Complete Prose Works
There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish
meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world
over there, with its _personnel_ of lords and queens and courts, so
well-dress'd and so handsome. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy,
and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.
Literature, strictly consider'd, has never recognized the People,
and, whatever may be said, does not to-day. Speaking generally, the
tendencies of literature, as hitherto pursued, have been to make mostly
critical and querulous men. It seems as if, so far, there were some
natural repugnance between a literary and professional life, and the
rude rank spirit of the democracies. There is, in later literature, a
treatment of benevolence, a charity business, rife enough it is
true; but I know nothing more rare, even in this country, than a fit
scientific estimate and reverent appreciation of the People--of their
measureless wealth of latent power and capacity, their vast, artistic
contrasts of lights and shades--with, in America, their entire
reliability in emergencies, and a certain breadth of historic grandeur,
of peace or war, far surpassing all the vaunted samples of book-heroes,
or any _haut ton_ coteries, in all the records of the world.
The movements of the late secession war, and their results, to any sense
that studies well and comprehends them, show that popular democracy,
whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the
proudest claims and wildest hopes of its enthusiasts. Probably no future
age can know, but I well know, how the gist of this fiercest and most
resolute of the world's war-like contentions resided exclusively in the
unnamed, unknown rank and file; and how the brunt of its labor of death
was, to all essential purposes, volunteer'd. The People, of their own
choice, fighting, dying for their own idea, insolently attack'd by the
secession-slave-power, and its very existence imperil'd. Descending
to detail, entering any of the armies, and mixing with the private
soldiers, we see and have seen august spectacles. We have seen the
alacrity with which the American-born populace, the peaceablest and most
good-natured race in the world, and the most personally independent
and intelligent, and the least fitted to submit to the irksomeness and
exasperation of regimental discipline, sprang, at the first tap of the
drum, to arms--not for gain, nor even glory, nor to repel invasion--but
for an emblem, a mere abstraction--for the life, _the safety of the
flag_. We have seen the unequal'd docility and obedience of these
soldiers. We have seen them tried long and long by hopelessness,
mismanagement, and by defeat; have seen the incredible slaughter toward
or through which the armies (as at first Fredericksburg, and afterward
at the Wilderness,) still unhesitatingly obey'd orders to advance. We
have seen them in trench, or crouching behind breastwork, or tramping
in deep mud, or amid pouring rain or thick-falling snow, or under forced
marches in hottest summer (as on the road to get to Gettysburg)--vast
suffocating swarms, divisions, corps, with every single man so grimed
and black with sweat and dust, his own mother would not have known
him--his clothes all dirty, stain'd and torn, with sour, accumulated
sweat for perfume--many a comrade, perhaps a brother, sun-struck,
staggering out, dying, by the roadside, of exhaustion--yet the great
bulk bearing steadily on, cheery enough, hollow-bellied from hunger, but
sinewy with unconquerable resolution.
We have seen this race proved by wholesale by drearier, yet more fearful
tests--the wound, the amputation, the shatter'd face or limb, the
slow hot fever, long impatient anchorage in bed, and all the forms of
maiming, operation and disease. Alas! America have we seen, though only
in her early youth, already to hospital brought. There have we watch'd
these soldiers, many of them only boys in years--mark'd their decorum,
their religious nature and fortitude, and their sweet affection.
Wholesale, truly. For at the front, and through the camps, in countless
tents, stood the regimental, brigade and division hospitals; while
everywhere amid the land, in or near cities, rose clusters of huge,
white-wash'd, crowded, one-story wooden barracks; and there ruled agony
with bitter scourge, yet seldom brought a cry; and there stalk'd death
by day and night along the narrow aisles between the rows of cots, or
by the blankets on the ground, and touch'd lightly many a poor sufferer,
often with blessed, welcome touch.
I know not whether I shall be understood, but I realize that it is
finally from what I learn'd personally mixing in such scenes that I am
now penning these pages. One night in the gloomiest period of the war,
in the Patent-office hospital in Washington city, as I stood by
the bedside of a Pennsylvania soldier, who lay, conscious of quick
approaching death, yet perfectly calm, and with noble, spiritual manner,
the veteran surgeon, turning aside, said to me, that though he had
witness'd many, many deaths of soldiers, and had been a worker at Bull
Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, &c., he had not seen yet the first case
of man or boy that met the approach of dissolution with cowardly qualms
or terror. My own observation fully bears out the remark.
What have we here, if not, towering above all talk and argument,
the plentifully-supplied, last-needed proof of democracy, in its
personalities? Curiously enough, too, the proof on this point comes,
I should say, every bit as much from the south, as from the north.
Although I have spoken only of the latter, yet I deliberately include
all. Grand, common stock! to me the accomplish'd and convincing growth,
prophetic of the future; proof undeniable to sharpest sense, of perfect
beauty, tenderness and pluck, that never feudal lord, nor Greek, nor
Roman breed, yet rival'd. Let no tongue ever speak in disparagement of
the American races, north or south, to one who has been through the war
in the great army hospitals.
Meantime, general humanity, (for to that we return, as, for our
purposes, what it really is, to bear in mind,) has always, in every
department, been full of perverse maleficence, and is so yet. In
downcast hours the soul thinks it always will be--but soon recovers
from such sickly moods. I myself see clearly enough the crude, defective
streaks in all the strata of the common people; the specimens and vast
collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the
incapable, and the very low and poor. The eminent person just mention'd
sneeringly asks whether we expect to elevate and improve a nation's
politics by absorbing such morbid collections and qualities therein. The
point is a formidable one, and there will doubtless always be numbers of
solid and reflective citizens who will never get over it. Our answer
is general, and is involved in the scope and letter of this essay.
We believe the ulterior object of political and all other government,
(having, of course, provided for the police, the safety of life,
property, and for the basic statute and common law, and their
administration, always first in order,) to be among the rest, not
merely to rule, to repress disorder, &c., but to develop, to open up to
cultivation, to encourage the possibilities of all beneficent and manly
outcroppage, and of that aspiration for independence, and the pride and
self-respect latent in all characters. (Or, if there be exceptions, we
cannot, fixing our eyes on them alone, make theirs the rule for all.)
I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands, is not
repression alone, and not Authority alone, not even of law, nor by that
favorite standard of the eminent writer, the rule of the best men, the
born heroes and captains of the race, (as if such ever, or one time out
of a hundred, get into the big places, elective or dynastic)--but higher
than the highest arbitrary rule, to train communities through all their
grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule
themselves. What Christ appear'd for in the moral-spiritual field for
human-kind, namely, that in respect to the absolute soul, there is
in the possession of such by each single individual, something so
transcendent, so incapable of gradations, (like life,) that, to that
extent, it places all beings on a common level, utterly regardless
of the distinctions of intellect, virtue, station, or any height or
lowliness whatever--is tallied in like manner, in this other field, by
democracy's rule that men, the nation, as a common aggregate of living
identities, affording in each a separate and complete subject for
freedom, worldly thrift and happiness, and for a fair chance for growth,
and for protection in citizenship, &c., must, to the political extent
of the suffrage or vote, if no further, be placed, in each and in the
whole, on one broad, primary, universal, common platform.
The purpose is not altogether direct; perhaps it is more indirect. For
it is not that democracy is of exhaustive account, in itself. Perhaps,
indeed, it is, (like Nature,) of no account in itself. It is that, as
we see, it is the best, perhaps only, fit and full means, formulater,
general caller-forth, trainer, for the million, not for grand material
personalities only, but for immortal souls. To be a voter with the
rest is not so much; and this, like every institute, will have its
imperfections.
But to become an enfranchised man, and now, impediments removed,
to stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest; to
commence, or have the road clear'd to commence, the grand experiment of
development, whose end, (perhaps requiring several generations,) may
be the forming of a full-grown man or woman--that _is_ something. To
ballast the State is also secured, and in our times is to be secured, in
no other way.
We do not, (at any rate I do not,) put it either on the ground that
the People, the masses, even the best of them, are, in their latent or
exhibited qualities, essentially sensible and good--nor on the ground of
their rights; but that good or bad, rights or no rights, the democratic
formula is the only safe and preservative one for coming times. We endow
the masses with the suffrage for their own sake, no doubt; then, perhaps
still more, from another point of view, for community's sake. Leaving
the rest to the sentimentalists, we present freedom as sufficient in
its scientific aspect, cold as ice, reasoning, deductive, clear and
passionless as crystal.
Democracy too is law, and of the strictest, amplest kind. Many suppose,
(and often in its own ranks the error,) that it means a throwing aside
of law, and running riot. But, briefly, it is the superior law, not
alone that of physical force, the body, which, adding to, it supersedes
with that of the spirit. Law is the unshakable order of the universe
forever; and the law over all, and law of laws, is the law of
successions; that of the superior law, in time, gradually supplanting
and overwhelming the inferior one. (While, for myself, I would
cheerfully agree--first covenanting that the formative tendencies shall
be administer'd in favor, or at least not against it, and that this
reservation be closely construed--that until the individual or community
show due signs, or be so minor and fractional as not to endanger
the State, the condition of authoritative tutelage may continue, and
self-government must abide its time.) Nor is the esthetic point, always
an important one, without fascination for highest aiming souls. The
common ambition strains for elevations, to become some privileged
exclusive. The master sees greatness and health in being part of the
mass; nothing will do as well as common ground. Would you have in