"--This is not mine intendement To clepen no wight in no age Only gentle for his lineage; But whoso that is virtuous, And in his port not outrageous: When such one thou see"st thee beforn, Though he be not gentle born, Thou mayest well see this in soth, That he is gentle, because he doth As "longeth to a gentleman; Of them none other deem I can; For certainly withouten drede, A churl is deemed by his deed, Of high or low, as ye may see, Or of what kindred that he be."
It is no wonder vulgar men, who travel here and eat our dinners, laugh at this form of vulgarity. Wiser men see its cause, and prophesy its speedy decay. Every nation has its aristocracy, or controlling cla.s.s: in some lands it is permanent, an aristocracy of blood; men that are descended from distinguished warriors, from the pirates and freebooters of a rude age. The n.o.bility of England are proud of their fathers"
deeds, and emblazon the symbols thereof in their family arms, emblems of barbarism. Ours is an aristocracy of wealth, not got by plunder, but by toil, thrift, enterprise; of course it is a movable aristocracy: the first families of the last century are now forgot, and their successors will give place to new names. Now earning is n.o.bler than robbing, and work is before war; but we are ashamed of both, and seek to conceal the n.o.ble source of our wealth. An aristocracy of gold is far preferable to the old and immovable n.o.bility of blood, but it has also its peculiar vices: it has the effrontery of an upstart, despises its own ladder, is heartless and lacks n.o.ble principle, vulgar and cursing. This l.u.s.t of wealth, however, does us a service, and gives the whole nation a stimulus which it needs, and, low as the motive is, drives us to continual advancement. It is a great merit for a nation to secure the largest amount of useful and comfortable and beautiful things which can be honestly earned, and used with profit to the body and soul of man.
Only when wealth becomes an idol, and material abundance is made the end, not the means, does the love of it become an evil. No nation was ever too rich, or overthrifty, though many a nation has lost its soul by living wholly for the senses.
Now and then we see n.o.ble men living apart from this vulgarity and scramble; some rich, some poor, but both content to live for n.o.ble aims, to pinch and spare for virtue, religion, for truth and right. Such men never fail from any age or land, but everywhere they are the exceptional men. Still they serve to keep alive the sacred fire in the hearts of young men, rising amid the common mob as oaks surpa.s.s the brambles or the fern.
In these secondary qualities of the people which mark the special signs of the times, there are many contradictions, quality contending with quality; all by no means balanced into harmonious relations. Here are great faults not less than great virtues. Can the national faults be corrected? Most certainly; they are but accidental, coming from our circ.u.mstances, our history, our position as a people--heterogeneous, new, and placed on a new and untamed continent. They come not from the nation"s soul; they do not belong to our fundamental idea, but are hostile to it. One day our impatience of authority, our philosophical tendency, will lead us to a right method, that to fixed principles, and then we shall have a continuity of national action. Considering the pains taken by the fathers of the better portion of America to promote religion here, remembering how dear is Christianity to the heart of all, conservative and radical--though men often name as Christian what is not--and seeing how truth and right are sure to win at last,--it becomes pretty plain that we shall arrive at true principles, laws of the universe, ideas of G.o.d; then we shall be in unison also with it and Him.
When that great defect--lack of first principles--is corrected, our intensity of life, with the hope and confidence it inspires, will do a great work for us. We have already secured an abundance of material comforts. .h.i.therto unknown; no land was ever so full of corn and cattle, clothing, comfortable houses, and all things needed for the flesh. The desire of those things, even the excessive desire thereof, performs an important part in the divine economy of the human race; nowhere is its good effect more conspicuous than in America, where in two generations the wild Irishman becomes a decent citizen, orderly, temperate, and intelligent. This done or even a-doing, as it is now, we shall go forth to realize our great national idea, and accomplish the great work of organizing into inst.i.tutions the unalienable rights of man. The great obstacle in the way of that is African slavery--the great exception in the nation"s history; the national sin. When that is removed, as soon it must be, lesser but kindred evils will easily be done away; the truth which the land-reformers, which the a.s.sociationists, the free-traders, and others, have seen, dimly or clearly, can readily be carried out. But while this monster vice continues, there is little hope of any great and permanent national reform. The positive things which we chiefly need for this work, are first, education, next, education, and then education, a vigorous development of the mind, conscience, affections, religious power of the whole nation. The method and the means for that I shall not now discuss.
The organization of human rights, the performance of human duties, is an unlimited work. If there shall ever be a time when it is all done, then the race will have finished its course. Shall the American nation go on in this work, or pause, turn off, fall, and perish? To me it seems almost treason to doubt that a glorious future awaits us. Young as we are, and wicked, we have yet done something which the world will not let perish. One day we shall attend more emphatically to the rights of the hand, and organize labor and skill; then to the rights of the head, looking after education, science, literature, and art; and again to the rights of the heart, building up the State with its laws, society with its families, the church with its goodness and piety. One day we shall see that it is a shame, and a loss, and a wrong, to have a criminal, or an ignorant man, or a pauper, or an idler, in the land; that the jail, and the gallows, and the almshouse are a reproach which need not be. Out of new sentiments and ideas, not seen as yet, new forms of society will come, free from the antagonism of races, cla.s.ses, men--representing the American idea in its length, breadth, depth, and height, its beauty and its truth, and then the old civilization of our time shall seem barbarous and even savage. There will be an American art commensurate with our idea and akin to this great continent; not an imitation, but a fresh, new growth. An American literature also must come with democratic freedom, democratic thought, democratic power--for we are not always to be pensioners of other lands, doing nothing but import and quote; a literature with all of German philosophic depth, with English solid sense, with French vivacity and wit, Italian fire of sentiment and soul, with all of Grecian elegance of form, and more than Hebrew piety and faith in G.o.d. We must not look for the maiden"s ringlets on the baby"s brow; we are yet but a girl; the nameless grace of maturity, and womanhood"s majestic charm, are still to come. At length we must have a system of education, which shall uplift the humblest, rudest, worst born child in all the land; which shall bring forth and bring up n.o.ble men.
An American State is a thing that must also be; a State of free men who give over brawling, resting on industry, justice, love, not on war, cunning, and violence,--a State where liberty, equality, and fraternity are deeds as well as words. In its time the American Church must also appear, with liberty, holiness, and love for its watchwords, cultivating reason, conscience, affection, faith, and leading the world"s way in justice, peace, and love. The Roman Church has been all men know what and how; the American Church, with freedom for the mind, freedom for the heart, freedom for the soul, is yet to be, sundering no chord of the human harp, but tuning all to harmony. This also must come; but hitherto no one has risen with genius fit to plan its holy walls, conceive its columns, project its towers, or lay its corner-stone. Is it too much to hope all this? Look at the arena before us--look at our past history.
Hark! there is the sound of many million men, the trampling of their freeborn feet, the murmuring of their voice; a nation born of this land that G.o.d reserved so long a virgin earth, in a high day married to the human race,--rising, and swelling, and rolling on, strong and certain as the Atlantic tide; they come numerous as ocean waves when east winds blow, their destination commensurate with the continent, with ideas vast as the Mississippi, strong as the Alleghanies, and awful as Niagara; they come murmuring little of the past, but, moving in the brightness of their great idea, and casting its light far on to other lands and distant days--come to the world"s great work, to organize the rights of man.
VI.
A DISCOURSE OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. DELIVERED AT THE MELODEON, IN BOSTON, MARCH 5, 1848.
Within a few days one of the most distinguished statesmen of the age has pa.s.sed away; a man who has long been before the public, familiarly known in the new world and the old. He was one of the prominent monuments of the age. It becomes us to look at his life, works, and public character, with an impartial eye; to try him by the Christian standard. Let me extenuate nothing, add nothing, and set down nought from any partial love or partial hate. His individuality has been so marked in a long life, his good and evil so sharply defined, that one can scarcely fail to delineate its most important features.
G.o.d has made some men great and others little. The use of great men is to serve the little men; to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth. This is not the Hebrew rule, nor the heathen, nor the common rule, only the Christian. The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him. Perhaps greatness is always the same thing in kind, differing only in mode and in form, as well as degree. The great man has more of human nature than other men, organized in him. So far as that goes, therefore, he is more me than I am myself. We feel that superiority in all our intercourse with great men, whether kings, philosophers, poets, or saints. In kind we are the same; different in degree.
In nature we find individuals, not orders and genera; but for our own convenience in understanding and recollecting, we do a little violence to nature, and put the individuals into cla.s.ses. In this way we understand better both the whole and each of its parts. Human nature furnishes us with individual great men; for convenience we put them into several cla.s.ses, corresponding to their several modes or forms of greatness. It is well to look at these cla.s.ses before we examine any one great man; this will render it easier to see where he belongs and what he is worth. Actual service is the test of actual greatness; he who renders, of himself, the greatest actual service to mankind, is actually the greatest man. There may be other tests for determining the potential greatness of men, or the essential; this is the Christian rule for determining the actual greatness. Let us arrange these men in the natural order of their work.
First of all, there are great men who discover general truths, great ideas, universal laws, or invent methods of thought and action. In this cla.s.s the vastness of a man"s genius may be measured, and his relative rank ascertained by the transcendency of his ideas, by the newness of his truth, by its practical value, and the difficulty of attaining it in his time, and under his peculiar circ.u.mstances. In literature it is such men who originate thoughts, and put them into original forms; they are the great men of letters. In philosophy we meet with such; and they are the great men of science. Thus Socrates discovered the philosophical method of minute a.n.a.lysis that distinguished his school, and led to the rapid advance of knowledge in the various and even conflicting academies, which held this method in common, but applied it in various ways, well or ill, and to various departments of human inquiry; thus Newton discovered the law of gravitation, universal in nature, and by the discovery did immense service to mankind. In politics we find similar, or a.n.a.logous men, who discover yet other laws of G.o.d, which bear the same relation to men in society that gravitation bears to the orbs in heaven, or to the dust and stones in the street; men that discover the first truths of politics, and teach the true method of human society. Such are the great men in politics.
We find corresponding men in religion; men who discover an idea so central that all sectarianism of parties or of nations seems little in its light; who discover and teach the universal law which unifies the race, binding man to man, and men to G.o.d; who discover the true method of religion conducting to natural worship without limitation, to free piety, free goodness, free thought. To my mind such are the greatest of great men, when measured by the transcendency of their doctrine and the service they render to all. By the influence of their idea, letters, philosophy, and politics become n.o.bler and more beautiful, both in their forms and their substance.
Such is the cla.s.s of discoverers; men who get truth at first hand, truth pertaining either especially to literature, philosophy, politics, religion, or at the same time to each and all of them.
The next cla.s.s consists of such as organize these ideas, methods, truths, and laws; they concretize the abstract, particularize the general; they apply philosophy to practical purposes, organizing the discoveries of science into a railroad, a mill, a steam-ship, and by their work an idea becomes fact. They organize love into families, justice into a state, piety into a church. Wealth is power, knowledge is power, religion power; they organize all these powers, wealth, knowledge, religion, into common life, making divinity humanity, and that society.
This organizing genius is a very great one, and appears in various forms. One man spreads his thought out on the soil, whitening the land with bread-corn; another applies his mind to the rivers of New England, making them spin and weave for the human race; this man will organize his thought into a machine with one idea, joining together fire and water, iron and wood, animating them into a new creature, ready to do man"s bidding; while that with audacious hand steals the lightning of heaven, organizes his plastic thought within that pliant fire, and sends it of his errands to fetch and carry tidings between the ends of the earth.
Another form of this mode of greatness is seen in politics, in organizing men. The man spreads his thought out on mankind, puts men into true relations with one another and with G.o.d; he organizes strength, wisdom, justice, love, piety; balances the conflicting forces of a nation, so that each man has his natural liberty as complete as if the only man, yet, living in society, gathers advantages from all the rest. The highest degree of this organizing power is the genius for legislation, which can enact justice and eternal right into treaties and statutes, codifying the divine thought into human laws, making absolute religion common life and daily custom, and balancing the centripetal power of the ma.s.s, with the centrifugal power of the individual, into a well-proportioned state, as G.o.d has balanced these two conflicting forces into the rhythmic ellipses above our heads. It need not be disguised, that politics are the highest business for men of this cla.s.s, nor that a great statesman or legislator is the greatest example of constructive skill. It requires some ability to manage the brute forces of Nature, or to combine profitably nine-and-thirty clerks in a shop; how much more to arrange twenty millions of intelligent, free men, not for a special purpose, but for all the ends of universal life!
Such is the second cla.s.s of great men; the organizers, men of constructive heads, who form the inst.i.tutions of the world, the little and the great.
The next cla.s.s consists of men who administer the inst.i.tutions after they are founded. To do this effectually and even eminently, it requires no genius for original organization of truths freshly discovered, none for the discovery of truths, outright. It requires only a perception of those truths, and an acquaintance with the inst.i.tutions wherein they have become incarnate; a knowledge of details, of formulas, and practical methods, united with a strong will and a practised understanding,--what is called a turn for affairs, tact, or address; a knowledge of routine and an acquaintance with men. The success of such men will depend on these qualities; they "know the ropes" and the soundings, the signs of the times; can take advantage of the winds and the tides.
In a shop, farm, ship, factory, or army, in a church or a State, such men are valuable; they cannot be dispensed with; they are wheels to the carriage; without them cannot a city be inhabited. They are always more numerous than both the other cla.s.ses; more such are needed, and therefore born. The American mind, just now, runs eminently in this direction. These are not men of theories, or of new modes of thought or action, but what are called practical men, men of a few good rules, men of facts and figures, not so full of ideas as of precedents. They are called common-sense men; not having too much common-sense to be understood. They are not likely to be fallen in with far off at sea; quite as seldom out of their reckoning in ordinary weather. Such men are excellent statesmen in common times, but in times of trouble, when old precedents will not suit the new case, and men must be guided by the nature of man, not his history, they are not strong enough for the place, and get pushed off by more constructive heads.
These men are the administrators, or managers. If they have a little less of practical sense, such men fall a little below, and turn out only critics, of whom I will not now stop to discourse.
To have a railroad, there must have been first the discoverers, who found out the properties of wood and iron, fire and water, and their latent power to carry men over the earth; next, the organizers, who put these elements together, surveyed the route, planned the structure, set men to grade the hill, to fill the valley, and pave the road with iron bars; and then the administrators, who, after all that is done, procure the engines, engineers, conductors, ticket-distributors, and the rest of the "hands;" they buy the coal and see it is not wasted, fix the rates of fare, calculate the savings, and distribute the dividends. The discoverers and organizers often fare hard in the world, lean men, ill clad and suspected, often laughed at, while the administrator is thought the greater man, because he rides over their graves and pays the dividends, where the organizer only called for the a.s.sessments, and the discoverer told what men called a dream. What happens in a railroad happens also in a Church, or a State.
Let us for a moment compare these three cla.s.ses of great men. Measured by the test referred to, the discoverers are the greatest of all. They antic.i.p.ate the human race, with long steps, striding before their kind.
They learn not only from the history of man, but man"s nature; not by empirical experience alone, but by a transcendent intuition of truth, now seen as a law, now as an idea. They are wiser than experience, and by divination through their n.o.bler nature know at once what the human race has not learned in its thousands of years, kindling their lamp at the central fire now streaming from the sky, now rushing broad-sheeted and terrible as ground-lightning from the earth. Of such men there are but few, especially in the highest mode of this greatness. A single One makes a new world, and men date ages after him.
Next in order of greatness comes the organizer. He, also, must have great intellect, and character. It is no light work to make thoughts things. It requires mind to make a mill out of a river, bricks, iron, and stone, and set all the Connecticut to spinning cotton. But to construct a State, to harness fittingly twenty million men, animated by such divergent motives, possessing interests so unlike--this is the greatest work of constructive skill. To translate the ideas of the discoverer into inst.i.tutions, to yoke men together by mere "abstractions," universal laws, and by such yoking save the liberty of all and secure the welfare of each--that is the most creative of poetry, the most constructive of sciences. In modern times, it is said, Napoleon is the greatest example of this faculty; not a discoverer, but an organizer of the highest power and on the largest scale. In human history he seems to have had no superior, perhaps no equal.
Some callings in life afford little opportunity to develop the great qualities above alluded to. How much genius lies latent no man can know; but he that walks familiarly with humble men often stumbles over ma.s.ses of unsunned gold, where men proud in emptiness, looked only for common dust. How many a Milton sits mute and inglorious in his shop; how many a Cromwell rears only corn and oxen for the world"s use, no man can know.
Some callings help to light, some hide and hinder. But there is none which demands more ability than politics; they develop greatness, if the man have the germ thereof within him. True, in politics, a man may get along with a very little ability, without being a discoverer or an organizer; were it otherwise we should not be blessed with a very large House, or a crowded Senate. Nay, experience shows that in ordinary times one not even a great administrator may creep up to a high place and hang on there awhile. Few able administrators sit on the thrones of Europe at this day. But if power be in the man, the hand of politics will draw out the spark.
In America, politics more than elsewhere demand greatness, for ours is, in theory, the government of all, for all, and by all. It requires greater range of thought to discover the law for all than for a few; after the discovery thereof it is more difficult to construct a democracy than a monarchy, or an aristocracy, and after that is organized, it is more difficult to administer. It requires more manhood to wield at will "the fierce democratie" of America than to rule England or France; yet the American inst.i.tutions are germane to human nature, and by that fact are rendered more easy, complicated as they are.
In politics, when the inst.i.tutions are established, men often think there is no room for discoverers and organizers; that administrators alone are needed, and choose accordingly. But there are ideas well known, not yet organized into inst.i.tutions: that of free trade, of peace, of universal freedom, universal education, universal comfort, in a word, the idea of human brotherhood. These wait to be constructed into a State without injustice, without war, without slavery, ignorance, or want. It is hardly true that Infinity is dry of truths, unseen as yet; there are truths enough waiting to be discovered; all the s.p.a.ce betwixt us and G.o.d is full of ideas, waiting for some Columbus to disclose new worlds. Men are always saying there is no new thing under the sun, but when the discoverer comes, they see their mistake. We want the new eye.
Now, it is quite plain where we are to place the distinguished person of whom I speak. Mr. Adams was not a discoverer; not an organizer. He added no truth to mankind, not known before, and even well known; he made no known truth a fact. He was an administrator of political inst.i.tutions.
Taking the whole land into consideration, comparing him with his compet.i.tors, measuring him by his apparent works, at first sight he does not seem very highly eminent in this cla.s.s of political administrators.
Nay, some would set him down, not an administrator so much as a political critic.
Here there is danger of doing him injustice, by neglecting a fact so obvious, that it is seldom seen. Mr. Adams was a northern man, with northern habits, methods, and opinions. By the North, I mean the free States. The chief business of the North is to get empire over nature; all tends to that. Young men of talents become merchants, merchant-manufacturers, merchant-traders. The object directly aimed at, is wealth; not wealth by plunder, but by productive work. Now, to get dominion over nature, there must be education, universal education, otherwise there is not enough intelligent industry, which alone insures that dominion. With widespread intelligence, property will be widely distributed, and, of course, suffrage and civil power will get distributed. All is incomplete without religion. I deny not that these peculiarities of the North, come, also, from other sources, but they all are necessary to attain the chief object thereof--dominion over the material world. The North subdues nature by thought, and holds her powers in thrall. As results of this, see the increase in wealth which is signified by northern railroads, ships, mills, and shops; in the colleges, schools, churches, which arise; see the skill developed in this struggle with nature, the great enterprises which come of that, the movements of commerce, manufactures, the efforts--and successful, too--for the promotion of education, of religion. All is democratic, and becomes more so continually, each descendant founding inst.i.tutions more liberal than those of the parent State. Men designedly, and, as their business, become merchants, mechanics, and the like; they are politicians by exception, by accident, from the necessity of the case.
Few northern men are politicians by profession; they commonly think it better to be a collector or a postmaster, than a Senator, estimating place by money, not power. Northern politicians are bred as lawyers, clergymen, mechanics, farmers, merchants. Political life is an accident, not an end.
In the South, the aim is to get dominion over men; so, the whole working population must be in subjection, in slavery. While the North makes brute nature half intelligent, the South makes human nature half brutal, the man becoming a thing. Talent tends to politics, not trade. Young men of ability go to the army or navy, to the public offices, to diplomatic posts, in a word, to politics. They learn to manage men. To do this, they not only learn what men think, but why they think it. The young man of the North seeks a fortune; of the South, a reputation and political power. The politician of the South makes politics the study and work of his whole life; all else is accidental and subordinate. He begins low, but ends high; he mingles with men; has bland and agreeable manners; is frank, honorable, manly, and knows how to persuade.
See the different results of causes so unlike. The North manages the commercial affairs of the land, the ships, mills, farms, and shops; the spiritual affairs, literature, science, morals, education, religion;--writes, calculates, instructs, and preaches. But the South manages the political affairs, and has free-trade or tariff, war or peace, just as she will. Of the eight Presidents who were elected in fifty years, only three were northern men. Each of them has retired from office, at the end of a single term, in possession of a fortune, but with little political influence. Each of the five southern Presidents has been twice elected; only one of them was rich. There is no accident in all this. The State of Rhode Island has men that can administer the Connecticut or the Mississippi; that can organize Niagara into a cotton factory; yes, that can get dominion over the ocean and the land: but the State of South Carolina has men that can manage the Congress, can rule the North and South, and make the nation do their bidding.
So the South succeeds in politics, but grows poor, and the North fails in politics, but thrives in commerce and the arts. There great men turn to politics, here to trade. It is so in time of peace, but, in the day of trouble, of storms, of revolution like the old one, men of tall heads will come up from the ships and the shops, the farms and the colleges of the North, born discoverers and organizers, the aristocracy of G.o.d, and sit down in the nation"s councils to control the State. The North made the revolution, furnished the men, the money, the ideas, and the occasion for putting them into form. At the making of the Const.i.tution, the South out-talked the North; put in such claims as it saw fitting, making the best bargain it could, violating the ideas of the Revolution, and getting the North, not only to consent to slavery, but to allow it to be represented in Congress itself. Now, the South breaks the Const.i.tution just when it will, puts northern sailors in its jails, and the North dares not complain, but bears it "with a patient shrug." An eastern merchant is great on a southern exchange, makes cotton rise or fall, but no northern politician has much weight at the South, none has ever been twice elected President. The North thinks it is a great thing to get an inoffensive northern man as Speaker, in the House of Representatives. The South is an aristocracy, which the democracy of the North would not tolerate a year, were it at the North itself. Now it rules the land, has the northern ma.s.ses, democrats and whigs, completely under its thumb. Does the South say, "Go," they hasten; "Come," they say "Here we are;" "Do this," they obey in a moment; "Whist," there is not a mouse stirring in all the North. Does the South say "Annex," it is done; "Fight," men of the North put on the collar, lie lies, issue their proclamations, enroll their soldiers, and declare it is moral treason for the most insignificant clergyman to preach against the war.
All this needs to be remembered in judging of Mr. Adams. True he was regularly bred to politics, and "to the manor born;" but he was a New England man, with northern notions, northern habits, and though more than fifty years in public life, yet he seems to have sought the object of New England far more than the object of the South. Measure his greatness by his service; but that is not to be measured by immediate and apparent success.
In a notice so brief as this, I can say but little of the details of Mr.
Adams"s life, and purposely pa.s.s over many things, dwelling mainly on such as are significant of his character. He was born at Quincy, the 11th of July, 1767; in 1777 he went to Europe with his father, then Minister to France. He remained in Europe most of the time, his powers developing with rapidity and promise of future greatness, till 1785, when he returned and entered the junior cla.s.s in Harvard College. In 1787, he graduated with distinguished honors. He studied law at Newburyport, with Judge Parsons, till 1790, and was a lawyer in Boston, till 1794.
That may be called the period of his education He enjoyed the advantages of a residence abroad, which enabled him to acquire a knowledge of foreign languages, modes of life, and habits of thought.
His father"s position brought the son in contact with the ablest men of the age. He was Secretary of the American minister to Russia at the age of fourteen. He early became acquainted with Franklin and Jefferson, men who had a powerful influence on his youthful mind. For three years he was a student with Judge Parsons, a very remarkable man. These years, from 1767 to 1794, form a period marked by intense mental activity in America and in Europe. The greatest subjects which claim human attention, the laws that lie at the foundation of society, the State, the church, and the family, were discussed as never before. Mr. Adams drew in liberty and religion from his mother"s breast. His cradle rocked with the Revolution. When eight years old, from a hill-top hard by his house he saw the smoke of Charlestown, burning at the command of the oppressor. The lullaby of his childhood was the roar of cannon at Lexington and Bunker Hill. He was born in the gathering of the storm, of a family that felt the blast, but never bent thereto; he grew up in its tumult. Circ.u.mstances like these make their mark on the character.
His attention was early turned to the most important matters. In 1793, he wrote several papers in the "Centinel," at Boston, on neutral rights, advising the American government to remain neutral in the quarrel between France, our ally, and others; the papers attracted the attention of Washington, who appointed the author Minister to Holland. He remained abroad in various diplomatic services in that country, in Russia and England, till 1801, when he was recalled by his father, and returned home. It was an important circ.u.mstance, that he was abroad during that time when the nation divided into two great parties. He was not called on to take sides with either; he had a vantage ground whence he could overlook both, approve their good and shun their evil. The effect of this is abundantly evident in all his life. He was not dyed in the wool by either political party,--the moral sense of the man drowned in the process of becoming a federalist or a democrat.
In 1802, he was elected to the Senate of Ma.s.sachusetts, yet not wholly by the votes of one party. In 1803, he was chosen to the Senate of the United States. In the Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature he was not a strict party man; he was not elected to the Senate by a strictly party vote. In 1806, he was inaugurated as Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and continued in that office about three years. In 1808, he resigned his place in the Senate. In 1809, he was sent by Mr. Madison as Minister to Russia, and remained abroad in various ministries and commissions, till 1817, when he returned, and became Secretary of State under Mr. Monroe. This office he filled till he became President, in 1825. In 1829, failing of reelection, he retired to private life. In 1831, he was elected as one of the Representatives to Congress from Ma.s.sachusetts, and continued there till his death, the first President that ever sat in an American Congress.
It will be fifty-four years the thirtieth of next May, since he began his public career. What did he aim at in that long period? At first sight, it is easy to see the aim of some of the conspicuous men of America. It has obviously been the aim of Mr. Clay to build up the "American System," by the establishment of protective duties; that of Mr. Calhoun to establish free trade, leaving a man to buy where he can buy cheapest, and sell where he can sell dearest. In respect to these matters the two are exactly opposite to one another--ant.i.thetic as the poles. But each has also, and obviously, another aim,--to build up the inst.i.tution of slavery in the South. In this they agree, and if I understand them aright, this is the most important political design of each; for which Mr. Calhoun would forego even free trade, and Mr. Clay would "compromise" even a tariff. Looked at in reference to their aims, there is a certain continuity of action in both these gentlemen. I speak not now of another object which both have equally and obviously aimed at; not of the personal, but the political object.