factors responsible for the present crisis in Germany. So long as the United States Government declined to discuss war debts and the French Government declined to discuss reparations, it was clear that no real progress could be made toward a permanent settlement of the economic problem of Germany. "For the moment both France and the United States have succeeded in evading the real issues, but it is plain that they cannot be evaded much longer." The British cannot see that the French cling, as for life, to the Young plan, which guarantees them the continuation of the payment of reparations, while the United States has as yet only begun to think internationally. The conference was not a failure if it did nothing else but bring the official representatives of the United States once more into a meeting where they went without evasion or apology. Irrespective, too, of the ultimate outcome of the difficulties between the Japanese and Chinese, the most important fact for us was the universal welcome which was given our representative when he took his seat in the meeting of the Council of the League. The timid policy which kept him mute persisted until we had the mortifica-

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tion of reading that the representative of Great Britain had expressed the views of the United States, in voicing the protest of the Council to Japan! How much more potent would have been our contribution if our representative had spoken audibly for the United States, need not even be discussed. It has not been the habit of America to be mute in matters with which she is concerned, and the world will be the better when she assumes the responsibilities that are hers. It is too early even yet to judge of the action of President Hoover in proposing a moratorium of the debts due by Germany to the creditor nations. T h e reaction in Great Britain and in Italy was hearty and sincere. T h e French reaction was more doubtful, and the uncertainty of his nation's attitude probably prompted the visit of Premier Laval to the United States. But even if his joint announcement with President Hoover seemed to hide behind a cloud of words the real issues, the visit of the French premier was of significance in helping toward a broader understanding between the men who control the affairs of the two republics. Discounting any sentimental relationship between France and the United States, there is a great necessity for the two nations who control international finance at present to arrive at an understanding of the forces which are making for war or peace in Europe. If the two greatest republics in the world, through age and influence, can think in the same terms, the future must be more secure. But to Americans, the most encouraging result of the recent actions of President Hoover has been the general approval of his course throughout the United States. T h e dread of our mingling in European affairs, created by a certain group of politicians in order to discredit President Wilson, and deliberately nurtured as an asset by the leaders of the Republican party, has been greatly lessened by the action of a Republican President. T h e statements recently issued by the American Bar Association, the

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American Federation of Labor, the National Grange, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and by a group of seventy-one railroad executives, urging the United States to accept membership in the permanent court of International Justice, is only one indication of a recognition of the true condition of affairs. If our attitude toward foreign relations can be changed so easily by the action of a leader, there is no reason why, within ourselves, an ever more liberal spirit should not grow. T h e only way to make a people liberal is to make them wish to be. We have no century-old inherited hatreds to overcome; all that we need to remove is ignorance and fear, which is a child of ignorance. We are on the road to this consummation—even if the road is long. Liberality is essential to true culture and, as the levels of culture move down, broadening through increased vision and penetrating more deeply through education, matters of dispute will be settled first upon one level of intelligence, then upon the next lower stratum of thinking, until true liberality will come. There is only one thing which the true Liberal must never tolerate, and that is intolerance. Provincialism Provincialism may be due to a geographical situation, to an absence of education, to a lack of experience, or to a strong and persistent tradition of superiority. In its highest form it may find expression in art in a glowing or a wistful picture of a bygone civilization, such as Sara Orne Jewett gave us of New England, or Thomas Nelson Page painted of Virginia. In its lowest form, it may result in that deadliest of all tyrannies, the "small-town mind." This kind of mind is to be found everywhere, in the largest cities as well as in the smallest villages, but since its very essence is limitation, it is found in its supreme capacity for annoyance in the small town. If the town is

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of long standing, the most able and progressive elements have left it. If the town is new, they have not come to it. Consequently there grows up an oligarchy of opinion, too feeble to stand alone, but resentful of question, which seeks to arrange the lives of all those within the borders of the community, according to a preconceived pattern. It was seen in its most virulent form in New England and North Carolina in the seventeenth century during the witchcraft delusion, but it still exists, probably the most serious menace to the progress of the United States. T o this type of mind security lies in reducing life to a small scale and forcing everyone else to measure himself by the same scale. In its politics, in its theology, in its social life, it rests its personal impotence upon the organization to which it belongs, and it frequently mixes all three. When it imitates the larger city, it takes those institutions which appeal to its own nature, and therefore are helpless to improve it. It is not the art gallery, the theatre, the symphony concert that it imports, but an institution based on mutual admiration rather than individual excellence. T h e most pernicious quality of the small-town mind is its activity. If it were content with mere organization no one would care, for organization has its fine as well as its sinister aspects. But after the organization of the small town is perfected, it becomes an instrument of tyranny. T h e individual who will not walk with the herd must walk in unpleasant places or leave. Thus the stagnant floods of uniformity spread over civilization like a disease. Under their steady rise, beauty goes, taste goes, but the power of the small-town mind, encouraged by its victory, reaches out for larger fields. In politics the possessor of such a mind strikes where he can at the brilliant or the progressive leader, like Wilson or Roosevelt, but his admiration for his own kind, when raised to exalted places, amounts to genuine adoration. In reformatory projects he is not much interested unless they prevent other forms of mind from expressing

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themselves. T o him it is quite proper that if two-thirds of the Union desires Prohibition, the remaining one-third shall give up drinking—at least in theory. If daylight saving annoys him, he passes a law against it, notwithstanding a protest from the city dweller who wants it. Then when he goes to the city and finds the clocks wrong, he is justly incensed. For he takes difference as criticism and, like all narrow minds, he is extremely sensitive to it. For years he has been annoyed by the cartoons which represent him with too much accuracy for complete enjoyment, and he knows that these cartoons are made in the large cities by an artist whom he dislikes with the agelong hatred which the man who spends his life doing as everyone else does feels for the man who can do things differently. One of the most dangerous aspects of this narrowmindedness is its sincerity. Certainly some of the members of the legislature of Tennessee who passed the law prohibiting the teaching of "evolution" in the schools of the State believed they were saving the souls of the next generation. It is rather a pity that the fight for liberality had to be made on the issue of a form of scientific teaching, for there are fashions in science as in everything else, and most readers of the newspapers seemed to think the issue was Darwinism or Fundamentalism, neither of them certainly the last word in science or religion. It was in reality much more profound, for it was a contest between those who believe that a State legislature has the right to decide what form of religious, scientific, or historical teaching a pupil shall receive, and those who believe that it is none of its business, but that its responsibility lies in the providing of funds. It is another form of contest between the Legislative and Executive branches of government, to the latter of which belongs the appointment of the State Department of Education, where the real responsibility for the shaping of courses of instruction in the public schools must lie. Even more funda-

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mental is the right of the parent to decide whether or not he desires to send his son or daughter to a school where the matter and manner of teaching is determined by a political body, and one of the strongholds against provincialism was the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Oregon case. T h e r e it was settled, let us hope for all time, that the family and not the State is the arbiter of choice in the selection of the school to which a member of that family shall go. It is not easy to see what can be done with the possessor of the small-town mind—or his wife—for there is something distinctly feminine in the desire to order another person's life. Satire means little to him. O u r novelists have portrayed such a community in the fine portraiture of The Scarlet Letter, in the keen satire of The Hoosier Wilson, or in the coarse Schoolmaster, or Pudd'nhead bludgeoning of Babbitt. But the small-town mind does not read much except the newspaper. Perhaps the radio may help—if he listens to it. But the greatest hope lies in the development of education, in larger opportunities for travel, in the tendency of Americans to group themselves in culture levels rather than in geographical sections. T h e advertising slogan of the new Transcontinental Airplane Service—"From Coast to Coast in Forty-eight Hours"—strikes the knell of sectionalism, one element of the small-town mind. Every citizen of such a narrow community who can be induced to visit New York City or San Francisco is on the road to cure. But only on the road, for it is not the Rockies or the Alleghanies he has to cross—it is the stony hills on whose slopes his soul has always pastured. One aspect of provincialism in the United States which has been studied quite carefully for fifty years and has proved a rich field for romance is the mountaineer region, especially of the South. T h i s is a more attractive form of provincialism than the small town, for while the mountaineers are not as progressive as the tidewater peo-

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pie, their ignorance is not so much narrow as deep and they make no effort to impose their standards of living upon others. It may be questioned whether they are really as romantic figures as they are portrayed in the fiction of Charles Egbert Craddock and John Fox, J r . T h e widow Cagle in Lula Vollmer's play Sun-Up rings more truly. She is not a figure of romance but of actuality, and her hatred of "the law" is based upon her feeling that this " l a w " which has killed her husband, her father, and her son is an unreality, in whose making she has had no part. Of her kin were the mountaineers who refused to fight in the Great War because they had not had anything to do with the quarrel. It was not their war. In consequence they were made outlaws by the State. After talking to the descendants of the mountaineers of North Carolina, I am inclined to believe that much of the highly praised devotion to the Union during the Civil War was based upon the same feeling. T h e y refused to fight for the Confederacy because that, too, was not their war. They carried independence to the last extreme, for the State government became to them simply an instrument for interfering with their natural rights. T h e i r corn was their own; it was a natural process for it to distill. Why should they refrain from making whisky? Many of them died because they did the same thing as millions of Americans are doing today in their cellars without any qualms of conscience. If they became outlaws because of their resolute preservation of their inherent rights, it must be remembered that their ancestors defeated the British at King's Mountain in the Revolution, when the ancestors of the men who made them outlaws were Tories. These mountaineers are to be distinguished sharply from the shiftless primitives of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and of parts of New England. These have degenerated in some cases from better stock, in other cases are descendants of the debtor class who came here in colonial days and have accentuated their shiftlessness. T h e y are

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not picturesque, and their provincialism makes us aware that generalizations are as usual apt to be misleading. Provincialism is a state of mind, and discriminations are vitally necessary w h e n the very essence of the thing described lies in its difference from a broader standard. T h e deadly u n i f o r m i t y of the small-town m i n d springs from a f u n d a m e n t a l l y opposite source from the provincialism of the mountaineer or the survivals of older and richer civilizations. T h e decaying grandeur of the old shipping merchant princes of N e w England, w h i c h Miss Jewett could translate into terms of splendid though q u i e t sacrifice or of unbreakable pride will be swept away some day. So the more persistent survivals of Creole life in Louisiana, reflecting standards provincial in one sense and yet in another representing a wider acquaintance w i t h European c u l t u r e than any other phase of our civilization, may some day be submerged. In our natural desire to make all foreigners good Americans as quickly as possible, we tend to destroy their provincial customs instead of m a k i n g them our allies against the spread of the gospel of uniformity. If we d o not take care, these elements that b r i n g at least color and grace into city life may in time become undistinguishable from the descendants of the Puritans. In a country so diversified as ours both horizontally and vertically, a h i g h e r provincialism may become our salvation. Every local society which preserves the monuments of great moments of patriotism or of individual self-sacrifice, builds a b u l w a r k against the forgetfulness w h i c h is the sign of national decay. In a m u c h larger sense, the very existence of strongly marked political units is a guarantee of unity. Paradoxical as it may at first appear, the flexibility of the relations between the State and the Nation, so incomprehensible to foreign observers, is the cement which binds the U n i o n together. Since it is impossible for all sections to think alike, since indeed their most fundamental interests may be at variance, the time of inevitable separation w o u l d

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be ever threatening, were it not for the safety valve provided by the framers of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. It took much diplomacy to make clear to Japan why California and not the United States should decide whether Japanese adults should sit in the same schoolrooms with children of California. This was an extreme case, of course, but it is better to run the risk of offending a foreign nation than to have a problem vital and peculiar to one section settled by any agency except itself. Equally incomprehensible to a foreigner would have been the delightfully inconsistent proceedings when Arizona was admitted in 1912. Owing principally to President Taft's opposition to the provision in the proposed State constitution providing for the recall of judges by popular vote, Congress admitted the new State, provided that provision was omitted from her constitution. Once safely admitted, Arizona restored the offending measure to her state constitution by popular vote! So long as this flexibility is maintained, the minority will grumble but will acquiesce. But to a thoughtful observer of our constitutional progress, the tendency of the later amendments to the Constitution gives cause for alarm. While the first ten amendments definitely reserved rights to the States and to the people, the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth contain equally definite limitations or encroachments upon the powers of the States and the people. T h e Fourteenth and Fifteenth have passed into oblivion either on account of their temporary nature or through natural nullification by action of the States. T h e Sixteenth, which permitted the United States to levy an income tax, was inevitable. The Seventeenth, which took from the States the right to decide as to the manner of election of United States Senators, has already produced more scandals than even investigating committees can discover, and has certainly not cured the evil it was in-

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tended to allay. T h e Eighteenth has split both political parties, has been rendered abortive in many localities, and has also failed to cure the evils against which it was directed. Millions of people who do not drink liquor and have no interest in it resent the assumption by the national government of a function that belongs to the locality. If the South has a problem, and it is a real one, which makes it necessary to put every possible obstacle in the way of liquor selling, that is no reason why New York or Pennsylvania or Massachusetts, which has a totally different problem, should be forced into evasion or lawbreaking. No one objects to the Nineteenth Amendment, but here again the same result was being accomplished by State action as the different sections desired it. T h e r e are signs that the pendulum is swinging the other way. It is doubtful whether any amendment demanding uniformity of action among the several States could now be passed. T h e United States have had their lesson! T h o s e who have followed the historic development of our political theories will recognize that this reaction is only a return to the fundamental principles upon which the Constitution was framed. Under the national impulse toward unity which followed the Civil War, the T h i r teenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were forced through a Congress representative of only a portion of the United States. Under a similar impulse toward unification of thought, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments were passed in the period immediately following the Great War. T h e Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments were adopted in 1913, after protracted efforts to defeat them had finally been submerged in the spread of national feeling during the first portion of the twentieth century. Some of this opposition, notably that to the income tax amendment, was hardly based upon constitutional grounds. But in every case there was a sincere feeling that

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the continued amending of the Constitution was a mistake, especially when it limited the powers reserved to the States and the people. T h e conception of the Constitution as a limitation of Federal power, which Jefferson and Madison transmitted to Douglas, lost favor d u r i n g the period of Reconstruction and of national expansion, but it has been expressed by both Democratic and Republican leaders so frequently in recent times that it may be considered as once more t r i u m p h a n t in the political atmosphere. In fact, it has affected personal, social, and even scientific thinking. From the laborer in the large city who resents his inability to buy a drink of beer, to the scholars who recently met u n d e r the auspices of the Social Science Research Council to discuss the value of studying our economic and social problems by regions instead of as a unit, the futility of making generalizations about the United States is growing. But as each section makes itself better understood by the rest, and tries to understand the rest in terms of their necessities, the higher provincialism will gain u p o n the lower, and that unity which is our safety will rest the more securely upon the variety which alone makes it possible.

Individuality One of the usual mistakes in the consideration of Americans, especially by foreigners, is to speak of us as though we were all alike. O u r democracy is presumed to have reduced us to complete uniformity, while, as a matter of fact, it has produced in some respects the most highly individualized race in the world's history. It is true that a distinction must be made at once between certain phases of our national life in which individuality seems to be submerged, and others in which it is triumphant. It is to be doubted, for example, whether the average American workman gives to his j o b the individual character still to be found in European countries.

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Large-scale production and minute specialization in the manufacture of parts, as in the automobile industry, tends to impersonality in the finished product. T h e individual's pride of craft has nearly gone, for no one knows who made the radio set or the phonograph record or the electric washer. On the other hand, the progress from the victrola record to the radio is a tribute to individuality. T h e song on the victrola was made once for all and every time it was reproduced it was the same. T h e singer on the radio is an individual. He may become standardized to a certain extent, but nevertheless his performance has a personal touch and a possibility of variety which the phonograph, the victrola, the moving picture can never attain. It may well be that the love of a vivid personality which is one of the characteristics of the American soul accounts for the tremendous popularity of the radio. Our personal individuality in meeting the struggle for existence comes partially from the training of the pioneer. He had to meet conditions for which there were no precedents and he met them through individual initiative. From the Indian he learned to fight as an individual, and when at New Orleans the British veterans who shot as a unit from the hip met Andrew Jackson's backwoodsmen who took deliberate aim, they went down as mass action will always go down before united individuality. Our national avoidance of military organizations in times of peace is due not to any pacificism in the American soul, but to a feeling that military training is based fundamentally upon a subjection of the individual intelligence to minds that often lack flexibility and breadth of view. Ask any university officer who was brought into contact with military methods during the days of the student army training corps, and you will hear tales of helpless suffering, almost beyond belief. Just as democracy suffers from undue centralization, the greatest danger in the path of the American soul

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toward true individuality lies in the attempt to standardize every aspect of our lives. T o a generation that has been born in the impersonal shelter of a hospital and is buried in the incinerating plant, which destroys the privilege of passing as an individual through the processes of decay, the dangers of standardization may seem exaggerated. But to one who loves the individual touch in speech or conduct or even in those exterior manifestations of personality such as dress or cuisine, the processes of uniformity are disturbing. Even the necktie, the refuge of man's individuality in dress, seems to be in danger, and that last word in horror, the "ready made necktie," is once more rearing its loathsome head even in the smarter shops. T h e padded shoulders of men's coats, which make all men's bones alike, and which "went o u t " twenty years ago, are creeping back. Fashions, of course, change, and tailors must have work to do, but a man's clothes should clothe him and not the universe. On the other hand, there is a decided increase in variety in the color scheme of a man's socks and ties, and since a recognition of color values is always a sign of individuality, there may be hope still for the men. In women's fashions, the present writer is unable to see that subtle individuality which, he is assured, does really exist. T o a mere male, the hats all seem alike, built upon the model, apparently of a helmet —possibly a post-war influence! Skirts go u p and—thank Heaven—down again, but that was standardization and a blind following of fashion. Individuality may consist quite as much in resisting change as in following it, and the many women who can truthfully say that they never showed their knees may share with the many men who have never disguised their shoulder blades, in a mutual defiance of ugliness and bad taste. Even more significant is the standardization of language. Not so long ago, we seemed to be in danger of having but one answer to every question. No matter what remark was made, the word "absolutely" was hurled at

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the speaker in reply. It stood for every shade of assent and sprang, of course, from a lack of discrimination in the choice of words and from mental laziness. Discrimination is, after all, one of the sure tests of individuality. If we could discriminate between education and mere training, between independence and isolation, between character and personality, we should solve some of our problems. It is not generally recognized how much cloudy thinking is generated by the lack of discrimination in our critical vocabularies. Quite recently one of our most active critics stated positively that every great piece of literature had shocked the generation which first read it. T h i s is, of course, not true, but he meant probably that the literature in question had thrilled the readers of its day. Not to know the distinction between a shock and a thrill is, however, a form of ignorance unconfined to periodical criticism. Much that is distressing to even elementary standards of taste, such as the "dinner pajamas" of the misguided, is caused by a desire not to shock but to thrill the beholder. It is the effort to emphasize one's personality, in order to attract attention, which is one of the great foes to the development of individuality. It is naturally in the province of art that we should expect to find the most truly individual expression of the American soul. For individuality in the poet, the dramatist, the painter, or the musician is the quality which sets him apart from his fellows, challenges critical admiration, and often secures his ultimate fame. In our study of the growth of the American soul we have discussed the work of many poets and novelists who have possessed that individual quality, and if their recognition by their fellow countrymen was not usually immediate, America has not been alone in that respect. If Poe and Hawthorne had to wait, unappreciated at first, so did Keats and Shelley. Nor is it true, as is often said, that Americans lack the ability to distinguish between individuality and mere eccentricity or peculiarity. It is true that Edwin Arlington

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Robinson and Robert Frost, the two most individual notes in contemporary American poetry, had to wait unrecognized except by the discriminating, while Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay volleyed and thundered; but, although the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee in 1930 passed by not only Mr. Frost and Mr. Robinson, but also Mrs. Wharton, Miss Cather, and Mr. O'Neill, for a novelist far below them in achievement, I am convinced that a popular vote in America never would have selected Sinclair Lewis as the foremost American writer, notwithstanding the able publicity campaign that "made him great and kept him so." T h e thinking American likes four qualities in his artistic food—individuality, clarity, beauty, and sincerity. He may run after false gods for a while, and he may never give a delicate and distinguished art like that of Lizette Woodworth Reese adequate recognition, notwithstanding the valiant services in her behalf of Mr. Mencken, who resembles her—in his place of residence. But the American steadily refuses to be affected permanently by mere individualists who do not possess the other qualities. What must be most maddening to the school of poets who insist upon printing their verses so that each line begins with a small letter is that "nobody minds them." Equally encouraging is the fact that the publishers of Mr. Frost's poetry acknowledge that the profits upon his work now permit them to take chances in the publishing of new aspirants for poetic fame. And while the wide sale of Mr. Robinson's Tristram, and Mr. Benet's John Brown's Body were due partly to book-club distribution, the reaction to them reveals the audience that is waiting for real poetry uttered by an authentic and individual voice. There is something quite American in the fact that the machinery of democratic mass production in books, should result in bringing into his own the most distinctly individual poet of his day. There has been real progress in America in this recog-

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nition of the individual artist. T o her own generation Emily Dickinson was but a name, and in a real sense she waited for her own day. Three biographies in two years, and repeated editions of her poems, culminated in a striking drama of Susan Glaspell's, Alison's House, in which, through the vivid portrayal of Emily Dickinson's story upon the stage of Eva LeGallienne's theatre, the spirit of the most truly individual artist of her time dominates the boards upon which she never appears in person. In one of her finest moments she sent the message "to my countrymen"— This is my letter to the world T h a t never wrote to me,

and she who was too proud to sell the children of her soul even for the profit of appreciation, who was too sensitive to brave the hailstones of conformity which waited for her in the narrow life of a New England college town of her day, has, it is to be hoped, heard the answer her countrymen and the world are making now. It is probably not generally recognized that the most striking literary treatment of the relations of the individual soul to its Creator have been made by an American. Eugene O'Neill's work is treated elsewhere as an example of imagination, but he is also so profoundly an individualist and his dramas are so definitely the result of a native development in this respect that he becomes of great significance here. It will be remembered that American playwriting from the earliest days has celebrated the individual in revolt, first against political, then against economic oppression. At the beginning of the twentieth century, William Vaughn Moody drew the rebel who demanded of God the right to express himself and his own desires, even if they led to rebellion against the power that had created him. O'Neill goes further and demands that God express the human soul as an obligation taken upon Himself through the act of creation. Mr. O'Neill's

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own words express his philosophy better than any paraphrase: But where I feel myself most neglected is just where I set most store by myself—as a bit of a poet, who has labored with the spoken word to evolve original rhythms of beauty where beauty apparently isn't—Jones, Ape, God's Chillun, Desire, etc.—and to see the transfiguring nobility of tragedy, in as near the Greek sense as one can grasp it, in seemingly the most ignoble, debased lives. And just here is where I am a most confirmed mystic, too, for I'm always, always trying to interpret Life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of character. I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind—(Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery certainly)—and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression. And my profound conviction is that this is the only subject worth writing about and that it is possible—or can be—to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modern values and symbols in the theatre which may to some degree bring home to members of a modern audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage. Of course, this is very much of a dream, but where the theatre is concerned, one must have a dream, and the Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest ever! 1 Individualism could hardly be carried further than this. T h e essential dignity of E u g e n e O'Neill's art, free except in r a r e instances from Scandinavian pessimism, goes back for inspiration to the sources from which G r e e k art took its lofty defiance of fate. N o one would claim that the A m e r i c a n soul in general has risen to the heights of Mr. O'Neill's conception of the relations of m a n to his Creator. B u t perhaps the great unrest which is so m a r k e d in the newer generations comes in part from an obscure longing for a faith in something which will permit the preservation of their own personality, even in that f u t u r e life which they m a y deny b u t in which they still really believe. In the expression of this 1

From a letter to the present writer.

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longing, Mr. O'Neill is voicing the aspiration of his own generation. It is probable that the recent interest in biography and autobiography springs from the fact that it satisfies vicariously the desire for self-expression. A good biography gives that "you and me" feeling which is one of the essentials in the success of any book. Lives of great men, especially when their weaknesses are exposed by their biographies, not only remind us that we can make our lives sublime, but also that they did not always live upon the heights. But I believe it is not so much the comfort of this conclusion as it is the privilege of living for a time with an individual who was different from the many which has resulted in such wide reading of biography. Certainly the most recent biographers, to leave the purely sensational ones out of consideration, of course, have chosen Franklin, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Lincoln, Whitman, in America; Disraeli, Queen Elizabeth, Shelley, in England—individuals and personalities. And in the drama of Elizabeth the Queen, Maxwell Anderson gave Miss Lynn Fontanne the great opportunity which placed her at the summit of her brilliant career as an actress. If democracy means opportunity, it must mean eventually individuality. For the Creator, who has seen to it that no two human thumb-prints are alike, has also implanted in every human soul the possibility of a distinct individuality. Under favorable circumstances, this develops into varying degrees of significance. Mere difference, of course, is not individuality. T h a t comes when the difference is important. What has led some unthinking critics to believe that democracy is a foe to individual growth, is the large opportunity it affords for the self-expression of those whose personalities are merely shrill or blatant. Indeed, it seems to some observers that we have been suffering during the past decade, at least, from too much personality rather than too little. T h e moving-picture

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star is perhaps the most striking example of the powerful union of personality and publicity. But in every walk of life there has been an over-emphasis upon the unusual, all the way from certain artists who should know better, down to the pathetic efforts of those who believe that the printing of their names upside down on the doors of their cafes in Washington Square assures their customers an intellectual feast. In his play, Philip Goes Forth, George Kelly gave us a telling indictment of the American boy who was really intended for honest business but who was so obsessed by the necessity of doing something in which his individuality might be expressed, that he insisted upon writing plays which were not even sincere efforts. T h r o u g h the words of a boarding-house keeper in lower New York, Mr. Kelly uttered some trenchant home truths concerning the difference between the creative artist in any branch and the self-deceived thousands who believe that the mere wish to paint or write or compose or act constitutes a divine mandate to "go forth" and do it. T h e r e is nothing more tragic on the actual stage than the outer offices of any large theatrical producing organization in New York City, crowded with applicants who are often quite competent but who have not that quality of individuality which stamps them at once as desirable. T h a t those who select the successful candidates in any art do not always know how to choose is apparent to anyone who goes to a theatre or reads a book or walks through an exhibition of paintings. But notwithstanding the discouragement which comes to many, and in spite of such wise advice as Mr. Kelly or others may give, the believers in themselves will continue to beat against the doors of opportunity. Seventeen hundred manuscripts were submitted when Winthrop Ames offered a prize of $10,000 for the best play written by an American. On the whole, the gain is greater than the loss. For it is better that the heartaches should go on, rather than that one great individuality should be hampered or frustrated.

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It is an open question whether our present methods of publication of books and of production of plays help or hinder the really individual soul in America in obtaining his hearing. It has been urged with some plausibility that if publishing houses, instead of putting out three hundred titles a season, many of which fail to pay even their costs, would limit their output by more careful selection, and then devote more individual attention to the worthwhile books, it would tend to raise the standard of writing in America. T h e present system takes a chance on a large number of books, hoping that some will become best sellers, thus paying for the rest. Anyone familiar with the lockstep methods of most publishers in dealing with books will be inclined to agree with this theory. But it presupposes one essential: that those upon whose final judgment the publication of books depends will be able to choose intelligently the most significant ones. I am not quite so sure of that. Since publishing is a business and publishers have to go on paying overhead, would they have the courage to confine themselves to those books with the finest and most individual qualities? T h e tendency would be to cut out the rarer offerings and to play safe with "popular fiction" and textbooks. T h e same thing would probably happen in the theatre. T h o s e who blame the present supposed decline of that institution upon the presence of too many theatres in New York and insist that if half their number were in operation it would lead to better plays and better acting, also presuppose that in some miraculous way the judgment and discrimination of those who select and produce plays will suddenly improve. If it does not, it is a simple question of mathematics. T h e r e will still be just a dozen intelligent producers in New York and half as many theatres. Since the troubles of the theatre in New York are largely concerned with the ownership and control of the buildings, it is obvious that the more theatres there

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are, the better are the terms upon which producers can rent them. Better conditions for producers mean more opportunities for playwrights, especially for those whose individual quality makes hazardous the production of their plays. Probably, therefore, we who wish the individual to have his chance may rest, not content perhaps, but not altogether dissatisfied with the large numbers of books and plays. For somehow, somewhere, the individual soul will find his audience. In public life as well as in literature, the atmosphere of America is hospitable to supreme individual quality. In politics, the American people run after strange gods at times, and mere personality often deludes them. But an instinct, often subconscious, leads them in great crises to turn to the man who has character, even if personality is lacking. T h e best proof of the hospitality of democracy to individuality lies in the choice of the two great parties in 1928. Where but in America could even a strong individuality like G o v e r n o r Smith have won the nomination for the Presidency against the protest of the section which had always been the stronghold of his party? A n d where but in America could another strong individuality, Herbert Hoover, have forced the reluctant " O l d G u a r d " to nominate him as the candidate of a party which has always preferred institutions to individuals in its choice of issues? T h e leaders of the Republican party consented to the nomination of Mr. Hoover because they thought it had to meet an individuality with an individuality, or lose the election. Both these men have more than personality—thev have character, the ultimate flower of individuality, and, whatever their political fortunes, they represent that sure emergence of the individual in America. For every American is at heart an individualist, however he may conceal it, even from himself. His primary concern is to attend to his own business. Sometimes this

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tendency leads him astray, as in international affairs, where he has been playing a lone hand too long. Translated into his vernacular, he says to himself, "Yes, if necessary, I'll interfere if the other nations bother me; or I'll even fight, but I'll do it as America, not in a League." His individualism carries him often into a peculiar attitude toward law and legislative action. Supremely indifferent to most of it, he finds sometimes, as in the case of prohibition, that his individual liberty is proscribed. European countries, if it is conceivable that they could have passed such a law at all, would speedily have changed it. But the American, if he believes in prohibition, obeys it; if he does not, he simply disregards it. He has never thought of the law as an element of his own making, for which he is responsible. He knows there are thousands of laws on the statute books which are never enforced, but he does not bother to repeal them. Some cities have " B l u e L a w s " dating from the eighteenth century, which no one ever considers, unless some fanatic digs them up. One amusing case occurred recently in Philadelphia, when certain citizens were arrested for playing baseball on Sunday, under an ordinance of 1796. T h e i r attorney discovered a still earlier ordinance, making it illegal for a policeman to arrest anyone on Sunday, and had the amazed custodians of the law arrested in their turn. Yet the law is still upon the books! T h i s individualism, nurtured by geographical and racial differences, by historical cleavages, makes us the sport of the comic papers and the delight and despair of foreign visitors. From the eighteenth century, when Crévecceur wrote his essay, What is an American? it has afforded infinite ground for speculation. But laugh as he may, the foreign visitor knows that individuality is an essential quality in our national character, and we preserve it, as one of the most precious assets of America.

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Humor If we have any characteristic quality, it is generally supposed to be our humor. W e have not as a nation insisted upon it; we have modestly accepted the role thrust upon us as the funmakers of the world. It is true that certain of the foreign tributes to our capacity in this direction have not been without a suspicion of malice. One British writer upon our literature who insisted that Mark Twain, Bill Nye, and Artemus Ward were our most representative authors did not really intend his remarks as a compliment. Certainly anyone who tries to read a large dose of Artemus Ward or Bill Nye will soon be reduced to a condition of depression that time alone can cure. But here, as always, foreign criticism has hit upon a half truth. W e do love a joke, and we are not too particular about its quality. Neither is the Englishman nor the German nor the Italian, for that matter. Humor is the universal solvent of the human race, and once you can make a foreigner understand your jokes, he is in a fair way to understand your civilization. T h a t is probably the reason we are still so little understood, notwithstanding the volumes written about us. T h e r e is something delightful in the mere process of discovery, on the part of a visitor, of an American "funny story." Some years ago I happened to be present at a college undergraduate dinner when one of the other guests was a wellknown British oarsman. After the laughter which followed the first story had died down, a hearty roar burst from the Englishman. T h i s same result followed the second story and the rest. Of course the undergraduates appreciated in their own peculiar way the added zest these echoes gave to the dinner. T o the oarsman there was no humor in the situation he created; he had the courage to laugh when he was ready, not before. It can safely be said that an American would have laughed with the rest or not at all.

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What is the quality in our humor which is distinctly native? T h i s is not the place to distinguish between humor, wit, satire, and irony. We shall have to use the term in its broadest sense, as the quality of funmaking, whatever methods are used. Mark Twain, who should have known better, tried once to draw7 a distinction between the comic story, which, he said, was English; the witty story, which, he declared, was French; and the humorous story, which he claimed as an American product. All three countries, of course, have examples of all three forms of funmaking. T h e germ of truth in Mark Twain's remarks lay in his insistence upon the superiority of what he called the humorous story—the longer narrative which does not depend upon mere verbal dexterity but which must be well told, by an artist who leads his hearers gradually into the heart of a really humorous situation. Much of Mark Twain's success rested upon the way he told his stories. Read in cold type now, half the charm is gone. But enough remains to delight each new generation, for Mark Twain, unlike Bill Nye and Artemus Ward, never made the mistake of letting anyone take him as merely a funny man. Even the Germans understand some of his books, for he had developed his theory of relativity in humor long before Einstein had discovered it in physics, and he knew that the contrast between what is serious and what is funny lends much greater tang to the latter. One of the universal sources of humor is incongruity. America has no monopoly upon that. But in a comparatively young country the contrasts of different races or of varieties within the races present even sharper incongruities than obtain among the older nations. T h e frontier, too, whether in the South or West, provided delightful situations like the famous militia training in Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, which Thomas Hardy did the author the honor to transfer almost verbatim to The Trumpet Major. T h e fact that it fits so well into the English book throws some doubt, incidentally, upon its

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q u a l i t y . B u t w h e r e b u t in

the

p i o n e e r W e s t c o u l d w e i m a g i n e a c o n v e r s a t i o n like t h a t in Roughing

It b e t w e e n t h e m i n e r , S c o t t y , c h a i r m a n o f a

c o m m i t t e e t o a r r a n g e t h e f u n e r a l of his f r i e n d , a n d t h e clergyman from the East: "Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?" " A m I the—pardon me, I believe I do not understand." W i t h another sigh and a half-sob, Scotty rejoined, " W h y you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you would give us a lift, if we'd tackle you—that is, if I've got the rights of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door." " I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door." " T h e which?" " T h e spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises." Scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said, "You ruther hold over me, pard. I reckon I can't call that hand. Ante and pass the buck." "How? I beg pardon. W h a t did I understand you to say?" " W e l l , you've ruther got the bulge on me. O r maybe we've both got the bulge, somehow. You don't smoke me and I don't smoke you. You see, one of the boys has passed in his checks, and we want to give him a good send-off, and so the thing I'm on now is to roust out somebody to jerk a little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome." " M y friend, I seem to grow more and more bewildered. Your observations are wholly incomprehensible to me. Cannot you simplify them in some way? At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now. Would it not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and allegory?" N o t i c e t h a t M a r k T w a i n k n e w w h a t h e was d o i n g a n d recognized the f u n d a m e n t a l relation of slang and metap h o r . H e d i d n o t d e p e n d u p o n b a d s p e l l i n g , as J o s h B i l l ings d i d . T h e r e was a n essential s o u n d n e s s in n e a r l y all his h u m o r , a n d w h i l e m o s t o f t h e h u m o r i s t s o f o n e g e n -

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eration are forgotten by the next, he is one who will live. Notwithstanding Mark T w a i n ' s division of the field, there is an aptitude for quick and witty replies, which, while not by any means limited to America, flowers here in those places where satire and buffoonery are not very deeply appreciated. Spontaneous wit, born of that quickness of mind which, like republican institutions, we share with France, is almost as delightful in memory as on the occasion of its birth. Sometimes it crops out in unexpected emergencies to relieve embarrassment. How well I remember the dull winter afternoon when twenty-one weary teachers of English were about to close their labor of selecting the required reading for school boys and girls, preparatory to their entering college. Ponderously there rose a descendant of the Puritans who gravely remarked that since we had placed on the list certain passages from the Bible, we should see to it that the youth of the land were guided in the right paths. " I move you, Mr. Chairman," he concluded, "that we add a clause to the effect that these passages shall be read in the K i n g James Version, and in that alone." One of those chilly silences which comes when any reference is made in America to religious matters fell upon the group. But the chairman was equal to the occasion. He looked up brightly as though a great thought had just been born. " O h , Professor W , I think I would not press that motion," he said. " Y o u know I have always had considerable doubt as to whether K i n g James really wrote that version or n o t ! " In the roar that went up, Professor W 's stupid motion went the way of all flesh. Zoologists are not usually gifted with a sense of humor, or perhaps they would not be zoologists. But one of them, Dr. D , of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy, has that same quality of bringing together ideas not usually associated, with the resultant glory of the fitting reply. Not

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long ago I happened to sit next to him at luncheon and heard a visitor asking him a question. " I ' v e been over to your Institute, Dr. D he said, " a n d have been looking at your white rats—hundreds of them. T h e y run around in a circle, accomplishing nothing, apparently, but also apparently very well satisfied with themselves. T h e n suddenly they turn and run around in the opposite direction, accomplishing just as little but apparently just as well satisfied. What do they think they're doing?" Without a moment's hesitation Dr. D replied, " T h a t ' s perfectly simple. T h e y are attending committee meetings." Another fertile source of humor in America has been the contrasts which our varied life affords. Supreme among the humorists who treated these phases was Eugene Field. Certainly no humorists of today, however brilliant they may be at times, have approached him. It was not the dialect or the slang which accounted for the success of Casey's Table d'Hôte. It was a homely philosophy and a shrewd observation of life which lifts it into high rank. Field's Modjesky as Cameel, in which " T h r e e Fingered H o o v e r " was so impressed by the performance of the great actress as Camille that he stormed the stage to defend her and offer to marry her, with a past or not, is delightful incongruity. T h e difference between English and American humor may be illustrated by the story of a British tramp who had been arrested for stealing a turtle. " I didn't steal 'im," he protested, " h e follo\ved me ome." If it is conceivable that an American humorist could have thought of this placid joke, he would have written, " H e chased me home." T h e incongruity would have been sharpened, exaggerated, if you will. For exaggeration, which enters into the humor of all countries, has certainly been employed with telling effect in America. From the days of Irving, when Wouter van T w i l l e r , Governor of New

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Amsterdam, was described as four feet six inches high and six. feet four inches in circumference, down to Will Rogers and the terrible banalities of the so-called "comedy" of the moving pictures, exaggeration has been employed by artists like Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton, and others as a legitimate method of producing humor. Even more important than the use of exaggeration or incongruity or any other method is a knowledge of human nature. That is why "Mr. Dooley" wears so well. His sketch "On Reform Candidates" tells the whole story of the political conditions in our large cities. " O n the Victorian E r a " is a classic—after a remark that Queen Victoria and he were born at the same time, he goes on to describe the events that have happened: " G r e a t happenin's have me an' Queen Victorya seen in these sixty years. Durin' our binificent prisince on earth th' nations have grown r-rich an' prosperous. Great Britain has ixtinded her domain until th' sun niver sets on it. No more do th' original owners iv th' sile, they bein' kept movin' be th' polis. W h i l e she was lookin' on in England, I was lookin' on in this counthry. I have seen America spread out fr'm th' Atlantic to th' Pacific, with a branch office iv the Standard lie Comp'ny in ivry hamlet. I've seen th' shackles dropped fr'm th' slave, so's he cud be lynched in Ohio. I've seen this gr-reat city desthroyed be fire fr'm De Koven Sthreet to th' Lake View pumpin' station, and thin rise felix-like fr'm its ashes, all but th' West Side, which was not burned. . . . " O h , what things I've seen in me day an' Victorya'sl . . . "Glory be, whin I look back fr'm this day iv gin'ral rejoicin' in me rhinestone jubilee, an' see what changes has taken place an' how manny people have died an' how much betther off th' wurruld is, I'm proud iv mesilf. W a r an' pest'lence an' famine have occurred in me time, but I count thim light compared with th' binifits that have fallen to th' race since I come on th' earth." " W h a t ar-re ye talkin' about?" cried Mr. Hennessy, in deep disgust. "All this time ye've been standin' behind this bar ladlin' out disturbance to th' Sixth Wa-ard, an' ye haven't been as far east as Mitchigan Avnoo in twinty years. W h a t have ye had to do with all these things?" " W e l l , " said Mr. Dooley, " I had as much to do with thim as th' queen."

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It is perhaps this ability to p u t a great deal in a brief sentence that makes " M r . Dooley" important. T h e m a n who could say, "Divorce is the lettin' out iv a bad bargain iv the party that made it bad," was no mere purveyor of the ridiculous. He wrote in the Irish dialect, but his point of view is just as truly native as that of Lowell in the first series of The Biglow Papers. Both were sectional, one representing the r u r a l life of New England; the other, that of the large city in the Middle West. Another prolific source of American h u m o r has been the attempted reversal of the usual estimate of great m e n of o u r own or of other nations. Ben Franklin, who used this satiric method with telling effect against George III, has been himself the subject of much funmaking, especially devoted to his private character. H e can afford to smile at his critics, however, and there is no occasion for losing one's head about such matters. It may not have been the best taste on the part of the editors of the Harvard Lampoon to represent Washington crossing the Delaware with a caption underneath, "Sit down, you're rocking the boat!" But the police authorities of Boston might well have let Washington defend himself. T h e r e is a punishment waiting for those humorists who fail to understand when such a satiric method is f u n n y and when it is not. Echoes still linger, for example, of the terrible occasion when Mark T w a i n , at a d i n n e r given in Boston to Emerson, Longfellow, and others of the great New England group, thought it would be a m u s i n g to represent them u n d e r the guise of tramps wandering into a western m i n i n g tcwn. T o his horror, as he proceeded with his speech, no one laughed, and he fled f r o m the hall in despair. T h e incident is illuminating in its revelation of the fact that the audience must be receptive to the brand of h u m o r employed. Mark T w a i n was d e p e n d i n g upon the great American characteristic of irreverence for his effect, and somewhere else he might have made a success.

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W h i l e he was wrong in the individual occasion, he was right in the main. One of our national weaknesses is a willingness to make fun of anything for the sake of a laugh. T o coin a telling and amusing phrase, a critic will damn a book or a play, a picture or even a symphony, and a fine piece of art may be laughed out of life before it has had a chance. Many a political career has been blasted, too, by a well-directed humorcus phrase or a deliberate campaign of ridicule. Admiral Dewey, innocently transferring to his wife the title of the house the nation had given him. was ruled out of possibility as a presidential candidate by the newspaper columnists and cartoonists. R i c h m o n d Hobson, who sank the Merrimac in the harbor of Santiago, inadvertently allowed himself to be kissed by a feminine hero-worshipper and it was soon all over with him. Whether there has been any improvement in the humor of our political writing or cartooning is open to question. Certainly, to one who remembers the scurrilous humor of the Cleveland-Blaine campaign of 1884, our present political humorists seem to "roar like sucking doves." Political satire, being generally directed against a particular candidate, has not furnished many of those humorous treatments of general political absurdity, with which the British stage is familiar. But how rich a field there is in America has recently been revealed in George S. K a u f m a n ' s delightful musical comedy, Of Thee I Sing. But in other fields of humor there is certainly no improvement. All one has to do is to compare Life and Puck in their best days, when the talent of H. C. Bunner, E. S. Martin, C. D. Gibson, and many others were at their prime, with the Nexv Yorker of today. T h e last reflects, of course, the highly accelerated life of its time, but it reflects also a decline in standards of taste, a satisfaction in the merely startling which is distressing. T h e best test of the permanent quality of humor is, after all, to put it between covers. In the first place, it brings a large amount

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together. If the h u m o r rests mainly on exaggeration, the mind or the eye soon tires of it, for the jokes or the cartoons must grow more brilliant as they proceed—and they rarely do. T h a t is why a bound volume of selected cartoons from a funny paper of today is so disappointing, and another reason for the disappointment is a lack of beauty. It may be idle to hope for beauty from the naturalistic depiction of life in a night club or a harlot's room. But the point is that unless the shady picture or joke has some real elements of humor, it soon passes out of mind. Sex may have its beauty in art, but vulgarity never. T h e most serious aspect of the American's craving for humor lies in his willingness to laugh at diseases in public life, or at moral laxity, or at economic injustice, provided he is given an opportunity. On the front page of his daily paper he reads the revelation of corruption in the judiciary, of some strangling of industry by the forces who defy the law, or of immorality in men or women who by the very nature of their social significance should have felt it an especial duty to run straight. He may feel disgust, or anger, or contempt for the moment and think something should be done about it, and then, on the fifth page, he sees a cartoon making f u n of the matter, has a good laugh or a smile at least, and dismisses it from his mind. But his daughter, reading of the ease and safety with which social law is defied, may have one more of her defenses subtly broken down, and his son, taught daily that dishonesty is tolerated in high places and then laughed at, may not be so strong in resisting temptation. A n d the economic injustice, which he has forgotten, may some day, in its consequences, ruin him. I am inclined to believe that the Englishman or the Scotchman would not laugh so heartily, at least about the political or economic corruption, and would not be distracted so easily from his course of attack upon it by a cartoon. T h e r e are other reasons, which I have given elsewhere, for the American's indif-

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ference to these matters, but the speed with which every subject is made the butt of ridicule, either in the press or on the radio program, dulls the conscience by its very repetition, till the abuses seem to become the natural order of events. Moreover, since they become the subject of laughter, men cease to take them seriously or even to believe in them. Sometimes the possession of a keen sense of humor seems even to be a detriment to professional or business success. Such a man cannot take himself as seriously as one who is deficient in the quality, and to take oneself seriously is the first step to convincing others that one is important. I have in mind a striking instance in the man who in my class in college has made the most conspicuous success. He had ability to start with, but of humor I never saw a particle. At the tenth reunion of the class, he had been asked to talk about his profession, and he had prepared a serious address. His classmates, however, were in no mood for anything but fun. But he insisted on delivering the speech. At first they interrupted him with humorous suggestions as to the conduct of his affairs, then one by one they stopped and listened to the really eloquent description of the wrork he was doing. T h e applause that finally rang out spontaneously from those men was a tribute to the courage that dared to face a laugh. How few there were in that group who would have done it. Some would have been afraid of ridicule, others would have thought it not worth while to convince their classmates, in their careless mood, about anything; others would have had too much sense of humor to insist upon talking about themselves. But the qualities or lack of them, which won for the speaker on this occasion, have made him known on two continents. Perhaps if the American soul were not disposed to take itself so lightly, it would be better for the nation. Yet the ability to laugh at one's own weaknesses makes life more pleasant, if not more profitable. If the sale of novels like

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Main Street and Babbitt, or verse like the Spoon River Anthology, is any indication, we are singularly free from self-consciousness. In fact, it seems almost fatal, in certain critical circles, to depict in fiction, or on the stage, a phase of American life without satirizing it. A realist must to a certain extent be a satirist, but the danger is that a satiric picture of life is always a distorted picture, and in literature at least it never lasts long, unless, as in the work of Dickens or Howells or Mrs. Wharton, it has other elements which reveal the nobler aspects of human nature. Probably when all the phases of our humor are considered, the balance falls heavily in its favor. Despite the banalities of our comic supplements, or the puerilities of our highly paid conversations over the radio, it is a good thing for us that our peculiar vein of humor has become a vital element in the American spirit. For in our nervous, high-speed civilization it is a safety valve. A nation that can laugh wisely and fairly at its own weaknesses, before whose keen zest for a joke no solemn absurdity in high places is safe, keeps sharpened, on the whetstone of its own follies, the keen edge of its insight into the motives and the pretences of its national friends and enemies. We saw the flower of our civilization go into a war with a laugh on their lips. They faced the grim realities of the trenches and the gas attack in the same spirit. And the most searching analyses of the futility of war, like What Price Glory or It's a Great War, have been lightened by the saving grace of humor. With the strength of the Teuton, the grace of the Latin, and the flame-like thrust of the Celt, our humor fuses the varied elements of our national life into a vast body who have laughed together and have thereby taken one more step toward mutual understanding.

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Vision T h e r e are souls who, like mountain peaks, catch the first rays of the sun long before it sweeps down into the valleys. T h e y create the lasting monuments of a nation's art, or make the great discoveries in science which revolutionize men's thinking; they stir profoundly the longing for truth which never leaves man long without religion; they plan the great social or industrial movements which add to the comfort and well-being of mankind. America has never been without her men and women of vision; perhaps there are more today than ever, in this so-called age of the machine. She has had no monopoly of them, but from the days when one of the greatest visionaries of the world discovered her, there have been souls who adventured where other souls had said there was no path. Our history is a record of conflicting visions, made up of the dreams and aspirations of all nations, who here found a free air where, in spite of our commercialism, some of the dreams survived. In the final estimate of a nation, its soul is judged not by its mistakes, but by the products of its great moments of imagination. One of these moments came long ago when Franklin and Kinnersley drew from the clouds the electric fluid which has changed the entire course of civilization. In 1929 we celebrated the semi-centennial of the discovery by Edison of the incandescent light. W e let pass in 1926 an opportunity to pay honor to Bell, the discoverer of the telephone. In 1930 the General Electric Company celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the work of Elihu Thompson and W i l b u r Rice, out of which grew so many of the great developments of electrical science today. T h e progress of these two men is an illustration of American vision. In 1880 Wilbur Rice graduated from the Central High School of Philadelphia, a boy of eighteen. In his graduation speech, he put into a few words the accom-

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plishment at that time in the field of electricity, foretold television, and concluded: But all these wonderful applications are but forerunners of the dazzling future. When our homes are made bright by electricity and our mothers' weary hours over the sewing machine have ended, when our streets at midnight are as bright as at noon day, and our deep and darksome mines are resplendent with die electric light, when we can see and converse with our distant friends, though separated by thousands of miles, when city speaks to city and nation to nation; then shall all parts of the world be so linked together that a reign of peace, prosperity and comfort shall be inaugurated, which, Heaven permitting, shall endure until temporal things shall have an end and man shall be with his Creator.

This boy was speaking under the inspiration of a great teacher, Elihu Thompson, who had taught him chemistry and mechanics. He became the President of the General Electric Company, an example of the scientist-executive, who is at least as American as the predatory executive so often described by our journals of various hues. It is not too much to say that all over the world, men see by the light and hear by the sound which the vision of an American has given to them. When we thrill to hear the voice of a radio announcer tell us that his program is interrupted by the signals which are saving a ship from disaster, we do not remember that the vacuum-tube oscillator, without which radio broadcasting could not have proceeded, sprang from the vision of an American. It was to the imagination as well as the persistence of the Wright brothers that the aeroplane rose from failure to success. And surely it was not the triumph of the machine which thrilled the civilized world when Colonel Lindbergh reversed the voyage of Columbus and sailed alone amid the uncharted air. It was the triumph rather of the imagination of the man who knew the danger and surmounted it. It must always be remembered, too, that if it was Americans who gave him instant opportunities to capitalize his

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great flight, it was an American who refused to sell his fame to the highest bidder. If the imagination of American scientists has turned more often to practical applications than to abstract research, it is perhaps due to that practical idealism which Emerson preached so effectively to the generations that followed him. Michael Pupin, whose work in the realm of abstract physics is not so well known as his invention of the " P u p i n coil," makes an interesting case for the American devotee of pure science in his fascinating monograph, The Romance of the Machine. T h i s is not the place to give catalogues of names of the hundreds of Americans who are working not only in the great Research Foundations, but also in the leading universities, in the physical or natural sciences, history, literature, medicine, law, and kindred fields of scholarship. N o t all research is the product of vision, by any means. M u c h of it is simply the patient accumulation of facts, but it is the man of imagination who fuses those facts into a truth which becomes a landmark in the history of human progress. T o any student of the American spirit the names of Joseph Henry in physics, Josiah Gibbs, the creator of the science of physical chemistry, Asa Gray, in botany, Louis Agassiz in zoology, are familiar and need fear no comparison with the men of vision in other lands. In more recent times an example of vision in pure science is to be found in the work of A. A. Michelson, who for the first time accurately measured the velocity of light. Einstein paid a sincere tribute to the vision of American science when, at Pasadena, California, in 1930, he turned to Michelson and said: . . . You, my honored Dr. Michelson, began this work when I was only a little youngster, hardly three feet high. It was you w h o led physicists into new paths and, through your marvelous experimental work, paved the way for the development of the theory of relativity.

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You uncovered an insidious defect in the ether theory of light, as it then existed, and stimulated the ideas of H. A. Lorentz and Fitzgerald, out of which the special theory of relativity developed. . . .

In the work of both Michelson and of R. A. Millikan, in the measurement of the electron, the achievement of the American lay primarily in measuring more accurately what other physicists had been studying, and thus evolving theories which are of greater value. Quite as imaginative has been the accomplishment of A. H. Compton in establishing the composition of light waves, for in his experiments and his theories he seems to have depended upon his own inspiration. When we think, however, of Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, J. J. Thomson, Richardson, Rutherford, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and other Europeans, we can hardly claim that in the field of imaginative theory we have equaled the older civilizations. It is perhaps inevitable that this should be the case. T h e American, for several generations, has been engaged in "bettering himself." Neither he nor his children are likely to develop into the contemplative, philosophic type, which must have content with the conditions of his life as a fundamental basis. Moreover, he is subject to greater temptations than the European, for the industries which depend upon scientific discoveries for their very life are constantly on the watch for the most promising of the young men of imagination, and offer them not only salaries but opportunities almost impossible to resist. T h e only remedies for this condition lie in the wider recognition, public and private, of the men of vision, not only the scientist but the historian, the student of literature, who can rise above the recording of events to see with imaginative clearness some great principle or map out some great development of thought. If there were wider recognition of such men and women in America, there

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would be more who would turn their backs upon material rewards for the sake of the supreme satisfaction of achievement. In one of the most interesting gatherings of opinions concerning the contemporary expression of the American soul, Oliver Sayler's Revolt in the Arts, the various contributors reveal in general their belief that there is no revolt to speak about and that the immutable principles of art remain pretty much the same both in America and elsewhere. Norman Bel Geddes, the designer of The Miracle and Lysistrata, two visions of beauty in the theatre, says pertinently: T h e problem of industrial design is, to the artist, fraught with interest. H e is working in a medium, and with forms which hitherto have not been associated with artists; he is standing on the edge of a vast tract of unexplored territory. Industry, having recognized him and accorded him a place in its scheme, is proving a generous master. It takes for granted that he can create something beautiful; it insists upon but one quality—practicality —and it is this very insistence which is not only producing the best in contemporary design, but which hands to the artist the key to his problems.

There is the spirit of the pioneer again, undisturbed by conditions over which laments are being made and which are real enough in the limitation of opportunity. Mr. Bel Geddes himself might well have been discouraged on the opening night of The Miracle when the producer thanked publicly every foreign artist concerned in the production, while all that met the eye, at least, sprang from the vision of an American. Mr. Sayler's symposium on the arts revealed another quality of the American mind, upon which obstacles seem to act as a stimulus. T h e r e are several contributions concerning the talking picture, and the opinions are as various as the knowledge of the writers. But among all the inefficiency, the reckless prodigality in one direction and niggardliness in another, which has characterized the

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moving-picture

industry f r o m the b e g i n n i n g , the

most

severe critics of the art c a n n o t d e n y to it the q u a l i t y of imagination. F o l l o w i n g t w o statements b y m o t i o n - p i c t u r e producers that the i n t r o d u c t i o n of speech has limited the A m e r i c a n film industry to E n g l i s h s p e a k i n g countries a n d turned an international art back to a national one, comes the description of the w a y in w h i c h one c o m p a n y

has

already o v e r c o m e that limitation. M r . Jesse Lasky's o w n words p u t the case better than any paraphrase: A s a first step in solving this p r o b l e m , P a r a m o u n t i m p o r t e d artists from France a n d f r o m several Spanish-speaking countries, and—in H o l l y w o o d — p r o d u c e d several pictures in those languages w h i c h h a v e been enthusiastically received by all countries speaking these tongues. T h e H o l l y w o o d studio is c o n t i n u i n g to p r o d u c e such pictures. M e a n w h i l e , we h a v e established a studio near Paris in w h i c h w e are already m a n u f a c t u r i n g foreign-language pictures on a m a j o r scale. A l r e a d y , pictures are b e i n g m a d e in this studio in ten different languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, H u n g a r i a n , Czecho-Slovakian, G e r m a n , Polish a n d Jugo-Slavian. Perhaps the most striking d e v e l o p m e n t of the arts of space lies in the c o n q u e s t of the "sky scraper" and the creation of b e a u t y w h i c h reveals and not conceals

the

structure b e n e a t h it. B e a u t i f u l as the classic forms of the W o r l d ' s Fair in

1893 u n d o u b t e d l y

L o u i s S u l l i v a n and of Frank L l o y d

were, the vision of W r i g h t , leaders of

another school, gave an impetus to their followers w h i c h flowers

today in the l o f t y hotels, banks, and office b u i l d -

ings of the larger cities. H e r e as elsewhere, there were conflicting visions, each w i t h its d e v o t e d followers.

To

one it seems best to m o d e l a b a n k after a G r e e k T e m p l e , because of the b e a u t y of the form. T o the other, it seems best to let the material design the form, just as the play designs its scenery. If the lofty steel f r a m e is there, w h y not allow the brick or stone w h i c h covers it to express the structure b e n e a t h Astoria

it? T h e

answer is the n e w

B u i l d i n g in N e w York, w i t h its l o f t y

Waldorftapering

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towers, Gothic in general effect, but modern in its perfect adaptation to its purpose. T h e "Waldorf-Gray" brick, named for its first home, seems to be the inevitable support for the hidden frame of steel, an indissoluble marriage of structure and covering, the walls lifting their graceful bulk to the elements, but never forgetting the inner structure that gives them meaning and significance. Scornful of unnecessary ornament, it rises into the air and light which it lets in so generously to every room, a challenge to those who would return to the exotic, and an inspiration to those who would follow the vision which years ago an American architect gave to the world. Nowhere, perhaps, in recent years, has the American soul so revealed its power of imagination as in the drama. T h e prophets of disaster who believed the moving picture would end the legitimate stage have found, as any historian of dramatic art could have told them, that the impulse to create imaginary characters and let them work out their triumph or their ruin, is perennial. Of course, Eugene O'Neill comes to mind at once as an example of vision in the American drama, but he is not the only one. His work has grown steadily in power from Bound East for Cardiff and the other sea plays in which his imagination drew its inspiration from the love of adventure which is in his blood. In his first long play, Beyond the Horizon, he dramatized the search for the beauty which lies beyond that horizon which to the man without vision is a limitation, but to the man with imagination is merely a challenge. Like Hawthorne he has gone into the depths of human sin and suffering to find in the souls of men like the Emperor Jones or the "Hairy Ape," or women like Anna Christie, some spark of courage or aspiration for higher things which makes them worth while. The Great God Brown is a tragedy of the man of vision in an age which cannot understand him. The Fountain is the tragedy of a dreamer who loses his dream fighting small things until he himself grows small. Marco Millions is a

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telling satire of the man without vision who brings to the waiting East n o t h i n g but the commercialism of the West. Strange Interlude is a powerful imaginative conception of the hold the feminine n a t u r e has upon the men w h o love her. In Mourning Becomes Electra, O ' N e i l l dared to match his imaginative strength with the greatest of the Greek dramatists and came out t r i u m p h a n t . H e did this by projecting his vision into the f u t u r e of the d a u g h t e r of Agamemnon and by translating her story into terms of m o d e r n life, shaping her tragic ending into one great scene, superbly inevitable. But nowhere has O ' N e i l l showed his vision to so great a degree as in Lazarus Laughed. H e r e he passed beyond the gates of Death to reveal the eternal t r i u m p h of Life. His own words reveal the meaning of the poetic drama better than any paraphrase: T h e fear of death is the root of all evil, the cause of all man's blundering unhappiness. Lazarus knows there is no death, there is only change. He is reborn without that fear. Therefore he is the first and only man who is able to laugh affirmatively. His laughter is a triumphant Yes to life in its entirety and its eternity. His laughter affirms God, it is too noble to desire personal immortality, it wills its own extinction, it gives its life for the sake of Eternal Life (patriotism carried to its logical ultimate). His laughter is the direct expression of joy in the Dionysian sense, the joy of a celebrant who is at the same time a sacrifice in the eternal process of change and growth and transmutation which is life, of which his life is an insignificant manifestation, soon to be reabsorbed. And life itself is the self-affirmative joyous laughter of God. 1

O'Neill's work is so f r u i t f u l of discussion that it may well illustrate other phases of the American soul, especially that of individuality. But it is primarily because of his power of vision which refuses to be b o u n d by theatrical rules, and which selects themes too d a r i n g for the average hearer to at first appreciate, that he has become 1

Letter to the present writer.

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a world artist. This wide appeal has sprung from the universality of his themes, but there is nothing European or Asiatic in his work. It is distinctly American, in its deep love of human life, however humble, perhaps most of all, in the quiet waiting of the man himself, without any lowering of his artistic standards, until there came the worldwide recognition of his genius. And those who know him, know how little that has spoiled the simplicity of his nature. Like O'Neill, Philip Barry illustrates other qualities of the American soul beside that of vision, but it is in the province of the imagination that he has made his most significant contribution to drama. Still a young man, he has touched the relations of human beings with a rare insight and profound understanding. His first play, You and I, was a dramatization of the longing to create beauty which is in the soul of an artist. In White Wings he painted a picture not only of the coming generation who are striving for the opportunity to make their dreams concrete, but he drew also the gallant fight of the passing order to preserve the standards for which it has stood so long. In a Garden was again a tragedy of a woman's search for a lost illusion. Barry knows that the most precious thing in our lives is some illusion we are cherishing, which is more real than reality. In Paris Bound he treated with unusual vision the intricate question of modern marriage, and presented one of the strongest pleas for the preservation of the spiritual union of husband and wife that can be found in modern drama. He did it, too, in the spirit of high comedy. Barry's imagination rose to even greater heights in Hotel Universe. Here a group of Americans, at a house party in the South of France, are cured one by one of the obsessions which are rendering them weary of life. Stephen Field, who cures them, is supposed to be insane, but he is simply wiser than the normal person. Where has the mystic's vision been better put than in this speech?

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STEPHEN: Yes, it does bewilder one at first. I know. I too used to believe life h a d one aspect only. 1 was so sure that sleep a n d d r e a m i n g was—well, sleep and d r e a m i n g . A n d of course I knew that with death it was all over— PAT: Well? STEPHEN: Well, now I know I was mistaken. PAT:

HOW?

STEPHEN: I have f o u n d out a simple thing: that in existence there are three estates. T h e r e is this life of chairs a n d tables, of getting u p and, sitting down. T h e r e is the life one lives in one's i m a g i n i n g , in which one wishes, dreams, remembers. T h e r e is the life past death, which in itself contains the others. T h e three estates are one. W e dwell now in this one, now in that— but in whichever we may be, breezes from the others still blow u p o n us.

In Tomorrow and Tomorrow Barry gave us the vision of the soul of a woman whose longing to create found its outlet in the birth of a child whose life she later saved through her deep sympathy with the inner reaches of his nature. What distinguishes Barry's vision from that of others is not merely his understanding of the way the wife of a normal but unimaginative man, who loves her deeply, turns to the love of the great physician who visits them and becomes the father of her child. T h a t situation had been treated before, in the Bible. It is rather the manner in which Barry reveals the realization of the woman that even great passion may have its moment and then pass on, while the acceptance of duty may demand even loftier sacrifice for the happiness of others. It is her power of vision which allows her to understand what the future of her husband would be without her and the boy he has for years believed to be his son. Barry has to a singular degree the ability to transmit to his characters the power of imagination so that it appears to be their own spiritual property. T h o s e who had watched the career of the playwright who had shared in the creation of Beggar on Horseback and had written The Wisdom Tooth alone, knew that

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Marc Connelly had that quality of imagination which could touch a great theme with distinction. He fulfilled that promise with The Green Pastures. Here surely is something distinctly American. Starting with the amusing stories of Roark Bradford, he built up a dramatic picture of the Negro's idea of God, of Heaven and the Creation, that represents with marvelous insight the religious exaltation, combined with the childlike limitations of the Negro's imagination. T h e conception of " T h e Lord" brooding over His creations, His simple dignity when He comes to Earth, His final decision to try once more through suffering to win the erring peoples back to Him —all is depicted with a sympathy which is the beginning of vision. But even more remarkable is the way in which Mr. Connelly never lets his imagination run away with him. T h e possession of vision is one thing: the control of vision is an even greater thing. When we compare the eccentric productions of the "post-impressionists," of the "constructivists," and of other products of emotional confusion, which European dramatists and their American imitators have placed upon the stage, with the clarity, force and beauty of The Green Pastures, it is good to remember that it is built upon a native civilization and wrought by a native artist. Of another character but equally American was the play of Berkeley Square, built by John Balderston, a Philadelphian living in London, from Henry James' unfinished story, The Sense of the Past. Here the supernatural visit of a young American of the twentieth century to the England of the eighteenth, because of his great love for the past, was made possible on the stage by the imagination which could project the feelings of Peter Standish into an alien time. When he sees the cruelty, the brutality of the real eighteenth century, his soul revolts and he knows he cannot stay there. What he has loved in the past have been its architectural monuments, its survivals in beauty. But only a great vision could have drawn the

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turmoil in Peter's soul when he finds himself bound by the unbreakable fetters of fact, and the knowledge dawns upon him that the one other soul in the eighteenth century who understands him, and who loves him, is lost to him forever. T h e h u m a n soul, struggling against Fate in the present, has often been depicted, but the soul baffled by being hemmed in by the events of the Past, which cannot be changed, is a new creation. Even the Greek tragedy, based on the fulfilment of prophecy, is not quite the same thing. For Peter Standish lives at the end of the play, an alien and an exile from two centuries. Among the hopeless wails that retail the death of good taste in America, it is cheering to note that Berkeley Square and The Green Pastures were among the successes of the season in which they were produced, and that O'Neill has made a fortune not only for himself but for the T h e a t r e Guild. In the saving of h u m a n life and the betterment of social conditions, there is needed first an individual with vision and later an efficient organization which carries on the work already planned. Here again our history records its share of those pioneers. Perhaps Clara Barton, who died only in 1912, at the age of ninety-one, is a typical example. A frail woman, subject to constant nervous exhaustion, her life was one long struggle to help those in need. When, as a young woman, she found children without means of education, she startled and shamed the town authorities into action by volunteering to teach without salary if the town would establish a public school. W h e n she saw the rout of Bull R u n , she realized the urgent need of supplies for the Union army. Disregarding military red tape, she calmly advertised for supplies and got them. Without regular rank, except for a brief period as "Superintendent of the Department of Nurses for the Army of the James," her work in providing help to the soldiers brought her the admiration of all. Later, when she found our government, with its characteristic policy

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of isolation, had refused to be a party to the original R e d Cross convention in 1864, she fought for twenty years to reverse the decision and finally succeeded, during President Arthur's administration. T o her vision the foundation of the American R e d Cross is due, and if later developments forced her out of its administration, she remains an example of that combination of imagination and initiative and persistence which flourishes so well in American soil. W h i l e our political leaders, in deference to a supposed public opinion, have dealt with the larger aspects of international affairs in a parochial spirit, there have not been wanting minds and souls in America who have gone quietly on involving us in important international enterprises—for the good of the world. Several of these enterprises, which required vision for their inception, are associated in the minds of many with finance, which according to a certain school of thinking, has little to do with imagination. A n d yet the career of at least one American, that of Owen D. Young, contradicts in every particular this assumption. T h e r e is something distinctly American in the quiet way in which he did the largest share of the work of the first Reparations Commission in 1924, while someone else received the credit, and then in 1929 revised the arrangements for reparation payments, the most potentially disturbing factor in Europe. As head of the R a d i o Corporation, he interknit the activities of this great field both here and abroad, and the way in which he secured international co-operation, against the secret determination of some of the elements in the situation to shut others out, is a romance in itself. T h e concise understatement of his activities in his official biographical account in Who's Who cannot conceal the fact that he has become, from England to China, the adviser of governments. While our politicians snarl at each other and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs boasts that he has never been out of the United States,

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O w e n Y o u n g has gone about the task of providing those agencies for international co-operation which may keep the peace of the world. W h e n Mr. Y o u n g stepped out of the general agency of the Reparations Commission, another American, S. Parker Gilbert, stepped in, and again his impartial treatment of Germany, being unswayed by past resentments or, on the other hand, by sentimental relapses into forgetfulness of facts, challenged the respect everywhere of those w h o think. It is not only knowledge, however, that is the basis of Mr. Young's and Mr. Gilbert's accomplishments. It is the power to look at things in a large way, the heritage of a race whose horizons have always been movable. O n e of the institutions which grew out of the work of the Reparations Commission illustrates the possibility of finance in the stabilizing of international relations. T h i s is the Bank for International Settlements, known as the " W o r l d Bank," opened in 1929, having its beginning in the collection and distribution of reparations, but already becoming a powerful agency in assisting the international flow of capital. Representing principally central banks in the countries to which Germany owes reparations, the Board of Directors, notwithstanding the refusal of Secretary Stimson to permit any direct connection between the United States Government and the W o r l d Bank, elected as President Gates W . McGarragh, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of N e w York. T h a t the " W o r l d B a n k " is not just a money-changing institution was made clear w h e n the election in Germany in 1930 caused apprehension of an overthrow of the G e r m a n Government and possible repudiation of debt. German bonds tumbled and the budget deficit became apparent. Q u i c k l y a short-term loan, largely through American banks, was arranged through the W o r l d Bank, and an issue which might have been critical in the disturbed state of Europe was avoided. Again, if, as is possible under the provisions

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of the Young Plan of Reparations, Germany believes she is really unable to pay at any time her reparation account, the World Bank is first called upon to examine and report on the situation instead of having the question thrown at once into the political arena. Such a request was made by Germany in November, 1931 and a commission was promptly appointed. How potent such an influence is for peace is evident. Perhaps not so evident at first glance, but clear enough to those who know the American spirit, is the extension of the extra-legal form of government, so familiar and so dear to the American soul, into the realms of international finance. That the other nations have turned to us not only for our dollars but also for justice, for knowledge, and for vision, in this field, makes only more apparent the consequence of our great refusal in the field of politics. In the discussion of President Hoover's recent action, in establishing a moratorium, it has seemed to escape observation that the machinery for the postponement of the payments due by Germany already exists in the Young Plan. After a great deal of excitement, the seven-power conference adjourned, practically leaving to the World Bank the settlement of all details. T h e advantages or disadvantages which will ultimately result will be political rather than financial. But from our point of view, the most significant occurrence lay in the determined stand made by France that the Young Plan must not be disturbed. In other words, the political and financial security of Europe hung, in her eyes, upon the continuance of a project which arose from the vision of an American. It is the habit of each age and place to believe the problems that confront it are the most serious ones which could possibly occur. But surely, if vision were needed at any time, America needs it now. Led "back to normalcy" by mediocrity in high places, and turning to hard common sense and negative gravity as a refuge from the idealism that had disturbed its complacency, it basked in

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the s u n l i g h t of prosperity and asked only to be let alone. A s l o n g as the s u n l i g h t was shining, this was all very w e l l . B u t n o w , w i t h u n e m p l o y m e n t g r o w i n g daily, w i t h m o r e w h e a t than w e can use artificially kept f r o m t h e m a r k e t , w i t h a stake of nearly $25,000,000,000 of A m e r i c a n m o n e y invested in E u r o p e , or o w e d to us by E u r o p e a n nations, the c r y is g o i n g u p daily for leadership that has vision, to solve the p r o b l e m s that press for solution. In every crisis A m e r i c a has p r o d u c e d that leadership, a n d perhaps today she has it w a i t i n g — f o r an o p p o r t u n i t y .

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT will occur to any student of the American character. One of these, our national optimism, is blind at times, and yet is based upon a trait which has faced and conquered many a severe obstacle. Our inherent decency, notwithstanding the records of the divorce court, is reflected in the contrast between our point of view and that of Europe and Asia in matters of sex. W e may be no more moral than the rest, but we do not assume the satisfaction of passion as an inevitable result of opportunity. Moreover, we do not, except in some of our more adolescent fiction, prate about the "sacredness of passion." W e realize that there is nothing sacred about illicit love, for the average American has chosen his mate without family or social pressure, and breaks the moral code with his eyes open and with no excuse except his own desire. Often he (or she) is kept from disaster by the American sense of proportion which has relegated sex matters to their own share of the twenty-four hours of a busy life. And notwithstanding the sneers of the cynic, a friendship between boy and girl, or man and woman, is still possible in America as it has never been possible, at least on the Continent, in Europe, Anyone who still has in his memory the fragrance of such a friendship can never lose his belief that there is a soul in America. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the humanity which has gone to the help of other nations as well as our own. T h i s trait has been touched indirectly, as have our energy and our adaptability, in the discussion of other qualities of the American spirit. Indirectly, also, other weaknesses O T H E R QUALITIES

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Prospect

249

of the American character—our tendency toward superficiality, our forgetfulness, our patience with mediocrity, have been perhaps sufficiently analyzed. Where, then, is the mirror in which the American soul may find its true reflection—not magnified by the optimism of the ostrich or distorted by the pessimism which springs from emotional indigestion or the spiritual seasickness consequent upon a first voyage to Europe? If a nation has any permanent standard, it should be found in the ideals of the men and women it keeps in grateful memory. T h e American may chatter about the latest moving-picture star or home-run hitter, but he does not place them in any permanent portrait gallery. T h e absence of any official resting-place for America's great men is inevitable in a democracy, and the nearest approach to it is the Hall of Fame in New York University, where the choice is, of course, dependent ultimately upon the choice of the electors themselves. T h e sixty-nine names now selected may serve as a rough index to the American ideal of greatness. Arranged by categories, there are sixteen authors, thirteen statesmen, six scientists, five educators, five theologians, five soldiers or sailors, four inventors, four lawyers, three philanthropists, two painters, two actors, one sculptor, one engineer, one physician, and one explorer. It seems that the writers, nearly all of whom were chosen in the two first elections, of 1900 and 1905, had made the deepest impression upon the electoral body, composed of one hundred persons, chosen from different walks of life. T h e order of their selection, too, with Emerson first, followed by Longfellow, Irving, Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, Bancroft, Poe, Holmes, Cooper, Bryant, Motley, Parkman, and Mrs. Stowe, while Mark T w a i n had to wait until 1920 and Whitman until 1930, represents quite fairly the American estimate of their importance. That the writers should be generally recognized and accepted has its significance, too. For while each has his

250

The Soul of

America

individual nature, the majority represent the essential qualities of the American soul, today as well as in their own time. Democratic, liberal, imaginative, and efficient in the highest sense, all of them were, and in most of them a sense of humor heightened their appeal. Few of them were provincial, but those that were took on perhaps an added flavor from that quality. Of the thirteen statesmen selected, Franklin, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln represent that political theory which believes that the preservation of certain institutions is of supreme importance; while Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson represent that other philosophy which has stood for the rule of the people through a chosen leader. T h e proportion here of eight to five is more accidental than real perhaps, but it may indicate a preference of the American for the institutional type of mind which is not at variance with the facts of history or the elections of today. It is of interest to note that each group contributed four presidents of the United States, and, as time goes on, probably this balance will be preserved. For whatever the choice for the Hall of Fame may be, there will still be in America the two opposing political philosophies, and there will be only two. As long as there are descendants of the men who flung Charles I from his throne, or of those who invented the Electoral College to "refine the people's views," or of those who strove with Webster to compromise on slavery, in order to save the Union and their commercial prosperity, there will be a Republican party, or some similar organization with another name. Well disciplined, averse to the discussion of the unexpected, its conventions will present a solid phalanx of organized opinion, in which opposition will be submerged. Its cardinal belief, that prosperity, if allowed to alight upon the holders of property and the leaders of finance and industry, will filter

Retrospect

and Prospect

251

through to the greatest number, will not be disturbed by unemployment or the mutterings of the thirsty. It will fight its battles in the formation that lost at Hastings, but won at Marston Moor and Waterloo and Gettysburg by the errors of its foes. And as long as there are descendants of the men who followed Charles II into exile, or of those who went with Robert Emmett to death, or of those who cheercd on Andrew Jackson to victory, there will always be a Democratic party. Not so well disciplined, or so subject to direction, its political conventions will be swayed by emotions that cannot be discounted in advance; its delegates will do more of their own thinking, and prophecies are out of order. T h e i r great principle of personal liberty and their willingness to accept prosperity not as a gift of the gods, but as their own right, will permit discussion of subjects which may wreck their chances of immediate success, but may bring ultimate victory. If they win, it will be through the vigor of their attack, and for attack a great leader must be provided, who will unite the clans through the magnetism of his appeal. A n d because there will always be these two elements in our national character, derived primarily from our Teutonic and our Celtic ancestors, the political future of the Republic is secure. T h e economic future is not to be forecast with such certainty, but it must be determined by a power which has the vision to look beyond mere temporary conditions, and which never for a moment neglects the practical idealism which is so integral a part of the American spirit. We must face reality, stop thinking that we can be immune from the laws of supply and demand, and that the proper balance between the worker or producer and the investor can be disregarded. It was not only because we produced too many goods, but because the orgy of speculation created more and more opportunities for investment which in turn led to paper profits, till thousands

252

The Soul of

America

were spending what they did not possess, that the crash came. A desire to transfer themselves from the worker class to that of the investor seized the American people, but the necessary step of learning to be an investor never occurred to them! If the impulse to "take a chance" which brought on our present condition could only be turned in the legitimate direction, and the pioneer spirit, having conquered the last frontier, could pass beyond the limits of the United States and recognize that the good of the world is his own practical concern! It is not a policy of selfishness or isolation that will send back the American worker to his job and keep his family from cold and hunger. It is not lofty talking or even charity that will do it. It needs the courage to strike off the shackles from our trade as we once struck the shackles from our slaves. It needs the clear thinking that will recognize that we live in a world that has two hemispheres. And since all the panaceas of the economists have failed, why not apply some of the principles of Him who was once a carpenter and is the capitalist of eternity? For the spiritual future of the American soul the outlook is not dark. We shall have with us always the recklessness of youth, the cynicism of middle age, the avarice of the old. All nations have had these. But to any historian of the American spirit who has read the records of his nation by the light of sympathy and who looks around him, not to exploit the peculiar, the base, or the banal, but to find the truth about the people of the United States, there is no lack of faith or hope, even if there is need for charity. When we shake off the depression which the thought of some of our temporary rulers brings to us, and put resolutely aside the most insidious temptation of all, the desire to prove ourselves wiser than others by a destructive and penetrating analysis of those evils from which we believe ourselves personally to be free, we know in our hearts that our confidence in the American soul is justified.

Retrospect

and Prospect

253

If this brief account of the growth of that soul has not carried with it such a conviction, it would be idle to offer any further argument. Of late years the history of the American nation has been a happy hunting ground for those who have sought to bring down to a dead level of mediocrity the figures the nation loved to honor, and to discover and rediscover episodes whose retelling have no lessons for the present and no encouragement for the future. Weir Mitchell once said, "If memory were perfect, life would be unendurable." By a blessed provision of God or nature, the pain of the past is often forgotten and the brighter moments remain. But to the nation, the industrious hunter of isolated facts allows no such merciful forgetfulness of her moments of weakness or folly. Nor is she permitted without critical comment to enjoy her heroic lapses from the dreary paths of inevitable economic change. T o one who cherishes the American soul, however, it seems important still to make our descendants believe for their own sakes that their ancestors were not hypocrites, Pharisees, slave-drivers, disappointed office holders, or the offscourings of European jails, but were rather adventurous spirits who would stand oppression from no man and who brought with them to the free air of America the capacity to breathe it. For it was not in the bosoms of the deserters from the Colonial armies, but in the hearts of those who remained with Washington at Valley Forge, that the future of the American soul was planted. What is of real significance in the South today springs not from the lashes of the slave market, but from the spirit that could not only fight against hopeless odds but could accept every result of the contest except racial disintegration. What makes us cold to the recital of our military "unpreparedness" in 1 9 1 7 is the knowledge that even if it be true, no permanent quality of the American soul has been affected by it. But everyone knows that when we were once in, we bore our-

254

The Soul of

America

selves gallantly, and that every dollar of the people's money was spent honestly by a government that turned over to its successor a record of which any American, irrespective of party, may be proud. W e owe Europe nothing. In one great year we canceled the debts of gratitude to France for her help in the Revolution, to Russia for her support in the Civil War, and to England for her aid in the Spanish War. But we owe her and ourselves a less tangible thing—the great lesson we taught—that it is possible for a nation to spend its best life for no return except the preservation of liberty. T h e tragedy of our policy of isolation is that in this country a new generation has grown up which has been taught to believe it is right for a nation to repudiate its responsibilities. W e are not, however, worried about the new generations, for there seem to be several. They are just as willing, apparently, to serve breakfasts to starving school children as to sit up all night at parties. T h e y must somehow be occupied, and if for a while they seemed to be playing a game of which they did not know the rules, or who, if anyone, was keeping the score, they will inevitably set up rules of their own, which will not be very different from those of the other generations who once were young. Perhaps after all it is this capacity to play the game according to the rules which is the most universal characteristic of the average man in America. He is much more like "Silas Lapham," fifty years later, than he is like "Babbitt," just as Howells was much more of a novelist than Mr. Lewis. Everywhere from Maine to Texas he can be seen going quietly about his work, meeting his obligations as Silas did, making the same social blunders but learning fast, facing his ethical problems with the same vision, at first cloudy, then growing clearer as the mists of personal judgment clear away in the light of selfscrutiny. T h e most hopeful quality of the American soul is its

Retrospect

and

Prospect

255

perennial discontent. No people has ever scrutinized so thoroughly and with such varying degrees of understanding and sympathy its national weaknesses. When this land no longer holds men brave enough to protest against selfishness, stupidity, and intolerance; when the race fears to laugh at pretence in high places, and above all when the soul of America is content with its own achievement, then and not till then shall we have cause for despair.

INDEX

The

most important

reference

u (1er each item is printed

Adams, J o h n , 27; 38; 250. Adams, J o h n Quincy, 250. Adams, Samuel, 19; 2 1 ; 26. Agassiz, Louis, 234. Allen, J a m e s Lane, 161; 162. Anderson, Maxwell, 216. Architecture, American, 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 ; 237238. Austin, Mary, 103. Baker, Newton D., 122. Balderston, J o h n , 242-243. Bancroft, George, 249. Bank for International Settlements, the, 245-246. Barker, J a m e s N., his play Tears and Smiles, 16. Barry, Philip, 10; 240-241. Barton, Clara, 243-244. Benêt, S. V., 2 1 3 . Bird, Robert Montgomery, 52. Blaine, J . G., 10; 93; 97. Boker, George H., 80; 82. Brownell, Henry H., 82. Bryan, W. J . , 10; 119-120; 122; 145. Bryant, W. C., 249. Cable, George W., 110. Cadwalader, J o h n , 9. Calef, R o b e r t , 18. Cather, Willa, 103; 104; 1 6 1 ; 2 1 3 . Catholic element, 3; 7. Cavaliers, influence of, 3: 5. Celtic element, 5; 7-11; 13; 2 5 1 . Censorship, 195-197. China, relations with, 125-126; 199. Church of England, influence of, 3; 7. Clay, Henry, 43; 62; 69; 70; 74; 250. Cleveland. Grover, 10; 97-99; Lowell's estimate of, 99: 125; 157; 192. College, the American, 1 1 5 - 1 1 7 : /75curriculum of, 178-179: junior,

in

italics.

179-180; fraternities in, 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 ; efficiency of, 183-185. Colonial policy of the United States, 122-124. C o l u m b i a University, 1 1 6 . Compton, A. H., 235. Congress, the, contest of with the President, 84-90. Connelly, Marcus Cook, his Green Pastures, 195; 241-242. Conrad, R o b e r t T . , 52. Constitution, the, 35; 36; 58; 60; 206; amendments to, 207-209. Coolidge, C a l v i n , 197. Cooper, J a m e s Fenimore, 44; 45-46; 1 0 1 ; 176; 190; 249. C r a w f o r d , F. M a r i o n , 1 9 1 . Creole element, 14; 15; 206. Crcvecreur, J . H . St. J . , 220. Cross, W i l b u r , 155. Daly, Augustin, 10. Dartmouth College, 187. Davis, Jefferson, 75. Declaration of Independence, The, 23-25; 38; 60. Democracy, rise of, 38-40; influence upon dramatic themes, 52-53; as a quality of the American soul, / 168; political, 1 5 3 - 1 5 7 ; social, 157162; economic, 162-167. Democratic party, the, 35; 36; 37; 42; 43; 59: 9>; ' 4 4 : ' 5 5 : l 6 ° ; '94: 251. Dickinson, E m i l y , 21) 214; 216. Douglas, Stephen A., 10; 43; 44; 70D r a m a , American, represents democratic spirit, 52-53; national themes in, 65; o p p o r t u n i t y today, 2 1 8 ; vision in. 238-243. Draper, R u t h , 1 7 1 .

25» D u c h é , Jacob, 20; s i , D u t c h e l e m e n t , 3; 16. Edison, T h o m a s A., 232. E d u c a t i o n , 14; b e g i n n i n g s o f , 112113; C a t h o l i c system of, 113; as a charity, 113; as a right, 114-115; in colleges a n d universities a f t e r t h e C i v i l W a r , 115-117; e l e m e n t a r y , today, 173-175; college, 175-186; foreign Commissions on, 188-189; c o n " test against provincialism, 203-204. Efficiency, i68-i8y; of the A m e r i c a n f a m i l y , 169-171; e x p e r t , 171-172; in e d u c a t i o n , 173-185; in the W o r l d W a r , 185. Emerson, R a l p h W a l d o , 38; 44; his democracy, 50; his p r o p h e t i c foresight, 50; 57; 158; 176; 190; 216; 249English e l e m e n t , 4-7; 16. Federalist p a r t y , the, 35; 59; 61; 92. Field, E u g e n e , 225. Finance, 244-246. F o r d h a m University, 116. Forrest, E d w i n , 52. France, relations w i t h , 198; 199; 200; 254F r a n k l i n , B e n j a m i n , 19; 23; 26; influence of his Autobiography, 32-)}; f o u n d e r of t h e political p h i l o s o p h y of the " i n s t i t u t i o n , " 33; 113; 176; 192; 216; 232; 250. French element, 12-15; '6Frost, R o b e r t , 212; 213. G a r l a n d , H a m l i n , his Trail Makers of the Middle Border, 40; 105. Geddes, N o r m a n Bel, 236. G e o r g e t o w n University, 113. G e r m a n e l e m e n t , 8; 10-13; 37. G e r m a n y , relations w i t h , 124; 125; 136-146; 189; 198; 199-200. G i b b s , Josiah, 234. G i l b e r t , S. Parker, 245. " G i l d e d A g e , " the, 106-108. G r a n t , Ulysses S., 82; 86; 92; 122. G r a y , Asa, 234. G r e a t B r i t a i n , relations w i t h , 124; 125; 198; 199; 200; 254. Greeley, Horace, 76-77.

Index H a l l , James, his Legends of the West, 14. H a l l of Fame, the, 249-250. Hamilton, Alexander, 33-35; the f o u n d e r of institutions, 33-35; 58; 59: *5°H a r d i n g , W a r r e n G., 197. Harrison, W i l l i a m H e n r y , 40; 42. Harte, Francis Bret, 99; 100; 105. H a r v a r d University, 113; 115; 116. H a w t h o r n e , N a t h a n i e l , 48-49; the h u m a n i t y and insight of The Scarlet Letter, 4g; his progTessiveness, 49; 55: ' 9 ° : S ' * : 2 49H a y , John, 125-126: 128. Hayes, R u t h e r f o r d B., 93; 94; 95; 96. H a y n e , Paul H a m i l t o n , 90. H a y n e , R o b e r t Y., 61-62. H e n r y , Joseph, 234. H e n r y , Patrick, 19; 26; 250. H e m e , James A., 10; 109. Holmes, O l i v e r W e n d e l l , 249. H o o k e r , T h o m a s , 3. H o o v e r , Herbert, 140; 155; 200; 219; 246. H o p k i n s o n , Francis, 19; 20-22; his A Pretty Story, 20; 23; his Letters of a Foreigner, 22; his Battle of the Kegs, 22; 25; 26. H o p k i n s o n , Joseph, 33. H o w e , Julia W a r d , 81. Howells, W . D., 10; 108-109; the A m e r i c a n self-made m a n in Silas Lapham, 108; 231; 254. Hughes, Charles E., 72. H u g u e n o t element, 15. H u m o r , 221-231; qualities of American, 221-231; incongruity, 222-224; verbal dexterity, 224-226; historical characters as subject o f , 227; in politics, 228; contemporary, 228; dangers of, 230-231; as a safety valve, 231-232.

I m m i g r a t i o n , f r o m E n g l a n d , 4-7; 16; f r o m Ireland, 7-11; 12; 16; 37; f r o m Scotland, 8; 9; 11; 12; 16; 37; f r o m Wales, 8; 10; 11; 16; f r o m G e r m a n y , 8; 10-13; 37; f r o m France, 12-15; 16; f r o m H o l l a n d , 3: 16; f r o m Italy, 149-151; from B o h e m i a , 152; f r o m Russia a n d Southeastern E u r o p e ,

Index 152; from China, 152; from Japan, 152. Indian, the, 41; 101-103. Individuality, 209-220; our essential, 2 0 9 2 1 0 ; pioneer influence, 210; menace of standardization, 210212; in literature, 212-218; in the drama, 218-219; in public life, 219220. Irish element, 7-//; 12; 16; 37. Irving, Washington, 10; 44; 45; his essentially American quality, 45; 190; 249. Italian element, 149-151. Jackson, Andrew, 10; 37; 38-39; 40; 41; 42; 62; 70; 210; 250; 251. James, Henry, 10; 108; 190; 191. Japan, relations with, 198; 199. Jefferson, Thomas, 9; 24; 33; 35-37; founder of the political philosophy of individual freedom, 35-37; 38; 59; 60; 192; 250. Jewett, Sara Orne, 109; 206. Johnson, Andrew, 83-88; trial of, 8688; effect of his acquittal, 88. Kaufman, George S „ 228. Kelly, George, 10; 217. Ku Klux Klan, 89; 90; 91. Lafayette, Marquis de, 15. Latin element, 7; 149-151. League of Nations, the, 141; 143; 144; 145; 146; 147; 197-200; 219. Lee, Robert E., 82; 85. Lewis, Sinclair, 2 1 3 ; 254. Liberality, 187-201; in our attitude toward foreign countries, 188-191; of our greatest leaders, 192; of political parties, 193; in relations of labor and capital, 194-196; in censorship, 196-197; in foreign policy, 197-201. Lincoln, Abraham, 13; 55; 68; 70; 7 1 ; 72; 73-81; his devotion to the Union, 73-79; his First Inaugural, 75; his letter to Horace Greeley, 76-77; his Gettysburg Address, 78; his Second Inaugural, 79; his contribution to the American soul, 80; estimates of, 78; 79; 80; 81; 83; 104; 192; 206; >50.

259 Lindbergh, Charles A., 233. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 44; his effect upon the French soldiers in the Great War, 5 1 ; his defense of the Union, 66-69; 1 0 1 : s 49Lowell, James Russell, 43; 52; 55; 56; 57; 66; 76; 78; 79; 82; 96; 97; 99; 2 49McClellan, George B „ 82. McKinley, William, 119; 120; 1 2 1 . Madison, James, 35; 36; 58; 60; 192; 250. Mather, Cotton, 18. Michelson, A. A., 234; 235. Millikan, R . A., 235. Mitchell, S. Weir, his Red City, 28; 109; 1 2 1 ; 253. Monroe, James, 250. Moody, William Vaughn, 124; 214. Moratorium, the, 246. Morgan, John, 9; 25. Morgan, J . P., 107. Morgan, Mary, manuscript letter from, 24. Motley, John L „ 249. "Mr. Dooley," 226-227. New York University, 249-250. Norris, Frank, 105. O'Neill, Eugene, 10; his Strange Interlude, 196-197; 213; 212-216; letters from, 215, 239; as an individualist, 214-216; as imaginative artist, 238-240; his explanation of the meaning of Lazarus Laughed, 239; »43Page, Thomas Nelson, 90; 122. Paine, Thomas, his Common Sense, 22; his The Crisis, 23. Painting, American, 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 . Parkman, Francis, 249. Pennsylvania Dutch, 12. Pennsylvania, University of (College of Philadelphia), 20; 33; 1 1 3 ; 116; 176. Pioneers, the, 17; 40; 41; 101; 103; distinction between earlier and later, 104-105. Poe, Edgar Allan, 10; 46-48; his

Index

2ÖO American quality, 46-47; his kinship with the pioneer, 46-47; his constructive criticism, 47; his short stories, 48; 2 1 2 ; 249. Polk, J a m e s K., 40; 4 1 . Presbyterian element, 7. Preston, Margaret J . , 82. Princeton University, 1 1 6 . Provincialism, 20/-209; causes of, 2 0 1 ; the small-town mind, 201-204; in teaching, 203-204; remedies for, 205; as a field in literature, 204206; the higher, 206; as a guarantee of political unity, 206-207. P u p i n , Michael, 165; 234. Puritan element, 3; 5; 206. Quaker element, 3. R a n d a l l , J a m e s R . , 82. Reconstruction, period of, 82-92. Reese, Lizette W., 2 1 3 . R e p u b l i c a n party, 72-73; 9 1 ; 93; 98; 144; 194; 250. R e v o l u t i o n , the American, 19; 2 1 ; 22; 23; 25; 26. R i c e , W i l b u r , 232. R i t c h i e , A l b e r t , 72. R o b i n s o n , E d w i n Arlington, 8 1 ; 2 1 2 ; 213. R o c k e f e l l e r , J o h n D., 107. Roosevelt, F r a n k l i n , 72. Roosevelt, T h e o d o r e , 10; 120; 122; 126-132; his attack on the trusts, 127; his foreign policies, 127-128; 1 3 1 ; his crusade against corruption, 129; 157; 172; 192; 202. Russia, relations with, 254. R y a n , R e v . A b r a m J . , 82. Science. 232-235. Scottish element, 8; 9; 1 1 ; 12; 16; 37. Sedgwick, A n n e D., 190. Seward, W. H „ 72. Slavery, 53-57; 65; 69. Smith, A l f r e d E., 10; 72; 219. Smith, F. Hopkinson, 1 1 0 ; 160. Smith, R i c h a r d Penn, 52. Spanish-American W a r , 1 1 9 - 1 2 2 ; 124. Stanton, E d w i n M., 86. Stevens, T h a d d e u s , 83; 86; 88; 9 1 . Stowe, Harriet B., 249. Sullivan, Louis, 238.

Sumner, Charles, 83. Swedish element, 16. T a f t , William H., 120; 133. T a y l o r , Zachary, 43. Tenure-of-office Act, the, 86. T e u t o n i c element, 4-7; 2 5 1 . T h e a t r e , the, 39; 52; 218. T h o m a s , Augustus, 10; 100; 1 0 1 ; 109110. T h o m p s o n , Elihu, 232; 233. T i c k n o r , Francis Orray, 82. T i l d e n , Samuel J . , 10; 92-95. T i m r o d , Henry, 8 1 ; 82. Toleration, 187; 201. " T w a i n , M a r k , " 99; 100; 222; 223; 227; 249. T w e e d , " B o s s , " 92. Union, the, slow growth o f , 58-59; southern attitude toward, 60-62; Webster's defense o f , 63-65; Jackson's defense of, 65; L o n g f e l l o w ' s defense of, 66-69; Lincoln's devotion to, 73-7g; Cleveland as a symbol of the new union, 9g; the World W a r as a seal of union, 140. Van Buren, Martin, 40; 4 1 ; 43. Versailles, T r e a t y of, 198. Virginia, University of, 36. Vision, 2 ) 2 - 2 4 j ; in science, 232-235; in the arts, 236-237; in architecture, 237-238; in drama, 238 243; in humanitarian work, 243-244; in finance, 244-246; present need for, 246-247. Vollmer, Lula, her Sun-Up, 205. Warren, Mercy, her dramatic satires, The Adulaleur, The Group, 21. Washington, George, 2 1 ; 27-52; his liberality, 28; his influence on the American soul, 29-31; his real attitude toward foreign alliances, 31-32; his Farewell Address, 31-32; 38: 156: 192; 250; 253. Webster, Daniel, 33; ¿2-65; 69-70; 74: 250. Welsh element, 8; 10; 1 1 ; 16. Wharton, Edith, 1 9 1 ; 2 1 3 ; 2 3 1 . Whig party, the, 40; 42; 43; 62; 92; 97-

Index W h i t m a n , Walt, 216; 249. Whittier, J o h n G „ 5 1 ; 56; 57; 70; 249. Williams, R o g e r , 3. Wilson, Woodrow, 1 3 ; /32-/4Ä; his policy in Mexico, 1 3 3 1 3 4 ; his progressive legislation, 134 136; his conduct of the W a r , 1 3 6 - 1 4 1 ; his struggle for the L e a g u e of Nations and the Versailles T r e a t y , 1 4 1 - 1 4 6 ; expression of his ideals, 136-137;

261 1 4 1 ; 143-144; 157; 185; 192; 193; 197; 202. Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 1 1 0 . World Court, the, 200-201. World War, the, 136-146; 167; 185. Wright, Frank L l o y d , »37.

Vale University, 1 1 5 . Young, Owen D., 167; 199; 244-247.