GREAT THINGS YET TO BE DONE
Some four years ago a young man of uncommon ability, but lacking the imagination of hope, said to me that it seemed to him as if everything great had already been done.
"Great battles," said he, "have been fought; there will be no more wars of magnitude. The great principles of the law have all been announced and applied to every conceivable form of human rights and controversy. For example, in our own country there will be no more new and great constitutional arguments. Everything, from now on, will be only an application of what has already been said and decided.
"In invention, there may be some improvements on old and present devices, but there will be no more Edisons, no more Marconis. In medicine, we are about at the top of the mountain. In literature, the creative and fundamental things have all been done. There will be no more Shakespeares, no Miltons, no Dantes, no Goethes. Even Hugo is dead. From now on books will be mere second-hand talk.
"In statesmanship, nothing is left except that common housekeeping which we call administering government. In diplomacy, the same old lies will continue to be told, and so on."
This young man's profoundly melancholy view of life is that which I have found crushing the élan out of many young men; and particularly college students. In their hearts they feel that progress is finished, so far as individual effort by them is concerned. They feel that for them there is nothing but to eat, sleep, laugh, grieve and go to their graves. They feel that for them there is no such thing as leaving behind them a monument of their own constructive effort. Talk to most young men in college or school, and you will find this feeling, like a pathetic minor chord, running through their highest and most daring boasts.
Is not our college training responsible for some of this melancholy negativeness of life? However it happens, the truth is that too few young men come out of our great universities with the greater part of the boldness of youth left in them. Somehow or other those fine, and, if you will, absurd enthusiasms which nobody but young men and geniuses are blessed with, have been educated out of the graduate. How many seniors in our historic American universities would not have sneered John Bunyan out of existence, or have told the young and unripe Bonaparte how presumptuous he was to think of fighting the trained generals of Europe?
"Yes," says a certain type of young man, "all the great things have been done. Nothing is left for me but the commonplaces." This is not true.
The great things have not all been done; scarcely have they been commenced. "There is more before us than there is behind us," said my old forest "guide," wise with the wisdom of the woods and their thoughtful silences. And the purpose of this paper is to point out the infinite number of practical possibilities immediately at hand; to awaken each young man who reads these words to some one of the million voices which from all the fields of human endeavor is calling him; and so, by showing him things to do, make him a doer of things, if he will.
Let us take the law—that entrancing subject which exercises such an empire over the minds of most young men. Our own constitutional law is only a part of that universal body of jurisprudence with which all real lawyers must deal. Very well; we have only begun the discussion and settlement of our great constitutional questions. Marshall and Hamilton, it is true, when they formulated the doctrine of implied powers, seemed to unlock the door of all constitutional difficulties, leaving nothing for future lawyers and jurists to do but to find their way through the channels and passages thus opened.