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 Vérendrye 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. Étienne Brûlé 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 rivière 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 Galissonnière 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 Rivière aux Boeufs carried the builders of Fort Duquesne and a garrison for it down La Belle Rivière, 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 Céloron, a young man on horseback. He rode as many miles as La Salle went on foot in that memorable heart-breaking journey from Fort Crèvecoeur 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.
And, after all, this precursor, this runner before, was but one of hundreds of later Champlains, Nicolets, and La Salles, in the wake of whose visions came the producers, those who led forth the corn and wheat from the furrows, the trees from the forests, the coal from the ground, the iron from the hills, the steel from the retorts, the fire from the wells, the water from the mountains, electricity from the clouds and the cataract–dukes, field-marshals, generals, demigods whom no myth has enhaloed or poetry immortalized.
Prometheus, bringing fire to mortals, did in a more primitive way what they have done who have led forth the oil of the rocks (petroleum) to light the lamps of the earth. Orpheus, who sang so entrancingly that mortals forgot their punishments and followed him, and Amphion, who drew the stones into their places in the walls by his music, performed no more of a miracle than a lad who tips a Bessemer converter. Hercules is remembered as a hero of the garden of the Hesperides for all time, whereas he probably but imported oranges from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean, and is hardly to be mentioned by the side of such a Mississippi Valley transporter and importer as Mr. Hill.
But let us follow more particularly the producers of the fields, whom we call the farmers there, the men whom the son of Sirach had in mind when he said in the ancient days: “How shall he become wise that holdeth the plough, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad, … and whose discourse is of the stock of bulls?” It was a farmer’s son who invented the harvester, and four-fifths of the men (whom the writer, to whom I am indebted for many of these facts about the farmer, calls “harvester kings”)–along with the plough kings and wagon kings of whom democracy has been dreaming-were farmers’ sons. The plough, the self-binder, the thresher were all invented on the farm.
The son of Sirach said: “They shall not be sought for in the council of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high”; but fourteen of the first twenty-six Presidents were farmers’ sons, and that statistic gives but merest suggestion of the farmer’s part in all the councils of the people.
Here are a few significant, graphic facts which would furnish interesting material for a new edition of Virgil’s “Georgics” and “Bucolics” or lead Horace to revise his verses on rural life.
There are practically five times as many farmers (under the early man- power definition of the farmer) as the census shows, for the farmer now works with the old-time power of five men.
Six per cent of the human race (and the larger part of that six per cent is in the Mississippi Valley) produces, one-fifth of the wheat of the world, two-thirds of the cotton, and three fourths of the corn (and this takes no account of its reapers and mowers that gather the crops in other valleys).
It would cost three hundred million dollars more to harvest the world’s wheat by hand, if it were possible, than it costs now by the aid of the harvester and reaper. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, “Romance of the Reaper,” p. 178.]
Some years ago in a trial made in Germany in the presence of the Emperor and his ministers, it was shown that a Mississippi Valley harvester driven by one man could do more in one day than forty Polish women with old- fashioned sickles. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, “Romance of the Reaper,” pp. 134, 135.]
The precursor of the harvester saw grandmothers and mothers in the fields working day and night to cut and gather the harvest, but he could not now (except among the new immigrant farmers) see that spectacle. I cannot recall that, until I met that old-world population coming over the mountains as I made my first journey east out of that valley, over twenty years ago, I ever saw a woman at work in the fields.
The gallantry of that primitive pioneer life kept her in the cabin, which was the castle, and, while her labor was doubtless not less than her husband’s, it had the sanctity of its seclusion and its maternal ministries to life. In the new industrialism that has invited the daughters of the Polish women harvesters into the factories yonder there is this constant and increasing concern which is insisting upon a living wage, wholesome sanitary environment, and on shorter hours of labor for women and children–this purpose that will ultimately bring skies and sunsets without exposure or back-breaking labor.
On my way to a provincial university in the north of France not long ago, I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I passed in the misty morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and I thought how much better that was than the flail.
On a farm in the northwest, a hundred miles square, as long ago as 1893, three hundred self-binders were reaping the wheat at the cost of less than a cent a bushel–with practically no human labor beyond driving, [Footnote: H. N. Casson, “Romance of the Reaper,” p. 178.] and there are seven thousand harvesting machines made each week [Footnote: H. N. Casson, “Cyrus Hall McCormick,” p. 196.] by the one great harvester company alone.
The time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been reduced by the use of machinery from sixty-one hours to three; of an acre of hay from twenty-one to four; of oats from sixty-six to seven; of potatoes from one hundred and nine to thirty-eight–which is significant in its promise of the wisdoms of leisure. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, “Romance of the Reaper,” p. 179.]
But machinery has also increased the size of the farm. In France and Germany, I am told, the average farm is but five acres in size, and in England nine; while in the United States it is one hundred and thirty- eight acres, and in the States west of the Mississippi two hundred and eleven acres.
And the product? One harvest, in the picturesque words of Mr. Casson, would buy Belgium, two would buy Italy, three would buy Austria-Hungary, and five, at a spot-cash price, would take Russia from the Czar. Seven bushels of wheat for every man, woman, and child of the ninety or more millions in America and a thousand million dollars’ worth of food to other nations! That is the sum of the product–of what has been led forth in a single year.
But the leader forth, the producer, the man who set his heart upon “turning his furrows,” whose “wakefulness was to give heifers their fodder,” he has himself risen. He has, as I said of the farmers of Aramoni (the sons of the first settlers who are still turning up occasionally a flint arrow-head in the fields)–he has his daily paper, his daily mail, his telephone. He “pays his taxes with a week’s earnings.” He ploughs, plants, sows, cultivates, reaps by machinery. The poet Gray could find only with difficulty in that valley a footsore ploughman homeward wending his weary way, and Millet would in vain look for a sower, a man with a hoe, a woman reaper with a sickle, a man with a scythe or cradle. The new- world peasant is not only maintaining more than his per-capita share of the “fabric of the world” but he is taking his place in the councils of men.
What is most promising now is that these followers of the old pioneers of France in that valley are beginning to add to their acres new dominions, discovered by the new pioneers of France, such as the chemists Lavoisier and Berthelot, forerunners of the modern schools of agricultural chemistry and physical chemistry. One hundred years after La Salle completed the waterway journey to the gulf through that valley, Lavoisier made a discovery of the composition of water itself that has been of immense benefit, I am told, to the farmer of that valley and of other valleys. And then came Berthelot with his teaching of how to put together again, to synthetize, what man has waste-fully dissipated. France’s men of the lens and the retort have become precursors where France’s men of the boat and the sword went first, and have opened paths to even richer fields than those in which the harvesters have reaped.
There are as many agricultural colleges in the United States as there are States; there are at least fifty agricultural experiment stations, and there is ever new provision for scientific agricultural research.
Here is a partial catalogue of the enactments and appropriations of the legislature in the valley States for two years only:
LAWS AND APPROPRIATIONS SHOWING WORK DONE IN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT AND EXTENSION WORK BY CERTAIN OF THE STATES, 1911-14.
ALABAMA
1912.–$27,000, experiments with fertilizers, combating boll-weevil, plant breeding, horticultural investigations, agricultural extension, etc.
1913.–Same as for 1912.
COLORADO
1911-12.–$5,500, experiments with potatoes. 5,000, experiments with alfalfa, grain, etc. 3,500, dry farming.
1913.–$47,500, experimental work in dry farming, dairying, etc. 1913-l4.–County commissioners, on petition of one hundred taxpayers, to appoint county agriculturist; salary paid by county and expenses by county, State, and United States.
ILLINOIS
1913.–Authorized counties to appropriate $5,000 annually for soil and crop improvement.
See “American Year Book, 1913,” p. 466.
IOWA
1913.–$500, cross-breeding of fruits and edible nuts. Authorizing establishment of county corporations for improvement of agriculture.
40,000, experiment station.
10,000, veterinary investigation. 17,000, experimental farm.
40,000, agricultural extension.
See “American Year Book, 1913,” p. 465.
KANSAS
1913-14.–$55,000, experiment station. 15,000, production and dissemination of improved seeds. 102,500, for six branch stations, two of which are new. 125,000, pumping-plants at experiment station.
LOUISIANA
1912.–Police juries of several parishes authorized to appropriate not to exceed $1,000 annually in aid of farmers’ co-operative demonstration work; also to acquire and establish experimental farms.
MICHIGAN
1912.–Authorizing and regulating county agricultural departments for advice and assistance to farmers.
MINNESOTA
1913.–$60,000, maintenance of county agricultural agents; counties each to pay $1,000.
MISSOURI
1913-14.–$25,000, county farm advisers. 20,000, soil experiments.
30,000, agricultural investigations. 5,000, promotion of corn growing.
12,000, soil survey.
50,000, hog-cholera serum work. 2,500, orchard demonstration.
10,000, agricultural laboratories. 12,000, animal husbandry.
5,000, dairying.
MONTANA
1912.–$20,000, demonstration of dry-land farming.
1913.–County commissioners may, upon vote of 51 per cent of electors, appropriate $100 per month for agricultural instructor, remainder of salary to be paid by State and United States.
NEBRASKA
1911-12.–$100,000, establishment of school of agriculture. 3,000, agricultural botanical work.
1913-14.–$3,000, agricultural botanical work. County to employ farm demonstrator on petition of 10 per cent of farm-land owners.
1,250 (maximum), annually to each accredited high school teaching agriculture, manual training, and home economics.
85,000, for fireproof building for agronomy, horticulture, botany, and entomology.
OHIO
1913.–$229,200, aggregate of station appropriation.
OKLAHOMA
1913.–Counties authorized to appropriate $500 annually for farmers’ demonstration work.
See “American Year Book, 1913,” pp. 465-6.
TEXAS
1911.–Authorizing county commissioners’ courts to establish experimental farms.
1913.–Railroads may own and operate experimental farms.
WISCONSIN
1913.–Beginning January 1, 1914, $10,000, county agricultural representatives, agricultural development, etc.
WYOMING
1912.–$4,000, agriculture and soil-culture experiments. 1913.–$4,000, experiments along lines of agriculture and soil culture. 5,000, purchase and maintenance of experimental farm. 1914-15.–$5,000, dry-farm experiments.
See “American Year Book, 1913,” p. 466.
And nearly every State availed itself by specific act of certain appropriations under a federal grant. In addition to all this, appropriations are generally made for the holding of farmers’ institutes at which instruction is given by experts and farmers exchange experiences.
The agricultural colleges have a total of over one hundred thousand graduates, men and women, and it is they, and those who follow in increasing numbers, who are to cultivate the valley of Lavoisier and Berthelot even as the pioneers and producers of the past have cultivated for the world the valley of Marquette and La Salle.
It is not all as bright and promising as this rather generalized picture may seem to indicate. There are still isolations, there are bad crops in unfavorable places and untoward seasons. There are human failures. It is an intimation of the darker side that President Roosevelt appointed a commission [Footnote: Commission on Country Life.] a few years ago to see what could be done for the ignorances, the lonesomenesses, the monotonies of country life in America, and to prevent the migration to cities, even as Louis XIV. But all that I have described is there–aggressively, blusteringly, optimistically there–and is going most confidently on. It is for the most part a temperate life. All through that valley there has swept a movement, moral, economic, or both, which has closed saloons and prevented the sale of intoxicating drink of any sort in States or communities all the way from the lakes to the gulf.
But, singularly enough, there is promise of a new age of alcohol, I am told. Farmers can distil a variety of alcohol from potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon and use it in gasolene engines most profitably, which leads one who has written most informingly and hopefully of the American farmer to foreshadow the day when the farmer “will grow his own power and know how to harness for his own use the omnipotence of the soil” and get its fruits most beneficially distributed.
That there is a strong utilitarian spirit possessing all the valley I do not deny. But I often wonder whether we are not conventionally astigmatic to much of the beauty and moral value of such utilitarian life and its disciplines. There is intimation of this in a recent statement of a western economist to the effect that there was as great cultural value in developing the lines of a perfect milk cow as in studying a Venus de Milo, and in growing a perfect ear of corn as in representing it by means of color or expressing the rhythm of its growth in metered words. But, I believe that there is as much beauty and poetry there as among the isles of Greece, if only it were interpreted by the disinterested spirit and skill of the artist, the scholar, and the poet.
If we turn for a moment to the precursors who have led the way to the valley that lies beneath, the valley of the strata of coal and iron, with its subterranean streams of precious metal, its currents of gold and silver, and its lakes of oil and gas, and from these precursors to the producers and transporters who have led these elements forth to the uses of man, we shall find a like story–another chapter of democracy’s dreaming of kings.
The same author whom I have quoted liberally above has written what he calls “The Romance of Steel” in that valley. It begins with an Englishman of French ancestry, Bessemer, and one Kelly, an Irish-American, born on the old Fort Duquesne point. They had discovered and developed, each without the knowledge of the other, the pneumatic process of treating iron–that is, of refining it with air and making steel. Bessemer’s name became associated with the process. But the industry has made Kelly’s birthplace, the site of the old French fort, its capital (with another of those poetic fitnesses that multiply as we put the present against the past).
France not only gave to Pittsburgh her site but the crucibles in which her fortunes lay. Bessemer was the son of a French artist living in London in poverty. Young Bessemer had invented many devices, when Napoleon III, one day in a conversation, complained to him that the metal used in making cannon was of poor quality and expensive. He began experiments in London at the Emperor’s suggestion and later sent the Emperor a toy cannon of his own making. It was in this experimenting, as I infer, that the idea struck him of making malleable iron by introducing air into the fluid metal. But his first experiments were not particularly encouraging, and when he read a paper on the process of manufacturing steel without fuel before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it is said that every British steelmaker roared with laughter at the “crazy Frenchman” and that it was voted not to mention his silly paper in the minutes of the association. [Footnote: “On the 13th of August, 1856, the author had the honor of reading a paper before the mechanical section of the British Association at Cheltenham. This paper, entitled ‘The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel,’ was the first account that appeared shadowing forth the important manufacture now generally known as the Bessemer process.
“It was only through the earnest solicitation of Mr. George Rennie, the then president of the mechanical section of this association, that the invention was, at that early stage of its development, thus prominently brought forward; and when the author reflects on the amount of labor and expenditure of time and money that were found to be still necessary before any commercial results from the working of the process were obtained, he has no doubt whatever but that, if the paper at Cheltenham had not then been read, the important system of manufacture to which it gave rise would to this hour have been wholly unknown.”
Henry Bessemer, “On the Manufacture of Cast Steel: Its Progress and Employment as a Substitute for Wrought Iron.” British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report, 1865. Mechanical Science Section, pp. 165- 6.]
To-day, on the same authority, “there are more than a hundred Bessemer converters in the United States,” and they “breathe iron into steel at the rate of eighteen billion pounds a year”–“two and a quarter millions of pounds every hour of the day and night.”
With their companion open-hearth converters and attendant furnaces and mills, they not only hold the site of the old fort but make a circle of glowing fortresses around the valley–in Buffalo, in Birmingham, Alabama, and in the “red crags” of the Rockies at Pueblo, beneath Pike’s Peak. And within ten years a whole new city, [Footnote: Gary, Indiana.] not far from Chicago, on Lake Michigan, has been made to order. A river was turned from its course, a town was moved, and an entirely new city was constructed with homes for nearly twenty thousand workmen near a square mile of furnaces and mills.
The attention of the world has been centred upon the millionaires whom this mighty trade has made. The very book which I have quoted so literally carries as its luring subtitle, “The Story of a Thousand Millionaires.” “A huge, exclusive preoccupation with dollar-getting,” says H. G. Wells. But an occupation that finds the red earth and the white earth, carries it hundreds of miles to where the coal is stored or the gas is ready to be lighted, assembles the labor from Europe, and converts that red earth, with almost human possibilities, into rails and locomotives (that have together made a republic such as the United States possible), into forty- story buildings and watch-springs, into bridges and mariners’ needles, into battle-ships and lancets, into almost every conceivable instrument of human use, can hardly be rightfully called a preoccupation with dollar- getting, though it has brought the perplexing problem that has so much disturbed the hopes of democracy, dreaming of such masterful children, producers, and poets, yet dreading the very inequalities that their energies create.
There comes constantly the question as to how all this initiative which has been so titanic is to be reconciled with the general good–a world- wide and insistent problem, which will be more serious there when the neighborliness is not so intimate. But the new neighborly element will be found, we must believe, as an element has been found for the strengthening of steel.
I was told by a chemist, when visiting the mills in Pittsburgh, that every steelmaker knows that a little titanium mixed with the molten iron after its boiling in air multiplies its tensile strength immeasurably, though no one knows just why it is so. Perhaps, in the plans for the new cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago, we have sign of the social titanium that will increase the tensile strength of democracy in the places where the stress and strain are greatest.
But my concern just now is that the reader shall see how the valley first explored by the French has given and is giving bread to the world, and has postponed the dread augury of the Malthusian doctrine; how the larger valley of the explorers of the lens and crucible, Lavoisier and Berthelot, is opening into infinite distances; and how the under valley, when breathed upon by the air, has given its wealth to the over valley–and through this all to realize that France’s geographical descendants are out of those three valleys evoking, making, a new world.
For they are a people of makers–of new-age poets, not mere workers glorying in the shafts of their goads, wakeful to adorn their work and keep clean the furnace, and making their “craft their prayer” (an impossibility in these days of the high division of labor) but rough, noisy, grimy, braggart creators, caring not for the straightness of the furrow unless it produces more, the beauty of the goad unless it promotes speed, the cleanliness of the furnace unless it increases the output, or the craft itself; but only of the product, the thing led forth, and its value to the world. If so much is said of the dollar, it is because the dollar is the kilowatt, the measure of the product. And while we have not yet found the ideal way of distributing what has been led forth, do not let that fact obscure the world service of these new-world Prometheans, who have carried the fire to a mortal use which even the gods of Greece could not have imagined and have turned the air itself into fuel to feed it.
A young man, born son of a stone-mason in that valley, who has been successively a student, clerk, lawyer, solicitor-general of a great railroad, its president, and later the head of an industry that is carrying electricity over the world, said to me not long ago that he was building a trolley-line in Rome. It seemed a profanation. But if the titular function of the official who holds the highest spiritual office there was once the care of bridges (Pontifex Maximus), will the higher utilization of those bridges not be some day made as poetic, as spiritual, as high a function of state and society?
I see that son of the stone-mason, with blanched face and set jaw, facing and quelling a body of strikers threatening to tear up the tracks along the Chicago River, as brave as Horatius at the bridge across the Tiber. There is a vivid picture of democracy’s greatest problem in that valley. Then I see him flinging almost in a day a new bridge across the Tiber. There is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy’s poesy.
One writing of the habitants of one of those smoky valley cities said: “They are not below poetry but above it.” Rather are they making it– rough, virile, formless, rhymeless. It reminds me of some of Walt Whitman’s verses that at first seem but catalogues of homely objects on his horizon but that by and by are singing, in some rough rhythm, a song that stirs one’s blood.
Oil of rocks, led from cisterns in the valley, that Bonnecamp found so dark and gloomy on the Céloron journey, to the lamp of the academician and the peasant; wheat from millions of age-long fallow acres to keep the world from fear of hunger; flour from the grinding of the mills of the saint to whom La Salle prayed; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs, harvesters from the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails, cars, ready-made structures of twenty stories from the places of the forts; unheard-of fruits from the trees of the new garden of the Hesperides (under the magic of such as Burbank); flowers from wildernesses! Would Whitman were come back to put all together into a song of the valley that should acquaint our ears with that rugged music-that rugged music wakened by the plash of the paddle and the swirl of the water in the wake of the Frenchman’s canoe! As he is not, I can only wish that you who have read these chapters may have intimation of it, as not long ago in New York, standing before a rough, unsightly, entirely isolate frame in a university corridor–where there were heard normally only the noises of closing doors and shuffling feet–I put a receiver to my ears and heard, in the midst of these nearer, every-day noises, some distant cello whose vibrations were but waiting in the air to be heard. Some said there was but the slamming of doors, but I had evidence of my own ears that the music was there. I have not imagined this song of the valley, nor have I improvised it. Its vibrations which I myself feel are but transmitted as best an imperfect, detached frame in the midst of other sounds and interests can.
CHAPTER XVII
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW
The clearing in the forest for the log schoolhouse where Lincoln got his only formal schooling illustrates the beginning of the field of public provision for culture, a territory then made up in that valley largely of the white acres set apart from the domain of Louis XIV for the maintenance of public schools. I can tell you out of my own experience how meagre that provision was. Out on the open prairie a frame building–the successor of the log cabin–was built. I think the ground on which it stood had never been ploughed. I remember hearing, as if yesterday, a farmer’s boy reciting in it one day what we thought a piece of lasting eloquence: “Not many generations ago where you now sit encircled by all the embellishments of life, the wild fox dug his hole unscared and the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer; here lived and learned another race of beings”–little realizing that, except in the encircling embellishments, we were sitting on such a site, and that we were the “new race of beings” and much nearer to the stone-age man than were they who built the ancient wall just back of the Pantheon in Paris.
The thought of the nation for to-morrow was tangibly represented only by that hut twenty feet square, with its few nourishing acres, most primitively furnished, a teacher of no training in the art of teaching, a few tons of coal in a shed, a box of crayons, and perhaps a map. The master made his own fires and swept unaided, or with the aid of his pupils, the floor. When, years later, in a larger building on the same site I came to be master of the same school, and gathered for work at night the farmers’ sons who could not leave the fields by day, except in winter, I even paid the expense of the light. Now, if not on that site, certainly on thousands of others, in schools springing from such beginnings, the community provides not only chalk and electric light, but pencils, paper, books, lenses, compasses, lathes, libraries, gymnastic apparatus, pianos, and even food, if not free, at any rate at cost, in addition to trained teachers, trained in public normal schools, and janitors, and automatic ventilators to insure pure air, and thermostats to preserve an even temperature. The public has become father, mother, physician, and guild master as well as teacher of the new generation.
The public has even become the nurse, for in most of the large cities the kindergarten has become transformed into a public institution which takes the child from the home, sometimes almost from the cradle, but more often from the street, at the age of four, five, or six years, and keeps it until it is ready for the tuitions of the elementary grades. In St. Louis, just across and up the river from Fort Chartres, where the initial municipal experiment was made, there are now more than two hundred and eighty-three such schools.
It has, moreover, gone beyond these serious maternal employments. The strenuous civilization of the west has insisted that every man shall work. But now that it has succeeded in this, it is not only beginning to insist that he shall not work too much–the maximum hours of labor in many employments being fixed by law–but he is being taught how to play wisely. One of the most stirring books that I have read recently, “The Spirit of Play and the City Streets,” is an appeal written by Miss Addams, of Chicago, whose noble work has been for years among the people who live close by Marquette’s portage hut–an appeal for the recognition of the play instincts and their conversion into a greater permanent human happiness. There are statistics which intimate that the per-hour efficiency of men in some parts of America, whose number of hours of labor has been lessened, has also been diminished–diminished because of their imprudent use of their leisure, of their play time. So the thought of social experts is turning to teaching children to play wisely, they whose ancestors were compelled to leave off playing.
I speak of this here to intimate how far in its thought of the man of the future, the nation of to-morrow, that valley has travelled-first of all in its elementary training, and within much less than a half century, from chalk to grand pianos, and from inexpensive tuitions in reading, writing, and arithmetic to the dearer tuitions in singing, basket-weaving, cooking, sewing, carpentering, drawing, and the trained teaching of the old elementary subjects, with the addition of history, algebra, physiology, Latin, and modern languages.
When the State of Iowa was admitted into the Union, in 1846, there were 100 log schoolhouses in use, valued each at $125. The latest statistics I have at hand show that in 1912 the average value of the 13,870 school properties in the State was $2,170, that the average expenditure for each pupil was $28.86, and for each inhabitant $6.58, and that of the 507,109 pupils enrolled in the State only six per cent were in private schools– the average for the States of the west varying from less than one per cent to sixteen per cent.
The elementary school followed the frontier at even pace. It was usually the first public building of every community, large or small. That everybody saw it for what it was, I cannot maintain; but that it was the symbol of the nation of to-morrow, borne daily before the people of the present is certain. The westerners carried rails in the Lincoln campaign, in their pride of his humble birth and vocation; they carried miniature log cabins in another campaign in exaltation of another frontier hero. They pictured ploughs and axes on the shields of their commonwealths. But if one were to seek a symbol for the democracy of that valley, one could find none more appropriate than the image of a frontier schoolhouse. It is the most poetical thing of all that western landscape, when it is seen for what it is, though it is not always architecturally imposing. A signal- box, says an English essayist, such as one sees along the railroads, is only called a signal-box, but it is the house of life and death, a place “where men in an agony of vigilance light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death.” A post-box is only called a post-box; it is a sanctuary of human words, a place to which “friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched not only by others but even by themselves.” [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, on Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his “Heretics,” p. 41.] And so a schoolhouse is only called a schoolhouse, but it is a place where the invisible spirits of the past meet in the present the nascent spirits of the future–the meetinghouse of the nation of yesterday and to-morrow. And I would show that image of the schoolhouse upon a field of white, as suggesting those white acres consecrated of the domain of Louis XIV to the children of the west.
Some years ago, when walking across the island of Porto Rico in the West Indies, just after its occupation and annexation by the United States, I met in the interior mountains one morning a man carrying upon his shoulders a basket filled with flowers, as it seemed to me at a distance. As he approached, however, I saw that he was bearing the dead body of his child, with flowers about it, to burial in consecrated ground miles away. The first task of the new government there, as in the western States, was to make fields consecrated for the living child, to set apart sites for schoolhouses–the place for the common school.
That the common school has not in itself brought millennial conditions to the valley we are aware, even as universal man suffrage has not brought the full fruits of democracy. French philosophers and American patriots alike have expected too much perhaps of an imperfect human nature. But they have made their high demand of the only institution that can give in full measure what is sought in a democracy.
First, it teaches the child the way and the means by which the race has come out of barbarism and something of the rigor of the disciplines by which civilization has been learned.
Second, it gives this teaching to the whole nation of to-morrow. There are over ten million children in the public schools of that valley alone in America, and, as I stated above, less than eight per cent in the private schools; in the State of Indiana, where Lincoln had his slight schooling, less than three per cent are in private schools-that is, practically the entire people of the coming generation will have had some tuition of the common school, some equality of fitting.
Third, as is to be inferred from the second fact, children of rich and poor, of banker and mechanic, doctor and tradesman, come together, and in a perfectly natural companionship, though in the great cities, where there is less homogeneity, this mingling is somewhat disturbed by social stratification and the great masses of immigrants.
So is the motto of the French Republic written the length and breadth of that valley, though it may never actually be seen upon a lintel or door- post: the “liberty” of access to the knowledges which are to assist in making men as free as they can be; an elevating “equality” such as a State can give to men of unequal endowments, capacities, and ambitions; and a “fraternity” which is unconscious of else than real differences.
I gave intimation in an earlier chapter of the cosmopolitan quality of the human material gathered into those houses of prophecy. There is separation of Caucasian from African in the south, and there is more or less unwilling association of Caucasian and Oriental in places of the far west on the Pacific slope, but except for these and for individual instances where, for example, the social extremes are brought together, these minglings are but microcosms of the State itself. The schools are not in that valley, in any sense, places provided by wealth for poverty, by one class for another–charity schools; they are the natural meeting-houses of democracy, with as little atmosphere of pauper or class schools as the highways, on which even the President must obey the custom which controls the humblest.
And let me say in passing: there is no body of men and women in America more useful to the State, more high-minded, more patriotic, than the army of public school-teachers–our great soldiery of peace.
They are a body six times the size of our standing army–more than a half- million in number (547,289)–recruited from the best stock we have and animated by higher purposes, more unselfish motives than any other half- million public or private vocationalists of America. The total expenditure for the common schools is but four and a half times the appropriation for the standing army, though the number of teachers is six times (which intimates how little we pay our public school-teachers relatively– seventy-eight dollars per month to men, fifty-eight dollars to women teachers). These men and women, who take the place of father, mother, adviser, and nurse in the new industrial and social order–receive about one and a quarter cents a day per inhabitant, man, woman, and child–a little more than two sous per day.
It is this two-sous-per-day army that is our hope of to-morrow. It is primarily upon its efficient valor that the future of democracy depends. For it is they, rather than the parents, especially in the great cities and in communities of large foreign elements, who have its making in their hands. Without them the nation of to-morrow would be defenseless. She would have to increase her standing army of soldiers, and even then, with the multitudes of individual ignorances, malices, selfishnesses growing in her own valleys and being disembarked by millions at her ports, she would be powerless to defend her ideals.
One whom I have already quoted as speaking so disparagingly of Chicago said that the most touching sight he saw in America was the marching of the phalanxes of the nation of to-morrow past one of the generals or colonels of that standing army of teachers. It was not in Chicago, but it might have been. This particular phalanx had not been in America long. They were singing “Sweet Land of Liberty” as they marched, swishing their flags, and then they paused and repeated in broken speech:
“Flag of our great republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes, whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we salute thee! We, the natives of distant lands who find rest under thy folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love and protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people forever.” [Footnote: H. G. Wells, “Future in America,” p. 205.] A little florid, you may say. “But think,” said the English visitor, even as he passed out into the filthy street, “think of the promise of it! Think of the flower of belief that may spring from this warm sowing!”
And what gives most promise now is that this tuition has assumed a more positive interest in the nation of to-morrow. The pioneer school was a place of discipline, a place of fraternity, and it had the cooperation of the home discipline and of the discipline of the primitive industrial life in which the boy joined even during his school years. But that tuition was in a sense as unsocialized as was the democracy of that day. It was assumed that this meagre training would equip the boy with all the tools of citizenship. Being able to read, write, and cipher, his own instincts and interests would somehow procure good government and happiness. Whatever patriotic stimulus his school gave him, as I recall out of my experience, was through a history which engendered a feeling of hostility toward England. That is being succeeded by a positive programme that thinks very definitely of the boy’s fullest development and of his social spiritualization. The schoolhouse has become, or is in the way of becoming, the civic centre of the nation.
But on top of the eight years’ training of the elementary school, which was considered at first the full measure of the obligation of the community, the State in that region came to build additional years of discipline–the high schools, first to equip young men for colleges or universities and then to fit them for the meeting of the more highly complex and specialized problems of life. These schools multiplied in the upper Mississippi Valley at an extraordinary rate after the elementary schools had prepared the way. In the northern part of that valley alone sixteen hundred were established between 1860 and 1902. And there is hardly a community of five thousand inhabitants that has not its fully organized and well-equipped high or secondary school; while even towns of a thousand inhabitants or less have made such provision.
Near the site of the village of the Illinois Indians, the village where Père Marquette went from hut to hut in his ministries just before his death journey; where La Salle gathered about his rock-built castle his red allies to the number of thousands and attempted to build up what La Barre, in his letter to Louis XIV, characterized as an imaginary kingdom for himself–there is a beautiful river city, bearing the Indian name of “Ottawa,” and in the midst of it a large building that was for me the capital of an imaginary kingdom, my one-time world, though it is called a township high school. I speak of it because it is typical of the instruction and influence that have come out of the long past, and that are looking into the long future, in thousands of the towns and cities that have each about them as many aspiring men, women, and youth as La Salle had savage souls about his solitary castle in the wilderness.
These are the new Rocks St. Louis, these the eagles’ nests of the new Nouvelle France–I have visited scores of them–at Peoria, that was Fort Crèvecoeur; at Joliet, where is now one of the best-equipped schools in the valley; at Marquette, upon Lake Superior; at Chicago, where I spoke one day to four thousand high-school boys and girls, for in most of these schools the boys and girls are taught together. The valley has one of these schools every few miles, where are gathered for the higher, sterner disciplines of democracy those who wish to prepare themselves for its larger service.
Their courses are four years in length, and, though varying widely, have each a core of mathematics, English, foreign languages, and either science or manual training or commerce. In some large cities the schools are differentiated as general, manual training, and commercial. But the States of that valley have not stopped here. With the encouragement of national grants–again from the great domain of Louis XIV–they have established universities with colleges of liberal arts and sciences, and schools of agriculture, forestry, mining, engineering, pharmacy, veterinary surgery, commerce, law, medicine, and philosophy. There is not a State in all that valley that has not its university in name and in most instances in fact. They admit both men and women and there is no fee, or only a nominal fee, to residents of the State. These are the great strategic centres and strongholds of the new democracy. A little way back from Cadillac’s fort on the Detroit River is one, the oldest, the University of Michigan– founded in 1837–with 5,805 students. A few years ago I addressed there, at commencement, over eight hundred candidates for degrees and diplomas in law, medicine, pharmacy, liberal arts and science.
A little way from the Fox-Wisconsin portage is another, the University of Wisconsin, with 5,970 students. A few years ago I sat in that beautiful seat of learning among men from all parts of the world offering their congratulations at its jubilee. And they sat in silk gowns only less ornate than Nicolet’s when he came over the rim of the basin to treat with the Winnebagoes–whom he had supposed to be Chinese mandarins. I heard, too, the graduates receive their degrees on theses ranging from the poetry of a lesser Greek poet to the “pancreas of a cat.” I spent a month in its library at a later time and found it superior for my purposes to any other in America.
No higher institution of learning in America is more strongly possessed by the spirit of the ministry of scholarship directly to the people. It needs sorely advice of the arts that centre in Paris, as most of those universities do. It needs advice not of industry but of the indefatigable disinterestedness of the French.
Behind the Falls of St. Anthony in the Mississippi River, first described and named by Father Hennepin, is the University of Minnesota, with 6,642 students. The principal deity of the Sioux was supposed to live under these falls, and Hennepin, the priest of Artois, speaks in his journal of hearing one of the Indians at the portage around the falls, in loud and lamenting voice haranguing the spirit to whom he had just hung a robe of beaver-skin among the branches of a tree. The buildings that are and are planned to be on this site would tell better than a chapter of description what a single State has done and is purposing at this portage of St. Anthony of Padua, where hardly more than a lifetime ago the savage was sacrificing beaver-skins to the god of the Mississippi. There are many great laboratories and academic buildings upon that high shore at present, but a score more are in prospect for this mighty democratic university of letters and science, law and medicine, that will house in other centuries perhaps not merely the appeased spirit of the Mississippi but such learning as is in Paris or was in Padua, whose saint is still remembered by the falls; for the university has the necessary means. When the Église of the Sorbonne, which Richelieu had consecrated, was being built, the French priests out along the shores of Superior were preparing the way for this new-world university. Certain lands in that iron region which they first explored were given by the nation as dowry to the university. These were not thought to be valuable, as at the time of the grant the most valuable timber and farming land had been sold. Fifteen years ago, more or less, a train-load of iron ore was brought down from that region to Allouez, a town on the lake named in memory of the priest of St. Esprit– and now the lands of the university are valued at from thirty to fifty millions of dollars. [Footnote: “Forty Years at the University of Minnesota,” p. 243.]
One might follow the River Colbert all the way down the valley and trace its branches to the mountains on either side, and find in every State some such fortress: in Iowa a university with 2,255 students; in Illinois one with 4,330; and so on to the banks of the river in Texas where La Salle died–and there learn that the most extensive of all in its equipment may some day rise. These, besides the scores of institutions of private foundation, but compelled to the same public spirit as the State universities, tell with what thought of to-morrow the geographical descendants of France are doing their tasks of to-day, where Allouez and Marquette, Hennepin and Du Lhut, Radisson and Groseilliers, and the Sieur de la Salle wandered and suffered and died but yesterday,
Their paths have opened and multiplied not only into streets of cities and highways and railroads but into curricula of the world’s wisdoms, gathered from Paris and Oxford and Edinburgh and Berlin and Bologna and Prague and Salamanca, even as their students are being gathered from all peoples. Perrot spoke truer than he knew when he said to the savages of Wisconsin, “I am but the dawn of the day”; and the Indian chief who first of human beings welcomed Europeans the other side of the Mississippi River spoke in prophecy when he said that the earth had grown more beautiful with their coming.
The common school, the high school, the college and university–the common school compulsory for every child; the high school open to every boy and girl, without regard to race, creed, or riches; the university accessible to every young man and woman who has the ambition, the endurance, to make his way or her way to the frontiers of the spirit and endure their hardships! For I think of these universities as the free lands that were out upon the borders of that valley, except that this frontier of the mind will never, never find its limit. There will always be a frontier beyond, for new settlers, new squatters, of the telescope which makes the universe smaller, of the microscope which enlarges it, of the written word, the spoken word, the unknown quantities, the philosophies of life. Do we not