|
The purpose of Democracy—supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of established dynastic
rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime,
and ignorance—is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible
failures, to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine of the sovereignty and sacredness of the individual,
coequal with the balancedoctrine that man, properly trained, may and must become a law, and series of
laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal control, but all his relations
to other individuals, and to the State; and that, while other theories, as in the past histories of nations,
have proved wise enough, and indispensable perhaps for their conditions, this, as matters now stand
in our civilized world, is the only Scheme worth working from, as warranting results like those of Nature’s
laws, reliable, when once established, to carry on themselves.
As to the political section of Democracy, which introduces and breaks ground for further and vaster sections,
few probably are the minds, even in these republican States, that fully comprehend the aptness of that
phrase, "THE GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE," which we inherit from
the lips of Abraham Lincoln; a formula whose verbal shape is homely wit, but whose scope includes both
the totality and all minutiae of the lesson.
The People! Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion, is full of vulgar contradictions
and offence, Man, viewed in the lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely educated
classes. The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the Infinite, alone confronts his manifold and oceanic
qualities; but taste, intelligence and culture (so-called), have been against the masses, and remain so.
There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general,
of the feudal and dynastic world, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dressed
and so handsome. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins are gaunt and ill-bred.
Literature has never recognized the People, and, whatever may be said, does not to-day. Speaking generally,
the tendencies of literature, as pursued, are to make mostly critical and querulous men. It seems as if,
so far, there were some natural repugnance between a literary and professional life, and the rude spirit
of the Democracies. There is, in later literature, a treatment of benevolence, a charity business, rife
enough; but I know nothing more rare, even in this country, than a fit scientific estimate and reverent
appreciation of the People—of their measureless wealth of latent power and capacity, their vast, artistic
contrasts of lights and shades— and in America, their entire reliability in emergencies, and a certain
breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or war, surpassing all the vaunted samples of the personality of
book-heroes, in all the records of the world.
The movements of the late war, and their results, to any sense that studies well and comprehends them,
show that Popular Democracy practically justifies itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes
of its enthusiasts. Probably no future age can know, as we well know, how the gist of this fiercest and
most resolute of the world’s warlike contentions resided exclusively in the unnamed, unknown rank and
file; and how the brunt of its labor of death was, to all essential purposes, Volunteered. The People,
of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea, insolently attacked by the Secession- Slave-Power,
and its very existence imperilled. Descending to detail, entering any of the armies, and mixing with the
private soldiers, we see and have seen august spectacles. We have seen the alacrity with which the American-born
populace, the peaceablest and most good-natured race in the world, and the most personally independent
and intelligent, and the least fitted to submit to the irksomeness and exasperation of regimental discipline,
sprang, at the first tap of the drum, to arms—not for gain, nor even glory, nor to repel invasion—but
for an emblem, a mere abstraction—for the life, the safety of the Flag. We have seen the unequalled
docility and obedience of these soldiers. We have seen them tried long and long by hopelessness, mismanagement,
and by defeat; have seen the incredible slaughter toward or through which the armies (as at first Fredericksburg,
and afterward at the Wilderness), still unhesitatingly obeyed orders to advance. We have seen them in
trench, or crouching behind breastwork, or tramping in deep mud, or amid pouring rain or snow, or under
forced marches in hottest Summer (as on the road to get to Gettysburg), vast suffocating swarms, divisions,
corps, with every single man so grimed and black with sweat and dust, his own mother would not have known
him; his clothes all dirty, stained and torn, with sour, accumulated sweat for perfume, many a comrade,
perhaps a brother, sunstruck, staggering out, dying, by the roadside, of exhaustion—yet the great bulk
bearing steadily on, cheery enough, hollowbellied from hunger, but sinewy with unconquerable resolution.
I know not whether I shall be understood, but I realize that it is finally from what I learned in such
scenes that I am now penning this article. One night in the gloomiest period of the war, in the Patent
Office Hospital, as I stood by the bedside of a Pennsylvania soldier, who lay, conscious of quick approaching
death, yet perfectly calm, and with noble, spiritual manner, the veteran surgeon, Dr. Stone (Horatio Stone,
the sculptor), turning aside, said to me that though he had witnessed many, many deaths of soldiers, and
had been a worker at Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, etc., he had not seen yet the first case of man
or boy that met the approach of dissolution with cowardly qualms or terror. My own observation fully bears
out the remark.
What have we here, if not, towering above all talk and argument, the plentifully-supplied, lastneeded
proof of Democracy, in its personalities?
Grand, common stock! to me the accomplished and convincing growth, prophetic of the future; proof undeniable
to sharpest sense, of perfect beauty, tenderness and pluck, that never Feudal lord, nor Greek nor Roman
breed, yet rivalled. Let no tongue ever speak in disparagement of the American races, North or South,
to one who has been through the war in the great Army hospitals.
—Meantime, Humanity (for we will not shirk anything) has always, in every department, been full of perverse
maleficence, and is so yet. In downcast hours the Soul thinks it always will be—but soon recovers from
such sickly moods. I, as Democrat, see clearly enough (none more clearly), the crude, defective streaks
in all the strata of the common people; the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous,
the unfit and uncouth, the incapable and the very low and poor. The eminent person in his conscientious
cry just mentioned, sneeringly asks whether we expect to elevate and improve politics by absorbing such
morbid collections and qualities therein. The point is a formidable one, and there will doubtless always
be numbers of solid citizens who will never get over it. Our answer is general, and is involved in the
scope and letter of this article. We believe the object of political and all other government (having,
of course, provided for the police, the safety of life, property, and the basic common and civil law,
always first in order) to be, among the rest, not merely to rule, to repress disorder, etc., but to develop,
to open up to cultivation, to encourage the possibilities of all beneficent and manly outcroppage, and
of that aspiration for independence, and the pride and self-respect latent in all characters. (Or, if
there be exceptions, we cannot, fixing our eyes on them alone, make theirs the rule for all).
The mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands, is not authority alone, not even of law, nor
by that favorite standard of the eminent writer, the rule of the best men, the born heroes and captains
of the race (as if such ever, or one time out of a hundred, got into the big places, elective or dynastic!)
—but, higher than the highest arbitrary rule, to train communities through all their grades, beginning
with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves.
But to proceed, and closer to our text.
The curse and canker of Nations politically has been—or, at any rate, will be, as things have come to
exist in our day—the having of certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn— they
not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account. We repeat it, the question is,
finally, one of Science—the science of the present and the future. Much quackery teems, of course, yet
does not really affect the orbic quality of the matter. To work in, if we may so term it, and justify
God, his divine aggregate, the People (or, the veritable horned and fluke-tailed Devil, his aggregate,
then, since you so convulsively insist upon it. O, eminence!) —this, without doubt, is what Democracy
is for; and this is what our America means, and is doing—may I not say, has done? If not, she means nothing
more, and does nothing more than any other land. And as, by virtue of its cosmical, antiseptic power,
Nature’s stomach is fully strong enough not only to digest the morbific matter always presented, not to
be turned aside, and perhaps, indeed, intuitively gravitating thither—but even to change such contributions
into nutriment for highest use and life—so American Democracy’s. That is the lesson we, these days, send
over to European lands by every western breeze.
—There is (turning home again) a thought, or fact, I must not forget—subtle and vast, dear to America,
twin-sister of its Democracy—so ligatured indeed to it, that either’s death, if not the other’s also,
would make that other live out life, dragging a corpse, a loathsome, horrid tag and burden forever at
its feet. What the idea of Messiah was to the ancient race of Israel, through storm and clam, through
public glory and their name’s humiliation, tenacious, refusing to be argued with, shedding all shafts
of ridicule and disbelief, undestroyed by captivities, battles, deaths—for neither the scalding blood
of war, nor the rotted ichor of peace could ever wash it out, nor has yet—a great Idea, bedded in Judah’s
heart—source of the loftiest Poetry the world yet knows—continuing on the same, though all else varies—the
spinal thread of the incredible romance of that people’s career along five thousand years—so runs this
thought, this fact, amid our own land’s race and history. It is the thought of Oneness, averaging, including
all; of Identity—the indissoluble Union of These States.
|
