And with all this was a self-discipline in the two great knowledges by which men have climbed from savages to gods—language and mathematics. He was told one day that there was an English grammar in a house six miles from his home, and he at once walked off to borrow it. And he studied geometry and algebra alone. This may seem to you an inconsequential thing, but having myself on those same prairies not far away from the Sangamon acquired my algebra with little teaching and my solid geometry with only the tuition of a book and of the sun or a lamp, I am able to appreciate what the hardship of that self-schooling was. It was more agreeable to watch the clouds while the horses rested at the end of the furrow, to address, as did Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of poetic symbols.

But his private personal culture, as one [Footnote: Herbert Croly, Lincoln as more than an American in his "Promise of American Life," pp. 89-99.] has observed, had no "embarrassing effects," because he shared so completely and genuinely the amusements and occupations of his neighborhood. No "taint of bookishness" disturbed the local fellowships which gave him opportunity to express in "familiar and dramatic form" of story and illustration his more substantial philosophy and so find for it the perfect speech. His neighbors called him by homely, affectionate names, thinking he was entirely one of them—a little more clever, a little less ambitious in the usual channels of business and enterprise. He had no "moral strenuousness of the reformer" and no "exclusiveness" of learning. He "accepted the fabric of traditional American political thought." He seemed "but the average product," and yet, as this same writer has said, "at bottom Abraham Lincoln differed as essentially from the ordinary western American of the middle period as St. Francis of Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk of the thirteenth century." [Footnote: Croly, "Promise of American Life," p. 90.] He was not, like Jackson, simply a large, forceful version of the plain American trans-Alleghany citizen; he made no clamorous, boastful show of strength, powerful as he was physically and intellectually. He shared genuinely, with no consciousness of his own distinction, the "good-fellowship of his neighbors, their strength of will, their excellent faith, and above all their innocence." But he made himself, by discipline of his own, "intellectually candid, concentrated, and disinterested and morally humane, magnanimous and humble." This is not the picture of a conventional, generic democrat; and this is not, we are assured by the earlier writers, the picture of the westerner of that period. Indeed, Mr. Croly insists that while these Lincolnian qualities are precisely the qualities which Americans, in order to become better democrats, should add to their strength, homogeneity, and innocence, they are just the qualities (high intelligence, humanity, magnanimity, and humility) which Americans are "prevented by their individualistic practice and tradition from attaining or properly valuing." "Their deepest convictions," he contends, "make the average unintelligent man the representative democrat, and the aggressive, successful individual the admired national type." To them Lincoln is simply "a man of the people" and an example of strong will.

But the man who said this did not know that land of Lincoln—which was the valley of La Salle, and even before that the valley of the tribe of men— for I believe its inhabitants knew that he was the embodiment of what they coveted for themselves; that he was not their ordinary average but their best selves.

Their individualism has been, I must say again, under practical compulsions and has had fruits that deceive the eye. It is so insistent upon national productivity, but none the less is it joined to a high idealism that worships just the qualities that were so miraculously united in Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, some remember for their own excuse his coarse stories; some recall for their own justification his acceptance of the political standards that he found; but the great body of the people keep him in reverence and affection as the incarnation of patience, honesty, fairness, magnanimity, humility; not for his strength of will primarily, but for his strength of charity and honesty, and in so doing they reveal the ideal that is in and under their own individual struggle.

Montalembert said that "a social constitution which produced a Lincoln and others like him is a good tree whose sure fruit leaves nothing to envy in the product of any monarchy or aristocracy." Lincoln was not, we want to believe, a freak, a sport of nature, but the "sure fruit" that should not only leave nothing to envy in others, but leave nothing to question in the soundness of a democracy that gives evidence of its spirit in remembering Abraham Lincoln more tenderly, more affectionately, more reverentially than any one else in its history. It is less to his praise but more accurate, I think, that, as his biographer put it: "His day and generation uttered itself through him." He expressed their ugliest forms and their most beautiful developments.

None the less is it remarkable that not only should the virility and nobility of the frontier have been exhibited in him, but that the consummate skill and character known to the world's centres of culture should have had, in his speech and intellectual attitude and grasp, a new example.

When he wrote his letter in acceptance of the nomination to the presidency, he showed it to the superintendent of public instruction in Illinois, whom he called "Mr. Schoolmaster" (and who was years after my own beloved schoolmaster) saying: "I am not very strong on grammar and I wish you would see if it is all right." The schoolmaster had only to repair what we call a "split infinitive." But the great utterances of his life had no tuition or revision of schoolmasters. They were his own in conception and expression. He sent his Cooper Union speech in advance to several for advice, and they, I am told, changed not a word.

Of his debates with Douglas (1858), his speech in Cooper Union, New York, 1860, his oration at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery at Gettysburg, and of his second inaugural address, it has been said that no one of them has been surpassed in its separate field. Goldwin Smith said of the Gettysburg speech: "Saving one very flat expression, the address has no superior in literature." [Footnote: Goldwin Smith, "Early Years of A. Lincoln." In R. D. Sheppard, "Abraham Lincoln," p. 132.] These appraisements I would hesitate to repeat in France, where all letters come finally to be adjudged, if I did not know that this last document (the Gettysburg speech), at least, had been admitted to the seat of the immortal classics. It is said to have been written on scraps of paper, as the great care-worn man rode in the car from Washington to Gettysburg, and I have been told by one who was present at the ceremonies that the quiet had hardly come over the vast audience, stirred by the eloquence of Edward Everett's oration which had lasted two hours, before this briefest and noblest of American orations, spoken in a high and unmusical voice by the great lank figure, consulting his manuscript, was over. It is heard now in the memory of millions of school-children from the Atlantic to the Pacific:

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far beyond our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Bronze tablets bearing this oration for their inscription have been put on the walls of schoolhouses and public buildings all the way across the continent—plates in renewal of possession, that are another fruitage of the valley where the French planted their plates of possession and repossession a century before.

But I would also have read—especially in France, where letters are still being written that have the quality of literature—a letter of this frontiersman. The professor of history in the College of the City of New York, showing me his museum, would have me read again this letter in the hand of Abraham Lincoln; and I would have those beyond America, as well as in that valley, hear what a man of the western waters could write before the coming of the typewriter:

"DEAR MADAM: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

"Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN." [Footnote: "Lincoln, Complete Works" (Nicolay and Hay edition), 2:600. To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass., November 1, 1864.]

These two examples illustrate not only the form of his speech and writing, but the sympathy and the temper of the soul of the man. They need only the supplement of a comment on the strength of his thought in expression. It is said of his Cooper Union speech (his first speech before a large eastern urban audience, I think): "From the first line to the last, from his premises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled, an argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning.... A single, easy, simple sentence ... contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to verify and which must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire.... Commencing with this address as a political pamphlet, the reader will leave it as an historical work, brief, complete, profound, truthful—which will survive the time and occasion that called it forth and be esteemed hereafter, no less for its intrinsic worth than its unpretending modesty." [Footnote: Pamphlet edition with notes and prefaces by C. C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, September, 1860. Quoted in Nicolay and Hay, "Abraham Lincoln," 2:225.]

His first wide fame grew from a speech which he delivered on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, the city that had grown on the Illinois River by the side of La Salle's Fort Crevecoeur. "When the white man governs himself," he said there, "that is self-government; but when the white man governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government— that is despotism." [Footnote: "Lincoln, Complete Works," ed. by Nicolay and Hay, 2:227.] Two years later he made near there an address so irresistible in its eloquence that the reporters forgot why they were there and failed to take notes. So there are but fragments preserved of what is known as "the lost speech."

The minor anecdotes of his life that are treasured and the stories which he is said to have told would fill a volume—perhaps volumes. They all tell of a genius who through adversity became resourceful, who through the neighborly exchanges of a village learned a sympathy as wide as humanity, and who with an infinite patience and kindliness and good sense dealt with a divided people.

The world outside the valley at first thought him a buffoon because it heard only the echo of the hoarse laughter after his stories. They found when he spoke in Cooper Union that he had a mind that would have sat unembarrassed and luminous in the company of the men of the age of Pericles. But he had a sense of humor that, had he been there, would have saved Socrates from the hyssop. Mr. Bryce says, that all the world knows the Americans to be a humorous people. [Footnote: Bryce, "American Commonwealth," 2:286.] "They are," he has said, "as conspicuously the purveyors of humor to the nineteenth century as the French were the purveyors of wit to the eighteenth.... [This sense] is diffused among the whole people; it colors their ordinary life and gives to their talk that distinctively new flavor which a European palate enjoys." And he adds: "Much of President Lincoln's popularity, and much also of the gift he showed for restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, conveying the impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was most so." Yet it was no mask, it was instinctive.

On one of those days when the anxiety was keenest and the sky darkest a delegation of prohibitionists came to him and insisted that the reason the north did not win was because the soldiers drank so much whiskey and thus brought the curse of the Lord down upon them. There was, we are told, a mischievous twinkle in his eye when he replied that he considered it very unfair on the part of the Lord, because the southerners drank a good deal worse whiskey and more of it than the soldiers of the north.

Most of these stories and parables had a flavor of the west and of the fields where they were collected in the days when, as a lawyer, he followed the court from one town to another, and spent the nights in talk around the tavern stove.

When asked one day how he disposed of a caller who had come to him in a towering rage, he told of the farmer in Illinois who announced one Sunday to his neighbors that he had gotten rid of a great log in the middle of his field. They were anxious to know how, since it was too big to haul out, too knotty to split, too wet and soggy to burn. And the farmer announced: "I ploughed around it." "And so," he said, "I got rid of General——. I ploughed around him, but it took me three hours to do it."

This, then, was the lank boatman who came down the river (that was once the River Colbert) and who, seeing the horrors of the slave markets in New Orleans, went back to the Sangamon with a memory of them that was a "continual torment," as he said, and with a vow to hit that institution hard if ever he had a chance. It was this boatman who was twenty years later to have, of all men, the chance.

One cannot tell here, even in outline, the story of that irrepressible conflict in which this western ploughman and lawyer became commander-in- chief of an army of a million men and carried on a war involving the expenditure of three billion dollars. One need not tell it. It need only to be recalled that it was this man of the western waters who first saw clearly, or first made it clearly seen, that the nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved," he said, "but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other." And it was he who more than any one single force brought the fulfilment of his prophecy—of a nation reunited and all free.

He hated slavery. "If slavery is not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong." But he wanted to get rid of it without injustice to those to whom it was an inherited, if cherished, institution. If he saw a venomous snake in the road he would take the nearest stick and kill it, but if he found it in bed with his children, "I might hurt the children," he said, "more than the snake and it might bite them." He was as tender and considerate of the south as ever he was of an erring neighbor in Illinois, where it is remembered that he carried home with his giant strength one whom his comrades would have left to freeze, and nursed him through the night. So he sat almost sleepless, sad-hearted, through the four dark years, but resolute, cheering his own heart and those about him with a broad humor that came as "Aesop's Fables" out of the fields and their elemental wisdoms.

One summer's day, when ploughing in the fields of that land of Lincoln, I heard a sound of buzzing in the air and, looking up, I saw a faint cloud against the clear sky. I recognized it as a swarm of bees making their way from a hive, they knew not where, and with an instinct born of the plains at once I began to follow them and to throw up clods of earth to stop their flight, bringing them down finally on the edge of the field upon a branch of a tree, where they were at evening gathered into a new hive and persuaded back to profitable industry instead of wasting their substance in the forest. So this great ploughman used the clods of earth, the things at his hand, illustrations from the fields, to bring the thoughts of his countrymen down to contentful co-operation again.

"You may," said Alcibiades, speaking of Socrates, "imagine Brasidas and others to have been like Achilles, or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men. But of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either among men that now are or who ever have been—other than ... Silenus and the Satyrs, and they represent in a figure not only himself but his words. For his words are like the images of Silenus which open. They are ridiculous when you first hear them.... His talk is of pack-beasts and smiths and cobblers and curriers.... But he who opens the bust and sees what is within will find they are the only words which have a meaning in them and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honorable man." [Footnote: Plato, "Symposium," Jowett's trans., 1:592.]

The twenty-three centuries since Socrates do not furnish me with a fitter characterization of Lincoln. His image was as homely as that of Silenus was bestial. His talk was of ploughs and boats, polecats and whiskey. But those who opened this homely image found in him a likeness as of no other man, and in his words a meaning that was of widest and most ennobling comprehension. And, as Crito said for all ages, after the sun that was on the hilltops when Socrates took the poison had set and darkness had come: "Of all the men of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best." So has the poet of that western democracy given to all time this phrase, sung in the evening of the day of Lincoln's martyrdom, at the time when the lilac bloomed and the great star early dropped in the western sky and the thrush sang solitary: "The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last."]

We ask ourselves if he was the gift of democracy. And we find ourselves answering: his peculiar excellence could have come of no other order of society. We ask ourselves anxiously if democracy has the unerring instinct to find such men to embody its wishes, or did it take him only for a talented rail-splitter—an average man? But we have no certain answer to this anxious questioning. What gives most hope in new confusions and problems, unknown to his day, however, is that the more clearly his disinterestedness and forbearance and magnanimity and humility are revealed, the wider and deeper is the feeling of admiration and love for his character, which perhaps assures us, after all, better than anything else, of the soundness and nobility of the ideals of democracy.

They carried this man at death over into the valley of his birth, into the land of the men of the western waters that was Nouvelle France, and there buried him among his neighbors, of whom he learned his spirit of democracy, in the midst of scenes where he had mastered its language, in the very ground that had taught him his parables, by the side of the stream that gave him sight of his supreme mission. It is the greatest visible monument to his achievement that the "Father of Waters ... goes unvexed to the sea" [Footnote: Letter to John C. Conkling, August 25, 1863.] through one country instead of the territory of two or more nations and that the slavery he witnessed is no more. But it is a greater monument to him, as it is a nobler monument to those who have erected it in their own hearts, that he is revered the length of the course of the river first traced by La Salle, and through all the reach of the rivers of his claim from its source, even as far as its mouth at the limitless sea.



CHAPTER XIV

THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY

France evoked from the unknown the valley that may, in more than one sense, be called the heart of America. Her coureurs de bois opened its paths made by the buffalo and the red men to the shod feet of Europe. Her explorers planted the watershed with slender, silent portage traces that have multiplied into thousands of noisy streets and tied indissolubly the lakes of the north to the rivers of the south from which they were long ago severed by nature. Her one white sail above Niagara marked the way of a mighty commerce. Her soldiers sowed the molten seeds of tumultuous cities on the sites of their forts, and her priests and friars consecrated with their faith and prayers forest trail, portage path, ship's sail, and leaden plate.

But that is not all—a valley of new cities like the old, of new paths for greater commerce, of more altars to the same God! The chief significance and import of the addition of this valley to the maps of the world, all indeed that makes it significant, is that here was given (though not of deliberate intent) a rich, wide, untouched field, distant, accessible only to the hardiest, without a shadowing tradition or a restraining fence, in which men of all races were to make attempt to live together under rules of their own devising and enforcing. And as here the government of the people by the people was to have even more literal interpretation than in that Atlantic strip which had traditions of property suffrage and church privilege and class distinctions, I have called it the "Valley of the New Democracy."

When the French explorers entered it, it was a valley of aboriginal, anarchic individualism, with little movable spots of barbaric communistic timocracy, as Plato would doubtless have classified those migratory, predatory kingdoms of the hundreds of red kings, contemporary with King Donnacona, whom Cartier found on the St. Lawrence—communities governed by the warlike, restless spirit.

The French communities that grew in the midst of those naked timocrats, whose savagery they soothed by beads and crucifixes and weapons, were the plantings of absolutism paternalistic to the last degree. One cannot easily imagine a socialism that would go further in its prescriptions than did this affectionate, capricious, generous, if unwise, as it now seems, government of a village along the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi, from a palace by the Seine where a hard-working monarch issued edicts "in the fulness of our power and of our certain knowledge."

The ordinances preserved in the colonial records furnish abundant proof of that parental concern and restraint. They relate to the regulation of inns and markets, poaching, preservation of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews, stray hogs, mad dogs, matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and guardians, weights and measures, nuisances, observance of Sunday, preservation of timber, and many other matters.

Parkman cites these interesting ordinances, which illustrate to what absurd lengths this jealous, paternalistic care extended:

"Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. Another order forbids quarrelling in church. Another assigns pews in due order of precedence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 341.]

One intendant issued a "mandate to the effect that, whereas the people of Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them from raising cattle and sheep, 'being therein ignorant of their true interest, ... now, therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the cotes of this government shall hereafter own no more than two horses or mares and one foal—the same to take effect after the sowing season of the ensuing year (1710), giving them time to rid themselves of their horses in excess of said number, after which they will be required to kill any of such excess that may remain in their possession." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 341.]

And, apropos of the trend toward cities, there is the ordinance of Bigot, issued with a view, we are told, of "promoting agriculture and protecting the morals of farmers" by saving them from the temptations of the cities: "We prohibit and forbid you to remove to this town (Quebec) under any pretext whatever, without our permission in writing, on pain of being expelled and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the benefit of the hospitals." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 342.] There is even a royal edict designed to prevent the undue subdivision of farms which "forbade the country people, except such as were authorized to live in villages, to build a house or barn on any piece of land less than one and a half arpents wide and thirty arpents long." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 342.]

And this word should be added in intimation of the generosity of the paternalism:

"One of the faults of his [Louis XIV's] rule is the excess of his benevolence, for not only did he give money to support parish priests, build churches, and aid the seminary, the Ursulines, the missions, and the hospitals, but he established a fund destined, among other objects, to relieve indigent persons, subsidized nearly every branch of trade and industry, and in other instances did for the colonists what they would far better have learned to do for themselves." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 347.]

Like Aeneas, therefore, these filial emigrants, seeking new homes, not only carried their lares et penates in their arms but bore upon their shoulders their father Anchises.

Succeeding savage individualism, this benevolent despotism gave the valley into the keeping of an individualism even purer and less restrained than that which it succeeded, for the sparse pioneer transmontane settlements were practically governed at first by only the consciences or whims of the inhabitants, instructed of parental commandments learned the other side of the mountains, and by their love of forest and of their prairie neighbors.

And when formal government came a pure democracy, social and political—it came of individual interest and neighborly love and of no abstract philosophical theory or of protest against oligarchy; it came from the application, voluntary for the most part, of "older institutions and ideas to the transforming influence of land," free land; and such has been the result, says Professor Turner, [Footnote: See his "Significance of the Frontier in American History," in "Fifth Yearbook of the National Herbart Society, 1899," also his "Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History," in "Mississippi Valley Historical Association Proceedings, 1909-10."] that fundamentally "American democracy is the outcome of the American people in dealing with the West," that is, the people of this valley of the French pioneers.

The democratical man, as Socrates is made to define him in Plato's "Republic," was one in whom the licentious and extravagant desires have expelled the moderate appetites and love of decorum, which he inherited from his oligarchical father. "Such a man," he adds, "lives a life of enjoyment from day to day, guided by no regulating principle, but turning from one pleasure to another, just as fancy takes him. All pleasures are in his eyes equally good and equally deserving of cultivation. In short, his motto is 'Liberty and Equality.'"

But the early "democratical man" of that valley, even if he came remotely from such oligarchical sires as Socrates gives immediately to all democratical men, reached his motto of "Liberty and Equality" through no such sensual definition of life.

It is true that many of those first settlers migrated from places where the opportunities seemed restricted or conventions irksome or privileges unequal, but it was no "licentious or extravagant desire" or flitting from pleasure to pleasure that filled that valley with sober, pale-faced, lean- featured men and tired, gentle women who enjoyed the "liberty" not of a choice of pleasurable indulgences but of interminable struggles, the "equality" of being each on the same social, economic, and political footing as his neighbor. The sequent democracy was derived of neighborliness and good fellowship, the "natural issue of their interests, their occupations, and their manner of life," and was not constructed of any theory of an ideal state. Nor were they frightened by the arguments of Socrates, who found in the "extravagant love of liberty" the preface to tyranny. And they would not have been frightened even if they had been familiar with his doctrine of democracy. They little dreamed that they were exemplifying the doctrines of a French philosopher or refuting those of a Greek thinker.

Those primitive democratic and individualistic conditions had not yet been seriously changed when, in that bit of the valley which lies in the dim background of my own memory, there had developed a form of government more stern and uncaressing. But there was not a pauper in all the township for its stigmatizing care. There was not an orphan who did not have a home; there was not a person in prison; there was only one insane person, so far as the public knew, and she was cared for in her own home. The National Government was represented by the postmaster miles away; the State government by the tax assessor, a neighbor who came only once a year, if he came at all, to inquire about one's earthly belongings, which could not then be concealed in any way; and the local government by the school- teacher, who was usually a man incapacitated for able-bodied labor or an unmarried woman.

The citizens made and mended the public roads, looked after the sick in a neighborly way, bought their children's schoolbooks, and buried their own dead. I can remember distinctly wondering what a "poor officer" was, for there were no poor in that society where none was rich.

It was a community of high social consistency, promoted not by a conscious, disinterested devotion to the common welfare but by the common, eagerly interested pursuit of the same individual welfares, where there was room enough for all.

It is well contended in a recent and most profound discussion of this subject by Professor Turner (of whom I spoke as born on a portage) that this homogeneity of feeling was the most promising and valuable characteristic of that American democracy. [Footnote: See his "Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History."]

And it was, indeed, prolific of mighty consequences:

First of all, it made it possible for the United States to accept Napoleon's proffer of Louisiana.

Second, it compelled the War of 1812 and so confirmed to the United States the fruits of the purchase, demonstrating at the same time that the "abiding-place" of the national spirit was in the west.

And, third, that spirit of nationalism took into its hands the reins of action in the time when nationality was in peril. Before the end of the Civil War the west was represented in the National Government by the President, the Vice-President, the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Postmaster-General, the Attorney-General, the General of the Army, and the Admiral of the Navy. And it furnished, as Turner adds in summary, the "national hero, the flower of frontier training and ideals."

While the mere fact of office-holding does not indicate the place or source of power, it is noteworthy that the Presidents since the war—to the election of Wilson—Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Harrison, and Taft all came from this valley. Cleveland went over the edge of it, when a young man, to Buffalo and left it only to become governor and President; Arthur, who succeeded to the presidency through the death of President Garfield, and President Roosevelt, who also came first to the presidency through the death of a President and was afterward elected, were both residents of New York, though the latter had a ranch in the far west and seems rather to belong to that region than the place of his birth. Thus of the elected Presidents there was not one who had not a middle-western origin, experience, or association. The Chief Justices since the war have been without exception western men, and so with few exceptions have been the Speakers of the House. And practically all these Presidents, Chief Justices, Speakers, were pioneers or sons of pioneers in that "Valley of the New Democracy" or, at any rate, were nurtured of its natural fellowships, its one-man-as-good-as-another institutions, and its unhampered ambitions.

It is not mere geographical and numerical majorities that are connoted. It is the dominancy of the social, democratic, national spirit of the valley —the supremacy of the average, the useful man, his power and self- sufficiency when standing squarely, firmly upon the earth. It was the secret of the great wrestler Antaeus, the son of Terra, that he could not be thrown even by Hercules so long as his feet touched the earth. How intimately filial to the earth and neighborly the middle-west pioneers were has been suggested. And it was the secret of their success that they stood, every man in his own field, on his own feet, and wrestled with his own arms in primitive strength and virtue and self-reliant ingenuity.

Democracy did not theorize much, and when it did it stumbled. If it had indulged freely in the abstractions of its practices, it would doubtless have suffered the fate of Antaeus, who was finally strangled in mid-air by a giant who came over the mountains.

As it was, this valley civilization apotheosized the average man. Mr. Herbert Croly, in his "Promise of American Life," makes this picture of him: "In that country [the very valley of which I am writing] it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or exclusive devotion. The cheaply and easily made instrument was the efficient instrument, because it was adapted to a year or two of use, and then for supersession by a better instrument; and for the service of such tools one man was as likely to be good as another. No special equipment was required. The farmer was required to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who persisted in one job and who applied the most rigorous and exacting standards to his work was out of place and was really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards." [Footnote: Herbert Croly, "Promise of American Life," pp. 63, 64.]

Is this what democracy, undefiled of aristocratic conditions and traditions, has produced? it will be asked. Has pure individualism in a virgin field wrought of its opportunity only this mediocre, all-round, good-natured, profane, rough, energetic, ingenious efficiency? Is this colorless, insipid "social consistency" the best wine that the valley can offer of its early vintages?

I know those frontier Antaei, who, with their feet on the prairie ground, faced every emergency with a piece of fence wire. They differed from their European brothers in being more resourceful, more energetic, and more hopeful. If it be true that "out of a million well-established Americans taken indiscriminately from all occupations and conditions," when compared to a corresponding assortment of Europeans, "a larger proportion of the former will be leading alert, active, and useful lives," though they may not be wiser or better men; that there will be a "smaller amount of social wreckage" and a "larger amount of wholesome and profitable achievement," it may be safely said that, if the middle-west frontier Americans had been under consideration, the proportion of alert achievement would have been higher and the social wreckage smaller—partly because of the encouragement of the economic opportunity, and partly because of the encouragement of a casteless society.

I cannot lead away from those familiar days without speaking of other companionships which that valley furnished beyond those intimated— companionships which did not interfere with the rough frontier fellowships that made democracy possible. For it was in these same fields that Horace literally sat by the plough and sang of farm and city. It was there that Livy told his old-world stories by lamplight or at the noon-hour. It was there that Pythagoras explained his ancient theorem.

I cannot insist that these companionships and intimacies were typical, but they were sufficiently numerous to disturb any generalizations as to the sacrifices which that democracy demanded for the sake of "social conditions" and economic regularity.

The advancing frontier soon spent itself in the arid desert. The pioneer came to ride in an automobile. The people began to jostle one another in following their common aspirations, where once there was freedom for the energy, even the unscrupulous energy, of all. Time accentuated differences till those who started together were millions of dollars apart. Failures had no kinder fields for new trials. Democracy had now to govern not a puritanical, industrious, sparsely settled Arcady but communities of conflicting dynamic successes, static envies, and complaining despairs.

It met the new emergencies at first, one by one, with no other programme than the most necessary restraints, encouragement of tariffs for the dynamic, improved transportation for the static, and charity for the despairful; but all with an optimism born of a belief in destined success.

To this has succeeded gradually a more or less clearly defined policy of constructive individualism, under an increasingly democratic and less representative control. The paternal absolutism of Louis XIV has evolved into the paternal individualism of a people who are constantly struggling in imperfect speech to make their will understood and by imperfect machinery to get it done—and, as I believe, with increasingly disinterested purpose. It is, however, I emphasize, the paternalism of a highly individualized society.

I described in an earlier chapter a frontier community in that valley. See what has come in its stead, in the city into which it has grown. The child coming from the unknown, trailing clouds of glory, creeps into the community as a vital statistic and becomes of immediate concern. From obliging the nurse to take certain precautions at its birth, the State follows the newcomer through life, sees that he is vaccinated, removes his tonsils and adenoids, furnishes him with glasses if he has bad vision, compels him to school, prepares him not only for citizenship but for a trade or profession, prevents the adulteration of his food, inspects his milk, filters his water, stands by grocer and butcher and weighs his bread and meat for him, cleans the street for him, stations a policeman at his door, transports his letters of business or affection, furnishes him with seeds, gives augur of the weather, wind, and temperature, cares for him if he is helpless, feeds him if he is starving, shelters him if he is homeless, nurses him in sickness, says a word over him if he dies friendless, buries him in its potter's field, and closes his account as a vital statistic in the mortality column.

And there are many agencies of restraint or anxious care that stand in a remoter circle, ready to come in when emergencies require. I have before me a report of legislation in the States alone (that is, exclusive of national and municipal legislation) for two years. I note here a few characteristic and illustrative measures out of the thousands that have been adopted. They relate to the following subjects:

Health of women and children at work; employer's liability; care of epileptics, idiots, and insane; regulation of dentistry and chiropody; control of crickets, grasshoppers, and rodents; exclusion of the boll- weevil; the introduction of parasites; the quenching of fires; the burning of debris in gardens; the destruction of predatory fish; the prohibition of automatic guns for hunting game; against hazing in schools; instruction as to tuberculosis and its prevention; the demonstration of the best methods of producing plants, cut flowers, and vegetables under glass; the establishment of trade-schools; the practice of embalming.

I introduce this brief but suggestive list as intimating how far a democratic people have gone in doing for themselves what Louis XIV at Versailles in the "fulness of power" and out of "certain knowledge" did for the trustful habitants of Montreal, who were "ignorant of their true interest."

And, of course, with that increased paternalism has come of necessity an army of public servants—governors and policemen, street cleaners and judges, teachers and factory inspectors, till, as I have estimated, in some communities one adult in every thirty is a paid servant of the public.

Such paternalism is not peculiar to that valley. I remember, years ago, when I was following the legislation of an eastern State, that a bill was introduced fixing the depth of a strawberry box, and another obliging the vender of huckleberries to put on the boxes a label in letters of certain height indicating that they were picked in a certain way. And this paternalism is even more marked in the old-age pension provision in England, where the "mother of parliaments," as one has expressed it, has been put on the level of the newest western State in its parental solicitude.

But nowhere else than in this valley, doubtless, is that paternalism so thoroughly informed of the individualistic spirit. Chesterton said of democracy that it "is not founded on pity for the common man.... It does not champion man because man is miserable, but because man is so sublime." It "does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king." Indeed, democracy is ever dreaming of "a nation of kings." [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "Heretics," p. 268.] And that characteristic is truer of the democracy that came stark out of the forests and out of the furrows than of the democracy which sprang from protest against and fear of single kings.

The constitution east of the mountains was made in fear of a system which permitted an immediate and complete expression of the will of the people. The movement in American democracy which is most conspicuous is the effort to get that will accurately and immediately expressed—that is, a movement toward what might be called more democracy—toward a direct control of "politics" by the people—and that movement has had its rise and strength in the Mississippi Valley and beyond.

But who are the people who are to control? Only those who are living and of electoral age and other qualification? I recall again Bismarck's definition: "They are the invisible multitude of spirits—the nation of yesterday and to-morrow." And that invisible multitude of yesterday and to-morrow, whose mouths are stopped with dust or who have not yet found human embodiment, must find voice in the multitude of to-day—the multitude that inherits the yesterdays and has in it the only promise of to-morrow.

There may be some question there as to its being always the voice of God, but no one thinks of any other (except to add to it that of the woman). The "certain knowledge" and the "fulness of power" of Louis XIV have become the endowments of the average man—and the average man is one-half or two-thirds of all the voting men of the community or nation, plus one. But that average man, forgetful of the multitude of yesterday and ungrateful, has none the less wrought into his very fibre and spirit the uncompromising individualism, the unconventional neighborliness, and the frontier fellowships of yesterday. It is of that that he is consciously or unconsciously instructed at every turn. And he is now beginning to think more and more of the invisible multitude, the nation of tomorrow.

It is deplored that the so-called individuality developed in that valley is "simply an unusual amount of individual energy, successfully spent in popular and remunerative occupations," that there is "not the remotest conception of the individuality which may reside in the gallant and exclusive devotion to some disinterested and perhaps unpopular moral, intellectual, or technical purpose," as has such illustrious exhibition in France, for example. This is, we are told, one of the sacrifices to social consistency which menaces the fulness and intensity of American national life. And the most serious problem is to make a nation of independent kings who shall not exercise their independencies "perversely or irresponsibly."

Men have been always prone to make vocational pursuits the basis of social classification. In the Scripture record of man he had not been seven generations in the first inhabited valley of earth before his descendants were divided into cattlemen, musicians, and mechanics. For the record runs that Lamech had three sons, Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal—Jabal who became the father of those who live in tents and have cattle, Jubal the father of those that handle the harp and the organ, and Tubal the father of those who work in brass and iron. And we do not have to turn many pages to discover the social distinctions that grew out of the vocational. The first question of that western valley is, "Who is he?" and the answer is one which will tell you his occupation. No one who has not an occupation of some regularity and recognized practical usefulness is, as Mr. Croly intimates, likely to have much recognition.

On the other hand, within the limits of approved occupations, there is, except in great centres, no marked social stratification based on vocation, as in old-world life and that of the new world more intimately touched by the old. The man is recognized for his worth.

In the midst of that valley is a college town, [Footnote: Galesburg, Ill.] planted by a company of migrants from an older State seventy-five years ago who bought a township of land, founded a college, [Footnote: Knox College.] and built their homes about on the wild prairie. It has now twenty thousand inhabitants and is an important railroad as well as educational centre. It was nearly fifty years old when I entered it as a student. That I studied Greek did not keep me from knowing well a carpenter; that in spare hours I learned a manual trade and put into type my translation of "Prometheus Bound" did not bar me from the homes of the richest or the most cultured. Once, when a student, because of some little victory, I was received by the mayor and a committee of citizens, but the men at the engines in the shops and on the engines in the yards blew their whistles. When I went back to that college as its president it was not remembered against me that I had sawed wood or driven a plough. I knew all the conductors and most of the engineers on the railroads. I knew every merchant and nearly every mechanic, as well as every lawyer, judge, and doctor. Men had, to be sure, their preferential associations, but these were personal and not determined of vocation or class. A recent mayor of this city of two colleges was a cigar maker and, I was assured by a professor of theology in a local university, the best mayor it has had in years, and he died driving a smallpox patient to a pest-house. I received when in Paris, by the same mail as I recall, a resolution of felicitation from a Protestant body of which I was a member in that town, and a letter of like felicitation from the Catholic parish priest of that same city. I do not know how better to illustrate, to those who are working at the problem of democracy in other valleys, how democracy has wrought for itself in that valley of neighborliness and resourcefulness and plenty, in the wake of the monarchical, paternalistic affection of France.



CHAPTER XV

WASHINGTON: THE UNION OF THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN WATERS

We have followed the French explorers and priests as pioneers through the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi to the gulf and the Rocky Mountains. But there remains one further conquest, a conquest of their adventurous imaginations only, for none of their adventurous or pious feet ever travelled over the valley lying south of the St. Lawrence watershed and east of the Alleghanies, though they were probably the first of white men to see those peaks rising in the north of what is now New England, known as the White Mountains.

Standing on the summit of one of the White Mountains a few summers ago, I was shown a dim little indentation of the sky at the northwest which I was told was Mont Real. And since seeing that I have imagined Jacques Cartier in 1535 looking off to the southeast, when his disappointed vision of the west had tired his eyes, and catching first sight of these dim indentations of his sky, the White Mountains, which the colonists from England did not see until a century later and then only from their ocean side.

But whether the master pilot from the white-bastioned St. Malo saw them or not, we have record that Champlain in his exploration of the Atlantic coast did discern their peaks upon his horizon; and so we may think of the French as the discoverers not merely of the northern and western valleys, of the Adirondacks, in whose shadows Champlain and Brule and Father Jogues fought with the Iroquois and suffered torture, and of the snow-capped Rockies at whose feet Chevalier de la Verendrye was obliged to turn back, but also of the tops of the white hills near the Atlantic coast, which I have often seen lighted at sunrise while the lower slopes and valleys were in darkness or shadow—hills touched by the French, as by that rising sun, only at their tops and by the trails of their eyes.

For the moment those mountains stand upon the horizon as the symbol of the only part of North America east of the Rockies which the French pioneers did not possess before others by the trails of their feet or the paths of their boats. Verrazano of Dieppe had sailed along the Atlantic shore front, but so, perhaps, had Cabot. Ribaut had been "put to the knife" in Florida, but it was the knife of a Spaniard whose compatriots had been there before Ribaut. Etienne Brule had wandered all the way from Canada into Pennsylvania along the sources and upper waters of the Atlantic streams, but the colonists of other nations were sitting huddled at the mouths of the streams. And Father Jogues had endured the torturing portage from the shores of Lake George to the Mohawk, but the Dutch were by that time there to succor him from the Iroquois. Only with their eyes had the French beheld first of Europe the America of the eastern waters, whose inhabitants, when they came to put on uniform and fight for its independence, called themselves "Continentals," as if their little hem of the garment were the continent.

One wonders—if to little purpose—what would have been the consequence if De Monts, whom Champlain accompanied to America in 1604, had planted his little colony at some place farther south in his continental grant made by Henry IV, stretching, as it did, all the way from what is now Philadelphia to the St. Lawrence—if, for example, he had anchored off the Island of Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years before Hudson came up the harbor in the Half Moon, had settled there instead of on the sterile island of Ste. Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand, the sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the commissioners to fix the boundaries between the United States and Canada discovered in 1793—nearly two centuries later—the foundations of the "Habitation de l'isle Ste. Croix" that the French had built in the gloom of the cedars. Or if, when the scurvy-stricken colony left that barren site, they had followed Champlain to the mouth of the Charles, la riviere du Guast—the site of Cambridge or Boston—or even to the Bay St. Louis—which is remembered in Champlain's journal as the place where the friendly Indians showed him their fish-hooks made of barbed bone lashed to wood, but which has become better known as Plymouth Bay where the Pilgrims landed fifteen years later—there instead of Port Royal, where even Lescarbot's "Ordre de Bon- Temps" could not overcome the evil reports in France concerning a "churlish wilderness"! Or if Champlain, instead of seeking later the Rock of Quebec—whose rugged charms he could not forget even in the presence of the site of Boston or in the streets of Paris—had laid the foundations of his faith and his courage on the Susquehanna, for example! In any one of these contingencies there might have been a more prosperous Acadia. New England might conceivably have become Nouvelle France, and New York City might be bearing to-day the name of a seventeenth-century French prince.

An idle conjecture, but it does, I think, help us to appreciate the happy destiny (or by whatever name the sequence of events may be called) not that kept France out of that narrow Atlantic-coast strip but that put her in a position to become the power that should in a very true sense force the jealous, many-minded colonies of that strip into a union, make possible the erection of that feeble union into a nascent nation, give it, though under certain compulsion, territory to become a world-power, and finally furnish it, if grudgingly, with a great western, overmountain domain in which to develop a democratic and a nationalistic spirit strong enough to hold a continent-wide people in one republic. These services, intended and unintended, negative and positive, grudging and voluntary, performed, however, all in unsurpassed sacrifice and valiance not only of the explorers and priests but of the exiled soldiers, intimate how, out of all the misery of finding the northern water gate and keeping it and following the northern waterway and fortifying it, came the harvests—even if France did not gather them into her own granaries—of those who "sow by all waters."

We might not have had some of the institutions we do have if Champlain or Poutrincourt had anticipated the English Pilgrims at Plymouth, but we might still be a colony or a cluster of republics, even with all that we have got by way of those and other English migrants, except for these hardy men who kept battling with the ice and snow and water and famine at the north.

But what I wish to emphasize here—and I am much indebted to the young western historian Mr. Hulbert, for this view—is that France, struggling to keep the empire of her adventure and faith in the northern and western valleys of America, gave to the world George Washington. She made him, all unconsciously to be sure, first in war. She saved him, consciously, from the fate of an unsuccessful rebel. And she made it possible for him to be first in peace. These are all defensible theses, however much or little credit France may deserve in her purposes toward him.

Up in those same White Mountains there rises one that bears his name, taller than the rest. It stands in a presidential range that has no rivalling peak. A singular felicity in the naming of the neighboring mountains has given the name Lafayette to the most picturesque of all. There are well-known and much-travelled trails to the austere peak of Mount Washington. There is even a railroad now. Doubtless no mountain in America is known in its contour to more people, though there are many of loftier height and of more inviting slopes.

So the outlines of the life of Washington are known more widely than those of any other American. The trails to the height of his achievement and genius have doubtless been learned in the histories of France. And asking my readers to travel over one of those well-worn trails again, I can offer no better reason than that I may on the way call attention to objects and outlooks that should be of special interest to the eyes of a company of men and women whose geographical or racial ancestors gave us him in giving us the west.

Washington was born a British colonist. His great-grandfather settled in Virginia at about the time that La Salle was making his way up the St. Lawrence to the seigniory of St. Sulpice above the Lachine Rapids. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were frontiersmen, farmers, or planters. He had himself the discipline of the plantation, but he learned surveying and had also the sterner experiences of its frontier practice. Then came his appointment at nineteen as an adjutant-general of colonial militia in Virginia and with that office the still sterner disciplines beyond the frontier, where France was tutor, without which tuition he would doubtless have become and remained a successful colonial Virginia planter and general of militia.

I have estimated that all the young men in America of approximately Washington's age at that time could probably have been gathered into the Roman colosseum back of the Pantheon; at any rate, into an American university stadium. They could have been reached by the voice of one man. (Which will intimate how small America was—one-fourth the size of Paris when he was born, one-half the size of Paris when he became a major of militia.)

They were practically all country-born. There were, indeed, no great cities in which to be born. New York was little more than a town with only eight or nine thousand inhabitants; and Boston, the largest city at that time, had but thirteen thousand in the year 1732. They were men, as Kipling says of the colonials in the Boer War, who could "shoot and ride." And Washington was a strong athletic youth of fiery passions, which, given free rein, would have made him a successful Indian chief. (Indeed, the Indians admired him and called him Ha-no-da-ga-ne-ars—"the destroyer of cities"—and at last admitted him, as a supreme tribute, to their Indian paradise, the only white man found worthy of such canonization.) But, rugged, country-born men though they were, it was in no such neighborly democracy as Lincoln knew that they were bred. Washington had his slaves, his coat of arms, and the occupations and leisures and pleasures, so far as the frontier would permit, of an English gentleman. And it is no such slouchy, shabbily dressed figure as Lincoln's that Washington presents. I saw a few years ago a letter in Washington's own hand, in which he gave directions to the tailor as to the number of buttons that his coat should have, the shape of its lapel, and the fit of its collar. He was most insistent upon the conventions, though if such an assembly had been held, as I have suggested, of the young men from the eastern waters, there would have been no such uniformity of costume as now makes an audience of men in America, or in Europe, so monotonously black and white.

These young men did not dress alike; they did not spell alike. Washington's letters show that he did not even spell consistently with himself. And that first man of the eastern waters to follow the French in establishing a settlement on the western waters, Daniel Boone, left this memorial of his orthography on a tree in Kentucky: "C-I-L-L-E-D A B-A-R." They did not dress alike, they did not spell alike, they did not think alike. It was a great, and it must have seemed a hopeless, motley of men who were all unconsciously to lay the foundations of a new national structure.

They were all of immigrant ancestors, and most of them of most recent immigrant ancestry, or of foreign birth. Though much more homogeneous in their lineage than the present immigration, they had not the unifying agencies that now keep Maine and Florida within a few minutes of each other by telephone or a few hours by rail.

But there were in all, immigrants and sons of immigrants, hardly more in number than now enter that same land as aliens in one or two years. I spoke a few years ago at a dinner of the descendants of the Mayflower and was told that they numbered in all the country, as I recall, about three thousand—three thousand descendants in three hundred years of a hundred colonists, half of whom perished in the first winter; which leads one to wonder what the land of the Mayflower and the nation of George Washington will be in three hundred years, when the descendants of each shipload of immigrants of to-day will have increased in like ratio. From a single steerage passenger cargo, of the Lusitania or Mauretania, let us say, we shall have twenty, thirty, or forty thousand Lusitanians or Mauretanians as descendants; and from a single year's immigration thirty millions. The descendants of the colonial ships will be lost in this mighty new progeny of the ships of Europe and will numerically be as negligible as the North American Indian is in our census today.

But to come back to Washington: the appointment of the stripling as adjutant-general with rank of major was two years after the humpbacked Governor Galissonniere had sent Celoron down the Ohio on that historic voyage of plate-planting, the news of which had finally reached the ears of the governor of Virginia, who with many planters of Virginia (Washington's family included) had a prospective interest in lands along that same river. Then came the word through Indian and trader (the only long-distance telephones of that time) that forts were beginning to grow where the plates had been planted.

It was then that the young farmer, surveyor, soldier, just come of age, was chosen to carry a message to the commander of the nearest French fort in the valley—Fort Le Boeuf, which I have already described—about fifteen miles from Lake Erie on the slight elevation from which the waters begin to flow toward the Mississippi. The commander was Legardeur de St. Pierre, a one-eyed veteran of wars, but recently come from an expedition out across the valley toward the Rockies.

Parkman has made this picture of the momentous meeting of France and America in the western wilderness, which in its peopling has kept only a single tree of those forests, a tree pointed out to me as the Washington tree, though it, too, may have come with the migrants:

"The surrounding forests had dropped their leaves, and in gray and patient desolation bided the coming winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy 'clearing,' and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw from the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military exiles [Legardeur and his garrison] resigned themselves as they might to months of monotonous solitude; when, just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall youth [and he was only an inch shorter than Lincoln, six feet three inches] came out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion much older and rougher than himself, and followed by several Indians and four or five white men with packhorses. Officers from the fort went out to meet the strangers; and, wading through mud and sodden snow, they entered at the gate. On the next day the young leader of the party, with the help of an interpreter, for he spoke no French [a deficiency which he laments with greatest regret later in life], had an interview with the commandant and gave him a letter from Governor Dinwiddie. St. Pierre and the officer next in rank, who knew a little English, took it to another room to study it at their ease; and in it, all unconsciously, they read a name destined to stand one of the noblest in the annals of mankind, for it introduced Major George Washington, Adjutant-General of the Virginia Militia." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:136-7.]

At the end of three days the young British colonial officer of militia started on his perilous journey homeward, having been most hospitably entertained by the one-eyed veteran, bearing on his person a letter which St. Pierre and his officer had been the three days in preparing. The brave, courteous, soldierly lines of the frontier deserve to be heard to- day both in France and America:

"I am here by Virtue of the Orders of my General; and I entreat you, Sir, not to doubt, one Moment, but that I am determined to conform myself to them with all the Exactness and Resolution which can be expected from the best Officer.... I don't know that in the Progress of this Campaign [of repossession] anything passed which can be reputed an Act of Hostility or is contrary to the Treaties which subsist between the two Crowns.... Had you been pleased, Sir, to have descended to particularize the Facts which occasioned your Complaints I should have had the Honor of answering you in the fullest, and, I am persuaded, most satisfactory Manner."

In the spring the two hundred canoes which Washington saw moored by the Riviere aux Boeufs carried the builders of Fort Duquesne and a garrison for it down La Belle Riviere, and a little later is heard the volley of the Virginia backwoodsmen up on the Laurel ridges a little way back from Duquesne, the volley which began the strife that armed the civilized world—the backwoodsmen commanded by the Virginia youth, George Washington.

It is in that lonely ravine up among the ridges which I have described in an earlier chapter that the union of the eastern and western waters began. And there should be a monument beside Jumonville's to keep succeeding generations mindful of the mighty consequence of what happened then.

This fray of the mountains was one of the most portentous of events in American history. It was not only the grappling of two European peoples and two systems of government out upon the edges of the civilized world— the stone-age men assisting on both sides—a fray in which Legardeur de St. Pierre, Coulon de Jumonville, and de Villiers, his avenging brother, were France, and Washington was England. It was the beginning of the making of a new nation, of which that tall youth, who found the whizzing of bullets a "charming sound," was to be the very cornerstone.

He was here having his first tuition of war. De Villiers let him march back from Fort Necessity unharmed, when he might, perhaps, have ended the career of this young major in the great meadows where they fought "through the gray veil of mists and rain." Washington was taught by France, in these years of border warfare—for he went four times over the mountains— he was spared by France in the end to help take from France the title of the west, or so it seemed when, in 1763, the war which his command had begun was ended in the surrender of that vast domain to England. But we know now that the struggle had other issue.

The steep path of the years when the colonies were taught their first lessons of federation by their common fear of the French and their allies, led by the tall young man who emerged from the woods back of Fort Le Boeuf and later assisted by the moral and pecuniary sympathy of France, by the presence of her ships along their menaced coasts, by the counsels of her admirals and generals, and by the marching and fighting of her soldiers side by side with theirs, you know. It is a path so marked by memorials as to need no spoken word. Only one vista in this trail of gloom with overhanging clouded sky need detain us a moment. It lets us see Benjamin Franklin rejoicing in Paris after the news of the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777. We see Beaumarchais rushing away from Franklin's lodgings in Passy to spread the good news, and in such mad haste that he upset his carriage and dislocated his arm. And when we next look out from the path we see the British soldiers passing in surrender between two lines drawn up at Yorktown, the American soldiers on one side with Washington at their head, and on the other the French soldiers under Count Rochambeau.

Washington and Legardeur de St. Pierre at Fort Le Boeuf, Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown! You have been told again and again that except for the France of Rochambeau the War of Independence would probably have failed and that the colonies would have remained English colonies. But let us remember that except for the France of Legardeur de St. Pierre there would probably not have been, as Parkman says, a "revolution"; and by the France of Legardeur I mean the spirit of France that had illustration in his lonely, exiled watching of the regions won by her pioneers.

The French man-of-war Triumph brought to Philadelphia in May of 1783 the treaty of Paris. In the December following General Washington said farewell to his officers and returned to Mount Vernon, his estate on the Potomac. There he was busied through the next few months in putting his private affairs in order, in superintending the reparation of his plantation, and in receiving those who came to him for counsel or to express their gratitude. It was as a level bit of the mountain trail from which the traveller catches glimpses of a peaceful valley. And that is all that the traveller usually sees.

But there is a farther view. From that level path one can see over the Alleghanies the great valley so familiar to our eyes from other points of view, stretching toward the Mississippi.

In the autumn of 1784 (eight months after his farewell to the army) Washington leaves his home, as it appears, to visit some lands which he had acquired as one result of his earlier and martial trips out beyond the Laurel Hills. He had title to forty thousand acres beyond the mountains. He had even purchased the site of this first battle in the meadows, where he had built Fort Necessity and where he was himself captured by the French, but from which he was permitted to go back over the mountains with his flags flying and his drums beating. A "charming field of encounter" he called the place in his youthful exuberance before the battle in 1753. "Much Hay may be cut here When the ground is laid down in Grass; and the upland, East of the Meadow is good for grain," he wrote in his unsentimental diary, September 12, 1784. For over the mountains he went again on what was thought but a trip of personal business. But on the third day of the journey, September 3d, he writes, incidentally, as explaining his desire to talk with certain men: "one object of my journey being to obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the Eastern and Western Waters." And as he advances this becomes the possessing object.

Here are a few extracts from that diary still preserved in his own hand which give the intimation of a prescience that should in itself hold for him a grateful place in the memory of the west and of a concern about little things that should bring him a bit nearer to our human selves:

September 6. "Remained at Bath all day and was showed the Model of a Boat constructed by the ingenious Mr. (James) Rumsey for ascending rapid currents by mechanism.... Having hired three Pack horses to give my own greater relief...."

September 11. "This is a pretty considerable water and, as it is said to have no fall in it, may, I conceive, be improved into a valuable navigation...."

September 12. "Crossing the Mountains, I found tedious and fatieguing [sic].... In passing over the Mountains I met numbers of Persons and Pack horses ... from most of whom I made enquiries of the nature of the Country...."

September 13. "I visited my Mill" [a mill which he had had built before the Revolution]....

September 15. "This being the day appointed for the Sale of my moiety of the Co-partnership Stock many People were gathered (more out of curiosity I believe than from other motives). My Mill I could obtain no bid for...."

September 19. "Being Sunday, and the People living on my Land, apparently very religious" [these were Scotch-Irish who had squatted on a rich piece of land patented by Washington], "it was thought best to postpone going among them till to-morrow...."

September 20. "I told them I had no inclination to sell; however, after hearing a good deal of their hardships, their Religious principles (which had brought them together as a society of Ceceders [sic]) and unwillingness to seperate [sic] or remove; I told them I would make them a last offer...."

September 22. "Note—In my equipage Trunk and the Canteens—were Madeira and Port Wine—Cherry bounce—Oyl, Mustard—Vinegar—and Spices of all sorts—Tea, and Sugar in the Camp Kettles (a whole loaf of white sugar broke up about 7 lbs. weight).... My fishing lines are in the Canteens...."

September 23. "An Apology made to me from the Court of Fayette (thro' Mr. Smith) for not addressing me."

The Cheat at the Mouth is about 125 y'ds wide—the Monongahela near d'ble that—the colour of the two Waters is very differ't, that of Cheat is dark (occasioned as is conjectured by the Laurel, among which it rises, and through which it runs) the other is clear, & there appears a repugnancy in both to mix, as there is a plain line of division betw'n the two for some distance below the fork; which holds, I am told near a Mile.—the Cheat keeps to the right shore as it descends, & the other the left.

September 25. "At the crossing of this Creek McCulloch's path, which owes its origen [sic] to Buffaloes.... At the entrance of the above glades I lodged this night, with no other shelter or cover than my cloak & was unlucky enough to have a heavy shower of Rain."

September 26. "We had an uncomfortable travel to one Charles Friends, about 10 miles; where we could get nothing for our horses, and only boiled Corn for ourselves."

October 1. "I had a good deal of conversation with this Gentleman on the Waters, and trade of the Western Country."

October 4. "I breakfasted by Candlelight, and Mounted my horse soon after daybreak. I arrived at Colchester, 30 Miles, to Dinner; and reached home before Sun down." [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Washington and the West," pp. 32-85.]

In this revelation of Washington out of the laconic misspelled entries of his diary we have not only a most human portrait but an intimation of his practical far-seeing statesmanship. He looms even a larger figure as he rides through the fog of the Youghiogheny, for there he appears as the prophet of the eastern and western waters. In his vision the New France and the New England are to be indissolubly bound into a New America. He had written Chevalier de Chastellux from Princeton, October 12, 1783, after a return from the Mohawk Valley, that he could not but be struck by the immense extent and importance "of the vast inland navigation of these United States," that should bring that great western valley into communication with the east, and that he would not rest contented until he had explored that western country and traversed those lines which have given bounds to a new empire. And as he comes back over the Alleghanies from this journey of six hundred and eighty miles on the same horses he writes: "No well-informed mind need be told how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest to bind all parts together by one indissoluble band." And the indissoluble band is the smooth road and the navigable stream or canal. [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Washington and the West," p. 100.]

England and France had both restrained western migration, and the young provincial republic was doubtless of no mind to encourage it, so far as it then knew its mind. But Washington had a larger, wiser view than any other except Franklin, and even Franklin was not ardent for the canals. Washington was thinking, some will say, of the trade that would come over those paths; and so he was, but it was not primarily for his own advantage, not for the trade's sake, but for the sake of the weak little confederation of States for which he had ventured all he was and had.

He was (as my old professor of history in Johns Hopkins was the first to point out [Footnote: Herbert B. Adams, "Washington's Interests in Western Lands," in Johns Hopkins University Studies. Third series, No. I, 1885.]) the first to suggest the parcelling of the western country into "free, convenient, and independent governments," and here he appears the first not to speculate about but to seek out by fording streams and climbing mountains a practical way to a "more perfect union," and not merely for those jealous States lying along the Atlantic and within reach of its commerce, but for all the territory and people of their new heritage.

And singularly enough this very journey led not only to the establishment of those paths between the east and west, the national road, the canals reaching toward the sources of the rivers, and ultimately the trans- Alleghany railroad, but to the making of that unmatched document, the Constitution of the United States. And in this wise:

Washington called the attention of Virginia and Maryland to the importance of opening a communication between the Potomac and James and the western waters. He writes to Lafayette of being at the meeting of the Maryland Assembly in that interest. [Footnote: John Pickell, "New Chapter in the Early Life of Washington in Connection with the Narrative History of the Potomac Company, 1856," pp. 133-4.] These two States appointed commissioners to confer concerning this and other matters. Their recommendations resulted in the calling of a more widely representative convention, and this in turn in the convening of a body to revise the entire federal system.

So this peaceful journey of the warrior over the mountains to the great meadows and down into the tangled ravines of West Virginia became not only the prophecy of the indissoluble bond between the east and west; it became the first step in that movement which led the original States themselves into that more perfect union.

The sequence, which did not occur to me until I read recently the diary of that trans-Alleghany journey, gives Washington a new, if a homelier, majesty.

Napoleon the Great has spoken his praise of Washington as a general. Many of our own historians agree that it is very doubtful if without Washington the struggle for independence would have succeeded. Other men were important. He was indispensable. This intimates the occasion we have for gratitude that the commander of the French let him march out of Fort Necessity in 1754.

The world has for a century been repeating the eulogies that have outlived the invective of his day—and that are only now becoming humanized by the new school of historians who will not sacrifice facts to glowing periods. Washington is now more of a human being and less of a god than the Washington whom Lincoln found in Weems's "Life."

Yet with all the humanizing is he the austere, rugged, inaccessible mountain, its fiery passions hidden, its head above the forests. And so will he stand in history the justest of men, a man of highest purity of purpose and of greatest practical wisdom; but, if as a mountain, then as one that hides somewhere in its slopes such a path as we have learned to know in our journeys over this course, a portage path between two great valleys which its summit has blessed, for he was as a portage path between the eastern and western waters, between the institutions of New England and the fleur-de-lis fields of Nouvelle France.

I have visited the unmarked field where Fort Le Boeuf once stood, by French Creek, the field where "the most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this [American] continent" [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:4.] was put by the stripling Washington to the veteran Legardeur de St. Pierre.

I have, in my worship of the great general, followed through the rain and sleet of a winter's night and in the mud of a country road his famous march from the crossing of the Delaware to Trenton, made in that December night of 1776 when the struggle seemed most hopeless.

And I have been in the place in which—as to at least one historian—he seems to me the most of a man and the most of a prophet, even the most of a god, out in the glades and passes, the rains and fogs, of the Alleghanies, fording the streams and following the paths of buffalo and deer in an attempt to find a way between the east and west.



CHAPTER XVI

THE PRODUCERS

On the wonderful background which the passing life of that valley has filled with dim epic figures that are now but the incarnations of European longings, as rich in color as that which lies more consciously back of Greece and Rome or in the fields of Gaul (the splendors of the court of Versailles shining through the sombre forests and into the huts of the simple habitants)—on this I have depicted the rather shadowy suggestions of a matter-of-fact, drab democracy which is usually made to obscure all that background with its smoke. But if I have made your eyes see what I have tried to show, the colors and figures of the background still show themselves.

I have now to put against that wonderful background, dim as it is, the new habitants. I suggested earlier the emergence of their gaunt figures from the forests and the processional of their ships of the prairies through the tall grass that seemed as the sea itself.

I had in my thought to speak of these new inhabitants as workers, but that word has in it too much of the suggestion of endless, hopeless, playless labor. Yet they are workers all-or nearly all. There are some tramps, vagrants, idlers, to be sure, the spray of that restless sea. But when a man of great wealth wishes to give up systematic work he generally goes out of the valley or begins a migratory life, as do the wild birds of the valley.

But these busy, ever-working people of the valley are better characterized by other names, and they may be divided into three overlapping classes:

I. The precursors, those that run before, the explorers, the discoverers, the inventors, the prophets.

II. The producers, those, literally, who lead forth: the dukes, marshals, generals of democracy, bringers forth of things from the ground, the waters, by brain and muscle; and the transporters of the things brought forth to the places of need.

III. The poets, that is, in the old pristine Greek sense, the makers, the creators, in the generic sense, and not merely in the specific sense of makers of verses.

If you object to my terminology as exalting too much the common man, as putting sacred things to profane use, as demeaning prophecy and nobility and poesy, I shall answer that it is because of the narrowing definitions of convention that only the makers of verses, and not all of those, are poets, that only men of certain birth or ancestry or favor are dukes, and that prophets have entirely disappeared. And I bring to my support the more liberal lexicography of science, whose spectroscopy now admits the humblest elements into the society of the stars; whose microscopy, as Maeterlinck has helped us to become aware, has permitted the flowers to share the aspirations of animal intelligence; whose chemistry has gathered the elements into a social democracy in which no permanent aristocracy seems now to be possible, except that of service to man; whose physics has divided the atom and yet exalted it to a place which would lead Lucretius, were he writing now, to include it in Natura Deorum instead of Natura Rerum.

The son of Sirach, in his Book of Wisdom, has described the man who did the work of the world in ancient times; for "how shall he become wise," begins this essay, "that holdeth the plough, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labors, and whose discourse is of the stock of bulls? He will set his heart upon turning his furrows, his wakefulness is to give his heifers their fodder. So is every artificer and work-master that passeth his time by night as by day, they that cut gravings of signets; and his diligence is to make great variety; he will set his heart to preserve likeness in his portraiture, and will be wakeful to finish his work. So is the smith, sitting by the anvil, and considering the un-wrought iron; the vapor of the fire will waste his flesh, and in the heat of the furnace will he wrestle with his work; the noise of the hammer will be ever in his ears, and his eyes are upon the pattern of the vessel; he will set his heart upon perfecting his works, and he will be wakeful to adorn them perfectly. So is the potter sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always anxiously set at his work, and all his handiwork is by number; he will fashion the clay with his arm, and will bend its strength in front of his feet; he will apply his heart to finish the glazing, and he will be wakeful to make clean the furnace. All these put their trust in their hands; and each becometh wise in his own work. Without these shall not a city be inhabited, and men shall not sojourn or walk up or down therein. They shall not be sought for in the council of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high; they shall not sit on the seat of the judge, and they shall not understand the covenant of judgment; neither shall they declare instruction and judgment, and where parables are they shall not be found. But they will maintain the fabric of the world; and in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer."

The wisdom of the scribe, however, he said, "cometh by opportunity of leisure." That wisdom the west, as I have already intimated, has not yet learned. Such a scene as I witnessed a little time ago in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, a scene typical of what occurs many times a day there, is not yet to be seen in the valley. I saw that hall filled in the early afternoon with an audience markedly masculine, listening to a lecture on early Greek life, interspersed with readings from the Homeric epics. I cannot visualize, much as I could wish to, a like scene in the Mississippi Valley, except in the atmosphere of a woman's club, or at an assembly on the shore of the lake Chautauqua, which I have described in the narrative of the "sowing of the leaden plates," where men and women are for a little time shut away from their normal occupations in a fenced or walled town; or in a university where attendance upon the lecture is required for a degree. I cannot visualize it even with such a charming and amphionic lecturer as the great scholar who gave the lecture on Greece [Footnote: Dean Croiset.] to which I have referred.

It is that want, in the valley, of appreciation of the value of leisure and of its wisdoms, it is that worship of what the son of Sirach called the "wisdom of business," or busyness, it is that disposition not to listen to the voices of the invisible multitude of spirits of the past (who after all help to constitute a nation no less than the multitude of spirits of the present, and of the future), it is that inability to credit disinterested, materially unproductive, purposes and pursuits, and fit them into the philosophy of a perfectibility based on material prosperity —it is all of these that intimate the shortcomings of that life of the Valley of Hurry.

I saw another great and, as it seemed, non-university audience in the same amphitheatre in Paris listening just after midday to a lecture on Montesquieu, and I had not sufficient imagination to picture such an audience as near the Stock Exchange of Chicago as the Sorbonne is to the Bourse—in that western city where men take hardly time at that hour of day to eat, much less to philosophize. They will not pause to hear Montesquieu remind them that "democracy is virtue" or to hear Homer speak of virtue as the ancients conceived it.'

But, on the other hand, and there is another side, they will give up private business, eating, and all to stop a patent dishonesty, to improve the mail service, to discuss the smoke nuisance that happens to be choking their throats, or get rid of the beggar at the door, or to go to a ball game.

They do not there in any great number appreciate the wonderful, indefatigable, disinterested efforts of scholars, artists, poets, in the narrower sense—the wisdoms of seeming idleness or leisure. On the other hand, I am sure that the poetry and prophecy of those who (again in the language of the son of Sirach) are "building the fabric of the world" are not appreciated either in Paris or Chicago, partly because of convention and inadequate representation in the old world, and because of the smoke and noise and the thought of the "unwrought iron" in the new world.

Of the geographical precursors of that valley I have spoken. But there are others who have enlarged the boundaries and increased the size of acres discovered by the first precursors. Let me without fatiguing statistics give intimation of what I mean in one or two illustrations of the successors of the coureurs de bois, the runners before, the later prophets of the valley.

Out of a trough up in the Alleghany Mountains—one of those troughs occupied by the sinewy Scotch-Irish pioneers who first, after the French, as you will recall, crept down into the great valley—there journeyed one day, a century after Celoron, a young man on horseback. He rode as many miles as La Salle went on foot in that memorable heart-breaking journey from Fort Crevecoeur to Fort Frontenac. He rode through the territory which La Salle had so appealingly described to Louis XIV, now yellow with ripe wheat. Men and women, children and grandmothers, were toiling day and night with scythes and sickles to harvest it by hand, but could not gather it all, and tons were left to rot under the "hoofs of cattle." [Footnote: "He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the grain crop is this—it must be gathered quickly or it breaks down and decays. It will not wait. The harvest season lasts from four to ten days only. And whoever cannot snatch his grain from the field during this short period must lose it."—H. N. Casson, "Cyrus Hall McCormick," pp. 65, 66.]

This precursor came with a sword, beaten not into a ploughshare but into a something quite as indispensable, a sickle—a vibrating sickle driven by horses, that would in a day do the work of a dozen, twenty, thirty, forty men, women, children, and grandmothers. In his eastern home he had, like La Salle, suffered from creditors, from jeering neighbors who thought him visionary, if not crazed, and from fearful laborers who broke his machines; but there in that golden western valley he found sympathy, and, on the Chicago portage, a site for the making of his sickles, fitted into machines called harvesters—there where the French precursor's boat and sword were found not long ago. Seventeen years later, on his imperial farm, Napoleon III (whose royal ancestors had given the very site for the factory) fastened the cross of the Legion of Honor upon the breast of this prophet.

There were others who went with him or followed him into that richer valley, adding the self-rake to the sickle, then putting a platform on the harvester so that the men who bound the sheaves had no longer to walk and bend over the grain on the ground, as they had done since before the days of Ruth and Naomi, then devising an iron arm to take the place of one of flesh, and finally putting a piece of twine in the hand of that iron arm and making it do the work of the binder. I cannot help wondering what Tonty of the iron hand would have said could he have seen that half-human machine cutting the wheat, and with its iron hand tying it in bundles, there in the fields of Aramoni, just back of the Rock St. Louis.

But I do not need to idealize or emphasize to men of France the service of this particular precursor, who was for years considering the unwrought iron, making experiment after experiment before he came down into that golden valley, literally to multiply its acres a hundredfold; for the French Academy of Science declared that he had "done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man," and a late President of the French Republic is quoted as saying that without this harvester "France would starve." The King of Spain, the Emperor of Germany, the Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, and the Shah of Persia have added their tributes to those of the President of the French Republic, and all the nations of the earth are literally bringing their glory and their honor into that city of the portage strip, which, in a sense, has leading across and out of it paths to all the other golden valleys of the earth, for we are told that the sickles are reaping the fields of "Argentina in January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in October, South Africa in November, and Burma in December."

When in France, walking one afternoon from Orange to Avignon, the first object I saw as I entered that charming city of the palace of the Pope was a sign advertising the McCormick harvester.

I do not mean to intimate that all the sickles, that is, harvesters, are made on that portage strip, for if all the factories and coal lands (twenty thousand acres) and timber lands (one hundred thousand acres) and ore lands (with their forty million tons of ore) and railway tracks that unite to make these harvesters were brought together around that portage strip there would be no place for the city itself; but through one building on that strip the myriad paths do run, connecting all the tillable, grain-growing valleys of this planet; and yet a recent, most observing English critic, Mr. Wells, saw as he left that city only a "great industrial desolation" netted by railroads. He smelled an unwholesome reek from the stock-yards, and saw a bituminous reek that outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and left, "huge blackened grain- elevators, flame-crowned furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots, littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses." [Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 59.] Nothing but these in a place whose very smoke was a sign of what had made it possible for the nations of the earth even to subsist at all in any such numbers, or if at all, on anything better than black bread.