Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

[C] This was an address delivered before the graduating class at Hobart College in 1900.

If one could stand on the edge of the moon and look down through a couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be apparent that everything that happened on the earth was directly dependent on everything else that happened there. Whether the Italian peasant shall eat salt with his bread, depends upon Bismarck. Whether the prison system of Russia shall be improved, depends upon the ministry of Great Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield is in power, there is no leisure in Russia for domestic reform. The lash is everywhere lifted in a security furnished by the concurrence of all the influences upon the globe that favor coercion. In like manner, the good things that happen are each the product of all extant conditions. Constitutional government in England qualifies the whole of western Europe. Our slaves were not set free without the assistance of every liberal mind in Europe; and the thoughts which we think in our closet affect the fate of the Boer in South Africa. That Tolstoy is to-day living unmolested upon his farm instead of serving in a Siberian mine, that Dreyfus is alive and not dead, is due directly to the people in this audience and to others like them scattered over Europe and America.

The effect of enlightenment on tyranny is not merely to make the tyrant afraid to be cruel, it makes him not want to be cruel. It makes him see what cruelty is. And reciprocally the effect of cruelty on enlightenment is to make that enlightenment grow dim. It prevents men from seeing what cruelty is.

The Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor you of his. Every ukase he signs makes allowance for you, and, on the other hand, the whole philosophy of your life is tinged by him. You believe that the abuses under the Russian government are inscrutably different from and worse than our own; whereas both sets of atrocities are identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, in taste and smell and substance than your prejudice is willing to admit. The existence of Russia narrows America’s philosophy, and misconduct by a European power may be seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on the following day. More Americans have abandoned their faith in free government since England began to play the tyrant in South Africa than there were colonists in the country in 1776.

Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, the same language. The life that has been transplanted to North America during the last three centuries, is European life. From your position on the moon you would not be able to understand what the supposed differences were between European and American things, that the Americans make so much fuss over. You would say, “I see only one people, splashed over different continents. The problems they talk about, the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their education and catchwords are identical. They are the children of the Classics, of Christianity, and of the Revival of Learning. They are homogeneous, and they are growing more homogeneous.”

The subtle influences that modern nations exert over one another illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But if we turn to ancient history we find in its bare outlines staggering proof of the interdependence of nations. The Greeks were wiped out. They could not escape their contemporaries any more than we can escape the existence of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor Assyria Persia, nor Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, nor Rome the Goths. Life is not a boarding-school where a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of the rest. He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much here as we are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal—of such is our civilization.

Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest conclusion of science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every individual of that population has an influence as certain and far more discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the solar system?

A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitution of the United States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter incessantly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind.

We have an inherited and stupid notion that the East does not change. If Japan goes through a transformation scene under our eyes, we still hold to our prejudice as to the immutability of the Chinese. If our own people and the European nations seem to be meeting and surging and reappearing in unaccustomed rôles every ten years, till modern history looks like a fancy ball, we still go on muttering some old ignorant shibboleth about East and West, Magna Charta, the Indian Mutiny, and Mahomet. The chances are that England will be dead-letter, and Russia progressive before we have done talking. Of a truth, when we consider the rapidity of visible change and the amplitude of time—for there is plenty of time—we need not despair of progress.