Benjamin Franklin Butler

“ Perhaps no man, however high his character, can mix long in the business of politics and keep his hands quite clean. The leniency with which Butler was treated on this occasion must always remain an almost solitary stain upon the memory of Abraham Lincoln. On the memory of Benjamin Butler stains hardly show. At a later stage of the war Butler showed such abject cowardice that Grant begged that if his political importance required that he should have some military command he should be placed somewhere where there was no fighting. ”

“ Admirers of the German style find little to praise in a cautious bit-by-bit method, content with the tests which have most affinity with common sense, incredulous of exhaustive theories, leaving a large margin for the unaccountable or the unexplained. But it has its merits, one of them being that, dealing very solidly and very acutely with large and real matters of experience, the interest of such writings endures as the starting-point and foundation for future work. Butler out of England is hardly known, certainly he is not much valued either as a divine or a philosopher ”

“ His professional income as a lawyer was estimated at $100,000 per annum shortly before his death at Washington, D.C., on the 11th of January 1893. He was an able but erratic administrator and soldier, and a brilliant lawyer. As a politician he excited bitter opposition, and was charged, apparently with justice, with corruption and venality in conniving at and sharing the profits of illicit trade with the Confederates carried on by his brother at New Orleans and by his brother-in-law in the department of Virginia and North Carolina, while General Butler was in command. ”

“ In his ethics, as in his theology, Butler had constantly in view a certain class of adversaries, consisting partly of the philosophic few, partly of the fashionably educated many, who all participated in one common mode of thinking. ”

“ As he became a father in Boston within little more than twenty years after its first settlement, it may be presumed that he was an emigrant from Europe.
2. Benjamin Butler. The different dates in this and similar cases denote the births of different children bearing the same name; the former in all probability died before the birth of the latter.
3. James Butler probably died before 1692, if the Grace Butler, married to Andrew Rankin, April 15th, of that year, by Simon Bradstreet, was his widow. ”

“ From the instant that General Butler rises the discussion, however dull before, bristles into excitement, and one could hardly wish for an hour of racier enjoyment than is afforded by the debate when he desires to gain a point over able but envious opponents, who never attack him single-handed, and to meet whom, their shafts flying on every side, he brings up his subtlety of argument, his readiness, his audacity, his wit and repartee and forensic skill, till he winds them in their own toils. ”

“ Butler is a typical instance of the English philosophical mind. He will admit no speculative theory of things. To him the universe is no realization of intelligence, which is to be deciphered by human thought; it is a constitution or system, made up of individual facts, through which we thread our way slowly and inductively. Complete knowledge is impossible; nay, what we call knowledge of any part of the system is inherently imperfect. “We cannot have a thorough knowledge of any part without knowing the whole.” So far as experience goes, “to us probability is the very guide of life.” ”

“ For more than fifteen years he has been in his high office, and well will it be for all people if he will continue in it. It was not merely by his energy and daring soldiership that Butler won the confidence and admiration of all good men, but he has given an example of self sacrifice which for all time will be held up for the emulation of future generations. ”

“ Indeed, to a mind bent upon anything like scientific certitude in such matters, Butler's whole argument for a future life can hardly be of a feather's weight, because he seeks to prove by reason or comparison that which experience alone can settle. ”

“ If Tony Butler took no note of time as he sat at breakfast with Sir Joseph, he was only sharing the fortune of every man who ever found himself in that companionship. From one end of Europe to the other his equal could not be found. It was not alone that he had stores of conversation for the highest capacities and the most cultivated minds, but he possessed that thorough knowledge of life so interesting to men of the world, and with it that insight into character which is so often the key to the mystery of statecraft ”

“ Butler has seized on the Relay House, on the junction of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, with the rail from Washington, and has displayed a good deal of vigour since his arrival at Annapolis. He is a democrat, and a celebrated criminal lawyer in Massachusetts. Troops are pouring into New York, and are preparing to attack Alexandria, on the Virginia side, below Washington and the Navy Yard, where a large Confederate flag is flying, which can be seen from the President’s windows in the White House. ”

“ But General Butler's socialism was doubtless a matter of personal ambition—a bait to catch the popular vote. Nobody except Phillips, not even the laborers themselves, imagined anything else in his case. [Footnote: In the autumn of 1884 my brother asked a plumber then working for him, if he intended to vote for General Butler, who was presidential candidate that year for the labor-party. "No," replied the fellow, "Butler is a bad man; he will do for Governor of Massachusetts, but for President of the United States we want something different."] ”

“ This position is assumed throughout the treatise, and as against the deists with justice, for their whole argument rested upon the presupposition of the existence of God, the perfect Ruler of the world.
The premises, then, with which Butler starts are the existence of God, the known course of nature, and the necessary limitation of our knowledge. What does he wish to prove? It is not his intention to prove God's perfect moral government over the world or the truth of religion. His work is in no sense a philosophy of religion. His purpose is entirely defensive ”

“ Metaphysic itself, when it comes again to its own, will do so by verifying, with a closer intimacy than ever, its inevitable inherence within the very heart's core of our common average experience.
And it is within this human experience of ours that Butler does all his work. It is our daily Experience that he fastens on, clings to, accepts. For him, it holds the entire secret. He has no desire to go behind it, or beyond it. It is sufficient. It justifies itself. It supplies the standard to which reality must conform. ”

“ Allen does make stepping-stones of his dead selves he jumps upon them to some tune.” And he was perhaps a little inclined to treat his own dead self too much in the same spirit.
Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864, and returned via Callao to England. He travelled with three friends whose acquaintance he had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli, to whom he dedicated Life and Habit. He arrived in August, 1864, in London, where he took chambers consisting of a sitting-room, a bedroom, a painting-room and a pantry, at 15, Clifford’s Inn, second floor (north) . ”

“ There our author has resided; there he is said to have written something or other, and the very room and spot of its composition are pointed out. It is best not to be too critical; and, on the other hand, if we believe, in general, that where a man of genius has lived he has also written, we shall seldom be far wrong. There is little doubt that here Butler, possessed of more leisure and independence than at any other period of his life, did really revise and prepare his work for press, of which the first part was published in 1663, and the second in the year following. ”

“ So Butler continually argues; and all the force of his mind comes out in this splendid confidence that he has in facts, in experience, in the validity of our faculties. He was no metaphysician. We feel this in the chapters on the Future Life, and on Necessity. He is here at his weakest. He fails to convince. He is not in his true atmosphere or element. He comes to himself, and to his full power, when he is flinging aside all the metaphysical problem which underlies life, as freely as the plain man does in practice, in daily experience, in science. ”

“ Butler is a man, who experienced a hard struggle in early life, in the effort to train himself for his life's work, as a minister and farmer. He has overcome many of these difficulties in a manner, that is very praiseworthy and commendable. ”

“ Butler long took an active part in military affairs, and commanded the Prince of Wales’ Regiment from 1889 to 1898. He organized and became the first president of the Montreal Amalgamated Rifle Association and the Montreal Military Institute. In politics he is a Conservative, and in religion an Anglican, having been a member of the Diocesan and Provincial Synods over thirty years. In Free Masonry, he was Grand Master in 1894, and has been for many years Chairman of the Committee on Jurisprudence of the Grand Lodge of Quebec. ”

“ It seems merely to set the stamp of its approbation on certain courses of action to which we are led by the various passions and affections; it has in itself no originating power. How or why it approves of some and not of others is left unexplained. Butler's moral theory, like those of his English contemporaries and successors, is defective from not perceiving that the notion of duty can have real significance only when connected with the will or practical reason, and that only in reason which wills itself have we a principle capable of development into an ethical system. ”

“ Henry Festing Jones's Life of Samuel Butler tells the history of a very remarkable man with a vividness which leaves nothing to be desired. This is not a vain compliment; it is a tribute which common justice demands on an unusual occasion. There were ninety-nine chances in a hundred that Butler's life would never be adequately, or even intelligently, recorded. ”

“ The severity with which General Butler punished crimes against the Government that he was determined should be respected, or against the poor and oppressed, was of course in the Confederacy and in Europe denounced as the most fiendish cruelty, and he was characterized as a man whose every impulse was prompted by the most brutal passions. ”

“ Butler is a character much respected for the many excellent virtues which he possesses. But as a politician or an Orator, he has no pretentions to either. He is a Gentleman of fortune, and takes rank among the first in South Carolina. He has been appointed to Congress, and is now a Member of the Legislature of South Carolina. ”

“ Butler was eminently a gentleman, extremely suave in manner, gentle in dealing with those under his authority, mild and moderate in his ideas of discipline, a genuinely scholarly man in tastes and{74} pursuits, though probably not what experts in such a matter would have called a profound scholar. ”

“ When he was candidate for vice-president in 1912 it was given out that he was descended from the old Murray family of New York, which gave the name to aristocratic Murray Hill; and this I am assured is not the fact. He has been all his life what is called a “climber.” Ordinarily I hate puns on people’s names, but the name of Butler seems to have been a special act of Providence. His toadying to the rich and powerful is so conspicuous that it defeats its own ends, and brings him the contempt of men whose intimacy he wishes to gain. ”

“ There was, however, one prominent man from Massachusetts, who had united with the rebel leaders in the support of Breckenridge, and who sought to dispel this idea; this was Benjamin F. Butler, who came to Washington, to know of his old political associates what it meant? "It means," said his Southern friends, "separation, and a Southern Confederacy. We will have our independence, and establish a Southern government, with no discordant elements;"
"Are you prepared for war," said Butler.
"Oh! there will be no war; the North will not fight." ”

“ He has no real occasion to go beyond the frontiers of empirics; and he is glad to take advantage of this limitation. Within these frontiers knowledge is always purposive. It is the exhibition of the real coherence of things in an effective adaptation to a unity of Purpose. On the other hand, Butler gave a universal value to the verdicts of Conscience and Reason, whenever these were in possession of the facts. He never regarded these faculties as mere expressions of an individual mood. ”

“ And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long, and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name, they say, I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? ”

“ As he stood on the dais, one hand grasping his gown behind his back and the other marking his points, I felt that, perhaps for the first time, I was listening to pure and unstudied eloquence, suffused with just as much scorn against base wrongdoing as makes speech pungent without making it abusive. It should be recorded to Butler's credit that he was thoroughly feared. A Head-master who is not feared should be at once dismissed from his post. ”

“ He counts on human effort in the one case; why not in the other? Difficulty, struggle, doubt—these are our probation. Through them we have worked out our secular Civilization. Why should not the same methods be equally available in the spiritual sphere? Why should we isolate Religious development from the normal and natural and customary order of things? Why should we imagine for it some special and fantastic dignity, which would forbid it from conforming to our habitual experience?
Again and again, Butler's strong common sense keeps him true and realistic in this way. He is never on stilts. ”