The Art of Public Speaking Part 60

A THRILLING CHAPTER FROM BELGIUM'S HISTORY

Perhaps one or two chapters torn from the pages of Belgium history will enable us to understand her present-day heroism, just as one golden bough plucked from the forest will explain the richness of the autumn.

You remember that Venice was once the financial center of the world.

Then when the bankers lost confidence in the navy of Venice they put their jewels and gold into saddle bags and moved the financial center of the world to Nuremburg, because its walls were seven feet thick and twenty feet high. Later, about 1500 A.D., the discovery of the New World turned all the peoples into races of sea-going folk, and the English and Dutch captains vied with the sailors of Spain and Portugal. No captains were more prosperous than the mariners of Antwerp. In 1568 there were 500 marble mansions in this city on the Meuse. Belgium became a casket filled with jewels. Then it was that Spain turned covetous eyes northward. Sated with his pleasures, broken by indulgence and pa.s.sion, the Emperor Charles the Fifth resigned his gold and throne to his son, King Philip. Finding his coffers depleted, Philip sent the Duke of Alva, with 10,000 Spanish soldiers, out on a looting expedition. Their approach filled Antwerp with consternation, for her merchants were busy with commerce and not with war. The sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards makes up a revolting page in history. Within three days 8,000 men, women and children were ma.s.sacred, and the Spanish soldiers, drunk with wine and blood, hacked, drowned and burned like fiends that they were. The Belgian historian tells us that 500 marble residences were reduced to blackened ruins. One incident will make the event stand out. When the Spaniards approached the city a wealthy burgher hastened the day of his son's marriage. During the ceremony the soldiers broke down the gate of the city and crossed the threshold of the rich man's house. When they had stripped the guests of their purses and gems, unsatisfied, they killed the bridegroom, slew the men, and carried the bride out into the night. The next morning a young woman, crazed and half clad, was found in the street, searching among the dead bodies. At last she found a youth, whose head she lifted upon her knees, over which she crooned her songs, as a young mother soothes her babe. A Spanish officer pa.s.sing by, humiliated by the spectacle, ordered a soldier to use his dagger and put the girl out of her misery.

THE HORRORS OF THE INQUISITION

Having looted Antwerp, the treasure chest of Belgium, the Spaniards set up the Inquisition as an organized means of securing property. It is a strange fact that the Spaniard has excelled in cruelty as other nations have excelled in art or science or invention. Spain's cruelty to the Moors and the rich Jews forms one of the blackest chapters in history.

Inquisitors became fiends. Moors were starved, tortured, burned, flung in wells, Jewish bankers had their tongues thrust through little iron rings; then the end of the tongue was seared that it might swell, and the banker was led by a string in the ring through the streets of the city. The women and the children were put on rafts that were pushed out into the Mediterranean Sea. When the swollen corpses drifted ash.o.r.e, the plague broke out, and when that black plague spread over Spain it seemed like the justice of outraged nature. The expulsion of the Moors was one of the deadliest blows ever struck at science, commerce, art and literature. The historian tracks Spain across the continents by a trail of blood. Wherever Spain's hand has fallen it has paralyzed. From the days of Cortez, wherever her captains have given a pledge, the tongue that spake has been mildewed with lies and treachery. The wildest beasts are not in the jungle; man is the lion that rends, man is the leopard that tears, man's hate is the serpent that poisons, and the Spaniard entered Belgium to turn a garden into a wilderness. Within one year, 1568, Antwerp, that began with 125,000 people, ended it with 50,000.

Many mult.i.tudes were put to death by the sword and stake, but many, many thousands fled to England, to begin anew their lives as manufacturers and mariners; and for years Belgium was one quaking peril, an inferno, whose torturers were Spaniards. The visitor in Antwerp is still shown the rack upon which they stretched the merchants that they might yield up their hidden gold. The Painted Lady may be seen. Opening her arms, she embraces the victim. The Spaniard, with his spear, forced the merchant into the deadly embrace. As the iron arms concealed in velvet folded together, one spike pa.s.sed through each eye, another through the mouth, another through the heart. The Painted Lady's lips were poisoned, so that a kiss was fatal. The dungeon whose sides were forced together by screws, so that each day the victim saw his cell growing less and less, and knew that soon he would be crushed to death, was another instrument of torture. Literally thousands of innocent men and women were burned alive in the market place.

There is no more piteous tragedy in history than the story of the decline and ruin of this superbly prosperous, literary and artistic country, and yet out of the ashes came new courage. Burned, broken, the Belgians and the Dutch were not beaten. Pushed at last into Holland, where they united their fortunes with the Dutch, they cut the d.y.k.es of Holland, and let in the ocean, and clinging to the d.y.k.es with their finger tips, fought their way back to the land; but no sooner had the last of the Spaniards gone than out of their rags and poverty they founded a university as a monument to the providence of G.o.d in delivering them out of the hands of their enemies. For, the Sixteenth Century, in the form of a brave knight, wears little Belgium and Holland like a red rose upon his heart.

THE DEATH OF EGMONT

But some of you will say that the Belgian people must have been rebels and guilty of some excess, and that had they remained quiescent, and not fomented treason, that no such fate could have overtaken them at the hands of Spain. Very well. I will take a youth who, at the beginning, believed in Charles the Fifth, a man who was as true to his ideals as the needle to the pole. One day the "b.l.o.o.d.y Council" decreed the death of Egmont and Horn. Immediately afterward, the Duke of Alva sent an invitation to Egmont to be the guest of honor at a banquet in his own house. A servant from the palace that night delivered to the Count a slip of paper, containing a warning to take the fleetest horse and flee the city, and from that moment not to eat or sleep without pistols at his hand. To all this Egmont responded that no monster ever lived who could, with an invitation of hospitality, trick a patriot. Like a brave man, the Count went to the Duke's palace. He found the guests a.s.sembled, but when he had handed his hat and cloak to the servant, Alva gave a sign, and from behind the curtains came Spanish musqueteers, who demanded his sword. For instead of a banquet hall, the Count was taken to a cellar, fitted up as a dungeon. Already Egmont had all but died for his country. He had used his ships, his trade, his gold, for righting the people's wrongs. He was a man of a large family--a wife and eleven children--and people loved him as to idolatry. But Alva was inexorable.

He had made up his mind that the merchants and burghers had still much hidden gold, and if he killed their bravest and best, terror would fall upon all alike, and that the gold he needed would be forthcoming. That all the people might witness the scene, he took his prisoners to Brussels and decided to behead them in the public square. In the evening Egmont received the notice that his head would be chopped off the next day. A scaffold was erected in the public square. That evening he wrote a letter that is a marvel of restraint.

"Sire--I have learned this evening the sentence which your majesty has been pleased to p.r.o.nounce upon me. Although I have never had a thought, and believe myself never to have done a deed, which would tend to the prejudice of your service, or to the detriment of true religion, nevertheless I take patience to bear that which it has pleased the good G.o.d to permit. Therefore, I pray your majesty to have compa.s.sion on my poor wife, my children and my servants, having regard to my past service. In which hope I now commend myself to the mercy of G.o.d. From Brussels, ready to die, this 5th of June, 1568.

"LAMORAL D' EGMONT."

Thus died a man who did as much probably for Holland as John Eliot for England, or Lafayette for France, or Samuel Adams for this young republic.

THE WOE OF BELGIUM

And now out of all this glorious past comes the woe of Belgium.

Desolation has come like the whirlwind, and destruction like a tornado.

But ninety days ago and Belgium was a hive of industry, and in the fields were heard the harvest songs. Suddenly, Germany struck Belgium.

The whole world has but one voice, "Belgium has innocent hands." She was led like a lamb to the slaughter. When the lover of Germany is asked to explain Germany's breaking of her solemn treaty upon the neutrality of Belgium, the German stands dumb and speechless. Merchants honor their written obligations. True citizens consider their word as good as their bond; Germany gave treaty, and in the presence of G.o.d and the civilized world, entered into a solemn covenant with Belgium. To the end of time, the German must expect this taunt, "as worthless as a German treaty."

Scarcely less black the two or three known examples of cruelty wrought upon nonresisting Belgians. In Brooklyn lives a Belgian woman. She planned to return home in late July to visit a father who had suffered paralysis, an aged mother and a sister who nursed both. When the Germans decided to burn that village in Eastern Belgium, they did not wish to burn alive this old and helpless man, so they bayonetted to death the old man and woman, and the daughter that nursed them.

Let us judge not, that we be not judged. This is the one example of atrocity that you and I might be able personally to prove. But every loyal German in the country can make answer: "These soldiers were drunk with wine and blood. Such an atrocity misrepresents Germany and her soldiers. The breaking of Germany's treaty with Belgium represents the dishonor of a military ring, and not the perfidy of 68,000,000 of people. We ask that judgment be postponed until all the facts are in."

But, meanwhile, the man who loves his fellows, at midnight in his dreams walks across the fields of broken Belgium. All through the night air there comes the sob of Rachel, weeping for her children, because they are not. In moods of bitterness, of doubt and despair the heart cries out, "How could a just G.o.d permit such cruelty upon innocent Belgium?"

No man knows. "Clouds and darkness are round about G.o.d's throne." The spirit of evil caused this war, but the Spirit of G.o.d may bring good out of it, just as the summer can repair the ravages of winter. Meanwhile the heart bleeds for Belgium. For Brussels, the third most beautiful city in Europe! For Louvain, once rich with its libraries, cathedrals, statues, paintings, missals, ma.n.u.scripts--now a ruin. Alas! for the ruined harvests and the smoking villages! Alas, for the Cathedral that is a heap, and the library that is a ruin. Where the angel of happiness was there stalk Famine and Death. Gone, the Land of Grotius! Perished the paintings of Rubens! Ruined is Louvain. Where the wheat waved, now the hillsides are billowy with graves. But let us believe that G.o.d reigns. Perchance Belgium is slain like the Saviour, that militarism may die like Satan. Without shedding of innocent blood there is no remission of sins through tyranny and greed. There is no wine without the crushing of the grapes from the tree of life. Soon Liberty, G.o.d's dear child, will stand within the scene and comfort the desolate. Falling upon the great world's altar stairs, in this hour when wisdom is ignorance, and the strongest man clutches at dust and straw, let us believe with faith victorious over tears, that some time G.o.d will gather broken-hearted little Belgium into His arms and comfort her as a Father comforteth his well-beloved child.

_HENRY WATTERSON_

THE NEW AMERICANISM

(Abridged)

Eight years ago tonight, there stood where I am standing now a young Georgian, who, not without reason, recognized the "significance" of his presence here, and, in words whose eloquence I cannot hope to recall, appealed from the New South to New England for a united country.

He is gone now. But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been appointed by G.o.d to carry a message of peace on earth, good will to men, and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the dove from the ark.

Grady told us, and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr.

Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a shapely tree--symmetric in all its parts--under whose sheltering boughs this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled from oppression. Thank G.o.d, the ax, the gibbet, and the stake have had their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship.

So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made by slaves--and called it freedom--from the men in bell-crowned hats, who led _Hester Prynne_ to her shame--and called it religion--to that Americanism which reaches forth its arms to smite wrong with reason and truth, secure in the power of both. I appeal from the patriarchs of New England to the poets of New England; from Endicott to Lowell; from Winthrop to Longfellow; from Norton to Holmes; and I appeal in the name and by the rights of that common citizenship--of that common origin--back of both the Puritan and the Cavalier--to which all of us owe our being. Let the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its martyrs, not by its savage hatreds--darkened alike by kingcraft and priestcraft--let the dead past bury its dead. Let the present and the future ring with the song of the singers. Blessed be the lessons they teach, the laws they make. Blessed be the eye to see, the light to reveal. Blessed be Tolerance, sitting ever on the right hand of G.o.d to guide the way with loving word, as blessed be all that brings us nearer the goal of true religion, true Republicanism, and true patriotism, distrust of watchwords and labels, shams and heroes, belief in our country and ourselves. It was not Cotton Mather, but John Greenleaf Whittier, who cried:--

"Dear G.o.d and Father of us all, Forgive our faith in cruel lies, Forgive the blindness that denies.

"Cast down our idols--overturn Our b.l.o.o.d.y altars--make us see Thyself in Thy humanity!"

_JOHN MORLEY_

FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS

(Abridged)

Carnegie Inst.i.tute, Pittsburgh, Pa., November 3, 1904.

What is so hard as a just estimate of the events of our own time? It is only now, a century and a half later, that we really perceive that a writer has something to say for himself when he calls Wolfe's exploit at Quebec the turning point in modern history. And to-day it is hard to imagine any rational standard that would not make the American Revolution--an insurrection of thirteen little colonies, with a population of 3,000,000 scattered in a distant wilderness among savages--a mightier event in many of its aspects than the volcanic convulsion in France. Again, the upbuilding of your great West on this continent is reckoned by some the most important world movement of the last hundred years. But is it more important than the amazing, imposing and perhaps disquieting apparition of j.a.pan? One authority insists that when Russia descended into the Far East and pushed her frontier on the Pacific to the forty-third degree of lat.i.tude that was one of the most far-reaching facts of modern history, tho it almost escaped the eyes of Europe--all her perceptions then monopolized by affairs in the Levant.

Who can say? Many courses of the sun were needed before men could take the full historic measures of Luther, Calvin, Knox; the measure of Loyola, the Council of Trent, and all the counter-reformation. The center of gravity is forever shifting, the political axis of the world perpetually changing. But we are now far enough off to discern how stupendous a thing was done when, after two cycles of bitter war, one foreign, the other civil and intestine, Pitt and Washington, within a span of less than a score of years, planted the foundations of the American Republic.

What Forbes's stockade at Fort Pitt has grown to be you know better than I. The huge triumphs of Pittsburg in material production--iron, steel, c.o.ke, gla.s.s, and all the rest of it--can only be told in colossal figures that are almost as hard to realize in our minds as the figures of astronomical distance or geologic time. It is not quite clear that all the founders of the Commonwealth would have surveyed the wonderful scene with the same exultation as their descendants. Some of them would have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in the Old World or in the New always stand for progress. Jefferson said, "I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man. I consider the cla.s.s of artificers," he went on, "as the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a country are generally overthrown." In England they reckon 70 per cent.

of our population as dwellers in towns. With you, I read that only 25 per cent. of the population live in groups so large as 4,000 persons. If Jefferson was right our outlook would be dark. Let us hope that he was wrong, and in fact toward the end of his time qualified his early view.

Franklin, at any rate, would, I feel sure, have reveled in it all.

That great man--a name in the forefront among the practical intelligences of human history--once told a friend that when he dwelt upon the rapid progress that mankind was making in politics, morals, and the arts of living, and when he considered that each one improvement always begets another, he felt a.s.sured that the future progress of the race was likely to be quicker than it had ever been. He was never wearied of foretelling inventions yet to come, and he wished he could revisit the earth at the end of a century to see how mankind was getting on. With all my heart I share his wish. Of all the men who have built up great States, I do believe there is not one whose alacrity of sound sense and single-eyed beneficence of aim could be more safely trusted than Franklin to draw light from the clouds and pierce the economic and political confusions of our time. We can imagine the amazement and complacency of that shrewd benignant mind if he could watch all the giant marvels of your mills and furnaces, and all the apparatus devised by the wondrous inventive faculties of man; if he could have foreseen that his experiments with the kite in his garden at Philadelphia, his tubes, his Leyden jars would end in the electric appliances of to-day--the largest electric plant in all the world on the site of Fort Duquesne; if he could have heard of 5,000,000,000 of pa.s.sengers carried in the United States by electric motor power in a year; if he could have realized all the rest of the magician's tale of our time.

Still more would he have been astounded and elated could he have foreseen, beyond all advances in material production, the unbroken strength of that political structure which he had so grand a share in rearing. Into this very region where we are this afternoon, swept wave after wave of immigration; English from Virginia flowed over the border, bringing English traits, literature, habits of mind; Scots, or Scots-Irish, originally from Ulster, flowed in from Central Pennsylvania; Catholics from Southern Ireland; new hosts from Southern and East Central Europe. This is not the Fourth of July. But people of every school would agree that it is no exuberance of rhetoric, it is only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption and incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, neither Byzantine Empire nor Russian, not Charles the Great nor Charles the Fifth nor Napoleon ever rivaled or approached.

We are usually apt to excuse the slower rate of liberal progress in our Old World by contrasting the obstructive barriers of prejudice, survival, solecism, anachronism, convention, inst.i.tution, all so obstinately rooted, even when the branches seem bare and broken, in an old world, with the open and disengaged ground of the new. Yet in fact your difficulties were at least as formidable as those of the older civilizations into whose fruitful heritage you have entered. Unique was the necessity of this gigantic task of incorporation, the a.s.similation of people of divers faiths and race. A second difficulty was more formidable still--how to erect and work a powerful and wealthy State on such a system as to combine the centralized concert of a federal system with local independence, and to unite collective energy with the encouragement of individual freedom.

This last difficulty that you have so successfully up to now surmounted, at the present hour confronts the mother country and deeply perplexes her statesmen. Liberty and union have been called the twin ideas of America. So, too, they are the twin ideals of all responsible men in Great Britain; altho responsible men differ among themselves as to the safest path on which to travel toward the common goal, and tho the dividing ocean, in other ways so much our friend, interposes, for our case of an island State, or rather for a group of island States, obstacles from which a continental State like yours is happily altogether free.

n.o.body believes that no difficulties remain. Some of them are obvious.

But the common-sense, the mixture of patience and determination that has conquered risks and mischiefs in the past, may be trusted with the future.

Strange and devious are the paths of history. Broad and shining channels get mysteriously silted up. How many a time what seemed a glorious high road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac. Think of Canning's flashing boast, when he insisted on the recognition of the Spanish republics in South America--that he had called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old. This is one of the sayings--of which sort many another might be found--that make the fortune of a rhetorician, yet stand ill the wear and tear of time and circ.u.mstance. The new world that Canning called into existence has so far turned out a scene of singular disenchantment.

Tho not without glimpses on occasion of that heroism and courage and even wisdom that are the attributes of man almost at the worst, the tale has been too much a tale of anarchy and disaster, still leaving a host of perplexities for statesmen both in America and Europe. It has left also to students of a philosophic turn of mind one of the most interesting of all the problems to be found in the whole field of social, ecclesiastical, religious, and racial movement. Why is it that we do not find in the south as we find in the north of this hemisphere a powerful federation--a great Spanish-American people stretching from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn? To answer that question would be to shed a flood of light upon many deep historic forces in the Old World, of which, after all, these movements of the New are but a prolongation and more manifest extension.

What more imposing phenomenon does history present to us than the rise of Spanish power to the pinnacle of greatness and glory in the sixteenth century? The Mohammedans, after centuries of fierce and stubborn war, driven back; the whole peninsula brought under a single rule with a single creed; enormous acquisitions from the Netherlands of Naples, Sicily, the Canaries; France humbled, England menaced, settlements made in Asia and Northern Africa--Spain in America become possessed of a vast continent and of more than one archipelago of splendid islands. Yet before a century was over the sovereign majesty of Spain underwent a huge declension, the territory under her sway was contracted, the fabulous wealth of the mines of the New World had been wasted, agriculture and industry were ruined, her commerce pa.s.sed into the hands of her rivals.

Let me digress one further moment. We have a very sensible habit in the island whence I come, when our country misses fire, to say as little as we can, and sink the thing in patriotic oblivion. It is rather startling to recall that less than a century ago England twice sent a military force to seize what is now Argentina. Pride of race and hostile creed vehemently resisting, proved too much for us. The two expeditions ended in failure, and nothing remains for the historian of to-day but to wonder what a difference it might have made to the temperate region of South America if the fortune of war had gone the other way, if the region of the Plata had become British, and a large British immigration had followed. Do not think me guilty of the heinous crime of forgetting the Monroe Doctrine. That momentous declaration was not made for a good many years after our Gen. Whitelocke was repulsed at Buenos Ayres, tho Mr. Sumner and other people have always held that it was Canning who really first started the Monroe Doctrine, when he invited the United States to join him against European intervention in South American affairs.

The day is at hand, we are told, when four-fifths of the human race will trace their pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white people in the United States trace their pedigree to-day. By the end of this century, they say, such nations as France and Germany, a.s.suming that they stand apart from fresh consolidations, will only be able to claim the same relative position in the political world as Holland and Switzerland. These musings of the moon do not take us far. The important thing, as we all know, is not the exact fraction of the human race that will speak English. The important thing is that those who speak English, whether in old lands or new, shall strive in lofty, generous and never-ceasing emulation with peoples of other tongues and other stock for the political, social, and intellectual primacy among mankind. In this n.o.ble strife for the service of our race we need never fear that claimants for the prize will be too large a mult.i.tude.

As an able scholar of your own has said, Jefferson was here using the old vernacular of English aspirations after a free, manly, and well-ordered political life--a vernacular rich in stately tradition and n.o.ble phrase, to be found in a score of a thousand of champions in many camps--in Buchanan, Milton, Hooker, Locke, Jeremy Taylor, Roger Williams, and many another humbler but not less strenuous pioneer and confessor of freedom. Ah, do not fail to count up, and count up often, what a different world it would have been but for that island in the distant northern sea! These were the tributary fountains, that, as time went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time. What was new in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity.

What is progress? It is best to be slow in the complex arts of politics in their widest sense, and not to hurry to define. If you want a plat.i.tude, there is nothing for supplying it like a definition. Or shall we say that most definitions hang between plat.i.tude and paradox? There are said, tho I have never counted, to be 10,000 definitions of religion. There must be about as many of poetry. There can hardly be fewer of liberty, or even of happiness.