National ideals and problems

Front matter

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Preface

In this book my purpose has been to bring together a number of significant essays, addresses, and state papers which should be helpful in showing students what others, chiefly their fellow- Americans, have thought or now think about their country — its people, its ideals, and its significance both at home and abroad.

The time is opportune for seeking a more intelHgent acquaintance with our national ideals and problems. The war thrusts upon the nation the need of burnishing ideals as well as weapons. We should use this war to clarify our vision and intensify our national purposes, and we must, in our schools and colleges, make it a means for developing cathoHcity of spirit, human sympathy, sacrificial devotion to convictions, and passion for truth and justice.

ReaUzing the danger of doing violence in the stress of conflict to the very ideals we seek to defend and exalt. President Wilson early addressed a plea to the teachers in all grades of schools urging the conservation of our ideals. Said he, "The war is bringing to the minds of our people a new appreciation of the problems of national life and a deeper understanding of the meaning and aims of democracy. Matters which we have heretofore deemed commonplace and trivial are seen in a truer light. . . . When the war is over we must apply the wisdom we have acquired in purging and ennobling the life of the world."

An intelHgent understanding of American democracy is not xTierely a matter of interest; it is a patriotic duty for making both better Americans and better citizens of the world. Democracy is a body of ideals. Armies and navies alone cannot make the world safe for democracy. The world must be wrought to sympathy with democratic ideals, and, in accomplishing this, the schools — institutions devoted to the conserving of ideals and agencies able to reach the next generation — must undertake to viii PREFACE

inculcate these principles for which we are fighting. For what shall it profit us if we gain the whole world for democracy and thereby lose the soul of democracy?

In this work the teacher of English has a large part. Those who teach history or political science may give the facts, but those who handle the nation's Hterature impart the spirit of the nation. Since American Hterature affords the best possible interpretation of American ideals, the EngUsh teacher should have his students give attention more largely than heretofore to the history and progress of American thought as recorded in American literature.

The selections in this volume do not, of course, belong under the classification ''literature" in the narrower sense of the term. Nevertheless they are discussions of value in reaching conclusions regarding the American spirit and ideals, and as such may be appropriately brought into the literary vista of the student. Such study of American life and institutions as this book contemplates may be made in connection with the course in American literature.

But this book would seem to have its most useful place in the so-called ''thought-courses" in composition. This type of course has become so widely popular in recent years that it needs no defense or explanation. Its fundamental principle of accompanying the reading of thought-provoking selections with discussion, oral or written, upon questions and topics suggested by the reading is a most stimulating way to come to an understanding of national ideals. Furthermore, this method is a replica of the way in which definite national ideals must be reached. Each person must reach his own independent conclusions and then compound them by intelligent discussion in public and in private. Under this natural method, the student is brought to his own conclusions and to correcting or modifying them in the light of those formed by his classmates.

The selections have been arranged into a rough sequence and grouped under certain headings. Despite the fact that in some cases positions may seem arbitrarily assigned, the arrangement will be found of practical value in emphasizing the larger aspects

PREFACE ix

of the study. A convenient starting-point is had in a group of selections discussing the predominant characteristics of the American people. Next, to make this study of American characteristics more concrete, come selections dealing with a few great Americans who seem to exemplify the special make-up of mind and faculties that is the specific product of American democracy. The third group is composed of epoch-making addresses and state papers which every young American should know at first hand. These are followed by a group of selections discussing in a general way the aims and tendencies of American democracy. The next two groups present the closely related topics of the citizen's part in government and the especial responsibilities that rest upon the college-trained. After these comes a section devoted to a discussion of the principles that must be adhered to in making such changes and adjustments as the future may require. The last division contains selections discussing how and why America became a participant in the world war, and what she desires the outcome of the struggle to be.

In order to keep the book of moderate size, much important material had to be omitted. At no point was it harder to make rejections than in the second division. Patterns of Americanism. Jefferson, Jackson, Grant, Lee, Lowell, and many others, representative of Americanism in one way or another, seemed to demand inclusion, but finally the list was left with but four upon whom there would be almost universal agreement.

A word of explanation seems needed regarding the absence of selections from Bryce's The American Commonwealth. My first intention was to include several chapters from this source. But when it became possible for me to prepare for the moderate-priced English and American classics series of the Macmillan Company a volume including some twelve or fifteen of the most significant chapters of Bryce's book, under the title American Democracy, I thought it advisable to use all the space in this book for material from other quarters, and to suggest to those who may desire material from The American Commonwealth that they may find it in the collection referred to.

I take this opportunity of recording in a general way grate-

X PREFACE

fill thanks to those writers who have generously permitted me to use their work and to those pubHshers who have courteously dismissed copyright restrictions in my favor. Specific acknowledgements have been made at appropriate places throughout the book.

M. G. F.

Contents

Page

American Quality Nathaniel Southgate Shaler i

American Character Brander Matthews 14

II

Now, in so far as this Frenchman's belief is but an exaggeration of the saying of Napoleon's, that the English were a nation of shopkeepers, we need not wince, for the Emperor of the French found to his cost that those same English shopkeepers had a stout stomach for fighting. Nor need we regret that we can keep shop profitably, in these days when the doors of the bankers' vaults are the real gates of the Temple of Janus, war being impossible until they open. There is no reason for alarm or for apology so long as our shopkeeping does not cramp our muscle or curb our spirit, for, as Bacon declared three centuries ago, "walled towns, stored arsenals and armories, goodly races of horse, chariots of war, elephants, ordnance, artillery and the like, all this is but a sheep in a lion's skin, except the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warHke."

Even the hostile French traveler did not accuse us of any flabbiness of fiber; indeed, he declaimed especially against our "conquering appetite," which seemed to him scandalous "in a new people with no hereditary predisposition toward war." But here he fell into a common blunder; the United States may be a new nation— although, as a fact, the stars-and-stripes is now older than the tricolor of France, the union-jack of Great Britain, and the standards of those newcomers among the nations, Italy and Germany — the United States may be a new nation, but the people here have had as many ancestors as the population of any other country. The people here, moreover, have "a hereditary predisposition toward war," or at least toward adventure, since they are, every man of them, descended from some European more venturesome than his fellows, readier to risk the perils of the western ocean and bolder to front the unknown dangers of an unknown land. The warlike temper, the aggressiveness, the imperialistic sentiment — these are in us no new development of unexpected ambition; and they ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the way in which our forefathers grasped this Atlantic coast first, then thrust themselves across the Alleghanies, spread abroad to the Mississippi, and reached out at last to the Rockies and to the Pacific. The lust of adventure may be dangerous, but it is no new thing; it is in our blood, and we must reckon with it.

Perhaps it is because *'the breed and disposition of the people" is ''stout and warlike" that our shopkeeping has been successful enough to awaken envious admiration among other races whose energy may have been relaxed of late. After all, the arts of war and the arts of peace are not so unlike; and in either a triumph can be won only by an imagination strong enough to foresee and to divine what is hidden from the weakling. We are a trading community, after all and above all, even if we come of fighting stock. We are a trading community, just as Athens was, and Venice and Florence. And like the men of these earlier commonwealths, the men of the United States are trying to make money. They are striving to make money, not solely to amass riches, but partly because having money is the outward and visible sign of success — because it is the most obvious measure of accomplishment.

In his talk with Tolstoi, our French critic revealed an unexpected insight when he asserted that the passion of American life was not so much the use of money as a delight in the conquest of it. Many an American man of affairs would admit without hesitation that he would rather make half a million dollars than inherit a miUion. It is the process he enjoys, rather than the result; it is the tough tussle in the open market which gives him the keenest pleasure, and not the idle contemplation of wealth safely stored away. He girds himself for battle and fights for his own hand; he is the son and the grandson of the stalwart adven-

B turers who came from the Old World to face the chances of the new. This is why he is unwiUing to retire as men are wont to do in Europe when their fortunes are made. Merely to have money does not greatly delight him — although he would regret not having it; but what does delight him unceasingly is the fun of making it.

The money itself often he does not know what to do with; and he can find no more selfish use for it than to give it away. He seems to recognize that his making it was in some measure due to the unconscious assistance of the community as a whole; and he feels it his duty to do something for the people among whom he lives. It must be noted that the people themselves also expect this from him; they expect him sooner or later to pay his footing. As a result of this pressure of public opinion and of his own lack of interest in money itself, he gives freely. In time he comes to find pleasure in this as well ; and he applies his business sagacity to his benefactions. Nothing is more characteristic of modern American life than this pouring out of private wealth for pubHc service. Nothing remotely resembhng it is to be seen now in any country of the Old World; and not even in Athens in its noblest days was there a larger-handed lavishness of the individual for the benefit of the community.

Again, in no country of the Old World is the prestige of wealth less powerful than it is here. This, of course, the foreigner fails to perceive; he does not discover that it is not the man who happens to possess money that we regard with admiration but the man who is making money, and thereby proving his efl&ciency and indirectly benefiting the community. To many it may sound like an insufferable paradox to assert that nowhere in the civilized world today is money itself of less weight than here in the United States; but the broader his opportunity the more likely is an honest observer to come to this unexpected conclusion. Fortunes are made in a day almost, and they may fade away in a night; as the Yankee proverb put it pithily, "It's only three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves." Wealth is likely to lack something of its glamor in a land where well-being is widely diffused and where a large proportion of the population have either had a fortune and lost it or else expect to gain one in the immediate future.

Probably also there is no country which now contains more men who do not greatly care for large gains and who have gladly given up money-making for some other occupation they found more profitable for themselves. These are the men like Thoreau — in whose Walden, now half a century old, we can find an emphatic declaration of all the latest doctrines of the simple life. We have all heard of Agassiz, — best of Americans, even though he was born in another republic, — how he repelled the proffer of large terms for a series of lectures, with the answer that he had no time to make money. Closely akin was the reply of a famous machinist in response to an inquiry as to what he had been doing, — to the effect that he had accompUshed nothing of late, — "we have just been building engines and making money, and I'm about tired of it." There are not a few men today in these toiling United States who hold with Ben Jonson that "money never made any man rich, — but his mind."

But while this is true, while there are some men among us who care little for money, and while there are many who care chiefly for the making of it, ready to share it when made with their fellow- citizens, candor compels the admission that there are also not a few who are greedy and grasping, selfish and shameless, and who stand forward, conspicuous and unscrupulous, as if to justify to the full the aspersions which foreigners cast upon us. Although these men manage for the most part to keep within the letter of the law, their morality is that of the wrecker and of the pirate. It is a s3anptom of health in the body politic that the proposal has been made to inflict social ostracism upon the criminal rich. We need to stiffen our conscience and to set up a loftier standard of social intercourse, refusing to fellowship with the men who make their money by overriding the law or by undermining it — just as we should have declined the friendship of Captain Kidd laden down with stolen treasure.

In the immediate future these men will be made to feel that they are under the ban of public opinion. One sign of an acuter sensitiveness is the recent outcry against the acceptance of

"tainted money" for the support of good works. Although it is wise always to give a good deed the credit of a good motive, yet it is impossible sometimes not to suspect that certain large gifts have an aspect of ' 'conscience money." Some of them seem to be the result of a desire to divert public attention from the evil way in which the money was made to the nobler manner in which it is spent. They appear to be the attempt of a social outlaw to buy his peace with the community. Apparently there are rich men among us, who, having sold their honor for a price, would now gladly give up the half of their fortunes to get it back.

Candor compels the admission also that by the side of the criminal rich there exists the less noxious but more offensive class of the idle rich, who lead lives of wasteful luxury and of empty excitement. When the French reporter who talked with Tolstoi called us Americans "avid of pleasure" it was this little group he had in mind, as he may have seen the members of it splurging about in Paris, squandering and self-advertising. Although these idle rich now exhibit themselves most openly and to least advantage in Paris and in London, their foolish doings are recorded superabundantly in our own newspapers; and their demoralizing influence is spread abroad. The snobbish report of their misguided attempts at amusement may even be a source of danger in that it seems to recognize a false standard of social success or in that it may excite a miserable ambition to emulate these pitiful frivolities. But there is no need of dela3ang longer over the idle rich; they are only a few, and they have doomed themselves to destruction, since it is an inexorable fact that those who break the laws of nature can have no hope of executive clemency.

"Patience a little; learn to wait, Years are long on the dock of fate."

m

The second charge which the wandering Parisian journalist brought against us was that we ignore the arts and that we despise disinterested beauty. Here again the answer that is easiest is not altogether satisfactory. There is no difficulty in declaring that there are American artists, both painters and sculptors, who have gained the most cordial appreciation in Paris itself, or in drawing attention to the fact that certain of the minor arts — that of the silversmith, for one, and for another, that of the glass-blower and the glass-cutter — flourish in the United States at least as freely as they do anywhere else, while the art of designing in stained glass has had a new birth here, which has given it a vigorous vitality lacking in Europe since the Middle Ages. It would not be hard to show that our American architects are now undertaking to solve new problems wholly unknown to the builders of Europe, and that they are often succeeding in this grapple with unprecedented difficulty. Nor would it take long to draw up a list of the concerted efforts of certain of our cities to make themselves more worthy and more sightly with parks well planned and with public buildings well proportioned and appropriately decorated. We might even invoke the memory of the evanescent loveliness of the White City that graced the shores of Lake Michigan a few years ago; and we might draw attention again to the Library of Congress, a later effort of the allied arts of the architect, the sculptor, and the painter.

But however full of high hope for the future we may esteem these several instances of our reaching out for beauty, we must admit — if we are honest with ourselves — that they are all more or less exceptional, and that to offset this list of artistic achievements the Devil's Advocate could bring forward a damning catalogue of crimes against good taste which would go far to prove that the feeling for beauty is dead here in America and also the desire for it. The Devil's Advocate would bid us consider the flaring and often vulgar advertisements that disfigure our highways, the barbaric ineptness of many of our public buildings, the squalor of the outskirts of our towns and villages, the hideousness and horror of the slums in most of our cities, the negHgent toleration of dirt and disorder in our public conveyances, and many another pitiable deficiency of our civilization present in the minds of all of us.

The sole retort possible is a plea of confession and avoidance, coupled with a promise of reformation. These evils are evident and they cannot be denied. But they are less evident today than they were yesterday; and we may honestly hope that they will be less evident tomorrow. The bare fact that they have been observed warrants the behef that unceasing effort will be made to do away with them. Once aroused, pubHc opinion will work its will in due season. And here occasion serves to deny boldly the justice of a part of the accusation which the French reporter brought against us. It may be true that we "ignore the arts" — although this is an obvious overstatement of the case; but it is not true that we "despise beauty." However ignorant the American people may be as a whole, they are in no sense hostile toward art — as certain other peoples seem to be. On the contrary, they welcome it; with all their ignorance, they are anxious to understand it; they are pathetically eager for it. They are so desirous of it that they want it in a hurry, only too often to find themselves put off with an empty imitation. But the desire itself is indisputable; and its accompUshment is likely to be helped along by the constant commingHng here of peoples from various other stocks than the Anglo-Saxon, since the mixture of races tends always to a swifter artistic development.

It is well to probe deeper into the question and to face the fact that not only in the arts but also in the sciences we are not doing all that may fairly be expected of us. Athens was a trading city as New York is, but New York has had no Sophocles and no Phidias. Florence and Venice were towns whose merchants were princes, but no American city has yet brought forth a Giotto, a Dante, a Titian. It is now nearly threescore years and ten since Emerson delivered his address on the "American Scholar," which has well been styled our intellectual Declaration of Independence, and in which he expressed the hope that "perhaps the time is already come . . . when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fulfil the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of a mechanical skill." Nearly seventy years ago was this prophecy uttered which still echoes unaccomplished.

In the nineteenth century, in which we came to maturity as a nation, no one of the chief leaders of art, even including literature in its broadest aspects, and no one of the chief leaders in science, was native to our country. Perhaps we might claim that Webster was one of the world's greatest orators and that Parkman was one of the world's greatest historians; but probably the experts outside of the United States would be found unprepared and unwiUing to admit either claim, however hkely it may be to win acceptance in the future. Lincoln is indisputably one of the world's greatest statesmen; and his fame is now firmly estabHshed throughout the whole of civiHzation. But this is all we can assert; and we cannot deny that we have given birth to very few indeed of the foremost poets, dramatists, novelists, painters, sculptors, architects or scientific discoverers of the last hundred years.

Alfred Russell Wallace, whose renown is linked with Darwin's and whose competence as a critic of scientific advance is beyond dispute, has declared that the nineteenth century was the most wonderful of all since the world began. He asserts that the scientific achievements of the last hundred years, both in the discovery of general principles and in their practical appHcation, exceed in number the sum total of the scientific achievements to be credited to all the centuries that went before. He considers, first of all, the practical applications, which made the aspect of civilization in 1900 differ in a thousand ways from what it had been in 1801. He names a dozen of these practical applications: railways, steam navigation, the electric telegraph, the telephone, friction-matches, gas-Hghting, electric-lighting, the phonograph, the Roentgen rays, spectrum analysis, anesthetics, and antiseptics. It is with pride that an American can check off not a few of these utihties as being due wholly or in large part to the ingenuity of one or another of his countrymen.

But his pride has a fall when Wallace draws up a second Hst, not of mere inventions but of those fundamental discoveries, of those fecundating theories underlying all practical applications and making them possible, of those principles "which have extended our knowledge or widened our conceptions of the universe." Of these he catalogues twelve; and we are pained to find that no American has had an important share in the estabhshment of any of these broad generalizations. He may have added a little here and there, but no single one of all the twelve discoveries is mainly to be credited to any American. It seems as if our French critic was not so far out when he asserted that we were "terribly practical." In the apphcation of principles, in the devising of new methods, our share was larger than that of any other nation. In the working out of the stimulating principles themselves, our share was less than "a younger brother's portion."

It is only fair to say, however, that even though we may not have brought forth a chief leader of art or of science to adorn the wonderful century, there are other evidences of our practical sagacity than those set down by Wallace, evidences more favorable and of better augury for our future. We derived our language and our laws, our public justice and our representative government from our English ancestors, as we derived from the Dutch our rehgious toleration and perhaps also our large freedom of educational opportunity. In our time we have set an example to others and helped along the progress of the world. President Eliot holds that we have made five important contributions to the advancement of civilization. First of all, we have done more than any other people to further peace-keeping and to substitute legal arbitration for the brute conflict of war. Second, we have set a splendid example of the broadest religious toleration — even though Holland had first shown us how. Thirdly, we have made evident the wisdom of universal manhood suffrage. Fourthly, by our welcoming of newcomers from all parts of the earth, we have proved that men belonging to a great variety of races are fit for political freedom. Finally, we have succeeded in diffusing material well-being among the whole population to an extent without parallel in any other country in the world.

These five American contributions to civilization are all of them the result of the practical side of the American character. They may even seem commonplace as compared with the conquering exploits of some other races. But they are more than merely practical; they are all essentially moral. As President Eliot insists, they are "triumphs of reason, enterprise, courage, faith and justice over passion, selfishness, inertness, timidity, and distrust. Beneath each of these developments there lies a strong ethical sentiment, a strenuous moral and social purpose. It is for such work that multitudinous democracies are fit."

IV

A "strong ethical sentiment," and a "strenuous moral purpose" cannot flourish unless they are deeply rooted to idealism. And here we find an adequate answer to the third assertion of Tolstoi's visitor, who maintained that we are "hostile to all idealism." Our ideaHsm may be of a practical sort, but it is ideaHsm none the less. Emerson was an idealist, although he was also a thrifty Yankee. Lincoln was an idealist, even if he was also a practical politician, an opportunist, knowing where he wanted to go, but never crossing a bridge before he came to it. Emerson and Lincoln had ever a firm grip on the facts of life; each of them kept his gaze fixed on the stars — and he also kept his feet firm on the soil.

There is a sham idealism, boastful and shabby, which stares at the moon and stumbles in the mud, as Shelley and Poe stumbled. But the basis of the highest genius is always a broad common sense. Shakspere and Moliere were held in esteem by their comrades for their understanding of affairs; and they each of them had money out at interest. Sophocles was entrusted with command in battle; and Goethe was the shrewdest of the Grand Duke's counselors. The idealism of Shakspere and of Moliere, of Sophocles and of Goethe, is like that of Emerson and of Lincoln; it is unfailingly practical. And thereby it is sharply set apart from the aristocratic idealism of Plato and of Renan, of Ruskin and of Nietzsche, which is founded on obvious self-esteem and which is sustained by arrogant and inexhaustible egotism. True ideaHsm is not only practical, it is also liberal and tolerant.

Perhaps it might seem to be claiming too much to insist on certain points of similarity between us and the Greeks of old. The points of dissimilarity are only too evident to most of us; and yet there is a likeness as well as an unlikeness. Professor Butcher has recently asserted that "no people was ever less detached from the practical affairs of life" than the Greeks, "less insensible to outward utihty; yet they regarded prosperity as a means, never as an end. The unquiet spirit of gain did not take possession of their souls. Shrewd traders and merchants, they were yet idealists. They did not lose sight of the higher and distinctively human aims which give hfe its significance." It will be well for us if this can be said of our civiUzation two thousand years after its day is done; and it is for us to make sure that "the unquiet spirit of gain" shall not take possession of our souls. It is for us also to rise to the attitude of the Greeks, among whom, as Professor Butcher points out, "money lavished on personal enjoyment was counted vulgar, oriental, inhuman."