Delivered in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., October 18, 1914. Used by permission.

Long ago Plato made a distinction between the occasions of war and the causes of war. The occasions of war lie upon the surface, and are known and read of all men, while the causes of war are embedded in racial antagonisms, in political and economic controversies. Narrative historians portray the occasions of war; philosophic historians, the secret and hidden causes. Thus the spark of fire that falls is the occasion of an explosion, but the cause of the havoc is the relation between charcoal, niter and saltpeter. The occasion of the Civil War was the firing upon Fort Sumter. The cause was the collision between the ideals of the Union presented by Daniel Webster and the secession taught by Calhoun. The occasion of the American Revolution was the Stamp Tax; the cause was the conviction on the part of our forefathers that men who had freedom in worship carried also the capacity for self-government. The occasion of the French Revolution was the purchase of a diamond necklace for Queen Marie Antoinette at a time when the treasury was exhausted; the cause of the revolution was feudalism. Not otherwise, the occasion of the great conflict that is now shaking our earth was the assassination of an Austrian boy and girl, but the cause is embedded in racial antagonisms and economic competition.

As for Russia, the cause of the war was her desire to obtain the Bosphorus—and an open seaport, which is the prize offered for her attack upon Germany. As for Austria, the cause of the war is her fear of the growing power of the Balkan States, and the progressive slicing away of her territory. As for France, the cause of the war is the instinct of self-preservation, that resists an invading host. As for Germany, the cause is her deep-seated conviction that every country has a moral right to the mouth of its greatest river; unable to compete with England, by roundabout sea routes and a Kiel Canal, she wants to use the route that nature digged for her through the mouth of the Rhine. As for England, the motherland is fighting to recover her sense of security. During the Napoleonic wars the second William Pitt explained the quadrupling of the taxes, the increase of the navy, and the sending of an English army against France, by the statement that justification of this proposed war is the "Preservation of England's sense of security." Ten years ago England lost her sense of security. Today she is not seeking to preserve, but to recover, the lost sense of security. She proposes to do this by destroying Germany's ironclads, demobilizing her army, wiping out her forts, and the partition of her provinces. The occasions of the war vary, with the color of the paper—"white" and "gray" and "blue"—but the causes of this war are embedded in racial antagonisms and economic and political differences.

Why Little Belgium Has the Center of the Stage

Tonight our study concerns little Belgium, her people, and their part in this conflict. Be the reasons what they may, this little land stands in the center of the stage and holds the limelight. Once more David, armed with a sling, has gone up against ten Goliaths. It is an amazing spectacle, this, one of the smallest of the States, battling with the largest of the giants! Belgium has a standing army of 42,000 men, and Germany, with three reserves, perhaps 7,000,000 or 8,000,000. Without waiting for any assistance, this little Belgium band went up against 2,000,000. It is as if a honey bee had decided to attack an eagle come to loot its honeycomb. It is as if an antelope had turned against a lion. Belgium has but 11,000 square miles of land, less than the States of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Her population is 7,500,000, less than the single State of New York. You could put twenty-two Belgiums in our single State of Texas. Much of her soil is thin; her handicaps are heavy, but the industry of her people has turned the whole land into one vast flower and vegetable garden. The soil of Minnesota and the Dakotas is new soil, and yet our farmers there average but fifteen bushels of wheat to the acre. Belgium's soil has been used for centuries, but it averages thirty-seven bushels of wheat to the acre. If we grow twenty-four bushels of barley on an acre of ground, Belgium grows fifty; she produces 300 bushels of potatoes, where the Maine farmer harvests 90 bushels. Belgium's average population per square mile has risen to 645 people. If Americans practised intensive farming; if the population of Texas were as dense as it is in Belgium—100,000,000 of the United States, Canada and Central America could all move to Texas, while if our entire country was as densely populated as Belgium's, everybody in the world could live comfortably within the limits of our country.

The Life of the People

And yet, little Belgium has no gold or silver mines, and all the treasures of copper and zinc and lead and anthracite and oil have been denied her. The gold is in the heart of her people. No other land holds a race more prudent, industrious and thrifty! It is a land where everybody works. In the winter when the sun does not rise until half past seven, the Belgian cottages have lights in their windows at five, and the people are ready for an eleven-hour day. As a rule all children work after 12 years of age. The exquisite pointed lace that has made Belgium famous, is wrought by women who fulfill the tasks of the household fulfilled by American women, and then begins their task upon the exquisite laces that have sent their name and fame throughout the world. Their wages are low, their work hard, but their life is so peaceful and prosperous that few Belgians ever emigrate to foreign countries. Of late they have made their education compulsory, their schools free. It is doubtful whether any other country has made a greater success of their system of transportation. You will pay 50 cents to journey some twenty odd miles out to Roslyn, on our Long Island railroad, but in Belgium a commuter journeys twenty miles in to the factory and back again every night and makes the six double daily journeys at an entire cost of 37-1/2 cents per week, less than the amount that you pay for the journey one way for a like distance in this country. Out of this has come Belgium's prosperity. She has the money to buy goods from other countries, and she has the property to export to foreign lands. Last year the United States, with its hundred millions of people, imported less than $2,000,000,000, and exported $2,500,000,000. If our people had been as prosperous per capita as Belgium, we would have purchased from other countries $12,000,000,000 worth of goods and exported $10,000,000,000.

So largely have we been dependent upon Belgium that many of the engines used in digging the Panama Canal came from the Cockerill works that produce two thousands of these engines every year in Liege. It is often said that the Belgians have the best courts in existence. The Supreme Court of Little Belgium has but one Justice. Without waiting for an appeal, just as soon as a decision has been reached by a lower Court, while the matters are still fresh in mind and all the witnesses and facts readily obtainable, this Supreme Justice reviews all the objections raised on either side and without a motion from anyone passes on the decision of the inferior court. On the other hand, the lower courts are open to an immediate settlement of disputes between the wage earners, and newsboys and fishermen are almost daily seen going to the judge for a decision regarding a dispute over five or ten cents. When the judge has cross-questioned both sides, without the presence of attorneys, or the necessity of serving a process, or raising a dollar and a quarter, as here, the poorest of the poor have their wrongs righted. It is said that not one decision out of one hundred is appealed, thus calling for the existence of an attorney.

To all other institutions organized in the interest of the wage earner has been added the national savings bank system, that makes loans to men of small means, that enables the farmer and the working man to buy a little garden and build a house, while at the same time insuring the working man against accident and sickness. Belgium is a poor man's country, it has been said, because institutions have been administered in the interest of the men of small affairs.

The Great Belgium Plain in History

But the institutions of Belgium and the industrial prosperity of her people alone are not equal to the explanation of her unique heroism. Long ago, in his Commentaries, Julius Cæsar said that Gaul was inhabited by three tribes, the Belgæ, the Aquitani, the Celts, "of whom the Belgæ were the bravest." History will show that Belgians have courage as their native right, for only the brave could have survived. The southeastern part of Belgium is a series of rock plains, and if these plains have been her good fortune in times of peace, they have furnished the battlefields of Western Europe for two thousand years. Northern France and Western Germany are rough, jagged and wooded, but the Belgian plains were ideal battlefields. For this reason the generals of Germany and of France have usually met and struggled for the mastery on these wide Belgian plains. On one of these grounds Julius Cæsar won the first battle that is recorded. Then came King Clovis and the French, with their campaigns; toward these plains also the Saracens were hurrying when assaulted by Charles Martel. On the Belgian plains the Dutch burghers and the Spanish armies, led by Bloody Alva, fought out their battle. Hither, too, came Napoleon, and the great mound of Waterloo is the monument to the Duke of Wellington's victory. It was to the Belgian plains, also, that the German general, last August, rushed his troops. Every college and every city searches for some level spot of land where the contest between opposing teams may be held, and for more than two thousand years the Belgian plain has been the scene of the great battles between the warring nations of Western Europe.

Now, out of all these collisions there has come a hardy race, inured to peril, rich in fortitude, loyalty, patience, thrift, self-reliance and persevering faith. For five hundred years the Belgian children and youth have been brought up upon the deeds of noble renown, achieved by their ancestors. If Julius Cæsar were here today he would wear Belgium's bravery like a bright sword, girded to his thigh. And when this brave little people, with a standing army of forty-two thousand men, single-handed defied two millions of Germans, it tells us that Ajax has come back once more to defy the god of lightnings.

A Thrilling Chapter from Belgium's History

Perhaps one or two chapters torn from the pages of Belgium history will enable us to understand her present-day heroism, just as one golden bough plucked from the forest will explain the richness of the autumn. You remember that Venice was once the financial center of the world. Then when the bankers lost confidence in the navy of Venice they put their jewels and gold into saddle bags and moved the financial center of the world to Nuremburg, because its walls were seven feet thick and twenty feet high. Later, about 1500 A.D., the discovery of the New World turned all the peoples into races of sea-going folk, and the English and Dutch captains vied with the sailors of Spain and Portugal. No captains were more prosperous than the mariners of Antwerp. In 1568 there were 500 marble mansions in this city on the Meuse. Belgium became a casket filled with jewels. Then it was that Spain turned covetous eyes northward. Sated with his pleasures, broken by indulgence and passion, the Emperor Charles the Fifth resigned his gold and throne to his son, King Philip. Finding his coffers depleted, Philip sent the Duke of Alva, with 10,000 Spanish soldiers, out on a looting expedition. Their approach filled Antwerp with consternation, for her merchants were busy with commerce and not with war. The sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards makes up a revolting page in history. Within three days 8,000 men, women and children were massacred, and the Spanish soldiers, drunk with wine and blood, hacked, drowned and burned like fiends that they were. The Belgian historian tells us that 500 marble residences were reduced to blackened ruins. One incident will make the event stand out. When the Spaniards approached the city a wealthy burgher hastened the day of his son's marriage. During the ceremony the soldiers broke down the gate of the city and crossed the threshold of the rich man's house. When they had stripped the guests of their purses and gems, unsatisfied, they killed the bridegroom, slew the men, and carried the bride out into the night. The next morning a young woman, crazed and half clad, was found in the street, searching among the dead bodies. At last she found a youth, whose head she lifted upon her knees, over which she crooned her songs, as a young mother soothes her babe. A Spanish officer passing by, humiliated by the spectacle, ordered a soldier to use his dagger and put the girl out of her misery.

The Horrors of the Inquisition

Having looted Antwerp, the treasure chest of Belgium, the Spaniards set up the Inquisition as an organized means of securing property. It is a strange fact that the Spaniard has excelled in cruelty as other nations have excelled in art or science or invention. Spain's cruelty to the Moors and the rich Jews forms one of the blackest chapters in history. Inquisitors became fiends. Moors were starved, tortured, burned, flung in wells, Jewish bankers had their tongues thrust through little iron rings; then the end of the tongue was seared that it might swell, and the banker was led by a string in the ring through the streets of the city. The women and the children were put on rafts that were pushed out into the Mediterranean Sea. When the swollen corpses drifted ashore, the plague broke out, and when that black plague spread over Spain it seemed like the justice of outraged nature. The expulsion of the Moors was one of the deadliest blows ever struck at science, commerce, art and literature. The historian tracks Spain across the continents by a trail of blood. Wherever Spain's hand has fallen it has paralyzed. From the days of Cortez, wherever her captains have given a pledge, the tongue that spake has been mildewed with lies and treachery. The wildest beasts are not in the jungle; man is the lion that rends, man is the leopard that tears, man's hate is the serpent that poisons, and the Spaniard entered Belgium to turn a garden into a wilderness. Within one year, 1568, Antwerp, that began with 125,000 people, ended it with 50,000. Many multitudes were put to death by the sword and stake, but many, many thousands fled to England, to begin anew their lives as manufacturers and mariners; and for years Belgium was one quaking peril, an inferno, whose torturers were Spaniards. The visitor in Antwerp is still shown the rack upon which they stretched the merchants that they might yield up their hidden gold. The Painted Lady may be seen. Opening her arms, she embraces the victim. The Spaniard, with his spear, forced the merchant into the deadly embrace. As the iron arms concealed in velvet folded together, one spike passed through each eye, another through the mouth, another through the heart. The Painted Lady's lips were poisoned, so that a kiss was fatal. The dungeon whose sides were forced together by screws, so that each day the victim saw his cell growing less and less, and knew that soon he would be crushed to death, was another instrument of torture. Literally thousands of innocent men and women were burned alive in the market place.

There is no more piteous tragedy in history than the story of the decline and ruin of this superbly prosperous, literary and artistic country, and yet out of the ashes came new courage. Burned, broken, the Belgians and the Dutch were not beaten. Pushed at last into Holland, where they united their fortunes with the Dutch, they cut the dykes of Holland, and let in the ocean, and clinging to the dykes with their finger tips, fought their way back to the land; but no sooner had the last of the Spaniards gone than out of their rags and poverty they founded a university as a monument to the providence of God in delivering them out of the hands of their enemies. For, the Sixteenth Century, in the form of a brave knight, wears little Belgium and Holland like a red rose upon his heart.

The Death of Egmont

But some of you will say that the Belgian people must have been rebels and guilty of some excess, and that had they remained quiescent, and not fomented treason, that no such fate could have overtaken them at the hands of Spain. Very well. I will take a youth who, at the beginning, believed in Charles the Fifth, a man who was as true to his ideals as the needle to the pole. One day the "Bloody Council" decreed the death of Egmont and Horn. Immediately afterward, the Duke of Alva sent an invitation to Egmont to be the guest of honor at a banquet in his own house. A servant from the palace that night delivered to the Count a slip of paper, containing a warning to take the fleetest horse and flee the city, and from that moment not to eat or sleep without pistols at his hand. To all this Egmont responded that no monster ever lived who could, with an invitation of hospitality, trick a patriot. Like a brave man, the Count went to the Duke's palace. He found the guests assembled, but when he had handed his hat and cloak to the servant, Alva gave a sign, and from behind the curtains came Spanish musqueteers, who demanded his sword. For instead of a banquet hall, the Count was taken to a cellar, fitted up as a dungeon. Already Egmont had all but died for his country. He had used his ships, his trade, his gold, for righting the people's wrongs. He was a man of a large family—a wife and eleven children—and people loved him as to idolatry. But Alva was inexorable. He had made up his mind that the merchants and burghers had still much hidden gold, and if he killed their bravest and best, terror would fall upon all alike, and that the gold he needed would be forthcoming. That all the people might witness the scene, he took his prisoners to Brussels and decided to behead them in the public square. In the evening Egmont received the notice that his head would be chopped off the next day. A scaffold was erected in the public square. That evening he wrote a letter that is a marvel of restraint.

"Sire—I have learned this evening the sentence which your majesty has been pleased to pronounce upon me. Although I have never had a thought, and believe myself never to have done a deed, which would tend to the prejudice of your service, or to the detriment of true religion, nevertheless I take patience to bear that which it has pleased the good God to permit. Therefore, I pray your majesty to have compassion on my poor wife, my children and my servants, having regard to my past service. In which hope I now commend myself to the mercy of God. From Brussels, ready to die, this 5th of June, 1568.

"Lamoral D' Egmont."

Thus died a man who did as much probably for Holland as John Eliot for England, or Lafayette for France, or Samuel Adams for this young republic.

The Woe of Belgium

And now out of all this glorious past comes the woe of Belgium. Desolation has come like the whirlwind, and destruction like a tornado. But ninety days ago and Belgium was a hive of industry, and in the fields were heard the harvest songs. Suddenly, Germany struck Belgium. The whole world has but one voice, "Belgium has innocent hands." She was led like a lamb to the slaughter. When the lover of Germany is asked to explain Germany's breaking of her solemn treaty upon the neutrality of Belgium, the German stands dumb and speechless. Merchants honor their written obligations. True citizens consider their word as good as their bond; Germany gave treaty, and in the presence of God and the civilized world, entered into a solemn covenant with Belgium. To the end of time, the German must expect this taunt, "as worthless as a German treaty." Scarcely less black the two or three known examples of cruelty wrought upon nonresisting Belgians. In Brooklyn lives a Belgian woman. She planned to return home in late July to visit a father who had suffered paralysis, an aged mother and a sister who nursed both. When the Germans decided to burn that village in Eastern Belgium, they did not wish to burn alive this old and helpless man, so they bayonetted to death the old man and woman, and the daughter that nursed them.

Let us judge not, that we be not judged. This is the one example of atrocity that you and I might be able personally to prove. But every loyal German in the country can make answer: "These soldiers were drunk with wine and blood. Such an atrocity misrepresents Germany and her soldiers. The breaking of Germany's treaty with Belgium represents the dishonor of a military ring, and not the perfidy of 68,000,000 of people. We ask that judgment be postponed until all the facts are in." But, meanwhile, the man who loves his fellows, at midnight in his dreams walks across the fields of broken Belgium. All through the night air there comes the sob of Rachel, weeping for her children, because they are not. In moods of bitterness, of doubt and despair the heart cries out, "How could a just God permit such cruelty upon innocent Belgium?" No man knows. "Clouds and darkness are round about God's throne." The spirit of evil caused this war, but the Spirit of God may bring good out of it, just as the summer can repair the ravages of winter. Meanwhile the heart bleeds for Belgium. For Brussels, the third most beautiful city in Europe! For Louvain, once rich with its libraries, cathedrals, statues, paintings, missals, manuscripts—now a ruin. Alas! for the ruined harvests and the smoking villages! Alas, for the Cathedral that is a heap, and the library that is a ruin. Where the angel of happiness was there stalk Famine and Death. Gone, the Land of Grotius! Perished the paintings of Rubens! Ruined is Louvain. Where the wheat waved, now the hillsides are billowy with graves. But let us believe that God reigns. Perchance Belgium is slain like the Saviour, that militarism may die like Satan. Without shedding of innocent blood there is no remission of sins through tyranny and greed. There is no wine without the crushing of the grapes from the tree of life. Soon Liberty, God's dear child, will stand within the scene and comfort the desolate. Falling upon the great world's altar stairs, in this hour when wisdom is ignorance, and the strongest man clutches at dust and straw, let us believe with faith victorious over tears, that some time God will gather broken-hearted little Belgium into His arms and comfort her as a Father comforteth his well-beloved child.

HENRY WATTERSON

THE NEW AMERICANISM

(Abridged)

Eight years ago tonight, there stood where I am standing now a young Georgian, who, not without reason, recognized the "significance" of his presence here, and, in words whose eloquence I cannot hope to recall, appealed from the New South to New England for a united country.

He is gone now. But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been appointed by God to carry a message of peace on earth, good will to men, and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the dove from the ark.

Grady told us, and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr. Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a shapely tree—symmetric in all its parts—under whose sheltering boughs this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled from oppression. Thank God, the ax, the gibbet, and the stake have had their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship.

So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made by slaves—and called it freedom—from the men in bell-crowned hats, who led Hester Prynne to her shame—and called it religion—to that Americanism which reaches forth its arms to smite wrong with reason and truth, secure in the power of both. I appeal from the patriarchs of New England to the poets of New England; from Endicott to Lowell; from Winthrop to Longfellow; from Norton to Holmes; and I appeal in the name and by the rights of that common citizenship—of that common origin—back of both the Puritan and the Cavalier—to which all of us owe our being. Let the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its martyrs, not by its savage hatreds—darkened alike by kingcraft and priestcraft—let the dead past bury its dead. Let the present and the future ring with the song of the singers. Blessed be the lessons they teach, the laws they make. Blessed be the eye to see, the light to reveal. Blessed be Tolerance, sitting ever on the right hand of God to guide the way with loving word, as blessed be all that brings us nearer the goal of true religion, true Republicanism, and true patriotism, distrust of watchwords and labels, shams and heroes, belief in our country and ourselves. It was not Cotton Mather, but John Greenleaf Whittier, who cried:—

JOHN MORLEY

FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS

(Abridged)

Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pa., November 3, 1904.

What is so hard as a just estimate of the events of our own time? It is only now, a century and a half later, that we really perceive that a writer has something to say for himself when he calls Wolfe's exploit at Quebec the turning point in modern history. And to-day it is hard to imagine any rational standard that would not make the American Revolution—an insurrection of thirteen little colonies, with a population of 3,000,000 scattered in a distant wilderness among savages—a mightier event in many of its aspects than the volcanic convulsion in France. Again, the upbuilding of your great West on this continent is reckoned by some the most important world movement of the last hundred years. But is it more important than the amazing, imposing and perhaps disquieting apparition of Japan? One authority insists that when Russia descended into the Far East and pushed her frontier on the Pacific to the forty-third degree of latitude that was one of the most far-reaching facts of modern history, tho it almost escaped the eyes of Europe—all her perceptions then monopolized by affairs in the Levant. Who can say? Many courses of the sun were needed before men could take the full historic measures of Luther, Calvin, Knox; the measure of Loyola, the Council of Trent, and all the counter-reformation. The center of gravity is forever shifting, the political axis of the world perpetually changing. But we are now far enough off to discern how stupendous a thing was done when, after two cycles of bitter war, one foreign, the other civil and intestine, Pitt and Washington, within a span of less than a score of years, planted the foundations of the American Republic.

What Forbes's stockade at Fort Pitt has grown to be you know better than I. The huge triumphs of Pittsburg in material production—iron, steel, coke, glass, and all the rest of it—can only be told in colossal figures that are almost as hard to realize in our minds as the figures of astronomical distance or geologic time. It is not quite clear that all the founders of the Commonwealth would have surveyed the wonderful scene with the same exultation as their descendants. Some of them would have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in the Old World or in the New always stand for progress. Jefferson said, "I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man. I consider the class of artificers," he went on, "as the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a country are generally overthrown." In England they reckon 70 per cent. of our population as dwellers in towns. With you, I read that only 25 per cent. of the population live in groups so large as 4,000 persons. If Jefferson was right our outlook would be dark. Let us hope that he was wrong, and in fact toward the end of his time qualified his early view. Franklin, at any rate, would, I feel sure, have reveled in it all.

That great man—a name in the forefront among the practical intelligences of human history—once told a friend that when he dwelt upon the rapid progress that mankind was making in politics, morals, and the arts of living, and when he considered that each one improvement always begets another, he felt assured that the future progress of the race was likely to be quicker than it had ever been. He was never 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, timidity, and distrust." It is the moral impulses that matter. Where they are safe, all is safe.

When this and the like is said, nobody supposes that the last word has been spoken as to the condition of the people either in America or Europe. Republicanism is not itself a panacea for economic difficulties. Of self it can neither stifle nor appease the accents of social discontent. So long as it has no root in surveyed envy, this discontent itself is a token of progress.

What, cries the skeptic, what has become of all the hopes of the time when France stood upon the top of golden hours? Do not let us fear the challenge. Much has come of them. And over the old hopes time has brought a stratum of new.

Liberalism is sometimes suspected of being cold to these new hopes, and you may often hear it said that Liberalism is already superseded by Socialism. That a change is passing over party names in Europe is plain, but you may be sure that no change in name will extinguish these principles of society which are rooted in the nature of things, and are accredited by their success. Twice America has saved liberalism in Great Britain. The War for Independence in the eighteenth century was the defeat of usurping power no less in England than here. The War for Union in the nineteenth century gave the decisive impulse to a critical extension of suffrage, and an era of popular reform in the mother country. Any miscarriage of democracy here reacts against progress in Great Britain.

If you seek the real meaning of most modern disparagement of popular or parliamentary government, it is no more than this, that no politics will suffice of themselves to make a nation's soul. What could be more true? Who says it will? But we may depend upon it that the soul will be best kept alive in a nation where there is the highest proportion of those who, in the phrase of an old worthy of the seventeenth century, think it a part of a man's religion to see to it that his country be well governed.

Democracy, they tell us, is afflicted by mediocrity and by sterility. But has not democracy in my country, as in yours, shown before now that it well knows how to choose rulers neither mediocre nor sterile; men more than the equals in unselfishness, in rectitude, in clear sight, in force, of any absolutist statesman, that ever in times past bore the scepter? If I live a few months, or it may be even a few weeks longer, I hope to have seen something of three elections—one in Canada, one in the United Kingdom, and the other here. With us, in respect of leadership, and apart from height of social prestige, the personage corresponding to the president is, as you know, the prime minister. Our general election this time, owing to personal accident of the passing hour, may not determine quite exactly who shall be the prime minister, but it will determine the party from which the prime minister shall be taken. On normal occasions our election of a prime minister is as direct and personal as yours, and in choosing a member of Parliament people were really for a whole generation choosing whether Disraeli or Gladstone or Salisbury should be head of the government.

The one central difference between your system and ours is that the American president is in for a fixed time, whereas the British prime minister depends upon the support of the House of Commons. If he loses that, his power may not endure a twelvemonth; if on the other hand, he keeps it, he may hold office for a dozen years. There are not many more interesting or important questions in political discussion than the question whether our cabinet government or your presidential system of government is the better. This is not the place to argue it.

Between 1868 and now—a period of thirty-six years—we have had eight ministries. This would give an average life of four and a half years. Of these eight governments five lasted over five years. Broadly speaking, then, our executive governments have lasted about the length of your fixed term. As for ministers swept away by a gust of passion, I can only recall the overthrow of Lord Palmerston in 1858 for being thought too subservient to France. For my own part, I have always thought that by its free play, its comparative fluidity, its rapid flexibility of adaptation, our cabinet system has most to say for itself.

Whether democracy will make for peace, we all have yet to see. So far democracy has done little in Europe to protect us against the turbid whirlpools of a military age. When the evils of rival states, antagonistic races, territorial claims, and all the other formulas of international conflict are felt to be unbearable and the curse becomes too great to be any longer borne, a school of teachers will perhaps arise to pick up again the thread of the best writers and wisest rulers on the eve of the revolution. Movement in this region of human things has not all been progressive. If we survey the European courts from the end of the Seven Years' War down to the French Revolution, we note the marked growth of a distinctly international and pacific spirit. At no era in the world's history can we find so many European statesmen after peace and the good government of which peace is the best ally. That sentiment came to violent end when Napoleon arose to scourge the world.

ROBERT TOOMBS

ON RESIGNING FROM THE SENATE, 1861

(Abridged)

The success of the Abolitionists and their allies, under the name of the Republican party, has produced its logical results already. They have for long years been sowing dragons' teeth and have finally got a crop of armed men. The Union, sir, is dissolved. That is an accomplished fact in the path of this discussion that men may as well heed. One of your confederates has already wisely, bravely, boldly confronted public danger, and she is only ahead of many of her sisters because of her greater facility for speedy action. The greater majority of those sister States, under like circumstances, consider her cause as their cause; and I charge you in their name to-day: "Touch not Saguntum."[37] It is not only their cause, but it is a cause which receives the sympathy and will receive the support of tens and hundreds of honest patriot men in the nonslaveholding States, who have hitherto maintained constitutional rights, and who respect their oaths, abide by compacts, and love justice.

And while this Congress, this Senate, and this House of Representatives are debating the constitutionality and the expediency of seceding from the Union, and while the perfidious authors of this mischief are showering down denunciations upon a large portion of the patriotic men of this country, those brave men are coolly and calmly voting what you call revolution—aye, sir, doing better than that: arming to defend it. They appealed to the Constitution, they appealed to justice, they appealed to fraternity, until the Constitution, justice, and fraternity were no longer listened to in the legislative halls of their country, and then, sir, they prepared for the arbitrament of the sword; and now you see the glittering bayonet, and you hear the tramp of armed men from your capitol to the Rio Grande. It is a sight that gladdens the eyes and cheers the hearts of other millions ready to second them. Inasmuch, sir, as I have labored earnestly, honestly, sincerely, with these men to avert this necessity so long as I deemed it possible, and inasmuch as I heartily approve their present conduct of resistance, I deem it my duty to state their case to the Senate, to the country, and to the civilized world.

Senators, my countrymen have demanded no new government; they have demanded no new Constitution. Look to their records at home and here from the beginning of this national strife until its consummation in the disruption of the empire, and they have not demanded a single thing except that you shall abide by the Constitution of the United States; that constitutional rights shall be respected, and that justice shall be done. Sirs, they have stood by your Constitution; they have stood by all its requirements, they have performed all its duties unselfishly, uncalculatingly, disinterestedly, until a party sprang up in this country which endangered their social system—a party which they arraign, and which they charge before the American people and all mankind with having made proclamation of outlawry against four thousand millions of their property in the Territories of the United States; with having put them under the ban of the empire in all the States in which their institutions exist outside the protection of federal laws; with having aided and abetted insurrection from within and invasion from without with the view of subverting those institutions, and desolating their homes and their firesides. For these causes they have taken up arms.

I have stated that the discontented States of this Union have demanded nothing but clear, distinct, unequivocal, well-acknowledged constitutional rights—rights affirmed by the highest judicial tribunals of their country; rights older than the Constitution; rights which are planted upon the immutable principles of natural justice; rights which have been affirmed by the good and the wise of all countries, and of all centuries. We demand no power to injure any man. We demand no right to injure our confederate States. We demand no right to interfere with their institutions, either by word or deed. We have no right to disturb their peace, their tranquillity, their security. We have demanded of them simply, solely—nothing else—to give us equality, security and tranquillity. Give us these, and peace restores itself. Refuse them, and take what you can get.

What do the rebels demand? First, "that the people of the United States shall have an equal right to emigrate and settle in the present or any future acquired Territories, with whatever property they may possess (including slaves), and be securely protected in its peaceable enjoyment until such Territory may be admitted as a State into the Union, with or without slavery, as she may determine, on an equality with all existing States." That is our Territorial demand. We have fought for this Territory when blood was its price. We have paid for it when gold was its price. We have not proposed to exclude you, tho you have contributed very little of blood or money. I refer especially to New England. We demand only to go into those Territories upon terms of equality with you, as equals in this great Confederacy, to enjoy the common property of the whole Union, and receive the protection of the common government, until the Territory is capable of coming into the Union as a sovereign State, when it may fix its own institutions to suit itself.

The second proposition is, "that property in slaves shall be entitled to the same protection from the government of the United States, in all of its departments, everywhere, which the Constitution confers the power upon it to extend to any other property, provided nothing herein contained shall be construed to limit or restrain the right now belonging to every State to prohibit, abolish, or establish and protect slavery within its limits." We demand of the common government to use its granted powers to protect our property as well as yours. For this protection we pay as much as you do. This very property is subject to taxation. It has been taxed by you and sold by you for taxes.

The title to thousands and tens of thousands of slaves is derived from the United States. We claim that the government, while the Constitution recognizes our property for the purposes of taxation, shall give it the same protection that it gives yours.

Ought it not to be so? You say no. Every one of you upon the committee said no. Your senators say no. Your House of Representatives says no. Throughout the length and breadth of your conspiracy against the Constitution there is but one shout of no! This recognition of this right is the price of my allegiance. Withhold it, and you do not get my obedience. This is the philosophy of the armed men who have sprung up in this country. Do you ask me to support a government that will tax my property: that will plunder me; that will demand my blood, and will not protect me? I would rather see the population of my native State laid six feet beneath her sod than they should support for one hour such a government. Protection is the price of obedience everywhere, in all countries. It is the only thing that makes government respectable. Deny it and you can not have free subjects or citizens; you may have slaves.

We demand, in the next place, "that persons committing crimes against slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, shall be delivered up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee shall be the test of criminality." That is another one of the demands of an extremist and a rebel.

But the nonslaveholding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts, have steadily refused, if the criminal only stole a negro and that negro was a slave, to deliver him up. It was refused twice on the requisition of my own State as long as twenty-two years ago. It was refused by Kent and by Fairfield, governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each of the then federal parties. We appealed then to fraternity, but we submitted; and this constitutional right has been practically a dead letter from that day to this. The next case came up between us and the State of New York, when the present senior senator [Mr. Seward] was the governor of that State; and he refused it. Why? He said it was not against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore he would not comply with the demand. He made a similar refusal to Virginia. Yet these are our confederates; these are our sister States! There is the bargain; there is the compact. You have sworn to it. Both these governors swore to it. The senator from New York swore to it. The governor of Ohio swore to it when he was inaugurated. You can not bind them by oaths. Yet they talk to us of treason; and I suppose they expect to whip freemen into loving such brethren! They will have a good time in doing it!

It is natural we should want this provision of the Constitution carried out. The Constitution says slaves are property; the Supreme Court says so; the Constitution says so. The theft of slaves is a crime; they are a subject-matter of felonious asportation. By the text and letter of the Constitution you agreed to give them up. You have sworn to do it, and you have broken your oaths. Of course, those who have done so look out for pretexts. Nobody expected them to do otherwise. I do not think I ever saw a perjurer, however bald and naked, who could not invent some pretext to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings, hire an Old Bailey lawyer to invent some for him. Yet this requirement of the Constitution is another one of the extreme demands of an extremist and a rebel.

The next stipulation is that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, without being entitled either to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other similar obstructions of legislation, in the State to which he may flee. Here is the Constitution: