Certain accepted heroes and other essays in literature and politics

CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES
AND OTHER ESSAYS

H.C LODGE

KMM16 ROOM

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

Class

CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

AND OTHER ESSAYS
IN LITERATURE AND POLITICS

BY

HENRY CABOT LODGE

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1897

BY HENRY CABOT LODGE.

THE ENGLISH COLONIES IN AMERICA. With Col
ored Map. 8vo, Half Leather, $3 00.

Opening this book, the reader will at once be attracted
to the beautiful, clear print, which is such a luxury when
the eye is dim or weary. The arrangement is most ad
mirable. Eack Colony has its separate history, so clear
in outline, and the connection each has with the other
Colonies so distinctly stated. — Chicago Inter-Ocean.

PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

Copyright, 1897, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

AU rights reserved.

LI

1ST]

TO
MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE

THE HONORA1U.K

GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR

SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS

^ Stiitt-smiiii, yet friend to truth .' of soul sincere
In iiction faithful, and in honor clear!
Who I'rokt- no promise, ser~ce<i no prifctte e>u1,
\\'ho fftiini'tf no title iJHif -'.'ha li>*t n<> friend."

NOTE

With the exception of the last, these essays have all been
published before in different magazines and reviews. I
desire to thank the editors and publishers of Scribners
Magazine, of the Cosmopolitan, and of the North American
Review for their kind permission to reprint here the "Last
Plantagenet," "As to Certain Accepted Heroes," and the
essay on " Dr. Holmes."

11. V>« 1 - .

Washington, D. C., May, 1897.

CONTENTS

As TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 3

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 31

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS 95

CHATTERTON n?

DR. HOLMES 137

A LIHERAL EDUCATION 157

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS .... .189

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 203

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 233

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

- **7

UNIVERSITY

•

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

THERE have appeared lately some very
notable prose translations of the Homeric
poems ; Professor Palmer's Odyssey, and the
Iliad and Odyssey " done into English " by
Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Butcher, Mr. Leaf,
and Mr. Myers. These translations seem to
prove the decided superiority of fine prose in
giving an English version of the great Greek
epics. Whatever their advantages, metre or
rhyme, or both, impose such conditions upon
the translator that he is inevitably forced to
depart more widely from his original than if
he were not so fettered. Of course, a dry and
baldly literal rendering of Homer into English
prose is of little value except as a labor-sav
ing device for the school-boy. The proposi
tion that prose is the best vehicle for transla
tion rests necessarily on the assumption that
the prose itself is of the best, and such is cer
tainly the case in these new versions. All are
the work of ripe scholars, and all have the true

4 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

literary touch. The English is not only fine,
but thoroughly poetic in substance if not in
form. It is true they are translations, but it
seems as if nothing else could be said against
them. They preserve the spirit and fire of
the original better than any other rendering,
and they bear us along and make us feel the
rush and swing of the story with a strength
of which no translation in verse has hitherto
shown itself capable. I confess that I rather
prefer Professor Palmer, because his language
is simpler, somewhat more direct, and more
purely modern. The -slightly archaic forms
and occasional archaic words used by Mr.
Lang and his associates do not seem a gain.
More or less archaic English is practically no
nearer Homer than the English of to-day,
and yet it is distant from our own modes of
thought and speech. The employment of ar
chaisms seems, in fact, to contravene direct
ly the sound rule laid down in Mr. Lang's
introduction to the Odyssey, that a transla
tion should above all things conform to the
taste and speech of its day, as otherwise it
falls short of its first duty, which is to make
the original as simple and comprehensible as
possible.
/Yet, after all, this is but a small point.

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 5

Where everything is so good it is invidious
to grumble, or even to draw comparisons.
Moreover, my purpose is not to analyze or
criticise the merits or demerits of these
translations, which may be said to be whol
ly admirable, but to set down certain im
pressions which have come to me, or, rather,
which have been renewed and sharpened by
a fresh reading of Homer. To most boys,
I think, the study of Greek is a sore trial,
and it is a real misfortune that the Homeric
poems should be associated in their minds
with the idea of a disagreeable task. At the
same time, although boys do not realize the
splendor of Homer's poetry, or the beauty of
Homer purely as literature, the story of Odys
seus, simply as a story, has to them an abid
ing charm despite the highly adverse circum
stances under which they first encounter it.
On the other hand, it puzzles most boys, I
think, as it puzzled me, to understand why it
was worth while to learn with great labor a
language which in the Iliad, the only book we
knew, was devoted to the exploits of what
seemed to the boyish mind a set of not over
brave savages, very inferior in all ways to such
heroes of youth as Saladin and Richard of the
Lion Heart, or as Uncas and Leather-Stock-

6 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

ing. The boyish insensibility to the wonder
and beauty of the poetry passes away like
many other and better things of early days,
but the boyish judgment as to the characters
portrayed in the Iliad, after many readings
and a good many years, seems to have been on
the whole correct. If it is correct, then it is
not unworthy of consideration, for it is desira
ble in literature and art as well as in the prac
tical affairs of every-day life to look at things
as they really are, and to try not to be led
away either by confusions or conventions.

As literature, the Homeric poems are so
great that the world has fallen very easily into
the habit of assuming that because the poetry
is noble and beautiful the people whom it de
picts are noble and beautiful also. This is per
haps a natural error, but it is none the less an
error, for there is no necessary connection be
tween the merit of a literature and that of the
people it pictures to us. We make no such
mistake with modern authors. Nothing in
literature rivals Macbeth in tragic power or in
sustained splendor of thought and diction.
Some of the greatest passages in all poetry
are spoken by Macbeth, and yet no one would
think of calling him a hero or of holding him
up as a figure for after ages to admire. We

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 7

marvel at the genius which created Macbeth,
but we are in no doubt as to Macbeth's char
acter. With Homer, on the other hand, we
have associated the word heroic. The age of
which he wrote is the heroic age, his verse
is called heroic verse, and his characters are
conventionally called heroes. It is this con
vention which embodies the error. Homer
drew men as he saw them, with all the vivid
force of genius, but that fact does not make
them heroes in the accepted sense any more
than Shakespeare's genius makes lago other
than the villain that he was and that his crea
tor intended him to be.

Neither is it of moment whether the work
is history or fiction. It makes no difference
so far as this question is concerned whether
the men and women of whom Homer sang
ever lived or not. They are a good deal more
real and have entered far more into human
life and thought than many people who un
doubtedly have lived and died, and, like brave
Percy, been food for worms. They have been
used as types and examples; their words have
become part of the speech, their deeds a por
tion of the history of mankind. Their very
names have gone broadcast throughout the
world and have been given to children with-

8 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

out a drop of Greek blood in their veins, who
in many instances very likely went through
life without ever reading the exploits of their
namesakes, or knowing who those namesakes
were.

Such people as those whom we know in the
Iliad and the Odyssey, whether they really
lived once upon a time, or whether they were
but the creations of the poet's brain, deserve
consideration for their effect on humanity
quite as much as most well-established his
toric characters, and are also as a rule far
more interesting. Moreover, whether the he
roes of the Iliad existed or not in those pre
cise forms, they certainly existed as a society,
for Homer, like all great imaginative writers
of healthy mind, pictured what he saw and
knew. He threw over it all the glamour of
genius, but as he was a great genius he was
therefore essentially true both to life and
nature.

Let us look, then, at these Homeric charac
ters in the light of historical common-sense,
with Homer himself as our authority. Let us
forget for a moment that they are chronicled
in verse of surpassing beauty, and take only
the bare facts as Homer gives them.

Before coming to details, it must be remem-

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 9

bcred at the outset that these Homeric people
have been held up for generations among the
children of men not as heroes, in the technical
sense of belonging to what is called the heroic
age, but as real and lasting heroes, to be ever
imitated and admired. We need go no fur
ther for an example than to Mr. Myers's son
net, prefixed to this very translation, in order
to find Achilles called " chivalric." Let us be
gin, therefore, with Achilles, greatest and most
heroic of the heroes. What are the facts
about him as Homer gives them ? They arc
easily obtained, for the wrath of Peleus' son
and its consequences really form the Iliad,
and, familiar as they are, I must venture to
restate them, for on these facts, plainly stated,
the case largely turns.

Achilles was admittedly the best fighter,
the strongest man, and the most important
chief among those who gathered with their
followers for the siege of Troy. On the way
thither the combined forces landed on a buc
caneering expedition and took the city of
King Action. To Achilles in his share of the
spoils fell Briseis; to Agamemnon, Chryscis.
But the latter was the daughter of the priest
of Phoebus, and when Agamemnon refused to
give her up the sun god sent a pestilence

IO AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

among the Greeks. Then Achilles insisted
that Agamemnon should give up Chryseis,
and the king of men agreed, but on condition
that he should have Briseis by way of com
pensation. Thereupon followed a. dispute, '
purely verbal and physically harmless, which
is an interesting example of the dignity of
this particular body of heroes. There is in it,
alas, only a ha'porth of argument to an intol
erable deal of personal abuse. At one stage
the god-like Achilles came almost to the point
of fighting, but as that was something the
Homeric warriors always considered careful
ly, he counselled with Athene, who advised
him not to fight but to revile Agamemnon — a
course which Achilles pursued with the ut
most good-will and success.

We discover from the conversation which
ensued that in the opinion of Achilles the
king of men was " shameless," " crafty," and a
" dog-face," that he was a drunkard with the
" heart of a deer," without " courage to arm
for battle" or "to lay ambush." Agamem
non was more guarded in his language, hav
ing a wholesome fear of Achilles' superior
strength, but he carried his point and got
Briseis when Chryseis was returned. There
upon Achilles retired to his tent, a movement

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES II

which by his action has become the common
metaphor for sulking, and then through his
mother's aid he obtained from Zeus the prom
ise that he should be avenged by having the
Greeks driven and beaten by the Trojans
until they were ready to sue for his return on
his own terms. All, as we know, went as he
amiably desired. His friends and allies were
beaten and slaughtered in a series of engage
ments, and Achilles brought all this upon
them, and, in fact, deserted them, because a
slave girl had been taken from him. His al
lies evidently understood him, for they tried
to bribe him to come back by offering gold, a
form of persuasion which was perhaps judi
cious but was certainly not heroic. The one
cry of Achilles throughout is, in fact, that he
had not received his proper share of the
plunder, and that even from what he got the
best had been taken. For a treachery so con
siderable and so vindictive as his, the cause,
baldly stated, does not seem very noble even
in this materialistic and money-making age.

Finally the Greeks were so pushed that
Achilles permitted his dearest friend to wear
his own magic armor and lead forth the fa
mous Myrmidons. In the ensuing fight Pa-
troclus was killed by Hector, who got the

12 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

armor and put it on, and the news of Pa-
troclus' fall was brought to Achilles, who was
filled with rage and grief. One might sup
pose that, under the circumstances, this great
fighter would have caught up the first weap
ons he could find and rushed forth to avenge
his friend. Not at all. He sat him down
after much fine talk and waited until his
mother procured from Vulcan a new and
more splendid set of impenetrable armor.
Thus equipped he sallied forth, and, as might
have been expected, killed without difficulty a
number of unimportant persons and drove the
Trojans before him. He slew all who came
in his way, even those who begged for quar
ter—which, it must be said, all the Greeks did
habitually, and apparently from preference.
In the case of Lykaon, however, Achilles
went a step beyond even the general pleasant
custom. Lykaon not only fell at the great
warrior's feet and asked for mercy, but he
was totally unarmed. Achilles, rather amused
at the request for quarter, butchered the de
fenceless boy and passed on. This was very
likely a customary deed, suitable to the time
and place, but abstractly it was hardly a he
roic one.

At last he came to Hector, who awaited

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 13

him outside the walls. Hector sought an
agreement that the victor should return the
body of the vanquished in the fight, a propo
sition which Achilles, with the abusive words
of which he had large command, declined.
Hector ran three times around the walls and
Achilles failed to overtake him. Then Athene
appeared in the likeness of Deiphobus and
persuaded Hector to stand. Achilles threw
his spear without effect, and Athene returned
it. Hector threw his and turned to his
brother, Deiphobus, for a second, only to find
that there was no one there. Then, as
Shakespeare would put it, " they fight, and
Hector is slain." After his victory the
" chivalric " Achilles dragged Hector's body
behind his chariot, proposed to give it to the
dogs, slew twelve Trojan prisoners in honor
of Patroclus, and finally gave up Hector's
body only by the direct intervention of the
gods.

This, in the driest outline, is the story of
Achilles, as Homer gives it. What manner of
man do the facts disclose ? Simply an unusu
ally brutal savage of colossal strength, treach
erous and cruel, ready to sacrifice friends for a
quarrel over the spoils, utterly devoid of gen
erosity towards his foes, and not particularly

14 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

brave. He wore impenetrable armor ; he had
horses of divine origin ; he knew by divine
revelation that he was going to kill Hector,
and he had the treacherous assistance of a god
dess. Under such conditions it required but lit
tle courage to fight a man who, at the critical
moment, had no helper, human or divine. The
fight with Hector is nobly told, but, on Achil
les' side at least, it was a most ignoble fight.

Men must be judged by their own age and
time and by their own standards, if we would
judge them with any justice. To do otherwise
would be absurd. But it is equally absurd to
hold up men of a past age as abstractly he
roes because the poet of the time, writing from
his own point of view, declares them to be so.
To condemn Achilles because he had the
morals and manners of a South Sea Islander
of the time of Captain Cook, and therefore
does not come up to our standards, would be
highly unjust, but to treat him as a heroic
figure for all after generations to admire is
simple nonsense. He was a savage, and a bad
one. Tried even by the savage code, he stands
low, and to talk of him as " chivalric " is to
give him qualities utterly unknown to him or
any of his fellows. As a mere fighting savage,
moreover, he falls far below the Zulus who

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 15

thronged about Rorkc's Drift, or the North
American Indians who cut off and destroy
ed British and American armies with all the
strength of centuries of civilization behind
them.

It is not fair, however, to judge a people
from an individual. Achilles was much the
worst, as Hector was much the best, of Homer's
men. Hector showed generosity and nobility
of character, and despite his running away from
Achilles, he was, on the whole, the bravest of
them all. But what is of most concern is the
race, and on this the poem gives us abundant
information. It can be easily condensed, and
is not flattering. All the chiefs, from Nestor
down, bragged and boasted vociferously to
each other and to their foes. They had no
regard for plighted faith. The Trojan Panda-
rus shot at Menelaus when it had been agreed
that Menelaus and Paris should settle the dif
ferences by single combat. Diomed and Odys
seus captured Dolon, and, on promise that his
life should be spared, Dolon gave them infor
mation about the Trojan camp. Thereupon
they slew him.

Lying they regarded not only with leniency
but approbation. When Odysseus landed in
Ithaca he met Athene disguised, and, in re-

1 6 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

sponse to her questions, lied artfully. The
goddess, revealing herself, not only praised
him for his prudence, which was natural, per
haps, but for his skill in falsehood.

They were ungenerous to their foes, gave no
quarter except to preserve slaves, slaughtered
prisoners, and considered that it was a matter
of course to give up a captured city to rapine
and destruction, saving only women for slaves
and concubines, with whom each chief was
amply provided. All these qualities, it may
be said, are to be expected among a primitive
and savage people. This is undoubtedly true,
and if we treat Homer's Greeks as savages, as
they ought to be treated, and not as heroes,
according to the conventional modern usage,
the defence is complete; but then this defence,
of itself, proves the case against the heroes.

Moreover, whether savages or not, in one
particular these people ought to have excelled.
Physical courage is the commonest virtue of
men, whether savage or civilized, and in this
very point the men of the Homeric poems fall
short. Let us take a few examples. In the
fourth book Agamemnon "drave the cow
ards," as if they were a recognized body, into
the midst of the army, and then warned his
men not to be eager to fight single-handed,

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 17

but only to assail the foe from their chariots —
which was not exactly an inspiring form of
military address. In the thick of the com
bat, whenever any fresh warriors approached,
or any man of renown, the chiefs individually
would carefully consider whether to fight or
run away, which seems to have been always
an open question, although not commonly so
regarded by fighting men, especially of heroic
mould. So Diomed, one of the best, doubted
in the fifth book. In the eighth book they all
bolted except Nestor, who could not run away
because his horse was " foredone," and Dio
med, who took occasion, with great justice un
der the circumstances, to call Odysseus a cow
ard. Subsequently Diomed had another fit of
doubting as to whether flight was not best, but
managed, after much hesitation, to stand his
ground. In the ninth book, the king of men
was all for taking to the ships and running
away, because they had met with a reverse.
Odysseus also doubts in the eleventh book,
and so it goes. Examples might be multiplied
to show that flight was always a reasonable
alternative, duly considered even in the heat
of battle, and in no case a disgrace. It is curi
ous also to note how little hand-to-hand fight
ing there is. Nearly all the death-blows and

l8 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

wounds are given with hurled spears or with
arrows. It is obvious that the men of Homer
had not, as a rule, any liking for close work with
the sword — the surest sign that they were not a
hard-fighting race and that they could not stand
punishment. They evidently did not com
prehend the maxim laid down by Dr. Holmes,
when he compared the American bowie-knife
with the Roman sword, that the people who
shorten their swords lengthen their boundaries.

Most striking of all, however, is the way in
which Homer's men left the field if they were
wounded. When Agamemnon was hurt in
the forearm and Diomed in the foot, both left
the battle and betook themselves at once to
their tents. It is not easy to understand how
any army could have done very effective
fighting when their chiefs were ready to re
tire for such trifling hurts as these. But it
was apparently the usual practice ; and far
more significant than the act itself is the fact
that the poet treats these withdrawals from
the field as wholly a matter of course.

It would be unfair perhaps to contrast such
performances as these with the Roman fight
ing, or with that of the English who fell
around Harold, at Hastings, or of the Scotch
who died by the side of James, at Flodden,

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 19

or of the Americans who were killed to the
last man at the Alamo without even leaving
a messenger of death, as the Greeks did at
Thermopylae. It is quite fair, however, to
compare these Homeric warriors with those of
another primitive people also celebrated in
the verse of an early minstrel. What a poor
figure do the Greeks cut by the side of the
Nibelungs ! At the crossing of the river
Hagan is struck down twice from behind, but
he rises, hurt as he is, slays the boatman, and
takes the boat. If he had been like Aga
memnon he would have retreated to his tent
and had his head bound up. Or take the
most famous scene of all in the German epic,
the final struggle in Etzel's hall. That grim
fighting was simply impossible to such men
as Homer described. In a word, the Nibe
lungs are as superior to the Greeks as fight
ers as the Iliad and Odyssey are superior to
the Nibelungenlied as poetry.

Take, again, another example from a kin
dred race, the Jomsborg viking, who in fierce
sea-fight having cleft his enemy, Thorstein, to
the waist, has both hands cut off at the wrist,
and thus finds himself helpless and surround
ed by foes. Clasping his two boxes of treas
ure with his bleeding stumps he calls his few

20 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

surviving men to follow him, and plunges into
the sea, leaving to his enemies only a bloody
wreck. Still another instance from the same
early literature of a primitive people is the fa
miliar story of Gizli, the outlaw. Trapped and
surrounded by a band of fifteen men as brave
as himself, he kills or mortally wounds eight of
them, and when pierced with spears he man
ages to bind his cloak about his wounds, and
throwing himself upon his assailants kills one
more and falls dead upon the body of his foe.
These men were pirates and savages, if you
will, and so were the Homeric Greeks, but the
Norse viking and the Icelandic outlaw were
redeemed by a fierce courage and a capacity
for desperate fighting of which the Iliad shows
no trace.

Historically, and as a plain matter of fact,
the Homeric Greeks were a number of small
tribes under different chiefs, united for the
purpose of destroying another, and probably
kindred, collection of similar tribes. They
were primarily buccaneers, not differing in
any essential respect from Morgan and the
other heroes of the Spanish Main, except that
they were very inferior in fight. When faring
over the sea they would land and attack any
peaceful city they could get at. Sometimes

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 21

they were successful, as in the case of the
holy city of King Action, sometimes they
were repulsed, as Odysseus was by the Kebri-
ones. In this aspect they were simple pi
rates. When they took a city, as has been
said, they sacked it, killed the men, and car
ried off the women and children into con
cubinage and slavery. They did not, indeed,
always stop there, for, in the case of Troy,
Agamemnon reminds Menelaus in one passage
that they are to kill every one, even to the
child in the mother's womb.

When they were all gathered before Troy
they quarrelled among themselves, and were
eaten up by bitter feuds and jealousies. They
did a great deal of declaiming, and although
the language put into their mouths by Homer
is magnificent, their sentiments were low, and
the frequency and violence of their vituper
ation were amazing. They did a good deal
of not very desperate fighting, were ready to
run away on slight provocation, and finally car
ried the city by a trick. The gods, who repre
sented their ideals, were on the whole lower
than their worshippers, by whom they were
at times even beaten in battle. In a word,
the Homeric poems describe to us the doings
of certain primitive tribes who were cruel and

22 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

treacherous, subtle and cunning, liars and brag
garts, and, withal, not over brave, although
fighting was their principal business in life,
and courage should have been their conspicu
ous and redeeming quality.

Homer drew men and society as they were,
and the facts of history fall in with his facts.
It is only when we adopt the " chivalric " and
heroic theory that history and Homer fail to
agree. Of the early exploits of the Greek
race Thucydides says : " It is impossible to
speak with certainty of what is so remote, but
from all that we can really investigate I should
say that they were no very great things."
The Greeks of history were the true descend
ants of Homer's men, but bore no relation to
the fictitious beings whom a late posterity has
seen fit to find in the Iliad. The historic
Greeks as they became civilized improved in
sentiments, morals, and manners over the Ho
meric Greeks. They were ingenious, subtle,
clever. They were fertile in orators, writers,
and artists. They produced a sculpture and an
architecture which have never been equalled,
and a literature which stands among the fore
most of the world. They have had more ef
fect upon human thought probably than any
people who have ever lived. They improved,

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 23

too, in fighting, but as we have only their own
story, and as they retained their ancestors'
habit of speaking extremely well of their own
exploits, it is difficult to say how much they
had improved. They fought better than the
Asiatics, and they kept the Persians out of
Europe, but I confess I have always longed to
have a Persian account of those wars, in order
to gain some means of knowing just how
much the Greeks lied about the numbers of
Xerxes' army.

But, after all is said, the fact remains that
the Greeks politically continued to be at bot
tom a set of jarring, jealous tribes. They
built cities, but not empires; they founded
municipalities, but not states. They failed
not merely to govern others, but them
selves. When they came in contact with a
real fighting people like the Macedonians
they went down before them, and they fell
an easy prey to the Romans. They were far
cleverer thnn their conquerors, and yet, as
Bagehot says: "The Romans were praetors
and the Greeks barbers."

Such a fate must have been predicted for
the descendants of the Homeric people if
they are looked at rightly, and not through
the mist of modern misconceptions. With

24 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

all their talent and all their genius the Greeks
were not a fighting or governing race. Low
ell says, somewhere, " I cannot help sympa
thizing with the Romans, who thought it
better to found an empire than to build an
epic or carve a statue," and this sympathy
is wholesome and sound. It is true that we
respect more for their character and force the
men who formed the Roman law and built
the Roman roads than we do those who
reared the Parthenon or produced the lit
erature of Greece. The Romans were states
men, lawgivers, and soldiers, while the Greeks
ministered to their pleasure, gave them their
art, and improved their literature. In the an
cient world these different qualities did not
exist in the same nation, and it has been re
served to the English-speaking people to
combine the force and power of a governing
and conquering race with the greatest litera
ture, excepting the Greek alone, that the
world has yet seen.

The accepted view of Homer's chiefs, how
ever, is but part of the conventional and tradi
tional theory about the classics generally.
The classics were indissolubly associated in
men's minds with the revival of learning and
the escape of civilized man from the darkness

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 25

of the Middle Ages. People felt for the litera
ture and history of Greece and Rome not
only a just admiration but a profound grati
tude. Thus it came to pass very naturally
that education in its highest form meant clas
sical education. To know the classics was to
have a liberal education, the education of a
gentleman. An Englishman might be igno
rant of the most familiar facts of science or
history either of his own or other nations if
he could quote Horace aptly and correctly.
To this day, writing Latin verses is a principal
exercise of English school-boys — a form of ed
ucation about as useful and deserving of the
name as it would be to teach them to make
Choctaw acrostics or to write the Lord's
Prayer or the Ten Commandments within
the compass of the little-finger nail.

Of late years there has been a revulsion
everywhere against the classical tradition, and
the danger now is that it will go too far.
Simply because the dead languages have no
obvious practical use, it would be narrow in
the extreme to lay them aside in our higher
education. But they should stand on a true
and not on a false ground. Latin and Greek
should be studied and learned, because they
open the doors in the one case to the history

26 AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES

of a great people and in the other to one of
the noblest literatures and much of the best
thought mankind has yet produced. They
should be learned, because they enlarge the
mind and train and develop its powers. The
classics cannot longer hope to live on the the
ory that they are the sum of education, be
cause this is false, and the falsehood kills.
But they will live forever on their own merits
as the voices of a great past in literature and
history which every well-educated man must
be able to hear and understand.

What matters it, so far as the glory of the
literature and the poetry is concerned, wheth
er the men of whom Homer sang were leaders
of savage tribes or not? It matters nothing.
But it is of consequence that we should put
into Homer people who do not belong there,
and then give them out of our own ideas qual
ities they never had. Again the falsehood kills.
We love Homer, not because he drew a num
ber of persons whom we have chosen to speak
of as heroes after the types of chivalry, an
cient and modern, but because he has pict
ured to us in immortal verse part of the mov
ing pageant of human life. He has stirred
and delighted generations of men by the cre
ations of a genius and an imagination beside

AS TO CERTAIN ACCEPTED HEROES 27

which the modern literature which calls him
" primitive " looks as frail and small as the
Arab tent lurking in the shadow of the Pyra
mids when we compare it with the mighty
mass of the royal sepulchres towering above
it. We love Homer for the beauty of his
poetry, for his descriptions of sea and land,
of morning and evening, of battles and sieges,
of men and women in their strength and love
liness. Why should we seek to thrust into all
this imperishable beauty a set of persons who
have no business there, because they are the
creatures of our own brains, made after our own
fashions? It adds nothing to Homer to con
fuse his poetry with the characters it portrays.
Of all people we should take Homer and
Homer's men exactly as they are, for of Homer
we can rightly use the words of the one great
genius who has soared far beyond him, and
say, as Shakespeare does :

" He is as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth."

THE LAST PLANTAGENET

THE LAST PLANTAGENET

SOME one has said that " the youth of Eng
land take their theology from Milton and
their history from Shakespeare." Whether
the first proposition is true or false, there can
be no doubt that the second holds good, not
only as to the youth of England, but as to all
who speak or read the English tongue. The
history of England which Shakespeare wrote
is the history we really know, and the kings
he put upon the stage are those who are real
and vivid to English-speaking people to-day.
Whatever these sovereigns may have been in
reality, we think of them now as Shakespeare
drew them. His conception has become that
of the English-speaking world, and will so re
main.

Life-like as all these royal portraits are, how
ever, there is one that stands out with peculiar
vividness. This is the last Plantagcnet, Rich
ard III. Some of the historical plays are
never acted, and others seldom and irregular-

32 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

ly. But Richard III. is always upon the stage.
The tragedy which bears his name goes far
beyond the circle of those who read, and
passes easily out of the range of occasion
al "runs" and scattered performances, which
are the lot of its companions. It is intensely
popular as a play. It packs theatres, it thrills
audiences, it stirs the ambition of every aspir
ing tragedian, and it is ever before the public.
Shakespeare's Richard is the best known ruler
England has ever had, for he is as familiar to
the shoeblack and the newsboy, innocent of all
learning and shouting applause from the gal
lery, as he is to the patient scholar in his closet,
giving laborious days and nights to the mend
ing of a corrupt line, or the settlement of a
doubtful reading for some vast Variorum edi
tion of the great dramatist.

It is not a hold upon posterity, however,
which any one need envy. Lord Lyndhurst
said that the knowledge that Lord Campbell
would write his biography added a new terror
to death. If Richard could have known that
his story would have been told solely by his
enemies, and would then have passed into the
hands of the mightiest genius among men, to
be depicted with all the resources of consum
mate art and all the prejudices of a servant of

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 33

the Tudors, he might well have felt that there
was a new pang added even to the terrors of
a mediaeval death - bed. Yet such has been
his fate. Shakespeare took the statements of
one of the King's bitterest enemies, and from
them developed the Richard that we know.
In the light of recent discoveries, it is possi
ble now, in some measure, to see how near
the great poet came to the historic truth.
Richard is so distinct to us in the work of the
dramatist that his career is always interesting,
and has found many writers who have devot
ed to it much time and study. With the new
materials, however, which modern research
has discovered, the subject has risen from the
level of a merely curious inquiry about an in
teresting character and the events of a dark
period, to a plane where the great forces of
English history are disclosed, and something
more than a mere bloody struggle for personal
power is revealed.

The first step is to define the Richard we
know ; the second is to compare this Richard
and the supposed events of his life with the
facts which the centuries have spared, and
which now, after long hiding, have been
brought to light. But few words are needed
to set forth Shakespeare's Richard, so well is
3

34 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

he known to us all. He appears in three
plays — in the second and third parts of
Henry VI. , as well as in the one that bears
his own name, and is depicted with that force
of drawing and warmth of color of which only
one man in all literature is capable. He is
drawn with the utmost care and precision of
definition, and his career is worked out with
unsparing logic. From his first utterance to
his last, there is not a break or a slip to mar
the artistic completeness of the whole. The
man stands before us with all his tendencies,
motives, and passions laid bare, and their con
sequences are carried out with the relentless
force of a syllogism.

Richard makes his first appearance in the
second part of Henry VI., when York sum
mons his sons to back him in his claim to the
crown.

" Queen Margaret. — His sons, he says, will give
their words for him.

" York. — Will you not, sons ?

"Edward. — Ay, noble father, if our words will
serve.

" Richard. — And if words will not, then our weap
ons shall."

This first sentence defines him at once as

THE LAST PLANTAGENBT

35

the fighter and the man of action. Then he
bandies words with Clifford, who cries :

"Hence, heap of wrath, foul, indigested lump,
As crooked in thy manners as thy shape."

Thus he is immediately stigmatized as physi
cally hideous, and the first prejudice — that of
the eye — is roused against him. The battle
of St. Albans follows. Richard kills the Duke
of Somerset, and, apostrophizing the body,
exclaims :

" Sword, hold thy temper ; heart be wrathful still :
Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill."

The last line marks sharply the man whose
theory of life is to kill all who cross his pur
poses, while, as the play closes, his prowess in
the battle is also especially emphasized.

In the third part of Henry VI. Richard fig
ures largely. He is always the great soldier
of the Yorkists — the foremost in fight, the most
bloodthirsty, and the one who is ever eager for
action and for blows. It is he who rallies the
army at Towton when both Warwick and Ed
ward give way. It is he who rescues Edward
when Warwick imprisons him, and it is Richard
who leads the van at Barnet and Tewkesbury.

36 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

In this play his character is developed, and in
the great speech which begins :

" Ay, Edward will use women honorably,"

his qualities and purposes are minutely set
forth.

The play ends with the great scene in the
Tower, which Gibber tacked on to his version
of Richard III., and which is therefore familiar
to every one. Richard kills Henry, and, with
a cynical jest upon his lips, goes his way.

In the tragedy which bears his name there
is no need to trace him, for every one knows
it well. It is easy to sum up his character,
although an infinity of touches have gone to
make the finished picture. In his full and
final development Shakespeare's Richard is a
complete monster, physically and mentally,
without a redeeming moral trait, except a
courage that knows no fear. He is a great
soldier, a man of the highest ability — cold, de
termined, relentless. He is subtle, hypocriti
cal, ingenious, with an iron will and an address
which bends all things to his purpose. He is
devoured by an ambition for the crown. In
this he is the man of one idea, and never for a
moment loses sight of his object. He has a
savage wit, a biting sarcasm, a brutal frank-

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 37

ness, and, at the same time, a smooth, per
suasive tongue in time of need. His most
marked trait, perhaps, is the cynicism with
which he meets every event, and which does
not spare even himself or his ambition. There
is no softer side, there are no periods of re
morse. Moments of superstitious fear occur,
but these have no flavor of repentance, and as
soon as he can catch his breath these shadowy
terrors are trampled under foot. The quali
ties which are especially emphasized in Shake
speare's Richard are savage cruelty, indiffer
ence to bloodshed, ability, and a reckless fight
ing spirit, which finally brings him to his death.

Let us turn now to the facts of history, cold
and lifeless, with none of the glow of genius
upon them, and see how far the real Richard
was like the Richard of the poet. At the out
set be it said that Shakespeare, with his mar
vellous insight into human nature, could not
be the mere reproducer of what Horace Wai-
pole calls "mob stories and Lancastrian forg
eries," however much he may have followed
them. With the sure intuition of genius he
saw much that he could not find in the books
he read, and all this came out in the picture.
For example, the ambition of Richard as

38 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

Shakespeare shows it was in the main true.
He came of a race who, for generations, had
been occupied in getting and holding thrones;
and his whole life had been absorbed, and all
his immediate family had been concerned, in
a struggle to seize and keep the crown. It is
no wonder that to him, so born and so bred,
the one thing worth having in life was the
royal crown of England. In like manner
Shakespeare portrayed truly enough the
man's ability, his military capacity, his reck
less personal courage, and his strong personal
influence over every one with whom he came
in contact. These qualities, admitted alike
by friend and foe, we may take as undoubted.
All that remains is to see how far the other
features of Richard's character, as drawn by
Shakespeare, can be sustained by solid and
trustworthy historical evidence.

Shakespeare relied for his story upon the
account of Richard written by Sir Thomas
More, and the slightly varying versions of the
same narrative given by Hall and Holinshed.
Sir Thomas More's account is now known,
and is admitted by all recent authorities to
be, so far as the incidents go, the work of
Morton, Bishop of Ely, the one whom Rich
ard sends in the play to get strawberries from

THE LAST PLANTAGENET

39

his garden in Holborn. Morton was one of
Richard's bitterest enemies, and a Lancas
trian. Even if his narrative had been per
fectly clear and consistent, the attitude of
the author to the subject would prevent its
being accepted on any point adverse to Rich
ard without outside corroboration. But it is
not even consistent with itself, and can be
pulled to pieces by a critical examination al
most without reference to other authorities.
Yet it was received for a long time as final,
and is still adhered to, even by modern
writers, to a surprising degree. The story
gained its authority chiefly from the fact that
it passed through the hands of Sir Thomas
More, who wrote it out in a dignified style,
and in language which was an immeasurable
improvement on any English prose that had
then appeared. It was this which gave it
weight and acceptance ; and, as Dr. MahafTy
says of Thucydides, it is astonishing how a
solemn manner and a noble style will carry
unsupported and unfounded statements with
out dispute for generations. The work was
left a fragment by its reputed author, and
was not published in his lifetime. It was not
an age of historical research. Sir Thomas
More made, and could have made, no inves-

40 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

tigation, in the modern sense. He simply
took the tale as it was told him by his pa
tron, dressed it in a fine style, and left it to
posterity, who, receiving it through Shake
speare, has found it sufficient to damn Richard
with for all time.

Rather more than a hundred years elapsed,
and then Richard found a defender in Sir
George Buck, an old antiquarian who died in
1623. After his death, what he had written
about Richard was published, and he was set
down as an untrustworthy lover of paradoxes,
and passed unheeded. A century and a half
went by, and then came another defender, in
the person of Horace Walpole, with his His
toric Doubts. The author's wit and reputa
tion gained fame for the book, which showed
much critical acumen, and which fatally dis
credited the received accounts. But it failed
of its purpose, for it was regarded rather as
the fanciful recreation of a literary epicure
than as the serious historic criticism which it
really was.

The present century has produced many
painstaking and elaborate histories of Richard
III. — notably Miss Halsted's and Sharon
Turner's, both favorable to the King, and
Jesse's on the other side. None of these

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 41

writers, however, had access to the vast mass
of state rolls and records which have lately
been brought to light, and therefore they
wrote at a disadvantage. Since then there
have been t\vo large works of authority
on Richard — Mr. Gairdner's Life, and Mr.
Legge's Unpopular King. Mr. Gairdner, a
specialist on the period, an expert, and a
trained historian, with the new material be
fore him and completely master of it, has
done more for Richard than any one else. He
has adopted the adverse view, and has under
taken to sustain the traditional and Shake
spearian account by the new evidence at his
command. As he is perfectly candid, his
failure to make the new and unimpeachable
testimony bear out the old case is better for
Richard's cause than any defence. For, if in
his skilled hands the best testimony, beside
which the traditional accounts have no stand
ing, is unable to sustain the Shakespearian
view, the break-down is fairly complete, and
the time has arrived for the acceptance in his
tory of a view of Richard and his reign very
different from that popularly held.

Last of all comes Mr. Legge, as accurate
and painstaking as Mr. Gairdner, with all the
latter's material at his command, and some

42 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

further new and important matter which he
himself has discovered. Mr. Legge takes
what may be called the modern and more fa
vorable view, and supports his case strongly,
although in his eagerness he falls into the
very natural error of going too far, and of try
ing to show that Richard was right in all
points and clear of blame in many cases where
it is impossible to prove his innocence, and
where, in the broad historical view, it is not
very essential to the general theory to show
anything of the kind.

Now let us consider the facts in Richard's
case, not the various theories — for that would
occupy volumes, and one hypothesis differs
from another not in value, but in ingenuity.
For the purpose of this brief study, the undis
puted and reasonably certain facts are all we
can deal with. Indeed, we have no right to
go beyond the story they tell to reach a just
conclusion.

Richard III. was the eleventh child and
eighth son of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of
York, and Cicely, daughter of the Earl of
Westmoreland, of the great house of the Nev
illes. His father was descended through the
female line from Lionel, Duke of Clarence,
third son of Edward III., and thus held an

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 43

unimpeachable hereditary title to the throne
as against the Lancastrians, who derived from
John of Gaunt, the fourth son of Edward III.

Richard was born at Fotheringay Castle, on
Monday, October 2, 1452. After his defeat
and death, it was stated that his mother was
pregnant with him for two years, that he was
brought into the world feet foremost by the
Caesarean operation (an experience which his
mother, in a manner highly creditable to the
surgery of that period, seems to have survived
for more than thirty years), and that at his
birth he had a full set of teeth and long
hair down to his shoulders. These are un
usual circumstances — all the more unusual
when we reflect that no one noted them at
the time, that there is not a scintilla of con
temporary evidence to support them, that
they were never hinted at until forty years
after the event, and that they are absurd on
their face. Yet this silly fable has been made
part of the traditional Richard, most of it has
been gravely used by Shakespeare, and his
torians have seriously discussed it. It is, of
course, only fit, historically speaking, to be
consigned to the dust-heaps so much spoken
of by Carlyle.

Let us deal with the rest of the physical

44 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

horrors of Richard, and be rid of them all
at once. His deformity is a great feature
in Shakespeare, and is used with all Shake
speare's knowledge of human nature to ex
plain much of what would be otherwise in
credible. It is the bitterness of the deformed
which makes Richard hate the world, which
hardens his cruelty, and sharpens his already
keen-edged ambition with the desire to over
come the scorn of mankind for defects he
could not help, by reaching a place where he
could put the world under his feet. Yet
there is but little better evidence of his de
formity than there is of his having been born
with teeth.

The cheerful originator of both legends was
one Rous, a monkish writer of Guy's Cliff.
He wrote a eulogy of Richard while Richard
reigned, and an invective against him after
Henry VII. was on the throne. This fact
alone disqualifies Rous as an authority, and it
is not easy to understand why any one should
take anything he wrote as by itself trust
worthy testimony. Yet even Rous, with all
his worthlessness, only said that Richard had
the left shoulder a little lower than the right.
The work of Morton and Sir Thomas More
says the right shoulder was lower than the

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 45

left, and Polydore Vergil, who was not con
temporary, says there was an inequality, but
does not mention which shoulder was the
higher. This conflicting evidence is all there
is on the subject, and it only proves that, if
there were any deformity, it was so trifling
that no one could tell exactly what or where
it was.

It is hardly necessary to call witnesses to
disprove such triviality as this, but it is easily
done, and the refutation is complete. No
contemporary other than Rous even alludes
to Richard's deformity, and these others who
are silent are the only writers of real author
ity. Fabyan, the Londoner, who must have
seen Richard often, and who was a Lancas
trian, says nothing of any deformity. The
Croyland Chronicler, a member of Edward
IV.'s council, is equally silent, and so, too, is
Comines, although he twice speaks of Edward
as the handsomest prince he had seen, thus
showing that he noted physical appearance.
Stowe said he had talked with old men who
had seen Richard, and they declared "that
he was of bodily shape comely enough, only
of low stature." Even Rous himself, in his
portrait of Richard indicates no deformity.
The portraits indeed — and there are several

46 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

authentic examples — show us a man without
any trace, either in expression or feature, of
bodily malformation. The face is a striking
one, strong, high-bred, intellectual, rather
stern, perhaps, and a little hard in the lines,
but not in the least cruel or malignant, and
with a prevailing air of sadness.

The only other point to be considered in
this connection occurs in the famous scene at
the council board, where Richard, denouncing
Hastings, bares his arm, shrunken and with
ered as it always had been, according to Mor
ton, and says that it was due to the sorcery
of the Queen and others. If it always had
been withered, it is difficult to see how Rich
ard could have been so dull as to suppose
that, even in that superstitious age, he could
make any one believe that his arm had been
lately crippled by the machinations of the
Queen and Jane Shore. The thing was in
fact impossible. He very probably accused
Hastings of witchcraft or conspiracy, or any
thing else, when he wished to sweep him from
his path, but he bared no withered arm, be
cause the King, who at Bosworth unhorsed
Sir John Cheney, cut down Sir William Bran
don, forced his way through ranks of fighting
men nearly to Richmond himself, the general

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 47

who led the van at Barnet and Tewkesbury,
could not have been maimed in this way.
The man who performed these feats of dar
ing and of bodily strength must have been
quick, muscular, and adroit, a vigorous rider,
and skilled in the use of weapons. That he
performed these precise feats is proved and
unquestioned, and they were not performed
by a man with a withered, shrunken, useless
arm.

In the way of positive evidence we have
the statement of the Countess of Desmond,
quoted by Hutton, that Edward, who was no
torious for his beauty, was the handsomest
man present on a certain occasion, and that
Richard was the next. So we may leave the
deformity. There is a little poor evidence
that it existed in a very trivial form. There
is a great deal of good evidence that it did
not exist at all. As a physical horror, an index
to a black soul, which filled the on-looker with
repulsion, the tradition of Richard's deformity
is as idle a myth as that about his monstrous
birth, and, like that, may be dismissed to the
limbo of historical rubbish.

So far as the facts go, Richard was born
much like other people, and did not differ
from them in appearance by any malforma-

48 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

tion. We know nothing of his early child
hood, except that he was with his mother in
England. During that time his father first
took up arms for the redress of abuses, then
asserted his claim to the crown, was consti
tuted heir to the throne by Henry VI., and
finally was killed in the battle of Wakefield.
At this time Richard was eight years old, and
all the scenes of the play in which he appears
with his father as a full-grown fighting-man of
savage temper are necessarily pure invention.
After Wakefield, George and Richard were
sent by their mother for safety to the court
of Philip the Good, of Burgundy, whence they
returned to find their brother, victor in the
battles of St. Albans and Towton, firmly seat
ed on the throne as Edward IV. George was
created Duke of Clarence, Richard Duke of
Gloucester and Admiral of the Sea, and large
estates were conferred on both. Richard
then appears to have been placed, for training
and education, under the guardianship of the
great Earl of Warwick. By the time he was
fifteen he was out of tutelage, and we hear of
him as chief mourner at the ceremonies inci
dent to the reinterment of the bodies of the
Duke of York and the Earl of Rutland. A
little later we hear of him again with the

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 49

army upon the Scottish border, and we know
that he was then leading an active military
life.

Meantime Edward IV. made his foolish
marriage with Elizabeth Woodville ; the
Woodville, or Queen's faction, rose to pow
er, and a series of quarrels ensued with War
wick, which resulted in the great Earl going
over to the Lancastrians. With him went
the Duke of Clarence, moved thereto by
hatred of the Woodvilles and by the tempta
tion of becoming heir to the crown of Henry
VI. The uprising which followed was com
pletely successful. Edward was dethroned
and deserted. He fled the kingdom to
France, accompanied by Richard, who, boy as
he was, remained faithful in the dark hour,
while Clarence betrayed his brother, assisted
in his overthrow, and plotted to get the
throne himself.

Early in the next year, 1471, Edward and
Richard landed in England with a mere hand
ful of men, got possession of York, and thence
marched rapidly on London, gathering strength
as they advanced. Clarence now abandoned
Warwick and came over to his brother's side
— according to later authorities, induced to do
so by the diplomacy of Richard. London re-
4

50 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

ceived Edward favorably, and on Easter eve
the brothers marched out and met Warwick
at Barnet. In the hard-fought battle of the
next day Richard, only nineteen years old, led
the van and bore the brunt of the fighting.
The Yorkists won, and Warwick was killed.
Meantime Queen Margaret and her son had
landed with a powerful army, and less than a
month later — on the 4th of May — Edward met
and defeated them at Tewkesbury. Again
Richard was given the most responsible post.
Again he led the van, and, storming the Duke
of Somerset's intrenched camp, won a quick
and decisive victory.

We have now come to the first of his stage
murders, in which Shakespeare represents him
as a leading participant, the killing of Prince
Edward, son of Henry VI. Mr. Gairdner,
though he does his best by it, honestly admits
that this affair is " a tradition of later times,"
which is a mild way of putting it. There is no
contemporary evidence to sustain the charge
that the King and his brothers stabbed young
Edward. The Croyland Chronicle, the Fleet-
wood Chronicle, Dr. Warkworth, and two man
uscript contemporaries all say Edward was
slain " in the field." It is a distinct affirmative
statement. Fabyan later, and Lancastrian, says

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 51

the King, before whom Edward was brought,
struck the Prince with his gauntlet, and that
the boy was then slain by the " Kynge's ser
vants." On this statement the fable was built,
and even this later writer makes no shadow
of accusation against the royal brothers, who
were certainly not the " Kynge's servants."
But the inferior and later evidence must give
way to the higher. The statement of the five
contemporaries, who agree with each other, of
whom one was present, and another a Lancas
trian, by all rules of historical evidence must
be accepted as final. They say Edward was
slain in the field, and give no hint that he was
ever brought before the King at all. The
whole scene is an invention, but even if it were
not, there is not a suggestion, even in the later
writer, with whom the tale originated, that
Richard had anything to do with the killing
of the young Prince.

We now come to the second stage murder —
that of Henry VI. — which Richard in the play
commits single-handed. Henry VI. was con
fined in the Tower, and, after the battle of
Tewkesbury, the bastard Falconbridge, who
had command of the fleet, came to London
to liberate him and renew the struggle. Fal
conbridge was repulsed by the citizens and

52 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

retired to Kent, while Edward marched rap
idly to London on hearing the news of the
revolt. He arrived there May 2ist, and passed
that night with his court in the Tower, where
were held a cabinet council and a great ban
quet. The next day Richard set out for Can
terbury in pursuit of Falconbridge. On the
night of May 2ist, while all these affairs of
business and pleasure were in progress, Hen
ry VI. died, or was killed, in his neighbor
ing prison. The Fleetwood Chronicle, Yorkist,
says he died of " pure displeasure and melan
choly" at the disaster which had befallen his
family. As he was nearly, if not quite, imbe
cile, this story seems unlikely on its face. The
Croyland Chronicle says that King Henry was
found lifeless, and that the " doer thereof de
serves the name of tyrant," which, though
vague, can fairly point at only one person,
the King, Edward IV. Dr. Warkworth says
that Henry was put to death, the " Duke of
Gloucester and many others being then at the
Tower." Fabyan simply says the King " was
stykked with a dagger." The later writers all
tell different stories, varying from Sir Thomas
More, who, of course, says that Richard killed
Henry with his own hand, to Habington, who
blackens Richard in every possible way, but

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 53

on this occasion defends him and charges

o

the murder direct to Edward and his cabinet
council.

That Henry was murdered there can be no
reasonable doubt. The rising of Falconbridgc
had sealed his fate, and had shown that, imbe
cile though he was, he was still a source of
danger. How he was killed no one but those
directly concerned knew, and they did not tell.
The manner of his death was unknown, but
there is no evidence whatever of the first class
to fix.the actual killing on Richard and a good
deal to fasten the responsibility on the King.
Apart from the evidence, it is absurd to suppose
that the King's brother should have played
the part of an executioner. The Tower was
swarming with the victorious Yorkists — sol
diers of desperate character, inured to blood
shed — and the King's brother-in-law, Earl
Rivers, was in command. Henry was a dan
ger, and in the way, and it was not an age of
scruples. But while generally for the interests
of the House of York to be rid of him, it was
the especial interest of Edward, and not of
Richard, who was then too remote from the
throne to be affected at all by Henry's exist
ence. The natural explanation is the one best
supported by such evidence as is worth con-

54 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

sidering, that Henry was put to death by Ed
ward's order or with his sanction. That Rich
ard approved the step it is reasonable to sup
pose. Most persons appear to have accepted
it as a painful but necessary political action,
for politics at that time were of that pleasant
cast. But that Richard was more responsible
than the rest of his family, there is no reason
to believe ; and that he himself went sword in
hand and stabbed Henry is not sustained by
any good evidence, nor can it be accepted by
any fair rules of reasoning.

In any event, the House of York was now
firmly established, and the last Lancastrian of
the legitimate line was gone. For twelve years
Edward was to rule England undisturbed.
There is no need here to give any account
of his reign. It is enough simply to bring to
gether the known facts about Richard during
that period. In the first hours of triumph he
received his share of the spoils, made larger by
the fidelity which he had shown when Clarence
played Edward false. He was appointed Lord
Chamberlain and steward of the Duchy of Lan
caster, and received the forfeited estates of
Oxford, a portion of Warwick's, and the whole
of divers others. He also received the thanks
of Parliament, which indicates that he was

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 55

popular. Soon after this began the contest
about his marriage with Anne Neville. The
famous wooing scene in Shakespeare and his
treatment of Richard's marital relations arc-
pure invention. At the time of the Shake
spearian wooing, which must have been May
22, 1471, Richard was in Kent quelling an in
surrection, and Anne, who had not yet com
pleted her fourteenth year, was a prisoner in
the Tower, having been captured at Tewkcs-
bury with Queen Margaret. She was never
married to Prince Edward, and is spoken of
as "puella" in the Croyland Chronicle. It is
probable that she was betrothed to the Lan
castrian Prince, although there are doubts even
on this point.

The historic facts are that Richard and Anne
were cousins, and had been brought up to
gether, and that after the final settlement of
Edward upon the throne Richard sought her
in marriage. Anne, however, was the sister
and co-heiress of Isabella, daughter of the great
Earl of Warwick and wife of Clarence. The
Duke of Clarence wished to get all the War
wick estates, and, having no mind to divide
them with his brother, abducted Anne and
hid her in London in the disguise of a kitchen-
maid. Richard discovered her, took her away,

56 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

with her own apparent good-will, and put her
in sanctuary. Then came a fierce dispute be
tween the brothers, who argued the case before
the council, and it was even feared that they
would take up arms. Finally the decision went
in Richard's favor. The King sustained him.
He got half of the Warwick estates, and mar
ried Anne, probably in 1473. There is no evi
dence to show that they lived together other
wise than happily, or that Richard ever neg
lected her. On the contrary, they were con
stantly together. She bore him children, one
of whom became Prince of Wales, and the in
timation of Shakespeare that Richard had a
hand in her death is sustained by no evidence
worth considering.

' The four years succeeding the battle of
Tewkesbury, Richard, who was Warden of
the Marches and High Constable, spent al
most entirely on the northern borders. It
was a difficult position, for there was much
disaffection in that region. Richard governed
wisely and well, and proved himself a strong
administrator. He achieved a popularity in
the north which never failed him, and even
after his death the people there defended his
memory.

In 1475 Edward, after burdening his sub-

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 57

jccts with terrible taxation, raised a fine army
and invaded France. Once there, instead of
fighting and winning, as he undoubtedly
could have done, he came to a treaty with
Louis, and for money down and an assured
tribute, withdrew. All the great nobles and
courtiers about him were bribed largely and
openly, and gave their assent. Richard alone
stood out, refused all bribes, and denounced
the treaty as shameful. His attitude was as
well known as it was exceptional, and estab
lished his strength and popularity with the
people of England, who, wrung with taxation
for a war, resented bitterly the conclusion of
a sordid peace.

Soon after the King's return from France
the trouble with Clarence culminated. Ed
ward had never been on good terms with his
brother George since the latter's double
treachery to himself and Warwick. He
treated him coldly, and discriminated against
him in exemptions and gifts. Clarence
sulked and withdrew from court. He was
rich and popular, he began to talk about the
bastardy of Edward's children, in which case
he was the next heir to the throne he had al
ready tried to reach, and finally, on the death
of his wife, he set about to marry the daugh-

58 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

ter of Charles of Burgundy. In a word, he
became dangerous. He was arrested, tried
publicly, and condemned. The King gave
the order for his death, urged thereto by the
Woodville faction, but to save a public execu
tion the Duke was assassinated in the Tower
in 1478. There is not only no proof, or even
hint of proof, that Richard had anything to
do with it, but the only fact we know is that
Richard endeavored to prevent extreme
measures. Even Sir Thomas More admits
that Richard's guilt was doubtful, and merely
surmises that he really desired Clarence's
death while he openly opposed it. Mr. Gaird-
ner says that there is nothing in the original
sources (which clearly prove Clarence's death
to have been wholly of the King's doing) to
connect Richard with the crime. Yet none
the less, and this is a fair example of the
way Richard has been treated, he endeav
ors to throw suspicion on him by showing
that he received some advantages from Clar
ence's death in the way of an estate, and
he hints that Richard's religious foundations
at that period might have been works of
repentance for his brother's execution. The
plain truth, on all existing evidence, is that
Richard had nothing to do with the death

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 59

of Clarence, except to try vainly to pre
vent it.

The year before Clarence's assassination
there were indications of difficulties with
Scotland, which were fomented by France,
and which culminated in war in 1481. Rich
ard, as Lieutenant-General in the north, was in
command of the army. He took the town of
Berwick, marched on Edinburgh, and entered
the city, making a treaty or arrangement
with the Lords in control which satisfied the
English claims. He then marched back to
the borders, besieged and took the castle of
Berwick, and thus restored to England the
powerful fortress which Margaret and the
Lancastrians had surrended to Scotland twen
ty-one years before. Throughout he showed
the military ability and the administrative ca
pacity for which he was always distinguished,
and he was thanked again for his services by
Parliament.

The following year, on April 9, 1483, Ed
ward IV., worn out by dissipation, died of a
surfeit. Long years after, Tudor historians,
who felt it necessary to attribute all the cur
rent mortality of that period to one source,
insinuated a suspicion that Richard, who had
not been in London for some time, and who

60 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

was then at his government in the north, was
in some way responsible for the King's death.
The story is so silly that it is not worth con
sidering, and is abandoned even by those
writers who take the traditional view of Rich
ard. What concerns us here is to trace Rich
ard's subsequent course.

Edward had endeavored to bring about
some arrangement before his death which
should prevent the war of factions and secure
the peaceful accession of his son, Edward V.,
then in his thirteenth year. It was all in vain.
The breath was hardly out of his body before
the struggle was begun by the Woodville fac
tion to get possession of the person of the
young King and thereby of the government.
The Marquis of Dorset, young Edward's half-
brother, seized the treasury, and began illegal
ly to equip a navy. The others undertook to
raise an army to escort the King from Lud-
low, and were only prevented from doing so,
and compelled to cut the retinue down to two
thousand men, by the efforts of Lord Hast
ings, one of the most powerful nobles in the
country, and a bitter enemy of the Woodville
faction. All these movements were distinctly
treasonable, for Richard had been constituted
by the will of Edward IV. guardian of his

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 6 1

son and Protector of the realm. The contest,
therefore, at the start, was between the lawful
authority and a powerful faction headed by
the Queen.

Richard, on his side, was as prompt as his
adversaries. With a small following, and ac
companied by the Duke of Buckingham, he
started for London, and succeeded in inter
cepting the Prince's retinue at Northampton,
the Prince himself having been hurried on to
Stony Stratford. Briefly stated, Richard ar
rested Earl Rivers and Lord Grey, the King's
uncle and half-brother, and Sir Thomas Vaugh-
an, sent them to prison at Pontefract Castle,
and then went on to Stony Stratford. Masters
of the young King's person, Richard and Buck
ingham, then marched to London and estab
lished their charge in the Tower, which, it
should be remembered, was at that period a
palace quite as much as a prison. Meantime
the Queen, the rising which she had project
ed having failed, had taken sanctuary with
her daughter and her second son, the Duke
of York, at Westminster. Then followed six
weeks of plotting and intrigue. The Wood-
ville faction held one council in the Tower,
Richard another in Crosby Place. Lord Hast
ings, who had helped Richard against the

62 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

Woodvilles, had no mind to sustain him in
power as Protector — still less as King — and
Richard, acting with the suddenness and de
termination which were part of his character,
arrested Hastings for high treason at a council
meeting, and had him executed, without even
a form of trial, that very afternoon. At the
same time, Rivers, Vaughan, and Grey, after
due trial, were executed at Pontefract.

With the death of Hastings, Richard had
swept his last powerful opponent from his path
and was master of the situation. From this
point he moved rapidly to the throne, which
we cannot doubt he had intended to seize
from the moment he heard of his brother's
death. Into the management by which it was
brought about, it is not necessary to enter.
He based his claim on the bastardy of Ed
ward's children, owing to the latter's precon
tract with Lady Eleanor Butler. This, although
worthless in point of mere justice and accord
ing to the ideas of the present day, was at that
period a perfectly good technical ground, and
Richard produced direct evidence amply suffi
cient for his purpose. His case was consid
ered so strong that, after his death, Henry
VII. ordered all the petitions of the city of
London, asking Richard to be King, and set-

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 63

ting forth the reasons for the bastardy of his
nephews, to be destroyed. The accidental
preservation of one or two of these petitions
has alone enabled us to know on what grounds
Richard made his claims. By these it is also
proved that the later historians falsified them
in saying that they set forth a precontract
between Edward and his mistress, Elizabeth
Lucy, as given by Shakespeare, which was idle
on its face, and in suppressing the real precon
tract with Lady Eleanor Butler, which was
witnessed by Stillington, Bishop of Bath.
Richard was unscrupulous, but he was not
fatuous, and he did not attempt to impose
on the public so feeble a story of the bastardy
as that set forth by Shakespeare.

The city of London petitioned him to as
sume the crown. After a feigned declination
he consented. The council confirmed the ac
tion. Parliament, which had been summoned,
and then, by a writ of supersedeas — issued
probably by the Woodville faction — post
poned, met, nevertheless, and confirmed Rich
ard's title, which was later confirmed again by
a Parliament formally brought together. If
the bastardy of Edward's children is not ad
mitted, Richard, according to the ideas of that
day, was, like Henry IV. and Henry VII., a

64 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

usurper. According to modern theories, he
was a constitutionally chosen King, with the
election of lords, commons, council, and city,
as much so as any ruler who ever sat upon the
throne.

He secured the throne with far less blood
shed than marked any of the changes of the
crown from the accession of Henry VI. to that
of Henry VIII. He executed three noblemen
representing the Woodville faction at Ponte-
fract, and one, Lord Hastings, in London.
His action in regard to the Woodvilles was
popular, and is so admitted by all historians, for
that faction was hated as oppressive and lux
urious. Hastings's death was regretted, but
was regarded as a political necessity. Richard's
management of the city and of his own claim
to the throne was perfectly open, and he be
came King by the assent of every branch of the
government and of the popular voice. What
ever his purposes — and they were no doubt
as ambitious and selfish as his methods were
violent and unscrupulous — it could not have
been otherwise, for Richard did not have the
usual weapon of usurpers, an army. It was
reported that his forces from the north were
coming, twenty thousand strong, to his sup
port. These troops did not arrive until after

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 65

Richard had assumed the crown, been pro
claimed and accepted King, and taken the
royal oath. When they came, there were
only four or five thousand, according to Fa-
byan, raw levies in rusty armor and unfit
really for service. They remained until after
the coronation, but played no part, and were
not considered as of any importance by the
Londoners.

Richard, therefore, reached the crown in
eight weeks, with no army at his back, and
but trifling opposition. He could have ef
fected this on only one condition. The com
munity wanted him. If they had not, he
would have been helpless and defeated at the
start. It was natural enough, if we look at it
without traditional prejudice. Richard was
recognized as the ablest man in the kingdom,
both as general and administrator. He had
opposed the French peace, conquered Scot
land, and brought peace to the borders. He
was a strong man, capable of rule. On the
other side was a boy King whose accession
meant a period of violence and disorder as
factions struggled for control, and that worst
of all tyrannies, the rule of contending nobles.
Richard offered the best chance of law, order,
and strong government, and that is the sole

5

66 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

reason that he was able to carry his adroit
schemes to such quick success.

The coronation took place almost immedi
ately, on July 6th, and was performed with
great splendor. The new King signalized his
accession by a general pardon, extending his
clemency even to some of the most bitter
enemies of himself and his house. He then
set out on a progress through the kingdom.
Everywhere he was received with acclama
tion, and many of the towns voluntarily of
fered him gifts of money to defray the ex
penses of his journey, which is the strongest
proof of his popularity. Such offers were rare
at that period, but Richard declined them all.
Every sign that we can now discover points
to the fact that he himself was very popular,
and that among the masses of the people his
accession to the throne was regarded as the
best thing that could have happened.

While he was on this progress the report
went out that his nephews, the princes, had
died by foul means in the Tower. Thus we
come to the deed which has formed the dark1
est stain on Richard's character, and which
has done more to damn him with posterity
than all else. Yet, curiously enough, we
know less about it and have less evidence

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 67

concerning it than any other event in his ca
reer. The narrative of Sir Thomas More,
which has always been the accepted version,
carries in itself its own refutation. No out
side evidence is needed. Careful criticism of
the story, as More or Morton tells it, shows it
to be full of contradictions and impossibili
ties. It falls to pieces on examination. Let
us put together what we actually know. The
young King, Edward V., went to the Tower as
soon as he arrived in London, in the spring of
1483. Late in June, just before Richard be
came King, the Queen -mother gave up the
second boy, the Duke of York, and he like
wise went to the Tower. Early in the follow
ing autumn it was rumored that the royal
children were dead. Two of the contempo
rary chroniclers are entirely silent on the sub
ject. The third merely mentions the report
of their death. Nothing was known clearly
at that time beyond the fact that a rumor to
that effect was abroad. Richard preserved
absolute silence. He never denied the ru
mor. He never declared the princes dead as
a means of perfecting his title. After his
death he was attainted, and in the bill of at
tainder no mention is made of the murder of
the princes. His bitterest enemies did not

68 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

then number that among his crimes. Not
until seventeen years after Richard's death,
not until Perkin Warbeck had attempted to
personate the Duke of York, and it had be
come the direct interest of Henry VII. to
prove the death of the princes, did anything
like a definite account of their taking off ap
pear. It was then said that Tyrrel and Digh-
ton had confessed to smothering the two boys
in the Tower.

Sir James Tyrrel, who had been Master of
the Horse under Edward IV. and Richard,
and subsequently trusted and advanced by
Henry VII., was then in prison for complicity
in aiding the Duke of Suffolk, for which he
was subsequently executed. Dighton, also in
prison, was released and rewarded by Henry
VII., because "his statement pleased him."
What they really confessed, if anything, is un
known, for all we have is what the King
"gave out"; and what the King " gave out"
we know only by hearsay and report. This
sums up all the meagre evidence in regard to
the death of the princes ; for the bones dug
up in the reign of Charles II., and honored
by royal burial, are worthless as testimony.
They might have been the bones of any one,
even of an ape, whose skeleton, found in a tur-

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 69

ret, passed for a time as that of Edward V.,
and the place where they were found does
not agree with the accepted story, or indeed
any other.

All that we actually know, therefore, is
that the princes went into the Tower in the
summer of 1483, and though it was generally
believed, by their mother among others, that
one escaped, there is no proof that they were
ever seen again alive outside the Tower walls.
We also know that it was rumored in the
autumn of 1483 that they had been murdered,
and there knowledge stops. They may have
been murdered by Richard's order, or have
died, being delicate boys, of neglect and con
finement. They may have survived Richard,
and died, or been murdered, under Henry,
whose interest in having them dead was
greater than Richard's, for Henry could not,
without destroying his wife's title, admit their
bastardy. One conjecture, so far as proof
and contemporary evidence go, is just as
good and almost as well supported as anoth
er. We can only fall back on general reason
ing. There is no proof that they survived
Richard ; the rumor of their death started in
his time, and it was to his interest to have
them out of the way, as movements were on

70 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

foot among the nobles to assert Edward V.'s
claim to the crown. The fairest inference is
that they were put to death by Richard's
order, and, in the darkness that covers the
whole business, an inference is all we have.
The murder of the princes is the blackest
crime charged to Richard, and although direct
proof of it seems impossible, he cannot be re
lieved from it unless new and positive evi
dence to the contrary is discovered.

At the time when this sinister rumor start
ed, Richard was confronted with a much more
practical danger. The Duke of Buckingham,
whom Richard had declined to make too
powerful, went into open rebellion, influenced
largely by Morton, Bishop of Ely, who had
been committed to the Duke's charge as a
prisoner. This revolt was a signal for like
movements by Lancastrians, the remnants of
the Woodvilles, and the Earl of Richmond.
It was a formidable situation for a King
scarcely three months on the throne. Rich
ard met it with his accustomed courage and
capacity. He raised forces, moved with his
usual quickness, and struck hard. The ris
ings in the south were crushed, Richmond
was repulsed from the coast, while by great
floods in the west Buckingham's army was

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 71

broken and dispersed, and he himself made a
prisoner, and promptly and justly executed for
high treason.

This display of power brought quiet and
gave Richard opportunity to enter on the
public work of his short reign. It is only pos
sible here to give a summary of what he ac
complished, but that is sufficient to show, not
only his wisdom and ability, but that he had
a strong, new policy, which ran consistently
through every act. It was this policy, vigor
ously carried out, which makes good Richard's
place as the harbinger of the new epoch,
which vindicates his ability as a statesman,
and which at the same time wrought his de
struction.

In the first place, he had two Parliaments in
his short reign. The Plantagenets as a race
were not afraid of Parliament, and in their
struggles for power they were fond of appeal
ing to the Commons and seeking a parliamen
tary title. There was nothing of the huckster
ing spirit which the Tudors showed, and still
less of the quarrelsome timidity and bad faith
of the Stuarts in the relations of the Plantag
enets to their Parliaments. They were quite
ready to fight with or domineer over a Parlia
ment, but they were equally ready to meet

f2 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

with it and seek its assistance. Richard was
conspicuous for this, and he was equally marked
in his regard for the courts. Almost his first
act was to take his seat with the judges on the
King's Bench, and he devoted himself to re
establishing and strengthening the administra
tion of justice between man and man, and to
the enforcement of the laws for the protection
of life and property. He abolished Benevo
lences, the most oppressive form of wringing
money from individuals in the form of gifts.
It was a cruel system, harsh, unequal, and in
determinate in the amounts demanded. For
it he substituted, or rather relied on, taxation,
which, if burdensome, was at least determinate
in amount, and was imposed with some regard
to equality and justice.

He prohibited the wearing of any badges or
cognizances but those of the King. This was
a fatal blow to the private armies of the great
nobles, and meant the end of private wars and
a check upon constant insurrection. It carried
in principle the overthrow of the feudal system
and the substitution of one responsible king
for a multitude of irresponsible and petty ty
rants.

He gave his protection and patronage to the
new learning. He was the friend of Caxton

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 73

and the encourager of printing, and ordered
that no obstacle should be placed in the way
of the introduction of books, and of all that
could promote the new art in the kingdom.
He devised a method of carrying despatches
and news, in which may be traced the first
germ of the letter post. He gave liberally to
the Church, after the fashion of his time; but,
superstitious as he was, he curbed the over
grown power of the clergy, and sought to check
some of the gross abuses of the day by bring
ing them within the jurisdiction of the secular
courts. All this, in addition to extensive rela
tions with foreign powers and several progresses
through the kingdom, represents a great work
for two troubled years, work that only a vigor
ous mind, filled with new and definite ideas,
could have conceived.

At the close of two years the end came.
Richmond landed with a mercenary force, and,
gathering some of the ever-ready and discon
tented nobles, marched towards London. Rich
ard rapidly raised a much more powerful army
and hastened to oppose him. They met at
Bosworth. The royal forces were made up on
the old feudal system of bands led by nobles,
and these bands looked for command to
their immediate chiefs and not to the King.

74 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

If the leaders failed or were false their troops
went with them, and this was precisely what
happened at Bosworth. There was really
hardly any battle at all, as we can see from
the trivial loss of the invaders. The Stanleys,
commanding two large bodies of troops, de
serted the King's standard almost immedi
ately, and then turned upon the army they
had betrayed. The royal forces were thrown,
of course, into panic and confusion. Richard
was urged to leave the field. He had ample
time and opportunity to escape, but he refused.
u I will die as I have lived," he said, " King
of England." The wild fighting spirit of the
Plantagenets was roused. Putting himself at
the head of a handful of faithful followers, he
charged straight into the enemy's lines, making
for Richmond himself. He unhorsed Sir John
Cheney, a knight of gigantic stature. He cut
down Sir William Brandon, Richmond's stand
ard-bearer, and mortally wounded him. His
desperate valor brought him nearly to his rival,
and then the men of Stanley closed in around
him and he was beaten to the earth and killed
with a hundred blows from the hands of the
common soldiers. His crown was found later
in a hawthorn bush. His body disappeared.
There are various accounts as to what befel

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 75

it, but it is only certain that it was obscurely
buried.

So fell the last Plantagenet, fittingly, upon
the field of battle, heading a desperate charge.
So fell also the first King who saw the com
ing of a new time in England, and who was
great statesman enough to begin a policy
which would break the power of the nobles,
overthrow the feudal system, and bring from
the union of crown and people law and order
out of chaos and anarchy. The accepted tra
dition is that Richard was overthrown because
he was so universally hated for his cruelty and
tyranny that every one was eager to desert
him and to compass his downfall at the first
opportunity. For this tradition there is no
solid foundation. To begin with, Richard was
not a tyrant. All his legislation and his whole
general policy were popular and liberal. As
to his cruelty, admitting once for all every
crime that can be charged against him on any
reasonable evidence, the cold - blooded execu
tion of Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, and Grey,
and the murder of the princes, there is no
doubt that, according to the views of the
nineteenth century, Richard was indifferent
to human life, blood-thirsty, and cruel. He
did not live, however, in the nineteenth but in

76 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

the fifteenth century. He lived among feudal
nobles, in a period of constant and savage war,
and in a society whose views as to the sacred-
ness of human life and as to murder, treachery,
and the like, were those of North American
Indians. If Richard be tried by the only
proper standard, that of his own time, he will
be found to be not more, but less, cruel and
bloody than either his predecessors or those
who came after him. The act which has
especially blackened his memory is the mys
terious removal or murder of the princes.
Yet Clifford, backed by Margaret of Anjou,
had killed in cold blood Richard's brother,
the Earl of Rutland, a boy of sixteen, while
Henry VII. imprisoned and executed the
feeble-minded Earl of Warwick, the son of
Clarence. In mere numbers of executions,
excluding, of course, on both sides, those who
were taken in open rebellion, Richard has
much less to answer for than Queen Mar
garet or Henry VII. , and far less than Henry
VIII. , who put to death anybody who hap
pened to be distasteful to him on political,
personal, or religious grounds. There was no
public opinion in that day against putting to
death any one who had played and lost in the
great struggle of politics. Executions were a

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 77

recognized part of the business. When the
game went against a statesman in those days,
as Mr. Speaker Reed once said, he did not
cross the aisle and take his place as the leader
of his Majesty's opposition; he was sent to
the Tower and had his head cut off. Ant res
temps, autrcs mccurs. At every turn of the
wheel in the long struggle between the Lan
castrians and the Yorkists, the victorious par
ty always executed every leader of the other
side upon whom they could lay hands. Such
were the rules of the society, and such the
politics in which Richard was brought up,
and he played according to those rules, with
out excess, paying the final forfeit himself
with undaunted courage.

Nothing is further from the truth than the
notion that Richard was unpopular with the
masses of the people. He had never injured
them, and they did not care how many nobles
or princes he put to death. There is no evi
dence that there was any popular uprising
against Richard at any time, but, on the con
trary, all the evidence we have shows that he
was supported and liked by the people, espe
cially in the North, where he was best known.
This was but natural. Richard represented
law, order, and authority. All his legislation

78 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

was for the benefit of the people, and they
knew it. Their enemies and his were the
same, and they knew that too.

Yet it is true that Richard was hated. Faby-
an records that there were mutterings against
him on the very day of his coronation, but the
men who muttered thus under their breath,
according to the old chronicler, were the no
bles, not the people. Now we come to the
real unpopularity of Richard. He was hated
by the classes, not by the masses. The nobles
who had opposed him hated him because he
had beaten them ; those who had supported
him, because they found a master where they
intended to have a puppet. All classes of
the nobility soon grew to hate him with a
common and bitter hatred, because they recog
nized in him the enemy of their order and
saw that every move he made tended to de
stroy their power. He was fighting the battle
of crown and people against the feudal system
of petty tyrants, and the nobles, who saw po
litical and military ruin advancing upon them,
rose against the King who led the march.
They raised a rebellion under Buckingham
and failed. They took breath, set up a claim
ant to the throne, supplied him with forces,
and then, by treachery, wrecked the royal

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 79

army at Bosworth and slew their foe. It
was their last effort ; they were exhausted,
and, although they had changed kings, they
had not changed royalty or checked the
movement of the time. The feudal system
fell at Bosworth with the King who had
given it its death-blow and marked out the
road for his successor to follow.

It is here we come on the real importance
of Richard III., when we find him a part of
the great movement of the time, and leading
the real forces which make history. If Rich
ard's character as a man were all, it would not
be more than a matter of curiosity to inquire
into the truth concerning him. But behind
this personal question there rises one of real
importance, which has just been indicated,
and to which those who have written upon
him have given but little attention. On this
side we are no longer dealing with doubtful or
prejudiced chroniclers, no longer delving in
dark corners whence the best issue is a prob
ability. Here we come out into the broad
light of day, where our authorities are the un
questioned witnesses of laws and state rec
ords, which tell us nothing of persons but
much of things. In them, as we have seen, a
strong, consistent policy is disclosed, and that

80 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

policy reveals to us the great social and po
litical change then in progress.

It was the period when an old order of life
was dying and a new one was being born.
The great feudal system of England was
drawing to its unlamented close. It had
worked out its destiny. It had rendered
due service in its time, and had curbed the
crown in the interests of liberty, but its in
herent vices had grown predominant, and in
this way it had come to be a block to the
movement of men towards better things. In
its development the feudal system had ceased
to be of value as an aid to freedom against
a centralized tyranny, and had become in
stead purely a dissolving and separatist force.
When it culminated under Henry VI., we can
see its perfect work. The crown, the cen
tral cohesive national power, had ceased to
be. The real rulers of England were the
great nobles, who set up and pulled down
kings and tore the country with ambitious
factions. Warwick was the arch-type, and the
name he has kept through the centuries of
the " King -maker " really tells the story.
More men wore his livery and cognizance,
more men would gather to the Bear and Rag
ged Staff of the Nevilles, than the King him-

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 8 1

self could summon. In a less degree all the
great nobles were the same. Each was prac
tically the head of a standing army. If the
King did not please them, they took up arms,
set up another King, and went to war. As
they were always rent into bitter factions, the
King could not please more than a portion of
the nobility at any time, and the result was
organized anarchy or the Wars of the Roses.
The condition was little better than that
which led Poland to ruin and partition.

The other powers in the state were King
and people. To both the situation was hate
ful. The King did not like to hold his crown
by sufferance and lie at the mercy of two or
three powerful subjects. The people, espe
cially in the towns, began to long for peace
and order, and greatly preferred the chance of
one man's tyranny to the infinitely worse op
pression of a hundred petty tyrants. Steadily
King and people were drawing together, and
the only question was when they would be
able to crush the feudal nobility and break
their power. Edward IV. saw what it was
necessary to do, and made some spasmodic
efforts in the right direction. But Edward,
although a brilliant general, was no states
man. He was too sensual, too indolent, too
6

82 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

worthless, except on the field of battle, for
such work. Richard was as brilliant a soldier
as Edward, but he was also a statesman, and
he was neither sensual nor indolent. Short
as his reign was, a great work was done, and
we have seen that a clear, strong policy of
maintaining law and order and of crushing
the nobility runs in unbroken line through his
statutes.

It was wise and able work. Unluckily for
himself, although it made no difference in the
result, Richard was just a little too early.
The feudal nobility were dying, but not quite
dead. There were still enough of them to set
up a claimant for the crown, still enough to
betray Richard and kill him on the field of
battle. He was their enemy, and as a class
they knew it. It was not his cruelty, even if
we admit as true all the Shakespearian crimes.
Executions and murders of royal and noble
persons were too much the fashion of the
day to base a campaign on for the crown.
They called Richard tyrant and murderer and
" bloody boar," and he retorted with procla
mations in which he denounced them not
merely as traitors but as murderers, adulter
ers, and extortioners. There was just as much
truth in one charge as the other, and neither

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 83

was of any importance in the fight. Mr. Lcggc
is right in saying that there was no national or
popular uprising. Indeed, the people of York
mourned publicly over Richard's " treacherous
murder," when such lamentation was far from
safe, and quarrelled in defence of his memory
six years later. There was, in reality, no reason
for a popular revolt against Richard, for, as has
been shown, all his legislation and public acts
made for the benefit of the people as much as
of the crown, and, as Richard represented the
new movement in politics, they were bound to
do so.

If Richard had been a little more thorough
and a little more cruel, if he had sent Lord
Stanley to the block, as he was warranted in
doing by the code of the day, if he had sent
Stanley's wife along the same road, and pro
cured, as he might have done, the murder of
the Earl of Richmond, all would have gone
well with him. He would have died, probably,
according to his sneer, " a good old man," and
he would have left an immense reputation as
the King who stamped out feudalism, opened
the door to learning and civilization, brought
crown and people together, consolidated the
English monarchy, and set England on the
triumphant march of modern days. His exc-

84 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

cutions and cruelties would have been glossed
over, and his exploits and abilities enlarged.
But he struck the first intelligent blow from
the throne at the anarchic nobility, and they
had still strength to return the blow, kill him,
and then load his memory with obloquy.

Richard's immediate vindication as a states
man lies in the fact that his successor continued
his policy, and, enforcing the law against pri
vate liveries, fined heavily his great supporter,
the Earl of Oxford, because, on a royal visit,
the Earl received him with two thousand re
tainers wearing the cognizance of the house of
Vere. The movement towards the consolida
tion of the monarchy and the development of
the people as a force proceeded from the points
fixed by the last Plantagenet. Richard came
just at the dawn of the new movement, and
thus marks by his reign no less than by his
legislation a turning-point of momentous im
portance in the history of the English-speaking
race.

He was the beginner of new things, but he
was also the end of an old order. He was the
last of a great dynasty. For nearly four hun
dred years the Plantagenets held the English
throne. In all history there has never been of
one blood and of one lineage, unbroken and un-

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 85

tainted, a reigning family which has shown so
much ability of so high an order. They pro
duced great soldiers and great statesmen, and
these were the rule. The weaklings were only a
few marked exceptions. They were, essentially,
a royal, ruling, fighting race, and their end was
coincident with that of the old feudal nobility
and its system. The change was startling. The
great dynasty of fighting monarchs and states
men was succeeded by a set of bourgeois kings.
Henry VII. was the grandson of an obscure
Welsh gentleman, and his methods answered
to his origin. He was a shrewd, able man, un
scrupulous and crafty, every whit as cruel as
Richard, and, as Horace Walpole says, one of
the " meanest tyrants " who ever sat upon a
throne. He recognized in the light of what
Richard had done the true forces of the time,
and went with them. But the old conquer
ing, adventurous spirit of the Plantagenets had
gone and the bourgeois monarchy had come.
A bourgeois monarchy it remained, despite the
false romance cast over the Stuarts, and it be
came more so than ever when a third-rate
German family was called to the throne. In
the four hundred years since the Plantagenets
there have been three dynasties in England,
besides Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange.

86 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

Among them all, since the last Plantagenet fell
at Bosworth, closing a long line of statesmen
and warriors, England has had but two great
rulers, and one was a country squire, the other,
a Dutch prince. There was ability in the Tu-
dors, and common-sense, much meanness and
cruelty, and highly imperfect morals. Of the
Stuarts, Charles II. had some sense, but the
rest had neither sense nor morals, and were as
worthless a family as accident ever brought to
a crown. The Guelphs have answered their
purpose, but it would be flattery to call them
mediocre in ability. It is a picturesque con
trast to the brilliant Plantagenets, and yet it
must be admitted that these mediocre bour
geois sovereigns, in the main plain and sensible
folk, have been best probably for England and
for the marvellous development of her people.
The change in the nobles was no less sharp
than in the occupants of the throne. The old
feudal nobility was practically extinct when
Henry VII. came to the throne, and new men
took their places. This old nobility had
grievous faults, and their political system was
deadly. They were sunk in superstition; not
merely the superstition of the Church, but
that of the necromancer and the witch, the
wizard and the soothsayer. In cruelty and

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 87

bloodshed they had the habits of Red Indians.
They were illiterate, tyrannical, vindictive, and
often treacherous. Yet, despite all this, they
were brave and adventurous, a fighting, con
quering, ruling class. As to the crown a bour
geois monarch, so to the dead feudal nobility
a bourgeois nobility succeeded. Empson and
Dudley typify at the worst the new men who
rose to power under Henry VII. The new
nobility was a land-grabbing, money-getting
set. They plundered the Church and seized
her lands; they inclosed the commons and
added them to their domains. As a class,
they were sharp political managers, rarely
statesmen, and they had none of the bold,
adventurous spirit of their predecessors. They
made no wars, they sought no conquests, they
engaged in no dangerous enterprises. If the
old nobility had the failings usually attributed
to pirates, their successors had the faults com
monly given to usurers.

Last remained the people, who were neither
extinct nor dethroned, but who were just tak
ing the first painful steps which were to lead
them to supremacy. The abolition of military
tenures and the break-down of the feudal sys
tem wrought a great change in their condition.
Villanage disappeared, and from holding land

88 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

by military service they became rent-payers.
Then the commons were inclosed, and the
struggle for life became desperate. Some
were forced down until they sank into agri
cultural laborers. Others remained tenant
farmers ; others rose to be small squires and
country gentry. Very many were forced off
the land and took to the sea, to trade, to the
professions. In the earlier days the daring
English spirit was embodied in her Plantag-
enet kings and her feudal nobility. After
the coming of the bourgeois monarchy that
spirit deserted kings and nobles, but it was
as strong and undimmed as ever in the de
scendants of the men who had drawn the
bow and followed the Edwards and the
Henrys at Poictiers and Cressy and Agin-
court. While the bourgeois kings and no
bles controlled England, she displayed, as a
nation, none of the old spirit. We find it
then only in men like Drake and Raleigh, but
they came from the people, from the old
fighting stock. At last crown and people
clashed, and under Cromwell England rose
once more to the rank of a great power, able
to dictate to Europe. The Plantagenet spirit
came again with the man of the people.
There was a brief interregnum, then the de-

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 89

scendants of the feudal retainers consolidated
and obtained control of the nation ; and, be
ginning with William and Marlborough, Eng
land entered on that wonderful course of con
quest and extension which ran through the
whole eighteenth century, and subdued new
continents and old civilizations alike. The
spirit of the Plantagenets and their nobles
came to a new and more glorious being
among the descendants of the men who had
followed them, and while the bourgeois no
bility produced the Duke of Newcastle, the
commons of England gave her the elder Pitt.

Such was the change which began under
Richard III., and which modern research among
rolls and records has brought to light by ex
hibiting to us the course and purpose of his
legislation. The importance of his place in
history is plain enough to those who care to
look into it with "considerate eyes." The
ability of the man, his greatness as a soldier,
his wisdom as a statesman are also clear.
These things were his alone; while his crimes
and his overmastering ambition, although his
own too, were also the offspring of his times,
of which he, like other men, was the child and
prototype.

Yet the helplessness of history when it

90 THE LAST PLANTAGENET

comes in conflict with the work of a great
imagination has never been more strikingly
shown than in the case of the third Richard.
Historians and critics may write volumes,
they may lay bare all the facts, they may
argue and dissect and weigh and discuss ev
ery jot and tittle of evidence, but, except to
a very limited circle, it will be labor lost so
far as the man Richard is concerned. The
last Plantagenet will ever remain fixed in the
popular fancy by the unsparing hand of
genius. To the multitude who read books,
to the vaster and uncounted multitude who
go to the theatre, there will never be but
one Richard — the Richard of Shakespeare.
There, in the drama and on the stage, he has
been fixed for all time, and nothing can efface
the image. He will be forever, not only to
the English-speaking world, but to the people
of Europe, to whom Shakespeare's language
is an unknown tongue, the crook-backed ty
rant. Always, while art and letters survive,
will the last Plantagenet limp across the stage,
stab Henry with a bitter gibe, send Clarence
to his death with a sneer, and order Bucking
ham and Hastings to execution as he would
command his dinner to be served. The opin
ion of posterity probably does not trouble

THE LAST PLANTAGENET 91

Richard much since the event at Bosworth ;
but if it did, he nevertheless has one com
pensation for all the odium which has been
heaped upon him. Despite the lurid light in
which he appears, it is still he, and not his
rival, who has the plaudits of the countless
people who have watched, and will yet watch,
his career upon the mimic stage. They know
that he is a remorseless usurper, a devil in
carnate, for it has been set before them with
the master's unerring art. But the same art
has shown them the man's ability and power,
his force of will, and his dauntless courage.
When the supreme moment comes, the popu
lar sympathy is not with Henry, loudly pro
claiming his virtuous sentiments, but with his
fierce antagonist. The applause and cheers
which greet the final scene are not for the re
spectable Richmond, but for him who kills
five Richmonds, who enacts more wonders
than a man, and who dies King of England,
hemmed in by enemies, as full of valor as of
royal blood, desperate in courage as in all else,
fighting grimly to the last like a true Plantag-
enet.

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS

MUCH has been written first and last about
certain English words and phrases which are
commonly called "Americanisms." That they
are so classified is due to our brethren of Eng
land, who seem to think that in this way they
not only relieve themselves of all responsibili
ty for the existence of these offending parts
of speech, but that they also in some mys
terious manner make them things apart and
put them outside the pale of the English
language. No one would be hard-hearted
enough to grudge to our island kindred any
comfort they may take in this mental opera
tion, but that any one should cherish such a
belief shows a curious ignorance, not merely
as to many of the words in question, but as to
the history and present standing of the lan
guage itself. To describe an English word
or phrase as American or British or Austra
lian or Indian or South African may be con
venient if we wish to define that portion of

96 SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS

the English-speaking people among whom it
originated or by whom it has been kept or
revived from the usage of an earlier day.
But it is worse than useless to do so if an
attempt to exclude the word from English
speech is thereby intended. It is no longer
possible in any such fashion as this to set
up arbitrary metes and bounds to the great
language which has spread over the world
with the march of the people who use it.
The " Queen's English" was a phrase correct
enough in the days of Elizabeth or Anne,
but it is an absurdity in those of Victoria.
In the time of the last Tudor or the last
Stuart every one whose native tongue was
English could be properly set down as a sub
ject of the English Queen. No such propo
sition is possible now. The English-speaking
people who owe no allegiance to England's
Queen are to-day more numerous than those
who do.

In the face of facts like these it is just as im
possible to set limits to the language or to es
tablish a proprietorship in it in any given place
as it would be to fetter the growth of the peo
ple who speak it. It is the existence of these
conditions which also makes it out of the ques
tion to have any fixed standard of English in

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS 97

the narrow sense not uncommon in other lan
guages. It is quite possible to have Tuscan
Italian or Castilian Spanish or Parisian French
as the standard of correctness, but no one
ever heard of " London English " used in that
sense. The reason is simple. These nations
have ceased to spread and colonize or to
grow as nations. They are practically sta
tionary. But English is the language of a
conquering, colonizing race, which in the last
three centuries has subdued and possessed an
cient civilizations and virgin continents alike,
and whose speech is now heard in the remot
est corners of the earth.

It is not the least of the many glories of
the English tongue that it has proved equal
to the task which its possessors have imposed
upon it. Like the race, it has shown itself
capable of assimilating new elements without
degeneration. It has met new conditions,
adapted itself to them, and prevailed over
them. It has proved itself flexible without
weakness, and strong without rigidity. With
all its vast spread, it still remains unchanged
in essence and in all its great qualities.

For such a language with such a history no
standard of a province or a city can be fixed
in order to make a narrow rule from which no
7

98 SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS

appeal is possible. The usage of the best
writers for the written, and of the best edu
cated and most highly trained men for the
spoken word, without regard to where they
may have been born or to where they live, is
the only possible standard for English speech.
Such a test may not be very sharply defined,
but it is the only one practicable for a lan
guage which has done so much, and which is
constantly growing and advancing. As a rule
of conduct in writing or speaking it is true
that this kind of standard may be in unes
sential points a little vague. But this de
fect, if it be one, is outweighed a thousand
times by the fact that the language is thus
freed from the stiffness and narrowness which
denote that the race has ceased to march, and
that expansion for people and speech alike is
at an end.

Yet the changes made during this world
wide extension, with all the infinite variety
of new conditions which accompanied it, are,
after all, more apparent than real. That they
should be so few and at the same time so all-
sufficient for every fresh need that has arisen
demonstrates better than anything else the
marvellous .strength and richness inherent in
the English language. In some cases new

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS 99

words have been invented or added to express
ne\v facts or new things, and these are both
valuable and necessary. In other cases old
words, both in the mother-country and else
where, have, in the processes of time and of
altered conditions, been changed in meaning
and usage, sometimes for the better and some
times for the worse. In still other instances
old words and old meanings have lived on or
been revived by one branch of the race when
given up or modified elsewhere.

It is this last fact which makes it so futile to
try to shut out from the language and its liter
ature certain words and phrases merely because
they are not used in the island whence people
and speech started on their career of conquest.
It does not in the least follow, because a word
is not used to-day in England, that it is either
new or bad. It may be both, as is the case
with many words which have never travelled
beyond the mother-country, and with many
others which have never been heard in the par
ent-land. On the other hand, it may equally
well be neither. The mere fact that a word
exists in one place and not in another, of itself
proves nothing. That those of the English-
speaking people who have remained in Great
Britain should condemn as pestilent innova-

ioo SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS

tions words which they do not use themselves
is very natural, but quite unscientific. It is
the same attitude as that of the Tory reviewer
who condemned some of James Russell Low
ell's letters as " provincial." They are different
in tone and thought from that to which he is
accustomed, and hence he asserts that they
must be bad. The real trouble is merely that
the letters are American and not English, con
tinental and not insular. They are not in the
language or the spirit of the critic's own parish ;
that is all. They jar on his habits of thought
because they differ from his standard, and so
he sets them down as provincial, failing hope
lessly to see that mere difference proves noth
ing either way as to merits or defects. So a
word used in the United States and not in
England may be good or bad, but the mere
fact that it is in use in one place and not in
the other has no bearing as to either its good
ness or the reverse. Its virtues or its defects
must be determined on grounds more relative
than this.

The best proof of the propositions just ad
vanced can be found by examining some of the
words which exist here and not in Great Brit
ain, or which are used here with a meaning
differing from that of British usage. It is well

SHAKESPEARE S AMERICANISMS IOI

to remember at the outset that the English
speech was planted in this country by English
emigrants, who settled Virginia and New Eng
land at the beginning of the seventeenth cen
tury. To Virginia came many educated men,
who became the planters, land-owners, and lead
ers of the infant State, and, although they did
little for nearly a century in behalf of general
education, the sons of the governing class were
either taught at home by English tutors or sent
across the water to English colleges. In New
England the average education among the first
settlers was high, and they showed their love
of learning by their immediate foundation of
a college and of a public-school system. The
Puritan leaders and their powerful clergy were,
as a rule, college-bred men, with all the tradi
tions of Oxford and Cambridge fresh in their
minds and dear to their hearts. They would
have been the last men to corrupt or abuse the
mother-tongue, which they cherished more than
ever in the new and distant land. The language
which these people brought with them to Vir
ginia and Massachusetts, moreover, was, as Mr.
Lowell has remarked, the language of Shake
speare, who lived and wrote and died just at the
period when these countrymen of his were tak
ing their way to the New World. In view of

102 SHAKESPEARE S AMERICANISMS

these latter-day criticisms, it might seem as if
these emigrants ought to have brought some
kind of English with them other than that of
Shakespeare's England, but, luckily or unluck
ily, that was the only mode of speech they had.
It followed very naturally that some of the
words thus brought over the water, and then
common to the English on both sides of the
Atlantic, survived only in the New World, to
which they were transplanted. This is not re
markable, but it is passing strange that words
not only used in Shakespeare's time, but used
by Shakespeare himself, should have lived to
be disdainfully called " Americanisms " by peo
ple now living in Shakespeare's own country.
It is well, therefore, to look at a few of these
words occasionally, if only to refresh our memo
ries. No single example, perhaps, is new, but
when we bring several into a little group they
make a picturesque illustration of the futility
of undertaking to exclude a word from good
society because it is used in one place where
English-speaking people dwell and not in an
other.

What Mr. Bartlett in his dictionary of
Americanisms calls justly one of "the most
marked peculiarities of American speech " is
the constant use of the word "well" as an in-

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS 103

terjection, especially at the beginning of sen
tences. Mr. Bartlett also says, " Englishmen
have told me that they could always detect
an American by this use of the word." Here
perhaps is a clew to the true nationality of the
Danish soldiers with Italian names and idio
matic English speech who appear in the first
scene of Hamlet :

" Bernardo. — Have you had quiet guard ?
"Francisco. — Not a mouse stirring.
" Bernardo. — Well, good-night."

This is as excellent and precise an example
of the every-day American use of the word
" well " as could possibly be found. The fact
is that the use of " well " as an interjection is
so common in Shakespeare that Mrs. Clarke
omits the word used in that capacity from her
concordance, and explains its omissfon on the
ground of its constant repetition, like " come,"
" look," " marry," and so on. Thus has it
come to pass that an American betrays his
nationality to an Englishman because he uses
the word " well " interjectionally, as Shake
speare used it. I have seen more than once
patronizing criticisms of this peculiarity of
American speech, but have never suffered at

IO4 SHAKESPEARE S AMERICANISMS

the sight, because I have always been able to
take to myself the consolation of Lord Byron,
that it is

"Better to err with Pope than shine with Pye."

Our English brethren, again, use the word
" ill " in speaking of a person " afflicted with
disease " — to take Johnson's definition of the
word " sick." They restrict the word " sick "
to "nausea," and regard our employment of
it, as applicable to any kind of disease, or to a
person out of health from any cause, as an
"Americanism." And yet this "American
ism " is Elizabethan and Shakespearian. For
example, in Midsummer •- Night 's Dream (Act
I., Scene I.), Helena says, " Sickness is catch
ing," which is not the chief characteristic of
the ailment to which modern English usage
confines the word. In Cymbelinc> again (Act
V., Scene IV.), we find the phrase, " one
that's sick o' the gout." Examples might be
multiplied, for Shakespeare rarely uses the
word "ill," but constantly the word "sick"
in the general sense. In the Bible the use of
" sick " is, I believe, unbroken. The marriage
service says, " in sickness and in health," and
Johnson's definition, as Mr. Bartlett points

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS 105

out, conforms to the usage of Chaucer, Milton,
Dryden, and Cowper. Even the Englishman
who starts with surprise at our general appli
cation of " sick " and "sickness," and who is
nothing if not logical, would not think of de
scribing an officer of the army as absent on
" ill-leave " or as placed upon the " ill-list."
The English restriction of the use of these
two words is, in truth, wholly unwarranted, and
should be given up in favor of the better and
older American usage, which is that of all the
highest standards of English literature.

The conditions of travelling have changed
so much during this century, and all the
methods of travel are so new, that most of
the words connected with it are of necessity
new also, either in form or application. In
some cases the same phrases have sprung
up in both England and the United States
to meet the new requirements. In others,
different words have been chosen by the
two nations to express the same thing,
and, so far as merit goes, there is little to
choose between them. But there are a few
words in this department which are as old
as travelling itself, and which were as neces
sary in the days of the galley and the pack-
horse as they are in those of the steamship

io6 SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS

and the railroad. One of them is the com
prehensive term for the things which travellers
carry with them. Englishmen commonly use
the word " luggage "; we Americans the word
" baggage." In this habit we agree with Touch
stone, who, using a phrase which has become
part of our daily speech, says (Act III., Scene
II.), " though not with bag and baggage, yet
with scrip and scrippage." Leontes also, in the
Winter s Tale (Act I., Scene II.), employs the
same phrase as Touchstone. It may be ar
gued that both allusions are drawn from mili
tary language, in which " baggage " is always
used. But this will not avail, for " luggage "
occurs twice at least in Shakespeare, referring
solely to the effects of an army. In Henry V.
(Act V., Scene IV.) we find " the luggage of
our camp"; and Fluellen says, in the same
play (Act IV., Scene VII.), "Kill the poys
and the luggage !" Shakespeare used both
words indifferently in the same sense, and the
" Americanism " was as familiar to him as the
" Briticism."

In this same connection it may be added
that the word "trunk," which we use where
the English say " box," is, like " baggage,"
Shakespearian. It occurs in Lear (Act II.,
Scene II.), where Kent calls Oswald a " one-

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS 107

trunk-inheriting slave." Johnson interpreted
this to mean " trunk-hose," which makes no
sense. Steevens said "trunk" in this connec
tion meant " coffer," and that all his prop
erty was in one " coffer " or " trunk." This
seems to have been the accepted version ever
since, as it is certainly the obvious and sensi
ble one.

Almost always the preservation or revival
of a Shakespearian word is something deserv
ing profound gratitude, but the great master
of English gives some authority for one dis
tasteful phrase. This is the use of the word
" stage " as a verb in the sense of to put upon
the stage, a habit which has become of late
sadly common. So the Duke, in the first
scene of Measure for Measure , says :

" I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes."

Again, in Antony and Cleopatra (Act III.,
Scene XL), " be stag'd to the show, against
a sworder." And again, later in the same
play (Act V., Scene II.), Cleopatra says:

"the quick comedians
Extemp'rally will stage us."

io8

It is true that these examples all refer to per
sons and not to "staging plays," as the phrase
runs to-day, but the use of the word, especial
ly in the last case, seems identically the same.
Among characteristic American words none
is more so than " to guess," in the sense of
" to think." The word is old and good, but
the significance that we give it is charged
against us as an innovation of our own, and
wholly without warrant. One sees it contin
ually in English comic papers, and in books
also, put into the mouths of Americans as a
discreditable but unmistakable badge of na
tionality. Shakespeare uses the word con
stantly, generally in the narrower sense where
it implies conjecture. Yet he also uses it
in the broader American sense of thinking.
For example, in Measure for Measure (Act
IV., Scene IV.), Angelo says, "And why
meet him at the gates, and redeliver our
authorities there?" To which Escalus re
plies, in a most emphatically American fash
ion, " I guess not." There is no questioning,
no conjecture here. It is simply our common
American form of " I think not." Again, in
the Winter s Tale (Act IV., Scene III.), Ca-
millo says, " Which, I do guess, you do not
purpose to him." This is the same use of

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS 109

the word in the sense of to think, and other
instances might be added. In view of this it
seems not a little curious that a bit of Shake
speare's English, in the use of an excellent
Saxon word, should be selected above all
others by Englishmen of the nineteenth cen
tury to brand an American, not merely with
his nationality, but with the misuse of his
mother-tongue. Be it said also in passing that
" guess " is a far better word than " fancy,"
which the British are fond of putting to a
similar service.

Leaving now legitimate words, and turning
to the children of the street and the market
place, we find some curious examples, not
only of American slang, but of slang which
is regarded as extremely fresh and modern.
Mr. Brander Matthews, in his most interest
ing article on that subject, has already point
ed out that a " deck of cards " is Shakespea
rian. In Henry VI. (Third Part, Act V., Scene
I.), Gloucester says:

' But while he thought to steal the single ten,
The king was slyly fingered from the deck."

Mr. Matthews has also cited a still more re
markable example of recent slang from the
Sonnets — of all places in the world! — where

110 SHAKESPEARE S AMERICANISMS

"fire out" is apparently used in the exact
colloquial sense of to-day. It occurs in the
1 44th Sonnet :

" Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt
Till my bad angel fire my good one out."

" Square," in the sense of fair or honest, and
the verb " to be square," in the sense of to be
fair or honest, are thought modern, and are
now so constantly used that they have well-
nigh passed beyond the boundaries of slang.
If they do so, it is but a return to their old
place, for Shakespeare has this use of the
word, and in serious passages. In Timon of
Athens (Act V., Scene V.), the First Senator
says:

" All have not offended ;

For those that were, it is not square to take

On those that are, revenges."

In Antony and Cleopatra (Act II., Scene II.)
Mecsenas says, " She's a most triumphant
lady, if report be square to her."

Very recent is the use of the word
"stuffed," particularly in American politics,
to denote contemptuously what may be most
nearly described as large and ineffective pre
tentiousness. But in Much Ado about Noth-

SHAKESPEARE'S AMERICANISMS m

Act I., Scene I.) the Messenger says, "A
lord to a lord, a man to a man; stuffed with
all honorable virtues." To which Beatrice re
plies, " It is so, indeed ; he is no less than a
stuffed man : but for the stuffing, — Well, we
are all mortal." Here Beatrice uses the
phrase " stuffed man" in contempt, catching
up the word of the messenger.

" Flapjack," perhaps, is hardly to be called
slang, but it is certainly an American phrase
for a griddle-cake. We must have brought it
with us, however, from Shakespeare's England,
for there it is in Pericles (Act II., Scene I.),
where the Grecian — very Grecian — fisherman
says, " Come, thou shalt go home, and we'll
have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting days,
and moreo'er puddings and flapjacks ; and
thou shalt be welcome."

" Mad," in the sense of angry, is usually re
garded in England as peculiarly American
and a very improper use of the word. In
Romeo and Juliet (Act III., Scene V.), Lady
Capulet says to her husband, " You are too
hot," and he replies, " God's bread ! it makes
me mad," which, taken in connection with
Lady Capulet's phrase, seems to bring the
word " mad " clearly within the American
usage. But however this may be, it is certain

112 SHAKESPEARE S AMERICANISMS

that in Pepys's time " mad " in the sense of
angry was a common colloquial usage (e.g.,
Pepys, II., 72). This, therefore, is again one
of the Americanisms we brought with us from
England.

I will close this little collection of Shake
speare's Americanisms with a word that is
not slang, but the use of which in this country
shows the tenacity with which our people have
held to the Elizabethan phrases that their an
cestors brought with them. In As You Like
It (Act I., Scene I.), Charles the Wrestler
says, " They say many young gentlemen flock
to him every day, and fleet the time careless
ly, as they did in the golden world." " Fleet,"
as a verb in this sense of " to pass" or "to
move," may yet survive in some parts of Eng
land, but it has certainly disappeared from
the literature and the ordinary speech of both
England and the United States, except as a
nautical phrase. It is still in use, however, in
this exact Shakespearian sense in the daily
speech of people on the island of Nantucket,
in the State of Massachusetts. I have heard
it there frequently, and it is owing no doubt
to the isolation of the inhabitants that it still
lingers, as it does, an echo of the Elizabethan
days, among American fishermen and farmers

OF TMt

UNIVERSITY

Of

AMERICANISMS 113

in the closing years of the nineteenth cen
tury.

In tracing a few Americanisms, as they are
called, to the land whence they emigrated so
many years ago, I have not gone beyond the
greatest master of. the language. A little
wider range, with excursions into other fields,
would furnish us with pedigrees almost as
good, if not quite so lofty, for many other
words and phrases which are set down by the
British guardians of our language as " Ameri
canisms," generally with some adjective of an
uncomplimentary character. But such fur
ther collection would be merely cumulative.
These few examples from Shakespeare are
quite sufficient to show that because a word
is used by one branch of the English-speaking
people and not by another, it does not there
fore follow that the word in question is not
both good and ancient. They prove also
that words which some persons frown upon
and condemn, merely because their own par
ish does not use them, may have served well
the greatest men who ever wrote or spoke the
language, and that they have a place and a
title which the criticisms upon them can never
hope to claim.

There is here a little lesson which is well
8

114 SHAKESPEARE S AMERICANISMS

worth remembering, for the English speech is
too great an inheritance to be trifled with or
wrangled over. It is much better for all who
speak it to give their best strength to defend
ing it and keeping it pure and vigorous, so
that it may go on spreading and conquering,
as in the centuries which have already closed.
The true doctrine, which may well be taken
home to our hearts on both sides of the water,
has never been better put than in Lord Hough-
ton's fine lines:

" Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,
Far as the farthest prairies sweep,
Where forest glooms the nerve appal,
Where burns the radiant Western fall,
One duty lies on old and young —
With filial piety to guard,
As on its greenest native sward,
The glory of the English tongue.

" That ample speech ! That subtle speech !
Apt for the need of all and each :
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
Wherever human feelings tend.
Preserve its force ; expand its powers ;
And through the maze of civic life,
In Letters, Commerce, even in Strife,
Forget not it is yours and ours."

CHATTERTON

CHATTERTON

WE have the high authority of Major Pen-
dcnnis for the statement that this is a very un
charitable world, and there can be no doubt
that, in practice, success succeeds, while failure
goes out into the cold air of neglect and for-
getfulness. Yet as human nature is not only
complicated, but contradictory, humanity has
a great deal of sentimental pity for itself, which
it is fond of showing in various ways. How
commonly, for example, do we hear it said of
families in which one member has attained dis
tinction and success that some other member
was really the most brilliant, although he has
never come to anything at all, perhaps has come
to even worse than nothing. There is probably
no truth whatever in statements of this kind,
but it is often soothing, nevertheless, to believe
them. It is the same with those who die very
young. Not only have we declared as a maxim
that those who thus die are beloved of the
gods, but we are prone to believe and assert

Il8 CHATTERTON

that they are or would have been the superiors
in beauty, character, and intellect of those who
have the misfortune to tamely survive and live
out more or less effectively the allotted span
of life. This is, after all, a gentle, kindly sen
timent, at which we may smile, but with which
only the sourest of misanthropes would quarrel ;
and it matters little whether it has or has not
the further merit of exact truth. But when one
of those who have died ere their prime has
really given signs of exceptional promise, when
it has been possible to believe that a dawning
genius has been swept away by envious fate,
then imagination comes to the aid of pity, and
we readily make a marvel of him whose life has
been untimely cropped, for what might have
been is not tied down by the hard facts which
fetter what is.

To early deaths we owe three of the noblest
poems in the language — " Lycidas," "Ado-
nais," and "In Memoriam." Of the subject
of " Lycidas " we know only that he was a
young scholar named King, and that Milton
immortalized his memory ; and of Arthur
Hallam but little more than that he was a
youth of rare promise and a friend of Ten
nyson. Keats, young as he was, left enough
of accomplished work to take him out of the

CHATTERTON IIQ

range of speculation and place him securely
in the first rank of great English poets. But
there are others in our literature beloved of
the gods who did not have Milton or Shelley
or Tennyson to mourn for them in imperish
able verse, who yet have appealed strongly to
human sympathy and imagination, and whose
names, at least, are familiar and high-placed.
Among them the most conspicuous undoubt
edly is Chatterton. His name, indeed, is bet
ter known than that of many men who have
filled large places in our literature; and there
is a general conviction that he was a genius,
although it is doubtful if any one except his
editor or biographer could be found who could
quote a line of his works. Chattcrton's fame
has come primarily from the events of his own
brief life, and the world has been content to
take his genius on trust. This is natural enough,
for that life-story was one to appeal most strong
ly to both our feelings and our imagination.
He was a mere boy, and yet he had perplexed,
if not deceived, the literary and critical world
of his day by a series of forged poems. He
was also a prolific writer apart from this. He
fought a desperate battle with adverse fate, and
died in misery, by his own hand, before he was
twenty. The dead boy on his miserable bed

120 CHATTERTON

in a squalid garret has been made familiar to
us by the painter, while the playwright and the
actor have put his struggle for life and glory
before us on the stage. Every one knows the
name and the story, and has sighed over the
picture and the play. Very few, probably,
know more, and perhaps it might be best to
end there, and not inquire further. Fate dealt
hardly with Chatterton, and the fame he fought
for came only after his death. He certainly
suffered enough to have it given to him freely,
even if it rests merely on the sad and romantic
story of his life. Yet one hardly likes to stop
there, after all, for if he has no other title to
remembrance than his youth and death, then
his literary fame is but notoriety earned by
forgery. If, on the other hand, there can be
discovered in what he wrote the clear promise
of a great performance in the future, then his
forgeries are a valuable part of our literature,
instead of being merely the wild error of an
ambitious boy, and his death becomes the
tragic end, not only of a young life, but of a
genius which, in its ripeness, might have given
joy to mankind. To his writings, so well ed
ited by Mr. Skeat some twenty years ago,
we must look for the answer to this question ;
and they deserve examination, not only to

CHATTERTON 121

satisfy a curious inquiry, but for their own
merits.*

Those merits, it must be confessed, have been
disputed, and in at least one instance by one
of the best of critics. In a notice of Edgar
Poe, Mr. Lowell paused a moment to say that
he " never thought the world lost more in the
' marvellous boy,' Chatterton, than a very in-
genius imitator of antiquated dulness. When
he becomes original (as it is called), the interest
of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid."
This uncompromising criticism always made
me vaguely wonder whether the popular tra
dition or Mr. Lowell had estimated Chatterton
rightly, for Mr. Lowell is very high authority,
and he also had that exact knowledge, which
is rarely the possession of those who make
and repeat popular and accepted opinions. It
is, in fact, hardly too much to suppose that
the majority of possible readers, having a
wholesome preference for their own tongue,
have turned away affrighted at the hopeless
jargon of Rowley, and taken what was said
of Chatterton wholly on trust. No doubt it

* The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton. With

an essay on the Rowley Poems by Walter Skeat, and a

memoir by Edward Bell. London : George Bell & Sons.
1875-

122 CHATTERTON

is also true, as has just been said, that the
undeniably precocious powers of the boy, his
strange life and tragic death, have given a
fictitious interest, not only to him, but to his
unread works. Yet it must also be remem
bered that when Mr. Lowell gave his opinion,
neither he nor the world had had an opportu
nity to read Chatterton's poetry in an intelli
gible form, and so judge it fairly. This oppor
tunity is given by Mr. Skeat. The " Rowleian
dialect," as Mr. Skeat calls it, was subjected
by him to a rigid examination, which resulted
in the discovery of the system upon which it
was formed. When this had been done, it then
became comparatively easy to translate the
poems and give them to the world in an intel
ligible version.

</It appears that Chatterton, in the manufact
ure of his dialect, proceeded in a simple way.
From Kersey's or Bailey's dictionary he copied
all the words marked O (old), with their mean
ings, in reverse order, into a manuscript book.
For instance, Kersey gives " cherisaunei (O)
—comfort," which would appear in the note
book " comfort — cherisaunei." When a word
thus entered was susceptible of more than one
meaning, mistakes would be likely to occur.
For example, Kersey has " lissed (O) — bound-

CHATTERTON 123

ed," explained as " encircled by a list." This
would be entered " bounded — lissed." Thus
given, bounded might mean either surrounded
by a list or leaped, and with the latter signifi
cation it is used several times by Chatterton.
Another error of a somewhat different kind is
curious. Kersey has " heck (O) — a rock," a
misprint for rack. Chatterton uses it with its
misprinted meaning of rock. Such mistakes,
which abound, proved very important, for they
furnished Mr. Skeat with conclusive proof of
the correctness of his results. . Having thus got
a foundation for his dialect, Chatterton enlarged
it in three ways: by taking the groundwork
of his word from Kersey and altering the ter
mination, by altering the spelling of a word
capriciously, and by coining words at pleasure,
either from intelligible roots or from pure im
agination. In the whole vocabulary there is
found to be only seven per cent, of genuine
old English words rightly used. The spelling
is stolen entirely. It is the debased kind
of "Chevy Chase," and the ''Battle of Ot-
terbourn." Mr. Skeat, after stating that a
language on this system may be readily ac
quired in a few weeks, gives an amusing in
stance of the ease with which it may be ap
plied :

124 CHATTERTON

" Offe mannes fyrste bykrous volunde wolle I singe

And offe the fruite of yatte caltysned tre,
Whose lethal taste into thys worlde dydde brynge
Both morthe and tene to all posteritie," etc.

The system and spelling were easy enough-;
the real difficulty was to supply the matter.
This Chatterton did, and then came the prob
lem of editing him in such a way as to get at
the poems themselves. Four methods of solv
ing this problem occurred to Mr. Skeat : to re
print the old text with old notes compiled
from former editions ; to reprint the old text
with sound critical notes ; to do away with
needless disguises of spelling, and reduce the
words to the sufficiently uniform spelling of
the fifteenth century ; or, finally, to do away
with needless disguises altogether, and, on the
correct theory of the poems not being genu
ine, render them into modern English. Of
the first method Mr. Skeat decided there had
been too much already; that the second would
be a mere infliction on the reader; and that
the third was absurd, as the poems were not
genuine, and in all cases, except where the lan
guage was practically modern English (as the
" Bristowe Tragedie "), such reduction would
have been impossible. The fourth method
proposed was therefore boldly taken, and the

CHATTERTON 125

poems, with a few exceptions, rendered into
modern English. Oddly enough, the diction
was improved by this translation and the
rhythm rendered more melodious, indicating,
as might have been conjectured, that Chatter-
ton had written in eighteenth century Eng
lish and translated into " Rowleian." I have
sketched here only the results, but the ingen
ious processes employed to arrive at them well
repay reading.

Thus, then, after a hundred years, the Row
ley Poems were at last given to the world,
stripped of all disguises, to stand or fall by
their own merits. The work has proved to
have been worth the labor expended on it by
the editor. Passages of beauty which were
hidden, together with a mass of bad lines,
under the language of Rowley, are scattered
through the poems. Even those familiar with
Chatterton will pardon the quotation of a few
lines in their modern form :

" When Autumn sere and sunburnt doth appear,

With his gold hand gilding the falling leaf,
Bringing^up Winter to fulfil the year,

Bearing upon his back the ripened sheaf;
When all the hills with woody seed are white,
When lightning fires and gleams do meet from far
the sight ;

126 CHATTERTON

" When the fair apples, red as evening sky,

Do bend the tree unto the fruitful ground ;
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye

Do dance in air, and call the eyes around ;
Then, be the evening foul or be it fair,
Methinks my heart's delight is mingled with some
care."

There are both feeling and imagination in
these lines, uneven as they undoubtedly are
in execution. The passage is taken from the
" Tragedy of -/Ella," a composition chiefly re
markable for its very weak construction and
the absence of all dramatic elements. Yet
among the feeble crudities of the poem there
are indications, faint though they be, of pas
sion and power in the following lines:

" &l. — My better kindnesses which I did do,
Thy gentleness doth represent so great,
Like mighty elephants my gnats do shew;
Thou dost my thoughts of paying love abate.
But had my actions stretched the roll of fate,
Plucked thee from hell or brought heaven down

to thee,

Laid the whole world a footstool at thy feet,
One smile would be sufficient meed for me.
I am love's borrower, and can never pay,
But be his borrower still and thine, my sweet,

for aye."

In passing judgment on these lines, the ex-

CHATTERTON 127

treme youth of the writer must be remem
bered. That Chatterton was little more than
fifteen when he wrote this passage does much
to atone for the obvious faults. Yet, besides
•its own merits, and beyond mere external re
semblances, the poem has a distinct flavor of
the great Elizabethan period. This quality is
apparent in all the poems, and is of interest
because it shows that the boy's instincts were
true, and carried him back past the age of
Anne to find his models in the great period
of English literature.

"The Battle of Hastings," a long, dreary
poem, containing a combat in each stanza,
obviously written under Homeric influences,
apparently exhibits nothing but Chatterton's
unequalled power of spinning metred and
rhymed lines. Yet, again, in all this waste of
verses, we find on examination a long pas
sage descriptive of " Kenewalcha Fair," which
is a striking picture, and possesses beauty
of imagery and language. After explaining
who Kenewalcha was, the poet describes her
as,

" White as the chalky cliffs of Britain's isle,
Red as the highest colored Gallic wine,
Gay as all nature at the morning smile,

Those hues with pleasaunce on her lips combine ;

128 CHATTERTON

Her lips more red than summer evening skyen,

Or Phoebus rising on a frosty morn;
Her breasts more white than snows in fields that

lien,

Or lily lambs that never have been shorn,
Swelling like bubbles in a boiling well,
Or new-burst brooklets gently whispering in the
dell.

" Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell,

Brown as the nappy ale at Hocktide game,
So brown the crooked rings that featly fell

Over the neck of this all-beauteous dame.
Gray as the morn before the ruddy flame

Of Phoebus' chariot rolling through the sky ;
Gray as the steel-horned goats Conyan made tame,

So gray appeared her featly sparkling eye ;
Those eyes that oft did mickle pleased look
On Adhelm, valiant man, the virtues' doomsday-
book.

" Majestic as the grove of oaks that stood

Before the abbey built by Oswald king ;
Majestic as Hibernia's holy wood,

Where saints for souls departed masses sing;
Such awe from her sweet look forth issuing

At once for reverence and love did call ;
Sweet as the voice of thrushes in the spring,

So sweet the words that from her lips did fall;
None fell in vain, all shewed some intent;
Her wordes did display her great entendement.

' Taper as candles laid at Cuthbert's shrine,
Taper as elms that Goodrick's abbey shrove,

CHATTERTON 129

Taper as silver chalices for wine,
So taper were her arms and shapey-grove.

As skilful miners by the stones above
Can ken what metal is contained below,

So Kenewalcha's face, y-made for love,
The lovely image of her soul did show;

Thus was she outward formed ; the sun, her mind,

Did gild her mortal shape, and all her charms re
fined."

No doubt these similes are many of them
marked by youthful faults, and very grave
faults too, yet such a one as

" Gay as all nature at the morning smile,"

goes far to redeem other errors. These
stanzas have been taken at random from
many equally good and equally deserving ex
amination. The excellences occur almost en
tirely in descriptive passages, as is certain to
be the case with so young a writer, but it may
fairly be said that there are indications of
genius, or of something closely akin to it.

It is almost mere guess-work to attempt
to fix Chatterton's real place among poets.
It can, indeed, only be approximated very
roughly by comparing his verses with other
equally youthful productions. Tried by this
tes{ — and any other would be manifestly un-
9

130 CHATTERTON

just — Chatterton comes out very well. The
poetical blossoms of Cowley, long since with
ered, are insipid to the last degree, and the
frigid morality of Pope's boyish performances
is destitute of any real feeling. One is forced
indeed to believe that the great poet of
Queen Anne's reign was little better than a
prig at the age of twelve. The " Hours of Idle
ness," Henry Kirke White's verses, the lispings
of Moore, all these, and a host more, show
nothing but an early capacity for smooth ver
sification ; and yet some of the writers came
to great results and lasting fame afterwards.
Shelley and Keats, who both wrote verse
while very young, exhibit widely different
powers from any of the men just mentioned.
Despite the metaphysical speculations which
disfigure " Queen Mab," passages of extraordi
nary beauty give no uncertain promise of the
coming glories, while the sonnet on Chap
man's Homer stands alone in its perfection
among boyish productions and high up among
the great sonnets of the language. Chatter-
ton more nearly resembles Shelley than any
of the others — not in quality or kind, but in
the way in which his powers are shown.
Apart from his marvellous fecundity, one
finds buried in the mediaeval debris passages

CHATTERTON 131

of real beauty and strength both in thought
and expression. The rarity of such qualities
in juvenile verses entitles Chatterton to a high
place among very young poets, and specula
tion may therefore fairly say that in the future
—never reached — he might have been among
the first. We agree with Mr. Lowell that the
acknowledged, or " original," poetry was poor
enough, and the reason is that the real poet
was not there, but in the imaginary world
which the boy had created for himself.
Therefore it is that in the forgeries we find
the imagination, the richness of diction, and
the occasional beauty of thought which lift
Chatterton up to a place as a poet, and which
are almost wholly lacking in the other poems,
where he was forcing himself to write without
having his heart in his work.

In estimating Chatterton, it ought also to
be taken into consideration that he did not
form one of the regular links in the chain of
literary development. He was sent into the
world before his time. With the exception
of Gray's splendid verse and a few poems by
Collins and Goldsmith, it was a period of dust
and ashes in poetry when Chatterton came
upon the stage. The school of poetry which
had been in its prime at the beginning of the

132 CHATTERTON

century, was in the last stages of dissolution.
It was commonly known as the didactic school
of poetry, and how great it could be in its own
way Pope had shown. But the art of sinking
in poetry had gone on rapidly since Pope's day,
and it was reserved to the latter half of the
same century to justify Canning's celebrated
definition " that a didactic poem was so called
from SiSdcr/ceiv, to teach, and TroiTjfjia, a poem,
because it teaches nothing and is not poeti
cal." No period of decline in literature is
ever strong or fruitful, but the decadence of
such a school as this was naturally more than
usually barren. Nature, under Queen Anne,
was, at best, the pretty, trim nature of Windsor
Forest ; in later days she became a painted, ar
tificial creature, with not even youth to plead
for her. Against this nature of form and fash
ion Chatterton revolted. From him comes
the first lyric note, the harbinger of the great
poetic outburst which was to uplift English
poetry again at the end of that century and
the beginning of the next. But the world
was not ready for him, and his voice fell upon
deaf ears. Chatterton's genius was impris
oned by conventionalities, and beat its wings
wildly against the bars of the cage. The only
thing of beauty in the sluggish life of the dull

CHATTERTON 133

provincial town was the ancient church of
St. Mary. To this shrine the eager fancy of
the boy turned and clung ; here his genius
and his aspirations found an outlet, and, re
pulsed by the every-day world, he was driven
back into the dead world of the Middle Ages.
The old church was a centre around which
Chatterton's imagination wove a story ; and
in this fabric of his brain, and not in the dull
years of Bristol or the fevered months of Lon
don, we find the real history of his life. The
good burgher Canynge, the poet-priest Rowley
and his friends, the knights and ladies at the
tournaments, the inexorable king — these were
the characters appearing in the romance which
may be constructed from the poems. Here
Chatterton was at home, here all was smiling
and kindly. Horace Walpole might spurn
him, but Rowley would not; and among the
creatures of his fancy Chatterton found rest
and peace, while outside all was harsh, bit
ter, and unsympathetic, with poverty for a
companion and suicide for friend. To judge
Chatterton as he was, we must go to the
Rowley Poems, for there the real life was
lived. In the weary years in Bristol, in the
few short, mad months in London, the boy
was acting a part. It is this distinction that

134 CHATTERTON

makes the vast difference between the ac
knowledged and the Rowley Poems. Mr. Skeat
follows Malone in thinking that the African
Eclogues form the connecting link between
the forgeries and the so-called genuine work.
In this I cannot agree. They may be nearer
than the others, but they are far, very far,
from the poems of Rowley. In those alone
do we find the promise of a worthy perform
ance. The promise might never have been
fulfilled, but nevertheless it is there. There,
too, we can see the workings of an eager, pas
sionate nature, creating for itself a realm of
thought, where the boy lived his real life, more
beautiful and more pathetic even than the
history of his actual existence among men,
which will always remain one of the great
tragedies of English literature. It was the
Rowley Poerns, muffled in the clumsy and
pitiful disguise under which their hapless
author hoped they might steal their way to
fame, which caused Wordsworth, with sure
poetic instinct, to give to Chatterton his most
enduring monument in the famous lines which
have fixed him in our literature as

"The marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride."

DR. HOLMES

t

DR. HOLMES

THE year which witnessed on the same day
the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles
Darwin seems to have a better right to be
called annus mirabilis in the history of the
English-speaking people than that year in the
reign of Charles II., of blessed memory, which
usually bears the title. But the great states
man and popular leader on one side of the At
lantic and the great man of science on the
other were not the only gifts of 1809 to hu
manity. In that year were also born Glad
stone and Tennyson and Oliver Wendell
Holmes. A short time ago, perhaps, we
might not have added the name of Dr.
Holmes to this brief and memorable list.
Death, however, changes and corrects the per
spective wonderfully. Without any sugges
tion, or even thought, of comparisons, whether
odious or the reverse, it is now easy to see
that Dr. Holmes rightfully belongs among
the remarkable men born in 1809. When he

138 DR. HOLMES

died, words were spoken about him in lands
and languages not his own, which in a flash
showed to all men, and especially to us of his
own country, how large a place he had filled
in this hurried and crowded world. Since
then has come Mr. Morse's admirable biogra
phy, and that too adds to his fame and enables
us to realize more clearly than ever before
how great a space in literature Dr. Holmes
occupied.

It is not my intention to trace the career of
Dr. Holmes, for that has been done finally and
in the most delightful manner by Mr. Morse.
Dr. Johnson's hundred years, moreover, have
only just begun, and it is too soon to say,
" Come, let us judge him," but it is not too
soon, perhaps, to look for a moment at the
work he did and the place he filled, and to ex
press our gratitude for both.

Dr. Holmes had in all ways a singularly
happy and successful life. Literary fame came
early and remained with him, ever growing
and broadening. In his old age he did not
have the sore trial of outliving his reputation,
but saw it at the end as fresh and flourishing
as in the beginning and with all the promise
of long endurance. In Massachusetts, and es
pecially in Boston, he was universally beloved,

DR. HOLMES 139

and when it was known that he was dead, men
felt, despite his age, as if there, where he was
best known, his going made a gap in nature
and took from them something which was as
much a part of their being as the air they
breathed. Such a life, so full of happiness to
others and to himself, so crowded with all that
most men desire, may well be called fortunate.
Yet the word is not wholly apt or adequate.
Such a life is not all a matter of fortune. It
is in very large measure due to the man him
self. Dr. Holmes owed his success to his own
gifts and to their wise use, but he also, in large
measure, owed the happiness which he both
enjoyed and imparted to his cheerful philos
ophy 3n^ to his wide, eager, and quick sympa
thies with all that touched mankind.

He was in one respect a very rare combina
tion. He had the scientific mind, and at the
same time he was a poet and novelist. As a
physician, and as a lecturer for many years upon
anatomy, he won distinction and success, and
every form of scientific thought and inquiry had
for him always strong attractions. He could
think and could impart his knowledge with the
precision and accuracy which science demands.
Yet with this strongly marked habit of mind
were joined a lively imagination, the power to

140 DR. HOLMES

body forth the shapes of things unknown, and
a most delicate fancy. These mental qualities
in a high degree of excellence are rarely found
together. Instances have not been wanting —
like Sir Thomas Browne, for example — of men
of scientific profession and training who had
likewise great literary gifts, and who as observ
ers, thinkers, and writers take high rank. But
this is something very different from the genius
of the poet and romancer. The creative imag
ination and the scientific cast of thought, joined
as they were in Dr. Holmes, imply an extraor
dinary flexibility and versatility of mind. In
his case, too, the mingling of the different ele
ments never affected either injuriously. Imag
ination did not make his medicine or anatomy
untrustworthy, nor did his scientific tendencies
make either his verse or his prose cold or dry.
His wit and humor, it is true, gleamed through
his lectures, and left behind them to a gener
ation of students a rich harvest of stories and
traditions. The scientific cast of thought, on
the other hand, as it often supplied an image
or a metaphor, may possibly have had some
thing to do also with the unfailing correctness
of the poet's verse. Certain at least it is that
the unusual combination of these widely differ
ing qualities of mind was no less remarkable

DR. HOLMES 141

than the fact that they never jarred upon each
other, and never warped the life's work in
either direction.

His fame, of course, was won as a man of
letters, not as a man of science, and it is as a
man of letters that the world at large looks
upon him. Here his good fortune was with
him also. He came at a good time. Before
his birth, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Frank
lin, and Alexander Hamilton were the only
American writers whose work had found a
permanent place in literature. Two of these
were specialists, one in theology, the other in
statecraft, and both wrote with a particular
purpose. Franklin alone had added to litera
ture in its broad sense, and he, curiously
enough, although neither a poet nor romancer,
united great literary talent with scientific at
tainments of the highest order, as well as with
the finest arts of the statesman and diploma
tist. But one writer cannot create a litera
ture, and it wasjeft to the nineteenth century
to show that Americans could make a distinct
and characteristic contribution to the great
literature of the English-speaking people.

Dr. Holmes's life covered the whole period
of this literary development in which he was
himself to play so large a part. Knickcr-

142 DR. HOLMES

backer s History of New York, the first endur
ing work of this period, was finished in 1809,
the year of Dr. Holmes's birth. He was a
boy of six when "Thanatopsis " appeared, the
first poem of the new country which was to
hold a place in the higher poetry of our lan
guage. A few years later he might have read
Precaution, that pale imitation of an English
novel which Cooper sent forth to deserved fail
ure, and then he could have rejoiced in the
series of American stories by the same author
which followed hard upon it, which added a
new figure to the great heroes of fiction, and
which travelled about the world with all the
delight of fresh adventure and original charac
ters in their pages.

But while Dr. Holmes's birth and boyhood
were thus coincident with the appearance of
the earliest writings of Irving and Bryant and
Cooper, he himself and his own contempora
ries were the men who were to do the largest
work for American literature in the century
just then beginning. Poe was born in the
same year as Holmes, and has himself a high
place in the list of the annus mirabilis. His
weak character and unhappy life obscured his
work and warped men's judgment, but his
wild genius has mounted steadily towards its

DR. HOLMES 143

true place. He to whom so little was given
in his lifetime has now, years after his death,
called forth the admiration of English critics
and excited the devotion of more than one
French poet. At this moment a school of de
cadents and symbolists, who bear the same
relation to our real literature that Lyly, with
his " Euphues," bore to the literature of the
Elizabethans, find, as they think, in Poe, who
is real and lasting, a master and forerunner, as
well as a justification for their own little pass
ing fashion.

But Poe stood far apart from the men with
whom Dr. Holmes is inseparably connected.
Hawthorne, the greatest of them all in a pure
ly literary sense, was only four years Holmes's
senior. Emerson was born in 1803, Longfel
low in 1807, Whittier in 1808. Lowell, who
was, perhaps, more intimate with Dr. Holmes
than any one else, was only ten years his jun
ior, while the historians, Bancroft and Prcscott,
Motley and Parkman, were his life-long friends
and comrades in greater or less degree. They
were all New Englanders, all offspring of the
old Puritan stock. It was a remarkable group
of men ; and now that the last has gone we
can see what a large place they fill in Ameri
can literature, and how much of all that we

144 DR. HOLMES

like to think of as lasting in that literature is
their work. Poe, who did not love them, and
who felt that they did not appreciate the
genius which he knew himself to possess, was
wont to rail at them as the " New England
school." Some of his keen criticism of them
and others was both true and penetrating, but
he was wrong when he called these men " a
school." They were in no sense " a school,"
for they differed as utterly in their work as
they did in their purposes and lines of
thought. They may have shared certain
literary opinions and they were undoubtedly
friends, but "a school" cannot exist without
teachers and pupils, leaders and followers, and
these men were equals, working each in his
own way.

Of all the group, Dr. Holmes, although he
may not hold the highest place among them
for literary achievement, was the most various
in performance and the most versatile in facul
ty. We all think of him first as a poet. There
are some of his poems which are in every one's
mind, which live in our memories, and rise to
our lips. In a recent notice in some English
journal, it was said, with a faint flavor of pat
ronage, that certain of Dr. Holmes's poems
were in all the anthologies. The critic might

DR. HOLMES 145

have added that most good poems in the lan
guage arc. To say of a poet that his verses are
in all the anthologies, and on the lips of the
people, has been a noble praise from the days
of Tyrtaeus to our own. Dr. Holmes has won
this place. Certain of his poems, like " The
Chambered Nautilus," " The Last Leaf," or
"Old Ironsides," are in every collection. They
have passed into our speech, they have become
part of our inheritance; and greater assurance
of remembrance than this no man can have.

Dr. Holmes is perhaps thought of most of
ten as the poet of occasion, and certainly no
one has ever surpassed him in this field. He
was always apt, always happy ; he always had
the essential lightness of touch, and the right
mingling of wit and sentiment. But he was
very much more than a writer of occasional
verse, and his extraordinary success in this
direction has tended to obscure his much
higher successes, and to cause men to over
look the fact that he was a true poet in the
best sense. The brilliant occasional poems
were only the glitter on the surface of the
stream, while behind and beneath them lay
depths of feeling and beauties of imagery and
thought to which full justice has not yet been,
but surely will be, done. ' He felt this a little

10

146 DR. HOLMES

himself ; and he never wrote a truer line than
when he said :

"While my gay stanza pleased the banquet's lords,
My soul within was tuned to deeper chords."

In his poetry and in his mastery of all the
forms of verse, he showed the variety of tal
ent which was perhaps his most characteristic
quality. He had a strong bent towards that
kind of poetry of which Pope is the best ex
ample, and he possessed much in common
with the author of the Essay on Man. He
had the same easy flow in his verse, the same
finish, wit of a kindlier sort, the same wisdom
without any attempt at rhymed metaphysics,
and a like power of saying, in smooth and per
fect lines,

" What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

The metrical form which is so identified with
Pope always seemed to appeal to Dr. Holmes,
and, when he employed it, it lost nothing in
his hands. But this was only one of many in
struments he used. He was admirable in nar
rative and ballad poetry, the poetry of energy,
movement, and incident, of which "Bunker Hill
Battle " is as good an example as any. He

DR. HOLMES 147

ventured often into the dangerous domain of
comic poetry, where so few have succeeded
and so many failed, and he always came out
successful, saved by the sanity and balance
which one always feels in everything he wrote.
Of a much higher order were the poems of dry
humor, where a kindly satire and homely wis
dom pointed the moral, as in the " One Hoss
Shay." But he did work far finer and better
than all this, excellent as this was in its kind.
He was not one of

" The bards sublime,

Whose distant footsteps echo through the corridors
of time."

Nor was he one of those who seem to have
sounded all the depths and shoals of passion.
I do not think he thought so himself or ever
was under the least misapprehension as to the
nature of his own work, and in this freedom
from illusions lay one secret of his success and
of the tact which never failed. I remember his
saying to me in speaking of orators and writ
ers, that once or twice in the lives of such men
there came a time when they did, in the boy's
phrase, "a little better than they knew how."
I naturally asked if such a moment had ever
come to him. He smiled, and I well recall

148 DR. HOLMES

his reply: "Yes, I think in the 'Chambered
Nautilus' I may have done a little 'better
than I knew how.' " There can be no doubt
that in that beautiful poem, which we all
know by heart, there is a note of noble aspi
ration which is found only in the best work.
But that is not the only one by any means.
That same aspiring note is often heard in his
verse, and there are many poems by Dr. Holmes
filled with the purest and tenderest sentiment.
Such, for instance, are the lines on the death of
his classmate and friend, Professor Peirce ; such,
also, is the " Iron Gate," the tender and beauti
ful poem which he read at the breakfast given
him on his seventieth birthday. Such, too, are
his lyrics, which include much of his best work,
and which have in a high degree the fervor
and the concentration which the best lyric
ought always to possess.

People generally link his name with a mem
ory of wit and humor, for he had both in large
measure, and the world is very grateful to any
one who can make it laugh. But the senti
ment and aspiration, which are of higher qual
ity than wit and humor can ever be, and which
are felt most often in the poems that love of
man or love of country have inspired, as well
as the perfection of the poet's workmanship

DR. HOLMES 149

and the originality of his thought, arc in Dr.
Holmes too often overlooked. This perfection
of form and felicity of imagery never left him.
In the poem on the death of Francis Parkman,
written only a year before his own death, when
he was well past eighty, there is neither weak
ness nor falling off. The sentiment is as true
and simple as ever, the flow of the verse as
easy, and when he puts England's conquest of
France in Canada into the single line

" The Lilies withered where the Lion trod,"

we need no critic to tell us that the old happi
ness of phrase and power of imagery remained
undimmed to the last.

Yet, when all is said of his poetry, of which
he left so much fixed in our language to be
prized and loved and remembered, I think it
cannot be doubted that the work of Dr.
Holmes which will be most lasting is to be
found in the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
and its successors. The novel of Elsie Ven-
ncr is a strong and interesting book. The
story holds us fast, and the study of a strange
and morbid state of mind has the fascination
given to the snakes themselves. Such a book
would have made the fame and fortune of a

150 DR. HOLMES

lesser man. But, as lasting literature in the
highest sense, it falls behind the Autocrat.
There the whole man spoke. There he found
full scope for his wit and humor and mirth,
his keen observation, his varied learning, his
worldly wisdom, his indignation with wrong,
and his tenderest sentiment. To attempt to
analyze the Autocrat and its successors would
be impossible. It is not the "kind of literature
that lends itself to analysis or criticism. It is
the study of many-sided humanity in the form
of the essay rather than the novel, although
the creation and development of character
play in it a large part. Such books, with the
quality of enduring life, are few and rare, al
though many have attempted them, but when
they really have the vital qualities they are not
of the fashion of the day which passeth away,
but for all time, because they open to us the
pages of the great book of human nature. Mon
taigne and Addison, Goldsmith, Sterne, and
Charles Lamb are the best, perhaps the only
masters really in this field, for the exact com
bination of wit and humor, of pathos and wis
dom, of sense and sentiment, where the les
son of life runs close beneath the jest and
the realities tread hard upon the fancies, is as
essential as it is rare. To this small and chosen

DR. HOLMES 151

company Dr. Holmes belongs, and in it he
holds high place. All the qualities, all the di
versities are there, and, most important of all,
the perfect balance among them is there too.
The style runs with the theme, always easy
but never slovenly, always pure and good but
never labored, like talk by the fireside, with
out either affectation or carelessness, while over
it all (and this is stronger in Dr. Holmes than
in any one else) hangs an atmosphere of friend
liness which draws us nearer to the writer than
any other quality. Writings such as these have
all had, perhaps all require, the air of learning
as evidence that to keen observation of man
has been added the knowledge of many books.
It is to be feared that Sterne, sham as he was
for all his genius, got his learning by wholesale
theft from Burton. But the learning of the
others was genuine, and in no one more so
than in Dr. Holmes. He had an eager love of
knowledge of all kinds, whether new or old,
which carried him far afield. Like Dr. John
son, he rarely read a book through from cover
to cover, but also like Dr. Johnson, he ab
sorbed all there was in a book with great
quickness and remarkable power of retention.
He has said in print, I believe — I remember
certainly his saying to me — that two of the

152 DR. HOLMES

books which he always kept by him for odd
moments or the wakeful hours were Montaigne
and Burton. It was a most typical choice : the
Frenchman of olden time looking out on life
with his keen vision and cheerful cynicism, and
the melancholy Englishman with his curious
and rambling learning strongly tinctured with
quaint medical lore. Dr. Holmes, who loved
them both, ranged over the fields that both
had occupied, as well as over others they had
never touched.

It is in his novels, to which I have only allud
ed, that the critics have agreed that Dr. Holmes
had least success. So far as Elsie Venner is
concerned, I am not of this mind. But it is
generally overlooked that in the Autocrat and
its successors he has drawn and created char
acters which all his readers love and remem
ber, and that he has also described in these
same volumes little scenes and situations which
show the best art of the novelist. Let me
quote a single example, the familiar scene of
the " Long Path " on Boston Common, in the
Aiitocrat :

" At last I got out the question — ' Will you take the
long path ?' ' Certainly,' said the school-mistress, ' with
much pleasure.' ' Think,' I said, ' before you answer ;
if you take the long path with me now, I shall in-

DR. HOLMES 153

terpret it that we shall part no more.' The school
mistress stepped back with a sudden movement as if
an arrow had struck her.

" One of the long granite blocks used as seats was
hard by — the one you may still see close by the Gingko
tree. ' Pray sit down,' I said. ' No, no,' she answered,
softly, ' I will walk the long path with you.' "

Surely there is a very beautiful, a very
charming art in this little scene. It is as
good as the death of Lefevre in Tristram
Shandy, and has much the same qualities of
tenderness and reserve, of simplicity and sug
gestion.

I have spoken very inadequately of the writ
er, not at all of the man. It is not easy for
those of us who have known Dr. Holmes all
our lives and who have lived so near to him, to
write of him with the proper critical discrim
ination. The spell is yet upon us, the charm
is still too potent. We have the personal
feeling too strongly with us to be entirely dis
passionate as judges or critics of the man him
self.

But Dr. Holmes had one personal quality
which ought not to be passed over without
mention anywhere or at any time. He was a
thorough American and always a patriot, al
ways national and independent, and never co-

154 DR. HOLMES

lonial or cosmopolitan or subservient to foreign
opinion. In the war of the rebellion no one
was a stronger upholder of the national cause
than he. In his earliest verse we catch con
stantly the flutter of the flag, and in his war
poems we feel the rush and life of the great
uprising which saved the nation. He was in
the best sense a citizen of the world, of broad
and catholic sympathies. But he was first and
before that an American, and this fact is at
once proof and reason that he was able to do
work which has carried delight to many peo
ple of many tongues, and which has won him
a high and lasting place in the great literature
of the English-speaking people as well as among
that small and beloved company of authors
with whom we like to live and talk, and who
are, above all things else, our*familiar friends.

01 KO '

rt*.*-

6>>A • i

u, 0-<UU'

,

.

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

Of THE

UNIVERSITY

Of

A LIBERAL EDUCATION*

THE most splendid chapter in modern his
tory is that which tells of the rise of the new
learning in Europe and in England. It has
all the unspeakable charm of spring, and all
the glory of awakening life which Michael
Angelo drew on the vaulting of the Sistine
Chapel and called the creation of Adam.
Men struggled up out of the darkness of the
Middle Ages with much sore labor. That they
won through as they did was due to men's
bringing up from their hiding places all that
was left of the writings and the art of Rome and
Greece. In the fragments of these two great
literatures were revealed the thought, the art,
and the history of a high and long-forgotten
civilization. The discovery roused the intel
lect of Europe from its long sleep. For cen
turies this awakening was called the revival of

* An address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Soci
ety of Harvard University, in Sanders Theatre, Thursday,
June 28, 1894.

158 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

learning; and the burst of genius in literature
and art and thought, which followed hard upon
it, has never been equalled in richness of pro
duction or in exuberance of life. Small won
der is it that mankind felt a profound grati
tude to the literatures which had thus led them
to the light. It was natural enough that under
such conditions they should have looked upon
learning as a knowledge of the classics, and
should have defined a classical as a liberal
education.

v'Thus it came to pass that a liberally edu
cated man was one educated in the classics,
and a man who did not know the classics, no
matter what his other acquirements might be,
stood without the sacred pale. This definition
of a liberal education has lasted to our own
time, and technically it is still correct. Yet we
all know that there has been a widespread re
volt in practice from the old and classic theory.
To my thinking, the pendulum has now swung
too far. Mere knowledge of the Latin and
Greek literatures no longer makes nor can
make a liberal education, but Greek and Lat
in nevertheless ought invariably to be a part
of it. To read Greek and Latin is always, and
at the very least, an accomplishment and a re
finement. The key which opens the door to

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 159

the Iliad should be forced into the hand of
every boy seeking the higher education. Then
we may part company with the old system, if
you will, and let the student turn the key or
leave the door locked, as he pleases. But so
far as the threshold, at least, of those great
poems, the old and the new theories ought to
travel together.

I have, however, no intention of entering
upon the well-fought ground of the study of
the classics. My purpose here is very different.
It is to speak of a liberal education in its broad
est and truest sense, without any reference to
recent controversies over the study of what
are misnamed the dead languages, just as if the
speech of Homer could ever die while civiliza
tion lives. To understand, however, the real
relation of a liberal education to our American
life, the first step is a right definition. We all
know the conventional or classical definition,
but we must have the true one as well.

One of the best known and least read of
Queen Anne's men is Sir Richard Steele. His
good and evil fortune, his kind heart, his ready
wit, his attractive but somewhat imperfect
character, are all familiar to a large posterity
with whom he has ever been popular. But
his writings, in which he took so much simple

160 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

pride, are, it is to be feared, largely unread.
The book of quotations contains only two
sentences of his writing, and one of these can
hardly be called familiar. But the other fully
deserves the adjective, for it is perhaps the
finest compliment ever paid by a man to a
woman. Steele wrote of Lady Elizabeth
Hastings that " to love her was a liberal educa
tion," and thus rescued her forever from the ob
livion of the British Peerage. He certainly did
not mean by this that to love the Lady Eliza
beth was as good as a knowledge of Latin and
Greek, for that would have been no compli
ment at all, unless from Carlyle's friend Dry
asdust, a very different personage from the
gallant and impecunious husband of " Prue."
No, Steele meant something very far removed
from Latin and Greek, and everybody knows
what lie meant, even if one cannot put it read
ily into words.

To the mind of the eighteenth century, a lib
eral education entirely classical, if you please,
so far as books went, meant the education
which bred tolerance and good manners and
courage, which taught a man to love honor
and truth and patriotism, and all things of
good report. Like the history of Sir John
Froissart, it was the part of a liberal education

A LIBERAL EDUCATION l6l

" to encourage all valorous hearts and to show
them honorable examples." Such, I think, we
all believe a liberal education to be to-day, in
its finest and best sense. But yet this is not
all, nor are the fields of learning which a great
university opens to its students all. Besides
the liberal education of Steele and the ample
page of knowledge which a university unrolls,
there is still something more, and this some-
thing is the most important part.

The first expression that we get as to the
purposes of our own university is given in
New England's First Fruits, published in Lon
don in 1643. It is there said : " One of the
next things we longed for, and looked after,
was to advance learning and perpetuate it to
posterity ; dreading to leave an illiterate min
istry to the churches when our present minis
ters shall lie in the dust."

The later charters of the college all pro
posed as its purpose that it should fit persons
for the church and for civil employment, and in
these old phrases is the kernel of the whole
matter. It was the object of the college, as the
Puritans looked at it, to perpetuate learning,
which was at once the badge and guide of
civilization, but it was also and equally the
object of the college to fit its students for life.

1 62 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

The founders of the college mentioned only
one field of work, that of the ministry. It
was a natural limitation enough at that time.
The clergy were the most powerful, and to
the Puritan mind by far the most important,
class in the community, and therefore this
early account of New England tells us that the
leading object of the college was to maintain a
learned ministry. Fifty years later the views
had widened, and the purpose of the college
is then defined as the preparation of men not
only for the church, but for civil employment,
or, in other words, for the service of the State.
This idea has gone on broadening ever since,
until now the true conception of the high
est duty of a great university is, or ought
to be, to fit its scholars for the life which
lies before them when they go out into the
world. Ordinarily we think of a college sim
ply as a place where men receive their pre
liminary training for the learned professions,
where they lay the foundations for a life of
scientific or historical investigation, for classi
cal scholarship, or for the study of modern
languages or literature, and where they gather
that general knowledge which constitutes the
higher education, even if the student leaves
learning behind him at the college gate to

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 163

enter on a life of action or of business. Yet
in reality these are but the details of a liberal
education, and we do not want to lose sight
of the city on account of the number of
houses immediately around us.

The first and the most important function
of a liberal education is to fit a man for the
life before him, and to prepare him, whatever
profession or pursuit he may follow, to be a
useful citizen of the country which gave him
birth. This is of vast importance in any
country, but in the United States it is of
peculiar moment, because here every man has
imposed upon him the duties of sovereignty,
and in proportion to his capacity and his
opportunities are the responsibilities of that
sovereignty.

A liberal education is a great gift and a high
privilege. Every one who is fortunate enough
to receive it ought to realize what it has cost.
Many men obtain it in the most honorable
manner by great personal effort, self-sacrifice,
and self-control. They are sure to value it
aright. But the cost to which I refer is great
er than this. These vast endowments which
have founded and built up American colleges,
from the noble and often pathetic gifts of the
early settlers down to the millions which have

164 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

been given in our own time, represent the de
votion, the ambition, the toil, and the thrift of
thousands of men and women who have sought
to do something according to their strength,
that those who came after them might have
more generous opportunities, and that civili
zation might be advanced. Thus it is that a
liberal education is such a precious and dearly
bought gift to those who obtain it. Yet it is not
enough even that the men who receive a liberal
education should appreciate it. It is far more
important that the universities which dispense
it should understand what it means in its
widest sense, and should direct it to its true
purposes ; for it is possible so to pervert it that
it shall be of no value, but rather an injury, not
only to the student but to the community, and
in this wise become hurtful to education itself.
If a man is not a good citizen it boots little
whether he is a learned Grecian or a sound
Latinist. If he is out of sympathy with his
country, his people, and his time, the last re
finement and the highest accomplishments are
of slight moment. But it is of the utmost im
portance that every man, and especially every
educated man, in the United States, no matter
what his profession or business, should be in
sympathy with his country, with its history in

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 165

the past, its needs in the present, and its as
pirations for the future. If he has this, all the
rest will follow, and it is precisely at this point
that there seems to be a real danger in our uni
versity life and in our liberal education. The
peril, moreover, is none the less real because
the wrong influence is subtle.

We are apt to gather here at the end of
each college year in a kindly and very nat
ural spirit of mutual admiration. Those of
us who come from the busy outside world,
come to renew old memories, and to brighten,
if only for a moment, the friendships which
time and separation would darken and rust.
We are in no mood for criticism. Yet it is
perhaps as well not to let the mutual con
gratulations go too far, for we have the ad
vantage of coming from without, and are not
likely to mistake the atmosphere which gath
ers about a university for that of the world at
large. A lord chancellor of England said some
years ago, in a speech in Balliol College hall,
" I am glad to be informed from preceding
speakers of the talents, virtues, and distinction
of the company here present. Would that I
were fifty years younger to be educated under
such influences as these. Had I that good
fortune there is no knowing what I should

l66 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

become. It is owing to men like these that
Oxford can boast that the tide of civilization
flows within her limits, lower, indeed, but not
much lower than in the world around." Some
people may be heretics enough to think that
similar observation might not be out of place
sometimes as a suggestion at least at the com
mencement dinners of some of our own uni
versities. In any event, the sting of the lord
chancellor's satire lay as usual in its large leav
en of truth. The danger of every university
lies in its losing touch with the world about it.
This is bad anywhere. It is worse in a repub
lic than anywhere else.

We must, however, be more definite again if
we would reach any result. "Losing touch"
is a vague expression; " lack of sympathy"
is little better. It is not easy to put my
meaning in one word, but perhaps to say
that the first duty of an American university
and its liberal education should be to make
its students good Americans comes as near to
it as anything. Still we must go a step fur
ther, for many persons are prone to sneer at
the demand for Americanism, as if it meant
merely a blatant and boastful Chauvinism,
employed only for the baser political uses.
There is always an attempt to treat it as if

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 167

it were something like the utterances which
Dickens satirized long ago in the persons of
Jefferson Brick and Elijah Pogram. That was
certainly neither an agreeable nor creditable
form of national self-assertion. Yet it was in
finitely better, coarse and boastful as it was,
than the opposite spirit which turns disdain
fully even from the glories of nature because
they are American and not foreign, and which
looks scornfully at the Sierras because they
are not the Alps. The Bricks and the Po-
grams may have been coarse and vulgar, yet
the spirit of which they were caricatures was
at least strong, and capable of better things,
while the other spirit is pitifully weak, and
has no future before it except one of further
decay.

True Americanism is something widely dif
ferent from either of these. It is really only
another word for intelligent patriotism. Loud
self-assertion has no part in it, and mere criti
cism and carping, with their everlasting whine
because we are not as others are, cannot exist
beside it. Americanism in its right sense docs
not tend in the least to repress wholesome
criticism of what is wrong; on the contrary, it
encourages it. But this is the criticism which
is made only as the first step towards a rem-

1 68 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

edy, and is not mere snarling for snarling's
sake. Such Americanism as this takes pride
in what we have done and in the men we
have bred, and knows not the eternal com
parison with other people which is the sure
sign of a tremulous little mind, and of a deep
doubt of one's own position.

To all which the answer is constantly made
that this is merely asserting a truism and a
commonplace, and that of course every one
is intelligently patriotic. Of the great mass
of our people this is true beyond question.
They are thoroughly patriotic in the best
sense. Theoretically it is true of all. Practi
cally there is still much left to be desired
among our liberally educated men, and it is of
this precise defect among those who have a
liberal education that I wish to speak.

The danger of the higher education of a
great university is, that in widening the hori
zon it may destroy the sense of proportion so
j far as our own country is concerned. The
teachings of a university open to us the litera
ture, the art, the science, the learning, and the
history of all other nations. They would be
quite worthless if they did not do so. These
teachings form, and necessarily form, the great
mass of all that we study here. That which

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 169

relates to our own country is inevitably only
a small part, comparatively speaking, of the
great whole. This also is quite natural. Our
own nation is comparatively new. Its history
is not long, and it is not set off by the glitter
of a court, or of an ancient aristocracy. Our
literature is young. Our art is just develop
ing. In the broad sweep of a liberal educa
tion, that portion which relates to the United
States is but one of many parts. Hence there
is a tendency to lose the sense of proportion,
to underrate our own place in the history and
life of the world, and to forget that knowledge
of our own country, while it excludes nothing
else, is nevertheless more important to each one
of us than that of all other countries, if we mean
to play a man's part in life. There is no danA
ger that liberally educated men will overvalue!
their own country; there is great danger that)
they will undervalue it. This does not arise
from any lack of opportunity here to learn
our history, or to know what we have done as
a people. It comes from a failure rightly to
appreciate our history and our achievements.
We are too apt to think of ourselves as some
thing apart and inferior, and to fail to see our
true place in the scale of nations. Many men
of liberal education either expect too much of

1 70 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

the United States, or value too little what has
been accomplished here. As has just been said,
we are a young nation — and certain fruits of a
high civilization require time to ripen. It is
foolish to criticise the absence of those things
which time alone can bring to perfection, and
their coming is retarded, not hastened, by
fault-finding. On the other hand, we are apt
to overlook what really has been done, and we
often fail to judge rightly because we use super
ficial comparisons with some other contempo
rary people, instead of measuring ourselves by
the just standards of the world's history.

Let us look for a moment at the last hun
dred years which cover our history as a nation.
In that time we have conquered a continent,
won it from the wilderness and the savages,
by much privation, and much desperate and
heroic fighting, unrecorded for the most part,
with nature and with man. Where else in the
nineteenth century will you find such a con
quest as that ? And this empire that we have
conquered we have saved also from being rent
asunder. That work of salvation cost us four
years of war. Look again over the nineteenth
century and see where you can find a war of
like magnitude, equal to ours in its stake, its
fighting, its sacrifices, or in the noble spirit that

A LIBERAL EDUCATION iyi

it evoked among our people. As the French
traveller said, standing among the graves at
Arlington, " Only a great people is capable of
a great civil war."

I will not touch upon the material develop
ment, unequalled in history, which has gone
hand in hand with this conquest of waste
places and fighting tribes of Indians. It is
enough here to count only those higher things
which show the real greatness of a nation.

Turn to the men. In our hundred years we
have given to the world's roll of statesmen
Washington and Lincoln. You cannot match
them elsewhere in the same period. Are there
any better or purer or greater than they to be
found in the tide of time? Take up the list
of great soldiers. Setting aside Napoleon,
who stands all apart with Caesar and Hanni
bal, what nation has made a larger gift to
the leaders of men in battle than the country
which added to the list the names of Washing
ton, Grant, and Lee ? Since Nelson fell at
Trafalgar, where in naval warfare will you find
a greater chief than Farragut ?

In those wonderful inventions which have
affected the history and development of man,
the country which has given to the world the
cotton-gin, the telegraph, the sewing-machine,

172 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

the steamship, the telephone, and the armored
ship holds a place second to none.

Turn now to those fields which exact the
conditions of an old civilization — wealth, lei
sure, and traditions. Even here, despite the
adverse circumstances of national youth, there
is much to record, much to give fair promise,
much in which to rejoice.

From the time of Franklin and his kite, we
ever have done our share in scientific work.
We have developed a literature of our own,
and made it part of the great literature of the
English-speaking race. The Luxembourg has
opened its jealously guarded doors to give
space and place to five American painters, and
the chisel of St. Gaudens has carved statues
which no contemporary elsewhere can rival.
The buildings at the Chicago Fair came as
a beautiful surprise and a great achievement.
They showed that we had the capacity to
take rank among the great building races of
the earth.

It is a great record for a hundred years. Even
if we glance only at the mountain tops, it is a re
markable story of conquest and growth. If our
universities do not teach us to value it rightly
they are of little worth, for to know the pres
ent and to act in it we must have a just knowl-

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 173

edge of our place in history. If we have that
knowledge, we shall realize that a nation which,
whatever its shortcomings, has done so much
and bred such men, has a promise for the fut
ure and a place in the world which brings a
grave responsibility to those who come to the
inheritance.

The first step, then, for our universities, if
in the true spirit of a liberal education they
seek to fit men for the life about them, is to
make them Americans and send them forth in
sympathy with their country. And the sec
ond step is like the first : A university should
aim to put a man in sympathy with his time,
and make him comprehend it, if we would
have him take effective part in the life of his
time. As the danger on the first point of pa
triotism is that the many-sided teachings of a
university will prevent a just sense of the place
held by our country, so on the second point
the danger is that dealing largely with the
past, the university will alienate its students
from the present. The past is a good school-
house but a bad dwelling-place. We cannot
really understand the present without the
fullest knowledge of the past, but it is the
present with which we are to deal, and the
past must not be allowed to hide it.

174 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

There is a visible tendency in universities
to become in their teachings laudatores tern-
poris acti, and this tendency is full of peril.
The world was never made better, the great
march of humanity was never led by men
whose eyes were fixed upon the past. The
leaders of men are those who look forward,
not backward.

" For not through eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward look — the land is bright."

v As I say do not undervalue your own coun
try, so I say do not undervalue your own
time. The nineteenth century is dying. It
has been a great century. It has seen Water
loo and Sedan and Gettysburg. As it has
passed along it has beheld the settlement of
Australia and South Africa, and the conquest
of the American continent. It has replaced
the stage-coach with the locomotive, and
united the continents with electric cables. It
has been the century of Lincoln and Bismarck,
of Wellington and Grant, and Lee and Moltke.
Scott and Thackeray, Dickens and Hawthorne
have woven stories to rejoice it ; and Brown
ing and Tennyson and Victor Hugo, Lowell

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 175

and Poe have been among its later poets. It
has been a time richly worth living in. Now
in its closing years, with the new and un
known century hard upon us, it is more than
ever a time worth living in, full of marvellous
voices to those who will listen with attentive
ears, full of opportunity to any one who will
take part in its strifes, fullest of all of pro
found interest to those who will look upon it
with considerate eyes.

How, then, is a university to reach the re
sults we ought to have from its teachings in
this country and this period ? How is it to
inspire its students with sympathy for their
country and their time as the most important
of all its lessons? Some persons may reply
that it can be obtained by making the uni
versity training more practical. Much has
been said on this point first and last, but the
theory, which is vague at best, seems to me
to have no bearing here. It is not a practical
education which we seek in this regard, even
if it was the business of a university to give
one, but a liberal education, which shall foster
certain strong qualities of heart and head.
Our search now and here is not for an educa
tion which shall enable a man to earn his liv
ing with the least possible delay, but for a

176 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

training which shall develop character and
mind along certain lines.

To one man Harvard gives the teaching
which fits him to be an engineer ; to another,
that which opens to him law or medicine or
theology. But to all her students alike it is
her duty to give that which will send them
out from her gates able to understand and to
sympathize with the life of the time. This
cannot be done by rules or systems or text
books. It can come, and can only come, from
the subtle, impalpable, and yet powerful influ
ences which the spirit and atmosphere of a
great university can exert upon those within
its care. It is not easy to define or classify
those influences, although we all know their
general effect. Nevertheless it is, I think,
possible to get at something sufficiently defi
nite to indicate what is lacking, and where
the peril lies. It all turns on the spirit which
inspires the entire collegiate body, on the
mental attitude of the university as a whole.
This brings us at once to the danger which I
think confronts all our large universities to
day, and which I am sure confronts that uni
versity which I know and love best. We are
given over too much to the critical spirit, and
we are educating men to become critics of

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 177

other men, instead of doers of deeds them
selves. This is all wrong. Criticism is health
ful, necessary, and desirable, but it is always
abundant, and is infinitely less important than
performance. There is not the slightest risk
that the supply of critics will run out, for
there are always enough middle-aged failures
to keep the ranks full, if every other resource
should fail. But even if we were short of
critics, it is a sad mistake to educate young
men to be mere critics at the outset of life.
It should be the first duty of a university to
breed in them far other qualities. Faith, hope
and belief, enthusiasm and courage are the
qualities to be trained and developed in
young men by a liberal education. Youth is
the time for action and for work, not for criti
cism. A liberal education should encourage
the spirit of action, not deaden it. We want
the men whom we send out from our universi
ties to count in the battle of life and in the
history of their time, and to count more and
not less because of their liberal education.
They will not count at all, be well assured, if
they come out trained only to look coldly
and critically on all that is being done in the
world, and on all who are doing it. Long
ago Emerson pointed the finger of scorn at

12

178 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

this type when he said: "There is my fine
young Oxford gentleman, who says there is
nothing new and nothing true and no mat
ter." We cannot afford to have that type,
and it is the true product of that critical spirit
which says to its scholars, "See how badly
the world is governed ; see how covered with
dust and sweat the men are who are trying to
do the world's business, and how many mis
takes they make ; let us sit here in the shade
with Amaryllis and add up the errors of these
bruised, grimy fellows, and point out what
they ought to do, while we make no mistakes
ourselves by sticking to the safe rule of at
tempting nothing." This is a very comfort
able attitude, but it is the one of all others
which a university should discourage instead
of inculcating. Moreover, with such an atti
tude of mind towards the world of thought
and action is always allied a cultivated indif
ference, than which there is nothing more en
ervating.

And these things are no pale abstractions
because they are in their nature purely mat
ters of sentiment and thought. When Crom
well demanded the New Model, he said, "A
set of poor tapsters and town apprentices
would never fight against men of honor."

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 179

They were of the same race and the same
blood as the cavaliers, these tapsters and ap
prentices ; they had the same muscles and the
same bodily form and strength. It was the
right spirit that was lacking, and this Crom
well, with the keen eye of genius, plainly saw.
So he set against the passion of loyalty the
stem enthusiasm of religion, and swept resist
ance from his path. One sentiment against
another, and the mightier conquered. Come
nearer to our own time. Some six thousand
ill-armed American frontiersmen met ten thou
sand of the unconquered army of Wellington's
veterans hard by New Orleans. They beat
them in a night attack, they got the better of
them in an artillery duel, and finally they drove
back with heavy slaughter the onset of these
disciplined troops who had over and over again
carried by storm defences manned by the sol
diers of Napoleon. These backwoodsmen
were of the same race as their opponents, no
stronger, no more inured to hardships than
Wellington's men, but they had the right
spirit in them. They did not stop to criti
cise the works, and to point out that cotton-
bales were not the kind of rampart recognized
in Europe. They did not pause to say that a
properly constituted army ought to have bayo-

180 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

nets and that they had none. Still less did
they set about finding fault with their leader.
They went in and did their best, and their
best was victory. One example is as good
as a hundred. It is the spirit, the faith, the
courage, the determination of men which
have made the world move. These are the
qualities which have carried the dominion of
the English-speaking people across continents
and over wide oceans to the very ends of the
earth. It is the same in every field of human
activity. The men who see nothing but the
lions in the path, who fear ridicule and dread
mistakes, who behold the faults they may com
mit more plainly than the guerdon to be won,
win no battles, govern no states, write no books,
carve no statues, paint no pictures. The men
who do not fear to fall are those who rise. It
is the men who take the risks of failure and
mistakes who win through defeats to victory.
If the critical spirit govern in youth, it
chokes action at its very source. We must
have enthusiasm, not indifference ; willingness
to subordinate ourselves to our purpose, if we
would reach results, and an imperfect result is
far better than none at all. Abraham Lincoln
said once, speaking of Henry Clay, "A free
people in times of peace and quiet, when

A LIBERAL EDUCATION l8l

pressed by no common danger, naturally di
vide into parties, f At such times the man who
is of neither party is not, cannot be, of any
consequence. Mr. Clay was therefore of a
party." This which Lincoln said of politics
merely expresses in a single direction the truth
that a man cannot succeed who is a mere critic.
Qlc must have the faith and enthusiasm which
will enable him to do battle whether with sword
or pen, with action or thought, for a cause in
which he believes^ This does not imply any
lack of independence, any blind subservience
to authority or prejudice. Far from it. But
it does imply the absence of the purely critical
spirit with no purpose but criticism, which dries
up the very springs of action.

" That is the doctrine simple, ancient, true ;
Such is life's trial, as old Earth smiles and knows.
Make the low nature better by your throes ;
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above."

There is nothing fanciful in all this. It is
very real, very near, very practical. You can
not win a boat-race, or a football-match unless
you have the right spirit. Thews and sinews
are common enough. They can be had for the
asking. But the best will not avail if they are
not informed with the right spirit. You must

182 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

have more than trained muscles ; you must
have enthusiasm, determination, brains, and
the capacity for organization and subordina
tion. If the critical spirit prevails, and every
one is engaged in criticising, analyzing, and de
claring how much better things would be if
they were only different from what they are,
you will not, you cannot, win, other things
being equal. Differences in physical qualities
may often determine results, but such differ
ences come and go like luck at a game of cards.
But if the critical, indifferent spirit reigns, it
means sure and continued defeats, for it saps
the very roots of action and success.

As it is in the struggles of the playground
or the river, so it is in the wider fields of seri
ous life. If the college merely teaches young
men to tell the truth and keep their hands
clean, they have learned two lessons which are
very valuable each in its own way. But if this
be all, the result of the teaching will be many
gentlemanly failures and comparatively few
successful men. If a university breeds a race
of little critics, they will be able to point out
other men's faults and failures with neatness
and exactness, but they will accomplish noth
ing themselves. They will make the world no
better for their presence, they will not count

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 183

in the conflict, they will not cure a single one
of the evils they are so keen to detect. Worst
of all, they will bring reproach on a liberal edu
cation, which will seem to other men to be a
hinderance when it should be a help.

The time in which we live is full of ques
tions of the deepest moment. There has
been, during the century now ending, the
greatest material development ever seen —
greater than that of all preceding centuries to
gether. The condition of the average man
has been raised higher than ever before, and
wealth has been piled up beyond the wildest
fancy of romance. We have built up a vast
social and industrial system, and have carried
civilization to the highest point it has ever
touched. That system and that civilization
are on trial. Grave doubts and perils beset
them. The economic theories of fifty years
ago stand helpless and decrepit in their immo
bility before the social questions which face
us now. Everywhere to-day there is an om
inous spirit of unrest. Everywhere there is
a feeling that all is not well when wealth
abounds and none the less dire poverty ranges
by its side, when the land is not fully pop
ulated and yet the number of the unem
ployed reaches to the millions, and all this in

184 A LIBERAL EDUCATION

the most prosperous country in the world,
with the greatest promise for the future.
One is not either an alarmist or a pessi
mist because he recognizes these facts, and
it would be worse than folly to try to blink
them out of sight. I believe that we can
deal with them successfully if we will but
set ourselves to the grave task, as we have to
the trials and dangers of the past. I am sure
that, if these great social problems can be
solved anywhere, they can be solved here in
the United States. But the solution will tax
to the utmost all the wisdom and courage and
learning that the country can provide. What
part are our universities, with their liberal ed
ucation, to play in the history that is now
making and which is still to be written? They
are the crown and glory of our civilization,
but they can readily be set aside if they fall
out of sympathy with the vast movements
about them. I do not say whether they
should seek to resist or to sustain, to guide or
to control those movements. But if they
would not dry up and wither, they must at
least understand them. A great university
must be in touch with the world about it —
with its hopes, its passions, its troubles, and
its strivings. If it is not, it must be content

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 185

41 For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon."

If it effaces enthusiasm and breeds critics, it
mu^t be content to gather about barren altars
on which the fire has gone out, and to prac
tise rites from which all meaning has fled.
Such is not the object or purpose of a liberal
education. The university which pretends to
give a liberal education must understand the
movements about it, must see whither the
great forces are tending, and justify its exist
ence by breeding men who by its teachings
are more able than all others to render the
service which humanity is ever seeking. (To
do this a liberal education must first of all
mean that the university which gave it sends
forth men who are fit for life because they
have breathed in the spirit which puts them
in sympathy with their country and their
time.) They must be men to whom the great
refusal is impossible when their people or
their country call upon them to do their part
either in war or

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS*

EARLY in May, 1497, a little vessel with
some twenty persons on board set sail from
Bristol on a voyage of discovery. This year
the four hundredth anniversary of that event
has been duly commemorated at the place
where it occurred. Such occasions have been
much the fashion of late on both sides of the
Atlantic, owing no doubt to the great ad
vance in historical knowledge and to the in
creased interest in history which this century
has witnessed ; but among all the events thus
celebrated there is perhaps hardly one which
more deserves commemoration than the sail
ing of the little Bristol vessel four hundred
years ago. " We derived our rights in Ameri
ca," said Edmund Burke, " from the discovery
of Sebastian Cabot, who first made the North
ern Continent in 1497. The fact is sufficiently
certain to establish a right to our settlements

* Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century (May, 1897), by
the kind permission of Mr. James Knowles.

I go THE HOME OF THE CABOTS

in North America." On that voyage of the
Cabots and its results rested the English claim
to North America. Under that claim, suc
cessfully maintained, Englishmen planted the
colonies which reached from Georgia to Maine,
and which by their growth finally enabled the
mother -country to drive the French from
Canada and make the continent from Mexico
to the North Pole a possession of the English-
speaking race. From those early colonies
have come the United States and the Domin
ion of Canada. The daring voyage of discov
ery which made these things possible, and
gave a continent to the English race, certainly
deserves to be freshly remembered.

Burke really stated the whole case in the
sentence just quoted, but he made one error.
The commander of the ship and the leader of
the expedition was not Sebastian but John
Cabot. That Sebastian accompanied his father
is probable, although not certain ; but there is
no doubt whatever that John Cabot was the
originator, chief, and captain of this famous
expedition, so small when it sailed away from
Bristol, so big with meaning to mankind when
it returned a few months later.

The following year there was another voy
age made by the Cabots, with larger results

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS 191

in the way of exploration and information as
to this new world, which they thought part of
the country of the "Great Cham." Into the
story of these memorable voyages, about
which volumes have been written, or into the
interesting career and long life of Sebastian
Cabot — for John Cabot disappears from our
ken after the second expedition — I do not
propose to enter. My only purpose here is
to try to show who these men were who ren
dered this great service to England and to
the world, and from what race they sprang.

On this point there have been much expendi
ture of learning, manifold conjectures, many
theories, and abundant suggestions; but the
upshot of all this labor has been merely one of
those historical puzzles or mysteries in which
the antiquarian mind delights. As a matter of
fact the explanation is very simple, and possibly
that is one reason why it has been overlooked.
By this I do not mean that any one can tell
where John Cabot was born, for no one knows,
nor has any evidence on that point been pro
duced. If some inquirer were to search among
the records of a certain outlying portion of the
United Kingdom, as has not yet been done,
with this object in view, something might be
found which would throw light on John Cabot's

IQ2 THE HOME OF THE CABOTS

birth and parentage. So far, however, there
is no positive evidence whatever in regard to
either. The case is hardly better in regard to
Sebastian, for when he was trying to leave the
service of Spain for that of Venice, he told
Contarini that he was born in Venice but
brought up in England ; while, on the other
hand, when he was an old man he told Eden
that he was born in Bristol, and carried to
Venice by his father at the age of four years.
The conflict between Sebastian's own state
ments is hardly more instructive than the ab
sence of all information in regard to his father.
But, although it is impossible to fix the birth
place of either of these men, it is still possible
to do that which is perhaps quite as important
— determine where the family or the race to
which they belonged originated.

John Cabot is always spoken of as a Vene
tian, and quite properly and correctly, but he
was a Venetian by naturalization, not by birth.
The first mention of his name in history occurs
in the Venetian archives, where we find the
record of his admission to citizenship in 1476.
Before that there is absolutely nothing, and
the Venetian archives simply prove that John
Cabot was not born in Venice, and was a Vene
tian only by adoption. We know that he mar-

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS 193

ried a Venetian woman, and, from Sebastian's
contradictory statements about his own birth
place, we also know that his father had con
nections of some sort in England, and passed
much time in that country long before the
famous voyage ; for on that point both Sebas
tian's versions as to his own nativity agree.
Therefore it was not by accident that John
Cabot went to England, where he had been
in the habit of going, and received from
Henry VII., in 1496, the patent granted to
himself and his three sons, Louis, Sebastian,
and Sanctius, for the discovery of unknown
lands in the eastern, western, or northern seas,
with the right to occupy such territories. The
recent authorities speak of John Cabot as prob
ably born in Genoa or its neighborhood, rest
ing apparently only on Pedro de Ayala's ref
erence to him as a Genoese and Stowe's loose
statement that Sebastian was " Genoa's son."
All this is mere guesswork. We really know
nothing about John Cabot's birthplace or fam
ily, except the not very illuminating fact that
he was not born in Venice.

Let us now turn from the particular to the

general. The Cabots were a numerous race.

We find them scattered all over Europe ; the

name varied a little here and there, but al-

13

194 THE HOME OF THE CABOTS

ways easily identified. If it can be shown
that people of that name have a home where
they have lived for many generations, then
the problem of the origin of the Cabot family
is solved. In Ireland and Scotland there have
been septs or clans all bearing a common
name, and, in tradition at least, going back to
a common ancestor. It needs no inquiry to
tell us where the O'Donnells came from, al
though some of them have been Spaniards for
several generations. We know the origin of
the MacMahons and MacDonalds, of France,
without much research. Wherever one meets
a Cameron or a Campbell, one may be sure
that his genealogy, if duly followed up, will
take us back sooner or later to Scotland. The
same law holds good very often in regard to
families which have no pretence to a tribal
origin or to the dignity of a clan or sept, espe
cially if they come from some island or some
sequestered spot on the main-land.

Such is the case with the Cabots, or Chabots.
The island of Jersey is their place of origin,
and the residence there of men of that name
goes back to a very early period. In Stowe's
list of those who accompanied William the
Conqueror to England we find the name Ca
bot spelled as it is to-day. The bearer was,

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS 195

no doubt, one of the many Normans who fol
lowed William from the land which their
Norse ancestors had swooped down upon a
century earlier. Whether the particular ad
venturer who, according to Stowe, came over
with the Conqueror was from the island of
Jersey we have no means of knowing. But
men of that name must have settled in the
island at a very early period, soon after it was
granted as a fief to Rolf the Ganger by Charles
the Simple. Down even to the present time
many of the people in two Jersey parishes
arc named Cabot, or Chabot. The word "Cha-
bot " means also a kind of fish and a measure,
and seems to be peculiar in this way to the
island. On the bells of some of the churches,
on the tombstones, and in the Armorial of
Jersey the name and arms are also found, and
go back to very early times. The arms, in
deed, prove the antiquity of the race in the
island. They are " armes parlantes," three
fishes (chabots), with the pilgrim's scallop shell
for a crest, indicating the period of the Cru
sades. The motto is one of the ancient pun
ning mottoes, " Semper cor, caput, Cabot."
These peculiarities of name and arms indicate
the antiquity of the family and also its identi
fication with that particular spot where the

196 THE HOME OF THE CABOTS

fish borne upon the shield are indigenous and
known by a particular name which gives them
appropriateness for the coat -of -arms. The
name is also widely diffused in France, where it
is found in many noble families, including the
Rohans, owing to the mesalliance, so criticised
by Saint-Simon, of the heiress of the Rohans
with Henri de Chabot. In the French diction
aries it is usually stated that the family is an
cient and comes from Poitou, where it has been
known since 1040, and no doubt many of the
name who afterwards reached distinction came
from that part of France. The use of the word
in common speech for a fish and a measure
indicates, however, very strongly that the orig
inal seat of the race was on the Channel island
of Jersey. The people there were of Norse
descent, for the first settlements of the Nor
mans were made along the coast of Normandy.
It was, in fact, from that northern coast of
France that the Normans spread over Eng
land and Europe, going in the course of their
wanderings much farther afield than Poitou.
But, however this may be, it is clear that the
Cabots were of Norman race, and that they
settled first on the coast of Normandy with
the rest of the adventurers who came down in
the wake of Rolf the Gansrer. The name has re-

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS 197

m.iincd unchanged, Cabot, or Chabot, for many
centuries. In the letters patent it is spelled
exactly as it is to-day — John Cabot. The
name is not Italian, nor is it anglicized, but is
the Norman -French name, as it has always
been known both in the Channel Islands and
in Poitou for more than eight hundred years.
Tarducci, the latest biographer of the Cabots,
in his zeal to prove that they were Italians,
produces names from Siena and elsewhere
which in sound have a resemblance more or
less distant to that of Cabot. But this is labor
wasted. The name in Henry's patent was too
plain and familiar to have been an anglicized
version of some Italian patronymic, and the
variations on the names of the discoverers in
the various contemporary authorities are mere
ly efforts to make the name Cabot conform
to the language of the writer, whether he
used Spanish, Italian, or Latin, and nothing
more.

There is, however, much better testimony
than the name to connect the navigators with
the race which multiplied in the Channel isl
and, and which had such numerous represen
tatives in Poitou. In the Armorial de la No
blesse de Langucdoc, by Louis de la Roque, it
is shown that Louis, the son of the navigator,

198 THE HOME OF THE CABOTS

settled at St.-Paul-le-Coste, in the Cevennes,
and had a son, Pierre, from whom the family
is traced to the present time. Pierre left a
will, in which he stated that he was the grand
son of the navigator John. The decisive point
is that the arms of this family are those of
the Jersey Cabots precisely — three fishes,
motto, and crest, all identical. Therefore the
arms of Louis, the father of Pierre and son of
John the navigator, are the Jersey arms, and
unite them with the island race. These same
arms, with their fishes, are found among all
the French Chabots quartered with those of
Rohan and the rest. They exist unchanged
in the American family, which came directly
from Jersey to New England in the latter
half of the seventeenth century. The same
name and the same arms constitute a proof of
identity of race before which the contradic
tory accounts of contemporaries of the discov
erers, void as they are of any affirmative evi
dence, or the guesses of modern investigators,
are of little avail. The arms also are impor
tant in showing, as has been already suggested,
that the family started from the island, and
not from Poitou ; for the chabot was a fish
caught in the neighborhood of the islands, a
very natural emblem to take there, but not at

THE HOME OF THE CABOTS 199

all a likely device to have been adopted in
Poitou.

Just where John Cabot was born, as was
said at the outset, no one now can tell, for he
was a wanderer and adventurer like his remote
Norse ancestors, and left no records or papers.
But that he drew his blood from the Nor
man race of the Channel Islands his name and
arms seem to prove beyond doubt. It is most
probable also that it was not by chance that
he got his patent from an English king, and
sailed on his memorable voyage from an Eng
lish port. England was not then a sea power,
nor was she numbered among the great trad
ing and commercial nations of Europe. Ven
ice or Genoa, Portugal or Spain, offered much
larger opportunities and greater encourage
ment to the merchant or the adventurer than
England. Yet John Cabot came to England
for his letters patent and set out from Bristol
on his voyage of discovery. We know from
Sebastian Cabot's statement that his father
had relations with England, and was much
and often in that country. It is not going
too far to suppose that, when he had made
up his mind to enter upon his voyage of dis
covery in the New World, he came back to
the land of which the home of his fathers, and

2OO THE HOME OF THE CABOTS

perhaps his own birthplace, was a part. It is
certain that no other reason for his doing so is
given in any contemporary evidence.

So long as the Cabots performed successful
ly the great work which it fell to them to do,
it perhaps does not matter very much where
they were born or whence they came. Yet
there is a satisfaction in knowing that the
strongest evidence we have shows that the
men who gave England her title to North
America, and made it the heritage of the
English - speaking people, were of that Nor
man race which did so much for the making
of England, and sprang from those Channel
Islands which have been a part of the kingdom
of Great Britain ever since William the Con
queror seized the English crown.

ENGLISH ELECTIONS

ENGLISH ELECTIONS

WE have in our Eastern States a few news
papers, with a small number of persons who
presumably read those newspapers, which are
not only greatly dissatisfied with things Amer
ican, but which always compare our short
comings with the bright standard of perfection
which they tell us exists in England. One of
the many subjects of their criticism has been
the conduct of our elections, and here, as
usual, they are fond of referring us to Eng
land, in order to show us by that shining ex
ample how far we are from an ideal condition.
I happened to be in England in the summer
of 1895, while the last general election was in
progress, and always having been much inter
ested in all matters relating to the conduct of
our own elections, I availed myself of the op
portunity thus presented to examine the Eng
lish methods which have been held up to us
by our Anglo-American critics at home as the
standard to which we should strive to attain.

204 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

The charges usually brought against us by
these critics are the violence and disorder of
our election contests, the personalities in which
we indulge, the campaign stories set afloat to
affect votes, and other sharp practices of a
like nature : frauds of various kinds ia regis
tration and voting, the lavish use of money,
and the relentless character of our party dis
cipline. I studied these various points in the
English elections which were going on every
where around me, and tried to make myself
familiar with all those features which Anglo-
Americans think we should imitate. I intend
here to give very briefly the results of my ob
servations.

As to the first point of violence and dis
order, I take the following cases as reported
in the London Times, in order to show the
contrast between the quiet and order which
prevail in England and the violence and dis
order which are said by our critics to char
acterize our elections. These cases, I admit,
present features very different from anything
that occurs in American elections. On that
point there can be no doubt. Whether we
should desire to imitate them is another ques
tion, which I will not now discuss.

Here is the first case I find among my clip-

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 205

pings from the Times : " Mr. Disraeli, M.P.,
Assaulted. — Mr. Coningsby Disraeli, M.P. for
the Altrincham division of Cheshire, was as
saulted on leaving the Conservative Club at
Altrincham after the close of the poll on Mon
day. Mr. Disraeli's carriage was surrounded by
a disorderly mob, which a force of Cheshire
constabulary were unable to keep in check.
Stones and bricks were thrown as the carriage
drove away, and Mr. Disraeli, besides being
struck with a stick, was momentarily stunned
by a stone which struck him on the back of
the head. The crowd afterwards smashed the
windows of the Conservative Club, and a mem
ber of the club was struck by a stone and con
veyed to the hospital unconscious. The street
was ultimately cleared by the police."

Passing from Altrincham to Croydon, we
learn that " Excitement is rising in Croydon.
Some of Mr. Hutchinson's more violent parti
sans proceeded to the front of the Central
Conservative Club in North End on Saturday
and indulged in hooting and yelling, which
were kept up until midnight. Several members
of the club attempted to address the gather
ing, but were pelted with eggs and apples for
their trouble. Yesterday morning both Mr.
Ritchie and Mr. Hutchinson attended divine

206 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

service at the parish church, and it is stated
that the Liberal candidate, while walking down
the aisle on his way out at the conclusion of
the service, was hissed by a number of ladies,
who took up positions on either side of the
vestibule."

The next relates to a London division :
" Tower Hamlets (St. George's]. — In conse
quence of the many serious disturbances that
have occurred in this division during the prog
ress of the contest, a large number of police
were yesterday drafted into the division, with
a view of maintaining order. Mr. Marks, who
was struck in the eye Tuesday night with a
large stone, was yesterday driving about the
constituency, accompanied by his wife, with
a shade over the injured eye. This unpro
voked assault has caused great indignation
throughout the division. Several petty dis
turbances occurred at one or two of the poll
ing-stations, but owing to the presence of the
strong force of police nothing serious took
place. The excitement became intense as the
close of the poll approached, each party exert
ing itself to the utmost in order to secure the
attendance of the electors at the polling
booths."

Now comes a case with a touch of humor ;

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 207

but the polite reply of Mr. Hay to an inter
ruption is a not uninteresting example of Eng
lish platform manners which we are so often
told our campaign speakers ought to copy: " Of
the 'dogs of war' most people have heard,
but the dog of politics is new. Hitherto that
friend of humanity has been remarkable for
faithfulness, but he would be a bold man who
would answer for him after certain political
associations, and his first introduction to pub
lic affairs has not been promising. There was
a Unionist gathering at Hoxton Church on
Saturday, attended by fully two thousand
persons, when serious disturbances occurred,
owing to a respectably dressed man forcing
his way through the crowd with a large mas
tiff having attached to his collar a card urging
the electors to * Vote for Stuart.' This occa
sioned a scuffle, ending in a free fight, which
the police had to put down. The Hon. Claude
Hay, Unionist candidate, then proceeded with
his speech, dismissing personal affronts with the
declaration that he did not care a button for
them, and describing the methods of his inter
rupters as * cowardly and un-English.' Point
ing to one of the disturbers, he said he could
only tell that gentleman he was a liar when he
stated that he would not carry out his pledges."

208 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

That these disturbances were not mere
horse-play the following case at Luton shows
plainly : " Bedfordshire (Lutoii}. — Some riot
ing took place at Luton on Friday night after
the declaration of the poll, and in addition to
the reading twice of the Riot Act, the local
authorities found it necessary to send for fifty
metropolitan police. A local solicitor, who
had been previously identified with the Liber
al-Unionist party, published on the eve of the
poll a pamphlet which the Conservatives con
sidered reflected upon their candidate, Colonel
Duke. An angry mob besieged his office,
broke his windows, and attempted to gain an
entrance. The disturbance continued until
one o'clock, when the combined London and
local police charged the crowd and dispersed
it. At Dunstable, where the solicior in ques
tion lives, the mob entered his house and
wrecked the furniture."

At Camborne, where Mr. Conybeare was
defeated, the contest was heated. A gen
tleman told me that he happened to meet
the election agent of Mr. Strauss, the suc
cessful Unionist candidate, and observing
that he had a black eye, asked him how he
got it. The agent said he was hit at Cam-
borne, and that there were twenty men in

j*n^«

> Of THC

UNIVE*8ITY

o*

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 209

the hospital there as a result of election
fighting.

On August Qth Mr. E. Garnet Man wrote
to the Times that he and Mr. Gretton were
" stoned and hustled," and had their meeting
broken up at Church Grcsley and Swadlincote
by a mob excited by the harangues of a Non
conformist minister.

These incidents which I have just cited were
chronicled in the newspapers, but seemed, so
far as I could observe, to pass without com
ment and quite as matters of course. There
was one case, however, which not only drew
forth a good deal of correspondence, but also
excited some little remark. This was the
East Norfolk election, where Mr. Rider Hag
gard was the Conservative candidate. He
and his party were mobbed at Ludham and
Stalham. He had ladies with him, and one
of them, Mrs. Hartcup, was seriously injured
by stones which struck her in the head. The
party took refuge from the arguments of their
political opponents in the Swan Hotel at Stal
ham. There they were besieged by a crowd
for several hours, and were only rescued by
constables armed with cutlasses, who dispersed
the mob. Mr. Haggard wrote with his accus
tomed force and eloquence to the Times about

210 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

the almost African dangers to which he had
been exposed, and the injuries which he and
his party had received from the attacks of the
mob. His opponent, Mr. Price, replied, and a
long controversy followed. Among others
who took part in it was one who signed her
self " A Lady Sufferer," and who seemed dis
posed to laugh at Mr. Haggard for his com
plaints, because she too had been stoned when
canvassing in the Liberal interests in the same
division some years before. She said, " I took
it as part of what I had to bear in the battle
of politics," and her letter exhibited a calm phil
osophy in regard to being made a target for
stones and other missiles which, I think,
would hardly be shown under like circum
stances by American, women, even by those
anxious to possess the suffrage.

Mr. Haggard's misfortunes were not, how
ever, the only incidents of the East Norfolk
election. In the division of which North Wal-
sam is the political centre a Unionist meeting
was held in the market-place. While it was
going on, Lord Wodehouse, the eldest son of
the Earl of Kimberly, demanded that Mr. John
Gaymer, who presided, should come down from
the chair, and on the latter gentleman's dis
playing some hesitation, " Lord Wodehouse,"

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 211

in the language of the newspaper, " forcibly
removed him from the rostrum." Mr. Gaymcr
returned, by some method not described, to
the chair, and then remonstrated with Lord
Wodehouse, who continually interrupted him,
and also called out : " Come down and have
it out with me. I will fight you for fifty
pounds." A few days after, Mr. Gaymer made
a complaint against Lord Wodehouse before
the magistrates, and the noble lord was fined
five pounds for assault. The matter did not,
however, end here. Some time after the elec
tion was over, the Conservative ministry had
Lord Wodehouse removed from the Com
mission of the Peace, of which he was a mem
ber. I think I may go so far as to say, al
though I have no desire to criticise English
election methods, that Lord Wodehouse was
guilty of what has been called in this country
" offensive partisanship." Yet even here, I
think, it would be thought that we were push
ing the spoils system pretty far to remove a
man from a judicial position on account of his
political conduct.

This practice of pelting a candidate and the
ladies who accompany him, according to the
English custom, is apparently a common di
version in the English elections. Sir William

212 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

and Lady Harcourt were pelted at Derby, and
I saw many allusions to similiar instances.
There is no need, however, of multiplying ex
amples. I have given, I think, enough cases
to show the orderly methods of political dis
cussion in England which our Anglo-American
critics would have us imitate.

In our last Presidential election (1896), which
was one of extraordinary excitement and pro
duced great bitterness of feeling, we had some
instances of pelting speakers and of shouting
them down. In every case the result was a
reaction in favor of the persons attacked, and
the assaults were denounced by the news
papers without distinction of party. No one de
fended such performances, still less were they
treated as matters of course. The attack with
missiles and interruptions upon Mr. Carlisle, at
Covington, undoubtedly injured the Democrats
and helped the Republicans in Kentucky,
while the exploit of the Yale students in
howling down Mr. Bryan, at New Haven, was
generally condemned and awakened sympathy
for the Democratic candidate for the Presi
dency.

I now come to the matter of charges made
against public men during a canvass for the.
purpose of affecting votes. The London cor-

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 213

respondent of the New York Tribune, in a let
ter written at the time, summed up some of
the campaigning in the English elections of
1895 as follows: "Campaign literature by the
ton ; roorbacks sprung in Ireland ; press ex
tracts showing how bad an opinion Lord Salis
bury once had of Mr. Chamberlain, and how
cordially that dislike was reciprocated by the
Birmingham leader; parallel columns brought
into play against one Unionist leader after an
other; and criminations about the purchase of
the Ulster votes answered by recriminations
about the government cordite contracts." This
list, however, does not cover by any means all
the charges of a personal character put for
ward during the canvass.

Mr. Benn, who was running in one of the
London divisions, was attacked by his oppo
nents because his insane brother had in a fit
of madness killed their father. Even in the
politics of " our violent people " a charge of
this sort for political purposes would, I think,
be considered cruel.

But attacks of this kind were not confined
to the lesser candidates. It was freely charged
that Sir H. Naylor-Leyland had changed from
the Conservative to the Liberal side because
the Liberal government had given him a bar-

214 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

onetcy. As to the truth of this charge I have
no opinion to express. I only know that Sir
H. Naylor-Leyland was recently made a bar
onet, and that this pleasant accusation against
him and the Liberal government was freely
made.

Much more serious, however, was the charge
against Lord Rosebery, which played a large
part in the campaign, that he had made four
peers, in consideration of the gift by these gen
tlemen of one hundred thousand pounds to
the campaign fund of the Liberal party. Lord
Rosebery's secretary, in a letter to the Times,
said that two of these peerages were con
ferred upon gentlemen whose merits no one
could question, and who were also poor men,
and that the other two were given in pursu
ance of an arrangement made by Mr. Glad
stone with which Lord Rosebery had nothing
to do. There were persons who found this
answer unsatisfactory, and the matter was
much discussed both in the press and on the
stump. This particular charge, moreover, was
not made merely by irresponsible orators and
newspapers. Mr. Chamberlain said in a speech
at Birmingham, on August 3d : " How can you
grant sincerity to a man who in one breath
denounces the House of Lords and seeks to

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 215

abolish it, and in another gives' reason for
the suspicion that he has been selling peer
ages to the highest bidder." I have no
knowledge whatever as to the foundation of
this charge, but considered merely as a cam
paign attack on the leader of one of the two
great parties, a man of the very highest char
acter, I think it will be admitted that even the
violence of the American Presidential election
can hardly show anything more serious. In
this connection, however, there is something
more to be said. Since I first noted this
charge and followed its fortunes as it was
tossed back and forth in the excitement of an
election contest, my attention has been called
to some other cases which lead me to be
lieve that the attack on Lord Rosebery and
Mr. Gladstone was not so unusual nor the
charge itself regarded in England as so mon
strous as I had supposed. In the Spectator for
May 23, 1896, occurs the following statement:
" Lord Salisbury was not distributing them
eccentrically, but according to the regular cus
tom, taking wealthy squires like Mr. E. Hen-
eage and Colonel Malcolm, of Poltalloch, for
his peerages; and giving baronetcies to Mr.
R. U. P. Fitzgerald, Mr. O. Dalgleish, Mr.
Lewis Mclver, Mr. J. Verdie, and Mr. C.

2l6 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

Cave, because they are wealthy men who
have done service to the party." If this sort
of thing is the " regular custom," the charge
against Lord Rosebery does not seem very
serious material for a party attack, and one
cannot see why it was pressed unless the sum
supposed to have been paid for those peer
ages was so large as to be thought exorbitant.
If this practice of giving peerages or titles in
return for contributions for political purposes
is the " regular custom," why is the American
habit of appointment to certain public offices
outside the classified places for political and
party services so monstrous and so painful to
our English critics and their followers here?
Colonel Higginson, from one of whose delight
ful essays* I have, in the language of the wise,
conveyed this extract from the Spectator, per
tinently inquires how this system of bartering
peerages differs from that of Tammany, ex
cept that it is more gilded and veneered.
The most that a man gets in the United
States is a temporary office with such dis
tinction as it carries and a very modest sal
ary. In England the rich party-worker gets
an hereditary dignity, which helps his children,

* Book and Heart.

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 217

at least, to an assured social position ; and if
a peerage, to a seat in the House of Lords.
The money may go, but the peerage and the
social position remain. I am not concerned
here with the ethics of either method. I mere
ly wish to point out that in principle the sys
tem of rewarding political supporters, party-
workers, and subscribers on one side of the
Atlantic does not differ at all from that in
vogue on the other, except that the English
give higher prizes and cover the transaction
under a name of more lofty sound.

As to the point of illegal practices at regis
tration and elections, I found that they were
not unknown in England. In Durham, where
the seat was won by one vote, it appeared
that the name of a man who was in jail at
the time had been voted upon, and it was
freely charged that the names of men who
were dead were used for the same purpose.
This election, I believe, was to be contested.
I saw it stated in the Times that a man was
charged with personation at Birkcnhead, and
from a single issue of the same newspaper I
take the following cases :

At Hartlepool, where the question of pre
senting a petition against the return of the
Unionist candidate was considered, the alle-

2l8 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

gations referred to the distribution of free
drinks and other illegal practices.

In the Litchfield division of Staffordshire
it was decided to present a petition against
the return of Mr. Fulford, and counsel were
of the opinion that there was ample evidence
of corrupt and illegal practices.

In the Falkirk Burghs a petition was de
cided upon against the return of Mr. John
Wilson, on the ground of alleged bribery by
the Unionist agent.

At Wigan, Henry Litherland was summoned
before the magistrate for bribing voters.

These cases, as I have said, are taken from
a single issue of the Times. But under the
head of " Ireland," on another day, I find the
following statement :

" Mayo (NortJi]. — Our Dublin correspondent,
telegraphing last night, says : The defeat of
Mr. Egan, the Parnellite candidate, is attrib
uted to clerical intimidation. In a speech to
his supporters, after the declaration of the
poll, he declared that the intimidation that
had been practised plainly showed that there
was no liberty of the franchise in North Mayo.
Acting under the advice of counsel, he has
lodged with the subsheriff an objection against
the return of the votes. The validity of more

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 219

than 400 ballot papers is impugned, and ob
jection is made to blocks of illiterate voters
recorded in Belmullet. It is further explained
that in certain specific cases the voting was
illegally conducted. The people of Ballina
do not regard the declared result as at all con
clusive, and it is stated that on the disputed
votes Mr. Egan would have a small major
ity. Mr. Egan is determined to fight in the
higher courts the gross clerical intimidation
practised in Belmullet, Ballycastle, and Cross-
molina, the strongholds of Mr. Crilly and Hea-
lyism."

These examples merely show that fraudulent
practices in elections are known as well in
England as in the United States.

I come now to the question of the expendi
ture of money. This possesses a double inter
est, because it not only shows us the English
practice, but it also throws a great deal of
light on the charge so freely made of late
years in this country that protection was not
only bad economically, but that it led to great
corruption, owing to the lavish expenditure
in the campaigns of the protected interests.
The example of England will enable us to see
not only the practice there as to election ex
penses, but also what the effect of a free-trade

220 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

system is in keeping down the amount of
money expended for campaign purposes.
\/The enormous sums spent for election pur
poses in England at the close of the last cen
tury are historic. Fortunes were flung away
and great estates crippled, if not ruined, in
some of the struggles for a coveted seat, where
personal and party passion ran high. It is
safe to say that nowhere at any time has
money ever been spent with such unbridled
profusion for the purpose of influencing votes
as in the England of that not very remote
period to which I have referred. Even as late
as 1867, John Bright said, at Birmingham :
" I am not able to say what it has cost to seat
those 658 members in that House, but if I
said that it has cost them and their friends
a million of money (pounds sterling), I should
say a long way below the mark. I believe it
has cost more to seat those 658 men there
than to seat all the other representative and
legislative assemblies in the world. There are
many members who pay always from £1000
to £15,000 for their election." It is safe to
say that there has never been a Presidential
election in the United States, not excepting
the last, when the total expenses of the two
great parties exceeded Mr. Bright's under-

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 221

estimate of a general English election in 1867,
and our election of iS</> is the only one that
at all equals it.

It is not, however, the election expenses
of 1867 that it is proper for us to consider
and compare our own with now. We must
deal with the England of to-day, where laws
have been passed to cure the evils of the
use of money at election, so flagrant even
thirty years ago.

The corrupt -practices act, which was the
result of the movement to purify and reform
elections in England, fixes the maximum
amount which each candidate can spend in
each division of the United Kingdom. The
candidates are required by law to make a re
turn of all their expenses, and these returns
are published officially. In 1892 the official
returns show that there were 670 seats and
1307 candidates. Fifty-six seats were uncon-
tested, and the expenses, therefore, in those
cases were little or nothing. The official re
turns include all the seats, although, of course,
if these 56 seats were deducted it would in
crease the average expenditure for the others.
The 1307 candidates in 1892 spent £958,532
(in round numbers, $4,792,660), including the
returning officers' charges, and £761,058, or

222 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

$3,805,290, exclusive of the returning officers'
charges — that is, for purely political purposes.
The total number of votes polled was 4,605,442,
and the amount of money spent per vote was
four shillings one penny, or just about one
dollar a head. The official returns for 1895
show that there were 670 seats and 1181 can
didates. There were, therefore, at least 159
uncontested seats, which, if deducted, would
raise very greatly the average expense of those
contested. Taking them, however, all together
as before, the official report shows that under
the act 1 181 candidates spent £773,333, includ
ing expenses of returning officers, and exclud
ing expenses of returning officers, £617,996.
This was at the rate of $s. 8f^., or about
90 cents, a head, the total number of voters
being 3,867,060. The decline in the number
of voters and in the total expense from 1892
to 1895 was due to the increase in the number
of uncontested seats, for the general interest
was certainly as great in the latter as in the
former year.

It must be remembered, however, that these
are only the official returns of the expenses
allowed to each candidate by the law. The
central committees of the two great parties
and other political committees interested in

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 223

special objects of legislation, such as bimetal
lism or the liquor traffic, spend a great deal of
money for political purposes of which no re
turn is made. I was told by good judges, in
cluding leaders of both the great parties, that
the election expenses of one general election
in England, exclusive of returning officers'
charges and of the expenditures by organiza
tions interested in special subjects, would
reach at least a million pounds. The central
committees, whose funds are very large, fur
nish, of course, a great deal of the money to
the candidates .which appears in the official re
turns, but they also necessarily spend a good
deal of money which does not appear in the
returns. Nor does the expenditure of money
cease here. I was told, for instance, that in
the Newmarket division, where two very rich
men were running, a great deal of money was
being spent on both sides. I asked how this
could be done under the corrupt-practices act,
and was informed that in this case one of the
candidates gave employment to all the unem
ployed in the division, thus encouraging many
voters in the support of correct political prin
ciples, and at the same time relieving the rate
payers. This may be called a special in
stance, but it indicates that evasion of the

224 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

corrupt-practices act is at least possible. One
other fact which I derived from official returns
seems to be of more general application. For
the week ending July I5th the increase of the
revenue from beer (there having been no
change in the law) over the same week of the
previous year was £337,000, indicating an in-
creased consumption of about one million
barrels. The first pollings of the general elec
tion took place on July I3th, and continued
for about three weeks. The Liberals charged
that their opponents were giving free beer to
the voters, and this extraordinary rise in the
revenue just at election time seems at least to
indicate that the consumption of beer in
creases marvellously in England when voting
is to be done.

There is nothing certainly in these facts and
figures to indicate that free trade has a de
pressing or lowering effect on election expen
ditures. But in making a comparison with
our own expenditures I will limit myself to
the totals of the official returns for Great Brit
ain, which are very far from representing the
amount of money actually spent. According
to those returns an election in England costs
as nearly as possible from ninety cents to one
dollar for every voter. On that basis we were

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 225

entitled, if we followed the English example
of moderation in election expenditures, to
have spent in the campaign of 1892 $12,154,-
542, and in that of 1896 at least $15,000,000.
As a matter of fact before 1896 there has
never been a campaign in which the national
committees of the two great American parties
have spent between them three million dol
lars. Allowing, however, three million to the
two national committees, and two million
more to cover all that is spent in addition out
side the two great committees, we have five
million dollars for the expenditures of an
American Presidential election before 1896,
which is at the rate of forty cents per voter,
as against one dollar in England. This is an
excessive estimate, for most of the money of
the national committees is sent to the poorer
States and Congressional districts, in very few
of which, indeed, candidates are to be found
who can afford anything like the average ex
penditure of an English division. Taking,
then, five million dollars as the expenditure of
the Presidential election, we find that it is
just about the amount actually spent at a
general election in England, and only half
what we should be entitled to spend if we
took the scale of the English official returns
15

226 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

per vote as our standard of expenditures.
When, in addition, it is remembered that in
this country we have great distances to cover,
which are unknown in England, and which
add enormously to the expense of campaign
ing, it will be seen that in the United. States,
despite the corrupting influences of protected
industries, we do not spend half the money
which we should spend if we lived up to the
English standard.

If we take the campaign of 1896, the most
expensive we have ever had, although one
party had much more money than the other,
it is safe to say that $6,000,000 would be a
liberal estimate for the expenditures of both
parties, while on the English basis we were en
titled to spend $15,000,000. When it is re
membered, also, that at the close of the cam
paign the Republican party was spending at
the rate of $25,000 a day for the expenses of
speakers and meetings, had issued and dis
tributed 100,000,000 pamphlets and circulars,
and was publishing matter relating to the cam
paign in some 15,000 newspapers, it is easy
to see that there could not have been much
money left for the purchase of votes. One
rather wonders indeed what becomes of a
nearly equal amount spent in England, where

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 227

distances arc short, where the campaign lasts
three weeks instead of four months, and where
the number of votes polled is only about one
quarter as many as were thrown in the United
States in 1896. These facts and comparisons,
which I offer without comment, are, I think,
worthy of consideration by those who think
we can escape from the use of money at elec
tions by purifying our system after the English
fashion and adapting ourselves to the English
model. Perhaps we should improve morally if
we did so, but we should certainly spend from
twice to three times as much money as we do
now at a Presidential election, which seems,
whatever else may be said of it, a queer kind
of cure for any political evil.

As to party discipline and party feeling, it
seemed to me that they were much the same
in England as in the United States. The
great body of voters there, as here, remain
firm in their party allegiance. Between them
is the shifting vote which cannot be depended
on, and which usually determines the fate of
elections, except in a case of a great party re
volt. In all the political talk which I heard,
and at the time I was in England everybody
was talking politics, I should say that there
was an even keener partisanship shown than

228 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

in this country. In Parliament party disci
pline is much stronger than with us, although,
as I have said, there is no perceptible differ
ence in the discipline of the great body of
voters. The cause of this severer discipline in
Parliament lies, of course, in the English sys
tem of government. The ministry is a com
mittee of both Houses. They have a power
to dissolve at any moment, and they therefore
hold over all their followers the great control
which comes from the ability to turn them out
of office and force them to the expense of an
election, and possibly to the loss of their seats.
Under these circumstances it is no wonder
that party discipline in Parliament is so very
strong.

In writing thus of some of the facts in re
gard to the English elections, I have not had
the slightest intention of criticising their meth
ods or finding fault with them. They are not
perfect ; they have their defects, like our own ;
but also, like our own, I have no doubt what
ever that English elections in the main are
fair and free, and that they express, as ours
do, the honest will of the voters. I took oc
casion to go over to the Battersea division, in
London, where John Burns was running, in
order to see the polling. The officers in charge

ENGLISH ELECTIONS 229

of the polling-booth which I visited very kind
ly admitted me behind the rail, so that I could
see the voting in progress. The system is ex
actly the same as that of my own State. It
is the secret, or Australian, ballot, and proceeds
much more rapidly than with us, because they
vote only for one, or at the most two or three
candidates. All the proceedings were quiet and
orderly. There was a small crowd outside the
polling -place who chaffed the voters good-
naturedly as they went in, but there was not
the slightest sign of disorder of any kind. I
also visited some polling-places in the adjoin
ing Clapham division. Here the voting was
proceeding even more quickly and quietly, if
possible, than in Battersea.

My purpose in what I have said here of
English elections, and in the analysis which I
have given of their election expenditures, has
been merely to show that they do not differ
materially from ours, although money is so
much more freely used in England than with
us. The moral to be drawn from it all is that
we should seek by every means in our power
to remedy any evils in our own system and to
guard against all dangers to the ballot-box.
But this can best be done by attending to our
own affairs, guided by general standards of

230 ENGLISH ELECTIONS

what is wise and right, and not by nervously
and weakly seeking to imitate other people.
There is no perfection to be found in English
election methods. They have their problems
as we have ours. We can manage our own
troubles best in our own way, and despite the
outcries of the Anglo-Americans in some of
our larger cities, it may be safely said that
English election methods are very much like
those of English-speaking people elsewhere,
and that human nature is not materially differ
ent in England from that in the United States,
so far, at least, as election contests are con
cerned.

OUR FOREIGN POLICY

OUR FOREIGN POLICY

DURING the last four years questions of our
relations with other countries, and involving
our interests outside our own borders, have
filled a large place in our politics, awakened
public attention, and aroused discussion both
in Congress and the press. One of these <
tions has been settled ; the others are still with
us. Their presence, meaning, and importance
alike merit serious study, and cannot be in
telligently disposed of by epithets or sneers.
Why is it that our foreign policy and our for
eign relations have thus come within a com
paratively short period so strongly and irre-
pressibly to the front? The fact is of itself
momentous enough, the issues involved suffi
ciently grave, to deserve a calmer considera
tion and a more candid discussion than are
always accorded to them.

Those who are opposed to our having any
foreign policy at all, and who desire to repress
these questions of foreign relations altogether,

234 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

have various explanations to account for their
appearance, which are easily stated, because
they required but slight labor in invention or
construction. One or two able editors, for ex
ample, who have abandoned the country of
their birth without acquiring any other, and
are therefore as well able to judge of patriot
ism as a blind man of a picture, set down the
whole thing as an outburst of pseudo - pa
triotism. Another equally thoughtful solution
is that those Americans who advocate a dis
tinct foreign policy for the United States are
simply demagogues, playing to the galleries
and seeking applause from that source ; and
it is asserted that the questions of our foreign
relations have been created in this way. If
this view is correct, there is certainly no reason
for anxiety on the part of those who suggest
it ; for playing to the galleries, while it may
give a momentary triumph to the performer,
rarely leads to any serious results either on
the stage or in real life. Again, those who
cater for the English market explain the phe
nomena by saying that the whole business is
an appeal to the Irish vote. This is, no doubt,
satisfying to the London editorial mind, but,
as a theory, it seems to lack breadth, for many
of the questions which have involved our for-

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 235

eign relations do not concern England at all.
Still another explanation is that it is all a
matter of party politics. This sounds pleasant
and satisfactory, but it is a little obscure, as
on all the foreign questions which have arisen
party lines have been entirely broken.

All these explanations, and there are others
of a similar character which I have not enu
merated, however they differ, agree on one
point — that these foreign questions have been
artificially forced forward, that they are the
work of a few newspapers and of a few violent
and unscrupulous public men, chiefly in the
Senate, and that those who support a strong
foreign policy are in every instance advocating
something new and unheard of in American
politics. If this be true, then the public men
and editors, whom their opponents, with singu
lar poverty of invention but with admirable
fidelity to British precedents, call "jingoes,"
are not merely dangerous and unscrupulous,
but they are persons of extraordinary power,
for they have performed the unexampled feat
of creating from nothing not one but a series
of great and far-reaching political questions.
Unfortunately for this theory, such an exploit
is quite impossible. Great political questions,
whether foreign or domestic, cannot be created

236 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

from nothing by any man or by any set of men.
They spring from existing conditions ; they
come from the social, economic, or political
development of mankind ; they usually have
their roots deep down in a distant past, and
all men can do is to point them out, call at
tention to them, take sides about them, fight
over them, and in some fashion or other settle
them.

The questions of foreign policy which have
been so prominent in the United States dur
ing the last four years are simply products of
this same general law. If we look at them
carefully we can readily discover why they are
here and what are the reasons of their exist
ence. The first cause is of world-wide scope.
(Economic conditions into which it is needless
to enter, but which of late have exerted a con
stantly increasing pressure both upon govern
ments and people, have been forcing nations
and individuals alike in the Old World to seek
everywhere for fresh outlets for population
and new opportunities for commerce, trade,
and money-making. In the fierce rivalry thus
engendered, the great powers of Europe have
reached out in all directions and seized the
waste places of the earth. With especial ra
pacity they have grasped for every bit of land

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 237

where there was a chance of finding gold. In
this way, and with these incentives, Africa has
been parcelled out among the great powers of
Europe. England has won a number of glori
ous victories over negro tribes; France has
seized on Madagascar; Italy has been badly
beaten in Abyssinia ; even Germany has taken
a share in the Dark Continent. In the far East
it is the same story. England and France
have been dividing Siam, while Russia is com
ing down with her railroad to the Pacific, tak
ing a large slice of China on the way.

So long as this process of seizing land was
confined to Asia and Africa it did not concern
the people of the United States, except as an
interesting exhibition of the march of civili
zation. But a movement of this kind driven
by great forces does not stop of its own ac
cord at any given point. The same policy
which had been adopted in Africa was applied
to the islands of the Pacific. In a few years
these were all absorbed by European powers,
but chiefly by England. Nothing practically
escaped except the Samoan group and the
Sandwich Islands. The former were saved by
the intervention of the United States, which
resulted in the Berlin agreement. The im
portance to the United States, both on mili-

238 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

tary and commercial grounds, of a foothold in
the South Pacific is, one would suppose, suf
ficiently obvious, yet the last administration
did its best to withdraw from the Berlin agree
ment, abandon our influence and control in
the Samoan group, and give up our valuable
right to the harbor of Pago - Pago. Luckily
this attempt to withdraw failed, and we still
retain our interest in Samoa.

Far more important than Samoa are the
Sandwich Islands, and there the pressure of
the movement from Europe began to be felt
after the seizure of the rest of the Pacific
islands was completed. In this connection it
will be well to show that the European move
ment for the seizure of land everywhere is not
a figure of speech, and at the same time to
demonstrate how real and great was the im
pulse which forced Samoa and Hawaii forward
as living questions in American politics. In
1888 Great Britain took the Gilbert group of
twelve islands, 1500 miles from Hawaii; the
Ellice group of five islands, 1800 miles from
Hawaii ; the Enderbury group of five islands,
1600 miles from Hawaii ; the Union group
of three islands, 1800 miles from Hawaii;
and Kingman, Fanning, Washington, Palmyra,
Christmas, and Jarvis islands. She also took,

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 239

still in the same year, Maiden, Starbuck, Du-
dosa, Penrhyn, Vostok, Flint, and Caroline
islands. In 1889 she took Ruie Island, 2400
miles from Hawaii ; Suwaroff Island, 1900
miles from Hawaii, and the Coral Islands, 900
miles from Hawaii. In 1891 she took Johns
ton Island, 600 miles from Hawaii; in 1892,
Gardner Island, 1600 miles from Hawaii ; and
in the same year Danger Island, 1800 miles
from Hawaii. The islands of Palmyra and
Johnston had been in possession of the Ha
waiian government since 1854, and are still
claimed as a part of Hawaiian territory.

This record, including the seizure of two
islands claimed by Hawaii, a very weak power,
seemed to indicate that England meant to ab
sorb every Pacific island she could reach, and
that she might be persuaded to take the Sand
wich Islands if they came in her way. It was
all done silently and efficiently by the law of
the strongest, and it was this advance which
brought the European movement into contact
with American interests. We had nothing to
do with it. The aggression was not ours.

With Hawaii, therefore, came the first of
those questions of foreign policy which have
disturbed so much those persons in the United
States who are cither colonial or cosmopolitan

240 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

in their predilections. In that connection for
the first time was heard the outcry about
"jingoism," and the declaration that an at
tempt was being made to drag the United
States into new and untried paths, and to un
settle the established order of things in order
to do so.

Let us see just how new the subject was.
So far as those islands of the Hawaiian group
were concerned, the work of introducing West
ern civilization had been done by Americans.
American influence had always been para
mount there, and an American settlement or
colony had been long established. Politically
our relations with Hawaii have always been
close and of an exceptional character. Those
relations cannot be more tersely and accu
rately described than in the words of Senator
Davis, in the very able speech which he made
on this subject in 1894:

" For more than fifty years, as a matter of
announced national policy on the part of this
government, acquiesced in by Hawaii and by
the nations of the civilized world, those islands
have been entailed to the United States, and
as to the United States have been in reversion
when the time should come when the fleeting
monarchy which has existed there should

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 241

expire*, There has not been a Secretary of
State since 1840 who has not announced this
determination and this policy. Mr. Webster,
Mr. Legare, Mr. Marcy, Mr. Buchanan, Mr.
Scward, Mr. Elaine, and all who have held
that office have spoken in the voice of their
government in this respect with no uncertain
tone, and it has been acquiesced in by foreign
nations. So that it is neither extraordinary
nor remarkable that at some time, under fa
vorable circumstances and conditions, that to
which manifest destiny had dedicated those
islands should be brought to pass. Indeed,
in 1854, Mr. Marcy, then being Secretary of
State, a treaty of annexation was negotiated,
and only failed of confirmation because of its
condition respecting pecuniary compensation
to be made, and because of the fact that the
treaty provided that the islands of Hawaii
should become a State in the Union."

So it appears, when we leave the region of
outcries and come to that of historical facts,
that Hawaii has been the peculiar care of this
nation for half a century, and that the military
and commercial importance of the islands and
the welfare of the American colony there have
been fully understood by successive adminis
trations of all parties. Those who took up
16

242 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

and supported Hawaiian interests in Congress,
therefore, were the conservative followers of
the traditional policy of the United States,
and those who opposed them were the inno
vators. Even after the Hawaiian treaty of
annexation was withdrawn by Mr. Cleveland,
the Senate without a dissenting voice passed
a resolution declaring that the attempt of any
other nation to take possession of the Sand
wich Islands would be regarded as an act of
hostility by the United States. Since then a
new danger has arisen from the Japanese, who
are seeking to get control of the islands by
pouring in colonists, and the United States
must now determine whether they will control
and protect the islands or shrink from the
responsibility and allow the islands to seek
safety under the British flag ; for we can no
longer refuse either to act ourselves or to
allow any one else to act. President McKinley
has met and practically settled the question
by sending to the Senate a new treaty of an
nexation by which, or by resolution, the islands
will be joined to the United States. The mili
tary and commercial reasons for this step are
conclusive. Even more conclusive are the ob
ligations to the people of the island which tra
dition and good faith alike impose upon us.

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 243

The small and select band who judge our for
eign policy by the criticism of the wishes of
Kn^land will be disturbed. There is also the
pitiful objection that taking the islands may
raise some problems and cause us a little ex
pense and trouble, as if the people who have
conquered a continent and fought the greatest
war of modern times could not manage a little
group of Pacific islands. But this is not the
place to discuss the merits or to defend our
policy in regard to Hawaii. All I desire to
show here is that the question was forced for
ward by the European movement for the seiz
ure of all land everywhere not held by a strong
hand, and that the party which urged action
on the part of the United States was pursuing
the established policy of fifty years, while their
opponents were the advocates of a wholly new
policy in this direction, and one which was not
entitled historically to be called American.

Such was the foreign question which arose
in the West gravely affecting our future in
the Pacific, where our commercial extension
and development must largely be. But the
same forces which operated there were at work
elsewhere, and were threatening us in a far
more vital point. The land-hunger which had
led to the partition of Africa was not likely

244 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

to be satisfied while anything else remained
undevoured. South America, with many weak
governments, and with almost endless quanti
ties of rich and unoccupied land, was, and is
still, very tempting. England already had a
foothold there, and under the new pressure a
difficulty which had been dragging along for
many years suddenly became acute. The un
settled boundary between British Guiana and
Venezuela, which had been moving to the
westward for some time, began to jump for
ward with leaps and bounds, stimulated by the
discovery of gold-mines, and by the natural
desire on the part of Great Britain to control
the Orinoco, one of the great river systems of
the continent. For twenty years we had been
trying through the ordinary diplomatic chan
nels, and by courteous representations, to in
duce Great Britain to settle the boundary
question with Venezuela by arbitration. All
our efforts had been in vain, but by the year
1895 it had become apparent that unless we
were prepared to see South America share
sooner or later the fate of Africa it was neces
sary for us to intervene. If Great Britain was
to be permitted to take the territory of Vene
zuela under pretext of a boundary dispute,
there was nothing to prevent her taking the

OUR KOKKIGN POLICY 245

whole of Venezuela or any other South Amer
ican state. If Great Britain could do this with
impunity, France and Germany would do it
also. These powers, as has been pointed out,
had already seized the islands of the Pacific
and parcelled out Africa. If the United States
were prepared to see South America pass
gradually into the hands of Great Britain and
other European powers, and to be hemmed in
by British naval posts and European depend
encies, there was, of course, nothing more to
be said. But this onward movement of Great
Britain came in conflict with the Monroe Doc
trine, which the United States has ever sus
tained at all hazards. This doctrine was there
fore at once invoked by Mr. Olney, who saw
clearly the meaning of the Venezuelan ques
tion, and who possessed the power and the
ability to deal with it.

A great deal of discussion, both then and
since, has been devoted to the Monroe Doc
trine, but in reality it is not in the least com
plicated. It is merely the corollary of Wash
ington's neutrality policy, which declared that
the United States would not meddle with, or
take part in, the affairs of Europe. The Mon
roe Doctrine announced it to be the settled
policy of the United States to regard any at-

246 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

tempt on the part of any European power to
conquer an American state, to seize territory
other than that which they then held, or to
make any new establishment in either North
or South America, as an act of hostility tow
ards the United States, and one not to be
permitted. In other words, the Monroe Doc
trine forbids any territorial aggression or ex
tension, whether permanent or nominally tem
porary, on the American continents by any
European power. It was at once said, when
this question arose, that the Monroe Doctrine
was not a principle of international law, and
had never been enforced. It is certainly not
a principle of international law any more than
the independence of the American colonies,
when it was first asserted, was a principle of
international law. We declared and estab
lished that independence and secured for it
the recognition of the civilized world. Other
nations continue to recognize it, not because it
is a principle of international law, but because
it is a fact with which it is not wholesome
to quarrel. Moreover, the Monroe Doctrine
rests on the great principle of self-preserva
tion, which is much older than international
law, and is recognized by it. Any nation has
the right to interfere in regard to another

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 247

country if its own safety is involved, and the
Monroe Doctrine is merely the application of
this principle limited in its scope to the Amer
ican hemisphere.

As to the second point made at that time-
that the doctrine had not been enforced — the
case is equally clear. The Monroe Doctrine
has been observed since its declaration by
other nations out of deference to the United
States. But one instance has arisen, prior to
the Venezuelan case, in which an infraction
was forcibly and seriously attempted, and then
the doctrine was vigorously vindicated. The
Emperor of the French undertook to estab
lish an empire with a European emperor in
Mexico. We were hampered at the moment
by a great civil war, but the despatch from
Mr. Seward, which carried to our representa
tives abroad the news of Lee's surrender, bore
also instructions to our Minister in France to
notify the French government, in diplomatic
language, that if the French armies were not
withdrawn from Mexico we would march five
hundred thousand men down there if necessary
and put them out. General Sheridan, with a
strong army, was immediately ordered to the
Mexican boundary, and the only mistake made
was in not allowing him to immediately cross

248 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

the frontier and expell the French. Mr. Sew-
ard, however, preferred the slower methods
of diplomacy, and in the course of two years
attained his object completely. The French
abandoned Mexico, and Maximilian was left
to his fate. There can be little question that
at the time both the French government and
the luckless Maximilian were quite aware that
the Monroe Doctrine was a vital principle, and
that it was dangerous to infringe upon it.
^ There can be no doubt that the effort of
England to extend her South American pos
sessions under pretext of a boundary dispute
was an infraction of the doctrine as originally
declared. But whether it was or not, we had
the right to intervene, because we believed
our own safety was threatened by the incep
tion of a policy which would have led, in its
expansion, to the partition of South America,
and to the establishment in this hemisphere
of powerful neighbors, whose presence would
have compelled us to become a great military
power, and at the same time would have en
dangered the existence of our trade and com
merce with the South American states.

We were wise enough to take to heart the
words of Junius : " One precedent creates an
other. They soon accumulate and constitute

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 249

law. What yesterday was fact to-day is doc
trine." \Ye acted on the sound principle of
obsta principiis. Mr. Olney sent a strong note
in July, 1895. Lord Salisbury replied, not
only controverting our position as to Vene
zuela, but attacking the validity of the Mon
roe Doctrine itself. Then, in December, Mr.
Cleveland sent his famous message. England
was surprised, in part with reason and in part
without. She was surprised, with reason, be
cause the American Ambassador and the
American correspondents of the London news
papers at that time had misled her as to
American feeling and intentions. She was
surprised, without reason, because she had
wilfully misconstrued our courteous remon
strances for twenty years back on this subject.
Englishmen are prone to mistake civility
for servility. The words sound somewhat
alike, but there is really a great difference be
tween them, and it was just here that England
made her error. Complaint was made at the
time, both in England and among her sup
porters here, that Mr. Cleveland's message,
especially the last clause, was rough and un
diplomatic. It was rough ; but mildness had
failed and roughness succeeded. Where po
lite and earnest remonstrance had proved

250 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

wholly ineffective, a little plain speech was en
tirely successful. Thackeray says somewhere :
" If a man's foot is in your way and he will
not remove it, stamp on it. He will not like
you, but he will take his foot out of the way."
It is very unpleasant to do such things, but
sometimes it becomes absolutely necessary.
Mr. Cleveland was rough ; Congress and peo
ple came to his support, and we have settled
the Venezuelan question. The Monroe Doc
trine has been vindicated, and South America
will not be treated like Africa. In the general
popular approval which followed Mr. Cleve
land's action, the opponents of any vigorous
policy anywhere were silenced for the mo
ment. But it was only for a moment. Stocks
had declined, and the cry of "jingo," and
" war," and " dangerous and revolutionary
policy " broke out strongly. Yet the Presi
dent and Congress and the American people
had merely been true to what had been the
traditional policy of the country for more than
seventy years. Those who opposed them were
the innovators in American politics. A weak
yielding in the case of Venezuela meant the
repetition of similar attempts, and the further
seizure of territory in the Americas, and that
would have brought war, and probably many

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 251

wars, in its train. The determined and success
ful resistance of the United States at the start
meant peace and the avoidance of a fruitful
cause of war. The President and Congress
were aiding the cause of lasting peace for the
United States. Those who opposed them
were doing what little they could to make us
a military power, and bring on war. Nothing
for more than fifty years at least has done so
much for our permanent peace and welfare as
the stand we took in regard to Venezuela.
Nothing of late years certainly has done so
much to improve our relations with England
as our attitude on this question, for England
has respect only for the strong, bold, and suc
cessful. She now understands our position in
regard to the Monroe Doctrine. She misun
derstood it before, and misapprehension breeds
differences while understanding and knowledge
tend to friendship.

Both Venezuela and Hawaii were forced
upon us by the new movement emanating
from Europe, which has developed within a
recent and comparatively short period. The
Cuban question came in a somewhat different
way, but equally without instigation or sug
gestion from the United States. There can
be no doubt that the same economic condi-

252 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

tions which underlie the European seizure of
land in all parts of the world also affected
Cuba. The general decline in the world's
prices, the increasing pressure of existing
debts, and the heightened severity of competi
tion, which set the powers of Europe in mo
tion to seize, divide, and occupy all parts of
the earth on which they could lay their hands,
fostered and stimulated the conditions which
have led to the present revolt in Cuba. But
behind these recent influences lies one much
older and far more efficient — the determina
tion of the Cubans to free themselves from
the corruption and oppression of Spanish gov
ernment, undoubtedly the most intolerable
now borne by any Western people, except
those who are so unhappy as to form a part of
the Turkish dominions. In Cuba, therefore,
the troubles are primarily political, and are of
long standing.

When the other Spanish-American colonies
revolted from the mother- country, Cuba re
mained faithful, and no revolution broke out
in the island. The success, however, of the
continental colonies in establishing their inde
pendence gradually made itself felt. In 1825
Bolivar offered to invade the island, where
numerous societies were formed to support

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 253

him ; but the invasion was checked by the in
tervention of our government, which advised
against it. Spain acted after her kind. In
stead of ignoring the evidences of sympathy
which had been shown towards Bolivar's pro
posed invasion, the Spanish government, by
an ordinance of the 28th of May, gave the
captain-general all the powers granted to the
governors of besieged towns — that is to say, it
put the whole island under martial law. With
this piece of needless and sweeping tyranny
resistance to Spain began in Cuba and has
continued at shortening intervals to the pres
ent day, each successive outbreak becoming
more formidable and more desperate than the
one which preceded it.

In 1826 an insurrection broke out, and its
two chiefs were executed. Soon after came
another, known as the " Conspiracy of the
Black Eagle," which was also repressed, and
those engaged in it were imprisoned, ban
ished, or executed. In 1837 the represent
atives of Cuba and Porto Rico were ex
cluded from the Cortes on the ground that
the colonies were to be governed by spe
cial law. In 1850 and 1851 occurred an ex
pedition for the liberation of Cuba, and the
death of its leader, Narcisso Lopez. There

254 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

were also expeditions under General Quitman
and others, and in 1855 Ramon Pinto was put
to death and many other patriots banished.
After this, for a number of years, the Cubans
attempted by peaceful methods to secure from
the government at Madrid some relief from
the oppression which weighed upon them, and
some redress for their many wrongs. All their
efforts came to naught, and such changes as
were made were for the worse rather than for
the better.

The result of all this was that in 1868 a rev
olution broke out under the leadership of Ces-
pedes. The revolutionists did not succeed in
getting beyond the eastern part of the island,
but they were successful in many engagements.
They crippled still further the already broken
power of Spain, and they could not be put
down by force of arms. The war dragged on
for ten years, and was brought to an end only
by a treaty in which Martinez Campos, in the
name of Spain, promised to the Cubans certain
reforms, to secure which they had taken up
arms. In consideration of these reforms the
insurgents were to abandon their fight for in
dependence, lay down their arms, and receive
a complete amnesty. The insurgents kept
their word. They laid down their arms and

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 255

abandoned their struggle for independence.
Spain unhesitatingly violated the agreement.
With a cynical disregard of good faith, her
promise of amnesty was only partially kept,
and she imprisoned or executed many who
had been engaged in the insurgent cause,
while the promised reforms were either to
tally neglected or carried out by some mock-
cry which had neither reality nor value.*
The result of this treachery, of the blood
shed which accompanied it, and of the in
creased abuses in government which followed,
was that the Cubans began again to prepare
for revolt, and in February, 1895, the present
revolution broke out. The struggle now going
on has developed much more rapidly than
any which preceded it, and has been marked
by far greater successes than the Cubans were
able to obtain in the war which lasted from
1868 to 18/8. In the preceding rebellion,
which was maintained for ten years, the in
surgents never succeeded in getting beyond
the great central province of Santa Clara, and

* See pamphlet by Adam Badeau, Consul-General in Cuba,
1885 ; also statement of General Tomaso Estrada Pahna,
printed for use of Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,
1896 ; and article by Clarence King in The Forum for Sep
tember, 1895.

256 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

their operations were practically confined to
the mountainous region in the eastern end of
the island. They now control all the island
except the cities garrisoned by the Spanish.
It is not my purpose, however, to enter into
any discussion of the details of the. present
war. It is enough to show that for seventy
years rebellions have broken out in Cuba at
short intervals, each one being worse than its
predecessor, and proving plainly that Spanish
rule and peace are an impossible combination
in the island.

The next point is as to our own policy in
the past in regard to Cuba. The many civil
wars in Cuba have given abundant opportunity
for declarations of that policy and for learn
ing what the action of our government has
been. John Quincy Adams, when Secretary
of State, instructed our minister to Spain as
follows :

" These islands [Cuba and Porto Rico] from
their local position are natural appendages to
the North American continent, and one of
them, Cuba, almost in sight of our shores, has,
from a multitude of considerations, become an
object of transcendent importance to the com
mercial and political interests of our Union.
. . . Such indeed are, between the interests

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 257

of that island and this country, the geographi
cal, commercial, moral, and political relations
formed by nature, gathering in the process of
time, and even now verging to maturity, that
in looking forward to the probable course of
events for the short period of half a century,
it is scarcely possible to resist the conviction
that the annexation of Cuba to our federal
republic will be indispensable to the continu
ance and integrity of the Union itself. . . .
Cuba, forcibly disjointed from its own unnatu
ral connection with Spain, and incapable of
self-support, can gravitate only towards the
North American Union, which by the same
law of nature cannot cast her off from its
bosom."

Henry Clay, the successor of Adams in the
Department of State, wrote as follows, likewise
to our minister at the Spanish Court:

" If the war should continue between Spain
and the new republics, and those islands [Cuba
and Porto Rico] should become the object and
theatre of it, their fortunes have such a con
nection with the prosperity of the United
States that they could not be indifferent spec
tators, and the possible contingencies of such a
protracted war might bring upon the govern
ment of the United States duties and obliga-
17

258 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

tions, the performance of which, however pain
ful it should be, they might not be at liberty
to decline."

At a later day Edward Everett declared that
the Cuban question was an American question,
and must be so regarded by other nations.
We have formally declared that we should not
permit the transfer of Cuba to any other Eu
ropean power, and have always and uniformly
assumed that the fate of that island, lying as
it does at our very doors, was of vital impor
tance to the United States. By this declar
ation we have not only shut out all European
powers except Spain from the island, but we
have incurred a responsibility towards the Cu
bans which we can neither disguise nor es
cape.

During the last Cuban war we adhered firmly
to our traditional attitude, and did not hesitate
to take steps looking towards the separation of
the island from the government of Spain.

This was the policy pursued by Mr. Fish,
who endeavored to purchase Cuban indepen
dence from Spain. It was approved at that
time by Mr. Sumner, although he felt a very
natural reluctance to extend any help to the
Cubans while negro slavery still existed in the
island. At a later date, in 1876, Mr. Fish de-

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 259

clarcd that the United States would intervene
unless the war was brought to an end — a dec
laration that undoubtedly hastened the con
cessions which stopped hostilities.

We can learn the views of American states
men at that time from the words of Sumner,
in 1869:

" For myself I cannot doubt that in the in
terest of both parties, Cuba and Spain, and in
the interest of humanity also, the contest
should be closed. This is my judgment on
the facts, so far as known to me. Cuba must
be saved from its bloody delirium, or little will
be left for the final conqueror. Nor can the
enlightened mind fail to see that the Spanish
power on this island is an anachronism. The
day of European colonies has passed — at least
in this hemisphere, where the rights of man
were first proclaimed and self-government first
organized."

It would not be easy to improve on Mr.
Sumner's statement of the larger aspects of
the Cuban question, and in making it he mere
ly followed the line marked out by Clay and
Adams and Everett. There is nothing new,
therefore, in the position of those who believe
that the Cuban question is one of supreme im
portance to the United States, with which we

260 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

are immediately concerned, and which it be
hooves us in the interests of humanity, of busi
ness, and political prudence alike to bring to
a final settlement. The new ground is that
taken by those Americans who oppose Cuba
and the Cubans and take the side of Spain.

It is worth while to consider for a moment
what is said for this new position in our poli
tics and foreign policy. One objection to the
Cuban cause is that the Cubans are of differ
ent race and creed, of Spanish extraction, and
with many people of mixed blood among them.
As to the validity of this objection I will say
nothing, for I desire to enumerate objections
rather than try to confute them. Yet it may
be observed in passing that this particular
proposition is both queer and novel among a
people who asserted that all men were creat
ed equal, and who have also the distinguished
honor to be the countrymen of Abraham
Lincoln.

Another objection, always brought forward
as conclusive, is that those who sympathize
with Cuba and with a prompt settlement of
the Cuban question desire war. This is mere
outcry and an appeal to fear and greed. A
firm attitude is the best promoter of peace.
Weakness and vacillation are the surest in-

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 261

ccntives to war. It is, for instance, part of
what is called the " jingo " policy to desire
the purchase of the Danish Islands. It was
the policy of Lincoln and Sevvard to obtain
these islands for a naval station, and here again
the " jingo" of to-day is in accord with the
opinion and the action of the greatest states
men of the past. But there is more in this
than the acquisition of a naval station. Den
mark desires to part with these islands. She
would like to sell them to us, but there are
other possible purchasers. The German Em
peror is said to covet them. An attempt on
the part of Germany to take them would lead
to serious trouble, if not to war, with the
United States. Our purchase of the islands,
on the other hand, would at once remove all
possibility of trouble with any other nation
over their possession, and would therefore be
preeminently a peace measure.

The case of the Danish Islands illustrates
on a small scale the true course in the much
larger and graver question of Cuba. That the
condition of the island is an anxiety and an
noyance, that American property is destroyed,
that the war causes alarm to business, are all
due to the simple fact that Cuba belongs to
Spain. So long as that ownership continues,

262 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

anxiety, agitations, and alarms of war are sure
to continue also, in connection with it. Thus
we come to the great principle which under
lies nearly every phase of our foreign policy.
In 1776 we ourselves began the movement to
drive Europe out of America. We succeeded
in our effort. The people of South America
followed our example and expelled the gov
ernment of Spain. In these days, when it is
the fashion to sneer at the Cubans, it may not
be amiss to recall the fact that Bolivar was
looked upon in the United States as a hero
and called a second Washington. The Mon
roe Doctrine, which followed, was but a decla
ration to the same effect that European gov
ernments must not return to the places from
which they had been expelled, nor seek to ac
quire new territory in the Americas. The re
peated revolts in Cuba result from the oper
ation of the same forces. It is part of the
movement which we began more than a hun
dred years ago, and the historical and po
litical evolution which it represents may be
delayed, but cannot be stopped. As Sumner
said, European colonial government is an an
achronism in this century in the Americas.
Ever since we started the movement ourselves
we have fostered and sympathized with it,

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 263

and this course has been not only natural, but
right. Practically all our difficulties with other
nations, except under the abnormal conditions
of our civil war, have been due solely to the
possession of colonies in this hemisphere by
European powers. Aside from the Mexican
war, we have never been disturbed by our
neighbors to the south, and have easily settled
our occasional disagreements with them. But
where European possessions exist, there our
serious troubles outside our own borders have
arisen. One strong reason for the regard felt
for Russia in the United States is that she
recognized these conditions in the Western
hemisphere, voluntarily withdrew from Amer
ica, and sold us Alaska. On the other hand,
all our troubles with England have grown out
of her rule in Canada, and if it were not for
Canada it would be difficult to conceive of
anything which could disturb our relations
with Great Britain. The same is true in even
greater degree of Spain, whose colonial govern
ment is oppressive and corrupt. We do not
seek or desire the annexation of Cuba, but it
is for the highest interests and for the peace
of the United States, to say nothing of the
large gain to humanity and civilization, that
Spain should be driven out and the island be-

264 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

come an independent republic. Those who
desire a firm and positive attitude in regard to
Cuba not only sustain the true and traditional
policy of the United States, but also follow
the course of action which makes most surely
for our own peace and welfare. Those who
oppose such a policy are in this as in other in
stances the innovators. They keep alive a dan
gerous situation, and they set themselves to
resist the whole course of the social and politi
cal evolution of the last hundred years on the
American continents.

Moreover, behind all these political, histori
cal, and economical reasons for standing by
the traditional foreign policy of the United
States lies the natural sentiment of the Ameri
can people. We sympathize instinctively with
the movement to drive European rule from
the Americas, and with men who are struggling
anywhere for freedom and for the right to gov
ern themselves. In certain quarters to-day it is
the fashion to sneer at this American senti
ment and to ask why we should sympathize
with the Cubans or waste thought upon them.
As it is a matter of sentiment, and as right
sentiment has and ought to have a large part
in the affairs of men, perhaps we cannot an
swer the inquiry of this new school of Ameri-

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 265

cans better than by Browning's noble lines to
some one who asked him why he was a
Liberal :

" But little do or can the best of us ;

That little is achieved through Liberty.
Who then dares hold — emancipated thus —

His fellow shall continue bound ? Not I
Who live, love, labor freely, nor discuss

A brother's right to freedom — That is 'why.'"

This has ever been the sentiment of Amer
ica. When the modern friends of Spain in the
United States jeeringly ask why we should
trouble ourselves about the Cubans or Arme
nians or Cretans, and go so far afield with our
sympathies, they fail to remember the history
of their own country. They forget the Con
gress which, stirred by the splendor of Web
ster's eloquence, sent words of encourage
ment to the Greeks. They forget whose sym
pathies went far across the waters to the
Hungarians, and who were the people who
brought Kossuth to safety in one of their own
men-of-war, while through the lips of Web
ster they rebuked the insolence of Austria.
Sympathy for men fighting for freedom any
where is distinctively American, and when
from fear or greed or from absorption in mere-

266 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

ly material things we despise and abandon it,
we shall not only deny our history and our
birthright, but our faith in our own Republic,
and all we most cherish will fade and grow dim.
This opposition to the popular and public
sympathy for those who seek freedom -and re
sist oppression finds expression also in other
ways. It leads some of its adherents from
hostility to the Cubans to opposition to build
ing and maintaining a proper navy and to
the construction of coast defences. Here it is
again in flagrant contradiction to the policy
which Washington declared, and to which we
have always tried to be true, that in time of
peace we should be prepared for war, because
in that way alone could peace be preserved.
We paid heavily in the war of 1812 for the
abandonment of Washington's policy by Jef
ferson, and we learned our lesson not only
from our sufferings in that war, but from the
victories of our ships on lake and ocean.
From that time until the civil war it was our
consistent policy to maintain a navy of mod
erate size but of the highest efficiency, and
composed of ships of the best type in each
class. On the same theory, and taught by the
same experience, we fortified our ports. Those
fortifications still stand, and they were once

OUR FOREIGN POLICY 267

the best of their kind. They are absolutely
useless now, owing to the change and advance
in methods of attack, but they are neverthe
less monuments of a well -settled American
policy and teach a lesson not to be neglected.
After our civil war the nation desired only
to rest and bind up its wounds. Navy and
coast defences were alike forgotten. At last
this neglect attracted public attention, and
under President Arthur and Secretary Chand
ler we began to build a new navy. Somewhat
later we entered upon the reconstruction and
armament of our coast defences to suit modern
conditions. This renewal of our old and tradi
tional policy went on with increasing vigor
until the foreign questions of the last few years
rose into prominence. Then it began to en
counter opposition. The very people who
objected to our taking a firm stand in relation
to any foreign power, because we were de
fenceless and unable to resist attack, began to
oppose our taking any steps to put the coun
try in a state of defence and able to resist an
enemy. This sounds like a paradox, and yet
the position is logical. The strongest card in
the hands of those who opposed the tradi
tional American policy in regard to the Mon
roe Doctrine or Cuba, or anything else, was

268 OUR FOREIGN POLICY

in a desperate appeal to fear. If the country's
coasts were well defended and the American
navy strong and efficient, they would be un
able to make this appeal or to arouse terror,
and so they went from the particular to the
general and attacked the policy of building
a navy or providing proper coast defences.
Here again, as in the question of foreign re
lations, they departed widely from the past
and took a line of action wholly new in our
politics.

It is easy to see where the "jingoes" get
their ideas of the proper foreign policy for the
United States, and for the course which they
advocate in regard to the navy and coast de
fences. They offer nothing new and they do
not seek war at all, but solely the preservation
of conditions and policies which shall insure
our peace and guard our rights. They simply
cling to the American traditions and beliefs
which have been handed down to them from
the time of Washington, and which all Ameri
can statesmen have held to as articles of faith
until these later days. The interest of novelt)/
lies with those who oppose these inherited
and distinctively American policies and tradi
tions. What they offer as an advantage is not
quite clear, but the danger of their proposed

OUR FOREIGN POLICY

269

course is very obvious, for the nation that
shrinks and yields is the nation which is sure
to fight in the end when it is forced into it by
neighbors whom their weakness has encouraged
to attack them at a disadvantage.
•• The mission of the great American Democ
racy is peace. We seek no conquests and de
sire to interfere with no other people. But
that mission can be fulfilled only on the con
dition that we show ourselves strong and not
weak; firm and not vacillating. As we respect
the rights of others, so must all others respect
our rights, and the just control which we must
exercise in the Americas.

Of TH€

UNIVERSITY

Of

THE END

ERRATA

Page 195- lines 13 and 14, for "Chmbol " read "Cbt
or Cabof; line 22, for (chaWs) rc,l(j ^^ or
caootsj.

NOTE.— Chabot is the ordinary name of the fish used
>n Heraldry, but in the Island of [ersev there is a fish
called locally "cabot."

HARPER'S CONTEMPORARY ESSAYISTS

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