LYMAN ABBOTT

FAITH AND DUTY

Lyman Abbott, born 1835, died 1922, clergyman, author, and editor, was one of the contributors to the original edition of "Modern Eloquence." The following speech, which sums up the progress which he had witnessed in his long life, indicates also some of the many good causes to which that life was devoted. This speech was delivered in response to the toast "The Day of the Pilgrims' Sons" at the one hundred and ninth annual festival of the New England Society, December 22, 1914.

MEMBERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-I desire to turn your thoughts from the past to the future; from the history which has been so concisely and admirably put before us to the duty which devolves upon the descendants of the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims did not all land on Plymouth Rock. Some of them landed on Plymouth Rock, some in New York, some in Pennsylvania, some in Maryland, some in Virginia, and some in the Carolinas. Some were Congregationalists, some were Presbyterians, some were Quakers, some were Roman Catholics, some were Episcopalians, some were Huguenots, but though of varied creeds, varied temperaments, and inheritance, they were so far agreed in their essential faith that in 1787 they united to form upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. This attempt to make a nation self-growing was a wonderful experiment, an audacious experiment, and rested upon a faith in man that was itself audacious. I believe that the experiment has already justified itself; that in the last 125 years more has been accomplished for human rights than in any other 125 years since the world began, and more by America than by any other country on the face of the globe. I am an American and an optimist. I come to you

to-night at the end of a nearly spent life. After one has reached the age of threescore years and ten he must expect pretty soon to step off the stage. I want to tell you, as far as I can within limits of time allotted to me, what we have done in my lifetime, and what we have left you younger men to do in your lifetime.

When I was a boy in half this continent was slavery. The hegro did not own himself. He was not a person. He was a thing. We have abolished slavery. When I was a boy it was a fair question, an open question, whether this was a confederacy of independent States or a nation. We have settled that question. No one any longer regards it as a confederacy of States. We all recognize it as a nation, and as a nation with extended and enlarged functions and powers. Calhoun declared that the State should determine whether a law was constitutional or not; if it was not constitutional in the view of the State, the State need not obey it. A little later some of the Southern States said that if they did not like this confederacy they could withdraw from it. And somewhere in the eighteen hundred and fifties, shortly after the assault on Sumner, I heard a great orator, Wendell Phillips, say in an eloquent speech that Massachusetts should recall their Senators and Representatives and withdraw from the confederacy of the States.

We no longer regard this as a confederacy. It is a nation, a nation with large functions, a nation with large powers, and we have achieved this unifying of the nation, we have achieved this liberation of the slave at the cost of a great civil war, a civil war which in one respect at least was unlike any other civil war that has ever been fought in the history of the world, I think. At the end of it not a single life was taken, and, if I mistake not, not a single acre of land was confiscated as a penalty upon those that were in revolt. The only lives that were taken were the lives of some who were guilty of assassination after the war was over. Search the pages of history to find another case where men have been arrayed in arms against each other, where a great revolt has arisen against a great and beneficent government, and at the end the parties have shaken hands and established a freer and greater friendship than they

had before. For when I was a boy the North looked on the South with contempt. They said, the South will not fight; and the South looked on the North with contempt; they said the North will not fight. Horrible as the war is it brings some advantages. After the boys in gray and the boys in blue had fought each other for four years, they found that they would fight, and then each side respected the other side, and we have a nation founded on mutual respect and confidence, the only nation that could stand the test of time.

Not only that-the war over, the North sent a new army of teachers, contributions of money (counted first by hundreds, then by thousands, not by millions) to help the South lay the foundation of a new civilization in a broad system of education. Not only that-the South set an example which I also think is unparalleled in the history of the world. The conquered country set herself to work under the leadership of her greatest and noblest man, Gen. Robert E. Lee, to establish in the South the very civilization against which they had been fighting for those four years.

Since then, we have fought in our time the most altruistic fight that has ever been fought in the history of the world. I know still there is some question in the minds of men respecting the Spanish-American War, and I am not going to discuss the general aspect of it. Enough to ask you to look at the picture of the American war compared with the picture of the war going on to-day on the other side of the ocean, and note this: We took Cuba and Porto Rico from Spain and turned over to the Cubans and the Porto Ricans all the taxes we received from the people, every dollar of it; we took the Philippines from Spain, and we sent an army of teachers, and turned our soldiers into teachers, that we might lay in that country the foundations of a free, self-governing community. We asked no war indemnity from the conquered country; instead we paid ourselves to Spain in hard cash the money she had expended in putting the public improvements in the country we had conquered from her. Again I say, search the pages of history and parallel it if you can in the history of mankind. When I was a boy the public school system was confined to one-half the nation. There was no public school in any proper