If you could witness the mortification poor Andrew Carnegie is now undergoing because of his lack of vision, you would have a lesson not soon forgotten. He built libraries but furnished no books to fill them. It was like building houses without windows. When leading business men commit such folly what can you expect of the nation at large?
The three things most needed by the people are food, raiment and shelter.
The next three are instruction, religion and discipline. Liberty is a privilege; it comes after all the others. The individual has no rights inimical to those of the collective conscience.
Until you learn this fundamental maxim, all your knowledge will prove but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
The nations are rattling over the cobble stones of bankruptcy on a buckboard of compromise, on the high road to revolution.
JOHN MARSHALL
(The Expounder of the Constitution)
Recorded October, 1920
Some recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States are, more than any other factor, calculated to develop and foster an element of national unrest. Its deliberations are beyond the intelligence of many and above the interests of the majority. Its psychology is that of a divorce between capital and labor. Its rulings remind me of what transpired in England early in the nineteenth century.
Many who were not socialists are beginning to turn from the older order, imbued with the feeling that nothing could happen in the future worse for the country at large than the conditions that are being endured in the present.
A revolution arrives after a series of connected events which exhausts the patience of the public, and events are moving with intensity as well as rapidity.
DANIEL WEBSTER
You will search the pages of history in vain without finding a parallel to present conditions.
The war gave Bohemia her freedom; at the same time it licensed a bohemian poet to keep Italy stewing in her own juice, a bohemian journalist from New York to direct affairs in Moscow, and a bohemian socialist from Switzerland to rule over Russia.
Added to this a fashionable ladies' pianist has tried his hand, or should I say fingers, in the science of unfurling the sails of Poland's new Ship of State, while shop-keepers direct affairs in Germany and pusilanimous politicians keep the people of America in a state of tepid trepidation and flatulent turmoil. Can you wonder that the country is being hypnotized by the sight of so many cantankerous cataleptics?
Macbeth declared he had waded in so far that returning would be as perilous as going on. Nothing will move them until they are swamped by the high tide of reaction and flung as flotsam on the rocks of a stormy opportunism.
A new Damocles has a sword suspended over the National Capitol, and liberty hangs to the hinges of the Constitution by a hair.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
While a few people are ready to return to first principles, many are giving expressions to Garden of Eden proclivities. But instead of the old Eve, you have the new Amazon; instead of the old serpent, copperheads in Congress; instead of the old Adam, fresh brands of bluebeards.
Agreeable to the apple of the new Adam's eye and the fruitarian diet of the new Eden, some ladies have adopted the fig-leaf standard. But let that pass for the moment, always bearing in mind that he who loses his sense of humor loses his equilibrium.
Millions of people are dancing their legs off to keep their heads on.
Providence is wiser than the moralists.
There was a way out of the trenches and there is a way out of the pessimism developed by the dying dispensation. It is not so much a question of keeping your powder dry as it is of keeping your wits from congealing.
Beware of nebulous notions and theories. Uncanny kinks lead to calamitous brain storms. A stitch in the side saves nine--kicks behind the solar plexus.
BENJAMIN WADE
(Late Governor of Ohio--U. S. Senator)
Viewed in the light that shines on the White House, there is no difference between a man from Ohio and a gentleman from Indiana.
Men from the pumpkin pie districts think and feel alike, judging world politics by the yard-stick method that prevailed in their villages when they were young men. They are not always aware that political ruts cause social ructions.
The all-wool-and-a-yard-wide politician was home-spun and honestly patriotic, but what you need is a home-spun thinker whose vision has got beyond the yard-stick measure and can take in the whole world.
An old-school president, at this juncture, will have little more authority than a Congo king would have at a conference of jurists in Paris.
Has anyone taken the trouble to find out just what distinguishes the minority from the majority?
While the home-spun politician was eating cookies and buckwheat cakes made by his mother in the Middle West, some millions in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and other foreign centers, were partaking of wienerwurst, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and rye bread, and clinking beer glasses, according to the custom of Continental Europe.
If we say that a statesman represents Americanism, the question arises what kind of Americanism? The Yankee, the Southerner, each had his place in the political economy of America from 1776 to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and even up to the Cleveland Administration, after which conditions began to change with startling rapidity, when the children born of foreign parents were beginning to come of age and the European ferment began to leaven the lumps of sectional dough.
The man who occupies the White House in 1921 should take Time by the forelock and the profiteer with the padlock, know how to translate "Es ist verboten" into Russian, and say, "Get thee behind me, Satan," in Esperanto.
If honesty, alone, is the best and only policy, our country would be safe, but honesty is only one of the qualities necessary in these days to carry a President through the mazes of a complex administration. Honesty does not always imply clear vision or even ordinary common sense. The faculties of diplomatic tact and political judgment are infinitely more important, and experience still more so.
In America the roles enacted by professional politicians remind one of a masquerade where everyone is trying to penetrate behind the masks and guessing is the rule. If in this heterogeneous ball-room you slap your partner on the back, you may elicit a grunt from a grouchy bolshevik or a groan from a disgruntled "bohemian."
And yet Congress enacts laws for Americans who understand no dialect but their own and who have to engage interpreters when they visit Paris. How many wealthy Americans realize that these United States have outgrown the cookie era, the buckwheat pancake era, the corn cob era, the wooden nutmeg era, and arrived at the root-hog-or-die era?
Young America today no more resembles the young America of thirty years ago than a butterfly resembles a caterpillar. Young men and women are sixty per cent cosmopolitan and forty per cent rebel.
During the next five years the number of young people who will insist on thinking for themselves will increase two-fold, because in that time many thousands of children born of foreign parents in America will have become mature enough to have fixed upon some sort of ideal.
Congress will realize the situation when it is too late for regrets to be of any service. Which calls to mind a story apropos of this pressing subject: A landlady, having no means of obtaining meat for her boarders, made a stew out of a litter of kittens. The truth became known in a day or two. One of the boarders said the very thought made her sick, to which the landlady replied: "Feeling sick won't do no good; them kittens has all been digested."
DON PIATT