LOWELL’S PROPHECY.
Now, friends, there has been an element of comedy to me in being held up in Massachusetts as an anarchistic agitator, when all that I have been doing has been to try to reduce to practice in the present day what the greatest men of Massachusetts have preached in past time. [Applause.]
I have got here, and I am going to read to you, just a few lines from Lowell and then two lines from Emerson—Lowell’s being written nearly 60 years ago and Emerson’s 50 years ago. Lowell’s run:
New times demand new measures and new men;
The old advances and in time outgrows
The laws that in our fathers’ day were best.
And doubtless after us some purer scheme will be
Shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.
My soul is not a palace of the past,
Where outworn creeds like Rome’s great Senate quake,
Hearing afar the vandals’ trumpet hoarse
That shakes old systems with a thunder fit.
The time is ripe and rotten ripe for change. [Applause.]
Then let it come; I have no dread
Of what is called for by the instinct of mankind.
[Cries of “Good!”]
Friends, that is what Lowell wrote in 1856. It is what we could put on our banners now in 1912.
And I appeal to the Massachusetts of Lowell’s time, to the Massachusetts that believed in the Bigelow papers, to the Massachusetts that sent young Lowell and Shaw, that sent Hallowell and so many of your people to the front in the Civil War.
I appeal to that Massachusetts to stand loyal now to the memories of Massachusetts’ great past.
And now just wait—only two more lines of poetry. One of the curious traits of many of our good friends who are at the moment our opponents is that they are entirely willing to pay heed to the loftiest democratic sentiments if you will only keep them as sentiments and not try to reduce them to prose.