312 Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications
REMARKS ON ADDRESS OF DR. SPARKS
BY DR. T. C.
MENDENHALL
Mr. President and Members of the
Society:
I had a story to tell this afternoon but
in view of the late
hour I have begged the Chairman to let me off. As he
insists
on not doing so I will put off my story
for a future day and
speak very briefly of a thought that has
been in my mind while
listening to the extremely interesting
paper of Dr. Sparks and
the very impressive address of General
Keifer.
Dr. Sparks has emphasized and
illustrated the irresistible
march of civilization towards the west,
a sometimes temporarily
halted, but never completely arrested
movement, which crossed
the continent of Europe, then the
Atlantic Ocean, and in our
own time has reached our western border,
the shores of the
Pacific.
The thought which came to me grew out of
a personal
incident which threatened to prevent my
hearing these two most
interesting addresses because of an
expected visit (now post-
poned for a day) from Dr. R. Fujisawa,
retired professor of
the Imperial University of Japan, in
which institution he was
my pupil more than forty years ago. He
has just completed
a course of lectures at the
International Political Institute which
has been in session at Williams College,
Williamstown. Massa-
chusetts.
As many of you know, the Institute is of
recent founda-
tion. holding its meetings annually for
a few weeks, for the
study of important international
questions. Distinguished men
are called from foreign countries to
give courses of lectures,
each upon some phase of the political
institutions of his own
land which may just now be of special
interest.
Dr. Fujisawa very kindly sent me
typewritten copies of
his lectures as given from day to day
and the leading note
which he has sounded rang in my ears
this afternoon as I heard
it repeated in the notable addresses to
which we have listened.
I recalled the fact that when I first
saw him he was a
typical youth of high rank in a nation
which at that time was
practically unknown among the people of
the, so-called, civilized
world. He belonged to the
"sword-bearing" caste of a people
ruled by what we would consider the most
autocratic govern-
ment known to man.
But a few years earlier this mighty
westerly movement of
democratic civilization had crossed the
broadest of the oceans
and planted its seed in this land, which
for centuries had neither
given to nor received from the other
nations of the earth.
Interstate Migration and the Making of the Union 313 In spite of this complete isolation, however, evolutionary forces had been at work and in many respects intellectual ad- vances had been made, parallel and equal to those of Europe and America, so that it was something more than the civilization of the fifteenth century which met that of the nineteenth when the guns of Commodore Perry brought the latter to the gates of the Land of the Rising Sun. A half century has elapsed; the enthusiastic student of forty-five years ago has won international distinction, first as a mathematician and physicist and later as a philosopher and pub- licist. His country, then almost unknown to the world, includ- ing a population barely one-fortieth of that of the whole earth, has come to be ranked as one of the five or six great nations. All history records no other such transformation. It is the puzzle of the ages. And now comes Fujisawa, carrying his message eastward instead of westward and the essence of it is democracy! It seems an inversion of the proper order that we should receive lessons in democracy from a nation which still accepts and reveres its hereditary monarch, while at the same time it assumes to be the most democratic on earth. But why not? If democracy means that the people shall have "that form of government which they most want", a new standard is established which may well receive our most thoughtful consideration, and we may seriously inquire whether, after all, as measured by that standard our government is a democracy. |
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