'This idee of keeping mad
Half a cent'ry, is too bad;
'Tis onchristian, and poor policy beside;
For they say that the young man
Has the 'brass to buy the pan,'
And her folks are putty sure that he'll provide.'
The old seaman's scornful eye
Glanced mute, but stern reply,
And the Yankee vowed and swore to me, the bard,
That old Jarl, that very night,
By the northern moon's cold light,
Talked with Hamlet's father's ghost in the back yard.
AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.
There are two opposite standpoints from which American civilization will be regarded both by the present and future generations; opposite both in respect to the views they give of American society and the judgment to be formed thereon: so opposing, in fact, that they must ever give rise to conflicting opinions, which can only be reconciled in individual instances by the actual occurrence of great events, and never when dealing with generalities. These two far distant points of view are the foreign and the native. We are, more perhaps than any other nation in existence, a peculiar people. Our institutions are new and in most respects original, and cannot be judged by the experience of other nations. Our manner of life and modes of thought—all our ideas of individual and national progress, are sui generis, and our experience, both social and political, as based upon those ideas, has been similar to that of no other race which history records. Hence to the foreign historian or philosopher our inner life is a sealed book; he can neither understand the hidden springs of action which govern all the movements of our body politic, nor appreciate the motives or the aspirations of the American mind: in a word, he can never be imbued with the spirit of our intellectual and moral life, which alone can give the key-note to prophecy, the pitch and tone to true and impartial history. And he who, reasoning from the few à priori truths of human nature, or from those characteristics which the American mind possesses in common with that of the Old World, shall pretend to treat of our systems and our intellectual life, or to map out our future destiny, will be as much at fault as the historian of a thousand years ago who should attempt to portray the events of this our day and generation. The historian of American civilization must not only be among us, but of us—one who is able not only to identify his material interests with those of the great American people, but also to partake of our moral habitudes, to be actuated by the same feelings, desires, aspirations, and be governed by the same motives. By such an one alone, who is able to understand our moral life in all its phases and bearings, can a clear and truthful view be taken of the great events which are continually agitating our society, and their bearings upon our present and future civilization be correctly estimated.
It is precisely from lack of this sympathy and of appreciation of the difficulties under which we have labored, that America has suffered in the opinion of the world. For the foreign view, looking upon us not as a new people, but as the offshoot of an old and cultivated race, has conceded to us little more than a certain mechanical ingenuity in fitting together the parts of an edifice built upon a foundation already laid for us away back in the ages—a carrying out of plans already perfected for us, and requiring little of originality for their development; forgetting that oftentimes the laying of the foundation is the easiest part of the work, while the erection and embellishment of the superstructure has taxed the efforts of the loftiest genius. In so far as regards the development of the national mind, the strengthening of the originating and energetic faculties, and the capability of profound and well directed thought arising therefrom, we are, as a race, deeply indebted to our progenitors of the Old World, and we have reaped therefrom a great advantage over other nationalities in their inception. But aside from these benefits, the cultivation of the race before the settlement of our country has been rather a hamper upon our progress. For here was to be inaugurated a new civilization, upon a different basis from and entirely incompatible with that of the Old World; here was to be established an idea antagonistic to those of the preexisting world, and evolving a new and more progressive social life, which needed not only a new sphere and new material, but also entire freedom from the restraints of the old-time civilization. And it is harder to unlearn an old lesson than to learn a new. The institutions and modes of thought of the Old World are to the last degree unfavorable to the progress of such a nationality as ours. Their tendency being toward the aggrandizement of the few and the centralization of power, renders them wholly incompatible with that freedom of thought and action, that opening up of large fields of exertion as well as of the road to distinction and eminence, with all their incentives to effort, which are the very life of a majestic republic stretching over a large portion of the earth's surface, embracing such mixed nationalities, and founded upon principles of progress both in its physical and mental relations which have rendered it in very truth a new experiment among the nations. We had first to forget the divine right of kings, and the invidious distinctions of class, with all their deep-seated and time-honored prejudices, and to start forward in a different and hitherto despised path toward which the iron hand of our necessity pointed, and in which all men should be considered equal in their rights, and the position of each should depend, not upon the distance to which he could trace a proud genealogy, but upon the energy with which he should grapple with the stern realities of life, the honesty and uprightness with which he should tread its path, and the use he should make of the blessings which God and his own exertions bestowed upon him. We had to learn the great but simple lesson that
'The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the man for a' that;'
and in so doing, to accept, for a time, the position of the Pariahs of Christendom, through the imputation of degrading all things high and noble to the rank of the low and vulgar, of casting the pearls of a lofty and ennobled class before the swinish multitude, of throwing open the doors of the treasury, that creatures of low, plebeian blood might grasp the crown jewels which had for ages been kept sacred to the patrician few; in a word, we had to take upon ourselves all the odium of a despised democracy—a moral agrarianism which should make common property of all blessings and privileges, and mingle together all things, pure and impure, in one common hotch-potch of corruption and degradation. Greater heresy than all this was not then known, and the philosopher of to-day has little conception of the sacrifice required of those who would at that time accept such a position.
Another and not less important lesson which our ancestors had to learn was, that national prosperity which depends upon the learning and refinement or energy of a certain privileged class, can never be otherwise than ephemeral; that the common people—the low plebeians, whom they had been taught to consider of the least importance in the state, are in reality the strength of the land; and that in the amelioration of their condition, in the education and mental training of the masses, while at the same time placing before them the highest incentives to individual exertion, lies the only sure basis of an enduring prosperity—that the only healthful national growth is that which is made up of the individual strivings of the great mass rather than the self-interested movements of the few; and as a consequence of this truth, that the privileged minority is really the least important of the two classes in any community. In the infancy of government, when a rude and unlettered people are little able to take care of themselves, the establishment of class distinctions is undoubtedly conducive to progress, as it tends to unite the people, thereby counteracting the thousand petty jealousies and strifes and bickerings which invariably beset an infant people, and to organize and systematize all progressive effort. It is, in fact, a putting of the people to school under such wholesome restraints as shall compel them forward while guarding them against those evil influences which militate against their prosperity. But in the course of events the time comes when these restraints are no longer necessary, but rather become hampers upon the wheels of progress; and when that period arrives, all these invidious distinctions should, in a well-regulated state, gradually disappear and give place to that freedom which is essential to individual advancement as the basis of national power. Trained as our ancestors had been to consider these distinctions divinely appointed, it was no easy task for them to abrogate so aged and apparently sacred a system, and nothing but the material evidence before their eyes in the experience of their own society, convincing them that such a course was an actual necessity of their future well-being, could have induced them so to depart from the teachings of their progenitors. Nor was it less difficult to determine how far these safeguards of the olden time might safely be dispensed with, or where or how deeply the knife should be applied which, in the fallibility of human judgment, might possibly cut away some main root of their social organization. Here was required the exercise of the profoundest wisdom and the most careful discretion—wisdom unassisted by any experience in the past history of the world other than that of the utter failure of all past experiments in any way similar to their own. To us of to-day, viewed in the light of intervening experience and of the increased knowledge of human affairs, this may seem a little thing; but to them it was not so, for the path was new and untried, and they were surrounded by the thickest of darkness. Thus it will be seen that in the founding of our system there were great difficulties, which only the loftiest aims and the utmost firmness and determination in the cause of the good and the true, with the liveliest sense of the necessities and the yearnings of human nature, and the true end of all human existence, could have overcome,—difficulties which, with all the cultivation of their past, rendered their task not less arduous than that of the founders of any community recorded in history even among the rudest and most savage of peoples. And for all their energy and perseverance the world has not yet given them the credit which is their due, although the yearly developing results of their labors are gradually restoring them to their proper position in the appreciation of humanity. And the time will come when their memory will be cherished all over the earth as that of the greatest benefactors of the human kind. As the Alpine glacier year after year heaves out to its surface the bodies of those who many decades ago were buried beneath the everlasting snows, so time in its revolutions heaves up to the view of the world, one by one, the great facts of the buried past, to be carefully laid away in the graveyard of memory, with a towering monument above them to mark to all succeeding ages the spot where they have wrought in the interest of humanity.