SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 229 



hand at any given time and with it so much more of potentiality and 

 possibility. 



Culture, then, having increased life and wants, has assumed the responsi- 

 bility of increased production. Now, culture is not a creative faculty. It 

 is simply an assistant to nature and genius. It takes them by the hand and 

 leads them to the best results. There is, some one has said, "always the 

 best way of doing everything if it is but to boil an egg." Culture digs up 

 the soil, waters the roots, and increases the production ten fold. It lubri- 

 cates the machinery and the busy hum of the shop sings with inspired joy 

 over the birth of a new power ; it grades down highways so that this 

 increased life and increased production may come together and exchange 

 wants and good wishes, and by those means lift man into a higher life. 



Culture is not a negative quality, vapid, inane; it is health and good 

 order. To begin with, it is a respecter of the rights of others. Nature has 

 no regard for rights. There is eternal enmity between sticks and stones, 

 rocks and streams, earth and sea, fire and water, big fishes and little fishes, 

 wolf and lamb, hawk and bird, and of all things, man is the most vicious. 

 He not only destroys his fellows but he destroys himself — his appetite leads 

 him captive to an untimely grave. Culture steps in and says: " Hands off 

 — off from property, from life, from crime and vice, and the destruction is 

 stayed. There is no creation here but a saving of energy and production. 

 The economy of equal rights has never been weighed or measured. Its 

 history has never yet, in my judgment, been properly and justly written, for 

 the reason that publicists have based progress too much on force and politi- 

 cal ethics on policy and material wealth. Force is not culture ; wealth is not 

 civilization. I protest against the brute element in our histories, and 

 materialistic tendency in the literature of our political economists. Con- 

 science has no more place in either than in a demonstration in mathematics. 

 There was a sense of right before there was a law against larceny. Force 

 did not make the law. I grant you force enforces it, but robbery never 

 made a law against robbing. Force can quell a man but it never converts 

 him. It diminishes crime, it is true, by the terrors of its penalties, but con- 

 science and culture diminish it tenfold more by withholding the hand from 

 the criminal act. The shame of vice, in the presence of virtue, the getting 

 behind screens and in the dark alleys, the putting on of seeming virtue in 

 the presence of good society, is a deference to the majestic power over man 

 which conscience and culture sway. 



Two men meet on a public highway, with equal rights to the common path. 

 In the "olden time" they would have gone at one another with club or 

 sword as fiercely as two mad bulls upon the western prairie to prove who 

 might be the better fellow. To-day each instinctively turns to the right and 

 passes with a "God speed thee, brother." This is not from fear or force. 

 Neither is armed, neither thinks of strife. Custom, but another name for 

 culture, controls the act, and the custom is based upon the sense of equality 

 and equal rights, the right of way for every human being on the globe. The 

 fact that it is a highway and not a war-path is due to civilization, the culture 

 of ages. Yet we have philosophers who resolve all this change, this so-called 

 culture and civilization, into force and self-interest! Who thinks of force 

 and self-interest in benevolence, in giving every man his due, in full meas- 

 ure, in equal rights, in telling the truth, in the tear of sympathy, in the 

 voice of affection, in the deference to old age, in the thousand and one acts 



