Modern Eloquence: Vol II | Page 3

Cable, who
is married to New England; the gifted woman who calls herself Charles
Egbert Craddock; and a host of others including that noble woman now
going blind in Lexington, who has done some of the sweetest work in
American poetry, Margaret J. Preston. [Applause.] I might go further
and claim Howells, every drop of whose blood is Virginian. If it were
not getting personal and becoming a family affair, I might mention the
fact that the author of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster," with whom I used to
play on the hills of Ohio River, was of direct Southern descent; that he

was born as I was, exactly on Mason and Dixon's line, and one of us
fell over on one side and the other on the other when the trouble came.
Notwithstanding all this, I hold that there can be no such thing as a
Southern Literature, because literature is never provincial, and to say of
any literature that it is Southern or Western or Northern or Eastern is to
say that it is a provincial utterance and not a literature. The work to
which I have referred is American literature. It is work of which
American literature is proud and will ever be proud, whatever is worthy
in literature or in achievement of any kind in any part of the country
goes ultimately in the common fund of American literature or of
American achievement; and that is the joy I have had in being here
to-night, when I ought to have been at home. The joy I have had
to-night has been that this sentiment of Americanism has seemed to be
all around me, and to run through and through everything that has been
said here to-night--a sentiment which was taken out of my mouth, as it
were, by the President this evening, that our first devotion above all is
to what I call the American idea. It seems to me that we are sometimes
forgetting what idea it is that has made this country great; what it is that
has made of it a nation of free men and educated men--a nation in
which the commonest laborer has the school open to him, as well as the
workshop; in which the commonest laborer can sit down three times
every day to a bountiful table. We sometimes forget the idea on which
our country was founded; the idea which prompted Jefferson, as a
young man, to stand up in the legislature of Virginia and fight through
three bills directly affecting mere questions of law, but determining the
future of this country more largely than any other acts,--even the acts of
Washington himself. Those three bills, one providing for the separation
of Church and State, one for the abolition of primogeniture, and the
third for the abolition of entail. The idea that ran through that time was
the idea of equal individual manhood--of the supremacy of the man to
all else, to the State itself, to Government and Society; that the
individual man was the one thing to be taken care of; that it is the sole
business of the Government to give him rights of manhood, to protect
him in his personal freedom, and then to let him alone.
We have imported of late subtly sophistical advocates of socialism who

would set up in opposition to these American ideas the system of State
paternalism, and assert the doctrine that the State should not let a man
alone to make the best use he can of his abilities and opportunities, but
should guide him and support him and direct him and provide for him
and, in short, make a moral and intellectual cripple of him. That is the
new and un-American idea which has recently been promulgated and
which has found expression in New York in 60,000 votes; it is the idea
which has been seized upon by those persons who have leagued
themselves together to secure to themselves larger profits upon their
industry or investments by taxing the whole people for the benefit of
the few, making the State the pap-giver, taking from the people the
taxes that should be rigidly limited to the needs of the government and
turning them into the pockets of the individual; supporting, helping and
making, as I have said, a cripple of him. That is the idea which has
prompted in large degree disturbances through which we have passed,
and to which reference has been made here to-night. It is the idea that
somehow or in some particular way a man should have some support
other than his own individual exertion, and absolute freedom can
provide for him.
It seems to me that one lesson we here to-night should take most to
heart is that lesson taught by the whole history of our country, that