Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
as this to be held out to ambition? Can we wonder at the shameless
profligacy, intrigue, and the base sacrifices of public interests
by which it is sought, and, when gained, held fast? Undoubtedly,
great social changes are required to heal this evil, to diminish
this accumulation of power. National spirit, which is virtual
hostility to all countries but our own, must yield to a growing
humanity, to a new knowledge of the spirit of Christ. Another
important step is, a better comprehension by communities that
government is at best a rude machinery, which can accomplish but
very limited good, and which, when strained to accomplish what
individuals should do for themselves, is sure to be perverted by
selfishness to narrow purposes, or to defeat through ignorance its
own ends. Man is too ignorant to govern much, to form vast plans
for states and empires. Human policy has almost always been in
conflict with the great laws of social well-being, and the less we
rely on it the better. The less of power given to man over man the
better. (_Works_, Vol. VI, pp. 26-27.)
Channing had evidently read his _Political Justice_ to good effect,
for the spirit of eighteenth-century liberalism had passed into his
thought and given shape to his political philosophy. In his hatred of
war, his pacifism, his humanitarian concern, his social-mindedness,
his repudiation of all coercive centralizing power, he proved himself
a child of Godwin. He would have no tyranny, whether by the organized
state or by the unorganized mass. He extended to all men the right
of free thought and free speech. In no other cause did he speak
more vehemently than in defense of this democratic right. When the
Abolitionists were mobbed and their presses broken he rejoiced in their
refusal to be silenced. “From my heart I thank them,” he wrote. “I am
myself their debtor. I am not sure, that I should this moment write in
safety, had they shrunk from the conflict, had they shut their lips,
imposed silence on their presses, and hid themselves before their
ferocious assailants.... I thank the Abolitionists, that in this evil
day, they were true to the rights which the multitude were ready to
betray.” Then follows a passage that is perennially true, considering
how hardly won and easily lost is the right of free speech:
Of all powers, the last to be entrusted to the multitude of men,
is that of determining what questions shall be discussed. The
greatest truths are often the most unpopular and exasperating; and
were they to be denied discussion, till the many should be ready to
accept them, they would never establish themselves in the general
mind. The progress of society depends on nothing more, than on the
exposure of time-honored abuses, which cannot be touched without
offending multitudes, than on the promulgation of principles,
which are in advance of public sentiment and practice, and which
are constantly at war with the habits, prejudices, and immediate
interests of large classes of the community. Of consequence, the
multitude, if once allowed to dictate or proscribe subjects of
discussion, would strike society with spiritual blindness, and
death. The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first
offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and
would rejoice to crush. The right of free discussion is therefore
to be guarded by the friends of mankind, with peculiar jealousy.
It is at once the most sacred, and the most endangered of all our
rights. He who would rob his neighbor of it, should have a mark
set on him as the worst enemy of freedom. (“The Abolitionists,” in
_Works_, Vol. II, p. 161.)
High-minded and generous was this child of Puritan idealism who had
gone to school to French infidel philosophy--never untrue to the
principle of free inquiry which in demanding for himself he willingly
granted others. He calmly accepted the fact of disintegration which
is implicit in all liberalism--the denial of traditional authority
and ancient custom--partly because he believed the old ways were
bad, but in part also because he held strongly to his faith in human
nature. Despite failure and discouragement he clung to his cardinal
belief--“My one sublime idea, which has given me unity of mind, the
greatness, the divinity of the soul.” He broke the more willingly with
an ungenerous past because he envisaged a nobler future. An intuitive
individualist, he was a forerunner of transcendental individualism,
and he found himself in hearty accord with Emerson’s doctrines in
the Divinity School address. With the later rationalistic phase of
Unitarianism which began with Theodore Parker’s memorable South
Boston sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in Christianity_, in
May, 1841, he found himself only partly in intellectual sympathy.
He remained a supernaturalist after the younger generation had
rejected supernaturalism; but his sturdy adherence to the principle
of liberalism would not suffer him to join in the Unitarian hue and
cry raised against the young radical. Unitarianism turned orthodox,
and bent on erecting new dogmas, seemed to him treasonable to every
liberal hope. “As to Mr. Parker,” he wrote, “I wish him to preach what
he thoroughly believes and feels. I trust the account you received
of attempts to _put him down_ was in the main a fiction. Let the
full heart pour itself forth!” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery
Channing_, p. 357.) Sixteen months after he penned those words Channing
was dead, but the spirit of his life was embodied in the great ferment
that was rising about him when he died. “Let the full heart pour itself
forth”--to many sober Bostonians it seemed that New England had taken
that injunction quite too literally and was pouring forth disturbant
and gusty heresies, but Channing would scarcely have disapproved.
Footnotes
[440] See Fenn, _Religious History of New England: King’s Chapel
Lectures_, p. 130.
[441] See Williston Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches
in the United States_, p. 283.
[442] _Ibid._, p. 356.
[443] _Ibid._, pp. 276-277.
[444] _Ibid._, p. 272.
[445] Compare a fuller estimate in Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_,
Vol. III, pp. 239-242.
[446] In the Glasgow edition of 1844 it prefaces the sixth volume.
[447] For a brief discussion, see Merriam, _American Political
Theories_, pp. 217-221.
Chapter III • Liberalism and the Social Conscience
I • The Social Mind
Unitarianism was generous in its bequests to New England, and amongst
its contributions to a nobler life not the least valuable was its warm
social sympathy. Channing’s tender social conscience sprang directly
from his humanitarian religion. Not from the hard old Calvinism did
he get this fine flower of a humane life, but from the new French
philosophy. Not from bounding his ethics by the Decalogue, or hating
sin more than he loved generosity, did he break the hard shell of
Puritan righteousness; but by metamorphosing the sinner into a child
of God and sharing with him the divine promise. Other-mindedness came
naturally to a religion established in a God of love. The social
conscience could not remain indifferent to injustice visited upon
the children of a common Father. Yet other-mindedness was a virtue
practiced too little in Calvinist New England. That old world had been
more concerned with hopes of individual salvation, with propitiating
an angry God, than with its present obligations to its neighbors.
Hard doctrine--which the old Puritan loved--was likely to make hard
characters, and an ascetic society was likely to breed close-fisted
natures. The conscience was tender in New England, but it was tender
chiefly as the guardian and monitor of the Ten Commandments; it gave
itself too little concern about the new commandment which Jesus
laid upon his disciples. It disciplined men and women in personal
righteousness, it created self-reliant characters, it scrutinized
narrowly the neighborhood conduct; but its social issues were likely
to be mean and petty. The righteousness of which it professed to be
guardian and monitor too often fell far short of generous manly stature.
From this hardness of the old religion came the hardness of the social
conscience. When the Yankee was driven by brutal fact to admit that
he was his brother’s keeper, he usually took care to get a few honest
pennies out of his brother’s board and lodging. The village poor
were provided for by farming out, as the taxes were farmed out. The
town meeting haggled narrowly over the terms, and substantial deacons
underbid each other. Though the price might be low, some profit might
still be got from the pauper’s keep. It was a cold, hard, unsympathetic
world for the social unfortunate, whether pauper, debtor, or idiot;
and it was harsh as well to the children of all but the wealthy.
The hours of toil were long, and the public schools about which the
historians have bragged rather too loudly, were poor affairs, starved
by the common niggardliness, ill taught and ill provided. The academies
and colleges that professed to keep the torch of learning aflame were
largely perquisites of the gentry. It is beside the point to assert
that public schools existed in New England long before Virginia had
any, and that poor boys stinted and starved their way through Harvard
and Yale. Well known as such facts are, they do not testify to a high
social sense in a people supposed to have been tender of conscience.
The Calvinist was taught to fear God rather than to love him. It was a
strong man’s business to save one’s soul and make a decent living; and
in the social code of New England the weakling must take his chance.
There was helpful neighborliness of course in old New England, and
much honest kindliness. Some of the hardest of dogmatic Calvinists
were the most considerate and gentlest of men. Old Samuel Hopkins of
slave-running Newport was a generous soul who preached the gospel of
love to one’s fellows, and practiced the virtues of apostleship to
the poor and outcast. He denounced the slave trade to parishioners
who knew all the inlets of the West African coast, and got himself
well disliked. His congregation preferred his hard theology to his
inconvenient humanitarianism, and kept him poor all his days. The
dogmatic Timothy Dwight scathingly attacked slavery in his _Greenfield
Hill_, denounced the injustice done the negro, and even protested
against the extension of capital punishment. Yet for all such protests
the common conscience was untouched. The Yankee was always standing
in the way of the Puritan’s righteousness. Respectability was founded
on property, and respectability was mightier in New England than even
John Calvin. It was the brutal debtor laws that brought on Shays’s
Rebellion, which Federalist church members put down and denied the
grievances. It was no tender conscience that extinguished slavery
in Massachusetts, for long after it became unprofitable there the
Yankee skipper was still in the slave trade. Dignified Tory Row on
what is now Brattle Street, Cambridge, was built by gentlemen who
drew their wealth from West Indian slave plantations.[448] William
Lloyd Garrison’s offense in Baltimore, for which he was thrown into
jail, lay in publishing the name of a Massachusetts shipmaster from
Newburyport--Garrison’s native town--who was engaged in the coastwise
slave traffic.[449] In the year 1830 there were somewhat more than a
hundred Abolition Societies in the United States, not one of which was
in New England; and in the first number of the _Liberator_ Garrison
wrote, probably without exaggeration, that he found “contempt more
bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice