Certain Diversities of American Life

by Charles Dudley Warner

However much or little there may be of permanent value in the vast production of northern literature, judged by continental or even English standards, the time has came when American scholarship in science, in language, in occidental or oriental letters, in philosophic and historical methods, can court comparison with any other. In some branches of research the peers of our scholars must be sought not in England but in Germany. So that in one of the best fruits of a period of intellectual agitation, scholarship, the restless movement has thoroughly vindicated itself.

I have called your attention to this movement in order to say that it was neither accidental nor isolated. It was in the historic line, it was fed and stimulated by all that had gone before, and by all contemporary activity everywhere. New England, for instance, was alert and progressive because it kept its doors and windows open. It was hospitable in its intellectual freedom, both of trial and debate, to new ideas. It was in touch with the universal movement of humanity and of human thought and speculation. You lose some quiet by this attitude, some repose that is pleasant and even desirable perhaps, you entertain many errors, you may try many useless experiments, but you gain life and are in the way of better things. New England, whatever else we may say about it, was in the world. There was no stir of thought, of investigation, of research, of the recasting of old ideas into new forms of life, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in England, anywhere, that did not touch it and to which it did not respond with the sympathy that common humanity has in the universal progress. It kept this touch not only in the evolution and expression of thought and emotion which we call literature (whether original or imitative), but in the application of philosophic methods to education, in the attempted regeneration of society and the amelioration of its conditions by schemes of reform and discipline, relating to the institutions of benevolence and to the control of the vicious and criminal. With all these efforts go along always much false sentimentality and pseudo-philanthropy, but little by little gain is made that could not be made in a state of isolation and stagnation.

In fact there is one historic stream of human thought, aspiration, and progress; it is practically continuous, and with all its diversity of local color and movement it is a unit. If you are in it, you move; if you are out of it, you are in an eddy. The eddy may have a provincial current, but it is not in the great stream, and when it has gone round and round for a century, it is still an eddy, and will not carry you anywhere in particular. The value of the modern method of teaching and study is that it teaches the solidarity of human history, the continuance of human thought, in literature, government, philosophy, the unity of the divine purpose, and that nothing that has anywhere befallen the human race is alien to us.

I am not undervaluing the part, the important part, played by conservatism, the conservatism that holds on to what has been gained if it is good, that insists on discipline and heed to the plain teaching of experience, that refuses to go into hysterics of enthusiasm over every flighty suggestion, or to follow every leader simply because he proposes something new and strange—I do not mean the conservatism that refuses to try anything simply because it is new, and prefers to energetic life the stagnation that inevitably leads to decay. Isolation from the great historic stream of thought and agitation is stagnation. While this is true, and always has been true in history, it is also true, in regard to the beneficent diversity of American life, which is composed of so many elements and forces, as I have often thought and said, that what has been called the Southern conservatism in respect to beliefs and certain social problems, may have a very important part to play in the development of the life of the Republic.

I shall not be misunderstood here, where the claims of the higher life are insisted on and the necessity of pure, accurate scholarship is recognized, in saying that this expectation in regard to the South depends upon the cultivation and diffusion of the highest scholarship in all its historic consciousness and critical precision. This sort of scholarship, of widely apprehending intellectual activity, keeping step with modern ideas so far as they are historically grounded, is of the first importance. Everywhere indeed, in our industrial age,—in a society inclined to materialism, scholarship, pure and simple scholarship for its own sake, no less in Ohio than in Tennessee, is the thing to be insisted on. If I may refer to an institution, which used to be midway between the North and the South, and which I may speak of without suspicion of bias, an institution where the studies of metaphysics, the philosophy of history, the classics and pure science are as much insisted on as the study of applied sciences, the College of New Jersey at Princeton, the question in regard to a candidate for a professorship or instructorship, is not whether he was born North or South, whether he served in one army or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or a Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to, but is he a scholar and has he a high character? There is no provincialism in scholarship.

We are not now considering the matter of the agreeableness of one society or another, whether life is on the whole pleasanter in certain conditions at the North or at the South, whether there is not a charm sometimes in isolation and even in provincialism. It is a fair question to ask, what effect upon individual lives and character is produced by an industrial and commercial spirit, and by one less restless and more domestic. But the South is now face to face with certain problems which relate her, inevitably, to the moving forces of the world. One of these is the development of her natural resources and the change and diversity of her industries. On the industrial side there is pressing need of institutions of technology, of schools of applied science, for the diffusion of technical information and skill in regard to mining and manufacturing, and also to agriculture, so that worn-out lands may be reclaimed and good lands be kept up to the highest point of production. Neither mines, forests, quarries, water-ways, nor textile fabrics can be handled to best advantage without scientific knowledge and skilled labor. The South is everywhere demanding these aids to her industrial development. But just in the proportion that she gets them, and because she has them, will be the need of higher education. The only safety against the influence of a rolling mill is a college, the only safety against the practical and materializing tendency of an industrial school is the increased study of whatever contributes to the higher and non-sordid life of the mind. The South would make a poor exchange for her former condition in any amount of industrial success without a corresponding development of the highest intellectual life.

But, besides the industrial problem, there is the race problem. It is the most serious in the conditions under which it is presented that ever in all history confronted a free people. Whichever way you regard it, it is the nearest insoluble. Under the Constitution it is wisely left to the action of the individual States. The heavy responsibility is with them. In the nature of things it is a matter of the deepest concern to the whole Republic, for the prosperity of every part is vital to the prosperity of the whole. In working it out you are entitled, from the outside, to the most impartial attempt to understand its real nature, to the utmost patience with the facts of human nature, to the most profound and most helpful sympathy. It is monstrous to me that the situation should be made on either side a political occasion for private ambition or for party ends.

I would speak of this subject with the utmost frankness if I knew what to say. It is not much of a confession to say that I do not. The more I study it the less I know, and those among you who give it the most anxious thought are the most perplexed, the subject has so many conflicting aspects. In the first place there is the evolution of an undeveloped race. Every race has a right to fair play in the world and to make the most of its capacities, and to the help of the more favored in the attempt. If the suggestion recently made of a wholesale migration to Mexico were carried out, the South would be relieved in many ways, though the labor problem would be a serious one for a long time, but the "elevation" would be lost sight of or relegated to a foreign missionary enterprise; and as for results to the colored people themselves, there is the example of Hayti. If another suggestion, that of abandoning certain States to this race, were carried out, there is the example of Hayti again, and, besides, an anomaly introduced into the Republic foreign to its traditions, spirit, aspirations, and process of assimilation, alien to the entire historic movement of the Aryan races, and infinitely more dangerous to the idea of the Republic than if solid Ireland were dumped down in the Mississippi valley as an independent State.

On the other hand, there rests upon you the responsibility of maintaining a civilization—the civilization of America, not of Hayti or of Guatemala which we have so hardly won. It is neither to be expected nor desired that you should be ruled by an undeveloped race, ignorant of law, letters, history, politics, political economy. There is no right anywhere in numbers or unintelligence to rule intelligence. It is a travesty of civilization. No Northern State that I know of would submit to be ruled by an undeveloped race. And human nature is exactly in the South what it is in the North. That is one impregnable fact, to be taken as the basis of all our calculations; the whites of the South will not, cannot, be dominated, as matters now stand, by the colored race.

But, then, there is the suffrage, the universal, unqualified suffrage. And here is the dilemma. Suffrage once given, cannot be suppressed or denied, perverted by chicane or bribery without incalculable damage to the whole political body. Irregular methods once indulged in for one purpose, and towards one class, so sap the moral sense that they come to be used for all purposes. The danger is ultimately as great to those who suppress or pervert as it is to the suppressed and corrupted. It is the demoralization of all sound political action and life. I know whereof I speak. In the North, bribery in elections and intimidation are fatal to public morality. The legislature elected by bribery is a bribable body.