The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V: Political EssaysLowell, James Russell
History
The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V: Political Essays
Lowell, James Russell
United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1869
fault of American training, but by the want of it, that these people
are what they are. When Lord Derby says that the government of this
country is at the mercy of an excited mob, he proves either that the
demagogue is no exclusive product of a democracy, or that England would
be in less danger of war if her governing class knew something less of
ancient Greece and a little more of modern America.
Whether or no there be any truth in the assertion that democracy tends
to bring men down to a common level (as it surely brings them up to
one), we shall not stop to inquire, for the world has not yet had a
long enough experience of it to warrant any safe conclusion. During our
revolutionary struggle, it seems to us that both our civil and military
leaders compare very well in point of ability with the British product
of the same period, and the same thing may very well be true at the
present time. But while it may be the glory, it can hardly be called
the duty of a country to produce great men; and if forms of polity have
anything to do in the matter, we should incline to prefer that which
could make a great nation felt to be such and loved as such by every
human fibre in it, to one which stunted the many that a few favored
specimens might grow the taller and fairer.
While the attitude of the government was by the necessity of the case
expectant so far as slavery was concerned, it is also true that the
people ran before it, and were moved by a deeper impulse than the mere
instinct of self-preservation. The public conscience gave energy and
intention to the public will, and the bounty which drew our best
soldiers to the ranks was an idea. The game was the ordinary game of
war, and they but the unreasoning pieces on the board; but they felt
that a higher reason was moving them in a game where the stake was the
life not merely of their country, but of a principle whose rescue was
to make America in very deed a New World, the cradle of a fairer
manhood. Weakness was to be no longer the tyrant's opportunity, but the
victim's claim; labor should never henceforth be degraded as a curse,
but honored as that salt of the earth which keeps life sweet, and gives
its savor to duty. To be of good family should mean being a child of
the one Father of us all; and good birth, the being born into God's
world, and not into a fool's paradise of man's invention. But even had
this moral leaven been wanting, had the popular impulse been merely one
of patriotism, we should have been well content to claim as the result
of democracy that for the first time in the history of the world it had
mustered an army that knew for what it was fighting. Nationality is no
dead abstraction, no unreal sentiment, but a living and operative
virtue in the heart and moral nature of men. It enlivens the dullest
soul with an ideal out of and beyond itself, lifting every faculty to a
higher level of vision and action. It enlarges the narrowest intellect
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