If such be the case within the law, what indifference to justice does the course of events exhibit in the world at large which comes under the law's inquisition so imperfectly! How continuous and inevitable, how terrible and pitiful is this aspect of life, is shown in successive ages by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in poem, drama, and tale, in which the noble nature through some frailty, that was but a part, and by the impulse of some moment of brief time, comes to its wreck; and, in connection with this disaster to the best, lies the action of the villain everywhere overflowing in suffering and injury upon his victims and all that is theirs. What is here represented as the general lot of mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives and fortunes of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice always present. The sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened by aught of vengeance that may overtake the wrong-doer; and it is constant. The murdered man, the wronged woman, can find no reparation. What shall one say of the sufferings of children and of the old, and of the great curse that lies in heredity and the circumstances of early life under depraved, ignorant, or malicious conditions? These brutalities, like the primeval struggle in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heard the name of justice. The main seat of individual justice and its operation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, governing their own conduct and modifying so far as possible the mass of injustice continually arising in the process of life, by such relief as they can give by personal influence and action both on persons and in the realm of moral opinion.
But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of the law over men in the mass, where individuality may be neglected, there remains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may be advanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation of the French lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similar great measures of class legislation, if you will. I confess I am one of those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the structure of society itself. The process of freeing man from the fetters of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men's passions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of justice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid to the door of society itself? Charity, great as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills; nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more than mollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal. Social justice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in institutions and laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature is possible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, and in their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall be equal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and the hope of happiness. Social justice, so defined, under temporal conditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in governmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no wide survey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished is a beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such as the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. What matters it? It is not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman's dream.
Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. They have been working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation has grown great in their charge. What, in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the configuration of a national life? The diffusion of material comfort among masses of men, on a scale and to an amount abolishing peasantry forever; the dissemination of education, which is the means of life to the mind as comfort is to the body, in no more narrow bounds, but through the State universal, abolishing ignorance; the development of human capacity in intelligence, energy, and character, under the stimulus of the open career, with a result in enlarging and concentrating the available talent of the State to a compass and with an efficiency and diversity by which alone was possible the material subjugation of the continent which it has made tributary to man's life; the planting of self-respect in millions of men, and of respect for others grounded in self-respect, constituting a national characteristic now first to be found, and to be found in the bosom of every child of our soil, and, with this, of a respect for womanhood, making the common ways safe and honourable for her, unknown before; the moulding of a conservative force, so sure, so deep, so instinctive, that it has its seat in the very vitals of the State and there maintains as its blood and bone the principles which the fathers handed down in institutions containing our happiness, security, and destiny, yet maintains them as a living present, not as a dead past; the incorporation into our body politic of millions of half-alien people, without disturbance, and with an assimilating power that proves the universal value of democracy as a mode of dealing with the race, as it now is; an enthronement of reason as the sole arbiter in a free forum where every man may plead, and have the judgment of all men upon the cause; a rooted repugnance to use force; an aversion to war; a public and private generosity that knows no bounds of sect, race, or climate; a devotion to public duty that excuses no man and least of all the best, and has constantly raised the standard of character; a commiseration for all unfortunate peoples and warm sympathy with them in their struggles; a love of country as inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is unparalleled in ardour; and a will to serve the world for the rise of man into such manhood as we have achieved, such prosperity as earth has yielded us, and such justice as, by the grace of heaven, is established within our borders. Is it not a great work? and all these blessings, unconfined as the element, belong to all our people. In the course of these results, the imperfection of human nature and its institutions has been present; but a just comparison of our history with that of other nations, ages, and systems, and of our present with our past, shows that such imperfection in society has been a diminishing element with us, and that a steady progress has been made in methods, measures, and men. No great issue, in a whole century, has been brought to a wrong conclusion. Our public life has been starred with illustrious names, famous for honesty, sagacity, and humanity, and, above all, for justice. Our Presidents in particular have been such men as democracy should breed, and some of them such men as humanity has seldom bred. We are a proud nation, and justly; and, looking to the future, beholding these things multiplied million-fold in the lives of the children of the land to be, we may well humbly own God's bounty which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits of democracy in the new ages of a humaner world.
It will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said of the ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment of that life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. In it the individual mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and mankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nigh perfect way. In it there is the slow embodiment of a future nobly conceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best that is, from age to age, in man's power. It includes the universal wisdom, the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, and here manhood climbs. It knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears the form Christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. Through democracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other system of government or conception of man's nature and destiny, the best of men may blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies of his own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, as elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal in destiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, however obstructed by time and circumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the ways of life. On the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblest cabin of the West, to lead an American life is to join heart and soul in this cause.
THE RIDE
Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the child's element, though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid and palpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he lives in horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looks intellectually for things definite and clear. Education in general through its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressing almost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in early years at least is sensual. So it was with me: the mind's eye saw all that was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eye beheld the world washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of mystery in man's life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mind be open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage's knowledge or the poet's emotion or such common experience of the world as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or the unlighted spirit,
I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and deeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had passed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least, not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my first Italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a stormy sea, and all was strange and solemn—the illimitable tossing of a wave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of a spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a new earth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck in this water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores, and gradually we drew near to it. I shall never forget the strangeness of that sight—that solitary island under the sunlit showers of early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near and distant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamed through them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were the whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed by, and I could not have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me. But when, some days afterward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked upon the magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, again I felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the mystery of the land. It was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of the natural world. Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed that on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fled before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. Since that morning in the Straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to the spirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like that lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain barriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, of a land men yet might tread as common ground.
"A poet's mood"—I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of our life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out in my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to mention,—one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister element of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel branch—sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for one instant of golden time.
But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them—wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. It was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace—athletes in the grain—with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They're wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain,—brothers and friends.