John H. Finley

“ We see the red children of the sun—the Indian sun- worshippers—clothed in white cloaks, receiving the white heralds of Europe; we hear the weather-beaten voyageurs chant on the shores of the gulf solemn, exulting songs learned in church and cloister of France; we hear the faint voice of their leader crying his claim to all the great valley from the mouth of the river to its source beyond the country of the Nadouesioux—the voice not of a human throat alone but of a vision in the wilderness. We discern after long years the sounds of its realization. ”

“ It is the dream of another realm, such reformers declare, that has riveted upon us the chains of lethargy and despair; shatter these, let men become aware of their real nature, let them see that the only truth is to recognize this life as all they have, and that their only hope of happiness is to get together and increase the physical comforts of existence—let this once come to pass, and at last a peace born of universal benevolence will settle down upon this long-vexed planet. Sympathy, they maintain, is a natural instinct of the heart, as surely as the lust of power and possessions ”

“ A traveller, Paul Fountain by name, and so of French origin, I suspect, wandering over those valley plains in the early days, tells of the sense of freedom, health, and strength that they give: "There is no air like the prairie air—not even the grand freshness of the boundless ocean itself.—The loveliness and variety of the prairie odors are quite indescribable, as are its superb wild flowers. It is a paradise. No man who has lived on it long enough to know it and love it (no great time, I can assure you) ever experiences real happiness after he has left it. ”

“ If the home of theoretical materialism is in the lecture-rooms of philosophy, the home of practical materialism is in the offices of Wall Street. If there is any truth that needs to be reiterated to-day, it is the simple truth that a man may heap up riches and increase his power indefinitely, and command all the visible sources of pleasure, and still be a poor, mean creature, a mere beggar in the veritable joys and honors of life. He that has many possessions needs be a strong man to escape their strangling grip. ”

“ Conservation has in such depth of years given a new perspective to the picture we have been painting of the life in that valley. The French were pioneers not merely of an exploiting individualism of a day, or of a hundred or two hundred years, not merely of a democracy thinking of an equality of the men of one generation, but also of the conserving dynamic civilization of hundreds of centuries of a people—to come back again to that best of definitions—who are the invisible multitude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and to-morrow. ”

“ Our great philosopher William James gave expression in one of his last utterances to a hope that every man, rich or poor, may come to serve the State (as now every man in France does his military service) in some direct duty that asks the same obedience, the same sacrifice, the same forgetting of self that is asked of the soldier—that every man by the payment of the blood tax may be able to get and keep the spirit of neighborliness, to know how to sympathize more deeply with his fellow men, and to learn the joy of disinterested doing for the nation. ”

“ As the most primitive and picturesque visualization of the curriculum of this bequest of the race mind of one generation to the next, the pillars of Enoch stood on the verge of history against the Eastern sky of our civilization’s dawn. They have crumbled, or they lie buried in sands that have hidden their wisdoms. The excavator’s spade could uncover no more interesting record than that which would tell us what this great teacher thought should be saved from flood and fire out of the experience of the race. ”

“ Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. ”

“ Is it not possible that Jesus’ social plan is the true and only way so to adjust the individual to his environment that he will find that which he is seeking? Is it not possible that Jesus’ plan provides the only practical way to eliminate the disastrous hatreds and wastage of modern industry, and to bring capital and labor into effective co-operation? Is it not possible that his idea of the fraternal community is the only satisfactory solution of our international problems? ”

“ Isolate we have indeed been as a people, but not provincially nor narrowly nor proudly isolate. We kept out of the partisan Ptolemaic concerns of Europe, but when the freedom of mankind was threatened, America’s policies leaped to the world horizon of her interest in humanity. Our America has had from the first a cosmic view, a concern for all mankind. “All men” are included in its national creed. It is only those who would narrow our horizon of sympathy and bring a Ptolemaic sky over our heads again that it has in its doctrine excluded. ”

“ CHAPTER XIV THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY France evoked from the unknown the valley that may, in more than one sense, be called the heart of America. Her coureurs de bois opened its paths made by the buffalo and the red men to the shod feet of Europe. Her explorers planted the watershed with slender, silent portage traces that have multiplied into thousands of noisy streets and tied indissolubly the lakes of the north to the rivers of the south from which they were long ago severed by nature. Her one white sail above Niagara marked the way of a mighty commerce. ”

“ In the course of a few minutes one sees a few iron carloads of ore that was a month before lying in the earth beyond Superior transformed into a girder for a bridge, a steel rail, a bit of armor-plate, a beam for a sky- scraper—and all in utter human silence, with the calm pushing and pulling of a few levers, the accurate shovelling by a few hands, the deliberate testing by a few pairs of experienced eyes. ”

“ No wonder that the venture and the happiness have gone out of faith, which is the trust in the centuries as against the years, in the unseen instead of in the seen. There is little to be gained by society congratulating itself in its victory over alcohol if all the time it judges all success by outward and obvious standards. As things are, it is regarded almost as a crime not to have made money, and the doom of the “unsuccessful” is not pity but reprobation. How is it that, in a universe in which we believe that the fundamental factors are spiritual, such a conception should have come to rule! ”

“ For they are a people of makers—of new-age poets, not mere workers glorying in the shafts of their goads, wakeful to adorn their work and keep clean the furnace, and making their "craft their prayer" (an impossibility in these days of the high division of labor) but rough, noisy, grimy, braggart creators, caring not for the straightness of the furrow unless it produces more, the beauty of the goad unless it promotes speed, the cleanliness of the furnace unless it increases the output, or the craft itself; but only of the product, the thing led forth, and its value to the world. ”

“ At the same time mankind was beginning to feel its unity and to work out its problems in universal terms. The yearning for brotherhood and for vital bonds that would bind each man to his fellows was strong. Consciously or unconsciously men everywhere were seeking for a satisfying philosophy of life that would afford them peace and happiness in this life and a definite hope of even greater joy in the realm beyond. They were also longing for a social organization that would give them freedom and an opportunity for each to live his life to the full. ”

“ All has to be begun again. Less than nothing is left to him of all his capital. Nothing is left except his own inflexible spirit and the loyalty of his Tonty in the heart of the wilderness. Still undismayed, he turns his hand to the giant task again, only to find when he reaches the Illinois a dread foreboding of the crowning disaster. The Iroquois, the scourge of the east, had swept down the valley of the Illinois like hyenas of the prairies, leaving total desolation in their path. ”

“ We need rather to emphasize the simple truth that poverty is not the only, or indeed the worst, of mortal evils, that happiness does not consist mainly in the things which money can buy, that the man of narrow means may enrich himself with treasures which only he can give to himself, and which no one can take from him, that the purest satisfaction is in the sense of work honestly done and duties well met, and a mind and conscience at ease with itself. Even to the very poor, if such must be, religion may offer manifold compensations. ”

“ I have intimated its influence in promoting migration cityward—a movement as wide as European civilization—but intensified there, where the inhabitants have not been tied through generations of inheritance or historic associations to particular fields, where primogeniture has no observance, and where the traditions are of the wilderness and the visions are ever of a promised land beyond. The city is on every boy's horizon. Its glow is in every prairie sky at twilight. ”

“ CHAPTER XVI THE PRODUCERS On the wonderful background which the passing life of that valley has filled with dim epic figures that are now but the incarnations of European longings, as rich in color as that which lies more consciously back of Greece and Rome or in the fields of Gaul (the splendors of the court of Versailles shining through the sombre forests and into the huts of the simple habitants) —on this I have depicted the rather shadowy suggestions of a matter-of-fact, drab democracy which is usually made to obscure all that background with its smoke. ”