Easily a.s.sumed and a.s.serted, too often it becomes tyrannous, dealing with things outer and visible while taking little if any account of the inner lights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity and ignorance; makes fakers of some and fanatics of others; in politics where not an engine of oppression, a corrupt influence; in religion where not a zealot, a promoter of cant. In short the self-appointed apostle of uplift, who disregarding individual character would make virtue a matter of statute law and ordain uniformity of conduct by act of conventicle or a.s.sembly, is likelier to produce moral chaos than to reach the sublime state he claims to seek.
The bare suggestion is full of startling possibilities. Individualism was the discovery of the fathers of the American Republic. It is the bedrock of our political philosophy. Human slavery was a.s.suredly an indefensible inst.i.tution. But the armed enforcement of freedom did not make a black man a white man. Nor will the wave of fanaticism seeking to control the food and drink and dress of the people make men better men.
Danger lurks and is bound to come with the inevitable reaction.
The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of the women. The leaders of feminism would abolish s.e.x. To what end? The pessimist answers what easier than the demolition of a s.e.xless world gone entirely mad? How simple the engineries of destruction. Civil war in America; universal hara-kiri in Europe; the dry rot of wealth wasting itself in self-indulgence. Then a thousand years of total eclipse. Finally Macaulay"s Australian surveying the ruins of St. Paul"s Cathedral from a broken parapet of London Bridge; and a Moslem conqueror of America looking from the hill of the Capitol at Washington upon the desolation of what was once the District of Columbia. Shall the end be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha, Mohammed and Confucius welded into a new religion describing itself as the last word of science, reason and common sense?
Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most do congregate the words of Watts" hymn have constant application:
_For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do._
When they have not gone skylarking or grown tired of bridge they devote their leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. There are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at the seaside resorts to the League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled Cats. Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. That is what many of them are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace? One who surveys the scene can scarcely think so.
But the whirl goes on; the yachts sweep proudly out to sea; the auto cars dash madly through the streets; more and darker and deeper do the contrasts of life show themselves. How long shall it be when the mudsill millions take the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend them as the furiosos of the Terror in France did the aristocrats of the _Regime Ancien_? The issue between capital and labor, for example, is full of generating heat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the crowded centers of population, it may not one day engulf us all?
Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping back into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way to perfection?
V
One thing is certain: We are not standing still. Since "Adam delved and Eve span"--if they ever did--in the Garden of Eden, "somewhere in Asia,"
to the "goings on" in the Garden of the G.o.ds directly under Pike"s Peak--the earth we inhabit has at no time and nowhere wanted for liveliness--but surely it was never livelier than it now is; as the s.p.a.ce-writer says, more "dramatic"; indeed, to quote the guidebooks, quite so "picturesque and interesting."
Go where one may, on land or sea, he will come upon activities of one sort and another. Were Timon of Athens living, he might be awakened from his misanthrophy and Jacques, the forest cynic, stirred to something like enthusiasm. Is the world enduring the pangs of a second birth which shall recreate all things anew, supplementing the miracles of modern invention with a corresponding development of spiritual life; or has it reached the top of the hill, and, mortal, like the human atoms that compose it, is it starting downward on the other side into an abyss which the historians of the future will once again call "the dark ages?"
We know not, and there is none to tell us. That which is actually happening were unbelievable if we did not see it, from hour to hour, from day to day. Horror succeeding horror has in some sort blunted our sensibilities. Not only are our sympathies numbed by the immensity of the slaughter and the sorrow, but patriotism itself is chilled by the selfish thought that, having thus far measurably escaped, we may pull through without paying our share. This will account for a certain indifferentism we now and again encounter.
At the moment we are felicitating ourselves--or, is it merely confusing ourselves?--over the revolution in Russia. It seems of good augury. To begin with, for Russia. Then the murder war fairly won for the Allies, we are promised by the optimists a wise and lasting peace.
The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Moscow sounded, we are told, the death knell of autocracy in Berlin and Vienna. The clarion tones that echoed through the Crimea and Siberia, albeit to the ear of the ma.s.ses m.u.f.fled in the Schwarzwald and along the sh.o.r.es of the North Sea, and up and down the Danube and the Rhine, yet conveyed a whispered message which may presently break into song; the glad song of freedom with it glorious refrain: "The Romanoffs gone! Perdition having reached the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, all will be well!"
Anyhow, freedom; self-government; for whilst a scrutinizing and solicitous pessimism, observing and considering many abuses, administrative and political, federal and local, in our republican system--abuses which being very visible are most lamentable--may sometimes move us to lose heart of hope in democracy, we know of none better. So, let us stand by it; pray for it; fight for it. Let us by our example show the Russians how to attain it. Let us by the same token show the Germans how to attain it when they come to see, if they ever do, the havoc autocracy has made for Germany. That should const.i.tute the bed rock of our politics and our religion. It is the true religion. Love of country is love of G.o.d. Patriotism is religion.
It is also Christianity. The pacifist, let me parenthetically observe, is scarcely a Christian. There be technical Christians and there be Christians. The technical Christian sees nothing but the blurred letter of the law, which he misconstrues. The Christian, animated by its holy spirit and led by its rightful interpretation, serves the Lord alike of heaven and hosts when he flies the flag of his country and smites its enemies hip and thigh!
Chapter the Eleventh
Andrew Johnson--The Liberal Convention in 1872--Carl Schurz--The "Quadrilateral"--Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--A Queer Composite of Incongruities
I
Among the many misconceptions and mischances that befell the slavery agitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into actual war the idea that got afloat after this war that every Confederate was a Secessionist best served the ends of the radicalism which sought to reduce the South to a conquered province, and as such to reconstruct it by hostile legislation supported wherever needed by force.
Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men who were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their better judgment through pressure of circ.u.mstance. They were Union men who had opposed secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the Border States did this cla.s.s rule but in the Gulf States it held a respectable minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for troops from Lincoln. The Secession leaders, who had staked their all upon the hazard, knew that to save their movement from collapse it was necessary that blood be sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the message from Charleston:
_With cannon, mortar and petard We tender you our Beauregard_--
with the response from Washington precipitating the conflict of theories into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.
The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between the North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one side and expatriation on the other side--resistance to invasion, not secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they had believed and feared in 1861 had come to pa.s.s, these men required no drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congress had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of this had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it even better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincoln he proceeded not very skillfully to build upon it.
The a.s.sa.s.sination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the hands of the radicals, led by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind the marching van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and brought them to the front. They were implacable men, politicians equally of resolution and ability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It was not alone Johnson"s lack of temper and tact that gave them the whip hand. His removal from office would have opened the door of the White House to Wade, so that strategically Johnson"s position was from the beginning beleaguered and came perilously near before the close to being untenable.
Grant, a political nondescript, not Wade, the uncompromising extremist, came after; and inevitably four years of Grant had again divided the triumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of 1871-72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the country face to face with a most extraordinary state of affairs. The South was in irons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere felt that conditions so anomalous to our inst.i.tutions could not and should not endure.
II
Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincoln and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic Party had reached the ebb tide of its disastrous fortunes.
It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans, dissatisfied for one cause and another with Grant, held a caucus and issued a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to a.s.semble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872.
A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction and inheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for the acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old and the new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Const.i.tution, naming them the Treaty of Peace between the Sections.
The negro must be invested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however mistaken and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete Black Laws inst.i.tuted during the slave regime must be removed from the statute books. The negro, like Mohammed"s coffin, swung in midair. He was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring.
For our own sake we must habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contented and useful citizen. Failing of this, free government itself might be imperiled.
I had behind me the intelligence of the Confederate soldiers almost to a man. They at least were tired of futile fighting, and to them the war was over. But--and especially in Kentucky--there was an element that wanted to fight when it was too late; old Union Democrats and Union Whigs who clung to the hull of slavery when the kernel was gone, and proposed to win in politics what had been lost in battle.
The leaders of this belated element were in complete control of the political machinery of the state. They regarded me as an impudent upstart--since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee--as little better than a carpet-bagger; and had done their uttermost to put me down and drive me out.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Abraham Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M B Brady_]
I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and my full share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental vitality, having some political as well as newspaper experience. It never crossed my fancy that I could fail.
I met resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying with scorn, generally irradiated by laughter. Yet was I not wholly blind to consequences and the admonitions of prudence; and when the call for a Liberal Republican Convention appeared I realized that if I expected to remain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a Democratic following, I must proceed warily.
Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar acquaintances--some of them personal friends--the scheme was in the air, as it were. Its three newspaper bellwethers--Samuel Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--were especially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley, Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my kinsman, George Hoadley and Ca.s.sius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But they were not the men I had trained with--not my "crowd"--and it was a question how far I might be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political a.s.sociates, to such company, even conceding that they proceeded under good fortune with a good plan, offering the South extrication from its woes and the Democratic Party an entering wedge into a solid and hitherto irresistible North.
Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have a look at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take it or leave it as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite open and intact.
III
A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never a.s.sembled. They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York--mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley"s personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz.
There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a motely array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pens to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave of cranks.
Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St.
Nicholas Hotel, where Schurz and White were awaiting us. Then and there was organized a fellowship which in the succeeding campaign cut a considerable figure and went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to limit the Presidential nominations of the convention to Charles Francis Adams, Bowles" candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White"s candidate, omitting altogether, because of specific reasons urged by White, the candidacy of B. Gratz Brown, who because of his Kentucky connections had better suited my purpose.