United States or Aruba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Johnson and Sir George Campbell. For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who are always in the right in this matter.
These Jeffersonian doctrinaires were men who at certain crises, in certain countries, might have rendered great service to the cause of liberty and humanity; but their influence in America was on the whole distinctly evil, save that, by a series of accidents, they became the especial champions of the westward extension of the nation, and in consequence were identified with a movement which was all-essential to the national well-being.
But doctrinaires always abound in times of revolution. By December the government was stronger than it had been at any time since the Revolution began. The zemstvos were no longer an active part of the revolutionary movement.
There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz.
'The doctrinaires call it a fault, said Forbes indignantly, pointing out the feature to his companions. 'I'd like to see them build anything nowadays with half so much imagination and charm.
'Lord 's intended tergiversation has been, I believe, some time known; he admits that all farmers without capital, in short, all little men, must be sacrificed. What a barbarous and odious policy, that goes upon the principle that none but capitalists are henceforth to be allowed to live, as farmers at least. We must turn the tables upon Lord and all such heartless doctrinaires!
Upon the simple right and wrong of it each was able to establish a case convincing to itself. Thus the War of Sections, fought to a finish so gallantly by the soldiers of both sides, was in its origination largely a game of party politics. The extremists and doctrinaires who started the agitation that brought it about were relatively few in number. The South was at least defending its own.
Mankind would have contained nothing but doctrinaires, and the arts would have stood still for ever. Capacity to learn comes with dependence on education; and as that animal which at birth is most incapable and immature is the most teachable, so too those human races which are most precocious are most incorrigible, and while they seem the cleverest at first prove ultimately the least intelligent.
On the day of his death, this simple Western attorney, who according to one party was a vulgar joker, and whom the doctrinaires among his own supporters accused of wanting every element of statesmanship, was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this solely by the hold his good-humored sagacity had laid on the hearts and understandings of his countrymen.
A very small group of extremists and doctrinaires had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of these survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive. It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters.
Word Of The Day