New York State Historical Association. Meeting

“ At the close of the Revolution the integrity of the Six Nations had been effectually broken, and the castles of the Mohawks swept from the valley proper. The history, of the latter nation especially, needs to be studied, not in the wild glamour of fiction, but in the realm of fact, as that of an original people, native to the soil of the New World, clasping hands with the era of the origin of man; a people who, when they were first met, had borrowed nothing, absolutely nothing, from the civilizations or the languages of the Old World—the Ougwe-howe, the "real men" of the Mohawk Valley. ”

“ That great institution, not reckoning many others devoted to the same cause, is of itself alone a glorious monument to the pioneers of Moreau who, in a tempest of scorn and ridicule, laid its foundations. Wisely the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, as the name implies, built up its sublime edifice of the same material—the granite of organization. From towns, through counties, states, nations and the civilized world, it carries on systematically its vast and beneficent enterprises. ”

“ If at present the consumer seems to be throttled by the trust-magnate, on one hand, and the labor-trust on the other, each monopoly working to the common purpose of keeping up prices to be paid by the consumer, the remedy is in his own hands. It is not in riot, revolution, anarchy, by frenzied declamations against those who are doing only what nine-tenths of the human kind would do for themselves, if opportunity were afforded; but by using the power which free government gives to the people, and correcting the evils by what Gladstone called "the resources of civilization." ”

“ It is always a pleasure to visit the homes of eminent persons who long since have died. To look upon the scenes that they once beheld; to walk in the paths that they once trod, is like coming into familiar intercourse with the intimate friend of the honored dead, and we go from the places hallowed by such associations with a sense of having gained almost a personal acquaintance with the great who there have had a habitation. The native town of Dr. Billy James Clark was beautiful old Northampton, in Massachusetts. ”

“ But the Platonic Communism was one where equality and humanity were left out. Plato could not escape the Time-Spirit. The Platonic Republic was his Athens idealized. "The very age and body of the time" gave to the philosopher's dream its form and pressure. The actual Hellenic Republics were not based upon the rights of man; a few ruled over a nation of proletariats and slaves. When they came into rough contact with the vigorous Roman civilization, they were shattered like iridescent bubbles. Even so wise-browed a philosopher as Plato failed to recognize sufficiently the human element. ”

“ The world thrilled with an emotion never felt before. What more natural than that a new social order should arise, into which should be gathered all classes of men, glorified, purified, ready for the Advent of the conquering Galilean, which was then almost universally anticipated. But alas, the Augustine City of God has never come. It will never come as a political organization. Its home is in the human heart. ”

“ The advent of Christianity had brought into the world the auroral flush of a new moral order, a quickened sense of social duty; a warmth of human brotherhood; a heightened conscience. The church was rising like a splendid mausoleum over the sepulcher of its founder. ”

“ We may consider government, or rather the social organism, as a working basis on which men manage to live together, receiving from and giving to each other protection for life and property. There is a noble phrase of Edmund Burke—he was a master of noble phrases—"moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race." In order to have any basis on which human beings could live together, there must have been a moulding together of immense diversities. ”

“ After the Indian war Sullivan was reviled unmercifully for the devastation wrought by him in the Indian country. Out of his love for General Washington he suffered in silence, while he had in his possession General Washington's written instructions to do exactly as he had done.
Perchance for a good man some would even dare to die. But what of a man whose friendship holds so strong that he may see that which is dearer to him than life—his character—filched from him, and lest he should harm a friend, allow his enemies to do with that character as they wished. ”

“ Human nature and human society are tremendously complex. No two persons are just alike; and each personality is a bundle of contradictory qualities. Government rests upon two forces, sovereignty and obedience. Somebody must command; somebody must obey. Each of these forces is powerfully operative in most men. The love of authority, dominion, power, the will to make another to do our bidding, is deeply planted in the human nature. Nothing is more intoxicating, more enjoyable, than power. ”

“ The volume of knowledge has become so vast that no man, even the wisest, can do more than to touch its skirts. In no department of study is the trend of specialization more active than in the interpretation of history. In the hunt after the subtle causes that have lurked in the bosom of society and have flamed into consuming fire, from time to time, the patient historian, the student of sociology, has grouped tendencies, impulses, transitional waves of popular feeling, into generalizations. ”

“ Fact will merge in fact; law will melt into a larger law; one deep of knowledge will call unto another deep; much that the proudest scientist of our day calls knowledge will vanish away; many theories now popular will be dissected and pruned and will be found to be "such stuff as dreams are made on," before the most enlightened humanity of a future age catches any one phase of nature in its snare and compresses it into rigid laws. ”

“ Sir William Johnson had died just as the Revolution was about to begin. His successors became not only as great Loyalists as ever he had been, but, being men of smaller minds and fewer talents. They added to the sentiment of loyalty an expression of it which took the form of satanic bitterness and brute savagery. It was these men who, with their followers, became the hated Tories of the frontier of New York—men of whom in some instances, Joseph Brant said, they had been more savage than the savages themselves. ”

“ He had sat at the feet of the great master of dialectic, and, with the hot enthusiasm of a reformer, painted a picture of the idealized man, living in a community where the supremacy of the intellect was to be recognized as authoritative, where the individual and family were to be absorbed in the state, and where a lofty communism was to be established, and in which Virtue, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were to be sovereign entities. ”

“ There are ages that are creative. At such times two classes of men are prominent and needed—one shackled to traditions, the other guided by visions. Thomas Jefferson belonged to the latter. In 1776 the American people not only broke the bonds binding them to old England, but forged other bonds which would bind them to a new political, social and industrial order, and of those who hammered these new ties into harmony with the longing and aspirations of men, Thomas Jefferson stands among the foremost Fathers. ”

“ The personal qualities which seemed to unfit Livingston for political leadership in New York did not strengthen his usefulness in France. It was the breadth of view which distinguished him in the formation of the Union that brought him success as a diplomat. With the map of America spread out before him he handled the Louisiana problem as patriotically as he had argued for a stronger national life, and when, at last, he signed the treaty, he had forever enlarged the geography of his country. ”

“ Yet such has been, in great degree, the case, and the name of Sullivan occupies a lesser space in the history of the Revolutionary struggle, than those of many others whose achievements fell far short of his in magnitude and importance. Sullivan has been made the victim of the intrigues and petty jealousies of his times, and while for this his own indiscretions may justly be blamed, the duty is none the less incumbent on the present generation to render due homage to one who is a brave soldier and a devoted, disinterested, self-sacrificing patriot. ”

“ We are now told that a reaction has set in against democracy; that the results of the democratic ideal, so far as attained, are a failure; that the tyranny of the mob has succeeded to that of the single despot; that in the most liberal governments of the world, even in the United States and England, where the problem of self-government has been most thoroughly worked out, the people are forgetting their high ideals and are using their collective power for base and ignoble purposes ”

“ In other words, the rights of man must be articulated with the duties of man. Freedom cannot exist without order. They are concentric. Without the recognition of the sanctity of obligation to others, the age-long aspiration of the race for liberty is an impotent endeavor. It would have plunged eyeless through the cycles in which it has worked its way into civilization, had it not been that reciprocity, mutual help, is a basis of its being. Mankind can never be absolved from this eternal law. ”

“ His theory of the state avoided, indeed, the absurdity of communism, but recognized slavery and the subjection of women. Like many of the modern Socialists, he denounced the taking of interest for the use of money. Such political theories must needs be ineffective. They ignore the equitable basis of society and indicate a short-sightedness that is amazing, in any era when thrift, industry and property rights are elements in the life of a state—as they were then and are now. ”

“ The red man was always free from political bondage. He was convinced that man was born free; that no person had any right to deprive him of that liberty. Undoubtedly the reason for this was the absence from the Indian mind of a desire for gain—that great passion of the white man—"His blessing and his curse in its use and abuse."
The hunter wants of the Indian, absence of property in a comparative sense, and the infrequency of crime, dispensed with a vast amount of legislation and machinery incident to the protection of civilized society. ”

“ Their military tactics were those of a people trained for war—successful war. Man to man, they were what no other barbarians have been, a match for the white man. They held the gateway to the West and their position made them umpires between the mighty nations of the Old World who were struggling for the possession of the New. Civilized in a sense they were, but they were barbarians too, and savages to their very heart of hearts. ”

“ If I have rendered more coherent and tangible the life and achievement of a universally influential philanthropist, I shall be pleased; but I hope, besides that good result, the consideration of the memoirs of a man who had a great mission in the world and who ably and conscientiously discharged it, will serve to impress upon us a sense of the power of elevated ideas when duly championed by even one consecrated soul. ”

“ Human history is a great tragedy indeed. But, like all tragedies, it has its spiritualizing, sanctifying, ennobling side. When the drama of the ages is unrolled we see much to make us weep; but we also see immeasurably more to make us glory that we are a part of the race. ”

“ When Messou arrived there and sought his lynxes, who were indeed his brothers, a bird told him that it had seen them in the bottom of the lake, and that certain animals or monsters held them there. He at once leaped into the water to rescue them, but immediately the lake overflowed, and increased so prodigiously that it inundated and drowned the whole earth. Astonished, he gave up all thought of his lynxes and turned his attention to creating the world anew. First he sent a raven to find a small piece of earth with which to build a new world. ”

“ Words cannot express, nor the mind conceive, the power of the prodigious engine which, distributed in a diversity of directions, is being exerted daily, hourly and momentarily by this great association of consecrated women. And here let me say that not only did the temperance reformation come into existence within the borders of our commonwealth, but that the late Frances Elizabeth Willard, the great light in the organization of which I have been speaking, was a daughter of the state of New York. ”

“ Democracy pre-supposes a tolerable measure of equality in possessions, and an absence of class privilege. The people must perhaps re-cast much of their legislation, to make sure that their public franchises and natural monopolies are not exploited by the few at the expense of the many. In a country where the press is allowed unlimited freedom, and where every man has a share in the government, where laws are flexible and easily modified, there should be little difficulty in curbing the pretensions of insolent wealth and protecting the people from lawlessness. ”