Such is the world which our times have given so largely into our keeping. This world demands a leadership such as gave our country unity under the Constitution of 1787. The giants of those days—a full dozen strong, loom large over the succeeding generations, and like Titans of old, their deeds illuminate our whole history. Much accursed as we are to-day by petty minds and selfish hearts in high places, we read the history of our heroic period with deepest yearning that the mighty dead might rise up and speak to us the living words we need to hear. We feel so helpless, so lost, and gone astray. What mind and character we may still have has ceased to function normally. From now on we may expect a steady drift toward monarchy. In a decadent republic monarchicalism is a natural growth. First comes a great class of the rich on the one hand and a great class of poor on the other. Both tend, because of their conditions, toward corruption. Both corrupt the state. The one will barter the ten commandments to keep what it has; the other to get what it wants. For a time the proletariat is oppressed with free corn and the circus, with organized charities, baseball and the movies. No republic can long endure on that regimen. Gold has already paved the way that leads to the United States Senate. All that is needed is more gold and the way will be smoothly paved to the throne of Caesar or Belshazzar.
It has always seemed to me that our stupendous national sacrifices during the War Between the States have never been recovered. We lost a million of the sturdiest and best men who ever grew to manhood in the world. So did that generation lose a million homes. We have to-day, instead of the ten millions of their descendants, equally divided between the city and country, some twenty millions of unskilled foreign workers crowded into the cities alone. With the close of the War Between the States we ceased, in every section, to produce first class national leaders. To-day Charles Murphy has replaced Alexander Hamilton. In Illinois, Lincoln the Great gives way to William Hale Thompson the Little. The passing of Woodrow Wilson from the public life leaves the South searching, perhaps in vain, for a leader to present to the service of the republic. Into our Southern political life, as into that of the North a generation ago, there is creeping the hireling of special interests. Only the ignorant can say that we have not fallen on times that are weak and evil and failing at every point.
So we drift—on and on; when to drift at all is to drift toward the abyss. With each setting sun we become less capable of doing well the great task assigned to us. We are deceived by the superficial results of mechanical progress. Hence we do not care to know that each waning summer marks a loss for us in all the fundamental determinants of blood, of character, of all the elemental forces. These basic elements of our peculiar civilization can be maintained only through the most watchful care. A single careless deed done to-day by the nation and countless ages must pay an ever increasing price of failure and misery. Our English-speaking peoples are as a ship of democracy struggling in the sea of unfaith,—an ocean of the world's failure and despair. We are driven before a furious gale; great waves wash over our decks. We drug ourselves into believing the theory that somehow Divine Providence always has cared for, and always will care for, the children, the lunatics and the United States. Of course this theory is trash. The Almighty helps only those that help themselves.
You millions of the middle classes of America, living in comfortable ease—upon your conscience is the greater burden placed! Will you continue to fiddle while the common weal is in flames? The future throughout your country and the world will hold you responsible! "BE . NOT DECEIVED, GOD IS NOT MOCKED. WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH, THAT ALSO SHALL HE REAP."
"The Federal Union—It Must Be Preserved"
The American government under God shall not perish from the earth.
In 1830 Andrew Jackson arose before a group of distinguished men assembled at a dinner in Washington and proposed the toast which forms the title of this chapter. It seems to me that this expression of the iron resolve of the old war-worn hero should be placed among those statements of our great leaders which have been as divine commands in the great crises which our country has experienced. Jackson loved the Union. In 1830 few people understood those peculiar underlying forces which were drawing the Union apart. It is evident to us now, after studying the history of the generation preceding the Civil War, that only a Union which exists in the minds and hearts of all its citizens can be an enduring entity. It may seem rather trite to say again that national unity is based first of all upon an individual sentiment. Even during the War Between the States this love of the Union as an ideal never ceased to animate the people of the South. They sought merely to rebuild the Union on a different basis. After the surrender at Appomattox the South faithfully accepted the old Union under the changed conditions of its re-establishment. Since that time their loyalty to the Union, as it is, has never been questioned. All must now recognize that until the great differences which severed the Union had been finally settled, the Union itself could not be re-established.