American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women. Kate Stephens

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СКАЧАТЬ glitter and a vision directed far away, as if not noting life, nor death, nor daily things near by, but fixed rather upon some startling shape on the horizon. The teeth were inclined to wedge-shape and set far apart. There was a firmly shut and finely curved mouth. “We make our own mouths,” says Dr. Holmes. About this people was smouldering fire which might leap into flame at any gust of mischance or oppression.

      This describes the appearance in later decades of the corporate man of the fifties and early sixties—

      “to whom was given

       So much of earth, so much of heaven,

       And such impetuous blood.”

      A sky whose mystery and melancholy, whose solitary calm and elemental rage stimulate and depress even his penned and grazing cattle, has spread over him for more than a generation. With his intensity and his predisposition to a new contrat social he and his descendants have been subjected to Kansas heat, which at times marks more than one hundred in the shade, and to a frost that leaves the check of the thermometer far below zero. He and his children, cultivators of their rich soil, have been subject to off-years in wheat and corn. They have endured a period of agricultural depression prolonged because world-wide. They have been subject, too, to the manipulation of boomers.

      Most lymphatic men—any Bœotian, in fact, but it is long before his fat bottom lands will make a Bœotian out of a Kansan—most lymphatic men ploughing, planting, and simply and honestly living would be affected to discontent by the thunder of booms and their kaleidoscopic deceit. Clever and sometimes unprincipled promoters representing more clever and unprincipled bond-sellers in Eastern counting-houses sought to incite speculation and lead the natural idealist by the glamour of town-building, and county-forming booms, railway and irrigation booms, and countless other projects.

      They played with his virtuous foibles and fired his imagination. He gave himself, his time, his men, his horses, his implements for construction; his lands for right of way. He hewed his black walnuts and elms into sleepers, and sawed his bulky oaks for bridges. He called special elections and voted aid in bonds. He gave perpetual exemption from taxes. Rugged enthusiast that he was he gave whatever he had to give—but first he gave faith and altruistic looking-out for the interests of the other man. Great popular works still abiding—cathedrals in Europe are perhaps the most noted—were put up by like kindling of the human spirit.

      His road was made ready for sleepers, and funds for purchasing iron he formally handed the promoters—since which day purslane and smartweed and golden sunflowers have cloaked the serpentine grades which his own hands had advanced at the rate of more than a mile between each dawn and sunset.

      One direct relation and force of these inflated plans to the Kansan have been that they often swerved and controlled the values of his land, and the prices of those commodities from which a soil-worker supports a family hungry, growing, and in need of his commonwealth’s great schools. And the man himself, poor futurist and striver after the idea, with a soul soaring heavenward and hands stained and torn with weed-pulling and corn-husking!—his ready faith, his tendency to seek a hero, his brushing aside of conservative intuition, his meliorism, his optimism, his receptivity to ideas, his dear humanness—in other words, his charm, his grace, his individuality, his Americanism—wrought him harm.

      Our corporate man, loving, aspiring, working, waiting, started out with a nervous excitability already given. He was a man with a bee in his bonnet. He was seeking ideal conditions. Originally he was a reactionist against feudal bondage, the old bondage of human to human and of human to land. Later his soul took fire at the new bondage of human to wage and job. He would have every man and woman about him as free in person as he was in idea.

      What wonder then that he or his descendent spirit in the midst of agricultural distress enacted a mortgage equity or stay law, and determined that that law should apply to mortgages in existence at the passage of the act! He it is of the all-embracing Populism, the out-reaching Prohibitionism, the husband-man-defensive Grangerism. Shall we not humanly expect him, and those suffering the contagion of his noble singleness, to clutch at plans for a social millennium? “Heaven is as easily reached from Kansas,” wrote an immigrant of 1855, “as from any other point.”

      He values openly what the world in its heart knows is best, and like all idealists foreruns his time. The legend is always about him of how the men and women of the early fifties hitched their wagon to a star—and the stars in his infinity above are divinely luminous and clear. His meliorism—which would lead his fellows and then the whole world aright—is nothing if not magnificent.

      But although he grubs up the wild rose and morning-glory, ploughing his mellow soil deep for settings of peach and grape, and supplants the beauty of the purple iris and prairie verbena with the practicalities of corn and wheat, he has yet to learn the moral effect of time and aggregation—that a moon’s cycle is not a millennium, a June wind fragrant with the honey of his white clover not all of his fair climate, and that a political colossus cannot stand when it has no more substantial feet than the yellow clay which washes and swirls in the river that waters his great State. In reality his excess of faith hinders the way to conditions his idealism has ever been seeking.

      The Kansan is, after all, but a phase—a magnificent present-day example and striving—of the mighty democratic spirit which has been groping forward through centuries towards its ideal, the human race’s ideal of ideals. In his setting forth of the genius of his people for democracy and the tendency of his blood for experiment and reform—according to that advice to the Thessalonians of an avaunt courier of democracy, to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good—he is led at times upon miry, quaggy places and by the very largeness of his sympathies enticed upon quicksands which the social plummet of our day has not yet sounded.

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

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      And not by eastern windows only,

       When daylight comes, comes in the light,

       In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

       But westward, look, the land is bright.

       Arthur Hugh Clough

      No university has anywhere ever become a great influence, or anything but a school for children, which was not wholly or almost wholly in the hands of the faculty or teaching body. The faculty is the teaching body. If you have the right sort of faculty, you have a university though you have only a tent to lecture in. If, on the other hand, you try to make a university out of a board of sagacious business men acting as trustees, and treat the professors simply as “hired men,” bound to give the college so many hours a week, you may have a good school for youths, but you will get no enlightening influence or force out of it for the community at large.

      A writer in The Nation, 1889

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

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      During a great national struggle for human rights, Laurel Town was touched by the high seriousness which rises from sincerity to the idea of human liberty and the laying down of lives in defence of that idea. Its baptism and its early years were thus purely of the spirit.

      A miniature burg, it snuggles upon broad, fat lands, semicircling the height that rises to the west. From the hill-top the tiny city is half-buried in СКАЧАТЬ