464 



those gray seclusions of the college quadrangles and 

 cloisters at Oxford and Cambridge, conscious with 

 venerable associations, and whose very stones seemed 

 happier for being there. . . . Are we to suppose that 

 these memories were less dear and gracious to the 

 Puritan scholars at whose instigation this college was 

 founded than to that other Puntan who sang the dim 

 religious light, the long-drawn aisles and fretted 

 vautts which these memories recalled ? . . . The piti- 

 ful contrast which they must have felt between the 

 carved sanctuaries of learning they had left behind 

 and the wattled fold they were rearing here on the 

 edge of the wilderness is to me more than tenderly 

 it is almost sublimely pathetic. . . . We come back 

 hither from the experiences of a richer life, as the son 

 who has prospered returns to the household of his 

 youth, to tind in its very homeliness a pulse, if not of 

 deeper, certainly of fonder emotion than any splendor 

 could stir. " Dear old mother," we say, " how charm- 

 ing you are in your plain cap and the drab silk that 

 has been turned again since we saw you ! You were 

 constantly forced to remind us that you could not give 

 us this and that which some other boys had, but your 

 discipline and diet were wholesome, and you sent us 

 forth into the world with the sound constitutions and 

 healthy appetites that are bred of simple fare." . . . Our 

 Puritan ancestors have been misrepresented and ma- 

 ligned by persons without imagination enough to 

 make themselves contemporary with, and therefore 

 able to understand the men whose memories they 

 strive to blacken. . . . They were the coevals of a gen- 

 eration which passed on in scarcely diminished ra- 

 diance the torch of life kindled in great Eliza's golden 

 days. Out of the new learning, the new ferment alike 

 religious and national, and the new discoveries with 

 their suggestion of boundless possibility, the alembic 

 of that age had distilled a potent elixir, either inspir- 

 ing or intoxicating, as the mind that imbibed it was 

 strong or weak. Are we to suppose that the lips of the 

 founders of New England alone were un wetted by a 

 drop of that stimulating draught ? that Milton was 

 the only Puritan that had read Shakespeare and Ben 

 Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher? I do not be- 

 lieve it, whoever may. ... I hope, then, that the day 

 will come when a competent professor may lecture 

 here also for three years on the first three vowels of 

 the .Romance alphabet and find fit audience, though 

 few. I hope the day may never come when the 

 weightier matters of a language, namely, such parts 

 of its literature as have overcome death by reason of 

 their wisdom and of the beauty in which it is incar- 

 nated, . . . are not predominant in the teaching given 

 here. . . . Give us science, too, but give us, first of all 

 and last of all, the science that ennobles life and 

 makes it generous. . . . There is some danger that the 

 elective system may be pushed too far and too fast. 

 . . . We are comforted by being told that in this we 

 are only complying with the spirit of the age, which 

 may be, after all, only a finer name for the mis- 

 chievous goblin known to our forefathers as Puck. 

 I have seen several spirits of the age in my time of 

 very different voices and summoning in very differ- 

 ent directions, but unanimous in their propensity to 

 land us in the mire at last. ... I know that I am ap- 

 proaching treacherous ashes which cover burning 

 coals, but I must on. . . One of the arguments against 

 the compulsory study of Greek namely, that it is 

 wiser to give our time to modern languages and mod- 

 ern history than to dead languages and ancient his- 

 tory involves, I think, a verbal fallacy. . . . Men 

 are ephemeral or evanescent, but whatever page the 

 authentic soul of man has touched with her immor- 

 talizing finger, no matter how long ago, is still young 

 and fair as it was to the world's gray fathers. Ob- 

 livion looks in the face of the Grecian muse only 

 to forget her errand. . . . But we must not be impa- 

 tient ; it is a fat cry from the dwellers in caves to 

 even such civilization as we have achieved. I am 

 conscious that life 'has been trying to civilize me for" 

 now nearly seventy years with what seems to me very 

 inadequate results. We can not afford to wait, but 



the race can. . . . Let our aim be, as hitherto, to give 

 a good, all-around education, fitted to cope with as 

 many exigencies of the day as possible. . . . Let it 

 be our hope to make a gentleman of every youth who 

 is put under our charge ; not a conventional gentle- 

 man, but a man of culture, a man of intellectual re- 

 source, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, 

 with that good taste which is the conscience of the 

 mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of 

 the soul. 



In the following year (1887) Mr. Lowell ad- 

 dressed the Tariff Reform League, of Boston, 

 and in the course of his remarks he said : 



If, in a free commonwealth, government by party 

 be a necessary expedient, it is also a necessary evil, 

 an evil chiefly in this, that it enables men nay, even 

 forces them to postpone interests of prime import 

 and consequence to secondary and ephemeral, often 

 to personal interests, and not only so, but to confound 

 one with the other. ... 1 do riot believe that there is 

 a man at this table who for the last twenty years has 

 been able to embody his honest opinion, or even a 

 fraction of it, in his vote. During all those years no 

 thoughtful man has been able to see lany other differ- 

 ence between the two great parties which stood be- 

 tween him and the reforms he deemed essential to 

 the well-being of his country than that the one was 

 in and wished to stay there, and the other was out 

 and didn't wish to stay there. . . . Each had an abun- 

 dance of aces in its sleeve, and each was divided on 

 the two great questions of vital . interest to the coun- 

 try the tariff and finance. 



In an address entitled " The Independent in 

 Politics," read before the Reform Club of New 

 York, in 1888, are the following expressions : 



When I say that I make no distinctions between the 

 two parties, I must be allowed to make one exception. 

 I mean the attempt by a portion of the Kepublicans 

 to utilize passions which every true lover of nis coun- 

 try should do his best to allay, by provoking into 

 virulence again the happily quiescent animosities of 

 our civil war. In saying this, I do not forget that 

 the Democratic party was quite as efficient in bring- 

 ing that war upon us as the seceding States them- 

 selves. Nor do I forget that it was by the same 

 sacrifice of general and permanent interests to the de- 

 mands of immediate partisan advantage, which is the 

 besetting temptation of all parties. Let by-gones be 

 by-gones. \ et I may say in passing that there was 

 something profoundly comic in the spectacle of a great 

 party, with an heroic past behind it, stating that its 

 policy would be to prevent some unknown villains 

 from doing something very wicked, more than twenty 

 years ago. ... If the politicians must look after the 

 parties, there should be somebody to look after the 

 politicians; somebody to ask disagreeable questions 

 and to utter uncomfortable truths ; somebody to make 

 sure, if possible, before election, not only what, but 

 whom, the candidate, if elected, is going to repre- 

 sent. 



After going more into detail, he sums up thus: 



But the tendency of excessive protection which 

 thoughtful men dread most is that it stimulates an un- 

 healthy home competition, leading to overproduction 

 and to the disasters which are its tainted offspring ; that 

 it fosters overpopulation, and thus of the most help- 

 less class when thrown out of employment ; that it 

 engenders smuggling, false invoices, and other de- 

 moralizing practices; that the principle which is its 

 root is the root also of rings and syndicates and trusts, 

 and all other such conspiracies for the artificial rais- 

 ing of profits in the interests of classes and minorities. 

 1 confess I can not take a cheerful view of the future 

 of that New England I love so well, when her lead- 

 ing industries shall be gradually drawn to the South, 

 as they infallibly will be, by the greater cheapness of 

 labor there. 



