SOME OF THE TEACHINGS OF

HISTORY

The State House of Vermont holds an interest for me that no public building can ever exceed. This Hall of the House of Representatives has a fascination that is unapproachable. Here my father sat as a member of the Legislature and his father before him. At an age so early that my memory holds no previous recollection, I was brought here by my mother and my grandfather to visit my father, and among other experiences, seated in the chair of the Chief Executive, with a veneration which has forever marked for me the reverence due that righteous authority which is vested in a government over which the people are supreme. Compared with that visit no other journey will ever seem of equal importance. No other experience will ever touch in like manner and in like degree my imagination. Here I first saw that sacred fire which lights the altar of my country.

These surroundings make a proper setting for the Vermont Historical Society, for there is nothing which so shadows forth the mighty and enduring influences of the past as the institutions of that form of government which are represented by the states of the American Union. You have chosen for your own particular province the record of the experience and attainments of a state, which is not only dear to me in a way which no other land can fill, but which had about her rugged beginnings a romance of action and tradition, which will forever endear her to every enquirer who possesses a soul that responds to the spirit of the sturdy pioneer, who met the trials of those boisterous, turbulent years, which marked the founding of Vermont. Those years are greatly worthy of the painstaking investigations that you and your associates and co-laborers past and present have lavished upon them.

They tell the story of men with a self-reliance that cannot be excelled. It would never have occurred to them to look to a government for support. They expected and invited the government to call on them for support. And they did not fail to respond instantly and effectively. They founded a state that declared the principles of absolute freedom of the person. While they recognized and secured the personal right to acquire and hold property, they disregarded it as a qualification for the exercise of the franchise, which they based wholly on character, resulting in manhood suffrage. Their constitution proclaimed the supreme sovereignty of the people and provided adequate safeguards for their rights and liberties. Most liberal of states they only needed a slight increase of religious toleration, long since granted, to make freedom here complete. It is not my purpose to enter into a description, however brief, of the Declaration of Rights or the Form of Government of your Constitution. The substance of its provisions is well known to all. It constitutes a noble structure supporting a free government, diffusing the blessings of the most enlightened civilization, representative of the best spirit of an American Commonwealth, functioning as a republic, with a simple dignity, passing the pomp of kings.

That which was represented in the establishment, support and perpetuation of the institutions of Vermont, is the development in its purest form of the theory of the equality and sovereignty of the people, in principle the ultimate condition, toward which it has long been our contention the whole human race is tending. The superlative fact for us is that when there was a people ready to adopt and cherish such institutions there were those ready to propose them. It has been so throughout all human experience, and while it is a phenomena the reason for which is partly shrouded in mystery, in and of itself it lends a sanction to the institutions of government and society, as they have existed in the

past or exist now, not on the assumption that they are perfect or have been perfect, but that they were and are the best that human conditions at that time could produce, and that they are working toward perfection. The results of this position are two-fold. It lays on society first, the necessity in behalf of the general welfare of supporting and defending our institutions, and in the second place of striving diligently for their practical improvement. The ground for optimism lies not in the fact of past or present perfection, but in the hope and belief that progress has been made and will be made in spite of many calamities, and many seeming disasters, which at present appear inscrutable to the understanding of finite beings.

The soundness of this position I believe is demonstrated by history, and the justification of those institutions, so typically American, here so resolutely adopted in the beginnings of this state, and ever since so stoutly maintained, if made at all will be made out of the knowledge of past human experience. It is this which preeminently justifies the study of history and the formation of Historical Societies. It is by an understanding and comprehension of the past that we judge of the present and the future.

History is to be studied and applied not for the purpose of advocating reaction. It is not the accurately informed who continually appeal to the good old times to the disparagement of the present. That is characteristic of those who substitute fable and hazy tradition for fact and reliable record. True history which includes all the records of the past, however obtained and wherever recorded, whether made upon the surface of the earth by the ceaseless shifting of air and water, or transmitted by written signs on tablet and parchment, or through oral repetition handed down from sire to son, or that most indelible of records the accumulated experience of generation after generation moulded into the brain of man, while ever a conservative force, yet holds the

only warrant for real progress. It is ignorance of its teachings, which leads men of good intentions to advocate either reaction or revolution, and a knowledge of its forces, which aids men to promote the public welfare. In judging of the strength of a state it is necessary to know what has gone before, what point of development has been reached by the people of that state, and whether their present plan of society is justified by their past experience.

States grow and there is an inexorable law of their growth. They must go through the process step by step. There is no hiatus in their development. Liberty is not bestowed, it is an achievement but it comes to no people who have not passed through the successive stages which always precede it. It is very far from a state of nature. It is no light and easy thing to secure or to maintain, but difficult of accomplishment and hard to bear. While there are no conditions under which it is better to be a slave than to be free there are many conditions under which it is infinitely easier to be a slave than to be free and for the sake of their ease there are those who have chosen to relinquish much of liberty rather than bear the responsibilities of the free. The greatest example of this was the development of feudalism in the middle ages. Men sought their security and protection at the expense of their freedom of action, so that whole communities were bound to varying servitudes which reached from honor to infamy, yet all with the same object, their greater ease and safety. While such a state has seemed to delay progress it really resulted in weeding out the incompetent and developing those who had the capacity to advance.

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The process of each state in government has been from unorganized races to the despotic rule of an absolute monarch, which in time became limited and its functions shared in by a nobility, gradually enlarging into some form of parliament, and finally extending to all the people. There have been many grades and forms of such development under many

and various names, but the process has ever been from anarchy through despotism to oligarchy which has broadened out into democracy, and ended in representative government, based on universal suffrage.

Many nations have failed somewhere along the way. The absolute monarchy has fallen into weak or vicious hands so that disorder at home or some superior force from abroad has overcome the State. Or a people have seemed to lack the genius for government, or a strong king has overcome a popular assembly, and what at one time appeared to be free institutions, administered by a legislative body with generous powers, as in Castile and Aragon at the beginning and in France at a later period of the Middle Ages has lapsed back to despotic rule. It is interesting to note that no nation ever lost its liberties in which there was maintained a strong representative body vested with the authority of providing the public revenue. It has been suggested that Spain was able to disregard the liberties of the people because her rulers became so enriched by the revenues of the new world that they no longer had need to call on the representatives of their subjects for funds but had ample means to provide an army which overawed the people and finally made the Spanish monarchy absolute.

When the French people at the time of their Revolution summoned the state's general, after a period of nearly two centuries of absolute monarchy, and attempted to step at once into a republic, of course they failed and landed in a new and worse despotism than that which they threw off. In our own day we have seen a like result in Russia. There is a step between absolutism and a republic which cannot be avoided in the experience of a people journeying toward popular sovereignty. Russia, with all the examples of the free nations before her, is under a despotism more despotic than ever was administered by a Czar. Russia and France, failing to reach at a single bound the form of government