Charles William Eliot - Four American Leaders
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Charles William Eliot >> Four American Leaders
By inheritance and by marriage Washington became, while he was still
young, one of the richest men in the country; but what a contrast
between his sort of riches and our sorts! He was a planter and
sportsman--a country gentleman. All his home days were spent in looking
after his farms; in breeding various kinds of domestic animals; in
fishing for profit; in attending to the diseases and accidents which
befall livestock, including slaves; in erecting buildings, and repairing
them; in caring for or improving his mills, barns, farm implements, and
tools. He always lived very close to nature, and from his boyhood
studied the weather, the markets, his crops and woods, and the various
qualities of his lands. He was an economical husbandman, attending to
all the details of the management of his large estates. He was
constantly on horseback, often riding fifteen miles on his daily rounds.
At sixty-seven years of age he caught the cold which killed him by
getting wet on horseback, riding as usual about his farms.
Compare this sort of life, physical and mental, with the life of the
ordinary rich American of to-day, who has made his money in stocks and
bonds, or as a banker, broker, or trader, or in the management of great
transportation or industrial concerns. This modern rich man, in all
probability, has nothing whatever to do with nature or with country
life. He is soft and tender in body; lives in the city; takes no
vigorous exercise, and has very little personal contact with the
elemental forces of either nature or mankind. He is not like Washington
an out-of-door man. Washington was a combination of land-owner,
magistrate, and soldier,--the best combination for a leader of men which
the feudal system produced. Our modern rich man is apt to possess no one
of these functions, any one of which, well discharged, has in times past
commanded the habitual respect of mankind. It is a grave misfortune for
our country, and especially for our rich men, that the modern forms of
property,--namely, stocks and bonds, mortgages, and city buildings--do
not carry with them any inevitable responsibilities to the state, or
involve their owner in personal risks and charges as a leader or
commander of the people. The most enviable rich man to-day is the
intelligent industrial or commercial adventurer or promoter, in the good
sense of those terms. He takes risks and assumes burdens on a large
scale, and has a chance to develop will, mind, and character, just as
Queen Elizabeth's adventurers did all over the then known world.
Again, Washington, as I have already indicated, was an economical
person, careful about little expenditures as well as great, averse to
borrowing money, and utterly impatient of waste. If a slave were
hopelessly ill, he did not call a doctor, because it would be a useless
expenditure. He insisted that the sewing woman, Carolina, who had only
made five shirts in a week, not being sick, should make nine. He entered
in his account "thread and needle, one penny," and used said thread and
needle himself. All this closeness and contempt for shiftlessness and
prodigality were perfectly consistent with a large and hospitable way of
living; for during many years of his life he kept open house at Mt.
Vernon. This frugal and prudent man knew exactly what it meant to
devote his "life and fortune to the cause we are engaged in, if
needful," as he wrote in 1774. This was not an exaggerated or emotional
phrase. It was moderate, but it meant business. He risked his whole
fortune. What he lost through his service in the Revolutionary War is
clearly stated in a letter written from Mt. Vernon in 1784: "I made no
money from my estate during the nine years I was absent from it, and
brought none home with me. Those who owed me, for the most part, took
advantage of the depreciation, and paid me off with sixpence in the
pound. Those to whom I was indebted, I have yet to pay, without other
means, if they will wait, than selling part of my estate, or distressing
those who were too honest to take advantage of the tender laws to quit
scores with me." Should we not all be glad if to-day a hundred or two
multi-millionaires could give such an account as that of their losses
incurred in the public service, even if they had not, like Washington,
risked their lives as well? In our times we have come to think that a
rich man should not be frugal or economical, but rather wasteful or
extravagant. We have even been asked to believe that a cheap coat makes
a cheap man. If there were a fixed relation between a man's character
and the price of his clothes, what improvement we should have seen in
the national character since 1893! At Harvard University, twelve hundred
students take three meals a day in the great dining-room of Memorial
Hall, and manage the business themselves through an elected President
and Board of Directors. These officers proscribe stews, apparently
because it is a form in which cheap meat may be offered them,
neglecting the more important fact that the stew is the most nutritious
and digestible form in which meats can be eaten. Mr. Edward Atkinson,
the economist, invented an oven in which various kinds of foods may be
cheaply and well prepared with a minimum of attention to the process.
The workingmen, among whom he attempted to introduce it, took no
interest in it whatever, because it was recommended to them as a cheap
way of preparing inexpensive though excellent foods. This modern temper
affords a most striking contrast to the practices and sentiments of
Washington, sentiments and practices which underlay his whole public
life as well as his private life.
If he were alive to-day, would he not be bewildered by much of our talk
about the rights of men and animals? Washington's mind dwelt very
little on rights and very much on duties. For him, patriotism was a
duty; good citizenship was a duty; and for the masses of mankind it was
a duty to clear away the forest, till the ground, and plant fruit trees,
just as he prescribed to the hoped-for tenants on his Ohio and Kanawha
lands. For men and women in general he thought it a duty to increase and
multiply, and to make the wilderness glad with rustling crops, lowing
herds, and children's voices. When he retired from the Presidency, he
expressed the hope that he might "make and sell a little flour
annually." For the first soldier and first statesman of his country,
surely this was a modest anticipation of continued usefulness. We think
more about our rights than our duties. He thought more about his duties
than his rights. Posterity has given him first place because of the way
in which he conceived and performed his duties; it will judge the
leaders of the present generation by the same standard, whatever their
theories about human rights.
Having said thus much about contrasts, let me now turn to some
interesting resemblances between Washington's times and our own. We may
notice in the first place the permanency of the fighting quality in the
English-American stock. Washington was all his life a fighter. The
entire American people is to-day a fighting people, prone to resort to
force and prompt to take arms, the different sections of the population
differing chiefly in regard to the nature and amount of the provocation
which will move them to violence and combat. To this day nothing moves
the admiration of the people so quickly as composure, ingenuity, and
success in fighting; so that even in political contests all the terms
and similes are drawn from war, and among American sports the most
popular have in them a large element of combat. Washington was roused
and stimulated by the dangers of the battlefield, and utterly despised
cowards, or even men who ran away in battle from a momentary terror
which they did not habitually manifest. His early experience taught him,
however, that the Indian way of fighting in woods or on broken ground
was the most effective way; and he did not hesitate to adopt and
advocate that despised mode of fighting, which has now, one hundred and
fifty years later, become the only possible mode. The Indian in battle
took instantly to cover, if he could find it. In our Civil War both
sides learned to throw up breastworks wherever they expected an
engagement to take place; and the English in South Africa have
demonstrated that the only possible way to fight with the present long
range quick-firing guns, is the way in which the "treacherous devils,"
as Washington called the Indians, fought General Braddock, that is, with
stratagem, surprise, and ambuscade; with hiding and crawling behind
screens and obstacles; with the least possible appearance in open view,
with nothing that can glitter on either arms or clothes, and with no
visible distinction between officers and men. War is now a genuinely
Indian performance, just as Washington saw one hundred and fifty years
ago that it ought to be.
The silent Washington's antipathy to the press finds an exact parallel
in our own day. He called the writers of the press "infamous
scribblers." President Cleveland called them "ghouls." But it must be
confessed that the newspapers of Washington's time surpassed those of
the present day in violence of language, and in lack of prophetic
insight and just appreciation of men and events. When Washington retired
from the Presidency the _Aurora_ said, "If ever a Nation was debauched
by a man, the American Nation has been debauched by Washington."
Some of the weaknesses or errors of the Congresses of Washington's time
have been repeated in our own day, and seem as natural to us as they
doubtless seemed to the men of 1776 and 1796. Thus, the Continental
Congress incurred all the evils of a depreciated currency with the same
blindness which afflicted the Congress of the Southern Confederacy and
the Union Congress during the Civil War, or the Democrat-Populist party
of still more recent times. The refusal of the Congress of 1777 to carry
out the agreement made with the Hessian prisoners at Saratoga reminds
one of the refusal of Congress, in spite of the public exhortations of
our present Executive, and his cabinet, to carry out the understanding
with Cuba in regard to the commercial relations of the island with the
United States. In both cases the honor of the country was tarnished.
The intensity of party spirit in Washington's time closely resembles
that of our own day, but was certainly fiercer than it is now, the
reason being that the questions at issue were absolutely fundamental.
When the question was whether the Constitution of the United States was
a sure defence for freedom or a trap to ensnare an unsuspecting people,
intensity of feeling on both sides was well-nigh inevitable. During
Washington's two administrations a considerable number of the most
eminent American publicists feared that dangerous autocratic powers had
been conferred on the President by the Constitution. Washington held
that there was no ground for these fears, and acted as if the
supposition was absurd. When the question was whether we should love and
adhere to revolutionary France, or rather become partisans of Great
Britain--the power from which we had just won independence--it is no
wonder that political passions burnt fiercely. On this question
Washington stood between the opposing parties, and often commended
himself to neither. In spite of the tremendous partisan heat of the
times, Washington, through both his administrations, made appointments
to public office from both parties indifferently. He appointed some
well-known Tories and many Democrats. He insisted only on fitness as
regards character, ability, and experience, and preferred persons, of
whatever party, who had already proved their capacity in business or the
professions, or in legislative or administrative offices. It is a
striking fact that Washington is the only one of the Presidents of the
United States who has, as a rule, acted on these principles. His example
was not followed by his early successors, or by any of the more recent
occupants of the Presidency. His successors, elected by a party, have
not seen their way to make appointments without regard to party
connections. The Civil Service Reform agitation of the last twenty-five
years is nothing but an effort to return, in regard to the humbler
national offices, to the practice of President Washington.
In spite of these resemblances between Washington's time and our own,
the profound contrasts make the resemblances seem unimportant. In the
first years of the Government of the United States there was widespread
and genuine apprehension lest the executive should develop too much
power, and lest the centralization of the Government should become
overwhelming. Nothing can be farther from our political thoughts to-day
than this dread of the power of the national executive. On the contrary,
we are constantly finding that it is feeble where we wish it were
strong, impotent where we wish it omnipotent. The Senate of the United
States has deprived the President of much of the power intended for his
office, and has then found it, on the whole, convenient and desirable to
allow itself to be held up by any one of its members who possesses the
bodily strength and the assurance to talk or read aloud by the week.
Other forces have developed within the Republic quite outside of the
Government, which seem to us to override and almost defy the closely
limited governmental forces. Quite lately we have seen two of these new
forces--one a combination of capitalists, the other a combination of
laborers--put the President of the United States into a position of a
mediator between two parties whom he could not control, and with whom he
must intercede. This is part of the tremendous nineteenth century
democratic revolution, and of the newly acquired facilities for
combination and association for the promotion of common interests. We
no longer dread abuse of the power of state or church; we do dread abuse
of the powers of compact bodies of men, highly organized and consenting
to be despotically ruled, for the advancement of their selfish
interests.
Washington was a stern disciplinarian in war; if he could not shoot
deserters he wanted them "stoutly whipped." He thought that army
officers should be of a different class from their men, and should never
put themselves on an equality with their men; he went himself to
suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and always believed that firm
government was essential to freedom. He never could have imagined for a
moment the toleration of disorder and violence which is now exhibited
everywhere in our country when a serious strike occurs. He was the chief
actor through the long struggles, military and civil, which attended
the birth of this nation, and took the gravest responsibilities which
could then fall to the lot of soldiers or statesmen; but he never
encountered, and indeed never imagined, the anxieties and dangers which
now beset the Republic of which he was the founder. We face new
difficulties. Shall we face them with Washington's courage, wisdom, and
success?
Finally, I ask your attention to the striking contrast between the
wealth of Washington and the poverty of Abraham Lincoln, the only one of
the succeeding Presidents who won anything like the place in the popular
heart that Washington has always occupied. Washington, while still
young, was one of the richest men in the country; Lincoln, while young,
was one of the poorest; both rendered supreme service to their country
and to freedom; between these two extremes men of many degrees as
regards property holding have occupied the Presidency, the majority of
them being men of moderate means. The lesson to be drawn from these
facts seems to be that the Republic can be greatly served by rich and
poor alike, but has oftenest been served creditably by men who were
neither rich nor poor. In the midst of the present conflicts between
employers and employed, between the classes that are already well to do
and the classes who believe it to be the fault of the existing order
that they too are not well to do, and in plain sight of the fact that
democratic freedom permits the creation and perpetuation of greater
differences as regards possessions than the world has ever known before,
it is comforting to remember that true patriots and wise men are bred
in all the social levels of a free commonwealth, and that the Republic
may find in any condition of life safe leaders and just rulers.
CHANNING
We commemorate to-day a great preacher. It is the fashion to say that
preaching is a thing of the past, other influences having taken its
place. But Boston knows better; for she had two great preachers in the
nineteenth century, and is sure that an immense and enduring force was
theirs, and through them, hers. Channing and Brooks! Men very unlike in
body and mind, but preachers of like tendency and influence from their
common love of freedom and faith in mankind. This city has learned by
rich experience that preaching becomes the most productive of all human
works the moment the adequate preacher appears--a noble man with a
noble message. Such was Channing.
His public work was preceded and accompanied by a great personal
achievement. All his life he grew in spirit, becoming always freer,
broader, and more sympathetic. In forty years he worked his way out of
moderate Calvinism without the Trinity into such doctrines as
these:--"The idea of God ... is the idea of our own spiritual natures
purified and enlarged to infinity." "The sense of duty is the greatest
gift of God. The idea of right is the primary and highest revelation of
God to the human mind; and all outward revelations are founded on and
addressed to it." There is "but one object of cherished and enduring
love in heaven or on earth, and that is moral goodness." "I do and I
must reverence human nature.... I honor it for its struggles against
oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight of so many
chains and prejudices, for its achievements in science and art, and
still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are
marks of a divine origin and pledges of a celestial inheritance."
"Perfection is man's proper and natural goal." What an immense distance
between these doctrines of Channing's maturity and the Calvinism of his
youth! He was a meditative, reflecting man, who read much, but took
selected thoughts of others into the very substance and fibre of his
being, and made them his own. The foundation of his professional power
and public influence was this great personal achievement, this attuning
of his own soul to noblest harmonies.
Thousands of ministers and spiritually-minded laymen of many
denominations have travelled since Channing's death the road he laid
out, and so have been delivered from the inhuman doctrines of the fall
of man, the wrath of God, vicarious atonement, everlasting hell for the
majority, and the rescue of a predestined few. They should all join in
giving heartfelt praise and thanks to Channing, who thought out clearly,
and preached with fervid reiteration, the doctrines which have delivered
them from a painful bondage.
Another remarkable quality of Channing's teachings is their
universality. Men of learning and spirituality in all the civilized
nations have welcomed his words, and found in them teachings of enduring
and expansive influence. Many Biblical scholars, in the technical sense,
have arrived eighty years later at Channing's conclusions about the
essential features of Christianity, although Channing was no scholar in
the modern sense; while they go far beyond him in treating the Bible as
a collection of purely human writings and in rejecting the so-called
supernatural quality of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Indeed,
many Biblical scholars belonging to-day to evangelical sects have
arrived not only at Channing's position, but also at Emerson's.
Just how much Channing's published works have had to do with this quiet
but fateful revolution no man can tell. The most eminent to-day of
American Presbyterian divines preached an excellent sermon in the
Harvard College Chapel one Sunday evening not many years ago, and asked
me, as we walked away together, how I liked it. I replied: "Very much;
it was all straight out of Channing." "That is strange," he said, "for
I have never read Channing." It is great testimony to the pervasive
quality of a prophet's teachings when they become within fifty years a
component of the intellectual atmosphere of the new times. At a dinner
of Harvard graduates I once complained that, although I heard in the
College Chapel a great variety of preachers connected with many
different denominations, the preaching was, after all, rather
monotonous, because they all preached Channing. Phillips Brooks spoke
after me and said: "The President is right in thinking our present
preaching monotonous, and the reason he gives for this monotony is
correct; we all do preach Channing."
The direct influence of Channing's writings has been vast, for they are
read in English in all parts of the world, and have been translated
into many languages. Thirty years ago I spent a long day in showing Don
Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, some of the interesting things in the
laboratories and collections of Harvard University. He was the most
assiduous visitor that I ever conducted through the University
buildings, intelligently interested in a great variety of objects and
ideas. Late in the afternoon he suddenly said, with a fresh eagerness:
"Now I will visit the tomb of Channing." We drove to Mount Auburn, and
found the monument erected by the Federal Street Church. The Emperor
copied with his own hand George Ticknor's inscriptions on the stone, and
made me verify his copies. Then, with his great weight and height, he
leaped into the air, and snatched a leaf from the maple which overhung
the tomb. "I am going to put that leaf," he said, "into my best edition
of Channing. I have read all his published works,--some of them many
times over. He was a very great man." The Emperor of Brazil was a Roman
Catholic.
Channing's philanthropy was a legitimate outcome of his view of
religion. For him practical religion was character-building by the
individual human being. But character-building in any large group or
mass of human beings means social reform; therefore Channing was a
preacher and active promoter of social regeneration in this world. He
depicted the hideous evils and wrongs of intemperance, slavery, and war.
He advocated and supported every well-directed effort to improve public
education, the administration of charity, and the treatment of
criminals, and to lift up the laboring classes. He denounced the bitter
sectarian and partisan spirit of his day. He refused entire sympathy to
the abolitionists, because of the ferocity and violence of their
habitual language and the injustice of their indiscriminate attacks. He
distrusted money worship, wealth, and luxury.
These sentiments and actions grew straight out of his religious
conceptions, and were their legitimate fruit. All his social aspirations
and hopes were rooted in his fundamental conception of the fatherhood of
God, and its corollary the brotherhood of men. It was his lofty idea of
the infinite worth of human nature and of the inherent greatness of the
human soul, in contrast with the then prevailing doctrines of human
vileness and impotency, which made him resent with such indignation the
wrongs of slavery, intemperance, and war, and urge with such ardor every
effort to deliver men from poverty and ignorance, and to make them
gentler and juster to one another.
In no subject which he discussed does the close connection between
Channing's theology and his philanthropy appear more distinctly than in
education. He says in his remarks on education: ... "There is nothing on
earth so precious as the mind, soul, character of the child.... There
should be no economy in education. Money should never be weighed against
the soul of a child. It should be poured out like water for the child's
intellectual and moral life." It is more than two generations since
those sentences were written, and still the average public expenditure
on the education of a child in the United States is less than fifteen
dollars a year. Eastern Massachusetts is the community in the whole
world which gives most thought, time, and money to education, public
and endowed. Whence came this social wisdom? From Protestantism, from
Congregationalism, from the religious teachings of Channing and his
disciples. Listen to this sentence: "Benevolence is short-sighted
indeed, and must blame itself for failure, if it do not see in education
the chief interest of the human race."
It is impossible to join in this centennial celebration of the advent to
Boston of this religious pioneer and philanthropic leader without
perceiving that in certain respects the country has recently fallen away
from the moral standards he set up. Channing taught that no real good
can come through violence, injustice, greed, and the inculcation of
hatred and enmities, or of suspicions and contempts. He believed that
public well-being can be promoted only through public justice, freedom,
peace, and good will among men.