Few, very few indeed, outside of the editorial sanctum ever learn how the surges of ambition, in all its varied and fantastic phases from the noblest to the meanest, assail and often vex journalistic duties. The public know not of the many gifted men who must thus at times be saved from themselves, and an editorial retrospect of half a century presents a sad record of the newspaper work of making bricks without straw. Justly excepting the comparatively few public men who tower over mediocrity in public place, journalism gives the position and fashions the fame of most of them. It is not done arbitrarily nor from choice, as public and political necessities are often paramount with journalists, as with others, in awarding public honors; but with all its exactions and responsibilities, which are ever magnified by the greater opportunities for usefulness, there is no calling that brings richer compensation for fidelity to duty. The consciousness that each day the editor whose readers are numbered by hundreds of thousands, may greatly aid in making the world better than it was in the passing yesterday, is a constant inspiration to the best efforts, and it is especially gratifying that even in the many and at times impassioned conflicts of journalistic dispute, the rugged and sharp-angled walls which divide us are ever so beautiful and fragrant with the flowers of good-fellowship, as is impressively taught by this assembly.
Thus charged with the highest of civil trusts in the most enlightened government of the earth, the editor must be honored or dishonored here by the measure of his fidelity to his exceptional duties, and must be so judged in the hereafter, when the narrow pathway of life that divides past and future eternities has been traversed. We come when bidden, we know not whence; we go when bidden, we know not whither; but each and all have duties to themselves, to their homes, to their country, and to the common brotherhood of man, which when performed with the faithfulness that human infirmities will permit, must greatly brighten the brief and often fretful journey from the cradle to the grave. Friends, in this evening twilight of my journalistic work, so sweetly mellowed by the smiling faces, young and old, about me, I answer your generous greeting with the gratitude that can perish only when the gathering shadows shall have settled into the night that comes to purple the better morn.
ST. CLAIR McKELWAY
SMASHED CROCKERY
[Speech of St. Clair McKelway before the National Society of China Importers, New York City, February 6, 1896.]
Mr. Chairman and Friends:—The china I buy abroad is marked "Fragile" in shipment. That which I buy at home is marked: "Glass—This Side Up With Care." The foreign word of caution is fact. The American note of warning is fiction—with a moral motive. The common purpose of both is protection from freight fractors and baggage smashers. The European appeals to knowledge. The American addresses the imagination. The one expresses the truth. The other extends it. Neither is entirely successful. The skill and care of shippers cannot always victoriously cope with the innate destructiveness of fallen human nature. There is a great deal of smashed crockery in the world.
You who are masters in the art of packing things and we whose vocation is the art of putting things, both have reason to know that no pains of placing or of preparation will guarantee freight or phrases, plates or propositions, china of any kind or principles of any sort, from the dangers of travel or from the tests of time. Your goods and our wares have to take their chances in their way across the seas, throughout the land and around the world. You lose some of yours merely in handling. The defects of firing cannot be always foreseen. The intrusion of inferior clay cannot be always prevented. The mere friction of contact may produce bad nicks. Nor is the fineness nor the excellence of the product an insurance against mishaps. From your factories or stores your output is at the mercy of carriers without compunction, and in our homes it is exposed to the heavy hands of servants without sentiment. The pleasure of many a dinner is impaired by the fear or the consciousness that inapt peasants are playing havoc with the treasures of art on which the courses are served.
If, however, the ceramic kingdom is strewn with smashed crockery, how much more so are the worlds of theology, medicine, politics, society, law, and the like. No finer piece of plate was ever put forth than the one inscribed: "I will believe only what I know." It was for years agreeable to the pride and vanity of the race. It made many a fool feel as if his forehead was lifted as high as the heavens, and that at every step he knocked out a star. When, however, the discovery was made that this assumption to displace deity amounted to a failure to comprehend nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the smashed crockery of the moral universe.
Nor is the smug and confident contention: "Medicine is a science, one and indivisible," so impressive and undented as it was. Sir Astley Cooper in his plain, blunt way is reported to have described his own idea of his own calling as "a science founded on conjecture and improved by murder." The State of New York has rudely stepped in and legally and irrevocably recognized three schools of medicine and will recognize a fourth or a fifth as soon as it establishes itself by a sufficient number of cures or in a sufficient number of cemeteries. Medical intolerance cannot be legislated out of existence, but it has no further recognition in legislation. A common and considerable degree of general learning is by the State required of all intending students of medicine. An equal and extended degree of professional study is required. An identical measure of final examination with state certification and state licensure is required. The claim that men and women must die secundum artem in order to have any permit to live here or to live hereafter, has gone to the limbo of smashed crockery in the realm of therapeutics. The arrogant pretension that men must die secundum artem has been adjourned—sine die. And the State which prescribes uniform qualifications among the schools will yet require uniform consultations between them in the interest of the people whom they impartially prod and concurrently purge with diversity of methods, but with parity of price.