Edwin Lawrence Godkin

“ The highest heights of devotion are often beyond their reach. But if it serves the purposes of a Prussian commander to have all the cost of an assault fall on one regiment, he apparently finds not the slightest difficulty in getting it to march to certain destruction, and not blindly as peasants march, but as men of education, who understand the whole thing, but having made it for this occasion their business to die, do it like any other duty of life—not hilariously or enthusiastically or recklessly, but calmly and energetically, as they study or manufacture or plough. ”

“ When we have all got to the blank wall which everybody admits lies at the boundary of experimental evidence, the philosopher will know no more about what lies beyond than the peasant, though the peasant will probably do then what he does now—people it with the creatures of his imagination. If a philosopher in our day likes to anticipate that period, and hazards the conjecture that matter lies beyond, he is welcome to his guess, but it ought to be understood that it is only a guess. ”

“ But there is one striking difference between American society and those societies in which comic papers have succeeded which not only goes a good way to explain their failure here, but puts a better face on some of their efforts—such as their onslaughts on the friends of progress—than they seem to wear at first sight. To furnish sufficient food for fun to keep a comic paper afloat, a country must supply a good many strong social contrasts for the professional joker to play upon, and must have a large amount of reverence for social distinctions and dignities for him to shock. ”

“ He may be preached into sacrifices in its behalf, but the springs of love cannot be got at by any system of persuasion. No man will love his country unless he feels it to be lovable; and it is to making it lovable that the exertions of those who have American patriotism in charge should be devoted.
Every Good American may take comfort in the fact that very few people indeed of any social or political value who have once lived in America ever want again to live in Europe, unless they go for purposes of study or education. ”

“ Take, again, the light thrown on the constitution of the sun by the spectroscope; it is a marvellous addition to our knowledge of our environment, but then, does it not make our ignorance as to the origin of the sun seem deeper? No scientific man pretends that any success in discovery will ever lead the human mind beyond the resolution of the number of laws which now seem to govern phenomena into a smaller number; but if we reached the limit of the possible in that direction to-morrow, we should be as far from the secret of the universe as ever. ”

“ CULTURE AND WAR The feeling of amazement with which the world is looking on at the Prussian campaigns comes not so much from the tremendous display of physical force they afford—though there is in this something almost appalling—as from the consciousness which everybody begins to have that to put such an engine of destruction as the German army into operation there must be behind it a new kind of motive power. It is easy enough for any government to put its whole male population under arms, or even to lead them on an emergency to the field. ”

“ All the rest of the way down to the springs the road ran through farms which looked as prosperous and peaceful as if the tide of war had not rolled over them inside a hundred years, and it is impossible to talk with the farmers ten minutes without seeing how thoroughly human and Anglo-Saxon they are. With them the war is history—tender, touching, and heroic history if you will, but having no sort of connection with the practical life of to-day. Some of us at the North think their minds are occupied with schemes for the assassination and spoliation of negroes, and for a "new rebellion." ”

“ The fact is—and it is one of the most suggestive facts we know of—that the very growth of the public conscience has helped to make peace somewhat more difficult, war vastly more terrible. When war was the game of kings and soldiers, the nations went into it in a half-hearted way, and sincerely loathed it; now that war is literally an outburst of popular feeling, the friend of peace finds most of his logic powerless. There is little use in reasoning with a man who is ready to die on the folly or wickedness of dying. ”

“ For there is no question that there is no country in the world in which the atmosphere is so friendly, and in which one is so sure of sympathy in misfortune, of acceptance on his own merits independently of birth or money, and has so many opportunities of escape from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as America. These are the things which, after all, in the vast majority of cases, win and hold the human heart ”

“ When we consider, too, that the jury is composed of men who may be said to be literally called in from the street, without the slightest regard to their special qualifications for the conduct of any inquiry, and that they are apt to represent popular passions and prejudices in all conspicuous and exciting cases, we easily see why a trial by a jury, under the common-law rules of evidence, is not the process through which a high-minded man who sought not for "damages," but to keep his reputation absolutely spotless in the estimation of his neighbors, would naturally seek his vindication. ”

“ PEACE The horrors of war are just now making a deeper impression than ever on the popular mind, owing to the close contact with the battle-field and the hospital into which the railroad and the telegraph and the newspaper have brought the public of all civilized countries. Wars are fought out now, so to speak, under every man's and woman's eyes; and, what is perhaps of nearly as much importance, the growth of commerce and manufactures, and the increased complication of the social machine, render the smallest derangement of it anywhere a concern and trouble to all nations. ”

“ We doubt whether this theory will ever die out, however much philosophers may preach against it, or however often facts may refute it, because it gratifies, or promises to gratify, one of the deepest longings of the human heart—the desire which each man feels to have a great deal of history crowded into his own little day. None of us can bear to quit the scene without witnessing the solution of the problems by which his own life has been vexed or over which he has long labored. ”

“ There is probably no one in existence, however good, and however quiet his conscience may be, who can endure without a shudder the thought of every transaction of his past life being dragged out in a court of justice for the amusement of a gaping crowd. Exactly how far the right is abused, and how far the discretionary powers of courts to limit its abuse accomplish their end, it is impossible to say, for it is only in sporadic cases of unusual importance that interest in the result is strong enough to warrant a lawyer's going to great length in cross-examination. ”

“ The losses of the battle-field were deeply felt at the North—in many households down to the very roots of life; but on the whole they fell on a large and prosperous population, on a community which in the very thick of the fray seemed to be rolling up wealth, which revelled as it fought, and came out of the battle triumphant, exultant, and powerful. ”

“ Now, what are the agencies which operate in producing the frame of mind which makes people ready to go to war on small provocation? It is at these the friends of peace must strike, in time of peace, and not after the cannon has begun to roar and the country has gone mad with patriotism and rage. They are, first of all, the preaching in the press and elsewhere of the false and pernicious doctrine that one nation gains by another's losses, and can be made happy by its misery; that the United States, for instance, profits in the long run by the prostration of French, German, or English industry. ”

“ Sensible people in every country acknowledge that a high education can in the nature of things be only obtained by a very small proportion of the population; but that the few who seek it, and can afford to take it, should get it, and should get it of the best quality, they hold to be a public benefit. Now, why a public benefit? The service that Harvard or Yale renders to the community certainly does not lie simply in the fact that it qualifies a thousand young men every year to earn a livelihood. ”

“ His influence, apparently, was not of the kind which reaches a man through articulate speech, but rather that which comes through the blast of a trumpet or the marching tune of a good band, and fills the heart with a feeling of capacity for high endeavor, though one cannot say in what particular field it is to be displayed. But though he founded no school and taught no system of morals, his eminence as a mere preacher was one of the very valuable possessions of the Anglo-Saxon world, as a sort of standing protest against the materialistic tendencies of the age ”

“ A man who has made a large fortune in honest trade or industry has not contributed his share to moral and intellectual interests by merely making donations. It is his duty, also, if he leaves children behind him, to see to it, as far as he can, that they are men who will be an addition to the general culture and taste of the nation, and who will stimulate its nobler ambition, raise its intellectual standard, quicken its love of excellence in all fields, and deepen its faith in the value of things not seen. ”

“ Therefore, we doubt whether the work of peace is well done by those who, amidst the heat and fury of actual hostilities, dwell upon the folly and cruelty of them, and appeal to the combatants to stop fighting, on the ground that fighting involves suffering and loss of life, and the destruction of property. The principal effect of this on "the average man" has been to produce the impression that the friends of peace are ninnies, and to make him smile over the earnestness with which everybody looks on his own wars as holy and inevitable, and his neighbors' wars as unnecessary and wicked. ”

“ In the first place, the newspapers and other cheap periodicals, and the lyceum lectures and small colleges, have diffused through the community a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge, a taste for reading and for "art"—that is, a desire to see and own pictures— which, taken together, pass with a large body of slenderly equipped persons as "culture," and give them an unprecedented self-confidence in dealing with all the problems of life, and raise them in their own minds to a plane on which they see nothing higher, greater, or better than themselves. ”

“ In other words, a man's occupying the position of a listener does not necessarily clothe him with the attributes of a judge, and there may be as much folly and impertinence in his going about saying, "I do not agree with Huxley; he has not satisfied me; he will have to produce more proof than that before I believe in evolution," as in going about saying, "I know as much about evolution as Huxley and could give as good a lecture on it as he any day." And yet a good many people are guilty of the one who would blush at the mere thought of the other. ”

“ In short, Bridget is the legitimate product of our economical, political, and moral condition. We have called her, in our extremity, to do duties for which she is not trained, and having got her here have surrounded her with influences and ideas which American society has busied itself for fifty years in fostering and spreading, and which, taking hold of persons in her stage of development, work mental and moral ruin. The things which American life and manners preach to her are not patience, sober-mindedness, faithfulness, diligence, and honesty, and eagerness for physical enjoyment. ”

“ The cottager, too, sets no bounds to his pretensions as to territory. His policy, apparently the old policy of the conqueror everywhere, is to let the boarder go up the coast and discover the most attractive resorts, and allow him to report on them in the newspapers, write poetry about them, lay the scene of novels and plays in them, and then pursue him and eradicate him from the soil as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes a resort far more beautiful to the eye than the boarder there is no denying. ”

“ It will be a sorrowful day for any people when their men come to consider death on the battle-field the greatest of evils, and the human heart will certainly have sadly fallen off when those who stay at home have neither gratitude nor admiration for those who shoulder the musket, or are impressed less by the consideration that the soldiers are going to kill others than by the consideration that they are going to die themselves. ”