prived should be accompanied with violence and even with crime. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end." Pray fearlessly for such ends: there is no risk! "Men are all tories by nature," says Arnold, "when tolerably well off: only monstrous injustice and atrocious cruelty 5 can rouse them." Some talk of the rashness of the uneducated classes. Alas! ignorance is far oftener obstinate than rash. Against one French Revolution that scarecrow of the ages weigh Asia, "carved in stone,” and a thousand years of Europe, with her half-dozen nations meted out and 10 trodden down to be the dull and contented footstools of priests and kings. The customs of a thousand years ago are the sheet-anchor of the passing generation, so deeply buried, so fixed, that the most violent efforts of the maddest fanatic can drag it but a hand's-breadth. Before the war Americans were like the crowd in that terrible hall of Eblis which Beckford painted for us, each man with his hand pressed on the incurable sore in his bosom, and pledged not to speak of it: compared with other lands, we were intellectually and morally a nation of cowards. 15 20 When I first entered the Roman States, a custom-house official seized all my French books. In vain I held up to him a treatise by Fénelon, and explained that it was by a Catholic archbishop of Cambray. Gruffly he answered, "It makes no difference: it is French." As I surrendered the volume 25 to his remorseless grasp, I could not but honor the nation which had made its revolutionary purpose so definite that despotism feared its very language. I only wished that injustice and despotism everywhere might one day have as good cause to hate and to fear everything American. At last that disgraceful seal of slave complicity is broken. Let us inaugurate a new departure, recognize that we are afloat on the current of Niagara, eternal vigilance the condition of our safety, that we are irrevocably pledged to the world not to go back to bolts and we would, and would not if we could. bars, — could not if Never again be ours 330 35 one 66 Very beautifloats with out the fastidious scholarship that shrinks from rude contact with the masses. Very pleasant it is to sit high up in the world's theatre and criticise the ungraceful struggles of the gladiators, shrug one's shoulders at the actors' harsh cries, and know that but for "this villainous salt5 let every petre you would yourself have been a soldier." But Bacon says, "In the theatre of man's life, God and his angels only should be lookers-on." "Sin is not taken out of man as Eve was out of Adam, by putting him to sleep." 10 ful," says Richter, "is the eagle when he stretched wings aloft in the clear blue; but sublime when he plunges down through the tempest to his eyry on the cliff, where his unfledged young ones dwell and are starving." Accept proudly the analysis of Fisher Ames: "A monarchy 15 is a man-of-war, stanch, iron-ribbed, and resistless when under full sail; yet a single hidden rock sends her to the bottom. Our republic is a raft, hard to steer, and your feet always wet ; but nothing can sink her." If the Alps, piled in cold and silence, be the emblem of despotism, we joyfully take the 20 ever-restless ocean for ours, only pure because never still. Journalism must have more self-respect. Now it praises good and bad men so indiscriminately that a good word from nine-tenths of our journals is worthless. In burying our Aaron Burrs, both political parties — in order to get the 25 credit of magnanimity — exhaust the vocabulary of eulogy so thoroughly that there is nothing left with which to distinguish our John Jays. The love of a good name in life and a fair reputation to survive us that strong bond to well-doingis lost where every career, however stained, is covered with the 30 same fulsome flattery, and where what men say in the streets is the exact opposite of what they say to each other. De mortuis nil nisi bonum most men translate, "Speak only good of the dead." I prefer to construe it, "Of the dead say nothing unless you can tell something good." And if the sin and 35 the recreancy have been marked and far-reaching in their evil, even the charity of silence is not permissible. To be as good as our fathers we must be better. They silenced their fears and subdued their prejudices, inaugurating free speech and equality with no precedent on the file. Europe shouted "Madmen!" and gave us forty years for the shipwreck. With serene faith they persevered. Let 5 us rise to their level. Crush appetite and prohibit temptation if it rots great cities. Intrench labor in sufficient bulwarks against that wealth, which, without the tenfold strength of modern incorporation, wrecked the Grecian and Roman States; and, with a sterner effort still, summon women into 10 civil life as re-enforcement to our laboring ranks in the effort to make our civilization a success. Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward. "New occasions teach new duties; Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly Nor attempt the Future's portal 15 20 20 II. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. The Leadership of Educated Men.1 Delivered before the Alumni of Brown University, Providence, June 20, 1882. [This oration is, in a way, a reply to the Phi Beta Kappa address of 25 Wendell Phillips. "The subject with which it deals, the place of the educated man in public affairs, was a particularly congenial one to Mr. 1 1 Reprinted, by permission, from the Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis: Copyright, 1893, by Messrs. Harper and Brothers. Curtis, as it has been to other men who have thought deeply over the problems of our democracy. In 1856, in an address which Mr. Curtis delivered before the literary societies of Wesleyan University, his first platform oration of any note, he chose for his topic The Duty of the 5 American Scholar to Politics and the Times.' A year later, in 1857, when he spoke to the graduating class of Union College on Patriotism' he took as his theme this question: How can you, as educated young Americans, best serve the great cause of human development to which all nationalities are subservient?' Again, twenty years after this, 10 in another address before the students of Union College, he had for his subject The Public Duty of Educated Men."" American Oratory, R. C. Ringwalt, p. 256. H. Holt & Co.] There is a modern English picture which the genius of Hawthorne might have inspired. The painter calls it, 15 "How they met themselves." A man and a woman, haggard and weary, wandering lost in a somber wood, suddenly meet the shadowy figures of a youth and a maid. Some mysterious fascination fixes the gaze and stills the hearts of the wanderers, and their amazement deepens into awe as 20 they gradually recognize themselves as once they were; the soft bloom of youth upon their rounded cheeks, the dewy light of hope in their trusting eyes, exulting confidence in their springing step, themselves blithe and radiant with the glory of the dawn. To-day, and here, we meet ourselves. 25 Not to these familiar scenes alone-yonder college-green with its reverend traditions; the halcyon cove of the Seekonk, upon which the memory of Roger Williams broods like a bird of calm; the historic bay, beating forever with the muffled oars of Barton and of Abraham Whipple; here, 30 the humming city of the living; there, the peaceful city of the dead ; —— not to these only or chiefly do we return, but to ourselves as we once were. It is not the smiling freshmen of the year, it is your own beardless and unwrinkled faces, that are looking from the windows of University Hall and of 35 Hope College. Under the trees upon the hill it is yourselves whom you see walking, full of hopes and dreams, glowing with conscious power, and "nourishing a youth sublime"; and in this familiar temple, which surely has never echoed with eloquence so fervid and inspiring as that of your commencement orations, it is not yonder youths in the galleries who, as they fondly believe, are whispering to yonder maids; it is your younger selves who, in the days that are no more, 5 are murmuring to the fairest mothers and grandmothers of those maids. Happy the worn and weary man and woman in the picture could they have felt their older eyes still glistening with that earlier light, and their hearts yet beating with undiminished 10 sympathy and aspiration. Happy we, brethren, whatever may have been achieved, whatever left undone, if, returning to the home of our earlier years, we bring with us the illimitable hope, the unchilled resolution, the inextinguishable faith of youth. 15 It was as scholars that you were here; it is to the feeling and life of scholars that you return. I mean the scholar not as a specialist or deeply proficient student, not like Darwin, a conqueror greater than Alexander, who extended the empire of human knowledge; nor like Emerson, whose serene 20 wisdom, a planet in the cloudless heaven, lighted the path of his age to larger spiritual liberty; nor like Longfellow, sweet singer of our national spring-time, whose scholarship decorated his pure and limpid song as flowers are mirrored in a placid stream— not as scholars like these, but as edu- 25 cated men, to whom the dignity and honor and renown of the educated class are precious, however remote from study your lives may have been, you return to the annual festival of letters. "Neither years nor books," says Emerson, speaking of his own college days, "have yet availed to extirpate a 30 prejudice then rooted in me that a scholar is the favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." But every educated man is aware of a profound popular distrust of the courage and sagacity of the educated class. 35 Franklin and Lincoln are good enough for us, exclaims this |