The alphabet and language. Immortality of the big trees. Wealth and poverty of the Chicago exposition

The Alphabet and Language

Immortality of the Big Threes

iv

>altb and Poverty of th
Chicao Exposition

assays

by T^homas Magee

LIBRARV

01- THK

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

Accessions No.

THOMAS MAGEE DIES|J
AFTER A LONG

Millionaire Real Estate Man
Passes Away at Miradero
Sanitarium — His Death Was
Expected for Three Days Past

SANTA BARBARA, September 30.— The j
death occurred here late this afternoon, at:
Miradero Sanitarium, of Thomas Magee, Sr.^i
the San Francisco millionaire real estate;
owner. He had been desperately ill for two
weeks and for three days his death was ex-1
pected. Mr. Magee had been a sick man for j
many months. It was a last hope, bringing j
him here. His wife, formerly Miss Helen <
Curtis of San Francisco, accompanied him
to Miradero and was at his bedside \vhen
he passed away. Mr. Tom Magee, Jr.
reached here yesterday in answer to a tele
gram advising him of his father's condition,
and to-day Fred Magee and Dr. Philip K.
Brown of the Sanitarium arrived. To-night
the remains were taken north.

The news of Mr. Magee's death was not
made public from the sanitarium until late
to-nigh. i after the widow and sons had left
Santa Barbara.

THE LATE THOMAS MAGEE

The Alphabet and Language
Immortality of the Big Trees

Wealth and Poverty of the
Chicago Exposition

Sbree Essays

By

Thomas Magee

«?•"• .-

WILLIAM DOXEY

631 MARKET STREET, UNDER PALACE HOTEL

SAN FRANCISCO

1895

COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY WILLIAM DOXEY.

C. A. MURDOCK A CO.
PRINTERS.

PREFACE.

ANY ONE actuated by a proper spirit, who has derived
great mental profit and pleasure from prolonged study
of outdoor nature, or of art, science, or any branch of
instructive literature, desires to extend that pleasure
and profit to others. This will especially be true where
a lover of good books constantly sees, from library re
ports, how small a proportion of such books are tasted
beside the vast number of trashy volumes devoured.
The writer of these essays knows that the subjects
herein treated are great and profitable ones, and that,
even if he has been incompetent to do anything like
justice to them, or has misapprehended some of their
teachings and laws, his book still contains enough
instructive and elevating facts to attract the attention
of students. He thereby hopes to lead them to pursue
the study of some at least of the subjects herein directly
or indirectly treated. He has derived intense pleasure
and profit therefrom; others cannot fail to give like
testimony, if they use like diligence.

The author has long been deeply impressed with the
necessity of mental digestion and assimilation following
reading. If they do not, reading is but unprofitable
" cramming," from which no real mental nutriment is
derived. He, therefore, urges students to think as they
read, and to allow no author to impress his conclu
sions upon them until they have themselves carefully
exercised their best judgment upon the subject under
review.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

7

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES 59

WEALTH AND POVERTY OF THE CHICAGO

EXPOSITION . 79

The Alphabet and Language,

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

HOMER, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Aristophanes. Dante, Shakespeare, and
Milton have all produced works upon which
the world has stamped the highest seal of
approval ; but a vastly greater and more diffi
cult work preceded them, without which their
authorship and fame would alike have been
impossible. This work was the ALPHABET, the
production of which was, in some respects, the
greatest mental achievement ever accomplished
by man. The knowledge of our A B C's, that
begins almost when the maternal lacteal nour
ishment ends, and which in education bears
about the same relation to solid knowledge
that first nourishment does to solid food, is
more wonderful to contemplate, and was more
difficult and tedious of invention and perfec
tion, than the works of the world's most deeply
revered authors. Individual men were the
authors of our greatest books ; but it required
the three greatest nations of antiquity, and at
least six thousand years of time, to produce a
phonetic alphabet. And even then it had not
by any means reached its present stage of de
velopment; for it is still far from perfection.

10 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

Even yet the alphabet does not by any means
furnish a visible sign for every audible sound
which the voice utters. It is both redundant
and defective ; of the twenty-six letters of our
alphabet, three (c, q, and x) are practically
useless, and we are therefore left with but
twenty-three letters to express not less than
thirty-two sounds. The phonetic alphabet was
invented— or, rather, developed— by the Egyp
tians, in four stages, from hieroglyphics. Hier
oglyphics are picture-writing. All phonetic
alphabets have their beginning in hieroglyphic
writing. The work of developing a phonetic
alphabet from hieroglyphics occupied the
Egyptians at least four thousand years. They
would, perhaps, have satisfactorily completed
the task, but that the use of hieroglyphics,
ideograms, and phonograms had such a hold
of their conservative minds that they never
rose to the untrammeled use of a phonetic
alphabet. Belief in the sacredness of the old
forms also had its effect in checking their
progress. They used the phonetic alphabet,
indeed, but so cumbrously that they derived
little benefit from its employment. The Egyp
tian alphabet was taken from Egypt by two or
three branches of the great Semitic race. The
Phoenicians, the maritime branch of the fam-

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 11

ily, did most toward the development of the
alphabet. Of the twenty-four letters in the
Greek alphabet, sixteen are commonly attrib
uted to the Phoenician Cadmus.

The object and use of an alphabet are to
express in speech every sound that is uttered
by the voice, and, ultimately, in the far higher
development of words, every thought that has
its birth in the mind of man. Five leading
ancient authors assert that the alphabet passed
from Phoenicia into Greece. The best authori
ties agree in asserting that the Egyptians in
vented the alphabet, that the Phoenicians
improved it, and that the mental flower of the
Aryan race, the Greeks, in the dawn of their
history, did most to bring it to the stage of
comparative perfection. From alpha and beta,
the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, in
its ultimate form, the word alphabet is derived,
although, by going back further, we find aleph
and beth, the two corresponding characters in
the Phoenician, or Semitic, alphabet. The first
means an ox, and the second a house. All ex
isting European alphabets have been derived
from that of Phoenicia. To the Greeks great
credit is due for extending the use and signifi
cation of the vowel sounds. All of the Semitic
alphabets were consonantal ; that is, the conso-

12 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

nants were the radical elements, and the vow
els relational only. The Greeks, in the devel
opment of the alphabet they received from
the Phoenicians, altered this, exhibiting the
mental ability and creative genius they subse
quently did in architecture, sculpture, oratory,
poetry, and science. They made the vowels
the pillars upon which the sound structure
rests. Consonants in their and our alphabets
are largely dumb (soundless) without the
vowels. For instance, the letters d-l-l are
soundless; but with the aid of the vowel 6,
they blossom into sound, and become dell, sig
nificant of flowers, grass, and running water.

In asserting that the invention of the alpha
bet was, in some respects, the greatest inven
tion of the human mind, probably many will
connect the invention with material rather
than mental work. The essence of alphabets
and words is material, too. That which is
most metaphysical, mysterious, and spiritual
in both can always be traced back to some
physical fact in nature. All picture-writing
was drawn from that source, although the
analogies were still mental. A picture of a
bird (to represent flight), and of the sun (to
represent light, brightness, heat, or time), and
of a house with a door open (to impart the

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 13

information that the inhabitant had gone on
a journey from the house two suns or days
before), was both a material and mental pic
ture ; the conveyance of a message as truly to
the mind, as far as it went, as the writing of a
letter. This is a lower stage of language ; and,
as I have said, that is where the Egyptians
and all other nations began — the majority
progressed no further. But beyond this first,
this hieroglyphic and ideographic stage, the
Egyptians passed to the glory of the true alpha
bet, their letters being still copied from living
animals, or from the sun, moon, or stars, from
fields or from trees, but now representing
sounds only. The letters have since been
so changed that it is very difficult to trace
the physical resemblances, although Dr. Isaac
Taylor, in his work on the alphabet, has done
so with a fair degree of success. In a lecture
on this subject, Max Miiller said :

" We still write English in hieroglyphics : and, in spite
of all the vicissitudes through which the ancient hiero
glyphics have passed, in their journey from Egypt to
Phosnicia, from Phoenicia to Greece, from Greece to Italy,
and from Italy to England, when we write a capital F;
when we draw the top line and the smaller line through
the middle of the letter, we simply draw the two horns
of the cerastes, the horned serpent which the ancient
Egyptians used for representing the sound of F. In the
same manner, in writing, the form of our capital Jzf^still

14 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

recalls very strikingly the bent back of a crouching lion,
which, in the later hieroglyphic inscriptions represents
the sound of L.n

Dr. Taylor and Max Miiller derived all, or
nearly all, their information on this subject
from the learned French Egyptologist, De
Rouge (Memoire sur I'Origine Egyptienne de
r Alphabet Phcenicien : par E. de Rouge, Paris,
187 f). In the transition from the singleness'
and simplicity of the letters of the alphabet
to the combination of words and ideas, resi
dent in and capable of expression by them,
ages elapsed. The letters, in one sense, were
the raw material only — words, the finished
product ; and it is perhaps approximately cor
rect to say that the distance between letters
and words is as great as between iron in bars
and iron in the works of a watch or in the
steam-engine. The difference between words
as they now exist in English orthography and
as both appeared in the comparatively recent
age of Henry the Eighth is very great. Four
hundred years ago each writer did that which
was right in his own eyes in spelling; but
orthography, through subsequent literary cul
ture, is now bounded by rules nearly as pre
cise as those of grammar. The alphabet is
the vehicle for the expression of the varying

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 15

sounds of the human tongue; words express
the feelings and thoughts — the most tender
or passionate feelings and the most sublime
and instructive thoughts — of the mental and
spiritual powers. They have been truthfully
called the wings of thought. Whether it is
true or false that we cannot even think with
out words, it is certain that we cannot com
municate with each other without them.
" Things," Dr. Lewand says, "are thinks"; and
" thinks," Max Muller adds, " are words."

Language, more than anything else, enables
each generation to transmit to its successor,
not alone all its strictly literary treasures
of wisdom and knowledge, but also all its
mechanical, agricultural, metallurgical, and
scientific knowledge. The pecuniary and all
other material wealth transmitted by each
generation to its successor, is of small value
compared to that transmitted by language,
through word of mouth and the printed page.
Speech is friendly, because it cannot be exer
cised at all without the social state.

Mysterious, wonderful, and elevated as the
alphabet is, it is still only the alphabet, beside
the far higher mental table-land of words.
Our words are, indeed, ourselves. Words best
show a man. " Speak, that I may see thee,"

16 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

says Ben Jonson; and again, our Lord, speak
ing on the most solemn subject to which hu
man attention can be called, that of the final
judgment, says : " For by thy words thou shalt
be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be
condemned." Our words being ourselves, by
them we must stand or fall. Right acts are ne
cessarily accompanied by right words. There
is, of course, the strongest possible motive to
those engaged in wrong acts to cover or ex
cuse them by right words; but words thus
used lose their force, and are seldom able to
convince, when the heart and truth are not in
them. Deception by looks is easier than de
ception by words. If we will exercise our
memories to remember why we have liked one
person and disliked another, we will find that
the foundation of our decision was based more
upon their speech than upon anything else.
Words were given us, a charlatan statesman
said, to enable us to conceal our thoughts.
This is a lie against nature and against lan
guage. And no one, not even the most con
summate Machiavelli, who under the guise of
a saint is endeavoring to play the devil, can
long succeed by his words in deceiving any
one. One of the best proofs of this is that
ethology means the science of character and a

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 17

treatise on morality. Leaving aside the moral
guilt and debasement of the speaker, there
fore, altogether, speech itself is debased when
not used on the straight lines of truth.

It is most significant that high deeds in
volve high language, and low deeds must have
their expression in low language. Sophocles
said to his countrymen, who complained that
he had debased their language : " You do the
deeds, and your ungodly deeds find me the
words" Marsh says : " The men who crawled
to such a tyrant as Tiberius used as lofty lan
guage as was used by the fathers of the Ro
man Republic." It will seem like presumption
to contradict such an authority, but there can
be no doubt that the Roman speech and inde
pendence were both alike degraded, by the
body-and-mind-crushing despotism of the five
monsters who were misnamed Csesars. Of one
period in the reign of Tiberius, Tacitus says :

"At no time was the city in a state of deeper anxiety
and alarm. Men were afraid to meet, afraid to discourse ;
silence and distrust extended alike to strangers and ac
quaintances, and both were equally divided ; even things
dumb and inanimate, roofs and walls, were regarded
with apprehension. Such was the pestilential character
of those times, so contaminated with adulation, that not
only the first nobles, but all who had been consuls, strove
for priority in the fulsomeness and extravagance of their
votes. . . . ' How fitted for slaves are these men ! '

11711 T

18 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

Tiberius constantly said, as he left the Senate. Even he
nauseated the crouching tameness of his slaves."

That I am not doing Marsh and his great
works on language injustice, these extracts will
show. Besides, he elsewhere asserts, what is
recognized as a universal truth by all writers
on philology, that the degradation of a nation
means the degradation of its language. Never
was Rome so degraded, not even under her
other imperial monsters (Caligula, Nero, Do-
mitian, or Commodus), as under Tiberius, and
his real ruler, Sejanus. Language as well as
liberty, therefore, undoubtedly suffered. In
deed, one of the most painful things to con
template in connection with the bondage of a
nation is that its language and literature suffer
no less than the bodies and minds of its people.
The north of England stubbornly resisted
William the Conqueror. He retaliated fear
fully, and in beating the people into submis
sion, he thereby nearly obliterated northern
English culture. Macaulay says that for one
hundred and fifty years after the Norman Con
quest there was, to speak strictly, no English
history. The rise of a national literature in
Hungary has twice been crushed by Austrian
oppression ; first in the sixteenth and the
second time in this century. Egypt never re-

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 19

covered from her crushing conquest by Cam-
byses. Rome conquered Carthage, and Car
thage has left us no literature. On this sub
ject Professor W. D. Whitney, in his work on
"Language and the Study of Language," says:

" Phoenicia has left us no literature. The coffin of one
of the kings of Sidon, found but a few years since, pre
sents in its detailed inscriptions a fuller view of the
Phcenician tongue than is derivable from all its other
known records, taken altogether. A few inscriptions
and a mutilated and obscure fragment of the Roman
poet Plautus, referring to Carthage, are the only relics
left us of the idiom of that queenly city."

A Latin translation was made of Mago's work
on agriculture, by order of the Roman Senate.
When it is remembered that Hamilcar and
Hannibal, in all the varied qualities that go to
make up great commanders, were unquestion
ably two of the greatest soldiers of the world,
it is forever to be regretted that Rome's
triumph left Carthage no less without mental
than military existence. Had Carthage
triumphed, the case would have been very
different. Even the gods worshiped by a con
quering people were frequently forced on the
conquered. In the Hibbert Lectures, by Sayce,
he says that if Bel-Merodach, the chief of the
Babylonian pantheon, was lord of other gods,
he was so only because the king of Babylon

20 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

was lord also of other cities and lauds. But
when Babylonia ceased to be an independent
power, the star of supremacy of its chief god
also set.

Rome's turn came after that of Carthage:
the imperial city was ground down by its
tyrants. Its literature, considering that it was
mistress of the world for hundreds of year^,
is pitifully poor, compared to that of Greece.
But the genius of the Roman people was not
originally directed toward literature, but tow
ard civic virtue, civic obedience, and continued
conquest. These are the reasons why Rome
never produced any world-work in literature.
When conquest left Rome time for mental cul
ture, tyranny, luxury, and vice had smothered
freedom, and the faith and truth which had
characterized the primitive Roman. Even the
two most happily circumstanced and most
popular of Roman poets, Virgil and Horace,
were mentally shackled. The fact that the
hand was gloved, and that the tyrant threw
continual flowers and favors in their paths,
did not take the gyves off their minds. They
were there to puff and praise Augustus chiefly.
After the second Punic War, lingual and na
tional decadence began at Rome. All litera
ture was based on Greek models. The Roman

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 21

mind was almost wholly imitative, and con
stantly looked back to Greece. Cicero wrote
thus to his brother : " I am not ashamed to
confess that all my own attainments are due to
those studies and those accomplishments which
have been handed down to us in the literary
treasures and the philosophical system of the
Greeks." Rome conquered the world, and her
language was long as imperial as her legions
and emperors — one eminently of force and
command. Rome impressed her language
on nearly all of her conquered subjects. She
wholly failed to do this with Greece, just
as the Mantchus as notably failed with
the Chinese, and the Northmen with the
French, because the nations conquered in
these cases were mentally the superior peo
ple. Despite these exceptional facts, however,
neither the Greek language under the Ro
mans, the Chinese under the Mantchus, nor
the French language in the portion of France
ruled by the Normans, was what each would
have been had no conquest been achieved
over the native people. The Dutch resisted
Spanish oppression, and overthrew the then
greatest nation of Europe. The result is that
the Dutch is a living and separate language
in Europe to-day; a philological game ban-

off

22 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

tarn, as it were, holding up its head and
crowing.

Of Arabic, Dr. Isaac Taylor says : " Of all
existing alphabets, the Arabic, both from
its literary importance and its geographical
extent, ranks next after the great Latin alpha
bet itself." This is saying very much — for
all European alphabets came from the Latin
alphabet. Dr. Taylor further says :

" The alphabet of the Koran is now the chief commer
cial alphabet of the East ; it constitutes the official script
by means of which three Asiatic empires are ruled, and
has been adapted to express the peculiar sounds of lan
guages of the most varied type — Arabic, Turkic, Per
sian, Pushti, Beluchi, Hindostani, and Malay. That the
local alphabet of Mecca should have exterminated all
other Semitic scripts and have established itself as the
dominant alphabet of Africa and Asia, is an illustration
more striking than any other that can be adduced of the
power of religious influences in effecting a wide and
rapid diffusion of alphabets."

Dr. Taylor in these remarks possibly over
looks the fact that it is doubtful whether
Mohammed himself was able to read or write.
He also overlooks the real power in this case,
which was that of the sword. That has been
a more potent influence than any other power
in propagating language. In Mohammed's
time, prayer took the form of military exer
cises. Brother would have slain brother, had

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 23

the Prophet willed it. Conquest came through
Mohammed and his successors by the sword
first and for Arabic afterwards. " It was in
the mosque, where the use of the sword was
deified, that the Moslems acquired the esprit
de corps and that rigid discipline which dis
tinguished their armies." " Aggressiveness,"
Prof. Wellhausen says, " was in the blood of
Mohammed and his followers and successors."
" There is no question," says the same author
ity, " that the material success of Islam was
the chief force that attracted new adherents.
The unique sovereignty of Allah was induced
by the fact that no might could withstand his.
In spreading, by means of the sword, the wor
ship of Allah, rich booty was gained."

Practically, Arabic had little or no litera
ture until the sword forced nation after nation
under its influence. The Arabs were greatly
elevated by becoming the pupils of the na
tions they conquered. Every man able to
bear arms was bound to render military ser
vice. The respect, admiration, and awe which
mankind has always yielded to military con
querors have a deeper foundation and a higher
reason than appears on the surface. To be
conquered physically largely means to be con
quered mentally, in soul as well as in body.

24 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

If a conquered people are elevated intellec
tually above their victors, they are thereby
enabled to some extent to parry the effects of
their degradation. The mind and the pen
have ultimately in all ages been mightier
than the sword. But this elevation and supe
riority always preceded and never followed
conquest; at least until the conquered people
had long subsequently achieved independence.
The Mantchus, who conquered the Chinese,
were a people of no mental culture whatever,
while the Chinese are, after the Brahrninic
Hindoos, the most cultured nation of Asia.
China, indeed, it is claimed, is one vast library.
The imperial catalogue of national literature
forms one hundred and twelve octavo volumes
of three hundred pages each. Macaulay speaks
of the immortality of the Strulbrugs as repre
senting Chinese civilization ; but in this he was
greatly mistaken. The Abbe Hue, the best
authority on China, says: " From about 1644,
China went through fifteen changes of dynas
ties, all accomplished by bloody revolutions
and civil wars. This means anything but
political or mental stagnation. Kepeatedly
subjected to foreign domination, China has
always vanquished her conquerors, compelling
them implicitly to adopt her civilization and

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 25

respect and maintain her institutions." She
was still, however, degraded by conquest. The
shaving of the head and wearing of the pig
tail are evidences of servitude imposed by her
present masters.

The Chinese have no true alphabet. They
have two hundred and thirty-four key charac
ters, each of which is a monosyllable. There
are about one hundred thousand words in their
vocabulary. This large stock of words, in an
uninflected language, is formed by joining
syllable to syllable. Instead of saying parents,
they say father-mother. The word average is
expressed by not-greatness, not-smallness ; brother-
brother is oldest brother; lady-lady is great lady.
A man may trade with unequaled success
on a small capital of words in Chinese. Sir
George Stanton says the Chinese penal stat
utes are all written in eight hundred words.
This is remarkable when it is remembered
that in China all laws are penal.

The language of a nation, more than any
thing else, shows the genius of the people. No
nation of the earth has accomplished so much
in the arts, mechanics, and agriculture with
such small material as the Chinese. This is
especially true of them in the art of arts,
agriculture, and is still more true of what they

26 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

have accomplished in language. Their lan
guage is yet in the rudeness of infancy — the
isolating stage, — and yet no nation of the
earth, perhaps, can point to a more extensive
literature. Its quality, too, is worthy of ad
miration, judged even by the highest civilized
standard.

The triumphs of a nation, either in the mil
itary, literary, scientific, or mechanical sense,
mean triumphs for its language and literature.
But where there has always been mental stag
nation and physical isolation, as in the case
of the Tartars, a people may overrun and de
stroy surrounding nations and yet themselves
remain in barbarism. Genghis Khan left to
his successors, an empire which extended from
the China Sea to the Dnieper, and yet he im
pressed nothing whatever on the nations he
conquered but the remembrance of his horri
ble massacres. After Tartar conquest and
massacres, it was said that " no eye remained
open to weep for the dead." Note, however,
that the word Mongol is from the root mong,
which means brave. They had bravery, and
that only.

English soldiers have been conquerors every
where, and, behind wooden walls, English
seamen won immortal victories; while her

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 27

navigators discovered almost innumerable
islands, and what is believed to be an Ant
arctic continent. The ships of her merchants
and mercantile adventurers have fretted all
seas. The English language would not now
be what it is — mentally and philologically
the most perfect and most conquering lan
guage of the earth — but for these facts. Yet
there was a time, lasting for about three hun
dred years after the Norman conquest, when
the Anglo-Saxon language was in the utmost
danger of obliteration. It is asserted by Ma-
caulay that it would have perished but for
the separation from France, through fortunate
failure to conquer that country.

Queen Mary said that if her heart was
examined after death Calais would be found
written on it, so deeply did its loss affect her.
But its loss, and that of all France to English
arms, was a vital gain to English language
and literature. After the Norman conquest,
the Saxon language and literature went into
bondage with the Saxon people. Saxon and
Norman words fought as fiercely for supremacy
as Norman and Saxon men. When, finally, the
two people began to coalesce on terms of equal
ity, and to become brother Englishmen, the
language showed — nay, still shows, — native

28 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

losses then suffered. Halliwell's dictionary of
archaic and provincial words contains over
fifty thousand words not recorded in modern
dictionaries. Saxon grammar remained com
paratively intact — for grammar, called the
blood and soul of language, is nearly indes
tructible ; but Saxon words and Saxon inflec
tions both suffered, and that in their best ele
ments, too, — the language of poetry and of the
affections, of the marketplace and of the home.
Unquestionably, our English vocabulary is far
richer and more copious, especially in the
technical terms used in astronomy, botany,
mineralogy, chemistry, etc., for the additions
it received from the Normans. French words
were first blended with Anglo-Saxon by the
genius of Chaucer and Spenser ; but the addi
tions were so abundant, so overflowing in
number, and in many cases so superfluous,
that those made then and since were not so
much additions as the adding of a new lan
guage to English, an addition that prevented
the growth of Anglo-Saxon and remitted to
obscurity many words the loss of which is
ever to be regretted, and can never wholly
be atoned. There is one comforting fact,
however ; words of French origin, often unre-
gretted, drop out of use and are never restored

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 29

to verbal circulation again; whereas, if a
homely but earnest Anglo-Saxon word drops
out of use, its loss is regretted, and it is fre
quently restored and always welcomed back.

The highest, the most spiritual, the most
mysterious thing about man is his speech. It
is a remarkable fact that nothing can be added
to or subtracted from the body of any lan
guage. The language may be nearly obliter
ated by conquest, as was the Ancient Celtic
and others herein named, but it cannot be
changed. Every language, no matter how
barbarous, is complete in itself. No such thing
is known as a language in transition. Forms
change; even the roots of a language may be
disguised, but they cannot possibly be altered
— their essential element, their fundamental
meaning, survives all change. Roots predi
cative and roots demonstrative remain, as Max
Muller asserts, as the ultimate analysis of all
language. The Hindoos were the first to trace
all words back to roots. Prof. Max Muller
claims that all of the words, numbering at
least two hundred and fifty thousand, in the
English dictionary, whether of native or im
ported speech, the near and far alike, can be
traced back to eight hundred roots, and these
to one hundred and twenty-one fundamental

30 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.
I

ideas or concepts. From this latter original
stock have been forged words and meaning
enough to give expression to every thought
that ever passed through the mind of man.
Never before did man erect so divine a temple
from such apparently insignificant materials.
Never did he appear so godlike as in thus
forging the thunderbolts of speech. Here,
if ever, he wielded the powers of Jupiter
Tonans.

It is a remarkable fact, and one tending
to the glory of mental democracy, that the
great works of the imagination and of poetry
were produced by men nearly innocent of
schools and scholarship. Homer, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, De Foe, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Burns,
and Abraham Lincoln were all self-taught
men, and nearly all spoke one language only.
So, too, measured by our almost immeasurably
extended standard, were ^Eschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, and Aristophanes. If Milton had
not been a schoolman, he would probably have
been an immeasurably greater, because an un
conscious, poet. This fact he himself recog
nized. Macaulay doubted that we should have
had Lear if Shakespeare had been able to read
Sophocles in Greek. The very best and most
earnest words in the four great languages of

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 31

the world — Greek, Latin, German, and Eng
lish — came from the common people. The
language of Luther, of the English Bible, and
of Shakespeare, was in each case a language
that the unlearned used and could under
stand. The best words of the Attic dialect,
the lingua Romana, and the mother tongue in
Anglo-Saxon, were all not only coined, but
long circulated first amongst the common peo
ple. The French Academy, composed of the
mental and scientific rulers of France, never
gave a word to the French language; street
gamins and peasants are constantly adding to
it; they first stamp the words as being of ster
ling philological value, and the learned finally,
and often most unwillingly, come to their use.
When a language became a dead one, it was
always killed by the over-culture of the learned,
as the dressing of wheat in milling deprives
it of the material from which bone and mus
cle — the pillars of the human body — are erect
ed. The best and most forcible, the most ear
nest, and most truthful language is democratic
rather than aristocratic. Dante was a scholar,
and his immortal work may seem to contradict
these statements; but in his Divine Comedy he
used, though, of course, he sometimes refined,
the dialect of peasants and market-women.

32 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

Macaulay's tribute to Dante was, perhaps, the
highest ever paid to a latter-day author:
" Dante," he says, " used the fewest and best
words it is possible to use."

The highest and best meaning of words is
not found in dictionaries, where the words are
disconnected, but in the best authors, who, by
the exercise of one of the highest gifts of genius,
place words in such living and happy combi
nations that, married in sentences, they produce
mental pictures from which are derived at
once the greatest mental profit and the highest
mental pleasure. A word standing alone is but
the link of a chain ; its greatest strength and
highest use can be attained only by combina
tion. Genius only can in such cases link and
combine words to produce the happiest and
best results of meaning. On this subject
Marsh says : " Dictionary definitions, consid
ered as a means of philological instruction,
are as inferior to miscellaneous reading as a
herbarium to a botanic garden. The vocabu
lary of the passions and the affections lives
and breathes only in mutual combinations."
In the selection of the very best words to ex
press in poetry the warmest feelings of the
heart and highest mental powers, Chaucer
rendered higher service than any other Eng-

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 33

lishman. And yet, if he had been more of the
people and less of the court, there would have
been much more Anglo-Saxon in English than
there now is; the language, indeed, would
have been almost radically different. No one
affects a language like a great poet. God and
great poets, say the Italians, are the only
creators. Shakespeare and the translators of
the Bible were greatly indebted to Chaucer.
Marsh calls him "the Charlemagne of the
new intellectual dynasty of England. He
unites what was best in Latin and Anglo-Saxon
words, and produced a polyglottic vocabulary
which is superior to that of either language
separately." In this connection, note how the
Bible is the Book, in another than the Chris
tian sense. Macaulay says of it : " At the time
when that odious style which deforms the
writings of Hall and Lord Bacon was almost
universal, appeared that stupendous work, the
English Bible, a book which, if everything
else in our language should perish, would alone
suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty
and power." It has been frequently said that
the translators of the Bible were inspired.
Our greatest translation, that of the time of
King James, was made in the language of the
common people. If the claim of inspiration

34 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

rested only upon that fact, which, of course, it
does not, then the Latin proverb, " Vox populi,
vox Dei" ("The voice of the people is the voice
of God,") would be true in a higher sense
than that in which it has been generally un
derstood. And there are high and valid phil
ological reasons why this is so. The language
of the common people is closest to nature —
material nature, — in which, it cannot be too
firmly remembered, the foundations on which
all that is best, most vital, and truthful in all
languages are laid. Therefore, he who used
the people's language used the highest, be
cause the most natural, simple, and powerful
language with which man's attention can be
aroused, his reason convinced, his affections
and mental and spiritual powers led captive.
Nature here means — as she, indeed, always
does mean — earnestness, truth, simplicity,
beauty and power.

One of the most noticeable, and yet one of
the most natural, facts about such a mental
man of men as Shakespeare, is that no author,
poet, or dramatist has ever imitated, or even
tried to imitate, his style. The attempt has
not been made, and if made, could not hope
to attain even that success which the maker
of artificial fruit and flowers achieves. In

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 35

making them, form and color may at least be
mechanically imitated; but none of Shakes
peare's greatest qualities are imitable. In
this respect he is alone, with all of the authors
of the world surrounding him. Shakespeare's
language, simple though its general character
istic is, is one of the most wonderful features
that stamp him as " not for a day, but for all
time."

One of the strongest illustrations of how
people can be degraded in a moral and philo
logical sense, while they were ardently devoted
to literary and artistic progress, is afforded by
the Italian Renaissance. Sculpture, architec
ture, painting, poetry, and general literature
never won more astonishing triumphs than
in that era — not even in the Golden Age of
Greece. Petrarch was crowned with greater
honors than are accorded to a military con
queror. Michel Angelo was an autocrat who
dictated terms to a tyrannical Pope. Lorenzo
de Medici was called the Magnificent, far more
for his mental ability and culture, his patron
age of art and learning, and his devotion to
the discovery of ancient manuscripts illus
trating classical learning, than for his enor
mous wealth, his remarkable abilities as a
ruler, and his lovableness as a man.

36 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

But while Italy was thus exalted in a liter
ary and artistic sense, it was never more
degraded morally. Such personages as the
Borgias, Pazzis, and Machiavellis were guilty
of murder by poisoning and other forms of
assassination, and of adultery and incest, or
else defended these crimes. They lied and
deceived with a countenance indicative of the
utmost candor, and with a boldness that
would have deceived the closest reader of
faces and actions. These were the leaders in
art and literature, no less than the rulers
in the government and social life. In the
debasement which they created, language
suffered in a vital, because a moral, sense.

A wretch, an assassin who stabbed swiftly,
unexpectedly, and devilishly, was a bravo,
a brave man, — and he was brave, compared
to those who hired him. A devotee of music,
art, or of learning, was, and is yet, a virtuoso,
devoted to the virtues, although his private
life may have been black and despicable. A
prostitute or mistress had her sin removed, in
the social and legal sense at least, in the
knowledge that society attached no stigma
either to her name or conduct. A bastard
inherited equally with legitimate children.
The Italian language yet bears strong traces

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 37

of this moral debasement and of the crushing
despotism to which the people's liberties were
then and have until lately been subjected.
Grandiloquent terms are used for the most
trifling articles, and an obsequiousness of
thanks akin to crawling is returned for the
most trifling favors. Leigh Hunt gives many
painful philological illustrations of these facts.
Such exaggeration and obsequiousness of lan
guage has in it no sincerity, no heart, and is
born at once of the degraded condition of
those who use it and of their poverty. The
Russians of to-day are a nation of shameless
liars, because they are cowed by despotism.
Lying and debasement of language in such
cases are not to be so harshly judged as in a
land of mental light and liberty. Lying is a
refuge of the weak and oppressed — " the vice
of slaves," as it is termed by Plutarch.

Language always conforms to the institu
tions of the country in which it is spoken.
Asiatic lands furnish the strongest illustration
of this principle. The dull, oppressed native
Hindoo, not figuratively or partially, but ac
tually and wholly, crawled before his superior,
in a monetary or social sense ; and his language
partook of and reflected his degradation. The
punishment prescribed in the Hindoo Vedas

38 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

for a Sudra who attempted either to hear a
priest recite or to raise himself in any way
above his utterly sunken condition was to the
last degree cruel and arbitrary. The Sudras
are the farmers and workers of India. They
composed three-fourths of the natives of that
country. As a consequence, their language is
as much a pariah and a product of poverty of
mind and spirit, and of utter degradation,
ignorance, and poverty, as they themselves.
The Gypsy language and grammar equally
illustrate the effect of ages of roaming va
grancy and illiteracy.

The nation that enjoys an upright, self-
asserting, self-respecting use of words must
have successfully demonstrated its courage
before domestic and foreign tyrants, and be in
the van of national progress and of mental
light and physical liberty. If it loses the lat
ter, it must to some extent lose its language,
in the highest and best sense. The decline of
Home, in the sense of a fall of its liberties, is
generally dated from the time of Marius, Sulla,
Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Csesar. But that
fall really began after the second Punic War ;
and it is an historical fact, related by Polybius,
that the Roman of his day could not read the
treaties between Rome and Carthage, so great

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 39

had been the changes in Latin. The lan
guage, like the people, had lost the ancient
earnestness, truth, and simplicity. It had
gained in copiousness of vocabulary; but this
gain was paid for by loss of simplicity and
virility, in the moral and social sense. The
Apostle Paul charged certain professors with
having a form of godliness, but denying the
power thereof. Language, in like manner,
may retain the form, the words, while the
truth, life, earnestness, and simplicity — the
soul, in short, — has departed. It may have
a name to live, while it is radically dead.

The reign of Louis the Fourteenth has been
called, and very justly, the Augustan age of
French literature. Authors in both those
ages were subsidized to write or sing the
glories of despots. But literature and art,
shackled by royal bounties and the prosti
tution born of them, were largely marked
by toadyism and the loss of life thereby cre
ated. The king named was treated always
as a deity. Those who have seen the paint
ings still remaining on the walls of Ver
sailles know this. The king once removed
an official, who, wishing to regain royal favor,
addressed the words of the fifty-first Psalm to
him, " Cast me not away from Thy presence,

40 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me." On
this subject, Buckle says :

" The French, in spite of the heroic efforts of the Fronde,
not only fell under the despotism of Louis the Four
teenth, but never even cared to resist it, and at length,
becoming slaves in their souls as well as in their bodies,
they grew proud of a condition which the meanest Eng
lishman would have spurned as an intolerable bondage.
As if to exhaust every form of absurdity, the most seri
ous misunderstanding arose as to who should have the
honor of giving the king his napkin as he sat at meals,
and who was to enjoy the inestimable privilege of help
ing the queen on with her shift. It should be remem
bered that these occurrences, and above all the impor
tance formerly attached to them, is part of the history of
the French mind. The end of this was a corruption, a
servility, and a loss of power more complete than has ever
been witnessed in any of the great countries of Europe."

Words can have their dignity wantonly
insulted and lowered by intentional misuse.
Lex, as is well known, means law in Latin, and
Rex, king. Some one, Laud or Strafford, aid
ing Charles the First in his attempt to make
himself superior to law, said that he had often
heard that rex was lex, but that he never be
fore heard that lex was rex. This doctrine
was derived from James the First, who laid
down the despotic maxim, A Dio rex, a rege lex.
War was fought to settle the meaning of the
two words first named. The result showed all
law-breakers, king as well as subject, that law
was king of kings in England. The English

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 41

language no less than English liberty was
vitally interested in this contest. Note, on the
other hand, the utter degradation of a coun
try where the king was not only the law tem
poral but spiritual. Of Philip the Second, a
contemporary, struck by the universal homage
he received, said : " The Spanish people do
not merely love, merely reverence, but abso
lutely adore him, and deem his commands so
sacred that they could not be violated without
offense to God." Loyalty and superstition went
hand in hand in Spain ; ignorance ruled, and
language was necessarily degraded.

The English aristocracy was greatly de
graded in the reign of the heartless, corrupt,
immoral, and wholly unpatriotic Charles the
Second. Lords and other aristocrats acted as
waiters on their knees, in serving the king
at table. French manners and customs were
slavishly followed by king and courtiers.
Literature was very much debased also, but
this debasement did not extend to the com
mon people ; and, therefore, language did not
suffer materially, nor national progress either,
in a legislative sense at least, — for some of
the best laws preservative of the freedom
of the people and press were passed in that
reign. What was true of public men and

0?

42 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

literature in the time of Charles remained
more or less true during all the succeed
ing reigns, until late in George the Third's
time. If the works of a majority of authors
of the time of Charles the Second, James, and
William and Mary could be blotted out, lan
guage would suffer little loss, while clean
literature would be a decided gainer. This
is particularly true of dramatic works and
poetry, so-called.

We are accustomed to think of George the
Third as having been a tyrant, only or mostly
in his treatment of the American colonies,
which he first exasperated into rebellion,
and thereby finally ennobled into independ
ence; but, in his home policy, he really
struck at English liberty and the English
language even more fatally, had he succeeded
in striking successfully. In 1771, writing to
Lord North on the subject of publishing par
liamentary debates (the people being desirous
of knowing what their law-makers were do
ing), he said : " It is highly necessary that this
strange and careless method of publishing-
debates should be put a stop to. But is not
the House of Lords the best court to bring
such miscreants before ; as it can fine as well
as imprison, and has broader shoulders to

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 43

support the odium of so salutary a measure?"
Now, had this weak and tyrannical king suc
ceeded in suppressing the publication of par
liamentary reports, the word miscreant would
have acquired two new meanings. From the
king's and his abettors' side it would have
meant those who were guilty of the crime, in
their eyes, of wanting to know what Parliament
was doing, while from the people's side it would
have meant those who were opposed to tyranm^.
Buckle says : " Every liberal sentiment, every
thing approaching to reform — nay, even the
mere mention of inquiry, — was abomination in
the eyes of that narrow and ignorant prince."
The right to prevent meetings was lodged in
an irresponsible appointee of the crown. If a
meeting of even twelve persons persisted in
discussing public questions for an hour after
a magistrate ordered them to disperse, the
penalty was death. It is alleged that the
word independence, in its modern acceptation,
does not occur in our language before the
early part of the eighteenth century. Ser
vile imitation of the French was the fashion
during a large part of the long period named,
and words of Latin or French origin were
very much used. Professor Morley says of
De Foe: "He also reformed the currency of

44 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

English speech, which in his time had been
lowered by French alloy." Literary feeble
ness was then long married to immorality.
Tawdry images were much used in the de
scription of natural objects. Nearly every
thing was unnatural, soulless, and insincere —
utterly foreign to the genius and spirit of what
is best in English language and literature.

It is well known that all European languages
are derived from the Aryan speech, which came
from the highlands of Asia. Professor Sayce
attempted to prove that this speech came from
the north of Europe ; but he himself has aban
doned that theory, I believe. The word Aryan
is from the root ar, one of whose fundamental
meanings is to plow. A plowing, an agricul
tural people were superior to those who lived
by pastoral pursuits or by hunting.

In its wealth of words, modern English is
one of the most composite of languages. The
Latin or Norman words, of course, vastly pre
ponderate over other foreign elements in its
vocabulary. This element represents probably
one-third of the words in the English diction
ary ; but English-speaking people, having been
foremost in exploration, and the greatest in
maritime and inland conquest and commer
cial enterprise, their language has thereby had

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 45

a larger number of foreign words admitted to
its stock of vocables than any other language.
It is a striking fact that the intellectual revival
in England, from 1485 to 1600, was simulta
neous with maritime discovery, military and
naval conquests, and mercantile adventure.
The foreign words introduced into English
then and since have been naturalized into the
body of the language, and had the bridle of its
grammar imposed upon them ; but they are
still not of the household. Anglo-Saxon would
be much poorer in words relating to the arts,
sciences, and jurisprudence if it had not been
for a long period dominated by the Norman
tongue; but if this mastery had never oc
curred, it would be richer in words expressive
of truth, of the home affections and duties,
and of morals and religion. Its richness, for
the highest and best poetical uses, would like
wise have been greater. Even as it is, how
ever, it is the most richly endowed, in its own
still preserved native resources, of any lan
guage of the world. That wealth was best
illustrated in immeasurably the greatest era of
its history, between the beginning of the reign
of Henry the Eighth and the close of that of
James the First.

Latin and Greek have much greater con-

46 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

ciseness of expression than English, because
they are fully inflected languages, while Eng
lish is most like to Chinese, which is wholly
uninflected. English, too, is constantly be
coming more uninflected, brief, and direct. Its
constant tendency is to abolish genders, tenses,
and degrees of comparison. Its collocation and
arrangement of prepositions, nouns, and verbs
are shorter, stronger, clearer, and more unalter
able in expression than either Latin, Greek or
German. It dispenses with inflections almost
entirely, and relies instead on the collocation
or syntax — that is, on the relative position of
words in sentences. It is in this way that the
English language is unconsciously but certainly
approaching to Chinese, which is the simplest
and most philosophical language in the world.
Max Miiller calls Chinese a language comme
il faut — that is, a language as it should be.
On this subject, Professor Sayce says : " If the
excellence of a language is to be decided by
the attainment of terseness and vividness,
Chinese would come to the front. English has
fitted itself to become a universal language, by
struggling to assimilate its condition to that
of Chinese." In these facts, which are facts of
brevity, simplicity, and constant tendency to
abolish grammar, lie one of the chief claims

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 47

of English to becoming a universal language.
Professor Sayce says: "The prophecy has
already been hazarded that Pigeon-English,
or a similar grarnmarless jargon, will be the
future medium of universal intercourse." If
some European language is to be acquired by
Oriental and savage people, their language will
undoubtedly be English, even if the oppor
tunity offered them to acquire French, Italian,
or German were equally good, and the reason
for the choice of English would lie in the facts
stated. "The English language," says Pro
fessor Sayce, " is quite as good an instrument
of thought as Sanscrit or Greek, and yet Eng
lish can hardly be said to be inflectional in the
way that Sanscrit and Greek are." If the world
is to have a universal language, it will not be,
by whatever else it may be characterized, a
language of concealment, but one of naked
simplicity and directness, both in expression
and meaning. Earnestness will also be one of
its striking characteristics. If that universal
language is to be the English, words of Ro
mance origin will no longer form, as they now
do, about fifteen per cent, of the vocabulary
used, but will dwindle down to three, four, or
five per cent. It may be stated, as a fact indi
cative of progress in this direction, that, though

48 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

words of foreign derivation have vastly in
creased, in the extension and cultivation of
chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, and in the
arts and sciences generally, the number of such
words used in general English literature is now
about twenty-five per cent, less than in the age
of Queen Anne. In the vocabulary of an or
dinary speaker, every word of Anglo-Saxon is
now included. No disrespect whatever is here
intended either to the Komance languages or to
the people who speak them. The differences
referred to are explicable by historical facts.
Under ancient Kome, in all its history, people
were ground down. In its earlier history mil
itary duty and conquest, slaughter, and blood
were the great objects in the life of the people
and rulers. In the later stages these objects
were still most followed and admired, but added
to these was the rule of the Ca3sars, which let
loose all the floodgates of evil, in despotism,
vice, effeminate luxury, lying, and deceit. The
language, like the people, became fearfully de
based ; men cowered, and in using language
they had to inflate, conceal, and deceive. Later
on, in Italy, France, and Spain, there was, to
say the least, much more in the government,
rulers, and social customs to keep up these
habits than to dissipate them. In the case of

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 49

the Northmen, they were always free. They
were, indeed, free-booters and savages, but
they became Christianized, civilized, and sof
tened with remarkable rapidity. Note how
the Icelanders, at first a most bloodthirsty
people, have become one of the most gentle
and hospitable races in the world. The scenes
witnessed in Paris between 1789 and 1793, and
in 1871, could never have occurred in Sweden,
Denmark, or Norway. But why ? Because
those nations never had their bodies, minds,
and language crushed for long ages, as have
the people of the Latin races.

Of France in the eighteenth century a great
writer said : " If ever there existed a state of
society likely by its crying and accumulated
evils to madden men to desperation, France
was in that state. The people, despised and
enslaved, were sunk in abject poverty, and were
crushed by laws of stringent cruelty, enforced
with merciless barbarism." The recoil and
revolt were proportionate to the long crushing
and degradation. Taine says that, at the time
of the Revolution, out of twenty-six million
Frenchmen, only one million could read, and
in political matters only five hundred or six
hundred were competent. What the aristo
crats thought of the common people is illus-

50 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

trated by the assertion quoted by De Tocque-
ville in his Ancien Regime, that Madame du
Chatelet had no objection to undress before
her servants, as she was not convinced that
valets were men. The insolence of language of
the one class, and the cringing humility of
that of the other, can therefore easily be im
agined. The effect of suddenly loosing the
shackles of this nation of mental slaves, arid
assuring them that they were able to rule
themselves without aid, and that their great
duty was to crush their oppressors and render
it impossible for them ever again to rule, was
like putting human minds into human tigers
and letting them loose to glut their appetites
for blood and revenge.

The Anglo-Saxon is to our tongues, what
father, mother, sister, brother are to our
hearts. Words from other languages have
been admitted into our household, but they
do not live under the same roof-tree. Many
of them are of thin and cold-blooded relation
ship only. It is a striking fact that, father,
mother, sister, brother, are all Anglo-Saxon ;
father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, uncle
and aunt, are either half or wholly of Romance
origin. The best general account of the differ
ence between other languages and Anglo-

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 51

Saxon is, that the latter is the mother tongue.
And this is one of the strongest claims of the
Anglo-Saxon to be the universal language
of the future. The Latin, under Rome, was
Patrius Sermo, the father's speech.

The steamship and the locomotive, by the
promotion of commercial intercourse, are two
of the strongest possible auxiliaries to assimi
lation of languages. They are democratic,
too, in the sense that they tend to spread, not
the language of the learned, but of trade and
of the common people. Barbarism and isola
tion vastly increase, while civilization and
intercourse reduce the number of languages.
Professor Sayce says : " Destroy literature and
facility of inter-communication, and the lan
guage of England and America would soon be
as different as those of France and Italy."
Language, especially of heathen nations, must
be elevated before the world can be morally
elevated and purified. Missionary labors have
shown that the heathen nations cannot be
converted until their language has undergone
moral re-creation. Where there are no words
expressive of purity, morality, truth, honesty,
candor, and good faith — where, in fact, spir
ituality is wanting in a language, — how can
the people who speak it be elevated to Chris-

52 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

tianity or be converted to its pure and high
tenets? Here, perhaps, is best seen the truth
of the assertion, heretofore made in these
pages, that the language is the people.

The Greek authors, especially Aristophanes,
did much to lower the moral and spiritual
dignity of many words. Words used as
trumpets by .ZEschylus were used as baubles
by Aristophanes. The latter's filthy defini
tion of freedom, is perhaps the strongest case
in point. How could language fail to be
debased and to suffer, when the great men
of Athens considered that the objects of life
were dominion and lust; that love, self-
sacrifice, and devotion were fictions, and that
oaths were only good for deception. The
Sophists, Dr. Draper says, urged the cultiva
tion of rhetoric, that noble art by which the
wrong may be made to appear right and the
worse the better cause ; by which he who has
committed a crime may so mystify society as
to delude it into the belief that he is worthy
of praise. This is the very depth of phil
ological, and, therefore, of moral, degradation.
" Base is the slave that pays," said Falstaff.
This is a code of morals to which every
Jeremy Diddler would give a cheerful assent,
and not suppose, either, that in thus reversing

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 53

the laws of honesty, he would also be assault
ing language. If this rule were adopted, the
word honesty, in its usual sense, would be in
danger of erasure. In numerous islands of the
South Pacific that word has never been called
into existence ; honesty, with virtue, truth, grati
tude, love, and many like words, being utterly
unknown. Not to have knowledge of these
virtues, and therefore not to have any word
expressive of them, is not nearly so bad as
first to have them and then, through moral
declension, to lose them. Murder was thus
almost erased as a crime, when assassination
by poisoning was in Italy described as only
" assisting " the death of a victim ; and in
France administering a fatal powder, to expe
dite the death of one from whom a fortune was
expected, was jocularly called " giving a pow
der of succession." In the fall in the meaning
of the word indolence a lie was inserted. It
declined into the meaning of not to grieve or
have pain. But the lie has been ejected, and
the word has gone back to its true meaning of
laziness, a habit inevitably productive of pain
and sorrow, instead of true ease and enjoy
ment. Trench says : " Far more and mightier
in every way is a language than any one of the
works which may have been composed in it."

54 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

This is true of all but the very greatest
works; but the assertion is not true of the Bible
or of Shakespeare, at least. In these two
works spiritual and mental temples were
erected from the stones of language whose
summits reach unto heaven; and yet their
height is not so wonderful as their wisdom,
simplicity, strength, grace, harmony, an<I
beauty. It is, indeed, hardly possible to
conceive of any author erecting mental struc
tures more lofty and sublime than those found
in these two books, although every word in
the vocabulary was used in the effort. Was
Italian greater than the use Dante made of
it? Can language, while yet in words simply
— that is, detached, — ever be so great as
when used in combination by inspired proph
ets, apostles, sages, and poets ? It was created
for the latter; and in the two books named
we have in the one case men inspired of God
spiritually, and in the other mentally, cre
ating works the wisdom, beauty, and full
meaning of which no man has ever yet been
able even to pretend to fathom.

It is generally admitted that no language
is more moral and truthful, in the sense of
earnestness and directness of meaning, than
the English. It will talk earnestly, plainly,

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 55

and truthfully; it is a philological hitter,
straight out from the shoulder. Much greater
modesty is displayed in English, too, than in
languages of Latin origin or in Latin itself.
Those who have read Tacitus in Latin and in
English, or the memoirs of St. Simon in
French and English, will understand this.
No modesty or concealment is thought neces
sary in the majority of Continental languages
of Latin origin. The support which English
has received from the Bible in these directions
has never been, as far as I know, sufficiently
understood or acknowledged. St. Paul and
St. John are known to the world at large only
as apostles of Christ. Few know that, in
addition, they were unsurpassed masters of
language. Never was greater brevity, strength,
power, persuasion, and spiritual and moral
beauty evolved from words than these men
exhibited in their use. No great sculptor,
painter, or poet ever attained his nearest
approach to perfection but by the yielding
of his higher powers and genius to the most
intense earnestness and love of his subject;
and he who wishes to see a writer's soul
thrown into his words must consult the two
inspired writers named. Words in the hands
of such authors — in the hands of all really

56 THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE.

great authors — become irradiated with divine
life, strength, light, and beauty; whereas,
when used for deception or in any way to
excuse moral turpitude, these elements must
go out of them. Their pillars, deflected from
the plumb line, begin to totter and to fall. A
coniferous tree and a lighthouse have both to
withstand strong assaults — the one from
wind, and the other from waves. Their
strength and ability to overcome these as
saults lie in having their center of gravity
near their base. The center of gravity of
words — their strength, likewise, — is in their
roots, their foundations.

In conclusion, it is necessary to remind all
readers that the language they use is not their
own, but belongs to the race. Untold labor
was spent on the best languages — untold sacri
fice of blood, suffering, and study, in elevating
and preserving them in their present stage of
liberty and purity. Language, then, is a sa
cred heritage, to be used with respect, and
with constant aim after truth and simplicity,
which always mean power. A solemn duty
rests upon all to contribute toward the eleva
tion of language by the use of what is best
and highest in words; words that shall not
debase, but elevate and refine. The author

THE ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE. 57

does not absolutely assert that great authors
cannot be rightly appreciated by those who
have not studied philology; but he does say
that, after such study, they will be much
better understood, and afford much greater
mental pleasure.

Immortality of the Big Trees

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES.

THE gigantic height and girth of the
Conifers of California and Oregon have
elicited universal wonder and admiration.
The botanist who first discovered and de
scribed them, and who in his lonely wander
ings suffered untold hardships in the search
(David Douglass), said that he could not con
template the redwoods and the Douglass spruce
without feelings of the deepest awe. So far
as the writer knows, no reasons have ever
been given for the great size of these trees.
The ice of the glacial period, which drove
them from their original homes in the far
north, to points much farther south than where
they are now found, planed and ground down
the solid rock of their present mountain
homes. The resulting detritus, still existing
there in ancient moraines, forms rich forest
soil. The force, therefore, which exiled them
from their old home at length prepared an
other. This glacial grinding and apparent
degradation resulted in mountain architecture
of the most Cyclopean and wonderful charac
ter, as revealed in the Yosemites of California
and Norway, in which domed-rock structure

62 IMMOETALITY OF THE BIG TREES.

predominates. Lifeless, cold, and unpitying
the glacial ice-tools may have been ; but they
graved and chiseled in curves, making beauty
wherever they went.

Although the moraine soil aids very rapid
growth in our gigantic conifers, they attain to
massive proportions and their greatest age
without it. One of the very largest sequoias
of the Sierra Nevada was found on a dry hill
side by Mr. John Muir, the well-known Cali
fornia botanist and geologist. This tree had
a diameter of thirty-five feet eight inches, ex
clusive of the bark. Mr. Muir estimated its
age, by counting the annual rings, to be over
four thousand years. It had evidently grown
very slowly, because its food was not the
mountain meal of a moraine, but hard fare
obtainable from rock; its chief sustenance,
indeed, was derived from the air: yet very
large growth and comparative immortality
were exhibited by that tree. What, then, were
the other elements to which it was indebted
for its massive size and great age? The answer
is, a constant and full supply of never-frozen
water at the roots, a still greater daily supply
of warm, unclouded sunshine. This continu
ous, rich, life-giving sunshine is one of the
most remarkable features of the Pacific coast

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES. 63

climate, but especially of the Sierra Nevada.

Whether the oldest sequoias be fifteen hun
dred or four thousand years old is not the
vital point. That point rests on the fact that
not a single one of these big trees has yet
been found showing any evidence of the fee
bleness of old age or of natural decay — not
one ! Fires deface and consume them ; storms,
when the trees are in exposed situations, may
prostrate, and lightning (a frequent agent in
their destruction) may blast and destroy, or
set fire to them ; but natural decay and death
have not yet marked or defiled them. The
continuity of unclouded light undoubtedly
has very much to do with this. On page 42
of " Bog ens Indveindring" the assertion is
made, that the trees requiring most light are
content with the poorest soils, and vice versa.
The almost miraculous rapidity with which
crops mature in the brief summers close to or
within the Arctic Circle is undoubtedly due,
more than is generally imagined, quite as
much to the continuity of sunlight as to an
extra supply of sun-heat.

Without sunlight, chlorophyl cannot be
formed, and without the latter agent carbonic
acid and water cannot be decomposed and as
similated in plants. How much heat is pro-

64 IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES.

duced by the absorption of light by the leaves
of the big Coniferas, or by deciduous trees, can
not yet be told; but, no doubt, the amount
has a very sensible effect in stimulating the
growth and sustenance of the trees. Clear
sunshine is continuous in the Sierra Nevada
of California from about June to November;
and even in the so-called winter months there
are, on the average, five days of clear weather
overhead to two of clouds and rain or falling
snow, even when the snow is on the ground
to a depth of from five to forty feet. I have
repeatedly been in the upper Sierra Nevada
on snowshoes, in winter, when the weather
overhead was as clear as in June, and when
the thermometer one hundred feet above the
snow covering must have registered from sev
enty to eighty degrees in the sun. February
in the valleys of California answers to the June
of the Atlantic States as a growing month.
All of the great Coniferse, but especially the
big sequoias, have a heavy and widespreading
mass of sponge-like roots, which arrest and
hold sufficient moisture for constant irriga
tion. There is, indeed, such a superabun
dance of water, that springs are constantly
found issuing from the base of these trees.
Now, the growth of trees is as much stimulated

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES. 65

by irrigation as that of food plants. By con
structing lateral irrigating ditches on hillsides
in Europe, firs grew to twice the size of those
found in dry soil adjoining. In other experi
ments, irrigated trees grew seven times as fast
as those not having the advantage of artificial
watering. The sequoias, therefore, are under
the most constant stimulus of elements most
vital at once to their health and growth. The
water around their roots, too, is never frozen.
When occasional severe frosts prevail, and the
thermometer, under their stress, descends to
its greatest depth (about five degrees below
zero), the ground is covered by snow, which
maintains the warmth of both roots and soil.
This is not the least of the causes tending to
the continuous growth, massive size, health,
and therefore great age, of the big trees of
California. The Coniferse of New England
cease growing in the late summer and fall;
they then begin to store up vitality to with
stand the cold of winter, as hibernating ani
mals do.

Although the growth of the great Coniferse
of California is continuous, there is no over-
stimulation in it. The growth is so perfectly
natural, and so eminently healthy and strong,
that it comes nearer resulting in immortal life

66 IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES.

in these trees than the age exhibited by any other
trees or any other living thing in the world.
Some other trees enumerated by the late Dr.
Asa Gray have also records of very great age.

" Trees [he says] far outlast all other living things, and
form familiar and appropriate symbols of long protracted
existence. . . . We are therefore naturally led to in
quire, whether there is any absolute limit to their exist
ence. If not destroyed by accident— that is, by extrinsic
cause of whatever sort,— do trees, like ourselves, even
tually perish from old age? The unavoidable indura
tion and incrustation of its cells and vessels, apart from
other causes, would put an early and sure limit to the life
of the tree, just as it does, in fact, terminate the existence
of the leaf, the proper emblem of mortality, which, al
though it generally only lives a single season, may be
said to truly die of old age. . . . The old and central
part of the trunk may, indeed, decay ; but this is of little
moment, so long as new layers are regularly formed at
the circumference. The tree survives, and it is difficult
to show that it is liable to death from old age, in any
proper sense of the term. . . . Though the wood in the
center of the trunks and larger branches, the product of
leaves and buds that have long ago disappeared, may die
and decay, yet, while new individuals are formed on the
surface with each successive crop of fresh buds, and
placed in as favorable communication with the soil and
air as their predecessors, the aggregate tree would appear
to have no necessary, no inherent limit to its existence.
. . . This doctrine of the indefinite longevity of trees
— that they die from injury or disease, or, in one word,
from accidents, but never from old age,— was first pro
pounded by the distinguished De Candolle, near the
commencement of the present century."

All of the remarkably aged specimens of
various species in all portions of the world

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES. 67

enumerated by Dr. Gray show some signs of
decrepitude or decay. Death was at work
somewhere in their center or circumference.
I am not able to assert that the sequoias are
the only exception, but they certainly are an
exception, to this rule. If they have any com
panions in other trees, they are very few. The
sequoia heartwood, the duramen, the oldest
wood in the tree, although in one sense dead,
is always the hardest and soundest wood in
the whole structure. This is a wonderful fact.
These sequoias are sustained by a combination
of the elements of soil, water, sunlight, and
sun-heat, not to speak at all of the sustenance
they, in common with all trees, derive from
the nourishing air. The quality and conti
nuity of this nourishment result in a height
and girth that are astonishing. But in this
respect the sequoias are not alone ; the sugar-
pine almost rivals them in stature, but falls
far below them in bulk and age. The sugar-
pines, too, are subject to many diseases; they
therefore decay and die, while the most dis
tinguishing and remarkable feature of the
sequoias is, that not one of them, as far as ob
served, is subject to any disease. It is possible
that this is partly due to the fact that they
have greater sap-distributing (that is, life-

68 IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES.

giving) power than any other tree whatever.
On this subject, Marsh says:

" In trees affected by no discoverable cause of death,
decay begins at the topmost branches, which seem to
wither and die for want of nutriment. The mysterious
force by which the sap is carried to the roots, -to the
utmost twigs, cannot be conceived to be unlimited in
power, and it is probable that it differs in different
species ; so that, while it may suffice to raise- the fluid to
the height of five hundred feet in the sequoia, it may not
be able to carry it beyond one hundred and fifty feet in
the oak. . . . Whenever a tree attains to the limit
beyond which its circulating fluids cannot rise, we may
suppose that death begins."

That limit has never been reached by the
most gigantic sequoias now growing, and it is
quite probable that, because of the perfection
of their nourishment, they have equal perfec
tion in the distribution of their sap. For what
we know of the living sequoia we are almost
wholly indebted to Mr. John Muir, the only
man in the world who has made a prolonged
botanical, personal study of them in their
mountain homes.

Professor Asa Gray prophesied that the fos
sil remains of these trees would be found in
the Arctic Circle. Nordenskjold and others
subsequently found these remains in great
abundance there. Professor Gray says :

" The difference between the two big trees of California
is as noticeable as their resemblance and their isolation.
They are the survivors of a numerous family of wide dis-

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES. 69

tribution, which is first recognized in the cretaceous for
mation in several species, and which reached its maxi
mum in middle tertiary in fourteen recognizable species
or forms. Almost from the first, these separated into two
groups, one foreshadowing the coast, the other the Sierra,
redwood. The intermediate species are extinct, the two
extreme forms have survived. ... So the sequoias
are of ancient stock ; their ancestors and kindreds formed
a large part of the forest which flourished about the polar
regions, and which extended into the low latitudes of
Europe. . . . Libocedrus (the Incense Cedar), ap
pears to have passed its lot with the sequoias. Two
species, according to Heer, were with them in Spits
bergen. Libocedrus decurrens is one of the noblest asso
ciates of the present redwoods. But all the rest are in
the southern hemisphere— two in the southern extremi
ties of the Andes, two in the South Sea Islands. Pines of
the same species, now found associated with the big trees,
were then their associates in Greenland."

How much is yet to be learned about these
trees may be understood from the little we can
say definitely about them in points herein
mentioned. Could the sequoias be protected
from fire, lightning, and storms, we would
probably find trees, not one to four thousand
years old, but of an age only to be reckoned
from the far distant past, when they were first
naturally sown in their last, present, and very
limited habitat.

In reference to the age of these trees, Pro
fessor Alfred Russel Wallace lately wrote:

"Very absurd statements are made to visitors as to the
antiquity of these trees, three or four thousand years

70 IMMORTALITY OP THE BIG TREES.

being usually given as their age. This is founded on the
fact that, while many of the large sequoias are greatly
damaged by fire, the large pines and firs around them are
quite uninjured. As many of these pines are assumed to
be near a thousand years old, the epoch of the ' great
fire ' is supposed to be earlier still, and as the sequoias
have not outgrown the fire-scars in all that time, they are
supposed to have then arrived at their full growth. But
the simple explanation of these trees alone having suf
fered so much from fire, is that their bark is unusually
thick, dry, soft, and fibrous, and it thus catches fire more
easily and burns more readily and for a longer time thati
that of the other Coniferce. Forest fires occur continu
ally, and the visible damage done to these trees has prob
ably all occurred in the present century. Professor G. B.
Bradley, of the University of California, has carefully
counted the rings of annual growth on the stump of the
4 Pavilion Tree,' and found them to be one thousand two
hundred and forty; and, after considering all that has
been alleged as to the uncertainty of this mode of esti
mating the age of a tree, he believes that, in the climate
of California, in the zone of altitude where these trees
grow, the seasons of growth and repose are so strongly
marked that the number of annual rin&s gives an ac
curate result. Other points that have been studied by
Professor Bradley are, the reasons why there are so few
young trees in the groves, and what is the cause of de
struction of the old trees. To take the last point first,
these noble trees seem to be singularly free from disease
or from decay due to old age. All the trees that have
been cut down are solid to the heart, and none of the
standing trees show any indications of natural decay.
The only apparent cause of their overthrow is the wind;
and by noting the direction of a large number of fallen
trees it is found that the great majority of them lie more
or less toward the south. This is not the direction of the
prevalent winds, but many of the tallest trees lean toward
the south, owing to the increased growth of the topmost

IMMORTALITY OP THE BIG TREES. 71

branches toward the sun ; they are then acted upon by
violent gales, which loosen their roots, and whatever the
direction of the wind that finally overthrows them, they
fall in the direction of the over-balancing top weight.

"The young trees grow spiry and perfectly upright,
but as soon as they overtop the surrounding trees and
get the full influence of the sun and wind, the highest
branches grow out laterally, killing those beneath their
shade, and thus a dome-shaped top is produced. Taking
into consideration the health and vigor of the largest
trees, it seems probable that, under favorable conditions
of shelter from violent winds and from a number of trees
around them of nearly equal height, big trees might be
produced far surpassing in height and bulk any that have
yet been discovered."

If Professor Wallace, by personal examina
tion and study, had arrived at the above con
clusions, his knowledge and reputation would
be the strongest possible guarantee of their cor
rectness; but all he says was gathered from
Professor Bradley, an associate professor of
English in the University of California. Pro
fessor Bradley is not a botanist, and is neither
here nor elsewhere recognized as an authority
on the subject of the sequoias. How, indeed,
could he be, since he never made any pretense
of long personal study of either their age,
growth, homes, or surroundings. He counted
the rings of but one tree.

The sequoias are the coniferous tree kings of
the earth. They possess, too, a striking in
dividuality and nobility, more remarkable in

72 IMMORTALITY OP THE BIG TREES.

some respects than any of their other features.
They are surpassed in size only by two varie
ties of the broad-leafed! eucalyptus species of
Australia. The Eucalyptus amygdalina has
been seen four hundred and eighty feet in
height, and with a circumference of over one
hundred feet three feet from the ground, and
of eighty feet fifty-six feet from the surface.

Since California was settled our sequoias
have been subject to constant destruction and
vandalism by fire and the axe. Even their in
fantile children were destroyed. If fire spared
them — which it never does — sheep, more
injurious to young trees than all other agents
of destruction combined, have for thirty years
been let loose in these magnificent and im
mortal groves, and each of them, whether the
young of one year or the king of four thousand
years, were alike doomed to destruction from
the various causes enumerated.

The war with these trees and their pine,
cedar, and fir companions is a war against
unsurpassed size, grace, strength, beauty, maj
esty, and comparatively everlasting age. The
United States Government, until lately, was
utterly unworthy of the heritage of them.
That ruin and desolation would follow their
loss was never denied ; and yet all that was

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES. 73

said and written on this subject, and all the
analogies cited from the experience of numer
ous countries where forest denudation has pro
duced the most widespread soil and climatic
desolation and disaster, fell until lately upon
unhearing official ears. But Mr. Noble, Secre
tary of the Interior under President Harrison's
administration, determined thoroughly to in
vestigate this forest question, in which he was
ably aided by the Sierra Club (of which Mr.
John Muir was President), and by all parties
interested in irrigation, which depends wholly
in this State on the rivers of the Sierra Nevada,
and they, in their turn, are nearly wholly de
pendent on forest preservation. Mr. Noble sent
two commissioners to the Sierra Nevada, whose
reports revealed almost innumerable cases of
bold-faced forest robbery under the dummy
system of perjury and land-grabbing. Their
report also showed the vital need of the im
mediate ejection of sheep and cattle from the
mountains in summer. Their owners for
thirty years have enjoyed free pasture there.
Here, as in Europe, it has been abundantly
shown that pasturage, especially of sheep, even
where it did not cause herders' fires, was ut
terly destructive to the natural condition of the
always friable soil and to all shrubbery and

74 IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES.

young trees. The shrubbery as much as the
large trees serves as a shade and protection for
snow. It is an efficient sunshade, detaining
the snow in its summer tendency of hasty re
turn to the freedom of water.

The commissioners referred to, recommend
ed that the size of the Yosemite reservation,
containing nearly one million acres, be not
reduced. A California Congressman (Mr.
Caminetti) has been laboring assiduously for
its reduction, on the ground that a number of
miners and settlers will be treated unjustly if
the reservation is preserved intact. Acting upon
thorough information thus personally obtained
by Mr. Noble's commissioners, and upon the
latter's strong recommendation, President Har
rison, by virtue of power conferred on him by
an act of Congress of 1893, reserved all of the
western slope of the Sierra Nevada range from
private entry, from the Yosemite National Park
on the north to the southern extremity of the
range, thus protecting the head-waters of all
the streams tributary to the great San Joaquin
Valley. This measure was by far the great
est boon conferred on California by President
Harrison's administration. But the work is
not complete. President Cleveland should
finish it by reserving the other half of the

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES. 75

Sierra Nevada, from the Yosemite Park to the
Oregon line. Mr. Muir thinks that all the
great forest belts of this coast should be under
the control of the General Government forever.
But neither Oregon nor Washington need irri
gation.

That portion of the forests of the Sierra still
left in Government ownership is so only be
cause of its inaccessibility. All timber lands
worth two dollars and a half an acre have been
appropriated, to an elevation of about six
thousand feet. Those higher up, and subject
still to reservation, will in many cases not re
main long so. Wagon-roads or railroads, by
making them accessible, will make them worth
stealing ; that being the word expressive of the
nearly universal means by which " Uncle Sam "
has been despoiled of the most magnificent
coniferous woods on the face of the earth. Too
soon — all too soon — they are destroyed or
stolen ; but they will never, alas, never return !
Long-drawn centuries were required for their
growth, and as long-stretching years would be
needed for their replacement ; but the fact is,
that when once cut, or otherwise destroyed,
they will never be replaced. With their re
moval all the requisites of soil protection and
moisture will be changed. The Sierra, with

76 IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES.

them, has the most glorious forests on the face
of the earth ; without them, as in all such cases
of denudation, blistered, bare rocks and soils,
torn by short-lived spring torrents, carrying
sand, rnud, rocks, and desolation to the valleys
below, will succeed. The completion of the
reservation of the wThole Sierra Nevada north
ward cannot be too speedily included in Mr.
Harrison's reservation of the southern half.
This business of reserving forests is a case of
the most pressing, most vital necessity, not on be
half of California alone, but of all the other
arid States — Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mex
ico, Idaho, and Colorado. But this last is a
subject upon which I cannot here enter, al
though it is a pressing and most mournful one.
California's case is the most important, only
because the trees to be saved are far the largest
and the finest of their species in the world. So
far, too, as Colorado is concerned, there is little
left for the Government to save. Railroad
builders, charcoal burners, cattlemen, sheep-
herders, and lumbermen have already swept
off nearly all of the comparatively small and
sparsely growing forests of that State.

Another persistent effort is just now being
made to reduce the size of the Yosemite timber
reservation described, on the plea that honest

IMMORTALITY OF THE BIG TREES. 77

settlers' rights will suffer ; that there is irriga
ble land on some portions of the tract, and
that there are also mineral lands on it. Let
the settlers, if there are any honest ones there,
be recompensed, but under no circumstances
should the reserve be reduced. Any change
in it, no matter how disguised, means its re
opening to timber-grabbers, and the destruc
tion of its forests.

Wealth and Poverty of the
Chicago Exposition.

~*~—;'^V v'^X.

ra, -.XV

'TJHI7EE ;iTY)}
^,

03T

'

WEALTH AND POVERTY OF THE
CHICAGO EXPOSITION.

THE World's Fair at Chicago was a greater
Exposition than that last held at Paris, as
the Paris Exposition was greater than the pre
ceding one at Philadelphia. Each of these
Expositions, indeed, is greater — necessarily
greater — than its predecessor, simply because
each is carrying more time, and with more time
more advance in the progressive, as compared
with the stationary arts. Of the latter, I
especially mean those arts which have mental
expression only, poetry and the drama, and
by the progressive arts, those which demand
both mental invention and physical expression
— sculpture, architecture, painting, music, and
mechanics. Men's minds have not ceased to
labor in the greatest of the arts first named
-that is, in poetry and the drama, — and
work has been performed in both within the
last half century which is worthy of both
deep study and of high praise ; yet small
approach to equaling, much less surpassing,
the poetry or drama of past ages can now
be registered. Indeed, Shakespeare, Homer,
^Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes,

82 WEALTH AND POVERTY

Virgil and Horace, Dante and Milton, and
to some minds Goethe and Schiller, Moliere
and Racine also, as poets and dramatists,
tragic or comic, and as moralists, philosophers,
naturalists, sages and wits, have so exhausted
human admiration, and so closely attained to
perfection, that there seems little real foothold
left for their successors. However admirable
the latter may have been, and however much
read or praised their works may be, it is
still generally felt, after the expression of
all praise, that they are hardly in the list
with the " poets paramount " who so long ago
preceded them. As Hazlitt has said: "The
niches are occupied ; the tables are full."

The world is so thoroughly explored, that,
omitting science, probably nearly all of what,
in a strictly literary sense, is known as learn
ing has been revealed. The shackles have
for ages been taken from the human mind,
and legal obstacles withdrawn from all human
effort. We therefore can hardly imagine
another age like the golden one of Greece,
or the mental triumphs, in a book sense, of
that of Elizabeth. The conviction is some
what similar, but not nearly so strong, in
regard to sculpture, architecture, and painting.
Few believe it possible that a mind and age-

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 83

encircling genius like Shakespeare can again
appear, unless by some world-transforming
scientific discovery, or new mental revolution
far surpassing anything now likely to occur.
Puck's promise of putting a girdle around the
earth in forty minutes — then apparently as
light, airy, and fabulous as the play in which
it occurs — has long ago been more than
realized; and even its comparative perform
ance, as, a fact of human transportation, either
in the air or through the earth, would not now
in some respects be as wonderful as was the
defeat of the Persians, the birth of a new sense
of Hellenic nationality, and the opening up of
the Old World to observation and increased
colonization by the Greeks, or the discoveries
of the treasures of the old learning, the break
ing up of ecclesiasticism, the substitution of
the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of
astronomy, and the discovery of a new world,
were to the Continent and England of the time
of Elizabeth. In sculpture and architecture,
Egypt, originally, had great influence upon
Greece; and Italy, in learning, had a similar
influence upon England.

Probably no nation can experience more
than one such climacteric as that which the
Greece of Pericles, the Italy of Lorenzo, and

84 WEALTH AND POVERTY

the England of Elizabeth experienced. The
events which created those periods were world-
transforming in their importance. They af
fected every human interest, mental and
physical. Beside these, the three most mem
orable epochs in the world's history, the late
terrible struggle which resulted in the unifi
cation of Germany, or the War of the Rebel
lion, which first solidly cemented the Great
Republic, was a comparatively unimportant
event. In each of these cases the struggle and
the results were of tremendous importance;
but each was but a great episode, and not an
epoch, in the history of the nation passing
through it. Each was a physical and national,
only partially mental, and not at all a world-
embracing, new birth. In proof of this,
attention may be called to the fact that the
literature of neither nation was profoundly
affected, and therefore was not transformed
by these events.

The writer does not think of asserting that
the nineteenth century has been barren of
great poets and prose writers. The fact,
indeed, is that the general contributions to
literature of the past half-century have never
been surpassed, in either quantity or quality.
Whatever poverty the nineteenth century has

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 85

exhibited in poetry is relative only. That is,
it is poor only when compared to the works
of the few poets — the concentrated geniuses
of all the ages— already named. But leaving
these, and these only, aside, Tennyson's " In
Memoriam" and "Princess," and Longfellow's
uEvangeline" and "Keramos," will bear com
parison with the works of any other poets of
any other age whatever. Whittier's " Snow
Bound," not equal to Gray's " Elegy" or Burns'
" Cotter's Saturday Night," is still worthy, as
simple annals of the New England poor at
their hospitable firesides, to be placed beside
those great pastorals, both in a poetical and
heart-touching sense. Macaulay, Motley, and
Fiske, as philosophic, graphic, and brilliant
writers of history, have seldom been surpassed
in any age; while for double gifts as an es
sayist, De Quincey has never been equaled.
As a writer of spiritualized English of the most
weird and heart-stirring power, he is seen at
his best in his " Confessions of an Opium Eat
er." Brilliant with high color as his word-
painting there is, it never oversteps good taste
or chastity of description. Common -sense
guides his pen, even when he describes opium
dreams and hallucinations. His language,
though like his dreams — gorgeous, — is never

86 WEALTH AND POVERTY

more extravagant than an attempt at full
description necessitates; while, on the other
hand, for the qualities of gentle humor, deli
cate fancy, and the most subtle wit, he is seen
at his best in " Murder as a Fine Art." The
best touches of Charles Lamb and Washing
ton Irving are not equal to that essay of De
Quincey's.

Other ages, too, cannot, because natural
science is so recent, pretend to furnish such
graceful prose-writing, illustrating scientific
truth, as that of Tyndall and Huxley. Eng
lish is there exhibited in a dual capacity, at
its best in direct force, power and scientific
accuracy, with imagery and description of the
most appropriate poetic beauty and felicity.
If the works of Darwin, Wallace, Agassiz, and
Draper are referred to last, it is not because
they are least. These naturalists have made
the results of their study of outdoor nature
as intensely interesting as the most brillant
novel, sober fact being illuminated with the
most wonderful scientific theoretical general
izations, which, but that they are facts, would
be relegated to the airy regions of fancy.
The poor earthworm, on which we had pre
viously heedlessly trampled, was shown by
Darwin almost to deserve deification, for its

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 87

universal and almost miraculous service to
agriculture.

If, therefore, the student who has confined
himself to and made the best poetical and
prose writers of the nineteenth century his
own, cannot, as he must not, boast that he has
drunk at the deepest well-springs, especially
of poetic thought, he can at least boast (the
limits before prescribed being still prominently
remembered), of having indulged in not less
fine, while more varied, intellectual nourish
ment than any age of the world has hitherto
been capable of providing.

When we take what comes next to author
ship, the arts that address themselves to both
the mental and physical eye, we are, it is true,
in a still very lofty, but yet a lower, world.
Therefore, it is still believed to be possible at
least, that such sculptors and architects as
the unknown Egyptian sculptors of Abou
Simel, the architects of Karnak, or such Greek
sculptors or architects as Phidias, Praxiteles,
Ictinus, and Lysippus; such Italian sculp
tors as Brunelleschi, Bramante, Sansovino,
Michel Angelo, Omodeo, and Lombardi ; such
painters as Michel Angelo, Raphael, Leonardo
da Vinci, Correggio, Fra Angelico, Perugino,
Titian, Salvator Rosa, Tintoretto, Van Dyck,

00 WEALTH AND POVERTY

and Eubens; the Gothic architecture of the
cathedral of Amiens, Eheims, Salisbury, and
Cologne, or the Romanesque Gothic of Milan,
may all yet be surpassed. There has not, it
is true, since those artists' days been any very
hopeful sign that this will occur; but it is not
regarded, as it is in the case of the work of the
poets and dramatists paramount, as almost im
possible. Therefore, whatever was exhibited
at the Chicago Exposition — the great poets'
works, necessarily, not being on exhibition
there — for study in architecture, sculpture,
and painting, were but copies in some shape of
the work of the giants of the olden days, the
works of men who have nestled in their brains
and therefrom borrowed their ideas. The
value of all latter-day work, indeed, is largely
measured by its success in keeping the great
masters in mind. All later laborers, not ex
cepting the greatest of them (in sculpture),
Thorwaldsen and Canova, are but copyists,
and not improvements on those who preceded
them. The giant in the plastic arts who will
in genius and execution surpass the ultimate
attainments of the old masters, may be pos
sible, but he has not yet appeared, nor is he
very sanguinely looked for. In his " Short
History of Art," Turner asserts that from the

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 89

eastern frieze of the Parthenon more is to be
learnt of the true principles of art than from
all the books that have ever been written.
Ruskin, quoted and endorsed by Symonds,
says: " This is the simple test, then, of a per
fect school — that it has represented the hu
man form so that it is impossible to conceive
of its being better done. And that, I repeat,
has been accomplished twice only — once in
Athens, and once in Florence."

On this subject, W. J. Stillman, the art
critic, says:

" No one can admit that the human intellect is weaker
than it was five or twenty centuries ago ; but it is cer
tain that if we take the pains to study what was done
five centuries ago in painting, or twenty centuries ago
in sculpture, and compare it with the best work of
to-day, we shall find the latter trivial and 'prentice
work compared with the ordinary work of men whose
names are lost in the lustre of a school. The distinction
is not one of mental caliber — for now and then we see
arise an individual of as strong and marked an artistic
mind as any but the two or three supreme men of the
past ; but their best work (and none are more willing
than they to admit it) is but amateurs' accomplishment
beside the certainty and comprehensiveness, both in
vision and execution, of even minor masters of the
great time. . . . There is not one living painter who
can paint a portrait as a Venetian painter of A. D. 1550
would have done it; only one, in my knowledge, who
has the same feeling for it. If we go to the work of wider
range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the Sistine
Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss; the simplest

90 WEALTH AND POVERTY

fragment of a Greek statue of B. c. 450 shows us that
the best sculpture of this century, even the French, is
only a happy child-work, not even to be put in sight of
Donatello or Michel Angelo.

For these reasons, in these directions, the
Chicago Exposition did not nearly equal the
first London Exhibition of 1851. But in other
respects the late Exposition surpassed all of
its predecessors. This advance is mostly in
what we may term the utilitarian arts, and in
practical science, towards perfection in which
the most of the genius of the nineteenth cen
tury has been and is still running, since the
great authors of the past so triumphed that it
is felt no present effort can equal, much less
surpass, its achievements. The triumphs of the
world now are mostly in the mechanical arts;
and poetry — we say, poetry — of a very high
character is being wrought in and expressed
by them. This assertion may at first sight be
doubted ; but a practically unanimous verdict
for it can be obtained, we think, by calling at
tention to a few facts. Let us take one of the
first locomotives, — the "Rocket" of Stephen-
son, — first run on rails in England in 1830.
That primitive machine is simply, in general
outline and construction, a rough engine and
boiler, stuck rudely on boards and wheels. To
the mental and physical eye of even the person

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 91

most ignorant of mechanics, it is an utterly
clumsy and inefficient machine ; how much
more so, therefore, to the educated mechanic.
Place it beside a locomotive of to-day, and the
difference in power and speed of the two ma
chines is not greater than their difference in
appearance. The difference is as great as that
between a child's comical drawing of the
human figure and a like sketch by a skilled
artist. Yet Stephenson's rough-looking boiler
on boards and rude wheels was the parent of
the present locomotive. The change is so vast,
however, in the development of grace, beauty,
strength, compactness of build, and intense
concentrated propelling energy, as to be really
a new creation. In these points, indeed, as a
world-transforming means of land transporta
tion, that small vehicle, the English locomo
tive, has no peer. The American locomotive
is equally powerful, but it is not so small,
simple, or compact. When we compare the
progress thus made, we cannot help seeing
that beauty, strength, concentration of power,
ease of motion, and therefore grace, have been
continuous. Harmony in the highest me
chanical expression has consequently elicited
poetry from this utilitarian means of land
transportation.

92 WEALTH AND POVERTY

Of the English locomotive Ruskin says : " I
cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed
humility with which I sometimes watch a
locomotive take its breath at a railway station,
and think what work there is in its bars and
wheels, and what manner of men they must be
who dig brown ironstone out of the ground
and forge it into that. What assemblage of
accurate and mighty faculties in them, . . .
infinitely complex anatomy of active steel,
compared with which the skeleton of a living
creature would seem to a careless observer
clumsy and vile." This from Ruskin, who
frequently berated steam, smoke, and factories
as blots on the landscape, insisting that water-
power factories only should be tolerated.

And yet, true as this illustration is in the
case of the locomotive, moving over hill and
valley at lightning speed, it does not afford
anything like as fine an illustration of mechan
ical art progress, moving forward in physical
harmony and poetry, as it increases in size,
power, concentration, usefulness, and speed, as
the ocean steamship offers. The rigid rail
affords little opportunity for display of grace
and ease of motion, compared to the undula-
tory freedom of movement possible in water.
The Cunard Steamship Company had on exhi-

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 93

bition at Chicago a complete and beautiful
model of the first steamship of the line, the
Britannia, which crossed the Atlantic in 1840,
in fourteen days and eight hours, with steam
and sail power. She was of eleven hundred
and fifty-four tons, and seven hundred and
forty horse-power. Her cargo capacity was
two hundred and twenty-five tons. She had
a length of two hundred and seven feet, a
breadth of beam of thirty-four and a third
feet, and a depth of twenty - four and a third
feet. The company had also models of the
other side-wheelers in use, until they were suc
ceeded by propellers. Beside these models, is
that of the latest triumph of marine engineer
ing, the mammoth Campania, of twelve thou
sand nine hundred and fifty tons burden, and
thirty thousand horse-power. Her length is
six hundred and twenty feet, her breadth of
beam sixty-five and a quarter feet, and depth
of hold forty -three feet. Looking at these
various steps of progress in marine architec
ture, the most ignorant can see at a glance,
that the increased power, size, speed, carrying
capacity, and passenger comfort of the Cam
pania do not more surpass the Britannia than
the grace, beauty of lines, and general appear
ance of the former vessel do those of the lat-

94 WEALTH AND POVERTY ,

ter. The tendency evidently has been, and is,
to greater length, less breadth of beam and
depth of hull, to rounded and keelless bottoms
— in other words, to greater litheness, more
fast-swimming, fish-like shape, and therefore
to much greater avoidance of contest with
water and wave resistance. Nor can it be
claimed that these changes resulted in less
strength, safety in sea-going qualities, or more
stomach discomfort from rolling and pitching.
Anything like a full appreciation of vessels
like the Campania and Paris can not be had
unless a few facts are recited : The very largest
land engines in factories are only of about
two thousand horse -power, and the largest
locomotives have only two hundred to three
hundred; the Campania is of thirty thousand
and the Paris of twenty thousand horse-power.
No one knows what great mechanical energy
is who has not been in the engine-rooms of
these vessels while under full headway. The
power and rapidity of motion of the engines
of the Paris can only be expressed by saying
that they are illustrations of tremendous
mechanical fury in action; and the wonder,
after thus seeing them, is not that the vessel
runs so fast, but that she does riot run much
faster. This is accounted for by air, wind,

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 95

and water resistance. Yet lying-to in even
a North Atlantic winter tempest is now prac
tically out of date. These vessels, and those
of the other crack lines also, can uninterrupt
edly stride over the most mountainous seas,
defy the fury of the wildest head gales, and
yet still speed on at the rate of three hundred
and fifty to four hundred miles a day — their
full rate of speed being five hundred to five
hundred and fifty miles. Their machinery
seems powerful enough almost to turn the
world, if ever it should grow tired of revolv
ing on its axis. The fires in the boilers seem
large and numerous enough to form a Tophet,
in point of size and heat. The Campania has
one hundred and two furnaces. These are
probably the largest fires ever kindled by man
on the earth, and the wide-throated blasts of
draught let in on them keep them up to a rage
of white heat at all times.

The Cramps of Philadelphia have just fin
ished the first of two steamships for the Ameri
can line. These vessels will, in speed at least,
it is promised, surpass the Campania, Lucania,
and Paris. The Campania has forty times the
power of the Britannia, but uses only five times
the fuel. Either the Campania or Paris can
carry as many passengers on one trip as the

96 WEALTH AND POVERTY

first four ships of the Canard line could have
carried in a year.

Steamships of the type of the Campania of
the Cunard line, and the Paris of the Inman
line, and some of the vessels built by the
Cramps of Philadelphia, are such monsters
in size, power, and carrying capacity, and
yet such perfect models of speed, grace, and
beauty, because of their harmony of line's,
length of hulls, and seabird ease of sitting
the water, that the most stolid beholder would
at once admit that these magnificent vessels
— " which o'er green Neptune's back of ships
make cities " — are literally epic poems on the
water — poems which their architects built for
utility, but which have almost greater grace
and beauty than utility. And the great ma
rine architect could not avoid, consciously or
unconsciously, thus running in lines of grace,
although his most ardent intent was increased
power, carrying capacity, strength, and speed.
Progress in these great utilitarian means of
land and ocean transport has all been toward
vastly greater ease of motion, beauty, and
harmony, and therefore grace and poetry —
a poetry visible and perfectly appreciable, as
I have said, to even the uneducated eye.
The same facts will be found in all of our

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 97

factories — perhaps not so plainly visible, be
cause the machinery in them is not detached
and moving in the same graceful, enclosing
vehicles as a locomotive on land or a steam
ship in the water.

The present saving in fuel is most notable,
too. The old steamships consumed five pounds
of coal per horse-power per hour; the new
marine racers but one and a half pounds. In
the old engines, steam was used but once; now
it does duty three to four times, by triple or
quadruple expansion engines. Instead of the
old pressure of thirty pounds, one hundred
and fifty to one hundred and eighty pounds
are used; steel instead of iron boilers make
this great pressure consistent with safety. The
machinery and boilers are all proportionately
lighter and much less complicated.

Now, after the relation of these facts of me
chanical art progress, and the assertion, which
will not be disputed, that the world has not
recently achieved such triumphs in strictly
literary work, or in sculpture, architecture, and
painting as it did in past ages, it is time to
ask if it must in the future content itself with
the development of mechanical grace with
utility — with poetry and power in the loco
motive and the steamship, in the factory and

98 WEALTH AND POVERTY

in the field, rather than the very highest tri
umphs that have ever been recorded in poetry,
painting, sculpture, or architecture? We an
swer, that this seems probable, and not only
probable, but reasonable, if the amelioration
of the condition of the world's workers is to
continue. The Golden Age is still far off; yet
the present age is a very forward one com
pared with the past. The steamship and
locomotive, either originally or in their im
provement, have helped the world forward
immensely. They have not wholly or nearly
abolished poverty. That is true, indeed ; yet
the age, with them, has taken many steps in
that direction. The world has improved very
much indeed within the last half century.
Mechanical invention has been the instrument
and means of an exceedingly large proportion
of this advance. Without rapid transporta
tion, little progress could be made in the
amelioration of the condition of the poor.
Bad as the condition of the small farmer or
agricultural laborer may now be, in conse
quence of the vastly increased world competi
tion caused by the far greater rapidity of ocean
and land transportation, neither of them is
anything like as badly off as he was fifty
years ago. In other words, let the list of com-

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 99

plaints against the present age be ever so long
and weighty, no one dreams that they could
be lessened by a return to the comparatively
near past. Very few European laborers now
work for six or eight cents a day, while that
sum was a common rate of wages everywhere
half a century ago. No Scotch peasant has
now the hard time that Burns and his father
experienced in scraping together the barest
necessities of life as small farmers. India has
been saved from periodical and unavoidable
seasons of famine, not by philanthropy so
much as by railroad lines. Without the latter
the strongest philanthropy or the most liberal
charity could not aid, because it could not in
time reach the suffering. The Yellow River
and its overflow are still China's sorrow, by
creating periodical famines, because Chinese
stolidity and unprogressiveness will not toler
ate railroads.

In the comparative infancy of railroads,
in 1856, Robert Stephenson asserted that the
railroads of Great Britain then effected a
direct annual saving of forty million pounds
sterling (two hundred millions of dollars).
This sum, he said, exceeded by about fifty per
cent, the interest on the National debt. The
present railroads of that country cost over

100 WEALTH AND POVERTY

nine hundred millions of pounds sterling, or
say four billion five hundred million dol- '
lars. If all railroads were obliterated in the
United States, the property, personal and
landed, of the whole country would be re
duced at once one-half, if not two-thirds.
And yet steam is but an inefficient indus
trial tool. About eighty-five per cent, of
the heat of coal is lost in turning it into
working energy in the steam-engine. But
before this loss is modified or wholly cor
rected, the world, by electricity or some other
mode of creating power, will probably have
advanced in mechanics to a higher, faster,
and far more effective agent than steam power
by land and sea. Coal, of course, will still be
needed in the production of electrical power.

The continued amelioration of the sufferings
and hardships of the common people of the
world can confidently be looked for from the
continued progress of the mechanical arts.
They have been and will continue in a much
higher degree to be expressions of and ministers
to utility, philanthropy and poetry. Look, for
instance, at the progress made through gang
and steam plows, reapers, and harvesters. The
man who now sits comfortably driving a gang
plow seems out more for a pleasant day's drive

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 101

and airing than a day's hard work, and the
same is measurably true of the changed modes
of reaping and threshing. The worst hand
drudgery of plowing, reaping, and threshing
has passed away, on the large farms of the
United States at least. Thirty steam thresh
ers only were required to prepare for mar
ket the wheat crop of two counties in Ohio,
which would otherwise have required the labor
of forty thousand men. These are the lines
in which the genius of the world is running;
these the tablets on which it is recording both
its material and mental expression and pro
gress, and inscribing its poetry also. This is
the " New Learning " of Bacon, in utilitarian
shape, but still in unquestioned wisdom and
poetic expression. Perhaps some scholar in
his closet, classicist in his study, or worshiper
of sculpture, architecture, and painting will
mourn and lament over all of this. But, as
they have been the very persons who most
strongly and continuously iterated and reiter
ated the truth upon our remembrance, that
these masters of the past cannot possibly be
equaled, and, as a rule, but faintly imitated, in
the present, perhaps they are partially to
blame for turning a portion of the current of
the world's genius to fields in which it has

102 WEALTH AND POVERTY

achieved incomparable triumphs — triumphs,
too, in which progress is certain to continue
to be still more rapid and assured. "What,
then," said Macaulay, in his essay on Bacon,
"was the end which Bacon proposed to him
self? It was, to use his own emphatic ex
pression, fruit. It was the multiplying of
human enjoyments and the mitigation of-
human suffering. It was the relief of man's
estate." No Exposition in the world ever
exhibited such an array of machines and
appliances for the relief of humanity and the
mitigation of prostrating drudgery, and there
fore for "the relief of man's estate," as that
at Chicago. It pointed, too, to a day, not far
distant, when machinery will still more effec
tually, and far more cheaply, lighten the bur
dens of humanity, and transport man by land
and sea, and probably through the air, with
far greater rapidity. The words of Macaulay
inscribed over the Transportation Building
at Chicago may be quoted, illustrative of the
truths we have been here recording : " Of all
inventions, the alphabet and printing-press
alone excepted, those which have served to
abridge distance have been most useful to
civilization." The triumphs of electricity will
almost certainly far surpass those of steam.

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 103

it is the coining giant of greater speed and
power. By it steam will be vanquished,
though not abolished, for it is needed to pro
duce electricity. And since human effort
could not compete successfully with past art
and genius, it was very natural that it should
strike for lines in which it could be regnant,
and where the amelioration of the condition
of humanity will attain its chief triumphs.
Let not the fact be forgotten either, that
with great mechanical there has also been
vast mental progress. This combination has
been so great, and the union so fruitful, that
the combined product renders this the greatest
mental and material age the world has ever
seen.

Note, too, that a higher science than that
embraced in the very highest branches of
mechanical art has been directly, or indirectly,
constantly laboring for, and aiding, that art
on all sides. We allude to natural philosophy
and the pure science connected therewith.
The most notable laborers in England in this
field have been Faraday, Joule, Thomson,
Huxley, and Tyndall, with Draper and Edison
in America. These great investigators in the
practical sciences, especially in the departments
of chemistry and electricity, have made dis-

104 WEALTH AND POVERTY

coveries as ethereal and poetical as anything
in the Midsummer Night's Dream or the Tem
pest, while at the same time founded, as the
magnificent "airy nothings" of these works
are not, on immovable pillars of solid fact.
Michael Faraday was one of the best repre
sentatives of these scientists. Their hands
and experiments were on the earth, but their,
thoughts and imaginations ranged almost to
heaven. It is no exaggeration to say that
even Shakespeare himself would have been
honored by Faraday's company. Certainly,
Faraday soared to and labored in as high a
heaven of invention. To the scientist of the
nineteenth century, as to the poets of all cen
turies, nature is but the sensible expression of
the spiritual. His crucibles, machines, and
tools may seem very mechanical and coarse
instruments of research; but through them,
aided and elevated by the highest powers of
the imagination, he has revealed truths on
which the mind finds a repose productive of
the greatest intellectual joy and content.
When we perceive and admit this, then "all
dregs and sediments," as Symonds says, in
another sense, " of the analytical, mechanical
alembic sink to the bottom, leaving a clear,
crystalline elixir of the spirit." The men who

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 105

have soared the highest in the scientific sky,
too, have not worked for gain. They had
their pay in their work — a wealth that the
world knows not of, — in their consultations
with nature, and their joy in the laurels from
the temple of industrial peace with which
their brows were crowned.

After long labor in the mysterious field of
the Correlation of the Forces, Faraday said : " I
have long held an opinion, almost amounting
to conviction, in common, I believe, with
many other lovers of natural knowledge, that
the various forms under which the forces of
matter are made manifest have one common
origin, or, in other words, are so directly
related and mutually dependent that they
are convertible, as it were, one into another,
and possess equivalents of power in their
action."

Commenting on this theory, Tyndall says:
"Faraday's difficulty in dealing with these
conceptions was at bottom the same as that of
Newton — that he was, in fact, trying to over
leap this difficulty, and with it probably the
limits prescribed to the intellect itself." Yet,
Tyndall adds : " In his search for the unity of
all force, he made all his great discoveries.
The discovery of magneto-electricity is the

106 WEALTH AND POVERTY

greatest experimental result ever obtained by
an investigator." In speaking of the import
ance and usefulness of the metals, Faraday
said that "refined civilization would be im
possible without them." He also said that
"the ancients deified them for a far more re
stricted use." What a pleasure it is to remem
ber that the assertion was justly made of this
great physicist "that his life was a struggle
always to say that which he thought was true,
and to do that which he thought was kind."
It was said by Sir David Brewster of Sir Isaac
Newton's " Principia," that it was a work that
might be carried to other worlds, and find its
truths there as solid and acceptable as on this
speck of earth. Much of Faraday's work was
of a like character.

The nineteenth century, therefore, with such
explorers and conquerors in the highest in
tellectual realms of physical truth — the fruit
of their labors nearly all consisting of mechan
ical art triumphs — is not poor, but rich be
yond computation. Those men, though labor
ers in a different field, were justly comparable
to the greatest poets, architects, sculptors and
painters the world has ever seen.

Considered from a practical and poetical
point of view, there never was such an

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 107

Exposition as that of Chicago. Every civil
ized country placed there its masterpieces of
mechanical art progress; and if we can im
agine the goddess of civilization and human
ity presiding there, she must have trium
phantly exclaimed, as she looked over the
miraculous machines: " These are my jewels."
And there is another and more poetical
side to these utilitarian Expositions. Emer
son expressed it. He said that the real ship
is the mind of the ship-builder. Therefore,
although expressed in material ships, locomo
tives, and gigantic or microscopic machines,
to the student by far the most wonderful
sights revealed in that Exposition were the
expressions of the minds of the inventors,
and the physicists, their leaders and allies; and,
therefore, those best capable of appreciating
them were there as much alone with the mind
as with Shakespeare in Hamlet, Macbeth, or
the Tempest, with Michel Angelo in the Sis-
tine Chapel or in the dome of St. Peter's.
Imagination, therefore, still rules the world.
Of all the children of genius, indeed, though
gifted with very different mental gifts and
expressions, it may be said, quoting the
Psalmist, " I have said ye are gods, and all
of you children of the Most High." In many

108 WEALTH AND POVERTY

cases, too, as great mental agony, suffering,
isolation, and want of world appreciation
would be revealed, if the history of all these
machines and their progress could be read,
as Shakespeare, Dante, and Michel Angelo
endured. Every great genius, indeed, in any
department of supreme human effort, is at
some period, and frequently all his life, "'a
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,"
but his joy cometh in the morning of success;
and the greatest and best of these men, but
for the sustenance of ideas, could not have
worked, endured and triumphed as they
did. If the Chicago Exposition, therefore,
was comparatively poor in what heretofore
has been called the "fine" arts, it was rich
beyond expression in those which are both
utilitarian and ideal, in useful and demo
cratic blessings, the fruits of which all the
sons and daughters of men may in some
sort largely share. Is not, indeed, the miti
gation of human loads and labor the high
est poetry; the harnessing of the forces of
nature to human use, progress in the great
est utility and divine harmony? Kepler's
was a mind comparable perhaps only to
Shakespeare's, in the elevation of the range
of its imaginative element. If restored to

OF THE CHICAGO EXPOSITION. 109

this life, that "new Prometheus and heaven-
sealer," as he was called, would have been an
enraptured visitor at Chicago, and doubt
less would cheerfully have admitted that his
work on Celestial Mechanics ("Harmonies of
the World") might well be linked with ter
restrial harmonies, as illustrated by the tiny
or Titanic mechanical triumphs there on ex
hibition, of which triumphs, too, this country
can justly claim the largest share.

MAR 11 1969

MAY 1 0 197G

DATE

20771-1, '22

YB 13514

.