Modern Eloquence Volume Ii Part 31

Contrast the business, political, moral, and social conditions which confront the journalism of this great city to-day, and none can fail to appreciate the greatly magnified duties and responsibilities of the journalist of this age. In this City of Brotherly Love, with the highest standard of average intelligence in any community of like numbers of the world, and the only great city to be found on the continent that is distinctively American in its policy, how sharp is the contrast between the civilization met by the Juniata "Sentinel" fifty years ago and the civilization that is met by the Philadelphia journalist of to-day?

Public wrongs ever appear like huge cancers on the body politic, and the swarms of the idle and vicious, with the studied crimes of those who would acquire wealth without earning it, are a constant menace to the social order and the safety of person and property, and demand the utmost vigilance on the part of the faithful public journal. Continued political power under all parties becomes corrupt and demoralized, and it is not uncommon for apparently reputable political leaders of all parties and organized crime to make common cause for public plunder. The business and social conditions are also radically changed, and with these the fearless journalists of to-day must deal with courage and fidelity. From what was many years ago regarded, and with some reason, as the license of the public press, has grown up the well-defined duty of reputable journalism to maintain with dignity and firmness its mission as public censor, and to-day in Philadelphia, as in all the leading centres of the country, American journalism is not only the great educator of the people, but it is the faithful handmaid of law and order and of public and private morals. Like all great callings, from which even the sacredness of the pulpit is not exempt, there are those who bring persistent dishonor upon journalism, and pervert its powers to ambition and greed; but discounted by all its imperfections, it is to-day the greatest of our great factors in maintaining the best attributes of our civilization and preserving social order and the majesty of law; and the duties of the journalist to-day in our great cities have reached a standard of dignity and magnitude of which even the wildest enthusiast of fifty years ago could not have dreamed.

Such is the revolution wrought in journalism within a single active lifetime. The newspaper is no longer a luxury. From being confined to the few, as it was half a century ago, the daily newspaper is now in almost every home in the great States of the Union, and the grave responsibility of journalism may be appreciated when it is remembered that the newspaper to-day is the greatest educator of the people who are to maintain our free inst.i.tutions. Widely as our schools have extended until they are accessible to the humblest of the land, the newspaper as an educator reaches vastly more people than all the colleges and schools of the nation. It is read not only by the men and women of mature years, but it begins its offices as teacher in the home circle as soon as the child becomes a pupil in the school, and it is constantly although imperceptibly moulding the minds of millions of our youths of all cla.s.ses and all conditions, and it has no vacations in its great work.

It not only aids the more intelligent to a sound exercise of judgment on questions of public interest, but it is ever quickening the impulses and shaping the aims of those who are most easily impressed, and during the important period of life when the character of men and women is formed.

I have long held that the responsible direction of a widely read and respected daily newspaper is the highest trust in our free government. I do not thus speak of it to claim for it honors which may be questioned, but I speak of it to present the oppressive responsibilities which rest upon those who are to-day educating a nation of 70,000,000 of people, under a government where every citizen is a sovereign, and where the people hold in their own hands the destiny of the greatest Republic of the world. Presidents, Cabinets, Senators, and Representatives come and play their parts on the public stage and pa.s.s away--the few to be remembered, the many to be forgotten--and political parties are created and perish as new necessities and new conditions arise in the progress of our free inst.i.tutions. In my own day there have been created four new political organizations which attained national importance, all of which have elected Governors in Pennsylvania, and two of which have elected Presidents of the United States, but three of them exist to-day only in history. They are the Anti-Masonic, the Whig, the American, and the Republican parties. Thus while rulers and the parties which call them to power, come and go in the swift mutations of American politics, the newspaper survives them all, and continues in its great career regardless of the success or defeat of men or political organizations.

To seek promotion in civil trust from the editorial chair of an influential newspaper, is to sacrifice the grander opportunity and responsibility for the unsatisfying fame of official distinction. It is the mission of the newspaper to create Presidents and other rulers; to judge them when in power; to sustain them when they have been faithful and efficient in the discharge of public duties, and to defeat them when they are forgetful of the public welfare. In the discharge of these important duties the newspaper must, above all, be free from the suspicion of seeking individual advantage and it can be so only by accepting its trust as highest of all and more enduring than all. Great editors have been presumably honored by conferring upon them high official positions in recognition of party services, but no editor in the entire history of American journalism who has made his newspaper secondary to political ambition, has written any other record than failure as both editor and statesman.

My brethren of the press need not be reminded of the often painful duties which come to the fearless editor. They must ever remember that "faithful are the wounds of a friend," and no cla.s.s of teachers so well-known that:--

"Forgiveness to the injured does belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."

Few, very few indeed, outside of the editorial sanctum ever learn how the surges of ambition, in all its varied and fantastic phases from the n.o.blest to the meanest, a.s.sail and often vex journalistic duties. The public know not of the many gifted men who must thus at times be saved from themselves, and an editorial retrospect of half a century presents a sad record of the newspaper work of making bricks without straw.

Justly excepting the comparatively few public men who tower over mediocrity in public place, journalism gives the position and fashions the fame of most of them. It is not done arbitrarily nor from choice, as public and political necessities are often paramount with journalists, as with others, in awarding public honors; but with all its exactions and responsibilities, which are ever magnified by the greater opportunities for usefulness, there is no calling that brings richer compensation for fidelity to duty. The consciousness that each day the editor whose readers are numbered by hundreds of thousands, may greatly aid in making the world better than it was in the pa.s.sing yesterday, is a constant inspiration to the best efforts, and it is especially gratifying that even in the many and at times impa.s.sioned conflicts of journalistic dispute, the rugged and sharp-angled walls which divide us are ever so beautiful and fragrant with the flowers of good-fellowship, as is impressively taught by this a.s.sembly.

Thus charged with the highest of civil trusts in the most enlightened government of the earth, the editor must be honored or dishonored here by the measure of his fidelity to his exceptional duties, and must be so judged in the hereafter, when the narrow pathway of life that divides past and future eternities has been traversed. We come when bidden, we know not whence; we go when bidden, we know not whither; but each and all have duties to themselves, to their homes, to their country, and to the common brotherhood of man, which when performed with the faithfulness that human infirmities will permit, must greatly brighten the brief and often fretful journey from the cradle to the grave.

Friends, in this evening twilight of my journalistic work, so sweetly mellowed by the smiling faces, young and old, about me, I answer your generous greeting with the grat.i.tude that can perish only when the gathering shadows shall have settled into the night that comes to purple the better morn.

ST. CLAIR McKELWAY

SMASHED CROCKERY

[Speech of St. Clair McKelway before the National Society of China Importers, New York City, February 6, 1896.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND FRIENDS:--The china I buy abroad is marked "Fragile" in shipment. That which I buy at home is marked: "Gla.s.s--This Side Up With Care." The foreign word of caution is fact. The American note of warning is fiction--with a moral motive. The common purpose of both is protection from freight fractors and baggage smashers. The European appeals to knowledge. The American addresses the imagination.

The one expresses the truth. The other extends it. Neither is entirely successful. The skill and care of shippers cannot always victoriously cope with the innate destructiveness of fallen human nature. There is a great deal of smashed crockery in the world.

You who are masters in the art of packing things and we whose vocation is the art of putting things, both have reason to know that no pains of placing or of preparation will guarantee freight or phrases, plates or propositions, china of any kind or principles of any sort, from the dangers of travel or from the tests of time. Your goods and our wares have to take their chances in their way across the seas, throughout the land and around the world. You lose some of yours merely in handling.

The defects of firing cannot be always foreseen. The intrusion of inferior clay cannot be always prevented. The mere friction of contact may produce bad nicks. Nor is the fineness nor the excellence of the product an insurance against mishaps. From your factories or stores your output is at the mercy of carriers without compunction, and in our homes it is exposed to the heavy hands of servants without sentiment.

The pleasure of many a dinner is impaired by the fear or the consciousness that inapt peasants are playing havoc with the treasures of art on which the courses are served.

If, however, the ceramic kingdom is strewn with smashed crockery, how much more so are the worlds of theology, medicine, politics, society, law, and the like. No finer piece of plate was ever put forth than the one inscribed: "I will believe only what I know." It was for years agreeable to the pride and vanity of the race. It made many a fool feel as if his forehead was lifted as high as the heavens, and that at every step he knocked out a star. When, however, the discovery was made that this a.s.sumption to displace deity amounted to a failure to comprehend nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching to find out and to equal G.o.d could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the gra.s.ses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and mult.i.tudinous ma.s.s of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the smashed crockery of the moral universe.

Nor is the smug and confident contention: "Medicine is a science, one and indivisible," so impressive and undented as it was. Sir Astley Cooper in his plain, blunt way is reported to have described his own idea of his own calling as "a science founded on conjecture and improved by murder." The State of New York has rudely stepped in and legally and irrevocably recognized three schools of medicine and will recognize a fourth or a fifth as soon as it establishes itself by a sufficient number of cures or in a sufficient number of cemeteries. Medical intolerance cannot be legislated out of existence, but it has no further recognition in legislation. A common and considerable degree of general learning is by the State required of all intending students of medicine.

An equal and extended degree of professional study is required. An identical measure of final examination with state certification and state licensure is required. The claim that men and women must die _secundum artem_ in order to have any permit to live here or to live hereafter, has gone to the limbo of smashed crockery in the realm of therapeutics. The arrogant pretension that men must die _secundum artem_ has been adjourned--_sine die_. And the State which prescribes uniform qualifications among the schools will yet require uniform consultations between them in the interest of the people whom they impartially prod and concurrently purge with diversity of methods, but with parity of price.

Other long impressive and long pretty plaques have also been incontinently smashed. One was lovingly lettered: "Once a Democrat, always a Democrat." Another was inscribed: "Unconditional Republicanism." In the white light of to-day the truth that an invariable partisan is an occasional lunatic becomes impressively apparent. Party under increasing civilization is a factor, not a fetish.

It is a means, not an end. It is an instrument, not an idol. Man is its master, not its slave. Not that men will cease to act on party lines.

Party lines are the true divisional boundary between schools of thought.

No commission is needed to discover or to establish those lines. They have made their own route or course in human nature. The bondage from which men will free themselves is bondage to party organizations. Those organizations are combinations for power and spoils. They are feudal in their form, predatory in their spirit, military in their methods, but they necessarily bear no more relation to political principles than Italian banditti do to Italian unity, or the men who hold up railway trains do to the laws of transportation. Party slavery is a bad and disappearing form of smashed crockery.

The smashed crockery of society and of law could also be remarked. Our fathers' dictum, that it is the only duty of women to be charming, deserves to be sent into retirement. It is no more their duty to be charming than it is the duty of the sun to light, or the rose to perfume, or the trees to cast a friendly shade. A function is not a duty. In the right sense of the word it is a nature or a habit. It is the property of women and it is their prerogative to be charming, but if they made it a duty, the effort would fail, for the intention would be apparent and the end would impeach the means. Indeed, the whole theory of the eighteenth century about women has gone to the limbo of smashed crockery. It has been found that education does not hurt her. It has been discovered that learning strengthens her like a tonic and becomes her like a decoration. It has been discovered that she can compete with men in the domain of lighter labor, in several of the professions, and in not a few of the useful arts. The impression of her as a p.a.w.n, a property or a plaything, came down from paganism to Christianity and was too long retained by the Christian world. There is even danger of excess in the liberality now extended to her. The toast, "Woman, Once Our Superior and Now Our Equal," is not without satire as well as significance. There must be a measurable reaction against the ultra tendency in progress which has evolved the New Woman, as the phrase is.

I never met one and I hope I never shall. The women of the present, the girls of the period, the s.e.x up-to-date, will more than suffice to double our joys and to treble our expenses. The new fads, as well as the old fallacies, can be thrown among the smashed crockery of demolished and discarded misconceptions.

I intended to say much about the smashed crockery of the lawyers. I intended to touch upon the exploded claim that clients are their slaves, witnesses theirs for vivisection, courts their playthings, and juries their dupes. More mummery has thrived in law than in even medicine or theology. The disenchanting and discriminating tendency of a realistic age has, however, somewhat reformed the bar. Fluency, without force, is discounted in our courts. The merely smart pract.i.tioner finds his measure quickly taken and that the conscientious members of his calling hold him at arm's length. Judges are learning that they are not rated wise when they are obscure, or profound when they are stupid, or mysterious when they are reserved. Publicity is abating many of the abuses both of the bench and the bar. It will before long, even in this judicial department, require both rich and poor to stand equal before the bar of justice. The conjugal complications of plutocrats will not be sealed up from general view by sycophantic magistrates, while the matrimonial infelicities of the less well-to-do are spread broad on the records. The still continuing scandals of part.i.tioning refereeships among the family relatives of judges will soon be stopped and the shame and scandal of damage suits or of libel suits, without cause, maintained by procured and false testimony and conducted on sheer speculation, will be brought to an end. The law is full of rare crockery, but it is also replete with crockery that ought to be smashed. Much bad crockery in it has been smashed and much more will be, if necessary, by the press, which is itself not without considerable ceramic material that could be pulverized with signal benefit to the public and to the fourth estate.

But why am I talking about smashed crockery when I am told that it is the very life of your trade? Were crockery imperishable this would be the last dinner of your a.s.sociation. Your members would be eating cold victuals at area doors, pa.s.sed to you on the plates you have made, by the domestics whose free and easy carelessness is really the foundation of your fortunes. You want crockery to be smashed, because the more smash the more crockery and the more crockery the more output, and the more output the more revenue, and the more revenue the more Waldorf dinners, and the more Waldorf dinners the more opportunity for you to make the men of other callings stand and deliver those speeches, which I like to hear, and in the hope of hearing which I now give way.

TRIBUTE TO MARK TWAIN

[Speech of St. Clair McKelway at a dinner given in honor of Samuel L.

Clemens [Mark Twain] by the Lotos Club, New York City, November 2, 1900. The President of the Lotos, Frank R. Lawrence, introduced Dr.

McKelway as the man whose wondrous use of adjectives has converted to his opinion many doubters throughout this city and country.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND FRIENDS:--Years ago we here sought to hold up Mark Twain's hands. Now we all feel like holding up our own, in congratulation of him and of ourselves. Of him because his warfare is accomplished. Of ourselves because he has returned to our company. If it was a pleasure to know him then, it is a privilege and an honor to know him now. He has fought the good fight. He has kept the faith. He is ready to be offered up, but we are not ready to have him offered up. For we want the Indian summer of his life to be long, and that to be followed by a genial winter, which, if it be as frosty as his hair, shall also be as kindly as his heart. [Applause.]

He has enough excess and versatility of ability to be a genius. He has enough quality and quant.i.ty of virtues to be a saint. But he has honorably trans.m.u.ted his genius into work, whereby it has been brought into relations with literature and with life. And he has preferred warm fellowship to cold perfection, so that sinners love him and saints are content to wait for him. May they wait long. [Applause.]

I think he is ent.i.tled to be regarded as the Dean of America's humor; that he is ent.i.tled to the distinction of being the greatest humorist this nation ever had. I say this with a fair knowledge of the chiefs of the entire corps, from Francis Hopkinson and the author of "Hasty Pudding," down to Bill Nye and Dooley. None of them would I depreciate.

I would greatly prefer to honor and hail them all for the singular fittedness of their gifts to the needs of the nation in their times.

Hopkinson and Joel Barlow lightened the woes of the Revolution by the touch of nature that makes the whole world grin. Seba Smith relieved the Yankee sense of tension under the impact of Jacksonian roughness, by tickling its ribs with a quill. Lieutenant Derby turned the searchlight of fun on the stiff formalities of army posts, on the raw conditions of alkali journalism and on the solemn humbugs of frontier politics. James Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bl.u.s.ter to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and l.u.s.t of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the coveted treasures of primeval nature. Charles F. Browne made "Artemus Ward" as well known as Abraham Lincoln in the time the two divided the attention of the world. Bill Nye singed the shams of his day, and Dooley dissects for Hinnissey the shams of our own. Nor should we forget Eugene Field, the beatifier of childhood; or Joel Chandler Harris, the fabulist of the plantation; or Ruth McEnery Stuart, the coronal singer of the joys and hopes, the loves and the dreams of the images of G.o.d in ebony in the old South, ere it leaped and hardened to the new.

To these, love and honor. But to this man honor's crown of honor, for he has made a mark none of the others has reached. Few of them have diversified the delights to be drawn from their pages of humor. They have, as humorists, in distinction to the work of moralists, novelists, orators and poets, in which the rarest among them shine, they have as humorists, in the main, worked a single vein. And some of them were humorists for a purpose, a dreary grind that, and some of them were only humorists for a period as well as for a purpose. The purpose served, the period pa.s.sed, the humor that was of their life a thing apart, ceased.

'Tis Clemens' whole existence! [Applause.]

As Bacon made all learning his province, so Mark Twain has made all life and history his quarry, from the Jumping Frog to the Yankee at Arthur's Court; from the inquested petrifaction that died of protracted exposure to the present parliament of Austria; from the Grave of Adam to the mysteries of the Adamless Eden known as the league of professional women; from Mulberry Sellers to Joan of Arc, and from Edward the Sixth to Puddin'head Wilson, who wanted to kill his half of the deathless dog.

Nevada is forgiven its decay because he flashed the oddities of its zenith life on pages that endure. California is worth more than its gold, because he showed to men the heart under its swagger. He annexed the Sandwich Islands to the fun of the nation long before they were put under its flag. Because of him the Missouri and the Mississippi go not unvexed to the sea, for they ripple with laughter as they recall Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, poor Jim, and the Duke. Europe, Asia Minor, and Palestine are open doors to the world, thanks to this Pilgrim's Progress with his "Innocents Abroad." Purity, piety and pity shine out from "Prince and Pauper" like the eyes of a wondering deer on a torch-lighted night from a wooded fringe of mountain and of lake.

But enough of what I fear is already too much. In expressing my debt to him, I hope I express somewhat at least of yours. I cannot repay him in kind any more than I could rival him. None of us can. But we can render to him a return he would like. With him we can get our way to reality, and burn off pretence as acid eats its way to the denuded plate of the engraver. We can strip the veneer of convention from style, and strengthen our thought in his Anglo-Saxon well of English undefiled. We can drop seeming for sincerity. We can be relentless toward hypocrisy and tender to humanity. We can rejoice in the love of laughter, without ever once letting it lead us to libertinism of fancy. We can reach through humor the heart of man. We can make exaggeration the scourge of meanness and the magnifier of truth on the broad screen of life. By study of him, the nothing new under the sun can be made fresh and fragrant by the supreme art of putting things. Though none of us can handle his wand, all of us can be transformed by it into something different from and finer than our dull selves. That is our delight, that is our debt, both due to him, and long may he remain with us to brighten, to broaden and to better our souls with the magic mirth and with the mirthful magic of his incomparable spell. [Applause.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: REPRODUCTIONS OF MURAL DECORATIONS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON

"_PATRIOTISM_"

_Photo-engraving in colors after an original painting by George W.

Maynard_

This is from a series of eight panels, representing "The Virtues"--Fort.i.tude, Justice, Patriotism, Courage, Temperance, Prudence, Industry, and Concord. Each figure is about five and a half feet high clad in drapery, and standing out on a solid red background. The style is Pompeiian, the general tone is somewhat like marble, but relieved by a touch of color. "Patriotism" is represented as feeding an eagle, the emblem of America, from a golden bowl, symbolizing the nourishment given by this Virtue to the spirit of the nation.]

WILLIAM McKINLEY