The Call of the Twentieth Century, an Address to Young Men Part 1

The Call of the Twentieth Century.

by David Starr Jordan.

To Vernon Lyman Kellogg

_So live that your afterself-- the man you ought to be--may in his time be possible and actual. Far away in the twenties, the thirties of the Twentieth Century, he is awaiting his turn. His body, his brain, his soul are in your boyish hands. He cannot help himself. What will you leave for him? Will it be a brain unspoiled by l.u.s.t or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you? Will you, boy of the Twentieth Century, let him come as a man among men in his time, or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance to touch it? Will you let him come, taking your place, gaining through your experiences, hallowed through your joys, building on them his own, or will you fling his hope away, decreeing, wanton-like, that the man you might have been shall never be?_

The new century has come upon us with a rush of energy that no century has shown before. Let us stand aside for a moment that we may see what kind of a century it is to be, what is the work it has to do, and what manner of men it will demand to do it.

In most regards one century is like another. Just as men are men, so times are times. In the Twentieth Century there will be the same joys, the same sorrows, the same marrying and giving in marriage, the same round of work and play, of wisdom and duty, of folly and distress which other centuries have seen. Just as each individual man has the same organs, the same pa.s.sions, the same functions as all others, so it is with all the centuries. But we know men not by their likenesses, which are many, but by differences in emphasis, by individual traits which are slight and subtle, but all-important in determining our likes and dislikes, our friendships, loves, and hates. So with the centuries; we remember those which are past not by the ma.s.s of common traits in history and development, but by the few events or thoughts unnoticed at the time, but which stand out like mountain peaks raised "above oblivion's sea," when the times are all gathered in and the century begins to blend with the "infinite azure of the past." Not wars and conquests mark a century. The hosts grow small in the vanishing perspective, "the captains and the kings depart," but the thoughts of men, their att.i.tude toward their environment, their struggles toward duty,--these are the things which endure.

Compared with the centuries that are past, the Twentieth Century in its broad outlines will be like the rest. It will be selfish, generous, careless, devoted, fatuous, efficient. But three of its traits must stand out above all others, each raised to a higher degree than any other century has known. The Twentieth Century above all others will be _strenuous, complex_, and _democratic_. Strenuous the century must be, of course. This we can all see, and we have to thank the young man of the Twentieth Century who gave us the watchword of "the strenuous life," and who has raised the apt phrase to the dignity of a national purpose. Our century has a host of things to do, bold things, n.o.ble things, tedious things, difficult things, enduring things. It has only a hundred years to do them in, and two of these years are gone already. We must be up and bestir ourselves. If we are called to help in this work, there is no time for an idle minute. Idle men and idle women no doubt will c.u.mber our way, for there are many who have never heard of the work to do, many who will never know that there has been a new century. These the century will pa.s.s by with the gentle tolerance she shows to clams and squirrels, but on those of us she calls to her service she will lay heavy burdens of duty. "The color of life is red." Already the fad of the drooping spirit, the end-of-the-century pose, has given way to the rush of the strenuous life, to the feeling that struggle brings its own reward. The men who are doing ask no favor at the end. Life is repaid by the joy of living it.

As the century is strenuous so will it be complex. The applications of science have made the great world small, while every part of it has grown insistent. As the earth has shrunk to come within our grasp, so has our own world expanded to receive it. "My mind to me a kingdom is," and to this kingdom all the other kingdoms of the earth now send their emba.s.sadors. The complexity of life is shown by the extension of the necessity of choice.

Each of us has to render a decision, to say yes or no a hundred times when our grandfathers were called upon a single time. We must say yes or no to our neighbors' theories or plans or desires, and whoever has lived or lives or may yet live in any land or on any island of the sea has become our neighbor. Through modern civilization we are coming into our inheritance, and this heirloom includes the best that any man has done or thought since history and literature and art began. It includes, too, all the arts and inventions by which any men of any time have separated truth from error. Of one blood are all the people of the earth, and whatsoever is done to the least of these little ones in some degree comes to me. We suffer from the miasma of the Indian jungles; we starve with the savages of the harvestless islands; we grow weak with the abused peasants of the Russian steppes, who leave us the legacy of their grippe. The great volcano which buries far off cities at its foot casts its pitying dust over us. It is said that through the bonds of commerce, common trade, and common need, there is growing up the fund of a great "bank of human kindness," no genuine draft on which is ever left dishonored. Whoever is in need of help the world over, by that token has a claim on us.

In our material life we draw our resources from every land. Clothing, spices, fruits, toys, household furniture,--we lay contributions on the whole world for the most frugal meal, for the humblest dwelling. We need the best work of every nation and every nation asks our best of us. The day of home-brewed ale, of home-made bread, and home-spun clothing is already past with us. Better than we can do, our neighbors send us, and we must send our own best in return. With home-made garments also pa.s.s away inherited politics and hereditary religion, with all the support of caste and with all its barriers. We must work all this out for ourselves; we must make our own place in society; we must frame our own creeds; we must live our own religion; for no longer can one man's religion be taken unquestionably by any other. As the world has been unified, so is the individual unit exalted. With all this, the simplicity of life is pa.s.sing away. Our front doors are wide open as the trains go by. The caravan traverses our front yard. We speak to millions, millions speak to us; and we must cultivate the social tact, the gentleness, the adroitness, the firmness necessary to carry out our own designs without thwarting those of others. Time no longer flows on evenly. We must count our moments, so much for ourselves, so much for the world we serve and which serves us in return. We must be swift and accurate in the part we play in a drama so mighty, so strenuous, and so complex.

More than any of the others, the Twentieth Century will be democratic. The greatest discovery of the Nineteenth Century was that of the reality of external things. That of the Twentieth Century will be this axiom in social geometry: "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points." If something needs doing, do it; the more plainly, directly, honestly, the better.

The earlier centuries cared little for the life of a man. Hence they failed to discriminate. In ma.s.ses and mobs they needed kings and rulers but could not choose them. Hence the device of selecting as ruler the elder son of the last ruler, whatever his nature might be. A child, a lunatic, a monster, a sage,--it was all the same to these unheeding centuries. The people could not follow those they understood or who understood them. They must trust all to the blind chance of heredity. Tyrant or figurehead, the mob, which from its own indifference creates the pomp of royalty, threw up its caps for the king, and blindly died for him in his courage or in his folly with the same unquestioning loyalty. In like manner did the mob fashion lords and princes, each in its own image. Not the man who would do or think or help, but the eldest son of a former lord was chosen for its homage. The result of it all was that no use was made of the forces of nature, for those who might have learned to control them were hunted to their death. The men who could think and act for themselves were in no position to give their actions leverage.

When a people really means to do something, it must resort to democracy. It must value men as men, not as functions of a chain of conventionalities.

"America," says Emerson, "means opportunity;" opportunity for work, opportunity for training, opportunity for influence. Democracy exalts the individual. It realizes that of all the treasures of the nation, the talent of its individual men is the most important. It realizes that its first duty is to waste none of this. It cannot afford to leave its Miltons mute and inglorious nor to let its village Hampdens waste their strength on petty obstacles while it has great tasks for them to accomplish. In a democracy, when work is to be done men rise to do it. No matter what the origin of our Washingtons and Lincolns, our Grants and our Shermans, our Clevelands or our Roosevelts, our Eliots, our Hadleys, or our Remsens, we know that they are being made ready for every crisis which may need their hand, for every work we would have them carry through. To give each man the training he deserves is to bring the right man face to face with his own opportunity. The straight line is the shortest distance between two points in life as in geometry. For the work of a nation we may not call on Lord This or Earl That, whose ancestors have lain on velvet for a thousand years; we want the man who can do the work, who can face the dragon, or carry the message to Garcia. A man whose nerves are not relaxed by centuries of luxury will serve us best. Give him a fair chance to try; give us a fair chance to try him. This is the meaning of democracy; not fuss and feathers, pomp and gold lace, but accomplishment.

Democracy does not mean equality--just the reverse of this, it means individual responsibility, equality before the law, of course--equality of opportunity, but no other equality save that won by faithful service. That social system which bids men rise must also let them fall if they cannot maintain themselves. To choose the right man means the dismissal of the wrong. The weak, the incompetent, the untrained, the dissipated find no growing welcome in the century which is coming. It will have no place for unskilled laborers. A bucket of water and a basket of coal will do all that the unskilled laborer can do if we have skilled men to direct them. The unskilled laborer is no product of democracy. He exists in spite of democracy. The children of the republic are ent.i.tled to something better. A generous education, a well-directed education, should be the birthright of each one of them. Democracy may even intensify natural inequalities. The man who cannot say no to cheap and vulgar temptations falls all the lower in the degree to which he is a free agent. In compet.i.tion with men alert, loyal, trained and creative, the dullard is condemned to a lifetime of hard labor, through no direct fault of his own. Keep the capable man down and you may level the incapable one up. But this the Twentieth Century will not do. This democracy will not do; this it is not now doing, and this it never will attempt. The social condition which would give all men equal reward, equal enjoyment, equal responsibility, may be a condition to dream of. It may be Utopia; it is not democracy. Sir Henry Maine describes the process of civilization as the "movement from status to contract." This is the movement from ma.s.s to man, from subservience to individualism, from tradition to democracy, from pomp and circ.u.mstance of non-essentials to the method of achievement.

Owen Wister in "The Virginian" says: "All America is divided into two cla.s.ses,--the quality and the equality. The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it. Both will be with us until our women bear nothing but kings. It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the _eternal inequality_ of man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature.

Therefore we decreed that every man should, thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, 'Let the best man win, whoever he is.' Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight."

_Paucis vivat humanum genus_: "for the few the race should live,"--this is the discarded motto of another age. The few live for the many.

The clean and strong enrich the life of all with their wisdom, with their conquests. It is to bring about the larger equalities of opportunity, or purpose, that we exalt the talents of the few.

This has not always been clear, even the history of the Republic. My own great grandfather, John Elderkin Waldo, said at Tolland, Connecticut, more than a century ago: "Times are hard with us in New England. They will never be any better until each farm laborer in Connecticut is willing to work all day for a sheep's head and pluck," just as they used to do before the red schoolhouses on the hills began to preach their doctrines of sedition and equality. There could never be good times again, so he thought, till the many again lived for the few.

It is in the saving of the few who serve the many that the progress of civilization lies. In the march of the common man, and in the influence of the man uncommon who rises freely from the ranks, we have all of history that counts.

In a picture gallery at Brussels there is a painting by Wiertz, most cynical of artists, representing the man of the Future and the things of the Past. A naturalist holds in his right hand a magnifying gla.s.s, and in the other a handful of Napoleon and his marshals, guns, and battle-flags,--tiny objects swelling with meaningless glory. He examines these intensely, while a child at his side looks on in open-eyed wonder.

She cannot understand what a grown man can find in these curious trifles that he should take the trouble to study them.

This painting is a parable designed to show Napoleon's real place in history. It was painted within a dozen miles of the field of Waterloo, and not many years after the noise of its cannon had died away. It shows the point of view of the man of the future. Save in the degradation of France, through the impoverishment of its life-blood, there is little in human civilization to recall the disastrous incident of Napoleon's existence.

_Paucis vivat humanum genus_: "the many live for the few." This shall be true no longer. The earth belongs to him who can use it and the only force which lasts is that which is used to make men free.

"Triumphant America," says George Horace Lorimer, "certainly does not mean each and every one of our seventy-eight millions. For instance, it does not include the admitted idiots and lunatics, the registered paupers and parasites, the caged criminals, the six million illiterates. In a sense, it includes the twenty-five to thirty million children, for they exert a tremendous influence upon the grown people. But in no sense does it include the whittlers on dry-goods boxes, the bar-room loafers, the fellows that listen all day long for the whistle to blow, those who are the first to be mentioned whenever there is talk of cutting down the force. It does not include those of our statesmen who spend their time in promoting corrupt jobs, or in hunting places for lazy heelers. It does not include the doctors who reach their high-water mark for professional knowledge on the day they graduate, or the lawyers who lie and cheat and procure injustice for the sake of fees.

"Most of these--even the idiots and criminals--do a little something towards progress. This world is so happily ordered that it is impossible for one man to do much harm or to avoid doing some good; and one of the greatest forces for good is the power of a bad example. Still it is not our bad examples that make us get on and earn us these smothers of flowery compliment.

"Some of us are tall and others short, some straight and others crooked, some strong, others feeble; some of us run, others walk, others snail it.

But all, all have their feet upon the same level of the common earth. And America's worst enemy is he--or she--who by word or look encourages another to think otherwise. Head as high as you please; but feet always upon the common ground, never upon anybody's shoulders or neck, even though he be weak or willing."

So in this strenuous and complex age, this age of "fierce democracy," what have we to do, and with what manner of men shall we work? Young men of the Twentieth Century, will your times find place for you? There is plenty to do in every direction. That is plain enough. All the pages in this little book, or in a very large one, would be filled by a mere enumeration. In agriculture a whole great empire is yet to be won in the arid west, and the west that is not arid and the east that was never so must be turned into one vast market-garden. The Twentieth Century will treat a farm as a friend, and it will yield rich returns for such friendship. In the Twentieth Century vast regions will be fitted to civilization, not by imperialism, which blasts, but by permeation, which reclaims.

The table-lands of Mexico, the plains of Manchuria, the Pampas of Argentine, the moors of Northern j.a.pan, all these regions in our own temperate zone offer a welcome to the Anglo-Saxon farmer. The great tropics are less hopeful, but they have never had a fair trial. The northern nations have tried to exploit them in haste, and then to get away, never to stay with them and work patiently to find out their best. Some day the possibilities of the Torrid Zone may come to us as a great discovery.

There is need of men in forestry; for we must win back the trees we have slain with such ruthless hand. The lumberman of the future will pick ripe trees and save the rest as carefully as the herdsman selects his stock. In engineering, in mining, in invention, there are endless possibilities.

Every man who masters what is already known in any one branch of applied science, makes his own fortune. He who can add a little, save a little, do something better or something cheaper, makes the fortune of a hundred others. "There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many."

Andrew Carnegie once said that the foundation of his fortune lay in the employment of trained chemists, while other men made steel by rule of thumb. Trained chemists made better steel, just a little. They devised ways to make it cheaper, just a little, and they found means to utilize the slag. All this means hundreds of millions of dollars, if done on a large enough scale.

There is no limit to the demands of engineering. A million waterfalls dash down the slopes of the Sierras. The patient sun has hauled the water up from the sea and spread it in snow over the mountains. The same sun will melt the snow, and as the water falls back to the sea it will yield again the force it cost to bring it to its heights. Thus sunshine and falling water can be trans.m.u.ted into power. This power already lights the cities of California, and some day it may be changed into the heat which moves a thousand factories. All these are the problems of the Electrical Engineer.

Equally rich are the opportunities in other forms of engineering. There is no need to be in haste, perhaps, but the Twentieth Century is eager in its quest for gold. The mother lode runs along the foothills from Bering Straits to Cape Horn. From end to end of the continent the Twentieth Century will bring this gold to light, and carry it all away. The Mining Engineer who knows the mountains best finds his fortune ready to his hand.

Civil Engineers, Steam Engineers, Naval Engineers, whoever knows how to manage things or men, even Social Engineers, Labor Engineers, all find an eager welcome. There are never too many of those who know how; but the day of the rule of thumb has long since past. The Engineer of to-day must create, not imitate. And to him who can create, this last century we call the Twentieth is yet part of the first day of Creation.

In commerce the field is always open for young men. The world's trade is barely yet begun. We hear people whining over the spread of the commercial spirit, but what they mean is not the spirit of commerce. It is persistence of provincial selfishness, a spirit which has been with us since the fall of Adam, and which the centuries of whitening sails has as yet not eradicated. The spirit of fair commerce is a n.o.ble spirit. Through commerce the world is unified. Through commerce grows tolerance, and through tolerance, peace and solidarity. Commerce is world-wide barter, each nation giving what it can best produce for what is best among others. Freedom breeds commerce as commerce demands freedom. Only free men can buy and sell; for without selling no man nor nation has means to buy. When China is a nation, her people will be no longer a "yellow peril." It is poverty, slavery, misery, which makes men dangerous. In the words of "Joss Chinchingoss," the Kipling of Singapore, we have only to give the Chinaman

"The chance at home that he makes for himself elsewhere, And the star of the Jelly-fish nation mid others shall shine as fair."

Since the day, twenty-three years ago, on which I first pa.s.sed through the Golden Gate of California, I have seen the steady increase of the shipping which enters that channel. There are ten vessels to-day pa.s.sing in and out to one in 1880. Another twenty-five years will see a hundred times as many.

We have discovered the Orient, and even more, the Orient has discovered us.

We may not rule it by force of arms; for that counts nothing in trade or civilization. Commerce follows the flag only when the flag flies on merchant ships. It has no interest in following the flag to see a fight.

Commerce follows fair play and mutual service. Through the centuries of war men have only played at commerce. The Twentieth Century will take it seriously, and it will call for men to do its work. It will call more loudly than war has ever done, but it will ask its men not to die bravely, but to live wisely, and above all truthfully to watch their accounts.

The Twentieth Century will find room for pure science as well as for applied science and ingenious invention. Each Helmholtz of the future will give rise to a thousand Edisons. Exact knowledge must precede any form of applications. The reward of pure science will be, in the future as in the past, of its own kind, not fame nor money, but the joy of finding truth. To this joy no favor of fortune can add. The student of nature in all the ages has taken the vow of poverty. To him money, his own or others, means only the power to do more or better work.

The Twentieth Century will have its share in literature and art. Most of the books it will print will not be literature, for idle books are written for idle people, and many idle people are left over from less insistent times. The books sold by the hundred thousands to men and women not trained to make time count, will be forgotten before the century is half over. The books it saves will be books of its own kind, plain, straightforward, clear-cut, marked by that "fanaticism for veracity" which means everything else that is good in the intellectual and moral development of man. The literature of form is giving way already to the literature of power. We care less and less for the surprises and scintillations of clever fellows; we care more and more for the real thoughts of real men. We find that the deepest thoughts can be expressed in the simplest language. "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points" in literature as well as in mechanics. "In simplicity is strength," as Watt said of machinery, and it is true in art as well as in mechanics.

In medicine, the field of action is growing infinitely broader, now that its training is securely based on science, and the divining rod no longer stands first among its implements of precision. Not long ago, it is said, a young medical student in New York committed suicide, leaving behind this touching sentence: "I die because there is room for no more doctors." And this just now, when for the first time it is worth while to be a doctor.

Room for no more doctors, no doubt, of the kind to which he belonged--men who know nothing and care nothing for science and its methods, who choose the medical school which will turn them loose most quickly and cheaply, who have no feeling for their patients, and whose prescriptions are given with no more conscience than goes into the fabrication of an electric belt or the compounding of a patent medicine. Room for no more doctors whose highest conception is to look wise, take his chances, and pocket the fee.

Room for no more doctors just now, when the knowledge of human anatomy and physiology has shown the way to a thousand uses of preventive surgery. Room for no more doctors, when the knowledge of the microbes and their germs has given the hope of successful warfare against all contagious diseases; room for no more doctors, when antiseptics and anaesthetics have proved their value in a thousand pain-saving ways. Room for no more doctors now, when the doctor must be an honest man, with a sound knowledge of the human body and a mastery of the methods of the sciences on which this knowledge depends. Room for no more doctors of the incompetent cla.s.s, because the wiser times demand a better service.

What is true in medicine applies also to the profession of law. The pettifogger must give place to the jurist. The law is not a device for getting around the statutes. It is the science and art of equity. The lawyers of the future will not be mere pleaders before juries. They will save their clients from need of judge or jury. In every civilized nation the lawyers must be the law-givers. The sword has given place to the green bag. The demands of the Twentieth Century will be that the statutes coincide with equity. This condition educated lawyers can bring about. To know equity is to be its defender.

In politics the demand for serious service must grow. As we have to do with wise and clean men, statesmen, instead of vote-manipulators, we shall feel more and more the need for them. We shall demand not only men who can lead in action, but men who can prevent unwise action. Often the policy which seems most attractive to the majority is full of danger for the future. We need men who can face popular opinion, and, if need be, to face it down.

The best citizen is one not afraid to cast his vote away by voting with the minority.

As we look at it in the rough, the political outlook of democracy often seems discouraging. A great, rich, busy nation cannot stop to see who grabs its pennies. We are plundered by the rich, we are robbed by the poor, and trusts and unions play the tyrant over both. But all these evils are temporary. The men that have solved greater problems in the past will not be balked by these. Whatever is won for the cause of equity and decency is never lost again. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," and in this Twentieth Century there are always plenty who are awake. One by one political reforms take their place on our statute books, and each one comes to stay.

In all this, the journalist of the future may find an honorable place. He will learn to temper enterprise with justice, audacity with fidelity, omniscience with truthfulness. When he does this he will become a natural leader of men because he will be their real servant. To mould public opinion, to furnish a truthful picture of the times from day to day, either of these ideals in journalism gives ample room for the play of the highest manly energy.

The need of the teacher will not grow less as the century goes on. The history of the future is written in the schools of to-day, and the reform which gives us better schools is the greatest of reforms. It is said that the teacher's n.o.blest work is to lead the child to his inheritance. This is the inheritance he would win; the truth that men have tested in the past, and the means by which they were led to know that it was truth. "Free should the scholar be--free and brave," and to such as these the Twentieth Century will bring the reward of the scholar.

The Twentieth Century will need its preachers and leaders in religion. Some say, idly, that religion is losing her hold in these strenuous days. But she is not. She is simply changing her grip. The religion of this century will be more practical, more real. It will deal with the days of the week as well as with the Sabbath. It will be as patent in the marts of trade as in the walls of a cathedral, for a man's religion is his working hypothesis of life, not of life in some future world, but of life right here to-day, the only day we have in which to build a life. It will not look backward exclusively to "a dead fact stranded on the sh.o.r.e of the oblivious years,"