Ohio History Journal

The Century and Its Lessons.             27

 

of the distinguished gentlemen whom we have assembled here

to greet.

This city of ours has in time sent forth her sons and daugh-

ters, who, with willing hands and strong hearts, have engaged in

founding other cities and States, thus following the noble ex-

ample set by their ancestors. Many of these sons and daughters

have returned in response to invitations cordially extended; and

I desire to say to them, as well as the strangers within our gates,

we extend a thousand hearty, cordial welcomes to you all.

This gavel, which I hold in my hand, and with which this

assembly was called to order, is of some historic interest; the

wood of which it is made is a portion of a log taken from one of

the first cabins built for the French emigrants at Gallipolis.

This wood is emblematical of the trials, suffering and hardships

endured by our forefathers in making possible the great advance

in the arts and sciences made by their descendants, this advance

being fully represented by the beautiful silver binding of the

gavel and the inscription thereon.

Again, I bid you all thrice welcome.

At the conclusion of this address, a selection of music was

given by the band, after which Mayor Bradbury introduced Dr.

N. J. Morrison, of Marietta College, who spoke on the topic "A

Century and its Lessons."

 

 

THE CENTURY AND ITS LESSONS.

 

Each century of human history is marked by a train of

peculiar events, characterized by its own peculiar spirit, gives

birth to its own family offspring of ideas, and bequeaths to after-

ages a heritage of peculiar and instructive lessons.

Thus the philosophic historian characterizes one century as

an age of intellectual and political decadence and another as an

age of intellectual and political renaisance; this century as a

period of Augustan brilliancy in Letters and that as a period of

Invention and Discovery.

And so we call the Eleventh Century of our era the " Age

of the Crusades," when a wave of religious and martial fanatic-

ism swept from West to East over all Europe and culminated in

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overwhelming the Moslem power in the Land of the Cross, and

crowning Baldwin, Count of Flanders, as Christian King of Jeru-

salem, just as the Clock of Time was striking the morning hour

of the year 1100.

The Thirteenth Century is distinguished in European his-

tory from all precedent and subsequent ages, by the develop-

ment and perfection of that matchless form of Christian Archi-

tecture, known as the Gothic Cathedral. York Minster, West-

minster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral in England; the Notre

Dame of Paris, and the Cathedral of Rheims in France, and the

Cathedrals of Strasbourg and Cologne in Germany, each a speci-

men of " poetry crystalized into stone," are illustrious examples

of the almost inspired skill of the church-builders of the Thir-

teenth Century.

The Sixteenth Century, introduced in 1492-98 by the Colum-

bian discovery of the New World, is marked throughout by the

influence of the most tremendous intellectual awakening and

intellectual commotion which the world has yet experienced.

This was the period of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Galileo in

Astronomy, and of the resulting revolution in men's ideas about

the system of the universe. Then also the Art of Painting

reached its perfection in the works of the three great masters,

Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Ranzio. It was the

Elizabethan era of Literature and Philosophy in England. It

was also the era of Luther, Calvin, Knox and Loyola, and the

great religious revolutions and counter-revolutions, which these

historic names signify.

This Nineteenth Century has its stream of- characteristic

events, moved by its own forces, along its own channels, toward

its own predetermined end. We call this the " Age of the Peo-

ple,"-meaning that mankind have at last reached that stage in

their toilsome progress, when the bonds of hereditary authority

and prescriptive privilege are broken, and men are moving for-

ward into the full enjoyment of an equality in personal liberty,

equality in civil rights, and equality in opportunity.

Properly regarded, the present century begins with the last

ten years of the Eighteenth Century. In that decade, events of

such momentous importance took place in one quarter of the

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The Century and Its Lessons.           29

 

world, as to give permanent impulse, character and direction to

the course of civilization since. It was then that Democracy

burst its Mediaeval fetters and marched forth from the prison-

house of ages, as a strong man armed, upon the stage of human

affairs to rule the world.

The French Revolution of 1789 set in motion political and

social forces which have dominated and given character to the

course of human events during the century since. It will aid us

in estimating the influence of these forces and in rightly inter-

preting the "Lessons of the Century," if we briefly recapitulate

the causes of the Revolution. These are commonly ascribed by

historians to the tyranny and reckless extravagance of the reign-

ing Bourbon monarchy; the iniquitous privileges and corruption

of the nobility and clergy; the unspeakable misery of the mass

of the people; and the revolutionary spirit of contemporary

French philosophy and literature.

The French king held in his own despotic power the pro-

perty, liberty and life of every subject, enacting the spirit of

that arrogant phrase of Louis XIV, "I am the State." He

imprisoned without trial and without preferring charges; gov-

erned without cabinet or legislature, -the royal edicts were

laws; imposed taxes according to the royal whim, or at the beck

of a corrupt courtier, that were spoliation and confiscation on the

property of the hapless people;--and the revenues thus obtained

were squandered in extravagances and debaucheries that would

shame a Turkish Sultan. One writer declares that "Louis XV

probably spent more money on his harem than on any depart-

ment of the French Government."

In 1790 the nobility of France comprised one quarter million

of souls in a population of 25,000,000 in the nation. They were

mainly the "Rubbish of Medieval Feudalism," living in idleness

and dissipation at the Court, and pensioners on the royal bounty.

Though numerically scarcely one one-hundreth part of the

French people, they monopolized more than one-fifth of all the

land. They were the "absentee" landlords of the time, exact-

ing exorbitant rents from the poor tenants of their estates with

remorseless rigor. And yet, though thus supported from the

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public revenue and holding vast territories of the richest land,

they were practically exempt from the burden of public taxation.

The French clergy constituted a decayed feudal hierarchy,

enormously wealthy; the higher stations, filled with scions from

the nobility, "Patrician Prelates," often of the most dissolute

morals, of whom the famous Talleyrand, at once secular Prince

and Primate of the Gallican Church, is an instructive example;

the clergy holding title to one-third of all the lands of France,

and receiving stipends from the public exchequer, yet privileged

with exemption from the public burthens.

On the other hand, the "plain, common people," the mass

of the French nation, oppressed and despoiled through many

generations by King and Court and Clergy, were reduced to a

condition of suffering penury. As the great Fenelon wrote in

an appeal to the King, " France is simply a great hospital, full

of woe and empty of bread." They were helots,-without in-

fluence in the State, without power or hope of redress for their

wrongs, their only " Use to the State to pay feudal duties to the

lords, tithes to the priest and imposts to the king."

To these primary causes of the impending catastrophe of

the kingdom of Louis XVI, must be added the great influence

on the opinions of Frenchmen, during the last half of the

Eighteenth Century, of the philosophical writings of Voltaire,

Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists generally. Their philosophy

was sceptical, iconoclastic, subversive of the existing order.

They assailed with undiscriminating ardor the abuses which had

barnacled on existing institutions and the institutions them-

selves. Religion, the State, society itself, in their view, needed

not reformation merely but an overturning.  To restore the lost

purity and happiness of mankind, society must return to the

state of nature. They entered upon a crusade for the recovery

of Human Rights.

By the winter of 1787, the financial disorders of the king-

dom reached a crisis,-there was a deficiency of 140,000,000

francs. The King called an assembly of the Notables, who had

not been previously summoned since the days of Henry of

Navarre, in the Sixteenth Century.  But, unwilling to tax

themselves, or to surrender for the general good any of their

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The Century and Its Lessons.           31

 

immunities and prerogatives, they adjourned without accom-

plishing anything. As a last resort, Louis XVIth resolved to

convoke the States General, comprising representatives of the

three orders of the State, the Nobility, the Clergy and the Com-

mons. This body, representing the French Nation at large, had

not before been invited to take part in the government for 175

years. During all this period the King and his Court had gov-

erned France alone.

The States General met at the Palace in Versailles, May

5th, 1789, and consisted of 1200 members, of whom a majority

were from the commons, the lesser half being divided about

equally between the nobility and the clergy. The King had

consented that the "Third Estate," as the commons were called,

should outnumber the aristocratic deputies, presuming on the

continuance of the ancient usage of the States General, accord-

ing to which voting was by the orders. But the Third Estate,

perceiving that they would be outvoted and powerless, and feel-

ing that they were backed by the public sentiment of the nation,

demanded that individuals, and not orders, should be counted in

the deliberations and decisions of the States General.

For five weeks the contest went on between the orders in

the States General when finally the Third Estate declared them-

selves the National Assembly, and invited the two orders to join

them in their deliberations, giving them clearly to understand

that if they declined, the commons would proceed to transact

public business without them.

The King, in anger at this revolutionary proceeding,

promptly prorogued the Assembly and closed the doors of the

Palace against the deputies. Undismayed, the Commons met in

tennis court of the Palace, and there bound themselves by

a solemn oath never to separate until they had given a constitu-

tion to France. Shut out from the Palace the deputies found

places of meeting in the churches, where they were soon joined

by a great part of the clerical deputies, and a little later by

many nobles. On the 17th day of June, 1789, the States Gen-

eral became in reality the National Assembly, its President, in

welcoming the adhesion of the other orders, exclaiming, "This

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day will be illustrious in our annals; it renders the family com-

plete."

Meanwhile events of startling moment are maturing. The

King masses troops around Versailles to overawe the National

Assembly. The rumor reaches Paris that he intends to disperse

the assembly by force of arms. The capital is in a ferment.

Leading men from the various wards of the city come together

and constitute themselves a Provisional Committee to protect the

city's interest and direct its government,-thereby creating the

germ, out of which speedily grew the Paris Commune of such

portentous power and tendency. The National Guard, so famous

in the after wars of the Republic and the Empire, is organized

and, with Lafayette at its head, placed under the direction of the

Commune. Rumor flies among the people that the guns of the

old Bastile, that grim mediaeval prison-house of tyranny, are

being trained on the city. "To the Bastile!" wildly shout the

excited multitude. And quickly a vast, armed, infuriated mob

have surrounded the fortress, battered in the doors, slain the

defenders, liberated the imprisoned, razed its towers and walls to

the ground. The fourteenth of July, 1789, has sounded. Paris

is in the hands of an armed mob.

When the report of this outbreak in the Capital reaches the

King, he cries out: "What, a rebellion?"  "No, Sire," "but

revolution."

When the news of this great event reaches the National

Assembly a scene transpires, the like of which the world has

never witnessed in any deliberative body. The privileged orders

realize that it is all over with their exclusive privileges. Rising in

the tribune, prominent members of the nobility declare their

willingness to renounce all exemptions. A contagious enthusi-

asm of generosity seizes the members. Nobles and prelates

crowd to the tribune to emulate this patriotic example. Every-

body is eager to make sacrifices for the common good. The

members embrace each other in transports of joy, and sing

the Te Deum in celebration of the advent among men of peace,

equality and good-will.

The revolution moves on with quickening pace. The

Parisian mob, led by frenzied Amazons, stream out of the city to

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The Century and Its Lessons.              33

 

Versailles, encamp about the Royal Palace for the night, and in

the morning assault and sack the Palace, and compel the King,

the Royal Family and the National Assembly to march back with

them to Paris. And thus is made "the joyous entry of October

6th, 1789," famous in the annals of the Revolution.

From this time the Paris Commune controls in public

affairs, holding the King hostage in the Tuilleries, and dictating

legislation to the National Assembly. The Assembly votes to

curtail the Royal prerogative, to confiscate the accumulated

wealth of the Church, to abolish the religious orders, and to give

universal suffrage to the people, meanwhile busying itself with

the task of framing a free Constitution for France.

Presently the Constitution, providing for the continuance of

the Monarchy, limited by a National Legislature, for an inde-

pendent judiciary, for local self-government throughout the

realm, for the election of all civil officers by the people, for the

abolition of rank and privilege and the installation of equality

among citizens, for a free press and absolute freedom of religion,

is offered to the Nation for solemn ratification. On the 14th day

of July, 1790, in the Champs de Mars, "in the presence of half

a million Frenchmen," the Abbe Talleyrand as representative of

the National Church; Lafayette as Commander of the National

Guard, the President of the National Assembly, and the King,

in succession take oath to maintain this Constitution; the Queen

also holding up the infant Crown Prince before the eyes of the

people, and pledging his future fidelity to that instrument.

Such solemn approval of the new civil institutions of France

by the several national powers, seemed, at first, to mark the

inauguration of a millenial era of political freedom and brother-

hood; the spirit of the transcendant motto of the Revolution,

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," seemed about to be realized.

But the King, tiring of his confinement in the Tuilleries,

secretly leaves Paris and attempts to fly from France; is caught

at the frontier, brought back, incarcerated, cited to trial as

a conspirator against the public safety, condemned, beheaded.

The Republic is proclaimed; the massacres of the "Bloody

Reign of Terror" follow. The hapless Mary Antoinette is

brought to the guillotine, pathetically crying out to the tribunal

Vol. III-3

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which had condemned her: " I was a Queen, but you took away

my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and

you robbed me of my children; my blood alone remains-take

it, but do not make me suffer long!"

The historical sequel is familiar-the Directory, the Consul-

ate the Empire, the prolonged struggle with embattled Europe,

until Waterloo, and then the restored Bourbons under Louis

XVIII.

I have tarried thus long in the presence of these great

events, because they have so largely dominated and shaped the

course of human affairs since. The motto of the Revolution,

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," embodies the political ideal of

humanity, and toward the attainment of that ideal have the

struggles of humanity since been directed. The political

progress of the century is but the progressive realization in

society of this ideal.

Thus the Revolution gave the coup de grace to feudalism in

all its forms; ecclesiastical, vassal and lord, military service, land

tenure and prerogative by inheritance.

The "divine right of kings" received mortal hurt by the

same stroke that slew its twin offspring of the Middle Ages--

Feudalism.  Monarchy has never recovered from the rude shock

given it by the fall of Louis XVI. Throughout Christendom-

save Russia-wherever sceptered monarchy still lags "super-

fluous" on the world's stage, kings have learned that they reign,

if at all, only as "citizen" kings deriving authority from the

consent of the governed. Since the days when the holy alliance

of Austria, Russia and Prussia was formed on the downfall of

Napoleon, to prop up the tottering thrones of Europe, half the

nations of the world have thrown off the trammels of monarchy

and become republics; and the other half only await favorable

opportunity to follow their example.

The nineteenth century is an era of revolution. Not a

country of Europe or America has, since the day of Waterloo,

remained unshaken. Scarcely had the holy alliance replaced the

expelled Bourbons on their forfeited thrones, when the people

of Italy, of Spain and Spanish America rose in revolt. In 1830

another revolutionary wave swept over Europe, lifting the

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The Century and Its Lessons.            35

 

"citizen" king to the throne of France and inaugurating a new

kingdom in Belgium of the most liberal tendencies. In 1848

again all Europe trembled in the throes of civil convulsions.

The boundaries of States were changed, kindred peoples arbi-

trarily separated coalesced, and political institutions were gener-

ally liberalized. Hungary sought national autonomy, and gained

political equipoise with her rival and late enemy in the dual

Empire of Austria-Hungary.

Many of the uprisings of the people during this period have

indeed aborted and been suppressed in blood; and yet, plainly

the aggregate result of all these revolutions and revolts of

nearly a century is the vindication of human rights and the ad-

vancement of human freedom.

The hundred years that expire to-day have been a century

of emancipation. At its dawning, the echo of the Marseillaise,

sung by the conquering legions of Republican France, heard

across the seas, roused the black slaves in the French West

Indies to strike for freedom. The eloquent pleadings of Gran-

ville Sharp, Wilberforce and Brougham in Parliament, finally im-

pelled the British government, in 1833, to break the shackles of

every slave on British soil, decreeing England's eternal reproba-

tion of the "wild and guilty phantasy that man can hold prop-

erty in man." In 1861 Alexander of Russia put his seal to a

state paper of transcendent human importance, by which 46,-

000,000 Russian serfs, slaves of the soil, have attained to free-

dom. By the fortunate issue of our own terrible civil war, in-

voked by human selfishness to perpetuate American slavery,

4,000,000 human chattels on our soil have been transformed into

free men, endowed with full citizenship. And lately, by the

great act of the enlightened ruler of Brazil, African slavery

in that country has ceased to exist, and vanished, finally, from

the soil of the American continent.

The present century has been made illustrious by the re-

naissance and rehabilitation of ancient nationalities. In the

third decade, the public life and literature of England and

America thrilled with the heroic story of the Greeks striking for

freedom from Turkish despotism, and for the restoration of the

commonwealth of Pericles and Epaminondas. Italy, since the

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days of Charlemagne, the victim of internal dissensions and the

sport of Transalpine greed, combining her previously dissevered

members into one body, has again become a nation, under one

political constitution, from the Alps to Sicily-independent,

free, progressive. And the historic people of the German

States, boasting one language and one noble literature, but

for centuries broken into an unstable chaos of political frag-

ments, feeble, discordant, often belligerent, and always the easy

prey of harpy nations around, led by the "Man of Blood and

Iron," have recently coalesced in the gigantic Military Empire

of revived and united Germany.

No feature of the Nineteenth Century is more striking than

the development of Parliamentary government. When the Great

Revolution opened Parliamentary rule existed only among Eng-

lish-speaking peoples in Great Britain and America. The irre-

sponsible despots of France had not consulted the people in

legislation for two hundred years. But now, at a century from

the storming of the Bastile, Russia, alone, of all Christian pow-

ers, is ruled without the intervention of a legislature chosen by

the people and for the people.

And as the people have thus, by their representatives, ac-

quired authority and the functions of government, in like pro-

portion has legislation been ameliorated and fitted to conserve

the rights and the interests of the people. Formerly laws were

promulgated by the classes for themselves; now the masses con-

trol in statute-making, or are coming to control. In America

and in Western Europe men are now substantially equal before

the law. A century ago the judges of England concurred in

this dictum of one of them -" There is no regenerating a felon

in this life; and for his sake, as well as for the sake of society, I

think it better to hang!" They did "hang" for nearly every

offense known to English law. Contrast the spirit of this hor-

rible maxim of jurists then with the humane spirit of the laws

and the humane practice of the Courts of England and America

to-day.

The present is par excellence the age of discovery in science

and of invention in the useful arts. The eloquent panegyric of

Macaulay on Science, as applied to the arts in promoting human

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The Century and Its Lessons.             37

 

welfare, is justified, and more than justified by the facts about

us: " Science has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has

extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil;

it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new

arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries

with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the

thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up

the night with the splendor of the day; it has extended the range

of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human

muscles; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse,

correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it

has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into

the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the

earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without

horses, to cross the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour

against the wind." And all these achievements of science, and

others since Macaulay still more wonderful, have accrued to the

benefit and glory of mankind since the Great Revolution.

Consider a few familiar contrasts between then and now:

There were then no locomotives, no railroads, no steam ships, no

telegraphs, telephones, or phonographs; no power printing press,

no stereotype, no electrotype; no hard rubber with its ten thou-

sand admirable utilities; no known utility of the then tameless

power of frictional electricity, which now swiftly draws our car-

riages by day, and lights up with the splendor of the sun our

streets and houses by night; no photography; no spectroscope

to analyze the beams of the sun and the far off twinkle of the

fixed stars, and no microscope to reveal to human ken the infini-

tude of organized beings which float unseen by us in the air we

breathe and swim in the water that we drink; no agricultural

machines for the farm. It took Washington eight days to journey

from Mt. Vernon to New York to be inaugurated First President.

Our present Chief Magistrate makes the same journey to cele-

brate the Centennial of Washington's inauguration in less than

eight hours. The French immigrants, whom we honor to-day,

were longer in making their toilsome journey from Alexandria

to this place, than Miss Bisland lately required to travel round

the globe.

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I should seem wanting in due honor for the profession to

whose service I have given my life, if, in this hasty resume of

some of "the lessons of the century," I should accord no place

to the progress of education.

In the year 1809, when, by the Peace of Tilsit between Na-

poleon and Alexander with his allies, Prussia was left dismem-

bered, stripped of half her territory, her military power broken,

her exchequer bankrupt, her people beggared by devastating war

and disheartened, two of her statesmen, William Von Humboldt

and Baron Stein, set themselves to the great task of national re-

generation and recovery; and they began their work of rebuild-

ing Prussia at the point where skillful architects of States must

always base the foundations of their edifices-in the education

of the people. They founded the University of Berlin, at the

moment of the lowest ebb in the life of the nation, which has

now grown into the dignity of the most powerful University

known to history. They reorganized the whole system of public

instruction and provided that every Prussian child not only might

but actually should attain to a fair education. And to their plan

instituted in the crisis of Prussia, publicists tell us Prussiaowes,

her remarkable advance among modern nations, her invincible

military prowess, her primacy in founding and directing the

destiny of the German Empire.

The liberalizing of the political institutions of Western

Europe has been accompanied with widespread revival in public

education. Provision for the education of all the children of

the State is now an accepted maxim of government in all en-

lightened nations. And in America how the galaxy of colleges,

starting with Harvard, has spread as a zone of living light

across the broad firmament of the continent. And how the in-

stitution of the common schools, offspring of Puritan parentage,

at first slowly following the New England emigrant in his march

to the Pacific, has lately, by the overthrow of its deadly enemy,

slavery, hastened southward and captured the country. And

to-day every State, from ocean to ocean, and from the lakes to

the gulf, wills that every child within its bounds shall enjoy the

blessings of education.

And with this progress of the nations during the last hun-

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The Century and Its Lessons.            39

 

dred years in respect to larger freedom, better legislation, more

general and improved education, in discovery in science, in in-

vention, in the arts, what advancement in national and indi-

vidual wealth! The Golden Era has dawned, if by that is

meant an age of accumulated and accumulating wealth. How

the comforts and elegancies of life have multiplied, and how

widely are they distributed. Men generally live far more ration-

ally, as if endowed with a more than animal nature, than ever

before. This is a grand age--a privilege to live in and be a

part of it.  We may not produce statues that can rival the

work of Phidias; we may have no painter that can limn like

Raphael; the age builds no gothic cathedrals to vie with Milan

and Cologne. We do better than all this-we dedicate our

highest powers to the production of agencies by which the

higher well-being of the average man may be promoted. Our

works of art are the cotton gin, the locomotive, the power press,

bridges for commerce across the straits of the seas, tunnels

under the Alps, canals to connect oceans, great laboratories and

museums of science, and school houses for the people.

The motto which inspired whatever good inhered in the

Revolution, and which has so far moulded human thought and

action since, " Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," approaches its

full realization in human society. The average man has all the

freedom he needs. On the whole the equality of men is pretty

fairly attained, certainly before the law, and largely in respect to

opportunity. Much progress also is making in the attainment

of the spirit of fraternity among men. To the full realization

of the spirit of brotherhood, and so of applied Christianity in

the world, is the summons for to-day-is the task of the coming

age.

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