The American Union Speaker Part 5

XVII.

CHARACTER OF CHATHAM.

The secretary stood alone; modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious polities, no idle contest for ministerial victories, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame.

Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous. France sunk beneath him. With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite; and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished,--always seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardor, and enlightened by prophecy.

The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent, were unknown to him. No domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness, reached him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system, to counsel, and to decide. A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age; and the treasury trembled at the name of Chatham, through all her cla.s.ses of venality. Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory and much of the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country, and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.

Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. He did not, like Murray, conduct the understanding through the painful subtlety of argumentation; nor was he, like Townshend, forever on the rack of exertion; but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of the mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed. Upon the whole, there was in this man something that would create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder; something to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish, or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world, that should resound through the universe.

H. Grattan.

XVIII.

THE PRESS AND THE UNION.

It were good for us to remember that nothing which tends, however distantly, however imperceptibly, to hold these States together, is beneath the notice of a considerate patriotism. It were good to remember that some of the inst.i.tutions and devices by which former confederacies have been preserved, our circ.u.mstances wholly forbid us to employ. The tribes of Israel and Judah came up three times a year to the holy and beautiful city, and united in prayer and praise and sacrifice, in listening to that thrilling poetry, in swelling that matchless song, which celebrated the triumphs of their fathers by the Red Sea, at the fords of Jordan, and on the high places of the field of Barak's victory. But we have no feast of the Pa.s.sover, or of the Tabernacles, or of the Commemoration. The States of Greece erected temples of the G.o.ds by a common contribution, and worshiped in them. They consulted the same oracle; they celebrated the same national festival: mingled their deliberations in the same amphictyonic and subordinate a.s.semblies, and sat together upon the free benches to hear their glorious history read aloud, in the prose of Heroditus, the poetry of Homer and of Pindar. We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Const.i.tution. We can meet together to celebrate no national festival. But the thousand tongues of the press--clearer far than the silver trumpet of the jubilee,--louder than the voice of the herald at the games,--may speak and do speak to the whole people, without calling them from their homes or interrupting them in their employments. Happy if they should speak, and the people should hear, those things which pertain at least to their temporal and national salvation!

R. Choate.

XIX.

AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE UNION.

In leaving this subject, I cannot help suggesting, at the hazard of being thought whimsical, that a literature of such writings as these, embodying the romance of the whole revolutionary and ante-revolutionary history of the United States, might do something to perpetuate the Union itself. The influence of a rich literature of pa.s.sion and fancy upon society must not be denied merely because you cannot measure it by the yard or detect it by the barometer. Poems and romances which shall be read in every parlor, by every fireside, in every school-house, behind every counter, in every printing-office, in every lawyer's office, at every weekly evening club, in all the States of this confederacy, must do something, along with more palpable if not more powerful agents, towards moulding and fixing that final, grand, complex result,--the national character. A keen, well instructed judge of such things said, if he might write the ballads of a people, he cared little who made its laws. Let me say, if a hundred men of genius would extract such a body of romantic literature from our early history as Scott has extracted from the history of England and Scotland, and as Homer extracted from that of Greece, it perhaps would not be so alarming if demagogues should preach, or governors practice, or executives tolerate nullification. Such a literature would be a common property of all the States,--a treasure of common ancestral recollections,--more n.o.ble and richer than our thousand million acres of public land; and, unlike that land, it would be indivisible. It would be as the opening of a great fountain for the healing of the nations. It would turn back our thoughts from these recent and overrated diversities of interest,--these controversies about negro-cloth, coa.r.s.e-wooled sheep, and cotton bagging,--to the day when our fathers walked hand in hand together through the valley of the Shadow of Death in the War of Independence. Reminded of our fathers, we should remember that we are brethren. The exclusiveness of State pride,--the narrow selfishness of a mere local policy and the small jealousies of vulgar minds, would be merged in an expanded comprehensive, const.i.tutional sentiment of old, family, fraternal regard. It would rea.s.semble, as it were, the people of America in one vast congregation. It would rehea.r.s.e in their hearing all things which G.o.d had done for them in the old time; it would proclaim the law once more; and then it would bid them join in that grandest and most affecting solemnity,--a national anthem of thanksgiving for the deliverance, of honor for the dead, of proud prediction for the future!

R. Choate.

XX.

THE LOVE OF READING.

Let the case of a busy lawyer testify to the priceless value of the love of reading. He comes home, his temples throbbing, his nerves shattered, from a trial of a week; surprised and alarmed by the charge of the judge, and pale with anxiety about the verdict of the next morning, not at all satisfied with what he has done himself, though he does not yet see how he could have improved it; recalling with dread and self-disparagement, if not with envy, the brilliant effort of his antagonist, and tormenting himself with the vain wish that he could have replied to it,--and altogether a very miserable subject, and in as unfavorable a condition to accept comfort from a wife and children as poor Christian in the first three pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress." With a superhuman effort he opens his book, and in the twinkling of an eye he is looking into the full "orb of Homeric or Miltonic song;" or he stands in the crowd--breathless, yet swayed as forests or the sea by winds--hearing and to judge the pleadings for the crown; or the philosophy which soothed Cicero or Boethius in their afflictions, in exile, prison, and the contemplation of death, breathes over his petty cares like the sweet south; or Pope or Horace laughs him into good humor; or he walks with aeneas and the Sibyl in the mild light of the world of the laurelled dead; and the court-house is as completely forgotten as the dreams of a pre-adamite life. Well may he prize that endeared charm, so effectual and safe, without which the brain had long ago been chilled by paralysis, or set on fire of insanity!

R. Choate.

XXI.

ELOQUENCE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Men heard that eloquence in 1776, in that manifold and mighty appeal by the genius and wisdom of that new America, to persuade the people to take on the name of nation, and begin its life. By how many pens and tongues that great pleading was conducted; through how many months before the date of the actual Declaration, it went on, day after day; in how many forms, before how many a.s.semblies, from the village newspaper, the more careful pamphlet, the private conversation, the town-meeting, the legislative bodies of particular colonies, up to the hall of the immortal old Congress, and the master intelligences of lion heart and eagle eye, that enn.o.bled it,--all this you know. But the leader in that great argument was John Adams, of Ma.s.sachusetts. He, by concession of all men, was the orator of that Revolution,--the Revolution in which a nation was born. Other and renowned names, by written or spoken eloquence, cooperated effectively, splendidly, to the grand result,--Samuel Adams, Samuel Chase, Jefferson, Henry James Otis in an earlier stage. Each of these, and a hundred more, within circles of influence wider or narrower, sent forth, scattering broadcast, the seed of life in the ready virgin soil. Each brought some specialty of gift to the work: Jefferson, the magic of style, and the habit and the power of delicious dalliance with those large, fair ideas of freedom and equality, so dear to man, so irresistible in that day; Henry, the indescribable and lost spell of the speech of the emotions, which fills the eye, chills the blood, turns the cheek pale,--the lyric phase of eloquence, the "fire-water," as Lamartine has said, of the Revolution, instilling into the sense and the soul the sweet madness of battle; Samuel Chase, the tones of anger, confidence, and pride, and the art to inspire them. John Adams's eloquence alone seemed to have met every demand of the time; as a question of right, as a question of prudence, as a question of immediate opportunity, as a question of feeling, as a question of conscience, as a question of historical and durable and innocent glory, he knew it all through and through; and in that mighty debate, which, beginning in Congress as far back as March or February; 1776, had its close on the second and on the fourth of July, he presented it in all its aspects, to every pa.s.sion and affection,--to the burning sense of wrong, exasperated at length beyond control by the shedding of blood; to grief, anger, self-respect; to the desire of happiness and of safety; to the sense of moral obligation, commanding that the duties of life are more than life; to courage, which fears G.o.d, and knows no other fear; to the craving of the colonial heart, of all hearts, for the reality and the ideal of country, and which cannot be filled unless the dear native land comes to be breathed on by the grace, clad in the robes, armed with the thunders, admitted an equal to the a.s.sembly of the nations; to that large and heroical ambition which would build States: that imperial philanthropy which would open to liberty an asylum here, and give to the sick heart, hard fare, fettered conscience of the children of the Old World, healing, plenty, and freedom to worship G.o.d,--to these pa.s.sions, and these ideas, he presented the appeal for months, day after day, until, on the third of July, 1776, he could record the result, writing thus to his wife: "Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater, perhaps, never was, nor will be, among men."

Of that series of spoken eloquence all is perished; not one reported sentence has come down to us. The voice through which the rising spirit of a young nation sounded out its dream of life is hushed. The great spokesman, of an age unto an age, is dead.

And yet, of those lost words is not our whole America one immortal record and reporter? Do ye not read them, deep cut, defying the tooth of time, on all the marble of our greatness? How they blaze on the pillars of our Union! How is their deep sense unfolded and interpreted by every pa.s.sing hour! How do they come to life, and grow audible, as it were, in the brightening rays of the light he foresaw, as the fabled invisible heart gave out its music to the morning!

Yes, in one sense, they are perished. No parchment ma.n.u.script, no embalming printed page, no certain traditions of living or dead, have kept them. Yet, from out and from off all things around us,--our laughing harvests, our songs of labor, our commerce on all the seas, our secure homes, our school-houses and churches, our happy people, our radiant and stainless flag,--how they come pealing, pealing, Independence now, and Independence forever!

R. Choate.

XXII.

TRIBUTE TO WEBSTER.

They say he was ambitious! Yes, as Ames said of Hamilton, "there is no doubt that he desired glory; and that, feeling his own force, he longed to deck his brow with the wreath of immortality." But I believe he would have yielded his arm, his frame to be burned, before he would have sought to grasp the highest prize of earth by any means, by any organization, by any tactics, by any speech, which in the least degree endangered the harmony of the system.

They say, too, he loved New England! He did love New Hampshire--that old granite world--the crystal hills, gray and cloud-topped; the river, whose murmur lulled his cradle; the old hearthstone; the grave of father and mother. He loved Ma.s.sachusetts, which adopted and honored him--that sounding sea-sh.o.r.e, that charmed elm-tree seat, that reclaimed farm, that choice herd, that smell of earth, that dear library, those dearer friends; but the "sphere of his duties was his true country." Dearly he loved you, for he was grateful for the open arms with which you welcomed the stranger and sent him onwards and upwards.

But when the crisis came, and the winds were let lose, and that sea of March "wrought and was tempestuous," then you saw that he knew even you only as you were, American citizens; then you saw him rise to the true nature and stature of American citizenship; then you read on his brow only what he thought of the whole Republic; then you saw him fold the robes of his habitual patriotism around him, and counsel for all--for all. So, then, he served you--"to be pleased with his service was your affair, not his."

And now what would he do, what would he be if he were here to-day? I do not presume to know. But what a loss we have in him! I have read that in some hard battle, when the tide was running against him, and his ranks were breaking, some one in the agony of a, need of generalship exclaimed, "Oh for an hour of Dundee!" So say I, Oh for an hour of Webster now! Oh for one more roll of that thunder inimitable! One more peal of that clarion! One more grave and bold counsel of moderation! One more throb of American feeling! One more Farewell Address! And then might he ascend unhindered to the bosom of his Father and his G.o.d.

R. Choate.

XXIII.

THE FRUITS OF SKILFUL LABOR AND CULTIVATED INTELLECT.

Perhaps as striking an ill.u.s.tration on a large scale as could be desired, of the connection between the best directed and most skilful labor and the most cultivated and most powerful intellect, is afforded by the case of England. British industry as a whole, is among the most splendid and extraordinary things in the history of man. When you consider how small a work-bench it has to occupy altogether, a little stormy island bathed in almost perpetual fogs, without silk, or cotton, or vineyards, or sunshine, and then look at that agriculture, so scientific and so rewarded, that vast net-work of internal intercommunication, the docks, merchant-ships, men-of-war, the trade encompa.s.sing the globe, the flag on which the sun never sets,--when you look, above all, at that vast body of useful and manly art, not directed, like the industry of France,--the industry of vanity,--to making pier-gla.s.ses and air-balloons and gobelin tapestry and mirrors, to arranging processions and chiselling silver and twisting gold into filigrees, but to clothing the people, to the manufacture of woolen, cotton, and linen cloth, of railroads and chain-cables and ca.n.a.ls and anchors and achromatic telescopes, and chronometers to keep the time at sea,--when you think of the vast aggregate ma.s.s of their manufacturing and mechanical production, which no statistics can ex-press, and to find a market for which she is planting colonies under every constellation, and by intimidation, by diplomacy, is knocking at the door of every market-house upon the earth,--it is really difficult to restrain our admiration of such a display of energy, labor, and genius, winning bloodless and innocent triumphs everywhere, giving to the age we live in the name of the age of the industry of the people. Now, the striking and the instructive fact is, that exactly in that island workshop, by this very race of artisans, of coal-heavers and woollen manufacturers of machinists and blacksmiths and ship-carpenters, there has been produced and embodied forever, in words that will outlast the mountains as well as the pyramids, a literature which, take it for all in all, is the richest, most profound, most instructive, combining more spirituality with more common sense, springing from more capacious souls, conveying in better wisdom, more conformable to the truth in man, in nature, and in human life, than the literature of any nation that ever existed. That same race, side by side with the unparalleled growth of its industry produces Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, and Newton, all four at the summit of human thought,--and then, just below these unapproachable fixed lights, a whole firmament of glories, lesser than they, as all created intelligence must be, yet in whose superior rays the age of Augustus, of Leo X., of Louis XIV., all but the age of Pericles, the culture of Greece, pale and fade. And yet the literature of England is not the only, scarcely the most splendid, fruit or form of the mental power and the energetic character of England. That same race, along with their indus try, along with their literature, has built up a jurisprudence which is for substance our law to-day,--has constructed the largest mercantile and war navy, and the largest commercial empire with its pillars encircling the globe, that men ever saw,--has gained greater victories on sea and land than any power in the world,--has erected the smallest spot to the most imperial ascendency recorded in history. The administrative triumphs of her intellect are as conspicuous as her imaginative and her speculative triumphs.

Such is mental power. Mark its union with labor and with all greatness; deduce the law; learn the lesson; see how you, too, may grow great. Such an industry as that of England demanded such an intellect as that of England.

Sic vobis etian itur ad astra! That way to you, also, glory lies!

R. Choate.

XXIV.

THE EMPIRE OF MIND.

Knowledge is power as well as fame. Think of that subtle, all-embracing, plastic, mysterious, irresistible thing called public opinion, the G.o.d of this lower world, and consider what a State, or a cl.u.s.ter of States, of marked and acknowledged literary and intellectual lead might do to color and shape that opinion to their will. Consider how winged are words; how electrical, light-like the speed of thought; how awful human sympathy.

Consider how soon a wise, a beautiful thought uttered here,--a sentiment of liberty perhaps, or word of succor to the oppressed, of exhortations to duty, to patriotism, to glory, the refutation of a sophism, the unfolding of a truth for which the nation may be better,--how soon a word fitly or wisely spoken here is read on the Upper Mississippi and beneath the orange-groves of Florida, all through the unequalled valley; how vast an audience it gains, into how many bosoms it has access, on how much good soil the seed may rest and spring to life, how easily and fast the fine spirit of truth and beauty goes all abroad upon the face of the world.

There is an influence which I would rather see Ma.s.sachusetts exert on her sisters of this Union, than see her furnish a President every twelve years or command a majority on any division in Congress; and that is such an influence as Athens exerted on the taste and opinion first of Greece, then of Rome, then of the universal modern world; such as she will exert while the race of man exists. This, of all the kinds of empire, was most grateful and innocent and glorious and immortal. This was won by no bargain, by no fraud, by no war of the Peloponnesus, by the shedding of no human blood. It would rest on admiration of the beautiful, the good, the true, in art, in poetry, in thought; and it would last while the emotions, its object, were left in a human soul. It would turn the eye of America hitherwards with love, grat.i.tude and tears, such as those with which we turn to the walk of Socrates beneath the plane-tree, now sere, the summer hour of Cicero, the prison into which philosophy descended to console the spirit of Boethius,-- that room through whose opened window came into the ear of Scott, as he died, the murmur of the gentle Tweed,--love, grat.i.tude, and tears, such as we all yield to those whose immortal wisdom, whose divine verse, whose eloquence of heaven, whose scenes of many-colored life, have held up the show of things to the insatiate desires of the mind, have taught us how to live and how to die! Herein were power, herein were influence, herein were security. Even in the madness of civil war it might survive for refuge and defence!

R. Choate.

XXV.

THE CITY OF OUR LIBERTY.

But now that our service of commemoration is ended, let us go hence and meditate on all that it has taught us. You see how long the holy and beautiful city of our liberty and our power has been in building, and by how many hands, and at what cost. You see the towering and steadfast height to which it has gone up, and how its turrets and spires gleam in the rising and setting sun. You stand among the graces of some--your townsmen, your fathers by blood, whose names you bear, whose portraits hang up in your homes, of whose memory you are justly proud--who helped in their day to sink those walls deep in their beds, where neither frost nor earthquake might heave them,--to raise aloft those great arches of stone,--to send up those turrets and spires into the sky. It was theirs to build; remember it is yours, under Providence, to keep the city,--to keep it from the sword of the invader,--to keep it from licentiousness and crime and irreligion, and all that would make it unsafe or unfit to live in,--to keep it from the fires of faction, of civil strife, of party spirit, that might burn up in a day the slow work of a thousand years of glory. Happy, if we shall so perform our duty that they who centuries hence shall dwell among our graces may be able to remember, on some such day as this, in one common service of grateful commemoration, their fathers of the first and the second age of America,--those who through martyrdom and tempest and battle sought liberty, and made her their own,--and those whom neither ease nor luxury, nor the fear of man, nor the worship of man, could prevail on to barter her away!

R. Choate.

XXVI.

SPECIMEN OF THE ELOQUENCE OF JAMES OTIS.

England may as well dam up the wafers of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. Arbitrary principles, like those against which we now contend, have cost one king of England his life, another his crown; and they may yet cost a third his most flourishing colonies.