Charles Dudley Warner

“ Whatever the greatness of the nation, whatever the accumulation of wealth, the worth of the world to us is exactly the worth of our individual lives. The magnificent opportunity in this Republic is that we may make the most possible out of our lives, and it will continue only as we adhere to the original conception of the Republic. Politics without virtue, money-making without conscience, may result in great splendor, but as such an experiment is not new, its end can be predicted. An agreeable home for a vast, and a free, and a happy people is quite another thing. ”

“ Therefore I say that we are still to make the continent we have discovered and occupied, and that the scope and quality of our national life are still to be determined. If they are determined not by the narrow tenets of the Pilgrims, but by their high sense of duty, and of the value of the human soul, it will be a nation that will call the world up to a higher plane of action than it ever attained before, and it will bring in a new era of humanity. If they are determined by the vulgar successes of a mere material civilization, it is an experiment not worth making. ”

“ There is something captivating to the imagination in being a citizen of a great nation, one powerful enough to command respect everywhere, and so just as not to excite fear anywhere. This proud feeling of citizenship is a substantial part of a man's enjoyment of life; and there is a certain compensation for hardships, for privations, for self-sacrifice, in the glory of one's own country. It is not a delusion that one can afford to die for it. But what in the last analysis is the object of a government? ”

“ The senate, as it stands, as it was meant to be in the Constitution, is the strongest safeguard which the fundamental law established against centralization, against the tyranny of mere majorities, against the destruction of liberty, in such a diversity of climates and conditions as we have in our vast continent. It is not a mere check upon hasty legislation; like some second chambers in Europe, it is the representative of powers whose preservation in their dignity is essential to the preservation of the form of our government itself. ”

“ The circle of darkness is drawn about a little group of Pilgrims who have come ashore on a sandy and inhospitable coast. On one side is a vexed and wintry sea, three thousand miles of tossing waves and tempest, beyond which lie the home, the hedgerows and cottages, the church towers, the libraries and universities, the habits and associations of an old civilization, the strongest and dearest ties that can entwine around a human heart, abandoned now definitely and forever by these wanderers ”

“ We strike directly at his power for mischief when we organize the entire civil service of the nation and of the States on capacity, integrity, experience, and not on political power.
And if we look further, considering the danger of concentration of power in irresponsible hands, we see a new cause for alarm in undue federal mastery and interference. This we can only resist by the constant assertion of the rights, the power, the dignity of the individual State, all that it has not surrendered in the fundamental constitution of the Republic. ”

“ The nation is what the majority of its citizens are. It is to be judged by the condition of its humblest members. We shall gain nothing over other experiments in government, although we have money enough to buy peace from the rest of the world, or arms enough to conquer it, although we rear upon our material prosperity a structure of scientific achievement, of art, of literature unparalleled, if the common people are not sharers in this great prosperity, and are not fuller of hope and of the enjoyment of life than common people ever were before. ”

“ Without reservoirs of wealth there would be no great universities, schools of science, museums, galleries of art, libraries, solid institutions of charity, and perhaps not the wide diffusion of culture which is the avowed aim of modern civilization.
But this in its kind is an old story. It is an experiment that has been repeated over and over. History is the record of the rise of splendid civilizations, many of which have flowered into the most glorious products of learning and of art, and have left monuments of the proudest material achievements. ”

“ To live the life now is to be no more isolated or separate, but to throw ourselves into the great movement of thought, and feeling, and achievement. Therefore we are altruists in charity, missionaries of humanity, patriots at home. Therefore we have a justifiable pride in the growth, the wealth, the power of the nation, the state, the city. ”

“ The Pilgrims were poor, and they built their huts on a shore which gave such niggardly returns for labor that the utmost thrift was required to secure the necessaries of life. Out of this struggle with nature and savage life was no doubt evolved the hardihood, the endurance, that builds states and wins the favors of fortune. But poverty is not commonly a nurse of virtue, long continued, it is a degeneration. It is almost as difficult for the very poor man to be virtuous as for the very rich man; and very good and very rich at the same time, says Socrates, a man cannot be. ”

“ Then all the way down from the capital to the city ward, we shall have vital popular government, free action, discussion, agitation, life. What an anomaly it is, that a free people, reputed shrewd and intelligent, should intrust their most vital interests, the making of their laws, the laying of their taxes, the spending of their money, even their education and the management of their public institutions, into the keeping of political bosses, whom they would not trust to manage the least of their business affairs, nor to arbitrate on what is called a trial of speed at an agricultural fair. ”

“ If he hands it over to bosses, who make politics a trade for their own livelihood, he will find himself in the condition of stockholders of a bank whose directors are mere dummies, when some day the cashier packs the assets and goes on a foreign journey for his health. When the citizen simply does his duty in the place where he stands, the boss will be eliminated, in the nation, in the State, in the town, and we shall have, what by courtesy we say we have now, a government by the people. ”

“ Our experiment on this continent was intended to be something more than the creation of a nation on the old pattern, that should become big and strong, and rich and luxurious, divided into classes of the very wealthy and the very poor, of the enlightened and the illiterate. It was intended to be a nation in which the welfare of the people is the supreme object, and whatever its show among nations it fails if it does not become this. ”

“ Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing strength. Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas. ”

“ While abuses like these exist, tolerated by the majority that not only make public opinion, but make the laws, this is not a government for the people, any more than a government of bosses is a government by the people.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth could see no way of shaping their lives in accordance with the higher law except by separating themselves from the world. We have their problem, how to make the most of our lives, but the conditions have changed. Ours is an age of scientific aggression, fierce competition, and the widest toleration. The horizon of humanity is enlarged. ”

“ What is the essential thing, without which even the glory of a nation passes into shame, and the vastness of empire becomes a mockery? I will not say that it is the well-being of every individual, because the term well-being—the 'bien etre' of the philosophers of the eighteenth century—has mainly a materialistic interpretation, and may be attained by a compromise of the higher life to comfort, and even of patriotism to selfish enjoyment. ”

“ There is no doctrine so belittling, so withering to our national life, as that which conceives our destiny to be a life of exclusion of the affairs and interests of the whole globe, hemmed in to the selfish development of our material wealth and strength, surrounded by a Chinese wall built of strata of prejudice on the outside and of ignorance on the inside. ”

“ It is not to be supposed that the Pilgrims had an adequate conception of the continent, or of the magnitude of their mission on it, or of the nation to come of which they were laying the foundations. They did the duty that lay nearest to them; and the duty done today, perhaps without prescience of its consequences, becomes a permanent stone in the edifice of the future. They sought a home in a fresh wilderness, where they might be undisturbed by superior human authority ”

“ That is the best government in which the people, and all the people, get the most out of life; for the object of being in this world is not primarily to build up a government, a monarchy, an aristocracy, a democracy, or a republic, or to make a nation, but to live the best sort of life that can be lived. ”

“ Except in the rapidity with which steam and electricity have enabled us to move to our object, and in the discoveries of science which enable us to relieve suffering and prolong human life, there is nothing new in our experiment. We are pursuing substantially the old ends of material success and display. And the ends are not different because we have more people in a nation, or bigger cities with taller buildings, or more miles of railway, or grow more corn and cotton, or make more plows and threshing-machines, or have a greater variety of products than any nation ever had before. ”

“ The federal government is not to interfere in what the State can do and ought to do for itself; the State is not to meddle with what the county can best do for itself; nor the county in the affairs best administered by the town and the municipality. And so we come to the individual citizen. He cannot delegate his responsibility. The government even of the smallest community must be, at least is, run by parties and by party machinery. ”

“ We are in no vain chase of an equality which would eliminate all individual initiative, and check all progress, by ignoring differences of capacity and strength, and rating muscles equal to brains. But we are in pursuit of equal laws, and a fairer chance of leading happy lives than humanity in general ever had yet. ”

“ You have seen the trails of the Indian and the deer replaced by highways of steel, and upon the spots where the first immigrants corralled their wagons, and the voyagers dragged their canoes upon the reedy shore, you have seen arise great cities, centres of industry, of commerce, of art, attaining in a generation the proportions and the world-wide fame of cities that were already famous before the discovery of America. ”

“ It comes nearer than any empire in history to being self-sufficient, physically independent of the rest of the globe. That is to say, if it were shut off from the rest of the world, it has in itself the material for great comfort and civilization. ”

“ Only a few years later, on the banks of the Connecticut, Thomas Hooker, the first American Democrat, proclaimed that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people," that "the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance," that it is the right of the people not only to choose but to limit the power of their rulers, and he exhorted, "as God has given us liberty to take it." ”

“ These lower and baser qualities of the age of the Puritans leave a stain upon a great achievement; it took Massachusetts almost two centuries to cast them off and come into a wholesome freedom, but the vital energy and the recognition of the essential verities inhuman life carried all the institutions of the Puritans that were life-giving over the continent. ”

“ It is incidental and imperative that the country should be an agreeable one to live in; but it must be more than that, it must be favorable to the growth of the higher life. The Puritan community of Massachusetts Bay, whose spirit we may happily contrast with that of the Pilgrims whose anniversary we celebrate, must have been as disagreeable to live in as any that history records ”

“ It is a great people that can withstand great prosperity. The condition of comfort without extremes is that which makes a happy life. I know a village of old-fashioned houses and broad elm-shaded streets in New England, indeed more than one, where no one is inordinately rich, and no one is very poor, where paupers are so scarce that it is difficult to find beneficiaries for the small traditionary contribution for the church poor ”

“ But a good government, the best government, is only an opportunity. However vast the country may become in wealth and population, it cannot rise in quality above the average of the majority of its citizens ”

“ Naturally the country is proud of this achievement. Naturally we magnify our material prosperity. But in this age of science and invention this development may be said to be inevitable, and besides it is the necessary outlet of the energy of a free people. There must be growth of cities, extension of railways, improvement of agriculture, development of manufactures, amassing of wealth, concentration of capital, beautifying of homes, splendid public buildings, private palaces, luxury, display. ”