V
THE ORIGINS OF LIBERAL THOUGHT IN AMERICA[17]
In approaching the subject of the origins of liberal thought in America, one cannot help remembering that the discovery of the new continent was itself such a stimulus to free thinking as the world had never before witnessed. From time immemorial, the trade between Europe and the remote parts of Asia had followed certain customary routes. From ancient days, long before Olympiads were heard of, when Assyrian kings with curly beards commemorated their victories in arrow-headed inscriptions, men had used those same routes. Up the Red Sea, in the early prime of hundred-gated Thebes, came ships from the Indian Ocean, with gems and spices to exchange for Egyptian fine linens and amulets of amber from the Baltic; and five thousand years later Venetian argosies at Alexandria were laden with just such gems and spices to distribute to the merchants of Augsburg, the royal household at Paris, the lords and ladies of Haddon Hall. Empires rose and fell, creeds and pantheons came and went, stately temples reared their heads for centuries and slowly crumbled in ruins, and still amid all the secular change the world's great stream of trade flowed through the same unshifting channels, and there was nothing to show that this state of things, to which men's ideas and habits had always been adjusted, was not to endure forever. So it was in that recent time when Henry V. of England was smiting the French chivalry at Agincourt, and his cousin Prince Henry of Portugal was beginning the search for an ocean route to the Indies. Never did the human mind get such a wrench out of its ancient grooves, never were such vistas of new possibilities laid open, never was beheld such glorious hardihood, such startling romance, as in the time when Columbus sailed westward to find the East, and Cortes met warriors of the Stone Age face to face. The men of Europe suddenly found themselves placed in new and unsuspected relations to the planet on which they lived; worlds of barbarism and savagery, unheard of and unspeakably bizarre, were brought to their notice; strange constellations arose in the firmament; strange beasts and birds were encountered amid outlandish trees and shrubs in new climates beyond unknown seas. The old familiarity with nature's aspects received an abrupt shock. On every side loomed up new questions to be answered, new practical problems to be solved. All man's inventive faculty, all his patient inquisitiveness, all the courage he could summon, were forthwith called into play. The dreams of boundless riches, the eager thirst for new knowledge, the superhuman bravery, which characterized the epoch of maritime discovery, are symptoms that reveal to us the highly wrought condition of the European mind at the time. A study of contemporary chronicles and letters cannot fail to bring home to us the singular intensity with which the thrill of venturesome romance was felt in every fibre of man's being.
The impulse thus given to free thinking must have been extremely powerful. It is customary to attribute the brilliant efflorescence of the human mind in the sixteenth century to the revival of Greek learning. Without seeking to diminish the respect due to that mighty cause, it may be contended that the influence of maritime discovery was equally important. While the Greek renaissance brought men into wholesome and stimulating intercourse with the highest achievements of literature, art, and philosophy, the discovery of the New World impressed upon them, as nothing had ever done before, the feasibleness of doing things in novel ways. With the wholesale displacement of commercial relations, the European mind burst the bounds of the snug little world to which its habits and theories, its politics civil and ecclesiastical, its science and its theology, had been adapted. The sudden and unprecedented widening of the environment soon set up a general fermentation of ideas. There was nothing accidental in Martin Luther's coming in the next generation after Columbus. Nor was it strange that in the following age the English mind, wrought to its highest tension under the combined influences of Renaissance, Reformation, and maritime adventure, should have put forth a literature the boldest and grandest that had ever appeared; that the era of Raleigh and Frobisher and the early Puritans should have seen even the highest mark of Greek achievement surpassed by Shakespeare. The gigantic revolution set on foot by Copernicus was already in full progress, the era of Descartes was just arriving, and the next century was to see modern scientific method receive its supreme illustration at the hands of Newton, while the principles of freedom in thought and speech were to find invincible champions in Milton and Locke.
Such was the age in which the work of English colonization in America was beginning. In looking for the origins of liberal thought in America, it is chiefly with English-speaking America that we are concerned. The Spanish mind, indeed, felt strongly the stimulus of the maritime discoveries and the contact with strange races of men, until an age of chivalrous enterprise bloomed forth in the literature of Calderon and Lope de Vega and Cervantes; but the new spirit was not strong enough to prevail over an ecclesiastical organization that had been growing in power since the Visigothic times. The higher intellectual life of Spain perished in the fires of the Inquisition, and art and song failed to lead the way to science and free thought; no Spanish Locke or Newton followed in the train of a Lope and a Murillo, but so lately as the year 1771 the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the law of gravitation as discordant with revealed religion.[18] With such a state of things in the mother country, liberal thought in the Spanish colonies was a plant of very slow growth. As for France at the end of the sixteenth century, there was a sturdy intellectual life there which no efforts of tyranny could more than partially repress; but circumstances threw the work of colonization into the hands of the Jesuits, and accordingly the history of New France, while eminent for devoted bravery and heroic endurance, shows scarcely a trace of liberal thinking either in politics or in matters pertaining to religion. Not with the French and Spanish portions of America, therefore, but with the colonies that developed into the United States, is our inquiry concerned.
The first and most obvious consideration which strikes us is that while the two centuries following the discovery of America witnessed an unprecedented awakening of the European mind, yet it was only with those nations that had retained self-government that this intellectual awakening was to come to prompt and full fruition. From the British islands and the Netherlands came the kind of public policy that allowed free thinking to take deep root and send up a thrifty tree of liberty. The planting of such seed in the spacious virgin soil of the New World was doubtless the greatest of all the manifold unforeseen results for which Columbus opened the way. It made political freedom the strongest power on earth, and thus favoured the attainment of that equable flexibility of mind which allows the thought to play freely about the facts which are laid before it. Not in a moment was such a grand result achieved; its complete realization has not yet come, and none of us may live to see it, yet toward that goal the whole impetus of men's civilizing work is tending, and there is no power that can prevent the consummation. Year by year, no matter how grave the questions with which we have to deal, we are becoming more and more able to let our minds play freely with them, to turn them hither and thither till all sides be seen and all aspects duly considered.
Not all in a moment, I say, has such a desirable result been achieved. So far is it, moreover, from having been brought about by conscious human effort that mankind have in general struggled desperately against it. Compared with the mass of men, it is only a few minds that have learned to regard absolute freedom of thought as something to be desired. Though the colonization of America came at a time when men's minds were stirred by novel ideas as never before, though the men of that generation were moving irrepressibly toward liberality of thought, yet there were very few who had any liking for liberal thought, or any good word to bestow upon it. There were few who doubted that absolute truth was attainable concerning the most abstruse questions of philosophy and religion, and an exactly true belief on minute points of theology was deemed necessary for one's personal salvation. Changes in opinion simply wrought a transfer of allegiance from one orthodoxy to another, and the new orthodoxy felt bound as much as the old one to persecute all who refused such allegiance. From this point of view the history of the progress of liberal thought becomes curiously interesting, for it shows how one of the most momentous revolutions in human life has steadily gone on in spite of the inveterate antagonism of the very men concerned in bringing it about! To a considerable extent, the history has been the same over a large part of the globe. The causes which have been at work in America have also been at work in Europe, and even beyond; and the liberal thought with which we are familiar is characteristic not so much of America as of the latter part of the nineteenth century. But along with the general causes there have been local causes which have especially concerned the New World, and a clear account of the matter requires us to indicate both the one and the other.