The Reign of Gilt

In Chicago, in Lincoln Park, there is a wonderful statue. A big, slouching form, loose yet powerful; ungraceful, yet splendid because it seems to be able to bear upon its Atlantean shoulders the burdens of a mighty people. The big hands, the big feet, the great, stooped shoulders tell the same story of commonness and strength.

Then you look at the face. You find it difficult to keep your hat upon your head.

What a countenance! How homely, yet how beautiful; how stern, yet how gentle; how inflexible, yet how infinitely merciful; how powerful, yet how tender; how common, yet how sublime!

Search the world through and you will find no greater statue than this—the statue of Abraham Lincoln, by St. Gaudens. It is Lincoln; but it is also a great deal more. It is the glorification of the Common Man—the apotheosis of Democracy.

As you look at that face and that figure you feel the history of the human race, the long, the bloody, the agonized struggle of the masses of mankind for freedom and light. You see the whole history of your own country, founded by common men for the common people, founded upon freedom and equality and justice.

Here is no vain haughtiness, no arrogance, no supercilious looking down, no cringing looking upward, nothing that suggests class or rank or aristocracy. Here is Democracy, the Common Man exalted in the dignity of his own rights, in the splendor of the recognition of the equal rights of all others; the Common Man, free and enlightened, strong and just.

The statue is in the attitude of preparation to speak. What is that brain formulating for those lips to utter?

The expression of brow and eyes and lips leaves no doubt. It is some thought of freedom and justice, some one of those many mighty democratic thoughts which will echo forever in the minds and hearts of men.

Let us recall three of those thoughts:

These were the ideas that found this country a few ragged settlements trembling between a hostile sea and a hostile wilderness and built it up to its present estate of democratic grandeur. Not tyranny, not murder disguised as war, not robbery disguised as “benevolent guidance,” not any of the false and foolish ideas of imperialism and aristocracy. But ideas of peace, of equal rights for all, of self-government.

Our era, conscious of the mighty works that can be wrought, conscious that we are all under sentence of speedy death, eagerly seeks out the young man, the obscure man. It has need of all powers and all talents, especially of the talents for creating, organizing, directing. Instead of it being true that a good man doesn’t have a chance any more, the reverse is true—inferior men have chances greatly beyond their powers, and immature men are forced into important commands, and discredited and ruined, so impatient is the pressure for men to do the world’s important work. This is the day of the man who wants a chance.

It is also a day in which we hear a great deal about the “unruly class.” This phrase is employed to designate some vague element in the masses of the people that is naturally turbulent and ever looking about for an excuse to “rise” and “burn, slay, kill.”

You may search through history page by page, line by line, and you will find no trace of the doings of this alleged “unruly class.” The more you read the more you will be struck by the universal and most tenacious love of quiet and order in the masses of mankind. You will see them robbed, oppressed, murdered wholesale upon mere caprice, the victims of all manner of misery. Your cheeks will burn and your blood run hot as you read. And you will note with wonder that they endured with seemingly limitless patience until they were eating grass by the wayside. Then, once in a while, but only once in a while, they “rose.” All the machinery of law and order was in the hands of the oppressors, so they were compelled to resort to violence. But even then they established new machinery or patched up the old as quickly as possible.

Every society that has been overturned from, within has been overturned by misrule; never by the unruly.

No; the real “unruly classes” are these “respectabilities” with the “pulls,” and these governmental officers who are “pulled”;—they violate the laws; they purchase or enact or enforce unjust legislation; they abuse the confidence and the tolerant good nature of the people; they misuse the machinery of justice.

Turn to your history again. You find that every once in a while the dominant element has begun to talk about the “unruly class,” to express fear of “risings,” of mob violence. And in every instance you find that the real reason for this denunciation and dread was that the dominant element had begun to be acutely conscious of its own misdeeds. It feared that its own weapons of injustice would be turned against itself by outraged justice. It feared that its punishment would be in proportion to its crimes.

Gladstone said that the Nineteenth century was summed up in the phrase, “Unhand me!” Its science struck off the shackles of ignorance upon the intellect—shackles of error, of false reverence, of superstitions about the causes of the inequalities of men. Thus, the Nineteenth century made it possible for this to be the Age of the Common Man. Not to states, not to institutions, not to class-made law, not to castes and orders and rank belongs the Twentieth century. It belongs to the Common Man—to you. You with your stout heart and your willing and capable hands. You with your active, intelligent brain, impatient of traditional nonsense, however poetically or plausibly englamoured. You with your enlightened sense of the equal rights of all men. You with your passionate resolve scientifically to correct the stupid and cruel inequalities of opportunity, that are as intolerable in an era of science as a cannibal feast in the temple of the Most High.

What is the watchword of this new day? From lip to lip, from land to land, from race to race, flies the “password eternal”—Democracy.

How the Nineteenth century did belie all the prophecies of pessimism! And how the Twentieth century will belie all the prophecies of its pessimists!

To realize this you must penetrate the dust and noise and clamor that are the surface of things. You must discard prejudice and that narrowness which makes you exaggerate the importance of the things immediately at hand—the things that are mere details of the great pattern which time is weaving in the loom of history—details incomprehensible unless you look at the pattern as a whole. Disregard tradition and egotism; free yourself of the small silliness that leads you to confuse intelligence with etiquette and clothes, with formal education which may or may not affect the intellect. Look deep into the realities and see there the lines of the Common Man—the toiler at the desk and bench and lever and plow, his mind bent upon his work, his work the improvement of his own condition and the handing down of the heritage of life richer and better in every way than he received it.

Through the ages this Common Man has been building like the coral insect—silently, secretly, steadily, strongly. History has little to say about him or his work, and that little misleading; the historians have been unable to get away from courts and battlefields and the legislation halls where fierce but futile and evanescent class struggles rage. But the real story of the past of the human race as an interpreter and prophet of the future is the story of the building of the coral continent founded broadly and deeply upon freedom and justice, upon Intelligence and Democracy. And now at last this continent of enduring civilization begins to emerge not here and there, not merely above the ebbtides of ignorance and tyranny, but everywhere and for all time.

Let us read the past aright. Its departed civilizations are not a gloomy warning, but a bright promise. If limited intelligence in a small class produced such gleams of glory in the black sky of history, what a day must be now dawning!

THE END