THE NATION.
We are of the race of the Empire Builders. Some races have been sent into the world to destroy. Ours has been sent to create. It was needed that the blunders of ten centuries and more, across the water, should be given a chance for amendment. On virgin soil, the European races might cure themselves of the fever pains of ages. So they were called here to try. There was no rubbish to sweep away. The mere destructive had no occupation. The builder and creator was the man wanted. In the full glow of civilization, with the accumulated experience of the toiling generations, with all the wealth of the fruitful past, we, 'the foremost in the files of time,' have been called to this business of nation making.
The men of our blood, they say, are given to boasting. America adds flashing nerve fire to the dull muscle of Europe. That is the fact. But the tendency to boasting is an honest inheritance. We can hardly boast louder than our fathers across the sea have taught us. The boasting of New York can scarcely drown the boasting of London. Jonathan thinks highly of himself, but, certainly, John Bull is not behind him in self-esteem.
But, after all, what wonder? Ten centuries of victory over nature and over men may give a race the right to boast—ten centuries of victory with never a defeat! The English tongue is an arrogant tongue, we grant. Command, mastery, lordliness, are bred into its tones. The old tongue of the Romans was never deeper marked in those respects than our own. It is a freeman's speech, this mother language. A slave can never speak it. He garbles, clips, and mumbles it, makes 'quarter talk' of it. The hour he learns to speak English he is spoiled for a slave. It is the tongue of conquerors, the language of imperial will, of self-asserting individuality, of courage, masterhood, and freedom. There is no need of being thin-skinned under the charge of boasting. A man cannot very well learn, in his cradle, 'the tongue that Shakspeare spake,' without talking sometimes as if he and his owned creation.
For the tongue is the representative of the speaker. A people embodies its soul in its language. And the people who inherit English have done work enough in this little world to give them a right to do some talking. They, at least, can speak their boast, and hear it seconded, in the bold accents their mothers taught them, on every shore and on every sea. They have been the world's day-laborers now for some centuries. They have felled its forests, drained its marshes, dug in its mines, ploughed its wastes, built its cities. They have done rough pioneer work over all its surface. They have done it, too, as it never was done before. They have made it stay done. They have never given up one inch of conquered ground. They have never yielded back one square foot to barbarism. Won once to civilization, under their leadership, and your square mile of savage waste and jungle is won forever.
We are inclined to think the world might bear with us. We talk a great deal about ourselves, perhaps; but, on the whole, are we not buying the privilege? Did a race ever buckle to its business in this world in more splendid style than our own? With both hands clenched, stripped to the waist, blackened and begrimed and sweat bathed, this race takes its place in the vanguard of the world and bends to its chosen toil. The grand, patient, hopeful people, how they grasp blind brute nature, and tame her, and use her at their word! How they challenge and defeat in the death grapple the grim giants of the waste and the storm—fever, famine, and the frost!
You will find them down, to-day, among the firedamps in the mines, to-morrow among the splendid pinnacles of the mountains, to settle a fact of science, or add a mite to human knowledge. Here is one, painfully toiling through the tangled depths of a desert continent, to find a highway for commerce or Christianity. Here is another, in the lonely seas around the pole, where the ghostly ice-mountains go drifting through the gray mists, patiently wrestling with the awful powers of nature, to snatch its secret from the hoary deep, and bring it home in triumph. Hard fisted, big boned, tough brained, and stout hearted, scared at nothing, beaten back by no resistance, baffled, for long, by no obstacle, this race works as though the world were only one vast workshop, and they wanted all the tools and all the materials, and were anxious to monopolize the work of the world.
They are workers primarily, makers, producers, builders. Labor is their appointed business as a people. Sometimes they have to fight, when fools stand in their way, or traitors oppose their endeavors. They have had to do, indeed, their fair share of fighting. Things go so awry in this world that a patient worker is often called to drop his tools, square himself, and knock down some idiot who insists on bothering him. And this race of ours has therefore often, patient as it is, flamed out into occasional leonine wrath. It really does not like fighting. That performance interferes with its proper business. It takes to the ploughshare more kindly than to the sabre, and likes to manage a steam engine better than a six-gun battery. But if imbeciles and scoundrels will get in its way, and will mar its pet labors, then, heaven help them! The patient blood blazes into lava, fire, the big muscles strain over the black cannon, the brawny arm guides the fire-belching tower of iron on the sea, and, when these people do fight, they fight, like the Titans when they warred with Jove, with a roar that shakes the spheres. They go at that as they do at everything. They fight to clear this confusion up, to settle it once for all, so it will stay settled, that they may go to their work again in peace. Fond of a clean job, they insist on making a clean job of their fighting, if they have to fight at all.
'But, after all, this race of ours is selfish,' you say. 'It works only for itself, and you are making something grand and heroic out of that. If it civilizes, it civilizes for itself. If it builds cities, drains marshes, redeems jungles, explores rivers, builds railroads, and prints newspapers, it is doing all for its own pocket.' Well, we say, why not? Is the laborer not worthy of his hire? Do you expect a patient, toiling people to conquer a waste continent here, for God and man, and get nothing for it from either? A people never yet did a good stroke of work in this world without getting a fair day's wages for the job. The old two-fisted Romans, in their day, did a good deal of hard work in the way of road and bridge building, and the like of that, across the sea, and did it well, and they got paid for it by several centuries of mastery over Europe. We rather think, high as the pay was, and little as the late Romans seem to have deserved it, it was, on the whole, a profitable bargain for Europe. The truth is, our race has, like all other great creating races, been building wiser than it knew. It is not necessary that such a race should be conscious of its mission. In its own intention it may work for itself. By the guiding of the Great Master, it does work for all humanity and all time. If a race comes on the earth mere fighters, brigands, and thieves, living by force, fraud, and oppression, even then it serves a purpose. It destroys something that needs destroying. In its own turn, however, it must perish. But an honest race, that undertakes to earn its honest living on the earth, and in the main does earn it, honestly and industriously, by planting and building, like our own, never works merely for itself. It plants and builds to stand forever. The results of patient toil never perish. They are so much clear gain to humanity.
To many, the conscious end of the existence of the Yankee nation may have been a small affair indeed. That end is only what they make it. Its unconscious end is, however, another matter. That end God has made. To one man, the nation exists that he may make wooden clocks and sell them. To another, the chief end of the nation's existence is that he may get a good crop of wheat to market during rising quotations. To another, that he may do a good stroke of business in the boot and shoe line. To another, that he may make a good thing in stocks. To some in the past, this nation existed solely that men might breed negroes in Virginia, and work them in Alabama! This great nation was worth the blacks it owned, and the cotton it raised! Actually that was all. The conscious end to thousands amounted to about this. Men looked at the nation from their own small place. They dwarfed its purposes. They made them small and mean and low. They did this three years ago more commonly, we think, than they do now. The war has taught us many things. It has certainly taught us higher ideas of the value of the Nation, and a loftier idea of the meaning of its life. We have awaked to the fact that we are trustees of this continent for the world. We have been fighting for two years and more, not to save this nation for the value of its wheat, or cotton, or manufactures, or exports, but for the value of the ideas, the hopes, the aspirations, the tendencies this nation embodies. We have risen to see that it were a good bargain to barter all the material wealth it holds for the priceless spiritual ideas it represents. France babbles about 'going to war for an idea.' We don't babble. We buckle on our armor and fight, we practical, money-making Yankees, who are said to value everything by dollars, and, after two years of tremendous fighting, are half amazed ourselves to find we have been fighting solely for a half-dozen ideas the world can lose only at the cost of despair. Since the days when men left house and home and friends, with red crosses on their hearts, to redeem from the hands of the infidel the sepulchre which the dead Christ once made holy, the world has never seen a war carried on for a more purely ideal end than our own. We fight for the integrity of the Nation. We fight for what that word means of hope and confidence and freedom and advancement to the groaning and bewildered world. We say, let all else perish,—wealth, commerce, agriculture, cunning manufacture, humanizing art. We expend all to save the Nation. That priceless possession we shall hold intact to the end, for ourselves, our children, and the coming years!