Thomas Carlyle, his voice rising clear and strong above the babble of Mammon, asked, in the closing chapters of his French Revolution:
"Hast thou considered how Thought is stronger than Artillery Parks, and (were it fifty years after death and martyrdom, or were it two thousand years) writes and unwrites Acts of Parliament, removes mountains, models the World like soft clay? Also how the beginning of all Thought worth the name is Love."
The truth which he uttered is still truth, and no matter who uttered it, the thought is the thought of Him who spake as never man spake; who was described in prophecy as the Prince of Peace; whose coming was greeted with the song of "Peace on earth; good-will to men," and whose teachings, when applied, will usher in the enduring peace of a universal brotherhood.
W.J. BRYAN.
Bryan, Idealist and Average Man
By Charles Willis Thompson
The subjoined estimate of William J. Bryan's character and public career, which appeared in The New York Times of June 9, 1915, is by the hand of one of its staff writers who has specialized in American national politics.
THE plain man of the prairie became Secretary of State when William J. Bryan did; the prairie then entered diplomacy, international controversy. The secret of all that has puzzled the land in his behavior lies in that fact. His hold on the West lies in the fact that he is in himself the average man of that country, with that man's ideals, aspirations, defects, and drawbacks. There seems nothing strange or funny in a Secretary of State who goes to New York and signs temperance pledges, or holds Billy Sunday's platform in Philadelphia, when you get a few miles away from the cities; and if it seems a little queer to New York to find the Secretary of State undertaking to demolish the Darwinian theory, there are plenty of regions where the Darwinian theory is regarded as a device of the devil to upset the Mosaic cosmogony. Chesterton says that Dickens never wrote down to the mob, because he was himself the mob; and Bryan never talked down to the men of the prairie for the same reason.
He is not a man of culture, nor of reading. He has been around the world, but when he came back the books and articles he wrote were such as might have been published as guide books or in encyclopedias; he could have written them without leaving home. Travel had no broadening or polishing effect upon his mind.