Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader Part 24

=_170._= CHARACTER OF FRANKLIN.

His was the morality of a strong, experienced person, who had seen the folly of wise men, the meanness of proud men, the baseness of honorable men, and the littleness of great men, and made liberal allowances for the failures of all men. If the final end to be reached were just, he did not always inquire about the provisional means which led thither. He knew that the right line is the shortest distance between two points, in morals as in mathematics, but yet did not quarrel with such as attained the point by a crooked line. Such is the habit of politicians, diplomatists, statesmen, who look on all men as a commander looks on his soldiers, and does not ask them to join the church or keep their hands clean, but to stand to their guns and win the battle.

Thus, in the legislature of Pennsylvania, Franklin found great difficulty in carrying on the necessary measures for military defence, because a majority of the a.s.sembly were Quakers, who, though friendly to the success of the revolution founded contrary to their principles, refused to vote the supplies of war. So he caused them to vote appropriations to purchase bread, flour, wheat, _or other grain_. The Government said, "I shall take the money, for I understand very well their meaning,--other grain is gunpowder." He afterwards moved the purchase of a fire-engine, saying to his friend, "Nominate me on the committee, and I will nominate you; we will buy a great gun, which is certainly a fire engine; the Quakers can have no objection to that."

Such was the course of policy that Franklin took, as I think, to excess; but yet I believe that no statesman of that whole century did so much to embody the eternal rules of right in the customs of the people, and to make the const.i.tution of the universe the common law of all mankind; and I cannot bestow higher praise than that, on any man whose name I can recall. He mitigated the ferocities of war. He built new hospitals, and improved old ones. He first introduced this humane principle into the Law of Nations, that in time of war, private property on land shall be unmolested, and peaceful commerce continued, and captive soldiers treated as well as the soldiers of the captors. Generous during his life-time, his dead hand still gathers and distributes blessings to the mechanics of Boston, and their children. True is it that

"Him only pleasure leads and peace attends, Whose means are pure and spotless as his ends."

But it is a great thing in this stage of the world to find a man whose _ends_ are pure and spotless. Let us thank him for that.

From "Historic Americans."

=_171._= CHARACTER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON.

Of all those who controlled the helm of affairs during the time of the Revolution, and while the Const.i.tution and the forms of our National and State Inst.i.tutions were carefully organized, there is none who has been more generally popular, more commonly beloved, more usually believed to be necessary to the Legislation and Administration of his country, than Thomas Jefferson. It may not be said of him that of all those famous men he could least have been spared; for in the rare and great qualities for patiently and wisely conducting the vast affairs of State and Nation in pressing emergencies, he seems to have been wanting. But his grand merit was this--that while his powerful opponents favored a strong government, and believed it necessary thereby to repress what they called the lower cla.s.ses, he, Jefferson, believed in Humanity; believed in a true Democracy. He respected labor and education, and upheld the right to education of all men. These were the Ideas in which he was far in advance of all the considerable men, whether of his State or of his Nation--ideas which he ill.u.s.trated through long years of his life and conduct. The great debt that the Nation owes to him is this--that he so ably and consistently advocated these needful opinions, that he made himself the head and the hand of the great party that carried these ideas into power, that put an end to all possibility of cla.s.s-government, made naturalization easy, extended the suffrage and applied it to judicial office, opened a still wider and better education to all, and quietly inaugurated reforms, yet incomplete, of which we have the benefit to this day, and which, but for him, we might not have won against the party of Strong Government, except by a difficult and painful Revolution.

=_Wendell Phillips,[51] 1811-._=

From "A Lecture delivered in December, 1861."

=_172._= THE WAR FOR THE UNION.

I would have government announce to the world that we understand the evil which has troubled our peace for seventy years, thwarting the natural tendency of our inst.i.tutions, sending ruin along our wharves and through our workshops every ten years, poisoning the national conscience. We know well its character. But democracy, unlike other governments, is strong enough to let evils work out their own death--strong enough to face them when they reveal their proportions. It was in this sublime consciousness of strength, not of weakness, that our fathers submitted to the well-known evil of slavery, and tolerated it until the viper we thought we could safely tread on, at the touch of disappointment, starts up a fiend whose stature reaches the sky. But our cheeks do not blanch. Democracy accepts the struggle. After this forbearance of three generations, confident that she has yet power to execute her will, she sends her proclamation, down to the Gulf--freedom to every man beneath the stars, and death to every inst.i.tution that disturbs our peace, or threatens the future of the republic.

[Footnote 51: A native of Ma.s.sachusetts: a vigorous thinker and speaker on the great moral and political topics of the day, and the most eloquent of the Anti-Slavery leaders.]

From His "Speeches, Lectures." &c.

=_173._= CHARACTER OF TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE.

Above the l.u.s.t of gold, pure in private life, generous in the use of his power, it was against such a man that Napoleon sent his army, giving to General Leclerc,--the husband of his beautiful sister Pauline,--thirty thousand of his best troops, with orders to re-introduce slavery. Among these soldiers came all of Toussaint's old mulatto rivals and foes.

Mounting his horse, and riding to the eastern end of the island, Samana, he looked out on a sight such as no native had ever seen before. Sixty ships of the line, crowded by the best soldiers of Europe, rounded the point. They were soldiers who had never yet met an equal, whose tread, like Caesar's, had shaken Europe,--soldiers who had scaled the Pyramids, and planted the French banners on the walls of Rome. He looked a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of his horse, and, turning to Christophe, exclaimed: "All France is come to Hayti; they can only come to make us slaves; and we are lost." He then recognized the only mistake of his life,--his confidence in Bonaparte, which had led him to disband his army. Returning to the hills, he issued the only proclamation which bears his name and breathes vengeance: "My children, France comes to make us slaves. G.o.d gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man the h.e.l.l he comes to make"; and he was obeyed. When the great William of Orange saw Louis XIV. cover Holland with troops, he said, "Break down the d.y.k.es, give Holland back to ocean"; and Europe said, "Sublime!" When Alexander saw the armies of France descend upon Russia, he said: "Burn Moscow, starve back the invaders"; and Europe said, "Sublime!" This black saw all Europe marshalled to crush him, and gave to his people the same heroic example of defiance.

=_Thomas Starr King, 1824-1864._= (Manual, p. 532.)

From "Patriotism and other Papers."

=_174._= GREAT PRINCIPLES AND SMALL DUTIES.

If we go to Nature for our morals, we shall learn the necessity of perfection in the smallest act. Infinite skill is not exhausted nor concentrated in the structure of a firmament, in drawing the orbit of a planet, in laying the strata of the earth, in rearing the mountain cone.

The care for the bursting flower is as wise as the forces displayed in the rolling star; the smallest leaf that falls and dies unnoticed in the forest is wrought with a beauty as exquisite as the skill displayed in the st.u.r.dy oak. All the wisdom of Nature is compressed and revealed in the sting of the bee; and the pride of human art is mocked by the subtile mechanism and cunning structure of a fly's foot and wing.

However minute the task, it reveals the polish of perfection. Omnipotent skill is stamped on the infinitely small, as on the infinitely great.

It is a moral stenography like this which we need in daily life....

The lesson of Christianity, then, urged and enforced by Nature, is the inestimable worth of common duties, as manifesting the greatest principles; it bids us attain perfection, not by striving to do dazzling deeds, but by making our experience divine; it tells us that the Christian hero will enn.o.ble the humblest field of labor; that nothing is mean which can be performed as duty; but that religious virtue, like the touch of Midas, converts the humblest call of conscience into spiritual gold.

The Greek philosopher, Plato, has left an instructive and beautiful poetic picture of the judgment of souls, when they had been collected from the regions of temporary bliss and pain, and suffered once more to return to the duties and pleasures of earthly life. The spirits advanced by lot, to make their choice of the condition and form under which they should re-enter the world. The dazzling and showy fortunes, the lives of kings and warriors and statesmen were soon exhausted; and the spirit of Ulysses, who had been the wisest prince among all the Greeks, came last to choose. He advanced with sorrow, fearing that his favorite condition had been selected by some more fortunate soul who had gone before him.

But, to his surprise and pleasure, Ulysses found that the only life which had not been chosen was the lot of an obscure and private man, with its humble cares and quiet joys; the lot which he, the wisest, would have selected, had his turn come first; the life for which he had longed, since he had felt the folly and meanness of station, wealth, and power....

CHAPTER III.

GENERAL AND POLITE LITERATURE.

=_William Wirt, 1772-1834._= (Manual, pp. 487, 490.)

From the "Life of Patrick Henry."

=_175._= HENRY'S EXAMPLE NO ARGUMENT FOR INDOLENCE.

I cannot learn that he gave in his youth any evidence of that precocity which sometimes distinguishes uncommon genius. His companions recollect no instance of premature wit, no striking sentiment, no flash of fancy, no remarkable beauty or strength of expression, and no indication however slight, either of that impa.s.sioned love of liberty, or of that adventurous daring and intrepidity, which marked so strongly his future character. So far was he indeed from exhibiting any one prognostic of this greatness, that every omen foretold a life at best, of mediocrity, if not of insignificance. His person is represented as having been coa.r.s.e, his manners uncommonly awkward, his dress slovenly, his conversation very plain, his aversion to study invincible, and his faculties almost entirely benumbed by indolence. No persuasion could bring him either to read or to work. On the contrary, he ran wild in the forest like one of the _Aborigines_ of the country, and divided his life between the dissipation and uproar of the chase, and the languor of inaction.

His propensity to observe and comment upon the human character, was, so far as I can learn, the only circ.u.mstance which distinguished him advantageously from his youthful companions. This propensity seems to have been born with him, and to have exerted itself instinctively, the moment that a new subject was presented to his view. Its action was incessant, and it became at length almost the only intellectual exercise in which he seemed to take delight. To this cause, may be traced that consummate knowledge of the human heart which he finally attained, and which enabled him when he came upon the public stage, to touch the springs of pa.s.sion with a master hand, and to control the resolutions and decisions of his hearers with a power almost more than mortal.

From what has been already stated, it will be seen how little education had to do with the formation of this great man's mind. He was indeed a mere child of nature, and nature seems to have been too proud and too jealous of her work, to permit it to be touched by the hand of art. She gave him Shakespeare's genius, and bade him, like Shakespeare, to depend on that alone. Let not the youthful reader, however, deduce from the example of Mr. Henry, an argument in favor of indolence, and the contempt of study. Let him remember that the powers which surmounted the disadvantage of those early habits, were such as very rarely appear upon this earth. Let him remember, too, how long the genius even of Mr. Henry was kept down, and hidden from the public view, by the sorcery of those pernicious habits; through what years of poverty and wretchedness they doomed him to struggle; and let him remember, that at length, when in the zenith of his glory. Mr. Henry himself, had frequent occasions to deplore the consequences of his early neglect of literature, and to bewail the ghosts of his departed hours.

From "Eulogium on Adams and Jefferson."

=_176._= JEFFERSON'S SEAT AT MONTICELLO.

Approaching the house on the east, the visitor instinctively paused, to cast around one thrilling glance at this magnificent panorama, and then pa.s.sed to the vestibule, where, if he had not been previously informed, he would immediately perceive that he was entering the house of no common man. In the s.p.a.cious and lofty hall which opens before him, he marks no tawdry and unmeaning ornaments, but before, on the right, on the left, all around, the eye is struck and gratified with objects of science and taste, so cla.s.sed and arranged as to produce their finest effect. On one side, specimens of sculpture set out in such order as to exhibit ... the historical progress of that art, from the first rude attempts of the aborigines of our country up to that exquisite and finished bust of the great patriot himself, from the master-hand of Ceracchi. On the other side, the visitor sees displayed a vast collection of specimens of Indian art--their paintings, weapons, ornaments, and manufactures; on another, an array of the fossil productions of our country, mineral and animal, the polished remains of those colossal monsters that once trod our forests, and are no more; and a variegated display of the branching honors of those "monarchs of the waste," that still people the wilds of the American continent.

From this hall he was ushered into a n.o.ble saloon, from which the glorious landscape of the west again bursts upon his view, and which within is hung thick around with the finest productions of the pencil--historical paintings of the most striking subjects from all countries and all ages, the portraits of distinguished men and patriots both of Europe and America, and medallions and engravings in endless profusion.

While the visitor was yet lost in the contemplation of these treasures of the arts and sciences, he was startled by the approach of a strong and sprightly step; and, turning with instinctive reverence to the door of entrance, he was met by the tall, and animated, and stately figure of the patriot himself, his countenance beaming with intelligence and benignity, and his outstretched hand, with its strong and cordial pressure, confirming the courteous welcome of his lips; and then came that charm of manner and conversation that pa.s.ses all description--so cheerful, so una.s.suming, so free, and easy, and frank, and kind, and gay, that even the young, and overawed, and embarra.s.sed visitor at once forgot his fears, and felt himself by the side of an old and familiar friend.