Chapter XI: New Englandism 433 (12)

When I think of the situation I am prone to compare with it other generations of college men and what they accomplished. History is not worth while if it tells us only of the past. It is of no more value than any other story, real or fictitious. History is significant only when the lessons of the past are valuable to the present. We are prone to think of education as influencing deeply only recent generations. Let me try and tell you briefly the story of some generations of college men who accomplished things that it will be worth while for us to consider to-day.

When the universities came into existence in the early thirteenth century social conditions were about as bad as can well be imagined. The incursions of the Goths had rubbed out all the old Roman law and the customs of the various nations had been obliterated in the disorder of the migration of the nations, when might absolutely made right. Gradually out of the inevitable lawlessness of the Dark Ages the Church, by her beneficent influence, brought the beginnings of {418} law and order so far as barbarous peoples could be lifted up. In the sixth century there was nearly everywhere in Europe social chaos. During the next centuries came the gradual uplift. Christianity in Ireland did much even in the preceding century, and then helped in the regeneration of Europe in the succeeding centuries. Charlemagne helped greatly, as his name chronicles, and Alfred, well deserving of the name the Great, carried on his work. In the tenth century everywhere the dawn of better things was to be seen. In the eleventh century organization of civil rights begins to make itself felt; in the twelfth century the universities were coming into existence; and then with the thirteenth century there was a great rejuvenescence of humanity in every department, but, above all, in the social order. Under feudalism men had no rights of themselves except such as were conferred on them by some external agency. In the thirteenth century the essential rights of man begin to make themselves felt and find confident assertion.

It is not hard to trace the steps of the development. Magna Charta was signed in 1215. The First English Parliament met in 1257. The representative nature of that parliament became complete in the next twenty years. The English Common Law was put into form about the beginning of the last quarter of the century and in 1282 Bracton published his great digest of it. The principle there shall be no taxation without {419} representation, our own basis for the Declaration of Independence five centuries later, was proclaimed as early as 1260 and was emphasized by the great Pope Boniface VIII at the end of the century. Early in the century, the great Lateran Council decreed that every diocese in the world should have a college and that the Metropolitan Sees at least should have such opportunities for post-graduate study as we now call universities. The first great Pope of the century, Innocent III, laid the foundation of a great City Hospital in Rome and required that every bishop throughout the world should have one in his See and that the model of it should be that of the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Leprosy was an epidemic disease among the people, somewhat as tuberculosis is now; measures were taken for the segregation of lepers, leper hospitals were built for them outside of the town, and these great generations solved a problem in hygiene as difficult as is ours with regard to tuberculosis.

Above all, the rights of the people were assured to them. At the beginning of the century probably the most striking thing among the population of the various towns, if a modern had a chance to visit them, would be the number of the maimed and the halt and the blind. We would be apt to wonder where were the industrial and manufacturing plants responsible for all this maiming of the people, and look in vain for the belching chimneys of factories or trains. It was {420} another form of selfishness that produced cripples in the twelfth century. Punishment was by maiming. For offences against property a man lost an eye, or a hand, or a leg. Very often the offences were of a kind that we would resent punishment for in the modern time. If a man were caught poaching on a nobleman's preserves of game, and sometimes it was the hunger of his children that drove him to it, he lost a hand. For a second offence, he lost an eye. For failures to pay various taxes, if the offence were repeated, maiming was likely to be the consequence. All this was in as perfect accordance with law as our fellow-servant or contributory-negligence doctrines. So that the sight of the maimed person might deter others from following this example of recalcitrancy, it was hoped that these cripples would not die, though in the imperfect surgery of the time they often did. Always the selfish pleasures of the upper classes so-called, when they are thoughtless, mean the loss of all possibilities of happiness for the lower classes. The ways of it all may be different from age to age, the results and the responsibility are always the same.

In the thirteenth century all this was changed. St. Louis of France sent one of his greatest noblemen who had unreasonably punished student poachers on a penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land and inflicted a heavy fine, and all notwithstanding the protest of the most powerful nobles {421} of his kingdom whose rights were invaded. How we do always hear about the invasion of the rights of the entrenched classes. In England men, even men without any patent of nobility or clerical privilege, began to have rights and others had duties towards them. Above all, men were given opportunities to bring out what was best in them. The great cathedrals were built, the great monasteries, some of the greatest castles, some of the fine colleges at the universities. Many of the municipal buildings were erected in the glorious architecture of the times. At these men were employed in what is probably the happiest work that a man can do. They had the chance to express themselves in the beautiful achievements of their hands. The village blacksmith made gates, and locks, and bolts, and hinges for cathedrals that are so beautiful that all the world has wondered at them ever since. The stained glass is the finest ever made. The illuminated books are beautiful beyond description, the handsomest of all times. The needlework of the vestments stands out as the most beautiful in history. The men and women who did these things were happy in the execution of beautiful works of art, and as the population was only scanty a large proportion of them were closer to beautiful things than the world has ever known.

Blessed is the man who has found his work. These men had found their work and were happy. Instead of going out to the deadly routine of {422} work they did not like, but that they had to do, because they must earn enough so as to get bread enough to eat for themselves and family, so that they might live and go out and work once more to-morrow and to-morrow, and so on to the end of recorded time, the workman dreamt of the beauty that he might express; went out hoping to achieve it; failed often but still hoped, and hope is life's best consolation; came away reluctantly, thinking that surely he would accomplish something on the morrow. It is the difference between mere routine work and the handicraftsmanship that satisfies because it occupies the whole man. Is it any wonder that our workman is discontented; is it any wonder that the England of that time should be called merry England and the France and Italy gay France and Italy?

All this organization of the workmen was accomplished by the university men of the time. They were mainly clergymen, but they had in them not only the wish, but the faculty to help those around them, and so there arose the beautiful creations of that time in art, architecture, literature and political freedom which did so much for the masses of the people. There were more students at the universities at the end of the thirteenth century to the population of the various countries of Europe than there are at the present time. That seems impossible, but so do all the other achievements of the thirteenth century,--their cathedrals, their arts and crafts, their {423} universities, their literature,--until you go back to study them. There is absolutely no doubt about these statistics. These university men were trained to self-government and to the government of others in the university life of the time. They took that training out with them, not for selfish purposes alone, but for the help of others. What they accomplished is to be found in the social uplift that followed. There is scarcely a right or a development of liberty that we have now that cannot be found, in germ at least, often in complete evolution, in the thirteenth century. The Supreme Courts of most of our states still make their decisions following the old English common law which was laid down in that century.

But it will be said, while so much was done for the workman, have we not heard that his wages were a few cents, almost nothing, and that his hours were long and he was little better than a slave? Only the first portion of this has any truth in it. He did get what seems to us a mere pittance for his day's wages. As pointed out by M. Urbain Gohier, the French socialist, when he visited this country to lecture a few years ago, the workmen of this time had already obtained the eight-hour day, the three eights as they are called, eight hours of work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for themselves. Besides they had the Saturday half-holiday, or at least, after the Vesper hour, work could not be required of them, and there was more than one holy-day of {424} obligation every two weeks, on which they did not work, and on the Vigil of which work ceased at four o'clock. As for their wages, by Act of Parliament they got fourpence a day at the end of the century and this does not seem much, but the same Act of Parliament set the minimum wage and the maximum price that could be charged for the necessities of life. A pair of hand-made shoes could be bought for fourpence, and no workman can do anything like that for a day's wage at the present or usually for more than double his daily wages. A fat goose cost but twopence halfpenny, and when the father of a family can buy two fat geese for his daily wages, there is no danger of the family starving. Our wages are higher, but the necessities of life have gone up so high that the wages can scarcely touch them.

In the parliament that passed these laws the greater proportion were college men. I suppose probably three-fourths of the members of both houses had been at the university. Now that the question of the abolition of the House of Lords is occupying much attention, we sometimes hear of it as a mediaeval institution. It is spoken of as an inheritance from an earlier and ruder time. I wonder how much the people who talk thus know about the realities. They must be densely ignorant of what the House of Lords used to be. At the present moment there are in the English House of Lords 627 members, only {425} 75 of whom do not owe their position directly or solely to the accident of birth. Even about half of this seventy-five can only be selected from the hereditary nobility of Scotland and of Ireland. In the Middle Ages it was quite different. Until the reformation so-called the Lords Spiritual formed a majority of the House of Lords. They consisted not only of the bishops but of the abbots and priors of monasteries and the masters of the various religious and knightly orders. This upper chamber of the olden time was elected in the best possible sense of the word. They were usually men who had risen from the ranks of the people and who had been chosen because of their unselfishness to be heads of religious houses and religious orders. There were abuses by which some of these Lords Spiritual obtained their places by what we now call pull, but the great majority of them were selected for their virtues, and because they had shown their power to rule over themselves had been chosen to rule over others.

They were men who could own nothing for themselves and families, and in whom every motive, human and divine, appealed to make life as happy as possible for others. They were all of them university men. Compare for a moment the present House of Lords with that House of Lords and you will see the difference between the old time and the present. No wonder England was merry England, no wonder historian {426} after historian has declared that the people were happier at this time than they have ever been before or since, no wonder men had leisure to make great monuments of genius in architecture, in the arts and in literature. No wonder the universities, in the form in which they have been useful to mankind ever since, were organized in this century; no wonder all our rights and liberties come to us. Great generations of the university men nobly did their work.

Young men, you are graduating from a college that is literally a lineal descendant of those old-time universities. You have had the training of heart and of will as well as of mind that was given to these students of the olden times. You have been taught that the end of life is not self, but that life shall mean something for others as well as yourself, that every action shall be looked at from the standpoint of what it means for others as well as for yourselves, and that you shall never do anything that will even remotely injure others.

You are not only going to lead honest but honorable lives. You are going to be true to yourselves first, but absolutely faithful to others. They are telling a story in New York now that, perhaps, some of you have heard. It is of the young man who had graduated at the head of his class at the high school and delighted his old father's heart. He kept up the good work, and came out first in his class at college. Then, when {427} he led a large class at the law school, you can understand how proud the old gentleman was. Tom came home to practise law in a long-established firm where there was an opening for him. Some six months later he said, one day, to his father, "Well, I made $10,000 to-day," and the old gentleman said, "Well, Tom, that is a good deal of money to make. I hope you made it honestly." The young man lifted his head and said, "You can be sure that I would not make it dishonestly." "That is right," the old man said. "Tell us how it came about." Then Tom told how he knew that a trolley line was going to run out far from town and that he had secured an option on some property through which it was going to pass. "You know old Farmer Simpson out on the Plank Road?" he said. "His boys have left him and gone to the city; he cannot work his farm any longer himself, and he cannot hire men for it, and he wants to get rid of it. I got positive information yesterday through one of our clients that a trolley line is going out through that farm. When I went out to see the old man he knew me at once, spoke about you, and when I offered to try to sell the farm for him and suggested the advisability of signing an option on it to me at a definite figure, so that I may be able to close the price with any one who wanted it, he signed at once at a ridiculously low figure because, though, as he said, he did not care to sign the papers for lawyer folk, {428} he knew I was different. I have got the farm at so low a price that $10,000 is the smallest profit I can look for. I think I will get that profit out of the company for the right of way, and then I will have the rest of the farm for myself. It will make a mighty nice country place."

Then there was a pause. The old gentleman did not lighten up any over the story, as Tom seemed to think he would. After a minute's silence the old man said, "Well, Tom, that was not what I sent you to college and law school for, to come out here and take advantage of my old neighbors. I thought that you would be helpful to us all, and that there would be more of happiness in the world because of your education. You may call that transaction honest, and perhaps it is legal, but I know that it is dishonorable. Tom, if you don't give Farmer Simpson back his option I do not think I want you to live here with me any more. Somehow I couldn't feel as if I could hold up my head if ever I passed Farmer Simpson and his wife, if you did. You may act as his attorney if you will and take a good fair fee for it, but you must not absorb all the profits just because the old man is in trouble and is glad to trust an old neighbor's son."

Of course Tom's father was dreadfully old-fashioned and out of date. Of course there are some people who will say that this sort of thing is quixotic. Now, this sort of thing is what higher education should mean, and does mean, in a {429} Catholic college. Your principles are not taught you for the sake of exercises of piety, nor attendance at religious duties. These you have got to do anyhow, but they are meant to inflow into every action of your life and to make the basic principle of them all, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

You are graduating from a Catholic college with high aims, you have had many advantages, more than are accorded usually in our time to men of your years in the training of heart and will as well as intellect, and much is expected of you. You are rich in real education and a stewardship of great intellectual and moral wealth is given over to you, and you must be better than others and be, above all, ever helpful to others. Your education was not given for your benefit, but for that of the community. Your neighbors are all round you. See that at the end of your life they shall all be happier because you have lived. If you do not do so you shall sadly disappoint the hopes of your teachers and, above all, you shall be false to the trust that has been confided to you.

Pass on the torch of charity. Let all the world be dear to you in the old-fashioned sense of that dear old word charity, not merely distantly friendly in the new-fangled sense of the long Greek term philanthropy. Be just while you are living your lives and you will not have the burden of philanthropy that so many rich men are now complaining of in your older years, and, above all, {430} you will not have the contempt and aversion of those who may accept your bounty, but who know how questionably you acquired the means of giving it and are not really thankful.

I have done but for just one word. Be just and fear not. If you will be just in your dealing with men, you will have no need for further advice and no need for repentance. I thank you.

{431}

NEW ENGLANDISM

{432}

"It isn't so much the ignorance of mankind that makes them
ridiculous as the knowing so many things that ain't so."
--Josh Billings, _writing as "Uncle Esek" in the "Century."_

{433}

NEW ENGLANDISM [Footnote 27]

[Footnote 27: The material for this was collected for a banquet
address in Boston on Evacuation Day, 1909, before the Knights of
Columbus. It was developed for various lectures on the history of
education, in order to illustrate how easy it is to produce a
tradition which is not supported by historical documents. In its
present form it appeared as an article in the _West Coast Magazine_
for July, 1910, at the request of the editor, Mr. John S. McGroarty,
with whom, more years ago than either of us care to recall now, I
had learned the New England brand of United States history at a
country school.]

There is a little story told of a supposed recent celestial experience, that seems, to some people, at least--perhaps it may be said without exaggeration, to most of those alas! not born in New England--to illustrate very well the attitude of New Englanders, and especially of the Bostonese portion of the New England population, towards all the rest of the world and the heavens besides. St. Peter, the celestial gate-keeper, is supposed to be disturbed from the slumbers that have been possible so much oftener of late years because of the infrequent admissions since the world has lost interest in other-worldliness, by an imperious knocking at the gate. "Who's there?" he asks in a very mild voice, for he knows by long experience that that kind of knocking usually comes from some grand dame from the terrestrial regions. The reply, in rather imperative {434} tone, is, "I am Mrs. Beacon from Boston," with emphasis on the Boston, "Well, madam," Peter says in reply, "you may come in, but," he adds with a wisdom learned doubtless from many previous incidents of the same kind, "you won't like it."

Of course, the thoroughgoing admiration of New England people, and especially of Bostonians, for all that is New England, and, above all, all that is Boston, has been well recognized for a long while and has not failed of proper appreciation, to some degree at least, even in New England itself. To Oliver Wendell Holmes we owe that delightful characterization of it in the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," "Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. You could not pry that out of a Boston man (and _a fortiori_ I think it may be said out of a Boston woman) if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar." James Russell Lowell expressed the same idea very forcibly in other words in some expressions of his essay on "A Certain Condescension in Foreigners," that have been perhaps oftenest quoted and are dear to every true New Englander's heart. Of course, he meant it a great deal more than half in jest, but who of us who know our Down Easterners doubt that most of them take it considerably more than half in earnest? Their attitude shows us very well how much the daughter New England was ready to take after mother England in {435} the matter of thinking so much of herself that she must perforce be condescending to others.

Lowell's expression is worthy to be placed beside that of Oliver Wendell Holmes for the guidance of American minds. They are keys to the situation. "I know one person," said Lowell, "who is singular enough to think Cambridge (Mass.) the very best spot on the habitable globe. 'Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless he never did.'" It only needed his next sentence fully to complete the significance of Boston and its academic suburb in the eyes of every good Bostonian. "The full tide of human existence may be felt here as keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross and in a larger sense."

Of course there is no insuperable objection to allowing New Englanders to add to the gayety of nations in this supreme occupation with themselves, and we would gladly suffer them if only they would not intrude their New Englandism on some of the most important concerns of the nation. But that is impossible, for New Englandism is most obtrusive. It is New England that has written most of the history of this country and its influence has been paramount on most of our education. It has supplied most of the writers of history and moulded most of the school-teachers of the country. The consequence has been a stamping of New Englandism all over our history and on the minds of rising generations for the better part of a century, with a {436} perversion of the realities of history in favor of New England that is quite startling when attention is particularly directed to it.

The editors of the "Cambridge modern History," in their preface, called attention to the immense differences between what may be called documentary and traditional history. They declare that it has become "impossible for historical writers of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled, by the classics of historical literature, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals, and official publications in order to reach the truth." Most people reading this would be prone to think that any such arraignment of American history, as is thus made by the distinguished Cambridge editors of history in general, would be quite out of the question. After all, our history, properly speaking, extends only over a couple of centuries and we would presumably be too close to the events for any serious distortion of them to have been made. For that reason it is interesting to realize what an unfortunate influence the fact that our writers have come mainly from New England and have been full of the New England spirit has had on our American history.

Every American schoolboy is likely to be possessed of the idea that the first blood shed in the Revolution was in the so-called Boston Massacre. {437} It is well known that that event thus described was nothing more than a street brawl in which five totally unarmed passers-by were shot down without their making the slightest resistance, as an act of retaliation on the part of drunken soldiers annoyed by boys throwing snowballs at them. This has been magnified into an important historical event. Two months before it, however, there was an encounter in New York with the citizens under arms as well as the soldiers, and it was at Golden Hill on Manhattan Island and not in Boston that the first blood of the Revolution was shed. Miss Mary L. Booth, in her "History of the City of New York," says: "Thus ended the Battle of Golden Hill, a conflict of two days' duration, which, originating as it did in the defense of a principle, was an affair of which New Yorkers have just reason to be proud, and which is worthy of far more prominence than has usually been given it by standard historians. It was not until nearly two months after that the Boston Massacre occurred, a contest which has been glorified and perpetuated in history, yet this was second both in date and in significance to the New York Battle of Golden Hill."

Practically every other incident of these times has been treated in just this way, in our school histories at least. Every American schoolboy knows of the Boston tea party, and usually can and does tell the story with great gusto because {438} it delights his youthful dramatic sense. Not only the children, but every one else seems to think that the organization of the tea party was entirely due to the New England spirit of resistance to "taxation without representation." How few of them are taught that this destruction of the tea had been definitely agreed upon by all the colonies and that it was only by chance that Massachusetts happened to be first in the execution of the project. My friend, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, in his article on "Some Popular Myths of American History," in the _Magazine of History_ (February, 1905), has stated this aspect of the question very forcibly. "Previous to the arrival of the ships in Boston, concerted action had been agreed upon, as has been already shown, in regard to the destruction of the tea, from Charleston, S. C., to Portsmouth, N. H. The people of Philadelphia had been far more active and outspoken at the outset than they of Boston, and it was this decisiveness which caused the people of Boston to act, after they had freely sought beforehand the advice and moral support of the other colonies."

It would be utterly unjust to limit the movement which culminated in the Boston Tea Party to any one or even several of the colonies; to make so much of the Boston incident is to falsify history in fact, but, above all, in the impression produced upon the rising generation that Boston was a leader in this movement. The first {439} tea-ship arrived in Boston November 28, 1773, and two others shortly after, but it was not until the evening of December 16th that their contents were thrown overboard. Over six weeks before this a precisely similar occurrence had taken place in New York without any such delay, and though the movement proved futile because it was undertaken on a false alarm, it is easy to understand that due credit should be given to those who took part in it for their thoroughgoing spirit of opposition to British measures. On this subject once more Dr. Emmet, whose great collection of Americana made him probably more familiar with he sources of American history than any one of our generation, has been, in the article already quoted, especially emphatic.

"On November 5, 1773, an alarm was raised in the City of New York to the effect that a tea-ship had entered the harbor. A large assembly of people at once occurred, among whom those in charge of the movement were disguised as Mohawk Indians. This alarm proved a false one, but at a meeting then organized a series of resolutions was adopted which was received by the other colonies as the initiative in the plan of resistance already determined upon throughout the country. Our schoolbooks are chiefly responsible for the almost universal impression that the destruction of tea, which occurred in Boston Harbor, was an episode confined to that city, while the fact is that the tea sent to this country was either {440} destroyed or sent back to England from every seaport in the colonies. The first tea-ship happened to arrive in Boston and the first tea was destroyed there; for this circumstance due credit should be given the Bostonians. But the fact that the actors in this affair were disguised as Mohawk Indians shows that they were but following the lead of New York, where this particular disguise had been adopted forty-one days before, for the same purpose."

Just as the Boston Massacre has been insistently pointed out as the first blood shed for American liberty, so the Battle of Lexington has been drilled into our school children's minds as the first organized armed resistance to the British. Without wishing at all to detract from the glory of those who fought at Lexington, there is every reason not to let the youth of this country grow up with the notion that Massachusetts was the first to put itself formally under arms against the mother country. Lexington was not fought until April 19, 1775. The battle of Alamance, N. C., which occurred on May 16, 1771, deserves much more to be considered as the first organized resistance to British oppression. The North Carolina Regulators rather than the New England Minute Men should have the honor of priority as the first armed defenders of their rights against encroachment. The subject is all the more interesting because the British leader who tried to ride rough-shod over stout Americans in North Carolina and met {441} with open opposition was the infamous General Tryon of subsequent Connecticut fame. Every one knows of his pernicious activity in Connecticut, very few that he had been previously active in North Carolina. That is the difference between history as "it has been written" for New England and the South. That the Battle of Alamance was no mere chance engagement, and that the North Carolinians were aflame with the real spirit that finally gave freedom to the colonies, can be best realized from the fact that the first Declaration of Independence was made at Mecklenberg in North Carolina, and that some of its sentiments, and even perhaps its phrases, were adopted in the subsequent formal Declaration of Independence of all the colonies.

For those who may be surprised that North Carolina should have been so prominent in these first steps in Revolutionary history and these primary developments of the great movement that led to the freedom of the Colonies, for we are accustomed to think of North Carolina as one of the backward, unimportant portions of the country, it may be well to say that at the time of the Revolution she was the third State in the Union in population, following Virginia and Pennsylvania in the number of inhabitants, exceeding New York in population by the total census of New York City and Long Island, and ahead of Massachusetts, which immediately followed it in the list by almost as many. The sturdy {442} inhabitants of the northern of the Carolinas had been for a decade before the Revolution constantly a thorn in the side of the British government and had been recognized as leaders in the great movement that was gradually being organized to bring all the colonies together for mutual help against the encroachments of the British government on their rights. Our school children fail almost entirely to know this because they have been absorbed by Massachusetts history--but then North Carolina did not have the good fortune to have writers of history. New England had them and to spare, and with a patriotic zeal for their native heath beyond even their numbers. Of course it may be said that these are old-time historical traditions which have found their way into history and are difficult to get out, though most of those who know any history realize their absurdity, and the modern historian, even though he may be from New England, holds the balance much more equitably between the different portions of the country. Apparently this is just what is not true, for New England professors of history and writers of history still continue to write in the same old strain of such surpassing admiration for New Englanders that every other portion of the country is cast into shadow. It was a distinguished professor of history at Harvard who, within five years, in an important historical work, [Footnote 28] said: "Whatever the social mixture {443} of the future, one thing is certain; the standards, aspirations and moral and political ideas of the original English settlers not only dominate their own descendants, but permeate the body of immigrants of other races--the Puritans have furnished the little leaven that leavens the whole lump."

[Footnote 28: "The American Nation," 27 vols.]

One wonders just what such a sentence means and, of course, finds it in many ways amazingly amusing. One would think that the only English settlers were the Puritans, and that they had had great influence in the origin of our government. Apparently, for the moment at least, this Harvard professor forgot in his enthusiasm for the forefathers in Massachusetts that the other branch of English settlers, those of Virginia, were ever so much more important in the colonial times and for long afterwards, than the Puritans. Of the first five Presidents four were from Virginia. It is possible they forget now, in Massachusetts, that only one was from Massachusetts, and that that one did more to disturb government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" than any other, so that after four short years the country would have no more of him and no more of these Massachusetts Puritans for more than a quarter of a century. This dear, good professor of Harvard has deliberately called all the non-English elements in our population foreigners because of his absorption in New England. He said: "If the list of American {444} great men be scanned the contribution of the foreigner stands out clearly. The two greatest financiers of America have been the English West Indian Alexander Hamilton and the Genevan Albert Gallatin. Two Presidents, Van Buren and Roosevelt, are of Dutch stock; five others, Jackson, Buchanan, Grant, Arthur and McKinley of Scotch and Scotch-Irish descent." All "foreigners" except the New Englanders! Save the mark!

It is rather interesting to find that their contemporaries of the Revolutionary period did not share that high estimation of the New Englanders which they themselves clung to so tenaciously and have writ so large in our history that the tradition of New England's unselfish wonder-working in that olden time has never perished. Most of us are likely to know something about the rather low estimation, at most toleration, in which during the Revolutionary period many of the members of Congress from New England were held by fellow-members of Congress from other portions of the country. They were the most difficult to bring into harmony with others, the slowest to see anything that did not directly enhance the interests of New England; they were more constantly in opposition to great movements that meant much for the future of the colonies themselves and the government of the United States afterward than any others. We are prone to excuse this, however, on the score {445} of their intolerant Puritanism, and taught by our New England schoolmasters, most of us, at least, fondly cherish the notion that all the New Englanders made supreme sacrifices for the country and did it with a whole-hearted spirit of self-forgetfulness that made every man, above all in Massachusetts, an out-and-out patriot. It is curious to find how different were the opinions of those from other portions of the country who came in contact with New Englanders at this time, from that which is to be found in their histories.

Washington, for instance, had by no means the same high opinion of the New Englanders, and, above all, of the New England troops, that they had of themselves and that their historians have so carefully presented of them. It is said that Sparks edited many of Washington's criticisms of New Englanders out of his edition of the "Life and Letters." Certain it is that some of the letters which Sparks did not consider it proper to quote from, contain material that is very interesting for the modern historian who wants to get at contemporary documents, and for whom contemporary opinions such as that of Washington cannot but seem especially valuable. In a letter from the camp at Cambridge, August 20, 1775, to Lund Washington at Mt. Vernon, Washington said: "The people of this Government [Massachusetts] have obtained a character which they by no means deserve; their officers, generally {446} speaking, are the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw. I have already broke one colonel and five captains for cowardice, and for drawing more pay and provisions than they had men in their companies. There are two more colonels now under arrest and to be tried for the same offenses; in short, they are by no means such troops, in any respect, as you are led to believe of them from the accounts which are published; but I need not make myself enemies among them by this declaration, although it is consistent with truth. I dare say the men would fight very well (if properly officered), although they are an exceedingly dirty and nasty people. Had they been properly conducted at Bunker's Hill (on the 17th of June) or those that were there properly supported, the regulars would have met with a shameful defeat, and a much more considerable loss than they did, which is now known to be exactly 1,057, killed and wounded. It was for their behavior on that occasion that the above officers were broke, for I never spared one that was accused of cowardice, but brought them to immediate trial."

One of the most interesting perversions of the history written by New Englanders is that in their emphasis of New Englandism they have sometimes signally failed to write even their own history as the documents show it. There has been much insistence, for instance, on the supposed absolute purity of the English origin of {447} the settlers in New England and especially in Massachusetts until long after the Revolution. Palfrey, in the introduction to his "History of New England," says: "The people of New England are a singularly unmixed race. There is probably not a county in England occupied by a population of purer English blood than they are." Senator Lodge, forty years later, in his "History of the Revolution," re-echoes Mr. Palfrey's words, and says that "the people were of almost pure English blood, with a small infusion of Huguenots and a slight mingling in New Hampshire of Scotch-Irish from Londonderry." During the past ten years the Secretary of State of Massachusetts, by order of the Legislature, has been compiling from the state archives the muster roll of the Massachusetts soldiers and sailors of the Revolutionary War. This does not bear out at all what Mr. Palfrey and Mr. Lodge have asserted so emphatically as to the exclusively English origin of the population of New England and, above all, of Massachusetts at this critical time. There is not a familiar Irish name that does not occur many times. The fighting race was well represented. There were 167 Kellys and 79 Burkes, though by some unaccountable circumstance only 24 Sheas. There were 388 O'Briens and other O's and Macs galore. There are Aherns and Brannigans and Bannons and Careys and Carrolls and Connellys, Connors and Corcorans and Costellos and Cosgroves and {448} Costigans, and so on right through the alphabet. Curiously enough there are no Lodges on the muster roll, but there is not an Irish name beginning with "L" that is not represented. There are no less than 69 Larkins and some 20 Learys and Lonergans and Lanigans and all the other Celtic patronymics in "L."

Dr. Emmet, who has investigated very carefully the question of the deportation of the Irish to this country under Cromwell, says that many shiploads of them were sent to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. He declares that enough Irish girls were sent over to Massachusetts at this time to furnish wives for all the immediate descendants of the Puritans. There are certainly many more Irish names than are dreamt of in the very early times. Priscilla Alden's name before she tempted John to give her his rather pretty name, has never found its way into poetry because no poetry would stand it--it was Mullen or Mullins.

Even after the Revolution the place of New England, but especially Massachusetts, in the Republic has been sadly misrepresented in our American history as a rule, because our school historians at least have usually been Bostonians. When Washington, in 1789, made his first visit as President of the United States to New England, he was received very enthusiastically in Connecticut, though this state had not been wholly favorable to the new government, but in {449} Massachusetts his reception was distinctly cold, and indeed, almost insulting. John Hancock was Governor of this State and he absolutely refused to meet the President at the State line, though most other Governors had done this, and while President Washington was in Boston he declined even to call on him. The reason for this was the assumption of a characteristic Massachusetts attitude. There seems no doubt now that John Hancock, not because he was pompous John Hancock, not because he was the Governor of Massachusetts--and this idea had been fostered among his people--honestly believed that the Governor of Massachusetts was a greater man in every way than the President of the nation.

There are many who might say that this state of mind has endured even to the present time. Certainly Massachusetts' representative men have constantly set the interests of their commonwealth above those of the Union. New England has always had a tendency that way. During the newspaper agitation over the recent tariff bill one of the cartoonists represented the United States as a puppy dog with New England as the tail, with the caption, "How long is the tail going to wag the dog?" During the second war with Great Britain in 1812 New England was the most recalcitrant portion of the Union, and another conceited Governor of the State hampered the nation in every way. Our histories for {450} schools, at least, have been so written as to produce the impression that only the South ever was dissatisfied with the Union, inclined to be rebellious and ready to talk about the nullification of the compact which bound the states together. The Hartford convention is mentioned, but not given near the place that it deserves, since it represents the feeling, very rife at that time, that such a procedure as nullification was quite justifiable. Twelve delegates from Massachusetts were present in this convention and there was a decided spirit of rebellion against the general government because, forsooth, the war had injured Boston's business.

It is not alone in history, however, that New England's thoroughgoing admiration for herself has served to disturb the attainment of truth by the rising generation of Americans. Besides exaggerating the comparative influence of New England in the affairs of the country, they have exaggerated the place of favorite New England authors in the literature of the world to such a degree that growing young America cannot help but have a number of false notions of comparative literary values, which he has to rid himself of before he is able to attain any proper appreciation of world literature or even of English literature. A little group of New England literary folk came into prominence about the middle of the nineteenth century. Because they were the best that New England could produce, {451} apparently they were considered by New Englanders as the best in the world. English critics, of course, laughed at their self-complacency, but our New England schoolmasters took New England's writers so seriously and proceeded to write so much about them and make them so much the subject of teaching not alone in New England but in every part of the country, that now it is almost impossible to get our people to accept any true standards, since admiration for these quite unimportant New England writers has ruined any proper critical literary appreciation.

As a consequence our rising generations for some time have been inclined to take Emerson seriously as a great philosopher, writer and thinker. They have been very prone to accept dear old Oliver Wendell Holmes, kindliest of men, charmingest of writers, as a great literary man. There have literally been hundreds of English writers such as these in the past three centuries of English literary history, who now take up at most but a few lines in even large histories of English literature. Taking Emerson seriously is fortunately going out of fashion. If one wanted a criterion of the depth of thought of the generation that accepted him originally and passed him along as a significant philosophic prophet, then surely one need go no farther. Our optimistic Carlyle, writing in a minor key, looms up so much smaller now than a generation ago that we can readily realize how {452} New Englandism infected literary and philosophic standards. What is thus said of Emerson may be repeated, with perhaps a little less emphasis, of the other writers whom New England has insisted on proclaiming to the world as representative of all that was best and highest in literature--because for a moment they commanded attention in New England.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was considered the proper thing in this country to talk of Longfellow as a great poet. Of course, no one does so any more. The devotion to him of so much time in our schools, while so many much more important contributions to our English poetry have but scanty attention paid them, is still producing not only a false impression on children's minds as to his proper place in literature, but is playing sad havoc with literary standards generally, so far as they may be the subject of teaching. Longfellow was, of course, nothing more than a pleasant balladist and a writer of conventional thoughts on rather commonplace themes in reasonably smooth verse. For really profound thought Longfellow's poetry has never a place. His loftiest flights of imagination do not bring him anywhere near the great mysteries of human life or the deep thoughts that run through men's minds when they are touched to the quick. Of the sterner passions of men he had scarcely an inkling.

Whittier, of course, has much more real poetry {453} in his little store of verse than Longfellow, but Whittier's voice is only a very low treble and his religious training was too narrow to permit him any breadth of poetic feeling. No one thinks now that anything that Whittier wrote will live to be read by any but curious students of certain anti-slavery movements in connection with the history of our civil war. He will have an interest for antiquarian litterateurs, scarcely more than that. Of James Russell Lowell's rather charming academic verse one would prefer to say nothing, only that the serious study of it in our schools leads the present generation to think that he, too, must be considered seriously as a poet. It is doubtful if Russell Lowell ever thought of himself as a poet at all. Appropriate thoughts charmingly expressed for occasions, in verse reasonably tuneful, he could do better than most men of his time in America--that was all. Of real poetic quality there is almost none. Lowell's verse will not be read at all except by the professional critic before another generation has passed, and I am sure that no one realized this better than Lowell himself.

What Longfellow and Lowell will be remembered for in the history of nineteenth century literature, most of the rising generation of Americans know very little about and the great majority of them completely ignore. It is for their critical and expository work in introducing great foreign authors--really great poets--to the {454} knowledge of their countrymen that both Longfellow and Lowell will deserve the gratitude of all future generations and some of their work in this regard will endure when their verse is forgotten. Longfellow's edition of Dante was not only well worth all the time he gave to it during thirty years, but represents a monument in American literature that will be fondly looked back to by many a generation of English-speaking people. Very probably of his work in verse the "Golden Legend" will mean more to a future generation than almost anything else that Longfellow has done. Above all, it was precious in making Americans realize how profound and how beautiful had been the work of the poets of Europe seven centuries ago.

In the light of this gradual reduction of the value of New England's literature to its lowest terms it is extremely amusing to find occasionally expressions of the value of the New England period in English literature as expressed by enthusiastic New Englanders and, above all, by ardent--what, for want of a better term we must call--New Englanderesses. One of these, Miss Helen Winslow, has recently and quite deservedly been made great fun of by Mr. H. W. Horwin in an article in the _National Review_ (England), headed, "Are Americans Provincial?" which brings home a few truths to us in what concerns our complacent self-satisfaction with ourselves. Miss Winslow declares that the {455} great Bostonian period was "a literary epoch, the like of which has scarcely been known since the Elizabethan period." She proclaims that "The Papyrus Club [of Boston] is known to men of letters and attainments everywhere." She notes that "Scott, Balzac and Thackeray received a legal training," just when she is going to add that "Robert Grant is also a lawyer." She adds that "young people everywhere adore the name of Sophie Sweet" (whoever she may be). Is it any wonder that the ordinary non-New-England American "gets hot under the collar" for his countrymen under such circumstances?