Joseph Husband

“ With the entrance of new territory [Pg 67] into the Union, the question flamed forth with greater violence: would the new states be free states or slave states? Would the slave-holders or the anti-slavery men rule the land? Would slavery or freedom dominate?
Schurz flung himself into politics and the anti-slavery party of the North. With clear vision he realized that slavery must be destroyed, but that the United States must be preserved; a separation of the slave states from the Union could not be tolerated; all must be united in freedom. ”

“ A rich inland empire was disclosing wealth beyond dreams of men: mines of iron and coal and various metals, forests unexplored and seemingly limitless, millions of rich acres unturned by the ploughshare and destined in time to come to feed the world. Already minds of vision were organizing railroads to bring together these riches and to make them accessible to the nation as a whole. All over the world people were turning from war-scarred and time-worn nations oppressed by the rule of kings to this free land of promise. ”

“ The scientific world will ever remember Louis Agassiz for his discoveries in zoölogy, for his vast researches in the study of fishes, and for his glacial theories and subsequent revelations in geology; but the world at large will hold him perhaps more dear as the master who brought to the United States the old sciences of an older civilization and, infusing them with his own vitality, became to the people of America the first and the great teacher of the history of the mighty book of nature, which before his time had remained closed to them. ”

“ To the scantily clad, starving, and penniless young man, the great city seemed to turn a cold and forbidding shoulder. But opportunity does not come to those who wait expectant of it: it is a prize to be won by struggle, and often by privation. Opportunity is everywhere, but it is only the stalwart, indomitable spirits who seek and seize it.
Hard days followed. From New York Riis went to Jamestown, a small village in the northern part of the state, and there he spent the winter doing such trivial jobs as fell to him, glad to receive the small and irregular pay which enabled him to struggle on. ”

“ But although Carnegie was one of the world’s most generous givers he had no desire to abolish poverty. “We should,” he said, “be quite willing to abolish luxury, but to abolish honest, industrious, self-denying poverty would be to destroy the soil upon which mankind produces the virtues which enable our race to reach a still higher civilization than it now possesses.” Not to help men were his millions given, but to help men to help themselves. In his long list of philanthropies, education is the goal. ”

“ With such traditions and in such environment, it is small wonder that young Jacob grew to be a healthy, normal boy charged with ambition and energy. There was fighting blood in his veins, but it was the blood that rises and fights against oppression and for the right, and never for conquest or the subjection of the weak.
It was the ambition of the father that Jacob should study for a professional career, but to the young boy, with his strong body and alert mind, the study of a trade appealed more keenly, and he was apprenticed for a year to a carpenter in the town. ”

“ Also, they found it necessary to develop the government of their new nation, and form from the wilderness, where once only the Indians dwelt, new states to increase the union of the great Republic.
But through all these years of labor there remained in the minds of men an appreciation of those other more beautiful factors of civilization; memories of an inheritance that were like dreams from which these pioneers waited to be awakened by someone who, at the right time, would come to them and, understandingly, would point out the way. The love of music was in their hearts. ”

“ Of the many monuments which Saint-Gaudens created there are five which commemorate great heroes of the Civil War. The monument of Admiral Farragut has been mentioned; standing in the heart of the country’s greatest city, it carries daily to the thousands who pass an unconscious inspiration—as though treading the swinging deck of his flagship, the Admiral seems to look forward with a grim determination, inflexible, indomitable—a man. ”

“ To-day we travel thousands of miles by railroad; a hundred years ago our great-great-grandfathers traveled by horse-drawn coaches. Where we may now speed a mile a minute behind a giant steam locomotive, they were content with what seemed to them the tremendous speed of eleven miles an hour. But all things change. There are always leaders in the world’s progress. Of these leaders was John Ericsson. Travel had been a luxury of the rich; the invention of the steam locomotive made fast and economical travel possible to the poor as well. ”

“ With his only means of earning a living destroyed, necessity compelled the elder Carnegie to seek occupation somewhere beyond the limits of the quiet Scotch town. Across the Atlantic a great new republic was just reaching its young manhood. Its fast-sailing clippers had made the Stars and Stripes of its flag known on every sea, and tales of the daring Yankee skippers had brought to complacent England a rude awakening from her peaceful sense of maritime supremacy. Within its boundaries even greater developments were taking form under the firm hands of the Americans. ”

“ To radical minds there is food for thought in this strange crest and its motto, for they who cry death to privilege often mean death to ambition, and without ambition the son of the weaver would never have become the world benefactor who made himself able to give wealth by the hundreds of millions for the good of humanity. ”

“ We can leave to the native-born their natural pride in their birthright, but we can claim that we pay a greater compliment to this land than can these others, for our citizenship is not the result of an accident but of our free choice. And we have paid our price. We, and we alone, know what it has cost to leave behind scenes and traditions and affections which clung close to the heart. ”

“ Denmark, that land of low-lying, storm-swept coasts, and level plains, has bred for centuries a race of hardy, freedom-loving people. It is only natural that America should hold out to them a promise of even greater opportunity and personal liberty. ”

“ These formal unveilings of monuments are impressive affairs and variations from the toughness that pervades a sculptor’s life. For we constantly deal with practical problems, with moulders, contractors, derricks, stone-men, ropes, builders, scaffoldings, marble assistants, bronze-men, trucks, rubbish-men, plasterers, and what-not else, all the while trying to soar into the blue.—But if managed intelligently there is a swing to unveilings, and the moment when the veil drops from the monument certainly makes up for many of the woes that go towards the creating of the work. ”

“ And on the scarred and grooved rocks was the final evidence; for these deep scratches had surely been ground by the advancing glacier as it slowly and silently moved onward. “The idea that such phenomena were not restricted to regions where glaciers now are found, but that traces of glacial action could be seen over enormous tracts of the earth’s surface, perhaps including regions in the tropics, and that in countries now temperate there might be discovered, not only the remains of tropical fauna and flora, but also distinct indications of a period of arctic cold—this was as new as startling.” ”

“ In the older civilizations there was a fertile field long cultivated for the ever-increasing growth of music.
In the United States, however, another condition existed. Here was a new civilization, transplanted by early settlers from beyond the sea. Here there was no existing civilization developed through centuries. It was a land to which had come men and women from every nation in the world, seeking freedom from the rule of kings and a place where they might live in peace and equality, regardless of their birth. Each brought with him the civilization of his native land. ”

“ Literature, art, music, and science are measures of civilization; so also are agricultural, industrial, and social progress. All men contributing to the advancement of civilization are benefactors of mankind. The inventor, the artist, the physician, the scientist, the manufacturer, the writer, the explorer, and the musician, all contribute to human happiness and advancement. ”

“ Many opportunities come to every man. It depends upon himself, and upon what he shall make of himself, what he makes of opportunities and what they will make of him.”
From a poor farmer boy, in fifty years, James J. Hill, by the force of his own determination, and the opportunities common to all men in the great Republic of which he became a citizen, achieved a position among the world-leaders of his day. Wealth in millions came to him, not by inheritance or a stroke of speculative chance, but from the works which he himself had conceived and created. ”

“ Unselfish, giving his all to the common cause, Jacob Riis is of the noble band of great Americans. As he lived, so he died, relatively a poor man. But poor only in worldly goods; for in the peace of his home and the love of wife and children he found a priceless wealth that gold can never buy. ”

“ There were few comforts or pleasures waiting to welcome young Ericsson into the world. The little village where he was born rested high in the mountains within six degrees of the Arctic Circle. All around were dark and gloomy forests, filled with strange legends and tales of ancient heroes, handed down from grandfather to father and from father to son. The hard thin soil of the mountains was unfit for cultivation, and it was difficult for the people of the forest villages to live on the poor crops which they produced in the few acres hewn from the forests. ”

“ Hill is the last of the generations of wilderness conquerors, the men who interpreted the Constitution, fixed our foreign relations, framed the Monroe Doctrine, and blazed all the great trails which determined the nation’s future. ”

“ Men want most to count among their fellows for what they are worth. This desire is more persistent than love, more universal than the thirst for wealth or power, more fundamental than the demand for pleasure. ”

“ And strange in contrast is the story of a baby of humble parentage who by chance first saw the light through the high windows of a castle wall, and lived to become an honored citizen of a land where royalty is unknown and all men are equal. ”

“ The soil was the sole source of their livelihood. Born in a wilderness where dark forests still sheltered wolves and deer, and where the Indians still roamed, the boy, from earliest childhood, received impressions that moulded his life’s destiny. He was born to see man subdue the wilderness, to see his struggle with the forces of primitive nature, to see his inevitable victory. As his own father hewed his few acres from the forest, so in the coming years was James J. Hill to redeem vast wilderness territories and give them to the use of man. ”

“ The reform was accomplished. For the deserving [Pg 151] poor, decent quarters were provided; the professional vagrants left the city.
In the gloom and dirt of the crowded tenements the souls of little children were shrunk and dwarfed. Riis was their crusader. Through his paper he appealed for flowers—flowers from those who came each day to the city from the country; flowers for “sad little eyes in crowded tenements, where the summer sunshine means disease and death, not play or vacation; that will close without ever having looked upon a field of daisies.” ”

“ Probably no nation in all the world has given so much in so short a time to civilization as the United States. The reason is not far to seek, for in no other country have such opportunities to accomplish their fine desires ever been offered to men of ambition and ability; never has there been so fair a field in which each man might rise as high as his own strength would carry him.
Courtesy of A. C. McClurg & Co.
Theodore Thomas (signature)
Since the world began, music has been a part of the very life of every nation. ”

“ The vision that inspired James J. Hill was not a colossal fortune, but the opening up and populating of a great territory with farmers leading large, wholesome, and prosperous lives. Two of the nine were artists, who neither asked nor received great financial rewards, but who found here the chance to create beauty and to form taste, and in seizing this chance they found their supreme satisfaction.
Of these nine men I have known only one, Augustus Saint-Gaudens; but none could have illustrated better the spirit in which work has to be done if it is to yield [Pg xiv] its greatest reward. ”

“ For half a century, from the glorious day when the United States cast off the yoke of a European monarchy and became a republic, there was small time in [Pg 76] the lives of Americans for music, art, and all the other finer elements of civilization. It was necessary that men should explore and open up the vast rich country in which they lived. They must build cities and plant fields with grain; they must dig deep mines and find coal and metals, and they must cut timber from the forests for the needs of the nation. ”

“ There was the golden cross presented to him by King Christian of Denmark, and there were other recognitions to be found in the friendship and respect of the foremost citizens of the United States. But of all honors, the greatest was the affection of the thousands whom he helped a little nearer to the light, for whom he had opened windows in their souls.
No better advice has been given than this: “As to battling with the world, that is good for a young man, much better than to hang on to somebody for support. A little starvation once in a while, even, is not out of the way. ”

“ On December 14, 1873, Louis Agassiz died at Cambridge, in the shadow of the walls of the great University [Pg 55] of which he had become so loyal a member. Above his grave a simple granite boulder from the glacier of the Aar, sent by loving friends in the land of his birth, gives in its brief inscription the name of a man whom the United States proudly claims as citizen, and whom the world honors as a man. ”

“ Deeper than the grudge that a man has against the society which refuses him due credit for his achievement is the grudge that a man feels when he has to admit to himself that his achievement is not really creditable. ”