The Investment of Influence | Page 4

the goddess came to Thebes
because of the blessings she left in her track. Her footprints were not in
the sea, soon obliterated, nor in the snow, quickly melting, but in fields
and forests. This unseen friend, passing by the tree blackened by a
thunderbolt, stayed her step; lo! the woodbine sprang up and covered
the tree's nakedness. She lingered by the stagnant pool--the pool
became a flowing spring. She rested upon a fallen log--from decay and
death came moss, the snowdrop and the anemone. At the crossing of
the brook were her footprints; not in mud downward, but in violets that
sprang up in her pathway. O beautiful prophecy! literally fulfilled 2,000
years afterward in the life of the London apple woman, whose
atmosphere sweetened bitter hearts and made evil into good.
Wealth and eminent position witness not less powerfully the
transforming influence of exalted characters. "My lords," said Salisbury,
"the reforms of this century have been chiefly due to the presence here
of one man--Lord Shaftesbury. The genius of his life was expressed
when last he addressed you. He said: 'When I feel age creeping upon
me I am deeply grieved, for I cannot bear to go away and leave the
world with so much misery in it.'" So long as Shaftesbury lived,
England beheld a standing rebuke of all wrong and injustice. How
many iniquities shriveled up in his presence! This man, representing
the noblest ancestry, wealth and culture, wrought numberless reforms.
He became a voice for the poor and weak. He gave his life to reform
acts and corn laws; he emancipated the enslaved boys and girls toiling

in mines and factories; he exposed and made impossible the horrors of
that inferno in which chimney-sweeps live; he founded twoscore
industrial, ragged and trade schools; he established shelters for the
homeless poor; when Parliament closed its sessions at midnight Lord
Shaftesbury went forth to search out poor prodigals sleeping under
Waterloo or Blackfriars bridge, and often in a single night brought a
score to his shelter. When the funeral cortege passed through Pall Mall
and Trafalgar square on its way to Westminster Abbey, the streets for a
mile and a half were packed with innumerable thousands. The
costermongers lifted a large banner on which were inscribed these
words: "I was sick and in prison and ye visited me." The boys from the
ragged schools lifted these words; "I was hungry and naked and ye fed
me." All England felt the force of that colossal character. To-day at that
central point in Piccadilly where the highways meet and thronging
multitudes go surging by, the English people have erected the statue of
Shaftesbury--the fitting motto therefor; "The reforms of this century
have been chiefly due to the presence and influence of Shaftesbury." If
our generation is indeed held back from injustice and anarchy and
bloodshed, it will be because Shaftesbury the peer, and Samuel, the
seer, are duplicated in the lives of our great men, who stand forth to
plead the cause of the poor and weak.
But man's atmosphere is equally potent to blight and to shrivel. Not
time, but man, is the great destroyer. History is full of the ruins of cities
and empires. "Innumerable Paradises have come and gone; Adams and
Eves many," happy one day, have been "miserable exiles" the next; and
always because some satanic ambition or passion or person entering
has cast baneful shadow o'er the scene. Men talk of the scythe of time
and the tooth of time. But, said the art historian: "Time is scytheless
and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm; we who smite like the
scythe. Fancy what treasures would be ours to-day if the delicate
statues and temples of the Greeks, if the broad roads and massy walls
of the Romans, if the noble architecture, castles and towns of the
Middle Ages had not been ground to dust by blind rage of man. It is
man that is the consumer; he is moth and mildew and flame." All the
galleries and temples and libraries and cities have been destroyed by his
baneful presence. Thrice armies have made an arsenal of the Acropolis;

ground the precious marbles to powder, and mixed their dust with his
ashes. It was man's ax and hammer that dashed down the carved work
of cathedrals and turned the treasure cities into battle-fields, and opened
galleries to the mold of sea winds. Disobedience to law has made cities
a heap and walled cities ruins. Man is the pestilence that walketh in
darkness. Man is the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
When Mephistopheles appears in human form his presence falls upon
homes like the black pall of the consuming plague, that robes cities for
death. The classic writer tells of an Indian princess sent as