Henry Watterson

“ We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him in the face, yet—if he be a true man—with a little bird singing ever in his heart the song of hope and cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson and Arkwright and the long procession of inventors, lowly born, to whom the world owes the glorious achievements of this, the greatest of the centuries. ”

“ Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the fable we call existence had so rare a setting and rung up its curtain upon such a succession of performances; has so concentrated human attention upon mundane affairs; has called such a muster roll of stage favorites; has contributed to romance so many heroes and heroines, to history so many signal episodes and personal exploits, to philosophy so much to kindle the craving for vital knowledge, to stir sympathy and to awaken reflection.
Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us as pictures live, as statues live. ”

“ The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief. But the adventuress in real life--the prudent adventuress who draws the line at adultery--the would-be leader of society without the wealth--the would-be political leader without the masculine fiber--is sure of disappointment in the end.
Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragette expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us.
It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that they have it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot for women. ”

“ The soldier is a picked man. Whether he be a soldier in arms, or a soldier of the cross, his courage, his loyalty, his love and faith challenge the confidence of men and the adoration of women. If he falls he has paid his mortal debt with honor. If he survives, though crippled, he is not disabled. His crutch tells its own story and carries its mute appeal, and there is an eloquence, though silent, resistless, in the empty sleeve.
Christendom stands face to face with the dispersion of some of its cherished ideals. ”

“ Shall we survive the lures with which the spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our wayward footsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and perverted religion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running to license, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity of glory--or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mount and ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed the phalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sides and sweep the decks of Europe? ”

“ To make haste slowly, to look before leaping, to take counsel of experience—were Democratic axioms. Thus the fathers of Democracy, while fully conceiving the imperfections of government and meeting as events required the need alike of movement and reform, put the visionary and experimental behind them to aim at things visible, attainable, tangible, the written Constitution the one safe precedent, the morning star and the evening star of their faith and hope.
What havoc the parties and the politicians have made of all these lofty pretenses! Where must an old-line Democrat go to find himself? ”

“ Why should we worry? Food-stuffs soaring—war stuffs roaring—everybody making money—the mercenary, the poor of heart, the mean of spirit, the bleak and barren of soul, could still plead the Hypocrisy of Uplift and chortle: 'I did not raise my boy to be a soldier.' Even the Lusitania did not awaken us to a sense of danger and arouse us from the stupefaction of ignorant and ignoble self-complacency. ”

“ A great man of letters quite thwarted, I became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the press--now and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was nearly thirty years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I did this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while some faint ambitions of statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a free nigger and not a slave nigger." ”

“ The woman who is for peace at any price—whose imagination is filled with the horror of war—who, true to her nature, shrinks from bloodshed—is not as the man who skulks from the line and lowers alike the flag of his country and his manhood. ”

“ Watteau took the elegancies and fripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, as if the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster took the curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height, superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners this country has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. ”

“ Never in the larger sense a leader of men as were Chatham and Fox, as were Washington, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas as were Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle tenacity of Louis the Eleventh of France, the keen foresight of Richelieu with a talent for the surprising which would have raised him to eminence in journalism. In short he was an opportunist void of conviction and indifferent to consistency.
The pen is mightier than the sword only when it has behind it a heart as well as a brain. He who wields it must be brave, upright and steadfast. ”

“ Thus a long, bloody and costly War of Sections--a fraternal war if ever there was one--brought on by alternating intolerance, the politicians of both sides gambling upon the credulity and ignorance of the people.
Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight. It comes easier and shows clearer. Anybody can now see that the slavery problem might have had a less ruinous solution; that the moral issue might have been compromised from time to time and in the end disposed of. Slave labor even at the South had shown itself illusory, costly and clumsy. ”

“ It has been my rule, aim and effort in my newspaper career to print nothing of a man which I would not say to his face; to print nothing of a man in malice; to look well and think twice before consigning a suspect to the ruin of printer’s ink; to respect the old and defend the weak; and, lastly, at work and at play, daytime and nighttime, to be good to the girls and square with the boys, for hath it not been written of such is the kingdom of Heaven?
There will always be in a democracy two or more sets of rival leaders to two or more differing groups of followers. ”

“ Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist--not quite yet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles--the first newspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried by Raymond and Forney--a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile of resources, and not afraid--stood foremost among them. Next came Horace White. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eye as cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, a working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. ”

“ How long shall it be when the mudsill millions take the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend them as the furiosos of the Terror in France did the aristocrats of the Régime Ancien? The issue between capital and labor, for example, is full of generating heat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the crowded centers of population, it may not one day engulf us all?
Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping back into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way to perfection? ”

“ He believed the North equally guilty with the South for the original existence of slavery. He clearly understood that the Irrepressible Conflict was a Conflict of systems, not a merely sectional and partisan quarrel. He was a just man, abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, indeed, who stood in awe of the Constitution and his oath of office. He wanted to leave the South no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor unremunerative, had sold its negroes to the South and then turned about and by force of arms confiscated what it had unloaded at a profit. ”