Perspectives: Thoughts on Leadership and the Republic

VOLUME 151

NUMBER 1

JANUARY 1933

HISTORY flows like a river. In a famous passage of the Decline and Fall the historian of Imperial Rome, who has watched the current as it swirls and eddies through the centuries, pauses to note how wide and placid the stream, how seemingly content with its destiny, just before it enters the rapids which lead tumultuously and inevitably to the cataract below. In the Age of the Antonines the world seemed to stand static and secure. Gibbon speaks of it as the epoch of happiest quiet and content mankind can remember.

Our Age of the Antonines was in the ’90s. We lived in a little world and it was not too much with us. Few were very rich, and in my New England, at least, few were very poor. Religion, if it had begun to decay, still flourished outwardly. A college education was an opportunity, not a convention. It was the day of comfort halfway between necessity and luxury. An understanding of beauty, of discrimination and taste, was being born into the American world. The national character was radiant with optimism. The search for the ultimate seemed fairly begun. The future was America’s. Hers was the sure and certain hope of the immortality of nations. Treason it was to question it. When Norton did, his classmate, Senator Hoar, with the conviction that seemed the birthright of our race, apostrophized him as ‘color blind and music deaf.’ Errors we might make, but Americans were of the Lord beloved, and he would chasten us in moderation.

The whole world (in those days we never reckoned the Orient as part of it) had not lurched from the absolute to the relative. Creation was still moving inevitably to a far-off divine event. The fixity of God’s plan was seldom questioned unless by freethinkers and suchlike unpleasant folk. One can measure the strength of the current, during the years between, by recalling an accepted dictum of Herbert Spencer. ‘What we call evil,’ wrote the most positive of philosophers, ‘must disappear. It is certain that we must become perfect. The ultimate development of the ideal man is as certain as any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance — that all men die.’ Certain — the very word is obsolete.

Copyright 1932, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Such was our world of forty years ago. I was a child of it, and the first note of warning from my own generation that the landmarks were growing faint and that we might lose our way among the difficult hills came to me from the verses of a young man, a year or two my senior. A poet is prophet, too. As the sailor feels to-morrow’s storm in some delicate shift of air, the poet is ever dimly conscious of the shadows which must cross the path, William Vaughn Moody knew no more of the future than the rest of us, but he felt its imminence, and his instinct was right. It was disquieting in those days to read: —

I had heard older people speak these thoughts, but, because judgment is the only thing of which experience has the right to boast, it is the sole gift of age which youth will not accept. Wisdom, boys believe, is instinctive and innate. When a man young like me — yet how unlike — thought thus, it was matter for conviction. This was no counsel of elders, brought up under the alien influence of an earlier generation, attempting in their folly to clap brakes on the revolving earth, shackling Eternity with the fears of Time. It was the authentic voice of Youth, of my generation, my world. I listened. The patriotic beat of my familiar music was losing its insistence. There was a new and uncertain note in the rhythm of my life.

Other influences there were, of course, a thousand of them, but Moody’s was separate and distinct. It was not that I had lost my confidence (though McKinley had supplanted Grover Cleveland, and the Republic was becoming an Empire) that, for all its wobbling, the nation would yet keep the course laid down by the Fathers, and eventually secure the happiness and virtue of mankind. The confidence of us all in that destiny, modest and manifest, was too robust to be dislodged. But within me for the first time stirred fear, doubt, and hesitation. The needle of my pocket compass began to oscillate: never since has it quite regained its fixity. Never since, save for brief intervals, has the course of my country seemed inevitably true, and in times like these one fancies it points to an alien destiny.

It is a commonplace, of course, that Youth takes counsel of its hope, and age of its apprehension, but as I watch the Congressional compass,

Would it have been so with Moody? Just as another poet, generous as he, saw in the Mexican War the renunciation of the Republic’s destiny, so to Moody the Spanish adventure rightly indicated that we had trimmed sail and were off on a new course. He was too hot an idealist to laugh over the farce mingled with the tragedy of the Cuban imbroglio. He merely knew we were casting away the freedom of the new world for the servitude of the old. And the course of our history for full thirty years proves, I submit, that Moody was substantially right. It was not given him to foresee that our gross iniquity toward an island people would eventually be set right, not from the moral compulsion of justice, but from the envy of trade and the jealousy of labor, yet even this sardonic method of justifying the ways of man to God would have been grateful to him as the fulfillment of righteousness.

II

What would Moody have thought of our inheritance from the Great War? What shall we think? The times that try man’s soul, test his character — we know a good deal more about ourselves than we did a dozen years ago, and a deal more about our country. To the historian ours will seem the record of a vacillating and inharmonious people. We have watched England fight against her poverty as a century ago she fought the Peninsular War, with unremitting courage. We have watched France win the Battle of the Franc as she won the Battle of the Marne. For good or evil, we have watched the integration of Italy and of Russia fashioning worlds out of new elements. But where is the stamp of the American character in the times we live in?

You cannot indict a people. Neither can you summarize the character of a nation. But perhaps you can picture the destinies toward which the nations strive if there can be set before you in roughest outline something of the ideal in which each finds the expression of its nobler hope.

Consider England. Is there a doubt of the type which, after a thousand years, still shadows forth the ideal of the race? Like fruit on English walls, slow ripening by rain and sunshine as well as by the gardener’s skill, it comes not through effort only, but through leisure and enjoyment. Ask the farmer; ask the clerk. Drop into a country pub and listen while the foam is blown off the ale. One type there is still trusted and admired, still beckoning young men to follow and enrich a pattern now within limits reaching completeness — the pattern of the English gentleman.

How long and constant this preoccupation of the race! Sidney, still the model, wrote the formula, ‘Higherected thoughts seated in the heart of courtesy,’ and because such was his attainment what epitaph in the solemn Abbey gives a juster sense of adequacy than the simple line above Fulke Greville: ‘Here lies a friend of Philip Sidney.’ Through the skein of English history runs the same bright thread. The strain is now heroic, now quixotic, and not far from comic when Wellington discloses as a prime reason for his efforts that ‘Boney’ is not a gentleman !

But even as I speak there is a change. Something there is in nature as in art which, as it nears the goal, shuns it. Perfection is the enemy of effort. From that pinnacle there is no way but down. A contemporary writer whom all of us should know has beautifully shown how the clipper ship was supplanted at the very instant of exquisite completion, and points to the majestic consummation of the locomotive as a present example of an ultimate which cannot be surpassed and must decline.

Whether the goal be permanent or transitory, one may say that the perfecting of the gentleman, with his artificial code, his technique of manners, his consideration for others, his learning, his wisdom, his integrity, is the ultimate fruit of English civilization. Whoever has been so fortunate as to know a Milner or a Grey, a Balfour or a Haldane, will not gainsay this word.

And, against the gentleman, Germany sets the philosopher. Less occupied with social ends than with the laws of Thought, believing Truth an ample goal without the danger which besets self-cultivation, synthesizing knowledge, abstracting the universe, dreaming the Faustian dream, tempering the spirit to the ether, and beyond the ether reconciling matter and thought — this is the dream the German dreams.

Then France. Beyond lucidity and beyond cynicism, beyond Art and Truth, and the sweet comfortableness of life, she has the vision, such as was manifest at the altar of Domremy — the vision of the Saint. Not the Saint of the Church Universal, but French pur sang. Since France and France alone is to herself precious eternally, so this vision of the nation is the sublimation of national genius and virtue, the marriage of France with the eternal.

We who know America, what shall we say of her ideal? Great qualities she has, great and necessary to the salvation of a democracy. Education is a passion with her. President Eliot used to speak of it as the American Religion — but how different from that religion wherein he worshiped the God of the Puritans, who cares not for the glories of the Temple but for the Spirit which dwells therein. For American education is a thing of trappings and appurtenances. Our schools are palaces and our colleges places to wonder at. But the teacher is not a leader, and the preëminence of the learned man is not unquestioned. It is significant that among the Nobel prizes we hardly receive our share. Take Physics: America has won three awards to five for France, seven for England, ten for Germany. Take Chemistry: there America’s tally is one to five for England, four for France, and fourteen for Germany. In Medicine, America has scored twice, France thrice, England four times, and Germany six. Nor can we find in Literature our field of victory. Here the single prize-winning American is the satirist of his own country. Among men of learning, Americans are more rarely honored by foreign universities than either German, French, or English scholars. Broadly speaking, it is true scholarship is advancing within our borders, but in its higher reaches there is behind it no such public support as that which in the lower grades rightly demands an equal opportunity for every boy. We are more concerned with the start of the race than with the finish.

Again the ancient rift between what a man does and what he is grows wide amongst us. The indurated Protestant tradition is strong. A man is judged by his works. The English believe in a man equipped for the expression of his own satisfactions. The French applaud the intellectual who in the higher circles of imaginative life is caught up in something which transcends experience. The German aspiration is not for a panacea, but a solution of the universal enigma. These are foreign to us to the point of incredulity. Sense is more to us than sensibility. What we admire is a man who through helping himself helps his fellows, who, abandoning the fruitlessness of theorizing, applies his quick intelligence to the needs, the pleasures, and the comforts of mankind, Edison is our philosopher. Ford is our prophet. Our poet is still unborn.

Of speculative intelligence we are impatient. We want it not in high places. Our President we make in our own image. Our ideal is the man, blameless and worthy, who through useful effort raises himself not too far above his fellows, who lives in righteousness a life of comfort, who does not torture his mind with profitless cerebration, but hitches it to the shafts of everyday life. Dignity is with us little more than freedom from debt, and high thinking is ‘high hat.’

Every man of sixty is apt to look companionably upon Pessimism, and perhaps I overstate my case. But I think not. I like Americans too well to talk wantonly in their regard. They are, I say advisedly, the kindest race on earth. No people has a more native generosity, none a more natural taste for virtue or more untainted confidence in the perfectibility of man. I recall a letter of Ferrero’s written to me a full decade before Prohibition had put the capstone on our effort to legislate virtue into the minds of men. There was, he said, nothing he liked better about America than this — the paradox of the most practical of peoples attempting to cure evils which every age before had learned were ineradicable, and buoyant in the certainty that man might be forever sheltered from the dangers of wine and women. The simplicities of that faith have been rudely shocked, but the native benevolence of Americans still stands, and if Faith, Hope, Charity, — these three, — be the prime gifts of God, what people is more richly endowed than ours!

I am addressing an American audience. Let me be frank. There is a quality odious even to ourselves, of which we are not innocent. Part of our Puritan inheritance, the vice of hypocrisy, is rooted in that virtue which is the pavement of Hell. We mean well, and are conscious of it, but the ingenuous confidence which Ferrero saw in us has had an evil flowering. The nice man, said the brutal Swift, is the man of nasty ideas, and in our preoccupation with the faults of others we are overnice. I am not thinking of the clamorous example of Prohibition, but rather of the thousand stones we throw at the world from out the windows of our own glass house. How many Americans crying out against the wriggling of foreign debtors keep in their minds memories of our defaulted bonds which made Dickens and Sydney Smith heap us with outrageous scorn? The espionage of Europe is the subject of our spirited sarcasm, yet wire tapping is part of the accepted machinery of our brand of justice. We look with horror on the dole, but forced contributions to American charity are quite another matter. The tramp of Japanese armies in Manchuria is war, but the taking of Vera Cruz is peaceful occupation, and Pershing’s invasion of Mexico mere repression of brigandage. We are, in the minds of our majority, the solitary preservers of the world’s peace. We cry out against the extravagance of armies we do not need, but in the long line of peace conferences and efforts at naval moderation, the exceptions taken by the United States and the refusals to compromise make a list that would be creditable to the record of the most belligerent power in Europe. We have our peace ideals, but we, too, are realistic, and in the eye of the Eternal I doubt whether the realism on either side of the water is susceptible of our nice distinctions. ‘My country, right or wrong’ — the patriotic immorality of Decatur’s creed that used to be nailed each day to the masthead of the Chicago Tribune has at least the virtue of candor, and I think the militant archangels will glow with less passionate resentment at this contravention of the divine command than at the moral unction of the American supplication: ‘Lord, we thank Thee that we are not as other men are.’

III

Those of us who are passing out of the full heat of the sun, how well we remember our confident morning. Always on the Fourth of July the orator pointed to the starry flag. Each star, he would say, differeth from another star in glory. But how wide and how essential that difference was he withheld from us. The awful lesson of the Civil War had taught the country what sectionalism meant, yet it was the sectionalism of two unequal halves, not a patchwork of discordant and clamorous selfishness. We thought the star dust of our constellation a single substance, a soil to breed planets of like growth. Many writers have called attention to the gross economic injustice of the political equalities of unequal States, but what I would suggest is a more difficult inequality. Great sections of the United States breed, and have bred for generations, men whose hearts and minds have lifted them to historic eminence, but greater sections still seem sterile soil. Great men are rare as they are precious, and no community can be reproached because genius is foreign to it. What I have in view is not genius, but that definite superiority of mind and character which compels men generally to give heed to its possessor and to look to him as a leader in the town that bore him, in the State that honors him, and in rarer instances throughout a nation, giving a whole people the pride and unity of a common inheritance. Such men have made America; or if, in a literal sense, they have not made her, they have given her significance and interpretation, and an understanding of herself. They are her essence — the distillation of her spirit. I speak, of course, not of political leaders merely, but of all whose energies, mental and moral, have enlarged for their fellow men the possibilities of life, widening, as it were, the breathing spaces of the world.

Of such in America the roster is generous. New England has given them to us abundantly, and the Northern seaboard States. To Kentucky and Virginia we are in debt forever. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois — their quota has been paid. Till the Civil War strewed salt over her furrows, South Carolina brought forth abundantly. Missouri has played her part. Tennessee has held her own. Kansas cannot be pointed at. But look beyond: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Washington, Oregon, Nebraska, the Dakotas — call the roll and who shall answer present? Go west from the farthest boundary of Illinois. For two thousand miles you shall hardly pass a village where a leader has been born.

I do not forget that a man from Iowa lives in the White House, that Nebraska has given us the useful Roscoe Pound, or that the invigorating honesty that is Tom Walsh, like the La Follettes, sprang from Wisconsin. Other exceptions there are, but, be it noted, these Western heroes are almost uniformly in the field of politics. Scientists, painters, musicians, poets, writers — the temper and the quality of our best are Eastern-born. Not only the men who made the West, but their successors, owe to the East their birth and inheritance. Take the names associated in men’s minds with Western modes of thought. How few of them are native sons! The Great Commoner hailed, not from Nebraska, but from Illinois. The great Dissenter — Borah — was a man grown before he saw Idaho. Miss Cather, of the West, West, is Virginia-born. The Western poets, Jeffers and Neihardt, first crossed the Mississippi from East to West.

These are typical cases. By and large, for a thousand miles north and south, for two thousand east and west, for all its wheat and corn and cattle, the land is, in the breeding of leadership, sterile soil. Here is an empire which produces men — the man almost never. Generalizations are always wrong, but they are not always false. When men say to me that one fourth of America enjoys the wealth the whole country produces, I say to them that all America enjoys the leaders which one fourth of the country produces.

I remember, of course, that of this great territory much — though not all — is new, and that through centuries, not decades, a race comes to its fulfillment. I bear it well in mind how vocal is my own Massachusetts in praising her famous men until the last patient listener departs. I recognize that as the centre of population treks slowly westward there is some tendency through the Middle West to improve its quota, but, making every allowance, the record in its essential is little altered.

Thus far had I come in my quest when I came upon certain corroborative evidence of real interest. Some forty years ago Henry Cabot Lodge was curious enough to make some attempt at an appraisal of this kind, basing his estimate upon the names recorded as of eminence in Appleton’s cyclopedia. Since the records of 15,000 Americans are printed there, it seemed to Lodge a fair basis for important speculation. I quote from his conclusion: ‘Two States, Massachusetts and New York, have furnished more than one third of the ability of the entire country; three, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, have supplied almost exactly one half, and five, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Virginia, have produced two thirds of the whole amount.’

This investigation was made in 1892. Let us check it by the figures of 1932. Remember that forty years have passed, more than a quarter of our nation’s history, though not, of course, of the history of the American-born. Remember that much of the West and very much of the South are not new country. Texas, for example, was admitted to the Union in 1845, California in 1850, Oregon in 1859.

An index of the first four volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography has recently been published. It is possible that when that great work is complete the figures now deducible may be altered, but if, as is most likely, percentages remain reasonably constant, they will furnish an extraordinary confirmation of my thesis. By this later test the order of excellence of the first five States, forty years later, remains the same — Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia. Lodge counted Maryland sixth, but the Dictionary gives this honorable place to Ohio. Four States of the Union embrace almost exactly one half of all the leaders of the fortyeight.

IV

An American who ponders these new figures has matter for thought. Here is, as it were, in shadowy outline an intellectual map of the United States. The selection of individuals on which it is based has been made in a catholic and a tolerant spirit, yet these first four volumes give a total of well over four hundred distinguished names to the State of Massachusetts, ninety-seven to Ohio, sixty-six to Maryland, while California scores three, Texas two, Arkansas, Kansas, New Mexico, Oregon, one each, and the cyclopedia adds a sardonic touch by naming ‘Bright Eyes’ as the single choice from the sovereign State of Nebraska. Ten States are absolutely without representation. The West and Southwest may be coming into their own, but the pace is certainly deliberate. It would, of course, be grossly unfair not to take into consideration the long lead of the original States and their early successors, but a disparity so immense and so continuing cannot be waved aside. A competent judge to whom I put the question hazarded the opinion that as time goes on the newer regions will furnish their proportionate share of preëminent men of action, but that in the proportion of men in the professions and intellectual callings the older régime tends to maintain its ascendancy.

These, you will say, are but guesses based on the slippery sands of judgment. In a sense they are. There is no fixed standard of eminence, no means of making accurate comparison, but all the straws blow steadily in the same direction, and whoso without special pleading writes the history of our country will not, I think, take a view far different from that which is here foreshadowed.

It is the West, remember, not the East, on which the American experiment depends. There lives our distinctive civilization. To the foreigner, not the cosmopolitanism of our seaboard cities, but the Americanism of the vast central plain and all that lies beyond, marks our contribution to social history. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, have their parallels; not so this bountiful storehouse of every human need, where the law of equal opportunity has on the whole been better observed than elsewhere on this earth, and where the yeast of the new world still ferments. If not of knowledge and attainment, the focus of political and of social control moves steadily westward. It is in the West that our country’s history will be wrought, and the time is not distant when the complacent East will study the injunction which English intelligence learned long since from Disraeli’s lips: ‘Now we must educate our masters.’

Why should this rich empire of South and West be so poor? Why this fertility in crops, yet, in the crop of crops, such barrenness? Of the sixtynine men and women whom the country has delighted to honor in the Hall of Fame, why should every one be born in so circumscribed an area? In the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, read the names which half the States and more present as heroes to the nation, and ponder the significance of their insignificance. Take lists of men of science, men of learning, men of letters; it is ever to States which have that more is given. The theories which in the far-off ’90s I used to read, ascribing the qualities of men to the geography of their native soil — the theories of Buckle and Taine, and in more fantastic form of Gobineau, gather dust upon the shelves. But between men of mark and the localities which brought them to manhood, who shall say there is no bond? Soil and food and climate — these, said the elder alchemists, make the men who make History. These indeed may breed the physical qualities, but that voice of peculiar authority, that response to the unspoken longings of the crowd, what gives a man that? Neither you nor I know. Probably the quality of the original stock plays the prime part. The crop depends upon the seed, and in the new vigor of Ohio, for instance, we seem to see something of the strength of her New England inheritance. From every centre of learning radiates its influence. In the four volumes of the Dictionary of American Biography there are listed 168 sons of Harvard, 125 of Yale, and of Amherst, Brown, and Williams, 24, 28, and 25. Such figures show that, in the making of men, formal education plays its part. But other powerful influences are at work, and I wonder whether in the very inequality of circumstance at which the nation rails, in the give-and-take of opposing interests, in dissimilarity rather than in harmony and sameness, that soil is not prepared where seeds of power grow.

Look about us. Whatever the secret of birth, how little interest there is in the United States in the exceptional boy! Our schools, like our motors, must be built for the average. For those who fall below our standard, — the defectives, — how ample and how sympathetic the provision! But for the exceptional boy how meagre the opportunity! At school he is promoted not into a class of superiors, but — what a world away — into a superior class, and not till he manages his own affairs in the world does he find his real mates.

All the machinery in our national life works toward an average. Of this sort of thing we talk much, but few understand how complete and unrelenting is the pressure against individuality. Laws bind us, taxes grind us toward a common level. National advertising, syndicated newspapers, College Board examinations, movies giving the same performance in a hundred theatres, the Book-of-the-Month, chain stores — all are ceaselessly at work flattening out the difference between Tom and Dick and leveling their distinction from Harry. There are sections of the United States where interests are still contrasted, and where the lives men live side by side are still incongruous. Here privacy is not yet snobbishness and men keep their friends because they have different views. The clash of thought and temperament is supported by the material cleavage beneath it. Men think their own thoughts and grow in their own image.

Consider the vast South and the still vaster West. Admirable as they are for the patient and persistent industry which has given honorable and independent comfort to fifty millions of people, yet it remains true that the wide open spaces open wide on intellectual nothingness. I would not speak harshly. Intellect is not everything, but without it a people cannot grow great.

V

In Moody’s boyhood and mine there still lived a Prophet now largely except in name forgotten. Leadership among men, the qualities that make for it, the effect it has on the thought and will of mankind, were his prime preoccupation. He rated the times in which he lived harshly enough, but the salvation in which he believed is worth recalling, for whatever validity it had then is tenfold greater now.

’I liken languid times,’ cried he, ‘ with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress toward final ruin — all this I liken to dry dead fuel waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man with his free force out of God’s own hand is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when once he has struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly — but as to calling him forth — ! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: “See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?” No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world’s history we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable Savior of his epoch — the lightning without which the fuel had never been burnt. The History of the world, I said already, is the Biography of great men.’

Is not this man a true prophet, himself one of those who exemplify his burning words? With all the current cant about the wisdom of the people, is it not true that the curse of our generation is the multitudinous voices of cliques and bands and parties which confound confusion with their discords? The very name of a minority where once we thought truth resided is become a menace. Not till there is a lonely trumpet note that thrills through countless hearts do we close our ranks and march forward. Consider the world to-day. Does anyone doubt that the responsible ministers of Europe and the United States, the Hoovers, MacDonalds, Hindenburgs, and Herriots, would do much to compose the world’s griefs were they trusted and freed from the constant fears of the discordant and unruly multitudes behind them? Our need is not for dictatorships or royalties, but for men who, trusting in democracies, are themselves trusted in return. The dry dead fuel is all about us, but the fire does not come down from Heaven.

If it would come at our call, should we call it? I like to think that from the bitterness of these years of depression at least we have reverted once more to our old American attitude toward leadership. True it is that in the modern world the influence of the individual has on the whole declined. It would be an interesting excursion into history to examine how the controlling importance of leaders has been largely supplanted by the dominance of invention. Printing presses, steam engines, electric motors in all their bewildering and pervasive ramifications, have led the advance, and here in America they have more and more controlled the destinies of the nation. The problem of Frankenstein besets us. Even so late as 1929 we thought that machines had secured our well-being, but when our cloud-capped towers collapsed the ancient and eternal need for men returned.

What directs the course of history is a subject too vast for random comment. I would not here bring into question the theory of economic determinism. Rather I would lay stress on what the presence of great men means to a nation as inspiration to its ideals, and illumination of those halfunderstood forces which mark the character of the times. How instantly we respond to the man who in speech or sermon, architecture or music, expresses thoughts disconnected and dormant within us, making them leap together like filings to a magnet. It chanced that I was present at the last Democratic Convention, looking with wonderment that with me never grows less at the touching efforts of a great party to express without adequate leadership its own mind. Watching as it were the struggle of a new era in the pangs of birth, I was struck by the universal, painful longing for some man of men to teach and lead the people. During the moments of the conventional invocation which opened the session I have no doubt that the prayer in my own heart merely echoed the silent, petition of forty thousand men: ‘Lord God, give us a man.’

To me it seems a clear sign of the times that, as confidence in our national destiny has waned, an everdeepening desire spreads through our community for a man to do what we long for, but cannot do ourselves.

VI

In the literature of lamentation there is a tendency to prolong the unhappy note. Jeremiah overstayed his welcome, and I would profit by his example. Yet it is not prudence but justice rather which bids me lift up my heart. America cannot plead the errors of youth. She was, as some sensible commentator has said, born old, and hers are the faults not of a young but of an unripened education. No longer can her bitterest critics say of her that she suffers from self-flattery. But if in these grim years our nerves are taut and our temper bad, if there are violence and disorder in our ranks during the long retreat, let us remember that it is we of the elder generation who left the way our fathers trod. We have eaten sour grapes, and our children’s teeth are set on edge. Defeatism and lethargy, which seem now to confound our country’s destiny, will pass. In that vast territory which seems to us so blank, the greater universities and the colleges, now too numerous to be strong, will gradually enlarge the horizon of their influence and spread the rich pattern of a national culture. In a democracy like ours, progress cannot alone be measured by leaders, but also by the unknown heroes of our moral and intellectual life who in their quiet stations pass the torch from hand to hand. No one who has traveled widely in America and has learned to look past the brick block and the drug store to quiet and restful homes beyond but knows how almost every town has its individual or group to whom automobiles rank below ideas, who love to think, to speculate, and read. Whenever a fine and serious book is written, a Variety of Religious Experience, an autobiography like Henry Adams’s, an American Epic, its sale leaps like living flame across the prairies, and does not go out. Never was soil more ripe for the earing than this heart of America.

Not again, it is true, shall we be the people of Moody’s youth, but, surely as the Mississippi flows to the sea, our mission shall be fulfilled. The American spirit which has brooded not once or twice over desperate phases of our country’s life still speaks to us. We follow now where no men lead, but leaders shall be vouchsafed to us. The wrack and ruin about us shall give us the strength of men who, with backs to the wall, look toward the sun.

E. S.