The Art of Public Speaking
wearied of foretelling inventions yet to come, and he wished he could
revisit the earth at the end of a century to see how mankind was getting
on. With all my heart I share his wish. Of all the men who have built up
great States, I do believe there is not one whose alacrity of sound
sense and single-eyed beneficence of aim could be more safely trusted
than Franklin to draw light from the clouds and pierce the economic and
political confusions of our time. We can imagine the amazement and
complacency of that shrewd benignant mind if he could watch all the
giant marvels of your mills and furnaces, and all the apparatus devised
by the wondrous inventive faculties of man; if he could have foreseen
that his experiments with the kite in his garden at Philadelphia, his
tubes, his Leyden jars would end in the electric appliances of
to-day--the largest electric plant in all the world on the site of Fort
Duquesne; if he could have heard of 5,000,000,000 of passengers carried
in the United States by electric motor power in a year; if he could have
realized all the rest of the magician's tale of our time.
Still more would he have been astounded and elated could he have
foreseen, beyond all advances in material production, the unbroken
strength of that political structure which he had so grand a share in
rearing. Into this very region where we are this afternoon, swept wave
after wave of immigration; English from Virginia flowed over the border,
bringing English traits, literature, habits of mind; Scots, or
Scots-Irish, originally from Ulster, flowed in from Central
Pennsylvania; Catholics from Southern Ireland; new hosts from Southern
and East Central Europe. This is not the Fourth of July. But people of
every school would agree that it is no exuberance of rhetoric, it is
only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption and
incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements
into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an
achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, neither
Byzantine Empire nor Russian, not Charles the Great nor Charles the
Fifth nor Napoleon ever rivaled or approached.
We are usually apt to excuse the slower rate of liberal progress in our
Old World by contrasting the obstructive barriers of prejudice,
survival, solecism, anachronism, convention, institution, all so
obstinately rooted, even when the branches seem bare and broken, in an
old world, with the open and disengaged ground of the new. Yet in fact
your difficulties were at least as formidable as those of the older
civilizations into whose fruitful heritage you have entered. Unique was
the necessity of this gigantic task of incorporation, the assimilation
of people of divers faiths and race. A second difficulty was more
formidable still--how to erect and work a powerful and wealthy State on
such a system as to combine the centralized concert of a federal system
with local independence, and to unite collective energy with the
encouragement of individual freedom.
This last difficulty that you have so successfully up to now surmounted,
at the present hour confronts the mother country and deeply perplexes
her statesmen. Liberty and union have been called the twin ideas of
America. So, too, they are the twin ideals of all responsible men in
Great Britain; altho responsible men differ among themselves as to the
safest path on which to travel toward the common goal, and tho the
dividing ocean, in other ways so much our friend, interposes, for our
case of an island State, or rather for a group of island States,
obstacles from which a continental State like yours is happily
altogether free.
Nobody believes that no difficulties remain. Some of them are obvious.
But the common-sense, the mixture of patience and determination that has
conquered risks and mischiefs in the past, may be trusted with the
future.
Strange and devious are the paths of history. Broad and shining channels
get mysteriously silted up. How many a time what seemed a glorious high
road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac. Think of
Canning's flashing boast, when he insisted on the recognition of the
Spanish republics in South America--that he had called a new world into
existence to redress the balance of the old. This is one of the
sayings--of which sort many another might be found--that make the
fortune of a rhetorician, yet stand ill the wear and tear of time and
circumstance. The new world that Canning called into existence has so
far turned out a scene of singular disenchantment.
Tho not without glimpses on occasion of that heroism and courage and
even wisdom that are the attributes of man almost at the worst, the tale
has been too much a tale of anarchy and disaster, still leaving a host
of perplexities for statesmen both in America and Europe. It has left
also to students of a philosophic turn of mind one of the most
interesting of all the problems to be found in the whole field of
social, ecclesiastical, religious, and racial movement. Why is it that
we do not find in the south as we find in the north of this hemisphere a
powerful federation--a great Spanish-American people stretching from the
Rio Grande to Cape Horn? To answer that question would be to shed a
flood of light upon many deep historic forces in the Old World, of
which, after all, these movements of the New are but a prolongation and
more manifest extension.
What more imposing phenomenon does history present to us than the rise
of Spanish power to the pinnacle of greatness and glory in the sixteenth
century? The Mohammedans, after centuries of fierce and stubborn war,
driven back; the whole peninsula brought under a single rule with a
single creed; enormous acquisitions from the Netherlands of Naples,
Sicily, the Canaries; France humbled, England menaced, settlements made
in Asia and Northern Africa--Spain in America become possessed of a vast
continent and of more than one archipelago of splendid islands. Yet
before a century was over the sovereign majesty of Spain underwent a
huge declension, the territory under her sway was contracted, the
fabulous wealth of the mines of the New World had been wasted,
agriculture and industry were ruined, her commerce passed into the hands
of her rivals.
Let me digress one further moment. We have a very sensible habit in the
island whence I come, when our country misses fire, to say as little as
we can, and sink the thing in patriotic oblivion. It is rather startling
to recall that less than a century ago England twice sent a military
force to seize what is now Argentina. Pride of race and hostile creed
vehemently resisting, proved too much for us. The two expeditions ended
in failure, and nothing remains for the historian of to-day but to
wonder what a difference it might have made to the temperate region of
South America if the fortune of war had gone the other way, if the
region of the Plata had become British, and a large British immigration
had followed. Do not think me guilty of the heinous crime of forgetting
the Monroe Doctrine. That momentous declaration was not made for a good
many years after our Gen. Whitelocke was repulsed at Buenos Ayres, tho
Mr. Sumner and other people have always held that it was Canning who
really first started the Monroe Doctrine, when he invited the United
States to join him against European intervention in South American
affairs.
The day is at hand, we are told, when four-fifths of the human race will
trace their pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white
people in the United States trace their pedigree to-day. By the end of
this century, they say, such nations as France and Germany, assuming
that they stand apart from fresh consolidations, will only be able to
claim the same relative position in the political world as Holland and
Switzerland. These musings of the moon do not take us far. The important
thing, as we all know, is not the exact fraction of the human race that
will speak English. The important thing is that those who speak English,
whether in old lands or new, shall strive in lofty, generous and
never-ceasing emulation with peoples of other tongues and other stock
for the political, social, and intellectual primacy among mankind. In
this noble strife for the service of our race we need never fear that
claimants for the prize will be too large a multitude.
As an able scholar of your own has said, Jefferson was here using the
old vernacular of English aspirations after a free, manly, and
well-ordered political life--a vernacular rich in stately tradition and
noble phrase, to be found in a score of a thousand of champions in many
camps--in Buchanan, Milton, Hooker, Locke, Jeremy Taylor, Roger
Williams, and many another humbler but not less strenuous pioneer and
confessor of freedom. Ah, do not fail to count up, and count up often,
what a different world it would have been but for that island in the
distant northern sea! These were the tributary fountains, that, as time
went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time. What was new
in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity.
What is progress? It is best to be slow in the complex arts of politics
in their widest sense, and not to hurry to define. If you want a
platitude, there is nothing for supplying it like a definition. Or shall
we say that most definitions hang between platitude and paradox? There
are said, tho I have never counted, to be 10,000 definitions of
religion. There must be about as many of poetry. There can hardly be
fewer of liberty, or even of happiness.
I am not bold enough to try a definition. I will not try to gauge how
far the advance of moral forces has kept pace with that extension of
material forces in the world of which this continent, conspicuous before
all others, bears such astounding evidence. This, of course, is the
question of questions, because as an illustrious English writer--to
whom, by the way, I owe my friendship with your founder many long years
ago--as Matthew Arnold said in America here, it is moral ideas that at
bottom decide the standing or falling of states and nations. Without
opening this vast discussion at large, many a sign of progress is beyond
mistake. The practise of associated action--one of the master keys of
progress--is a new force in a hundred fields, and with immeasurable
diversity of forms. There is less acquiescence in triumphant wrong.
Toleration in religion has been called the best fruit of the last four
centuries, and in spite of a few bigoted survivals, even in our United
Kingdom, and some savage outbreaks of hatred, half religious, half
racial, on the Continent of Europe, this glorious gain of time may now
be taken as secured. Perhaps of all the contributions of America to
human civilization this is greatest. The reign of force is not yet over,
and at intervals it has its triumphant hours, but reason, justice,
humanity fight with success their long and steady battle for a wider
sway.
Of all the points of social advance, in my country at least, during the
last generation none is more marked than the change in the position of
women, in respect of rights of property, of education, of access to new
callings. As for the improvement of material well-being, and its
diffusion among those whose labor is a prime factor in its creation, we
might grow sated with the jubilant monotony of its figures, if we did
not take good care to remember, in the excellent words of the President
of Harvard, that those gains, like the prosperous working of your
institutions and the principles by which they are sustained, are in
essence moral contributions, "being principles of reason, enterprise,
courage, faith, and justice, over passion, selfishness, inertness,