SCIENCE STUDY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 93 



erned by reason and not by feeling alone. When the Maine was 

 sunk in Havana Harbor her captain, in a notable dispatch telling 

 of the disaster, urged a suspension of judgment until the facts 

 should be known. Facts! In an hour our battle-cry was, "Re- 

 member the Maine ! " Under that motto, within a few days, one 

 of the great Chicago dailies (the Inter-Ocean) hung out the pen- 

 nant of the wrecked battle ship and enlistment signs. "Who was 

 right — the Maine's captain or the paper? "Which appeal meant 

 safety, and which danger? Our own commission investigated the 

 wreck. After an examination, which was kept entirely within our 

 own hands, the commission reported that the ship had been de- 

 stroyed from the outside, but that there was no evidence to fix the 

 responsibility. Did we fix the responsibility? Though the investi- 

 gation board could find no evidence, though reason said that the 

 destroyer of the Maine, were he Spain's own king, was Spain's 

 worst enemy, we forgot the cause of deliverance, and went into 

 battle with the cry of vengeance on our lips. This is not a state- 

 ment of sentiment but of fact. Your motives, or the President's, 

 or mine may have been pure — your opinion may have been un- 

 prejudiced — but these things around us we all saw and all heard. 

 We know that many men were carried away by their feelings, and 

 did not think. We know that their feelings grew into a prejudice 

 which was absolutely certain to distort the facts and to drive them 

 far from the truth if they ever came to the point of thinking. 

 The ears of the multitude have been closed to all counsels, however 

 wise; their eyes to all consequences, however fatal; their minds 

 to all logic, however clear and simple. 



We may consider more briefly, but not less carefully, other 

 tendencies which have been shown, seeing many of them in the 

 facts which have already been referred to. 



From the fact that passion has so largely supplanted reason in 

 moving many of our people we have developed some wonderful 

 instances of credulity. The sequence is most natural. When men 

 become unwilling, or uncaring, to ascertain the truth for themselves 

 they inevitably display a great willingness to swallow any state- 

 ment which may obligingly be offered them by some one else. So, 

 with half of the Spanish navy sunk and the other half accounted 

 for, we spent hours of glorious, wild conjecture, in the dear dead 

 days beyond recall, listening to the awful sound of cannonad- 

 ing in the Windward Passage, which reached us by the w T ay of 

 Mole St. Nicholas. We believe what is sufficiently exciting to 

 be true. 



Related to the phenomena we have noticed is another — the evi- 

 dent loss of individuality — of moral and mental independence. 



