Standard Selections Part 40

This message, Mr. President, comes to you from consecrated ground. Every foot of soil about the city in which I live is as sacred as a battle-ground of the republic. Every hill that invests it is hallowed to you by the blood of your brothers who died for your victory, and doubly hallowed to us by the blood of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat--sacred soil to all of us--rich with memories that make us purer and stronger and better--silent but stanch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms--speaking an eloquent witness in its white peace and prosperity to the indissoluble union of American States and the imperishable brotherhood of the American people.

Now, what answer has New England to this message? Will she permit the prejudice of war to remain in the hearts of the conquerors, when it has died in the hearts of the conquered? Will she transmit this prejudice to the next generation, that in their hearts which never felt the generous ardor of conflict it may perpetuate itself? Will she withhold, save in strained courtesy, the hand which straight from his soldier's heart Grant offered to Lee at Appomattox? Will she make the vision of a restored and happy people, which gathered above the couch of your dying captain, filling his heart with grace, touching his lips with praise, and glorifying his path to the grave--will she make this vision, on which the last sigh of his expiring soul breathed a benediction, a cheat and delusion? If she does, the South, never abject in asking for comradeship, must accept with dignity its refusal; but if she does not refuse to accept in frankness and sincerity this message of good will and friendship, then will the prophecy of Webster, delivered in this very society forty years ago amid tremendous applause, be verified in its fullest sense, when he said: "Standing hand to hand and clasping hands, we should remain united as we have been for sixty years, citizens of the same country, members of the same government, united, all united now and united forever." There have been difficulties, contentions, and controversies, but I tell you that in my judgment,

"Those opened eyes, Which like the meteors of a troubled heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in th' intestine shock, Shall now, in mutual, well beseeming ranks, March all one way."

DANIEL O'CONNELL[50]

WENDELL PHILLIPS

I do not think I exaggerate when I say that never since G.o.d made Demosthenes has He made a man better fitted for a great work than He did Daniel O'Connell.

You may say that I am partial to my hero, but John Randolph of Roanoke, who hated an Irishman almost as much as he did a Yankee, when he got to London and heard O'Connell, the old slaveholder threw up his hands and exclaimed, "This is the man, those are the lips, the most eloquent that speak English in my day," and I think he was right.

Webster could address a bench of judges; Everett could charm a college; Choate could delude a jury; Clay could magnetize a senate; and Tom Corwin could hold the mob in his right hand, but no one of these men could do more than this one thing. The wonder about O'Connell was that he could out-talk Corwin, he could charm a college better than Everett, and leave Henry Clay himself far behind in magnetizing a senate.

It has been my privilege to have heard all the great orators of America who have become singularly famed about the world's circ.u.mference. I know what was the majesty of Webster; I know what it was to melt under the magnetism of Henry Clay; I have seen eloquence in the iron logic of Calhoun; but O'Connell was Webster, Clay, and Calhoun in one. Before the courts, logic; at the bar of the senate, unanswerable and dignified; on the platform, grace, wit, and pathos; before the ma.s.ses, a whole man.

Emerson says, "There is no true eloquence, unless there is a man behind the speech." Daniel O'Connell was listened to because all England and Ireland knew that there was a man behind the speech,--one who could be neither bought, bullied, nor cheated.

When I was in Naples, I asked Thomas Fowell Buxton, "Is Daniel O'Connell an honest man?" "As honest a man as ever breathed," said he, and then he told me the following story: "When, in 1830, O'Connell first entered Parliament, the anti-slavery cause was so weak that it had only Lushington and myself to speak for it, and we agreed that when he spoke I should cheer him up, and when I spoke he should cheer me, and these were the only cheers we ever got. O'Connell came with one Irish member to support him. A large party of members (I think Buxton said twenty-seven) whom we called the West India interest, the Bristol party, the slave party, went to him, saying, 'O'Connell, at last you are in the House, with one helper. If you never go down to Freemason's Hall with Buxton and Brougham, here are twenty-seven votes for you on every Irish question. If you work with those Abolitionists, count us always against you.'

"It was a terrible temptation. How many a so-called statesman would have yielded! O'Connell said, 'Gentlemen, G.o.d knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if to help Ireland--even Ireland--I forget the negro one single hour.' From that day," said Buxton, "Lushington and I never went into the lobby that O'Connell did not follow us."

And then, besides his irreproachable character he had what is half the power of a popular orator, he had a majestic presence. A little O'Connell would have been no O'Connell at all. In youth he had the brow of a Jupiter and a stature of Apollo. Sydney Smith says of Lord John Russell's five feet, when he went down to Yorkshire after the Reform Bill had pa.s.sed, the stalwart hunters of Yorkshire exclaimed, "What, that little shrimp, he carry the Reform Bill!" "No, no!" said Smith, "he was a large man, but the labors of the bill shrunk him."

I remember the story Russell Lowell tells of Webster; when a year or two before his death, the Whig party thought of dissolution, Webster came home from Washington and went down to Faneuil Hall to protest, and four thousand of his fellow Whigs came out; drawing himself up to his loftiest proportion, his brow charged with thunder, before the listening thousands, he said, "Gentlemen, I am a Whig, a Ma.s.sachusetts Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig, a revolutionary Whig, a const.i.tutional Whig. If you break up the Whig party, sir, where am I to go?" And says Lowell, "We all held our breath, thinking where he could go. But if he had been five feet three, we should have said, 'Who cares where you go?'"

Well, O'Connell had all that; and true nature seemed to be speaking all over him. It would have been a pleasure even to look at him if he had not spoken at all, and all you thought of was a greyhound.

And then he had what so few American speakers have, a voice that sounded the gamut. I heard him once in Exeter Hall say, "Americans, I send my voice careering across the Atlantic like a thunderstorm, to tell the slave-holders of the Carolinas that G.o.d's thunderbolts are hot, and to remind the negro that the dawn of his redemption is drawing near," and I seemed to hear his voice reverberating and reechoing back to Boston from the Rocky Mountains.

And then, with the slightest possible flavor of an Irish brogue, he would tell a story that would make all Exeter Hall laugh, and the next moment there would be tears in his voice, like an old song, and five thousand men would be in tears. And all the while no effort--he seemed only breathing.

"As effortless as woodland nooks Send violets up and paint them blue."

FOOTNOTE:

[50] By permission of the publishers, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.

THE OPEN DOOR

PATRICK HENRY

I venture to prophesy there are those now living who will see this favored land among the most powerful on earth; able, sir, to take care of herself, without resorting to that policy which is always so dangerous, though sometimes unavoidable, of calling in foreign aid. Yes, sir, they will see her great in arts and in arms, her golden harvests waving over fields of immeasurable extent, her commerce permeating the most distant seas. But, sir, you must have men, you cannot get along without them. Those heavy forests of valuable timber under which your lands are groaning must be cleared away. Those vast riches which cover the face of your soil as well as those which lie hid in its bosom are to be developed and gathered only by the skill and enterprise of men. Your timber must be worked up into ships to transport the productions of the soil from which it has been cleared. Then you must have commercial men and commercial capital to take off your productions and find the best markets for them abroad. Your great want, sir, is the want of men, and these you must have and will have speedily if you are wise.

Do you ask how you are to get them? Open your doors and they will come in. The population of the Old World is full to overflowing. That population is oppressed by the government under which they live. They are already standing on tiptoe on their native sh.o.r.es and looking to your coasts with wistful and longing eyes. They see here a land blessed with natural and political advantages, which are not equaled by those of any other country upon earth, a land upon which a gracious Providence hath emptied the horn of abundance, a land over which peace hath now stretched forth her white wings, and where content and plenty lie down at every door.

Sir, they see something still more attractive than all this. They see a land where Liberty hath taken up her abode, that Liberty whom they had considered a fabled G.o.ddess existing only in the fancies of poets. They see her here a real divinity, her altars rising on every hand throughout these happy states, her glories chanted by three millions of tongues and the whole region smiling under her blessed influence. Let but this, our celestial G.o.ddess, stretch forth her fair hands toward the people of the Old World, and you will see them pouring in from the North, from the South, from the East, and from the West. Your wilderness will be cleared and settled, your deserts will smile, your ranks will be filled, and you will soon be in a condition to defy the powers of any adversary.

ORGANIZATION OF THE WORLD[51]

EDWIN D. MEAD

To-day, a century after Washington, we are called to a vision as inspiring and imperative as that which came to him as he rode up the Mohawk, and to a greater organizing work than that which he performed with such wisdom, courage, patience, and success. He was commanded to organize a nation; we are commanded to organize the world. He saw that the time had come when our power and our true interests must be measured on a continental scale; we are warned that the time has come when we must conceive of our power and our true interests by the measure of mankind. Let no man think himself any longer in the first place as a New England man, as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, but all of us Americans,--that was the vision and message of Washington; and that insight and that law, coming to petty, prejudiced, jealous, and disordered states, put an end to chaos and brought peace, prosperity, strength, largeness of life, and an ever broadening horizon. Let no man think of himself any longer in the first place as an American, as an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a German, a Russian, but all men in the first place citizens of the world,--that is the message which has been thundered in the ears of Washington's America in these eventful and surprising years as it was never done before. It took a civil war to teach Gadsden's Carolina and Washington's Virginia that the interests of the nation are above those of the state, and that a state can only then be true to itself and its duty when it remembers that there is a lower and a higher, and knows well what that lower and that higher are.

Virginia and Ma.s.sachusetts have no less genuine and worthy pride as states, they do not put to smaller or less vital use their sacred history and heritage, their great sons are no less their sons, because they bowed their heads to the baptism of a nation which must measure its powers and duties on a continental scale. They know that national life into which they are incorporated as the n.o.bler and more commanding life.

The nation is organized. Its logic was shaped finally in the fiery forge of war.

The nation is the largest thing we have yet got organized. We must organize the world. Unending jealousies, commercial clash, friction of law, paralysis of industry, financial disorder, the misdirection and miscarriage of good energy, mischievous ignorance and prejudice, incalculable waste, chronic alarm, and devastating wars are before us until we do it. That is the lesson of the hour. The relations and interdependence of the nations of Christendom have become, by the amazing advance of civilization in the century, closer, complexer, and more imperious far than the relations of Ma.s.sachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, when Washington from the heights of the Alleghanies looked into the West and thought of the continent. Yet France and Germany, England and Russia, America and Spain, in their great burrs of guns, jealous of each other, distrustful, envious, afraid, go on in their separate, incooperant, abortive ways, keeping G.o.d's earth in chaos, when a great wisdom and great virtue like Washington's a hundred years ago would convert them into a family of nations, into a federation and fraternity, with a comprehensive law, an efficient police, and a purposeful economy.

In the Parliament House at Westminster, among the scenes from English history painted on the walls, the American is most stirred when he comes to the Departure of the Pilgrim Fathers to found New England.

England--the England descended from the England which "harried them out"--will not let that scene go as a part of American history only, but claims it now as one of the proudest scenes in her own history, too. So the American will no more view Wyclif and Shakespeare and Cromwell and Milton and Gladstone as chiefly Englishmen, but as fellow-citizens,--as he views Victor Hugo and Kant and Tolsto and Mazzini. The American is to be pitied who does not feel himself native to Stratford and to London, as to St. Louis or St. Paul,--native to Leyden and to Weimar and Geneva. Each narrower circle only gains in richness and in sacredness and power as it expands into the larger; each community and state and nation, as it enters into a broader and completer organic life. This is the divine message to the world. Let there be peace; let there be order; and, that there may be, let us know what manner of men we are. "Peace on earth!"--that was the first Christmas greeting; and the first Christian argument upon the hill of Mars,--"G.o.d hath made of one blood all nations of men."

FOOTNOTE:

[51] By permission of the author.

THE PERMANENCY OF EMPIRE[52]

WENDELL PHILLIPS

I appeal to History! Tell me, thou reverend chronicler of the grave, can all the wealth of a universal commerce, can all the achievements of this world's wisdom, secure to empire the permanency of its possessions?

Alas! Troy thought so once; yet the land of Priam lives only in song!

Thebes thought so once; yet her hundred gates have crumbled, and her very tombs are but as the dust they were vainly intended to commemorate.

So thought Palmyra--where is she? So thought the countries of Demosthenes and the Spartan; yet Leonidas is trampled by the timid slave, and Athens insulted by the servile, mindless, and enervate Ottoman. In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their imagined immortality; and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb, have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of his footsteps. The days of their glory are as if they had never been; and the island that was then a speck, rude and neglected in the barren ocean, now rivals the ubiquity of their commerce, the glory of their arms, the fame of their philosophy, the eloquence of their senate, and the inspiration of their bards. Who shall say, then, contemplating the past, that England, proud and potent as she appears, may not, one day, be what Athens is, and the young America yet soar to be what Athens was! Who shall say, that, when the European column shall have moldered, and the night of barbarism obscured its very ruins, that mighty continent may not emerge from the horizon to rule, for its time, sovereign of the ascendant!

FOOTNOTE:

[52] By permission of the publishers, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.