Ohio History Journal

ADDRESS OF HENRY M. STORRS, D. D.

 

DELIVERED SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL EIGHTH.

Isaiah 35: 1. "The wilderness shall be glad for them."

THE pioneers and founders have done their work and

gone. They have left us material and tools. We are to

enter into their labors and carry forward their work. I

make no apology for naming as our subject that nation

which they founded, as it was, and is, and shall be,

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, A SOURCE OF BLESSING.

Your flint, dry and hard, is found to have its molecular

activity. Granite is mobile. The ear held close to the

dead earth in winter hears the million wheels on which

spring is coming. A nation is never still. Your "un-

speakable Turk" is no longer the Turk of Bajazet.

"Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar;" but your

Russian peasant of to-day is less a Tartar than was Peter

the Great in his time. The England of Victoria is not the

England of Elizabeth; the America of A. D. 1888, not that

of A. D. 1788. Constant interior activities, constant ex-

terior changes have been going on to make this nation

well nigh another people. Our early history, though so

near, is already remote. Of all nationalities most fluent,

we are ready to say, " Let the dead past bury its dead," and

to relegate the seventeenth, eighteenth, and larger part of

the nineteenth century to the care of any convenient un-

dertaker. Have we not already entered upon a time when

graver questions impend, and more gigantic forces are

swiftly coming to the front ?

Some men are anachronisms -coming before or after

they are wanted. St. Paul describes himself as " one born

out of due time." But these men seem born out of any

time. Deaf when their names were called they woke up

one or more centuries out of adjustment. Strangers and

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foreigners to their own age, they flit through life-shadows

of the Forgotten. Clinging to a dead Past they present

right angles to living issues, and are ridden down by that

Zeitgeist which drives nations forward. Like Niebuhr,

they are more at home in some ancient Rome than in

their own town and time.

It belongs to these memorial occasions to review that

Past, when great foundations were laid, and to gather up

its lessons of patriotic wisdom. We cannot afford to miss

the animating inspirations which come upon us from a

history like that belonging to the settlement of Marietta,

A.D. 1788, and the unbroken movement of free and pow-

erful empire from this point. They feed the fires of

patriotic devotion. They create inextinguishable faith in

the imperishable vigor of national life. The historical

orations and addresses already delivered here have pro-

foundly impressed this fact upon our minds.  But now

from the height of their great argument are we not sum-

moned to make some study of that which is, and that

which shall be?

Confessedly, there are difficulties in grasping this broad

American Life; for, first of all, it is formative and not fixed.

It has taken no final shape. There is a certain humor in

listening to foreigners taking our gauge and announcing

their judgment. They come over to "do America" in six

weeks. When they report we are not surprised to find that

they were " done " in most cases. " I confess," said a dis-

tinguished teacher in one of the larger Eastern universities

-a ripe scholar and an author of distinction, native, to our

manner born, and yet of wide foreign travel-" I confess I

never felt the American throb until I came this side the

Alleghanies and entered Ohio." What, then, of these

"six-weeks" runners? But such a man as Chief Justice

Coleridge, with the modesty of a judicial mind, and after

much longer stay, says: "I do not feel that I understand

America altogether. I have had glimpses into its life, and

must speak with hesitation." And Herbert Spencer, with

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.       101

some months of close study of this nation behind him, is

forced to say substantially: "I have a very imperfect

knowledge of America. I saw some things in your

national life, and I have fixed some points from which I

shall hope to observe and understand it better hereafter."

But, besides this baffling vastness and elusive change-

fulness, there are manifold contradictory forces at work in

it. The story was that the same Mayflower which brought

the Pilgrims to the shores of New England afterwards

brought slaves to the shores of Virginia. Were the story

true, it would not unfitly represent what has been going

on from the first-this commingling in rapid succession of

"all sorts and conditions of men." True at the outset, it

has been doubly true in our own day. Varieties of blood,

varieties of thought, varieties of morals, religion, language,

discrepant, discordant, divergent, have been finding equal

home in the great body, and this immensely increases our

difficulty in any effort to grasp the whole, or reach any-

thing like a complete and determinate judgment of the

American people.

But, while recognizing this diverse complexity, we still

assert a certain clear individuality, a discernable and proper

unity that in the end dominates all differences. It was

objected, when German was proposed as an addition to the

school curriculum in one of our cities, that "our people

have the English tongue, and want no other taught in the

public schools." "That is an open question;" replied the

German element in the Board, "the nation, it is true, at

first drew most largely from English loins and came with

English tongue, but now it is drawing from other sources,

and other tongues are coming. What we want is a lan-

guage into which all tongues shall have brought their best,

and which, when formed, shall be neither English, German,

French, Scandinavian, nor Italian, but American! " That

speaker, in ceasing to be a German, had not become, and

did not intend to be "English," but "American." There

is something real behind that. The local type is softening

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its rigid and exclusive lines. The New Englander, forget-

ting that he was born east of the Hudson, merges into the

greater whole. The Southerner-now that the war has

rubbed out slavery's barbaric civilization-will soon forget

his former self-isolation and suffer the capitalized North to

melt into his wide pocket as snowstorms do into the gulf-

streams off Hatteras. North and South, East and West,

Atlantic shore and Pacific slope, are fast becoming vibrant

with one common life-" the American throb."

It has been very happily said that "America was God's

great charity to the human race." He gave it in the ful-

ness of time to the suffering millions of older countries.

First settled, it has ever since continued to be settled by

"the poor." The birth-throe of this nation was the effort

to make a home where the humbler classes might give to

God a type of man grander and nobler than had ever been;

its birth-motive, to create on a new continent, amidst

unimpeded areas, a race better in opportunities, better in

results, tenderer, truer and wider in sympathy, loftier in

spirit-a race showing at length God's ideal of man

organized into a nation!

"Mankind has poured itself abroad here and is in its shirt-

sleeves at work; slovenly, down at the heel, without much

polish, awkward, but with a sort of unbuttoned comfort in

its look," says our poet-philosopher.  But that idea of

God is being wrought out. The amalgam here is of the

finest. The nations have been sending us of their best.

In these last forty years we have incorporated out of the

Old World well nigh 15,OOO,OOO citizens--mostly young,

vigorous, thrifty, determined in purpose, positive in ideas,

great-souled, looking forward to a brave future and resolved

on it - and they have gone into the rich life of this people.

The ancient civilizations, one after another, died out for

want of such fresh blood. Assyria dwelt unfed on the fat

soil of the Euphrates and Tigris, and soon perished where

she stood. Egypt incorporated nothing from abroad and

soon fell prone along her Nile. Greece followed. Her

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.      103

grace and beauty availed nothing. Hemmed in by geo-

graphic or political, ethnic or social limitations, which

excluded re-enforcement, there was no escape for her.

Christian faith had not come; and only fresh blood could

have even stayed the end.

Our later civilizations have been better fed. Five times

has England been soaked and saturated with foreign

inundations. Again and again has the original Kelt of

France been recruited and vitalized by such enriching

floods. Rome itself had not fallen could she have ab-

sorbed the Gothic blood. But how is our own nation

taking in, without stint or pause, the best blood of the

best races to expand and perpetuate its life! We have

room for it all. You cannot grow an oak in the parlor

vase. The vase shivers, or the oak dwarfs. England has

her "Greater Britain" beyond the seas. You set your

geranium, pot and all, into the rich garden loam, and

presently you wonder at its immense growth. Your cun-

ning plant, nature-wise, has found the water hole of its

prison, and through that sent out roots to feed from all the

soil beyond. England's roots have gone down into Aus-

tralia, India, Africa, America; have penetrated the whole

world's loam, and are sucking into herself whatever it can

give. We need not thus go out of ourselves. The world

comes to us. Our vase is no parlor affair.

We have but to look at this vast and continuous absorp-

tion of fresh blood to see how greatly we must be chang-

ing the very tissue of our people. The volume of it far

exceeds the entire mass of barbarism that swamped the

Roman Empire, and our original Pilgrim Father, Holland-

er, Huguenot, Cavalier, Quaker, Covenanter, is fast disap-

pearing under the flood pouring in at every open port.

Of the nearly sixty millions now making our white popu-

lation, more than one-third are those, or the immediate

descendants of those, whom the nation has sucked up into

itself from without in less than a quarter of the century

we are here to commemorate and review. Our larger

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cities are under their control. "You do not get into

America, on coming from Europe, till you get beyond the

pavements," said Wendell Phillips with fine irony. " These

are foreign cities on American shores." Hardly less is

true of some powerful Western States. These citizens of

foreign extraction are taking possession. Diffused every-

where, especially through the North and West, they are

found to be thoroughly armed, not with the artillery of

physical subjugation, but with views and faiths, covering

the whole field of human life, which they mean to defend,

propagate, and, if occasion require, impose on the nation.

Our "American Sabbath," as we call it; our intelligent

Protestant worship; our religious foundations of social

order; what are these to them ? Ingenious and powerful

minds are among them; educated intelligence, wide

knowledge, mental acumen, sagacity and skill in reaching

popular thought, intense purpose, and, withal, a sensitive

and strong spirit of clanship through the whole mass. Is

it possible to absorb this vast amount, not only of foreign

blood, but of thought and faith so widely variant, much

of it in open hostility to all that had been held, without

undergoing vast changes in the process?

Is this, then, another invasion of the Goths thundering

at the gates? Is our American national individuality to

perish, submerged beneath this vast un-American material?

We need scarcely fear. Our country keeps open door to

the East, a wide hearth and a plentiful table. Within

little more than eighty years we have added enough area

to cover all Europe as with a blanket, tucking it in at the

sides. China, too-that great goblet, brimming with hu-

manity, so full that she might spill fifty or a hundred

millions of her people without careening from the level-

will, perhaps, be coming to us. If the Providential hour

for it strike, who shall hinder? And still, though " Mon-

golian" be antipodes of "American," we are confident

that we have a something - the very essence and character-

istic of our national individuality -too well defined, too

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.     105

staunchly enduring, too strong and positive to be de-

stroyed.

Europe is broken into fragments. Differences of lan-

guage, faith, political organization-rigid and well nigh

invincible alienations-separate its people; solid walls of

bayonets divide its life. But on this vaster western area

our nation, clinging to itself throughout with the cohesive

power of Divine purpose, goes forward to its one splendid

aim, with a prophetic zest that allows no division and

tolerates no lagging. A great and eager mutual sympathy

runs through the whole body. The telegraph is swift; the

telephone instant. We speak across the continent; we

think through space. The Alleghenies are no hindrance;

the 'Rockies' no check. But that spirit of sympathy,

quicker than light, is forever present through every part,

binding the whole nation into one by bonds which cannot

be broken, and filling it with a great common life which

cannot die.

But there is yet another migration which arrests our

thought even more than this. The age is fermenting with

topics of highest moment. American mind is being fed

and modified, not only from its own soil, but from abroad.

Every foreign university, every solitary thinker, every

workingman's club, every industrial Union is sending

over daily fresh consignments. Nations now gather to

the cradleside of any new-born thought-wherever it may

first see the light or utter its cry. More impalpable, these

children of the mind, than aerial currents; more unfettered

than the light! The freedom of cities, countries, ages, is

theirs without a vote. They seem invested, so soon as

born, with something akin to Divine Omnipotence!

In the dark days of the Rebellion, Mr. Seward, Secretary

of State, sent out strong inducements to immigration. But

thought waits for no encouragements. It comes unasked.

Our libraries are crammed with foreign consignments

beyond the shelves of any importing merchant. The pro-

ductive thinking of our times has been stimulated beyond

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106  Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

all precedent by unexampled discoveries changing the

conditions and faiths of men. Has any result been kept

at home? Have not our people thrown every port open

to new facts or faiths, and then wrought them eagerly into

our very fibre ?

Take physical science alone; do we fully measure its

effects in changing human conditions in the time since

this region was settled? We find ourselves momently

waiting on scientific discovery, as one of the most power-

fully modifying causes at work on human life. Nothing

in the whole circuit of modern fact is more striking than

this outburst of a new revelation. The great volume of

God's physical work had but few and barren chapters for

our fathers. No one was found to open the book or loose

the seven seals thereof. Do we realize that Copernicus,

for example, had not yet brought out the new astronomy

which was to organize the stars for us, when De Soto was

entering Florida; that Galileo had not yet found the won-

drous tube that was to touch our eyes with supernal vision,

nor Kepler laid into human hands those threads of sidereal

law now guiding our swift feet through otherwise trackless

skies, when Virginia was already being settled; that the

Anatomy of the human frame had not yet gone far enough,

when the Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth, to show the

circulation of the blood; that it was still a full century

later when Botany took helpful shape; a full century and

a half before Electricity began its career, or modern Chem-

istry was at work; that Geology was just struggling into

existence when those first Ohio pioneers were turning the

prow of their " Mayflower" at this point into the mouth

of the Muskingum; or that the whole body of related or

dependent physical science is the fruit of the hurrying

years since that date ? To those brave and hardy men this

glorious universe of matter was little else than a hard,

round, unsightly thing, wherein evil dwelt, and soon to be

burned up forever. To us, it stands an almost infinite

Geode, broken open, and from its million crystal points

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.     107

light streams, and divinest law, for the bettering of human

life and the enriching of its soul. It would seem, indeed,

that well nigh the whole mass of this helpful modern

knowledge had sympathetic birth with our nation -both

of them children of Liberty returning to earth.

We may well take time, in this connection, to consider

what and how strong an education this nation has been

steadily acquiring. One of our best living thinkers de-

fines "education" to be "not a dead mass of accumula-

tions, but power to work with the mind." Your unlettered

mechanic may have that, and your best bred college man

none of it. On that definition the American people must

be regarded as strongly educated. Matthew Arnold says,

"they see clear and think straight." Our masses have

tense brain. They are impatient of twaddle. To a cer-

tain extent they are "mind readers." They forestall slow

reasoning and reach ends by short cuts. We may well

confess that in the Fine Arts and the higher literature; in

the mastery and handling of Philosophy; in the broad and

successful solution of government finance or the best

adjustments of society, they are often sadly crude in what

comes from the discipline of a broad and thorough knowl-

edge. But this does not touch our point, that, taken in

the mass, this American people has been educated "in

power to work with the brain" beyond all example. Indi-

rectly we have fine recognition of it from those asking not

long ago," Who reads an American book?" Your Charles

Dickens, Thackeray, Stanley, Kingsley, Farrar, Matthew

Arnold; your great singers and actors; your novelists,

poets, philosophers, and statesmen of the other side now

feel vastly securer of solid place and fame when they have

passed the ordeal of our national judgment.

Many things have wrought for this result, the great class

of economic reasons and necessities taking a foremost

place. Poor at the outset, our nation was thrust out into

the wilderness to scuffle for its life. It had a sharp, severe

struggle for bare existence. Everything was to be created,

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108  Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

and it had only its bare hands. The New England settlers

were a type. They skirted a barren shore and thrust

rugged roots into bleak rocks. It was hard schooling in a

dreary school-house. The soil was stern, the air sour, the

outlook dark. What remained but to put brain to hard

work? From that hour along the whole stretch of ad-

vancing settlement, this nation has been fertilized by

brain brought from fields of toil; it has never known ease.

When the surmounted Alleghanies flung onward from

war-encircled flanks those first pioneers down into the

"dark and bloody ground" of this Great Valley; and then

the now tamed prairies lifted them onward from their

broad bosoms up into the canons of the Rocky mountains,

and these, now hammered, and picked, and crushed in

quartz mills, in their turn threw them still further onward

to the shores of our hindermost sea,--what is the whole

story, from first to last, but that of brain-taxing, and brain-

educating work?

But coincident with this we find another set of forces

working to the same end -this vast system of public in-

struction founded by the pioneers and cherished by their

children. Here the American people are being trained,

not on the perverted theory of creating blind submission

to authority, but on the great, developing, Protestant prin-

ciple of unembarrassed and urgent inquiry into the reason

of things; of largest freedom to question, to doubt, to ex-

plore-this liberty to blaze my own path to any North

Pole I may choose to hunt in search for truth and life. It

is this which yields a nation strong to do its own thinking,

work with its own brain, and trust its own conclusions.

Even woman is leading the way in new and in old paths. The

very boys and girls are guiding our eyes to unsuspected

stars. Your university-bred man is only in the upper

form of this wide public school, and often the grades are

separated by nothing more than a dim and vanishing line.

What the school begins, the Press-whose daily blanket-

sheet is the poor man's fresh volume-carries forward; and

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.    109

what the press might fail to do, our system of popular gov-

ernment carries yet further. The national mind gains

immense vigor amidst this perpetual discussion of the

gravest possible questions. The town-meeting educated

New England. But, since the nation began, there has

been no hour when the whole mass of its citizens have

not been summoned to act upon the highest and gravest

questions of public economy and public justice. The

great Indian question began at our origin, and is not yet

settled. The slavery issue followed-far more vital, far

more complicated! " It tore the nation," you say. Yes,

but did far more in educating it. The tuition was costly,

but for that education no fees could be too heavy. On all

such issues as they come every man must have his word;

every citizen will have his vote, and, because he must

speak and will vote, he must have his thought; and the

tremendous power of such an education on our people up

to this hour no man can measure.

Some one may ask, "whether these and other forces,

contributing to make the nation what it has come to be,

will not, from this time, diminish in power." Will they

not increase rather?

Take those coming from the economic side, for example,

-have our last possible gains been made in that direction ?

We "have been subjugating Nature." Are we much

beyond the hither margin? Has not each conquest so far

simply opened our way to another, and higher? We travel

by steam. Very good! But is the steam car our finality ?

We talk over electric wires. But is this the best from

science? Nature is being prodded to give us something

better. Our people will have Nature's last secret, and

wrench every force from her hand. What shall be the

fruit of all this on mental life? History brings this word

from her portfolio-that broadened mind forever comes

from physical conquest. Mind makes discovery; but dis-

covery and the effort for it makes more mind. The

Crusades were a huge effort for Europe. But in breaking

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110  Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

Asia open Europe wrought out her own expansion. She

widened yet more in opening and subduing this continent.

Room was created in herself for a wider civilization when

Columbus burst the barriers of western seas, brought back

a new world, and anchored it off her shores. It is Law,

not accident, that mind shall feed on the spoils of matter,

and more still on the effort to get them. How much lies

before us in this direction, who can tell? But the in-

stinct for it is in the air. All men are musing in their

hearts-and such musings, what are they if not a divine

prevision making sure their own fulfillment?

The century since this town was founded has been a

busy one for our nation in politics and government. In

that time, so narrow as it is-little more than a single

pulse beat in any national life-we have founded and

matured these great, complicated, but now harmonious

systems of local, State, and National government; we have

vindicated a commanding position among the nations; we

have made treaties and established commerce with every

considerable people on the globe; we have organized rev-

enue and finance; we have added immense areas to our ter-

ritory; we have conducted great wars at home and abroad,

in every case to a successful issue; we have absorbed not

only neighboring states but immigrant nations; we have

confronted the Indian question in various aspects, and

extirpated that of slavery; we have created unexampled

armies and quietly disbanded them; we have made enor-

mous debts and showed how they can be paid without

oppressing labor or capital; we have demonstrated that a

great free people - electing its own rulers, making its own

laws, and administering its own vast power -can spread

over a whole continent, with varied and often conflicting

interests, and yet live in a compact unity under a written

constitution, maintain liberty, secure justice, and stand in

strength; while, at the same time, it holds its doors wide

to the incoming of an incongruous world!

And not less busy has this century been in the depart-

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.       111

ments of education, morals and religion.  Beginning with

nothing, we have brought into active existence that won-

derfully adjusted system of instruction that now-- with its

annual expenditure of more than $100,000,000 from public

funds, and its able corps of more than 250,000 teachers -

penetrates the entire nation with its presence, touching

every family with an uplifting power.  At the same time

we have created and supplied free public libraries in almost

every considerable town of the Republic; museums and

schools of art. We have made science popular and acces-

sible to its humblest student. The mind of the Nation

has been fed with the strongest food of the ages. During

the same time, in morals and religion we have been schooled

to find the reconciling points between law and liberty,

between social and public restraint and private freedom.

We have succeeded in solidly planting and building a free

church in a free State and in making it co-extensive with

the Nation. We have made enduring lodgment of a Divine

Faith in the popular heart, so strong and filled with mercy

that after crowding our own land with eleemosynary insti-

tutions for human suffering, it has found for itself a

thousand channels through which it is rushing forth with

God's glad tidings to the ends of the earth.

In all this has not our people had a noble schooling

leading up to greatness? It is not merely that they have

accomplished these things in time so brief and with wis-

dom so clear, but that they were compelled, in doing this,

to go forward in emergencies however hazardous, settling

questions involving the very life of the nation, with little

or no historic light to guide them, upon foundations then

first discovered and principles then first applied. It was

not a few great leaders; it was the people themselves,

schooled to such wisdom and power that, under God, con-

tinually wrought out such redemption.

Just here one might ask, "What remains? Has not the

work been finished? Have not the graver questions now

been settled; the supreme problems been solved?" No!

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112  Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

The onrush of Providence and of human unfolding is

startlingly rapid, and is leading off into new directions.

We have lately heard a distinguished living authority in

social economy saying, " I believe we are just beginning to

enter a terrible era in the world's history; an era of inter-

nal and domestic warfare such as has never been seen, and

the end of which only the Almighty can foretell." We

will not take time now to inquire whether this is exagger-

ated. But certainly thoughtful men will say, and without

hesitation, that the world as a whole, and our country in

particular, are entering, have entered, upon a new cycle

so wide-reaching, profound and complicated, so deeply

involving the very structure of society and of man's life

on earth as to tax human thought and effort beyond all

that has gone before.

Men are asking, in view of the strong, outstanding,

wide-spread facts of wrong and suffering and unequal con-

ditions, whether society is constituted as it ought to be;

whether it is administered'on a right system and with

right aims; whether, as it now exists, it is meant to serve

the greatest good of the greatest number, or chiefly the

interests of limited orders and classes. They urge the

question whether this huge, brawny, industrial strength

is being turned to best account; why the few receive so

much and the many so little; why, in face of growing

knowledge, moral elements, and total wealth, pauperism,

vice, disease, crime should not only go on, but go on in-

creasing. They are asking whether the members of this

great human body may not somehow be co-ordinated more

helpfully-the strong with the weak, and not against

them; the rich with the poor, the intelligent and skilled

with the ignorant and unskillful. They ask with great

force what help is due from sight of any kind to blindness

of all kinds; by those who stand on the fortunate side to

those on the " other side "-how human life may somehow,

here and now, be made over?

This whole class of questions has broken in on the

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.        113

thought of our people through all the doors, and can

not now be swept out. We may as well see this. A read-

ing public that thinks must ask them; a thinking public

that suffers will ask them. And your whole American

people, down to the humblest workingman are now read-

ing, thinking, suffering. The lowest depths are stirred.

These sociological questions, going to the root and sweep-

ing the whole area of man's earthly well-being, are at this

hour before every civilized nation, none more than our

own. A necessary outgrowth of Christianity sooner or

later, they have reached now the supreme place in human

thought. They demand action. They demand that we

shall aid in distributing Divine energies through all these

relations of men, and make this world more hospitable,

more homelike, to all comers-so that their stay here shall

not be altogether a sad one. These are burning questions.

They have come to stay till answered. They will grow in

power. They entered through Christ.  They sprung from

His bleeding side. He died for the race in its entirety.

His Kingdom takes in both worlds. What touches the

lowest interest of humblest man, what lifts or lowers one

woman the smallest fraction of a degree, what raises or

depresses the happiness of a child in poorest quarters one

hair's breadth, touches the very heart of this King of men.

And by so much as His Spirit takes stronger hold on

human thought, these questions become the more irre-

pressibly urgent.

See the change in books. It is hardly fifty years since

Carlyle described all literature as being little else than a

mass of self-devouring criticism. But what to-day ? Is it

not a mass of scientific fruit- acquired fact, broad views

of human needs and human condition-with a heart in it?

If science, it must be applied science. The great Liebig

finds a true employment for his brilliant chemistry in se-

curing better food for infants; Bell makes the telephone

wait at sick beds. Science is valued, as it serves. The

books that take hold on men; the works of art that touch

Vol. II-8

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114 Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

the world's nerves-- of what sort? Your Waverly novels

stand on shelves-entertaining, but dead for want of touch.

Your Dickens--opening up the dark windows of wide

wrong, deep suffering, and social misery - stirs you; stirs

man. True, he stops there; he has no balm. But it was

something to open up the wrong; it was more to have a

remedy.

So, too, with toil. It has an eager, impatient heart. It

is looking for readjustment. These crowded Industrial

Exhibitions that go the round of greater cities-London,

Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, New Orleans-are they meant

for idle play? Great service to suffering men, rather, is

to come out of them. Technical schools, better indus-

tries, uplifted workingmen must somehow be their fruit.

Wheels ! wheels! wheels !--" high and dreadful," but with

a living spirit in them! Humane purpose must be there

if men are to watch their whirling.

We look back to a time when the masses had small

hope of better conditions, except upward and hereafter-

their only outlet in that direction. Here they were over-

weighted for Time. Their earthly environments were

invincible prisons. So long as they should live on earth

they would grind out their fate, happy only in this, that

their wretched social conditions were no worse and could

not last forever, since death would come. But our age is

hopeful on the earthly side. It looks to putting all things

here under human feet. This wide-growing consciousness

of lordship over Nature makes even the weakest impatient

of being at all a serf. Men are demanding adjustments to

change earth into the true kingdom of God. Grace and

goodness seem an idle tale when Power, flushing the uni-

verse, has left them amidst so much of grief, disaster and

misery. The day of selfish segregation and individualism

is nearing its close; that of social fact, fellowship, organ-

ization has come, and we are in the midst of it. We

have to do with a nation where population resists stratifi-

cation. It marches to the music of a human brotherhood

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.     115

wide as man; a ring of steel, its atoms vibrate together.

Pulsations run at high speed through the people. Shoulder

to shoulder they touch; heart to heart they beat. Born

out of all the nations, they have yet one common life-

heterogeneous of origin, but homogeneous in spirit. Here,

amidst such a people, so prepared of God, these mightiest

questions of sociological well-being are thrown in for so-

lution. Who can foretell the wind of rising conflicts?

We can recognize struggles as impending, in comparison

with which those of the French and Indian wars, the

Revolution of A. D. 1776, the late Rebellion even, were

child's play. Our fathers knew nothing of this tumultuous

irruption of crass and crude material into one national life.

They saw not this rapid multiplying of restless classes -

impatient of law, impatient of religion, often uneducated,

or, oftener still, well educated for evil. Our national veins

seem already tense and strained with feverish passion; and

yet within another century this population of 60,000,000

will be quadrupled in number and possibly intensified in

passion. How are the national veins to be kept from

bursting ?

What answer have we to give; and whence shall we

draw power to preserve and transmit to coming centuries

in unimpaired strength that great Republic which these

founders and pioneers created for us ?

" Education ?"- "Popular education, co-extensive with

our land ?" You have it. Does it relieve the Nation from

this unrest - this restless unrest, invading at length quiet

homes? Education makes men more sensitive to suffer-

ing, to uneven conditions. It embitters life to look out

from lower and recognize what seem immovable barriers

to higher possibilities. Education of itself brings no peace.

The "calm philosophic mind" is not its fruit.  Russia

finds dynamite amidst her students.

If not to "education," shall we turn to "wealth"-

greater and better distributed? What we have is enor-

mous. Arithmetic has no figures for that which shall be.

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116  Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

It is interminable--this treasure in soil, mines, looms,

mills, commerce. Figures stagger under the weight, and

yet we have no more than dipped a spoon into the illimit-

able sea. And this expansion of our vast railway system,

which takes up the continent as a very little thing, stretch-

ing colossal iron fingers from ocean to ocean, and binding

the Nation into one cohering and wealth-producing whole

--who has not heard that amidst such wealth social

troubles will find quick adjustment?  A great mistake

The country is marked by prodigious increase of wealth-

production. Machinery, multiplying, revolves in golden

gulches. But does the desired solution seem to be ap-

proaching from that quarter? Wealth centralizes; and

creates - envy ! Its attendant shadow, poverty, still

follows, growing continually darker and bitterer. The

anthracite of half the country is controlled by no more

than half a dozen companies of few members. The rail-

way corporations that handle the commerce and govern

the industry of the whole land are not more in number.

The larger factories are devouring the smaller; the great

importers crushing those of lesser capital. Ranches are

sold by hundreds, possibly thousands, of square miles, and

for millions of dollars. But as wealth multiplies, destruc-

tive crowding into cities goes on. The slums are rank

with a fouler filth and more desperately wicked. Pauper-

ism, disease, crime rise at one end of the scale as wealth

at the other. And the restlessness of the suffering classes,

meanwhile, is not stayed.

Thoughtful men find ample necessity for continued and,

possibly, increasing capitalization of wealth. Our modern

civilization brings immense movements. These vast rail-

way systems which the magnificent scale of modern com-

merce makes imperative; these splendid factories covering

whole townships; these mining operations depending on

machineries consuming millions-how are they to be

created or worked ?

But that disparity of distribution presented between

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.        117

such enormous property in few hands, and starving pov-

erty near by among the many-who can wonder that wide-

spread, restless bitterness is its fruit, or that the poor

challenge the social order under which they take their

chances in life?  Concentration here leaves little there.

Drifts piled high necessitate many a bare spot. Four hun-

dred slaves toiled to maintain one Athenian aristocrat.

He was satisfied,-Do we wonder ?-if they were not. How

many toiling men and women, reaping small gains, are

required to maintain the wealth of no more than one of

our larger capitalists? And envy goes on!

Nor can we turn to our yet unoccupied national domain

as permanently furnishing an escape valve for this wide

discontent, with inferior conditions. The time is not far

distant when this open common, free to every comer, will

have been exhausted. The population, growing denser

and packed closer, will be more revolutionary against

social order. Then contagions of false theories, disturb-

ance, vice, crime, will spread faster and act with more

destructive force. Our help will scarcely come from this

quarter, or any of those thus far named.

We turn now, with earnest inquiry, toward our Christian

system, or the forces it contains. We challenge for it the

right to be heard and tried where everything else seems

doomed to fail. It has an imperfect, an inconclusive his-

tory; but it has no equivocal utterances and no doubtful

claims.  This religion we cling to, that the pioneers

brought with them to build on in this western wilderness.

Do not its prophets talk of it as that which shall reor-

ganize society upon foundations of equal justice and true

mercy; bring peace and plenty--"for iron, silver; for

brass, gold "- beat swords into ploughshares ?

I know the unhappy impression exists that our religion,

that Christ, our Lord, looks right on into eternity alone.

But are we not to see that, by His conception, the "King-

dom of Heaven" takes in time, not less than eternity-

the body, not less than the soul? Here is a suffering

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118   Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

woman; "Satan hath bound her, lo! these eighteen years"

-"the Son of man hath come to destroy the works of the

Devil"; therefore "loose her and let her go." Her bent

body, not less than her immortal soul, belongs to Him.

What human suffering does not run back into Him, the

center ganglion of the Race? What wrong is borne that

He is not concerned to right? What maladjustment of

human conditions that He does not claim the will and

power at proper time to rectify? What were His works

from day to day? He restored earthly wreck before He

touched immortal ruin; physical disaster, before spiritual

death. John Baptist sends: "Art Thou He that should

come?" What answer? "The blind receive their sight;

the lame walk; lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; the

dead are raised, and "-as a last fact-" the poor have glad

tiding preached to them."  The recovery of shattered

bodies led up to recovery of souls. Four-fifths of His

work lay in the plane of earthly evil. He has clearly

taken in hand to bring about what mankind needs this

side of eternity. He is King of nations, not less certainly

than King of saints. "His Kingdom ruleth over all"-

all affairs, all persons, all relations, all points that sociol-

ogy can ever raise.

Let us recognize the fact, and frankly, that our religion is

now coming to this final test-can it deal, not simply with

single souls in their standing before God, but with man

aggregated and thus going through this earthly life in

social relations? Has it power, not merely to go over the

outermost boughs, gleaning scattered berries here and there,

but to take the human tree in its entirety-roots, trunk and

branches-and transplant that, as by one mighty effort, into

the Garden of God where henceforth it shall feed on none

but divine soil, and bear none but sweet fruit?

The entire rectification of any one man carries seal of

Divinity. But our religion is now confronted with a

higher demand. That "trend of the world" for which

Christianity itself is responsible; that " spirit of the age"

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.        119

which itself has created; that Zeitgeist, which is God's

breath in history, is no more individualism, but social-

ism-sacred, Christian socialism. Men are every where

moving out of isolations and separateness into unity. "They

of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth." Shoulders

are coming to touch; hands link with hands. "I pro-

claim," said the great Hungarian, "the solidarity of

nations." But One greater than he has already been

heard crying to the race for which He died, "I proclaim

the solidarity of man," and this age at length is taking up

His word. Beneath it all we recognize God breaking down

walls of social separations that men should flow together

along lines of immeasurable mutual help.

Our nation has a right to ask that a religion making this

offer shall be fairly tried out to the end. Is it able to reor-

ganize human life, not in single souls only, but in all

organic and social relations? Can it put love as law every

where, into all dealings through society, business, wealth,

making all men willing servants of all; extracting pride

from power, and impatience from weakness? If it fail

here it must be confessed inadequate for this American

people. But let it be fairly tried! Let its advocates exem-

plify it. Let them bring it as living love among the

people. Then the "Old Gospel" clouds cleared away,

with no need of "apologetics," will shine in its own light

the confessed power of God. Paul wrote great doctrinal

treatises, but he "remembered the poor." Luther shook

Germany by his tremendous onset against doctrinal errors,

but his righteous soul was more stirred by flagrant crimes

of power and the peasants' wrongs. He translated the

Bible and sent it forth; he sung and preached, but every-

where plied his fiery energies to bring sweeter earthly life

into the homes of the humble and ignorant masses. Whit-

field preached, but he took his orphan asylums along into

every pulpit. Your missionaries in China and India, long

preaching with small apparent fruit, now added Christian

Charity to the word spoken, and bore abroad through fam-

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120   Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

ine-stricken provinces those gifts of Christian sacrifices

that saved starving myriads, and faith came. The proof

here was not in "apologetics," but in the eating !

Times change, tastes change, but our deeper wants are

forever the same. You send your old jewelry to be reset.

The cheaper band may be melted, but the precious jewel

must come home. Find new applications for this "glor-

ious gospel," but let not itself be cast aside. There is a

blessing in it. If the masses part with its ministries of

love, they themselves perish! It stands closer to them

than any other force now operating on earth. It is the

glory of the Roman Catholic Church that in those ages

when kings were unbridled despots and barons haughty

tyrants, the tiara of supreme Pontiff again and again

sought the brow of some humble man from the ranks, and

that scepter before which kings bowed and nobles trem-

bled was given into the hands of a lowly priest. But the

Founder of this religion came from a workshop, and His

apostles out of fish-markets. He is "not ashamed to call

us brethren."

But let religion in all its work, as in all its aspects,

devise liberal things. This nation has no use for what is

narrow. The spirit of our times is broad. Everything

works to make it so. These secular affairs handled on

scales of grandeur, these swift highways, these flashing

lines of speech, these nerves of steel that bind the earth

yet widen it, these embassies of peace that commerce

demands between the nations, this coming of the whole

earth into the nearness and kinship of one great home

through multiplying interchanges of mercy-how can our

people, amidst such an atmosphere, be other than broad

in thought, above all, in the deeper sympathies? You

can not crowd the Amazon from its mouth back into its

earlier beds. This great, broadened American heart can

not be crowded into a narrow faith. Aggressive, self-

reliant, confident in its power of thought, impatient of

authority, but open through every pore to all generous

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.    121

approach-what is that for which such a people waits on

this religious side? Great souls aflame-filled, animated,

inspired by the tremendous breadth of God's great love,

and lifted into that clear atmosphere of upper life where

Love is first seen in all its power of sacrifice! Otherwise,

in our poor handling, even Christ's religious force, which

should be kept close down to the wants and hearts of the

masses, grows away from them, like the Calaveras big

trees carrying their tops too high to bless the dwellers

below. We make it seek the top crust only when it should

go down through the mass of men seeking, most of all,

the bottom elements. Its heart-warm, throbbing with

sacrificing love-should lie up against the wretchedness

and dying hope of the world till its own life has come into

closest touch with every atom in the mass.

But we should come far short of a true statement were

we to omit the fact that this American people call for

great, positive faiths. It is impatient of weakness. It

asks an underpinning for every structure. Love rests on

fact. We have in our national blood demands for founda-

tions deep and strong as God. It was impossible that

physical science should go on, as we have seen, widening

the universe to our knowledge, showing the inflexible

working of unvarying, yet infinitely variant systems-that

it should go on revealing and demonstrating this network

of omnipotent law, with meshes fine enough and strong

enough to hold in unrelaxing coil every fact and every

being, however minute or however great-that it should

go on unfolding the stately march and movement of the

vast Whole along eternal ages, out of brooding darkness

into present splendors, by rythmic steps of an unswerv-

ingly accurate development-that it should go on estab-

lishing for us, even from the physical side, an undeviating

" moral order," everywhere making for righteousness-that

it should go on correlating with unanswerable logic those

subtle forces and connections of blood, of social relation,

of physical admixtures and dependence, which are work-

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122  Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

ing almost irresistibly to make men what they are--im-

possible, I say, that science should go on doing these things

without, in the end, modifying the whole circle of faiths as

to the moral relations in which we stand to the Great God

and to each other. A powerful change from this cause is

going on in public mind. We can see it; we feel it in the

general attitude toward the earlier conceptions of God, the

earlier conceptions of moral responsibility, of comparative

guilt, of law and penalty, of redemptive process and

change--conceptions, than which none are more vital or

fundamental; and in no part of the world, perhaps, is the

progress of this result more certain, in none more rapid,

than among the American people.

Scientific method naturally goes and grows with scien-

tific study. Assumption is challenged; authority sub-

mitted to relentless handling; everything must consent

to go into some crucible severe enough to test its metal.

Such criticism asks of all creeds, secular and religious

alike, not who made them, nor when they were made, nor

who has believed them; but what solid foundations of

tested fact are under them; what Rock of Ages they rest

on? It is impartial; it has no animus; it covers the

whole field of human inquiry and human faith. We are

not then to be surprised, offended, or alarmed, when pop-

ular thought among our own people demands that what

the Christian proffers to heart or intellect for rectifying

the world should undergo that treatment. The Nation

wants, for reaching that sublime destiny toward which it is

groping and moving, great, positive facts, resting on

foundations that can not be moved. There is a demand

for them. The people will have no shifting sands.

The massive essentials of our common Christianity seem

to meet the case. They were hewed and shaped and placed

for us by One who created human mind and knows human

need. To those who receive them, they vindicate their

own right to be. The Bible, where they lie, as ore in the

mine, is a solid unit of uplifting force. The whole of it

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.      123

makes toward one end. Let it be dissected. Let doubting

" criticism " go through that part which Christ called " the

Books of Moses," and prove to itself that Moses had

little or nothing to do with them; go through "the

prophets," as He called them, and show with equal satis-

faction that they have no right to be called prophets;

through "the Psalms of David," as He called and sung

them, and find for itself on them no imprint of David or

seal of God; and still the Old Bible with the New some-

how keeps its unity to the hearts of men, and goes on

" making toward righteousness" and lifting them up to-

ward God's light. Brought to honest trial in our lives, it

gives truth to-it creates-great, positive faiths. Here

are strength and happiness to troubled nations; here rest

and peace, courage, hope, tranquility to suffering men!

To-day our minds go back across the century to that

little band of patriotic pioneers who, for the sake of the

nation as well as themselves, broke ground for civilization

on this spot beside "the beautiful river." Of their heroic

character and achievements you have already heard. They

came from their Eastern homes with high resolve. Im-

perial States, one after another, should rise out of that

almost unbroken wilderness stretching toward the setting

sun. Those States should be dedicated to human free-

dom. Unfettered religion, pure morals, a broad and uni-

versal education, public and private security under pro-

tection of equal law, industry, thrift and plenty should

here be the inheritance of their children forever. They

were planning great things.  Prophetic hope lent them

inspiring visions. They were "building better than they

knew."

But their visions are yet no more than half fulfilled.

The progress of nations in the higher things is slow. The

swing of the pendulum is but once in a century, and we

die waiting a vibration. God is a patient toiler. We

haste and murmur.  His life is eternity; ours a flicker of

time. He waits to fortify advances; a point once gained

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124  Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly.

is secure. He is changing the world from within, and the

results are not base metal plated which might wear thin,

but transmuted to wear bright to the last. The great con-

victions, faiths, principles of His kingdom are slow-

wrought experiences. Only these enter life as chyle the

blood. With mingled goodness and severity He is slowly

and patiently bringing men to that state where heaven

comes down to earth. The centuries drop out of His

hand, but He toils on quietly. No haste mars the smooth-

ness or finish of His work. Righteousness, truth go down

to-day under the majority; but majorities, the nation, must

then go into His smelting pot. He always wins who sides

with God. The dynamics of physical laws, the expanding

or contractile forces of races, the operations of social con-

ditions may be made, if we will, to interpret for us this

involved, complex, slow, and yet sublimely evident on-

wardness and upwardness of our human progress. But

the grandeur of it is gone then! We need to recognize a

Something higher, moving on side by side with us, and

breaking through upon the human field by the weight

and tenderness of its mightier personality-an invisible

Divine Presence-our God and Father-working "all

things after the counsel of his own will" to bring out, in

the fullness of times, a readjusted world!

Such visions as these, it would seem, inspired and ani-

mated those pioneers of a century ago, and gave them

patience to labor and to wait. This whole American nation

now needs to be strengthened for its great place and work

on earth by faiths as great and positive, by visions as high

and clear. So inspired and strengthened, to what splendid

glory of character shall it not advance in those new cen-

turies before us? We may not be able to measure, but we

cannot fail to see on what a vast pattern God is moulding

our national form. We are compelled to believe in a des-

tiny which no other nation has dared to desire or dream as

its own ! Cramped within no insular limits, we have

secured the best part of this Western world. The very

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Address of Dr. Henry M. Storrs.        125

center of the human family, we divide and yet unite the

whole. The best blood of the most vigorous races flows

in our veins and nourishes our national life. The cher-

ished hopes of ages are bound up with our success. The

prayers of nations, whose children are gathered here, are

ours. A government created for freedom, equal justice

and generous education-distributed and guarded by an

almost divinely inspired wisdom; religion unfettered and

unweakened by alliance with the State, at work without

pause on every interest of human life and deeply incor-

porated with the convictions of the nation as it is pro-

foundly associated with all its history-these are some of

those massive foundations on which our structure and

future greatness stand.

Are we ready to accept and administer this trust for

mankind which has come down to us from the fathers and

noble pioneers, and which they in turn received from God,

the greater Founder of our nation? The grandeur of the

trust and the honor was never exceeded.

• 27