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We have all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in the breasts of our generation—that we do not help to poison the nation’s blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way—that oppression has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression.
It was in their loins the Messiah was; in them the apex of a nation’s prosperity; in them glory at its apogee. And across that tableau of might, of splendor, and of submission for one second flitted the silhouette of that dainty princess of Utopia, the Queen of Sheba, bringing riddles, romance, and riches to the wise young king.
These are inevitably destructive and a menace and hindrance to a nation’s life—even as it is recorded in the Torah and confirmed in history that when the Jews became fettered by empty forms and imitations, the wrath of God became manifest. When they forsook the foundations of the law of God, Nebuchadnezzar came and conquered the Holy Land.
His vision was set out in “The Anglo-German Problem,” written in 1912, now published in an authorized American edition, perhaps the most accurate forecast which has been penned of to-day’s conflict, and certainly one of the most exact analyses of the German nation made before the world learned, since last August, to know it as it is—as Sarolea, master delineator of a nation’s character, drew it.
Summer has succeeded summer, and all the June days since that day of terrific annihilation have poured their white suns upon these white milestones of the nation’s destiny—the only requiem, the winds of winter, and in summer the liquid notes of the meadow lark.
Spain and the world have learned that beneath the folds of our nation’s flag there lurks a power as irresistible as the wrath of God. Sleep on, side by side in the dim vaults of eternity, Manila Bay and Bunker Hill, Lexington and Santiago, Ticonderoga and San Juan, glorious rounds in Columbia’s ladder of fame, growing colossal as the ages roll.
Our community, our country, calls to us. Oh, when I look upon society and see what characters ride rampant there, when I look at government and see the awful corruption festering there, when I see how men in power, from the chief magistrate of the nation down to the humblest postmaster, will sell their souls for party, and betray their country to its enemies through lust of power, or something else, God knows what; when I see drunkenness holding high carnival in the nation’s capitol, reeling in the seat of the President, and retailing its maudlin declamation before a sickened country from Washington to Chicago, I can only turn to God and the future.
If a literature be, as I have said, the voice of a particular nation, it requires a territory and a period, as large as that nation’s extent and history, to mature in. It is broader and deeper than the capacity of any body of men, however gifted, or any system of teaching, however true. It is the exponent, not of truth, but of nature, which is true only in its elements.
When the fiery tongue of the Revolution blazed into the undying speech of liberty, Madison, Mason, Patrick Henry, and Edmund Randolph uttered their declaration that like a sunbeam has been written upon every page of the nation’s history: “All men are by nature equally free and have inherent rights—namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Upon the inviolability of this sublime doctrine the early colonists fought for liberty, and the nation flung a battle line more than two thousand miles long, and engaged at arms over two millions of men, in order to procure liberty for another race.
“On this day,” he said at last, “it is customary that in commemoration of your nation’s delivery out of Egypt I should release a prisoner to you. There are three others here, among them Jesus Barabba.” Then, for support perhaps, he looked over at the clamoring mob. “I will leave the choice to the people.”