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Often when dwelling in
Belfast, that most American, most truly Scotch-Irish, and rapidly
progressive of all British towns, have I been asked by eager friends from
all parts of this broad land to seek out their kindred and tell of their
ancestry. Then I have marked that as the old homestead on the hills, or
cross the downs, or midst the moor, was painted forth and the ofttimes
honorable names and deeds of true Ulster sires and forbears were told the
faces of my visitors would flush, their eyes would flash, and out would
leap the heart-born words: "Those were men of whom any heir might be
proud, and for whose sakes it is worth while to live honestly and
worthily."
In true souls of pure
chivalry there ever rise mighty longings that the old ancestral shields
shall never be sullied with spot, nor suffered to be eaten with the rust
of idleness, and that the old banners that have waved over heroes' heads
and graves shall never be trailed in the dirt of disgrace, nor furled in
foul defeat, nor borne in shameful struggles for godless power. In past
years it has been my aim before our National Congress to show how we grew
and whence we came; and to make it plain to my fellow-members that of no
mean strain had we our distinctive start, that the real Scotch-Irishman of
actual history and bold achievements began with picked men, Scottish
noblemen of high repute, honorable lairds of no small degree,
great-brained pioneers, thoughtful and learned clergy, splendid yoemen,
shrewd handicraftsmen, and daring soldiers of fortune. And in the face of
all the sharp criticisms called forth by my utterance on these points, I
boldly restate them as the facts of history and of my own sight and
knowledge. Never did a fresh, aggressive race step across the line of the
unhistoric into the historic fields with finer and more impulsive blood
than our own Brito-Teutonic ancestry of the Lowlands and of Ulster.
But having made you tread
with me the olden pathways of early struggles, and having carried you up
the steep ways of our fathers, and having planted you on the broad
hill-tops of our to-day's strength and assured power, I would now take a
far outlook and bid you join me as we stretch eager eyes forward and think
of what we must be for sake of sires and sons. To-day is the child of
yesterday and the father of to-morrow. It behooves us to see what faces,
forms, and souls we send down and out into great coming battles for God
and man. Freely we have received from our fathers for our strife, let us
freely and fully give to those that follow after on the hot-breathed road
of human contest. In
a bright and cultured home in Philadelphia this scene was enacted one
sunny September afternoon: An old, worn-out, and brave Confederate officer
called to see a somewhat distant relative, the sole representative of a
house whose sons and brothers and cousins had all stood and nearly all
died in the Federal blue. The old soldier waited for the coming of his
never before seen relative. When that young man entered the room, forward
with quick, firm step advanced the old leader; then, what none had ever
seen in the death-sleet of the hot-fought field, he retreated, and
trembled from head to foot. The tears rose and rolled down the old scarred
cheeks; the hand that had gripped the saber in the fierce cavalry rush
like a vise shook; and the lips that had lifted high and clear the wild
yell of battle quivered as across them came the broken words that told the
secret of this strange feeling: "O God! how like my John! "The living
relative gave back the dead and lost. We are the living; the dead have
done their noble deeds; but ours it must be to give them back and hand
them down that the coming days may still see what manner of men they were
in all holy conversation and all heroic deeds.
Of the physical and mental I have no fear.
Seeing what of build and brawn these successive meetings show, and hearing
the great organ tones of my race, and the strong souled utterances, all
worthy of the old brains, I know that in manly strength and in clean-cut
thought we will hold our own as in the past. Looking over this assembly,
and hearing the men and the women that gather here, I see the old in the
new, the forms and faces that give again the men and matrons of the hoary
tales, and recall to me my own oft-seen friends on Lowland moors and
Ulster hills. Sweeping my eyes from bar to bench, from pulpit to pew, from
press to platform, from busy floors to battling-fields, I can multiply the
sons and the daughters that are worthy of the days of old in all
intellectual activities. But what we have to make sure of is that the
moral and the spiritual qualities lying behind our forefathers' brawn and
brain and making them as soldiers and scholars, as editors and
ecclesiastics, as traders and toilers all they were; that these uplifting
and transfiguring moral and spiritual forces shall be handed down by us
and made to tell on and form the generations to come. It is a heavy burden
we bear: we carry the weighted honors and deeds of a shining ancestry, and
we are making the coming centuries for our kith and kin. We must never be
like our dear, impulsive brother "Pat" who, when reminded of his dues to
posterity, replied with his own matchless wit, but rather defective
philosophy: "Postherity? shure, thin, an' what did postherity iver do fur
me?'' Our work for posterity is the only good coin with which we can pay
our heavy debts to our ancestry. If there be one thing we set here before
us, it is the love of our forefathers; and love is immortal—to use
Ben-gel's words—and must be paid in perpetuity to the succeeding race. We
stir up here our pure minds by way of remembrance that we may crown the
dead with undying laurels by the garlands of hope and inspiration we bind
around the brows of the fresh-born. Hence I have taken as my theme for
this meeting Our
Pledge to Posterity.
And my only sorrow is that a season of such sad and almost killing work as
I have seldom been called on to pass through in my own field of pastoral
and public work has made it impossible for me to rise to the height of
this great argument or the right claims of this great national occasion.
1. Truth to our traditions.
Such our first pledge. This tale has been told
to me of one of England's noblest and most forceful statesmen: Morning
after morning he would enter first the old family gallery and there stand
almost as if in worship over against four ancestral portraits. Sometimes
he would be heard to murmur, "I'll not forget;" sometimes, "I will be
true." His eldest boy had watched often in awed wonder, and at last was
taken by the hand into the gallery. Set by his father before the oldest of
the pictures, its name well known, he heard his father say: "You too must
hear them speak." "What, father, how can they speak?" "My boy, for
fourteen years they have spoken to me every morning I have waked beneath
this roof, and each has his own message. He says, 'Be true to me;' and he
says, 'Be true to your race;' and he says, 'Be true to thyself;' and she,
my mother, says, 'Be true to God.'" Splendid illustrations of the true
"Noblesse oblige." Here is a scene from a humbler home, but the power is
no less moving, perhaps still more divine: A widow stands in an old kirk-yard
among the graves of her household, and, holding her only boy by the hand
says: "There was not much silver and gold to leave you, but they have left
you clean blood, pure names, honorable memories, and a great wealth of
prayers." These are
the moments and the spots where the souls of men rise into the strength of
grand resolves, and the strong winds of healthy and happy inspirations
blow life and hope and holy heroism into young hearts. And to multiply
just such moments and recall just such spots is one of the chiefest aims
and strongest bonds of this Society. For their own historic value and for
their rare romantic interest we are seeking to find out and keep alive the
memories and the traditions of the Scot, the Ulsterman, the
Scotch-Irishman; but more eagerly do we call for them that we ourselves
may by these tales of our grandfathers be spurred forward in the great
race for the crown of well-doing. Reliance on ancestors yields only
disgrace; responsibility to ancestry yields dignity. Reliance on ancestry
breeds idleness; responsibility to ancestry breathes inspirations.
Reliance on ancestry may make you but the waster of undeserved good;
responsibility to ancestry may make you the wearer of an immortal crown.
Reliance on ancestry will leave you with the demoniac among the tombs; but
responsibility to ancestry will plant you among the impulsive monuments of
those who now "through faith and patience are inheriting the promises."
Already to some small degree, though with us
yet it is but "the days of small things," our Society's work is yielding
just these precious fruits. As I have gone in the course of duty over this
land, and touched men and women of all ranks and conditions, I have found
that there is an awakening to a new and more thoughtful and
better-balanced sense of the real worthiness and the true distinctions of
our Scotch Irish blood and lineage. But few intelligently understood what
manner of men we were. From too many it had been steadily hidden what are
our large deserts in the land we have done so much to make. And some have
been made to believe that there is nothing we can fairly call our own;
that the honor belongs to Puritan and Cavalier and Hollander. But "the
darkness is passing and the true light is shining." "With the new day has
come a lifting of the head and a loftier carriage and higher aspirations.
"I never knew," said a by no means un-studious lawyer to me, "that we had
such an ancestry and such achievements on both sides the sea." And under
the force of this newfound fact the man stood straighter and looked the
world more squarely in the face than even his olden wont. On the bold brow
of the Danube, not far from historic Ratisbon, the Bavarian has built his
Walhalla; and in that hall of fame he has gathered the impulsive and
formative monuments and statues of his noble dead, that the living sons
and daughters of the land walking there may grow into worthy resemblances.
Back to the massy Grampians, to the basalt rocks of Antrim, to the breezy
hills of Down, the maiden walls of Derry, to Valley Forge, the valleys of
Virginia, the bends of the Ohio, and the gaps and passes of the Cumberland
and the Tennessee we will go; and reminding ourselves of the men and women
who held the sea-board East and won the great West, will say to ourselves:
"Go and do likewise." Hold by the great traditions which the scholars of
Knox and the colonists of Ulster and the sturdy pioneers of the
Alleghanies and the Virginias loved and lived by, free schools, free
churches, free altars and Bibles, free lands, free homes, free men and
women, and withal a God feared and served, and therefore a free
conscience. Ours has been a splendid patrimony, won by blood and tears at
the mercy-seat and on the bloody field. Let it be our resolve and sacred
pledge that this patrimony unincumbered and all-improved shall go to our
children's hands. 2.
We pledge constant readiness for the better.
Traditionalism may mean an old hulk rotting in
a deserted harbor. Readiness for the better is the new cruiser fit for
daring cruise and righteous battle. We are of the rovers' blood; we are
the children of the outward-bound colonists, willing now to leave the old
Scotch moor for the fresh hills of Down, and again the hampered homesteads
of Ulster for the width and wildness of the Susquehanna and the Tennessee.
The old foot-hold we value largely because from it we can make the safer
and the longer leap ahead. The pioneer is the typical Scotch-Irishman.
Hence we are ready—ay, ready—for the newer, if it be the better. But not
otherwise. We therefore claim for ourselves a quality of most singular
value, and in all truth supremely needful in this land; and daily growing
more valuable and necessary as the inflow from foreign shores multiply our
social, constitutional, and national questions. We have in the past and we
do this day represent perhaps more largely than any other of the older
component elements of our variously built State the people of fixed
principle and yet forward progress. We hold aloft old and fight-tattered
banners, but we take into the struggle the Gatling-gun and the
torpedo-boat. While we are not given to reckless change as is the wild
anarchist, we have never had our dwelling amid the decaying tombs like the
insane conservative. We have a great and marvelous loyalty to the past,
but we have a mightier love for the progressive. The Scotch-Irish have
been the men of balance, of cool judgment, slow of speech, but swift of
deed when the clear path opens. You know that there is immeasurable
distance between dragging your anchor and swinging at anchor. We have
never dragged, but we have always swung loose and escaped many a storm and
seized many a prize. The Scotch-Irish are a philosophic race, and they
have done what no other school has succeeded in accomplishing: they have
joined the most thorough positivism with the freest idealism and the most
sturdy realism. We hold the fort, but ever push our scouts forward, and
ever long for new conquests. We take no backward step. The most practical
business-like common sense, revealing itself in painful thirst, tireless
industry, and canniest sagacity, is joined to daring enterprise and quick
inventiveness. To-day
there are no qualities needing more to be kept alive and cultivated than
just this promising balance of the firm and the free, the conservative and
the liberal. Already the men of outlook who with clear eyes and all-pure
hearts stand on the watch-towers of our land behold the little clouds like
a man's hand in size rising out of the great sea of human society.
Questions regarding work and wage, regarding State and nation, regarding
this many-peopled land and the old countries of life-supply, regarding the
masses and the classes, regarding Churches and schools, regarding wealth
and want are all beginning to shape themselves; and there is need in this
land of just that race and with just its characteristics of firm loyalty
to the past and free love for the truly progressive, that grand old seaman
quality of swinging at anchor, which will help those who will follow and
must fight out their own sore strifes to keep the dear land safe and make
liberty sweeter and more comprehensive.
3. We pledge union, not uniformity.
This is another of our great racial traditions
and faiths and achievements. Religiously we have always been Churchmen,
but always Nonconformists. Politically we have held by the integrity of
the civic community and yet the independence of our inviolate
individuality. In this great nation of sovereign States and with
many-blooded hosts of sovereign citizens, this union without uniformity is
our twin secret of compacted strength and protective freedom. Unless these
two principles can be kept in harmony and can be made to act and react on
one another there must be a wild volcanic explosion. The imperial
individualities of this young and heady nation must have ample room and
marge to seethe and work and thus ripen and clarify; and at the same time
one holy home of the co-equal children must be guarded from all internal
division. But just this imperialism and individualism marked us in the
past and mark us to-day. No feature came out more clearly in the
Scotch-Irish as they stood fronting one another at Gettysburg or in the
Wilderness than just this twin feature of imperialism and individuality.
We would not bury that with our sword, but use it on the sweeter fields of
peace and for posterity. Because, as it seems to me, no other of the
original and formative folks, coming to and building up this great nation,
possess just what our race has hitherto been marked by. The Puritan has
individuality, and but little community. The Cavalier has his love for the
community, but none for a constitution ; he is brave for the State, but is
inclined to browbeat the subject. The Hollander has his eye fixed on
constitutions and courts, and but little care for the free life of the
community and the full liberty of the individual. The Celt has neither
commonwealth nor constitution, but binds himself to his chief and his own
clan. But the striking peculiarities we carried out from the school of
Knox and had developed in the formative influences of Ulster, to which I
turned your thoughts last year, are a sovereign State of represented
citizens and a sovereign subject with his inviolate freedom and
individuality and untrammeled conscience; a constitutional country, but an
independent individuality; the body politic, but the body personal; a
common capital for the common country where is visible the indivisible
unit of national and impartial authority, and a clear conscience across
whose defiant threshold only God may step. The Puritan and the Hollander
would guard against the tyranny of the State, the Cavalier against the
tantrums of the individual, and we against both.
To not a few thoughtful students of the trend
of. public affairs, it grows more clear that three great forces are
working in the ever seething masses of this wonderful nation, where the
hot and steamy blood of fiery youth is firmly held in the strong vessels
of most admirable polity and constitution; and that these forces must be
harmonized. These are socialism, State rights, and nationalism. Each force
has a voice, and as it lifts itself up you may hear, amid much that is
foolish and false, something of truth. Truth's least grain is precious,
and must be kept. The guarding of these grains and the setting them in one
common crown of glory, to be placed at some distant day on the brow of our
land, is the coming task; and truth to itself, truth to its past, truth to
its lessons and teachers will fit our race to be no mean workers unto
happy achievement, for the solution lies right in the line of
characteristic love of union and rejection of dead and deadening
uniformity. 4. We
pledge a free Church and a free school.
If there be any thing more truly fixed in the
past of our race, it is a love of religion and a love of learning. No one
need grow nervous as I come to this thin ice. Neither will I go in myself
nor drag you after mo. I have too much of that Scotch-Irish love of the
common rights in me, and too strong a regard for my own individuality to
enter on sharply debatable grounds. But there is a wide field here that
must be traversed, and that soon and steadily, by our country. There is
heard sounding all through the air of the land a desire for closer
approach among the holders of a common faith, and a clearer understanding
of the conditions on which our country and the separate States will work
and develop the great school system of the land. Toward this harmony of
Christianity and this completion of our school system every true man and
woman in the land must be hearty helpers. Our ancestors grew into
convictions on these subjects, then handed down their hard-won gains to
us, which are in my judgment of great value at this very point of national
advance and movement, and they are capable of being stated in a wise and a
generous way so that we shall be impelled the bettor to work the right
work and hand down to our posterity with larger measure what we have
ourselves received and augmented.
We still hold by, and will, the free Church
and the free school. We write the Church and the school. Some write only
the Church; some only the school; others the Church in, or rather under,
the school. We believe in the Church and the school, and each free for its
own work. As we
recognize God and Caesar, so we recognize Paul and Plato. We have our
theology; we have our philosophy. But we place them in distinct spots and
relations. We would have a school free to all the children of the land and
paid for by the land. We would have a Church free to all who choose to
enter, and paid for by those who use it; a school granted to all for the
impartation of knowledge fitting for citizenship; a sanctuary guarded by
the nation from all intrusion for the education of the soul for man's help
and for God's fellowship. No one shall force me to worship; but no one
shall forbid me to worship nor interfere with my quiet and rest for that
hallowed work. The common school, the free Church, and the sacred Sabbath.
5. We pledge respect for, but no fear of,
majorities. We claim
to be and are generally and generously recognized as a race of great
principles. We contend for principles. One great mark in us is loyalty. We
are loyal to home, loyal to friends, loyal to our party, loyal to our
country; but over all these has risen our loyalty to truth and God. That
has been our mark; and woe worth the day when it shall ever change.
Nothing seems to me of more value at this moment than that supremo regard
to the right, irrespective of the multitude. Votes do not always show
virtue; they can never make it. In the past our fathers were forced to
stand alone, sneers and shame and suffering their bitter lot. Ah how the
old Lowland and Ulster tales tell the woe-fraught tales! They stood alone
when they closed the gates of the Derry and fasted to the verge of death
rather than go with the multitude. But they kept the pass for the world.
And Washington at Valley Forge knew that they would be willing to stand
alone with him, if all others should fail. The minority sometimes holds
the salt of life. We like to be with the winning side, but we have never
been afraid to stand alone and to wait till from Philip drunk we could
appeal to Philip sober. Now in countries like Britain and America, where
rule must and rightly is by the mass, it is of the utmost value to have a
solid body of approved men, a sturdy phalanx known to be no cowards, a
tested set of people with cool heads and firm-ruled spirits who can bear
the sharp sting of most unwelcome and ill-deserved defeat and hold the
battle-field for another fray. It is just at this point that the unequaled
and historically proved staying power of our race comes out. We have hold
the fort just in this way times without number, and that has hitherto
always meant the coming day of victory. This regard for the right, and
this defiance of defeat we propose to carry onward and to hand down; and
if we do, one largest and noblest measure of service will be rendered this
land and struggling humanity. The famous utterance of the great French
strategist in one of his peninsular wars regarding the English soldiery,
"They don't know when they are beaten," is fully applicable to this folk
we own. They don't know their defeat; or rather, they know that more than
Phoenix life and energy are theirs, so that they can snatch life out of
the grave, and grandest victories out of the jaws of crushing loss. And
the present surrounding illustration of this fact is the "New South,"
throughout which and specially at the points of most marvelous and rapidly
advancing success, you find the indomitable Scotch-Irish confronting you
with all their thrift and energy and assurance of victory.
6. We pledge a peace-making brotherhood.
From our peculiar race affiliations we claim
kinship both in blood and in historic sympathies with the great race
powers of our land To all we can stretch out our hands of real kinship and
truest fellow-feeling. Ours is a truly peculiar position in this matter;
and ours may be, if we use it but wisely, a potent factor in welding into
still closer unity all sections of the country, all varieties of the great
peoples who have hero blended their blood and their labors. In former
years, when Austria held her rich possessions in Italy by tight grip of
military despotism, she had what was called the "impregnable
quadrilateral," the four famous and defiant fortresses of Peschiera,
Verona, Mantua, and Legnago, and herein lay her so great strength that
even Napoleon the Third after the critical battle of Solferino dared not
attack them. In this land we have a quadrilateral of conquering and kingly
races, soldier-like and sage, proud of great traditions and progressive on
all paths of noble struggle. Let them be held in firm and steadfast
brotherhood, and who will dare attack these unique lines of defense? And
central in this square of the living stronghold we stand, having special
links of communication with each part, and so bringing all into actual and
active sympathy. This quadrilateral of racial forces are the Puritans and
the Cavaliers, the Teuton and the Irish.' Let there be no strife between
us, for we be brethren. Yes, brethren! in all that is holiest and most
affiliating and most impulsive. And we are closest cousins to all; akin in
blood to English Puritan and Teuton, Hollander and German; akin to them
still more in the old battles and successful struggles that have made
their names famous and their work for humanity so glorious. Through our
Brito-Saxo-Norman descent we stretch out kinship grasp to the Huguenot;
and through our Ulster domicile we call the Irish Celts our
fellow-countrymen. Is it not a marvelous circle of association? Is it to
be wielded as it may, a weapon of tremendous power? Are we not hereby
enabled to speak to each in his own tongue the marvelous message of our
common country? May we not be a mighty harmonizing force? May this Society
not be guided to glorious works of wide pacification, the allaying of
jealousies, and the scattering of suspicions, and the spread of a sweeter
and dearer brotherhood all across the land? What it is to be able to look
at your neighbor's trouble from the inside of your neighbor's heart and
hearth! God has given us the homo word for each of these great race powers
in this country. Let us use it wisely, bravely, tenderly. We are said to
be exclusive. No Society can be possibly universal. But we include the
largest number of sectional elements and race distinctions of any one
homogeneous folk in all this broad American continent. We are found in all
parts, we belong to all parties, we combine in our family all creeds, we
stand in all Societies and trades and professions. Our ramifications are
simply startling when you come to trace them out. By descent and
intermarriage we have foot-hold at every hearth-stone nearly in the varied
community. The
possible power of this interpenetration is incalculable. We count that we
have some good reason to make ourselves decisively heard. The extent to
which we have spread our achievements and our character justify the tones
of kindly authority. It has been calculated that by birth, marriage, and
intermarriage about one-fifth of our whole population has Scotch-Irish
blood in their veins. If we add the associated and affiliated Hollander
and Huguenot, you get more than a fourth; add in the North German and
Welsh, our British cousins, and you widen the sweep of our race-kinships.
What a magnificent arch it is—finest European stock! Bind them together in
truest union and integrity, and what strength and splendor you have! In
that arch we are the key-stone: we bind and hold all in unity of beauty
and strength. In the war-days of terrible struggle it was the Scotch-Irish
of Pennsylvania that made her the key-stone of the arch of liberty. Be it
ours to become the keystone of the arch of a new and closer and more
fruitful union! Far, far back in the dark and storm-swept days of human
advance from barbaric woes and wickedness it was the bridge-builders that
did most for the advance of the conquering and transforming nations on the
march to bettor things. Let us be bridge-builders and give the true
linking of the North and South and East and West.
In that past battle-hour, of which to-day we
would remember only the great heroes and noble deeds of bravery common to
our common country, my family stood divided, as so many others; some stood
in gray and some wore the blue; but I remember well how just before the
first fell shot was fired one brave, blue-eyed boy who fell under
Stonewall's eye and to his sorrow, said to mo in my mother's home in
Edinburgh: "Thank God there is one homo where you and I can meet in peace
and kinship! " We would make this Society of ours just such a home.
Leaving Alexandria one bright, sunny morning I was shown the touching and
peaceful acre of God where in long, simple grave lines sleep together the
common heroes of our common hearths. We desire to see another acre of God
where not in sleep but in great conquering strength and generous rivalries
our common stock and all our national brotherhood shall work the richer
harvests of peace and religion.
They have in New York the most useful and
honorable Southern Society. We desire to rear another Society, neither
Southern nor Northern nor New England, but to re-erect the "Continental
Congress," knowing no South nor North nor East nor West, but brothers all
and only, our country one and indivisible. Brothers and sisters, it is the
day of monument-making; and well it is so. And the faded "Blue" will stand
in honoring silence before the granite that bears one word, "Lee," just as
the tattered "Gray" stood beside the tomb of Grant. Let us rear them; let
us guard them; let us crown them. But rarer monuments we may rear for our
land and for the wide and hopeful future, if only immortal and influential
we make our old ancestral principles, for then from mothers' knees and
fathers' sides will go out the future generations of our great, old line
to hear God's call in every fresh blast, and do God's work on each fresh
field of duty. |
