The Complete Essays of Charles Dudley Warner

by Charles Dudley Warner

In this period, which you will note is more distinguished by the desire for the accumulation of money than far the general production of wealth, the standard of a fortune has shifted from a fair competence to that of millions of money, so that he is no longer rich who has a hundred thousand dollars, but he only who possesses property valued at many millions, and the men most widely known the country through, most talked about, whose doings and sayings are most chronicled in the journals, whose example is most attractive and stimulating to the minds of youth, are not the scholars, the scientists, the men of, letters, not even the orators and statesmen, but those who, by any means, have amassed enormous fortunes. We judge the future of a generation by its ideals.

Regarding education from the point of view of its equipment of a man to make money, and enjoy the luxury which money can command, it must be more and more practical, that is, it must be adapted not even to the higher aim of increasing the general wealth of the world, by increasing production and diminishing waste both of labor and capital, but to the lower aim of getting personal possession of it; so that a striking social feature of the period is that one-half—that is hardly an overestimate —one-half of the activity in America of which we speak with so much enthusiasm, is not directed to the production of wealth, to increasing its volume, but to getting the money of other people away from them. In barbarous ages this object was accomplished by violence; it is now attained by skill and adroitness. We still punish those who gain property by violence; those who get it by smartness and cleverness, we try to imitate, and sometimes we reward them with public office.

It appears, therefore, that speed,-the ability to move rapidly from place to place,—a disproportionate reward of physical over intellectual science, an intense desire to be rich, which is strong enough to compel even education to grind in the mill of the Philistines, and an inordinate elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand. They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view, the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the fear that we are losing the sense of the relative value of things in this life.

Few persons come to middle life without some conception of these relative values. It is in the heat and struggle that we fail to appreciate what in the attainment will be most satisfactory to us. After it is over we are apt to see that our possessions do not bring the happiness we expected; or that we have neglected to cultivate the powers and tastes that can make life enjoyable. We come to know, to use a truism, that a person's highest satisfaction depends not upon his exterior acquisitions, but upon what he himself is. There is no escape from this conclusion. The physical satisfactions are limited and fallacious, the intellectual and moral satisfactions are unlimited. In the last analysis, a man has to live with himself, to be his own companion, and in the last resort the question is, what can he get out of himself. In the end, his life is worth just what he has become. And I need not say that the mistake commonly made is as to relative values,—that the things of sense are as important as the things of the mind. You make that mistake when you devote your best energies to your possession of material substance, and neglect the enlargement, the training, the enrichment of the mind. You make the same mistake in a less degree, when you bend to the popular ignorance and conceit so far as to direct your college education to sordid ends. The certain end of yielding to this so-called practical spirit was expressed by a member of a Northern State legislature who said, “We don't want colleges, we want workshops.” It was expressed in another way by a representative of the lower house in Washington who said, “The average ignorance of the country has a right to be represented here.” It is not for me to say whether it is represented there. Naturally, I say, we ought by the time of middle life to come to a conception of what sort of things are of most value. By analogy, in the continual growth of the Republic, we ought to have a perception of what we have accomplished and acquired, and some clear view of our tendencies. We take justifiable pride in the glittering figures of our extension of territory, our numerical growth, in the increase of wealth, and in our rise to the potential position of almost the first nation in the world. A more pertinent inquiry is, what sort of people have we become? What are we intellectually and morally? For after all the man is the thing, the production of the right sort of men and women is all that gives a nation value. When I read of the establishment of a great industrial centre in which twenty thousand people are employed in the increase of the amount of steel in the world, before I decide whether it would be a good thing for the Republic to create another industrial city of the same sort, I want to know what sort of people the twenty thousand are, how they live, what their morals are, what intellectual life they have, what their enjoyment of life is, what they talk about and think about, and what chance they have of getting into any higher life. It does not seem to me a sufficient gain in this situation that we are immensely increasing the amount of steel in the world, or that twenty more people are enabled on account of this to indulge in an unexampled, unintellectual luxury. We want more steel, no doubt, but haven't we wit enough to get that and at the same time to increase among the producers of it the number of men and women whose horizons are extended, who are companionable, intelligent beings, adding something to the intellectual and moral force upon which the real progress of the Republic depends?

There is no place where I would choose to speak more plainly of our national situation today than in the South, and at the University of the South; in the South, because it is more plainly in a transition state, and at the University of the South, because it is here and in similar institutions that the question of the higher or lower plane of life in the South is to be determined.

To a philosophical observer of the Republic, at the end of the hundred years, I should say that the important facts are not its industrial energy, its wealth, or its population, but the stability of the federal power, and the integrity of the individual States. That is to say, that stress and trial have welded us into an indestructible nation; and not of less consequence is the fact that the life of the Union is in the life of the States. The next most encouraging augury for a great future is the marvelous diversity among the members of this republican body. If nothing would be more speedily fatal to our plan of government than increasing centralization, nothing would be more hopeless in our development than increasing monotony, the certain end of which is mediocrity.

Speaking as one whose highest pride it is to be a citizen of a great and invincible Republic to those whose minds kindle with a like patriotism, I can say that I am glad there are East and North and South, and West, Middle, Northwest, and Southwest, with as many diversities of climate, temperament, habits, idiosyncrasies, genius, as these names imply. Thank Heaven we are not all alike; and so long as we have a common purpose in the Union, and mutual toleration, respect, and sympathy, the greater will be our achievement and the nobler our total development, if every section is true to the evolution of its local traits. The superficial foreign observer finds sameness in our different States, tiresome family likeness in our cities, hideous monotony in our villages, and a certain common atmosphere of life, which increasing facility of communication tends to increase. This is a view from a railway train. But as soon as you observe closely, you find in each city a peculiar physiognomy, and a peculiar spirit remarkable considering the freedom of movement and intercourse, and you find the organized action of each State sui generis to a degree surprising considering the general similarity of our laws and institutions. In each section differences of speech, of habits of thought, of temperament prevail. Massachusetts is unlike Louisiana, Florida unlike Tennessee, Georgia is unlike California, Pennsylvania is unlike Minnesota, and so on, and the unlikeness is not alone or chiefly in physical features. By the different style of living I can tell when I cross the line between Connecticut and New York as certainly as when I cross the line between Vermont and Canada. The Virginian expanded in Kentucky is not the same man he was at home, and the New England Yankee let loose in the West takes on proportions that would astonish his grandfather. Everywhere there is a variety in local sentiment, action, and development. Sit down in the seats of the State governments and study the methods of treatment of essentially the common institutions of government, of charity and discipline, and you will be impressed with the variety of local spirit and performance in the Union. And this, diversity is so important, this contribution of diverse elements is so necessary to the complex strength and prosperity of the whole, that one must view with alarm all federal interference and tendency to greater centralization.

And not less to be dreaded than monotony from the governmental point of view, is the obliteration of variety in social life and in literary development. It is not enough for a nation to be great and strong, it must be interesting, and interesting it cannot be without cultivation of local variety. Better obtrusive peculiarities than universal sameness. It is out of variety as well as complexity in American life, and not in homogeneity and imitation, that we are to expect a civilization noteworthy in the progress of the human race.

Let us come a little closer to our subject in details. For a hundred years the South was developed on its own lines, with astonishingly little exterior bias. This comparative isolation was due partly to the institution of slavery, partly to devotion to the production of two or three great staples. While its commercial connection with the North was intimate and vital, its literary relation with the North was slight. With few exceptions Northern authors were not read in the South, and the literary movement of its neighbors, such as it was, from 1820 to 1860, scarcely affected it. With the exception of Louisiana, which was absolutely ignorant of American literature and drew its inspiration and assumed its critical point of view almost wholly from the French, the South was English, but mainly English of the time of Walter Scott and George the Third. While Scott was read at the North for his knowledge of human nature, as he always will be read, the chivalric age which moves in his pages was taken more seriously at the South, as if it were of continuing importance in life. In any of its rich private libraries you find yourself in the age of Pope and Dryden, and the classics were pursued in the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge in the time of Johnson. It was little disturbed by the intellectual and ethical agitation of modern England or of modern New England. During this period, while the South excelled in the production of statesmen, orators, trained politicians, great judges, and brilliant lawyers, it produced almost no literature, that is, no indigenous literature, except a few poems and—a few humorous character-sketches; its general writing was ornately classic, and its fiction romantic on the lines of the foreign romances.

From this isolation one thing was developed, and another thing might in due time be expected. The thing developed was a social life, in the favored class, which has an almost unique charm, a power of being agreeable, a sympathetic cordiality, an impulsive warmth, a frankness in the expression of emotion, and that delightful quality of manner which puts the world at ease and makes life pleasant. The Southerners are no more sincere than the Northerners, but they have less reserve, and in the social traits that charm all who come in contact with them, they have an element of immense value in the variety of American life.