PART IX

RESPONSIBILITY

THE MEN TO MAKE A STATE

GEORGE WASHINGTON DOANE

[The fundamental virtues of a good citizen have rarely been better set down.]

The men, to make a State, must be intelligent men. The right of suffrage is a fearful thing. It calls for wisdom, and discretion, and intelligence, of no ordinary standard. It takes in, at every exercise, the interests of all the nation. Its results reach forward through time into eternity. Its discharge must be accounted for among the dread responsibilities of the great day of judgment. Who will go to it blindly? Who will go to it passionately? Who will go to it as a sycophant, a tool, a slave? How many do! These are not the men to make a state.

The men, to make a State, must be honest. I do not mean men that would never steal. I do not mean men that would scorn to cheat in making change. I mean men with a single tongue. I mean men that consider always what is right, and do it at whatever cost. I mean men whom no king on earth can buy. Men that are in the market for the highest bidder; men that make politics their trade, and look to office for a living; men that will crawl, where they cannot climb, these are not the

men to make a state.

The men, to make a State, must be brave men. I mean the men that walk with open face and unprotected breast. I mean the men that do, but do not talk. I mean the men that dare

to stand alone. I mean the men that are to-day where they were yesterday, and will be there to-morrow. I mean the men that can stand still and take the storm. I mean the men that are afraid to kill, but not afraid to die. The man that calls hard names and uses threats; the man that stabs, in secret, with his tongue or with his pen; the man that moves a mob to deeds of violence and self-destruction; the man that freely offers his last drop of blood, but never sheds the first, — these are not the men to make a state.

The men, to make a State, must be religious men. To leave God out of states, is to be atheists. I do not mean that men must cant. I do not mean that men must wear long faces. I do not mean that men must talk of conscience, while they take your spoons. I speak of men who have it in their heart as well as on their brow. The men that own no future, the men that trample on the Bible, the men that never pray, are not the men to make a state.

The men, to make a State, are made by faith. A man that has no faith is so much flesh. His heart is a muscle; nothing more. He has no past, for reverence; no future, for reliance. Such men can never make a state. There must be faith to look through clouds and storms up to the sun that shines as cheerily, on high, as on creation's morn. There must be faith that can afford to sink the present in the future; and let time go, in its strong grasp upon eternity. This is the way that men are made, to make a state.

The men, to make a State, are made by self-denial. The willow dallies with the water, draws its waves up in continual pulses of refreshment and delight; and is a willow, after all. An acorn has been loosened, some autumnal morning, by a squirrel's foot. It finds a nest in some rude cleft of an old granite rock, where there is scarcely earth to cover it. It knows no shelter, and it feels no shade. It asks no favor, and gives none. It grapples with the rock. It crowds up towards the sun. It is an oak. It has been seventy years an oak. It will be an oak

for seven times seventy years; unless you need a man-of-war to thunder at the foe that shows a flag upon the shore, where freemen dwell; and then you take no willow in its daintiness and gracefulness; but that old, hardy, storm-stayed and stormstrengthened oak. So are the men made that will make a state.

The men, to make a State, are themselves made by obedience. Obedience is the health of human hearts: obedience to God; obedience to father and to mother, who are, to children, in the place of God; obedience to teachers and to masters, who are in the place of father and of mother; obedience to spiritual pastors, who are God's ministers; and to the powers that be, which are ordained of God. Obedience is but self-government in action; and he can never govern men who does not govern first himself. Only such men can make a state.

"ONE ALTAR AND ONE SACRIFICE"

WILLIAM H. SEWARD

[Reprinted from H. B. Carrington's Columbian Selections.] WE departed early - we departed at the beginning — from the beaten track of national ambition. Our lot was cast in an age of revolution,- a revolution which was to bring all mankind from a state of servitude to the exercise of self-government, - from under the tyranny of physical force to the gentle sway of opinion, from under subjection to matter to dominion over nature.

It was ours to lead the way, to take up the cross of republicanism and bear it before the nations, to fight its earliest battles, to enjoy its earliest triumphs, to illustrate its purifying and elevating virtues, and by our courage and resolution, our moderation and our magnanimity, to cheer and sustain its future followers through the baptism of blood and the martyrdom of fire. A mission so noble and benevolent demands a generous and self-denying enthusiasm. Our greatness is to be won by

beneficence without ambition. We are in danger of losing that holy zeal. We are surrounded by temptations. Our dwellings become palaces, and our villages are transformed, as if by magic, into great cities. Fugitives from famine, and oppression, and the sword, crowd our shores, and proclaim to us that we alone are free, and great, and happy. Our empire enlarges. The continent and its islands seem ready to fall within our grasp, and more than even fabulous wealth opens under our feet. No public virtue can withstand, none ever encountered, such seductions as these. Our own virtue and moderation must be renewed and fortified, under circumstances so new and peculiar. Where shall we seek the influence adequate to a task so arduous as this? Shall we invoke the press and the pulpit? They only reflect the actual condition of the public morals, and cannot change them. Shall we resort to the executive authority? The time has passed when it could compose and modify the political elements around it. Shall we go to the Senate? Conspiracies, seditions, and corruptions in all free countries have begun there. Where, then, shall we go to find an agency that can uphold and renovate declining public virtue? Where should we go but there, where all republican virtue begins and must end? where motives are formed and passions disciplined? To the domestic fireside and humbler school, where the American citizen is trained. Instruct him there, that it will not be enough that he can claim for his country Lacedæmonian heroism, but that more than Spartan valor and more than Roman magnificence is required of her. Go, then, ye laborers in a noble cause; gather the young Catholic and the young Protestant alike into the nursery of freedom, and teach them there that, although religion has many and different shrines on which may be made the offering of a "broken spirit" which God will not despise, yet that their country has appointed only one altar and one sacrifice for all her sons, and that ambition and avarice must be slain on that altar, for it is consecrated to humanity.

to find somebody in his district who could graduate at the Military Academy, and, turning away from the rich and the high social levels, made choice of O'Rorke.

There is something that sets the heart beating warmly in the fact that when his friends of toil learned that he stood at the head of his class, they chipped in some of their hard earnings and bought him a costly, richly engraved gold watch as a token that they were proud of him.

He drilled me under the blooming horse-chestnuts on the east side of the academic hall; I can see him now, and the pompon-like, pink-tinted blossoms among the long leaves over us. Moreover, I well remember his looking at that same watch while giving me a little rest, probably nearly bored to death, and wondering how much longer he had to endure it. He graduated at the head of his class, and in less than eighteen months was brevetted twice for gallant and meritorious conduct. The fall before the Gettysburg campaign he became Colonel of the 140th New York; and sometime in the winter of 1862-63 I received, while at Fort Monroe, his wedding-cards, and the bride's name was Bridget. Many a time since, I have thought that this was his boyhood love, to which he had remained steadfast while honors were falling about him. However that may be, he was killed while standing on a large boulder, his regiment immediately before him, and fighting almost at the very muzzles of its guns on Round Top.

HARVARD COLLEGE IN THE WAR

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

A statue of

[From an answer to a toast in Memorial Hall, Harvard, June 25, 1884. The portrait referred to is that of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, killed at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, 1863. him by St. Gaudens stands on Beacon Hill, Boston. that of Charles Russell Lowell, a general of cavalry, mortally wounded at Cedar Creek, Virginia, 1864.]

The bust is