VI
If we are not, after all, a happy people, in the full enjoyment of life and liberty, what is this sickness that troubleth our Israel? Why huddle so many captains within the walls of the city, impotently whining beside their spears? Why seek so many for rest while this our Israel is young among the nations? “Thou hast multiplied the nation and not increased the joy; they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.” Weariness fell upon Judah, and despite the warnings of noble and eloquent prophets she perished. It is now a good many years since Mr. Arnold cited Isaiah and Plato for our benefit to illustrate his belief that with us, as with Judah and Athens, the majority are unsound. And yet from his essay on Numbers—an essay for which Lowell’s “Democracy” is an excellent antidote—we may turn with a feeling of confidence and security to that untired and unwearying majority which Arnold believed to be unsound. Many instances of the soundness of our majority have been afforded since Mr. Arnold’s death, and it is a reasonable expectation that, in spite of the apparent ease with which the majority may be stampeded, it nevertheless pauses with a safe margin between it and the precipice. Illustrations of failure abound in history, but the very rise and development of our nation has discredited History as a prophet. In the multiplication of big and little Smiths lies our only serious danger. The disposition of the sick Smiths to deplore as unhealthy and unsound such a radical movement as began in 1896, and still sweeps merrily on in 1912, never seriously arrests the onward march of those who sincerely believe that we were meant to be a great refuge for mankind. If I must choose, I prefer to take my chances with the earnest, healthy, patriotic millions rather than with an oligarchy of tired Smiths. Our impatience of the bounds of law set by men who died before the Republic was born does not justify the whimpering of those Smiths who wrap themselves in the grave-clothes of old precedents, and who love the Constitution only when they fly to it for shelter. Tired business men, weary professional men, bored farmers, timorous statesmen are not of the vigorous stuff of those
“Who founded us and spread from sea to sea
A thousand leagues the zone of liberty,
And gave to man this refuge from his past,
Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”
Our country’s only enemies are the sick men, the tired men, who have exhausted themselves in the vain pursuit of vain things; who forget that democracy like Christianity is essentially social, and who constitute a sick remnant from whom it is devoutly to be hoped the benign powers may forever protect us.